skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally understand the feeling. I'm currently in a low pay full time coding job without benefits. I'm in no financial situation to consider quitting (I wouldn't last a month). Only doing what I do at work advances my skillset little, so I've been forced to do extra on nights and weekends. It is never easy to coerce yourself into working extra but I've found a couple of tactics that have helped immensely.

1. Do it for money. I find working for someone else motivates me pretty well. I wanted to learn how to use JS frameworks like ember or angular so I've done a couple of simple restaurant menu CMS systems for local businesses. I did them for peanuts on the condition that I didn't have hard deadlines. Even though I have the luxury of taking as much time as I feel like, I feel some obligation to anyone paying me for work. I've also found that it effectively narrows the focus of the work in a way that might be more challenging in a more free form project. It's a lot harder for me to not start including "cool" but often-useless features in my own projects while I tend to keep my work for others limited to what was agreed upon originally.

2. My other method is to set myself up with two or three productive activities and force myself to rotate between them. I might choose learning German vocabulary, refreshing math online and writing a simple app in a new language for a night and make an effort to always be doing one of those tasks. I try to look at this time as relaxation and free time itself, so I try to set few expectations. When I get bored/frustrated, instead of turning on the TV or opening the news, I switch to the next activity and repeat until its time for bed. You can move forward on unrelated hobbies this way, something that frustrated me when I first learned how to code and overdid the focus and attention I gave it, to the point of severe frustration.

Lastly, try to relax and take it easy. If you put yourself through Hell every night you'll quit and get nowhere. Take nights off when needed and get to bed at a decent hour. You won't see immediate returns so any strategy has to be looking toward the long haul.
I just wanted to protect my visitors. Companies wouldn't listen to me when they found out I was student.
I hope everyone understands that. I'm just a guy in [redacted] who wanted to do something for the community. The designer/coder is just a kid who graduated from highschool. I want people to think our their data. Not to be the center of things. :(
Of course they can check at the point of sale, but times where paper money is most useful and times where you have immediate access to the blockchain do not exactly overlap. If they can check right then and there, might as well just do it electronically and skip the paper.

My point is basically that paper money is a store of value while these "paper bitcoins" are a proxy for a store of value, which introduces problems. It's almost like a fiat currency backed by bitcoin, except it has none of the governmental power used to make fiat currencies work.
Just fixed by a contributor. Thanks for the report!
Congratulations, you're violating Twitter's trademark and content display policy: https://twitter.com/logo
Well, that's four years. Only a year ahead of normal amortization schedules.
^ This is much more helpful than the posted content; which is essentially a collection of quotes on time management.
"Forget Codecademy" <- This isn't so simple.

You've gotta get started somewhere, and a safe place, in your browser, that doesn't require arduous setup ain't too shabby.

As Zack points out, there's a true difference between someone who "thinks they should code" and one who really wants it. Codecademy welcomes all comers, so it's hard to tell the difference. That shouldn't necessarily be an indictment those who start there.

At Thinkful (http://thinkful.com/) we send students to some Codecademy lessons, along with hundreds of hours of real-world projects and other resources.
If I had a child, I would open this site and it will make it sleep for sure ;).
PS. Good idea!
> If you are designing a language, compiling it to JavaScript is a pretty attractive option, for much the same reason that compiling C to machine code is an attractive option: running it in more places.

This sentence badly written. The point of the article is that Javascript is the C of the web, and if this sentence were put together correctly it would make the point.
I think Codecademy is great for people who already know how to code a little bit. I can use Codecademy to learn HTML/CSS or about using APIs. However, I think for a complete neophyte, a book like Learn Python the Hard Way is significantly better. Someone HAS to walk you through setting up a programming environment, running an interpreter or compiling, etc. It can be incredibly frustrating and intimidating for first timers.
Oh I wish I have a supercomputer and could play with one right now.
The US is the same way actually, and I always sort of figured the easier way in would be to get one of the minimum wage retailers to smuggle something in for me. As they're typically young and low-paid, they 1) need the money, 2) aren't as likely to think about dangerous possible outcomes and 3) (possibly) aren't as likely to worry about it anyway.

Of course, blowing up a plane is sort of a stupid notion anyway. If I wanted a terrorist attack, I'd just bomb a building directly, Oklahoma City style. That wouldn't even need to be a suicide attack. If I was dead set on a suicide attack on an airline, I'd just pick the longest security checkpoint line and blow myself up there.

There are plenty of tactical reasons for commandeering an airplane, but blowing it up is generally not one of them.
+ Add New Awesome Application (Android Dev Portal Easter Egg)
Clickable for the subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript
Also, their mindshare: "We're changing the world, 100K under-served people signed up!" vs, 5K who finish and most have at least a Master's already anyway :)
"Have a real project you want to build" and "You have to throw yourself in or you will fail." are spot on.

At Thinkful (http://thinkful.com/) our students spend more than half their time on projects they start from scratch, using real tools for exactly this reason. As a result they have 10x the engagement and completion rates vs other online ed tools (MOOCs et al).

Failing is learning, but failing is tough. We make that easier.
Bitcoin uses double SHA256 which is all integer operations, so that's not directly comparable to flops.

As far as I know most passwords hashes are also integer operations.

The cell processor in the ps3, despite being optimized for floating point ops, can do about 22.23 Mh/s. Assuming each of the 12,960 PowerXCell 8is in Roadrunner can do the same: 12960 * 23.23 ~= 288100 Mh/s which would earn you about 21.6 BTC/day at the current difficulty. That's about $2000/day at current prices.

The PowerXCells also have 8 SPUs vs 6 in the ps3, so they are potentially 25% faster.
hmm, though I question, who decided that is a the world backup day, its still is clear that it doesn't matter much, just like many other XYZ days that I don't follow.

But I don't see the need of legal actions around such a thing.
You need to distinguish design as an aesthetic from functional design.From a functional point of view reddit is a well designed site.In an ideal world of course they would be congruent but which is more important to get right first depends on what field you are in and who your customers are.
I wonder if this would be a good time to mention that I think I've got my new open-source snapshot backup tool (up on Github) ready for a larger testing audience? I'm a bit nervous about promoting it too widely until I'm sure that it is stable enough, but if anyone wants to test it in a non-critical setup, I'd appreciate any feedback.
...in our ADD culture.

As someone who has personal interaction with the disorder (I'm not officially diagnosed, but probably have it, my son has it, several siblings, nieces and nephews as well), I hate this phrase. Because people use it to mean the exact opposite of what the actual disorder is.

People with ADD or ADHD (different names for pretty much the same thing) do not lack focus. To the contrary, a primary characteristic is extreme focus. Instead we lack the ability to focus on what we are told to focus on.

Society labels this "distractibility" because the person does not focus on what those around would want them to focus on (following instructions, getting dressed, doing homework, etc) but instead goes back to what interests them (bugs, dinosaurs, math, etc). But in terms of ability to get fascinated by something, then follow through on complex tasks, people with ADD or ADHD are significantly more capable than the general public.
I think Coursera has struck a very effective balance between synchronous and asynchronous learning. Once you sign up for a class, you're able to go back and watch videos, get assignments, even submit assignments for automated grading.

For those of us who find the synchronous style to be a sufficient motivator, it's a great benefit. For people who fall behind but want to cover the material, they're welcome to do so. The grades don't actually matter, remember? Coursera is already "gamified." It's just that the game is done so well that most of the time we're not aware of it.
Need advice about what to do about my job and how to make a career change.
I work at a Higher Ed institution. About a year ago we were told by the state to merge with a medical research college. Suffice to say it’s been hell. I didn’t used to dread going into the office. Now I lay awake at night worrying and angry over it. There are pay inequities, office reassignments, and general resentment and anger at my campus. So that’s the back story. As for me... I don’t really want to work here anymore. The new organization is too different. This has led me to allot of soul searching and realizations about my job satisfaction.
Before I took this job I was a web administrator for a city website. I won a few awards, one of which placed my work at third in the nation for a city of our size. I was heavily into web development. But the university came knocking and it just seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up. Once at the university I saw my Unix certification become my only job function. I was promised I would be able to continue my web development but that didn’t really happen. The university was laid back and easy. I became complacent.
Post-merger I have been assigned as programmer to the enterprise group. The programmers are really application curators here. As a result I don’t really have an interest in the work. I opted for programming because the systems group is that bad. Before I moved to Higher Ed I was focused on web development. But now, I see myself using oracle forms and other legacy crap in the future. To complicate things I’m completely self-taught. Other than the fact that I can learn pretty much anything I put my mind to, I don’t have allot of current skills to offer. I’ve flirted with mobile, Django, and jQuery, but I just don’t know the best way forward. It’s hard to come home from work and be motivated. The atmosphere is so toxic and depressing. Last year I wrote a note to myself… You have to build that bridge to get there… I haven’t even laid the first brick. Any advice is appreciated.
I was not expecting much form this other than 'yet another aggregator'...but damn, this thing is amazingly fast. I'm impressed!
HipChat's Early April Fools - Emoticorrect
10 reasons you will fail
"8. Stop trying to figure out what you should do and just start."

I would say this last point is the most important one.
And it also kind of cripples most of the other points.
I half disagree. If you want to learn to be a sysadmin then learn to be a sysadmin. If you want to learn to code you learn to code. People who want to learn to code want to know what to type that'll get the computer to spit out whatever it is they want it to spit out. Mixing in environment stuff like you describe is just going to complicate things and turn people off entirely.

Furthermore, most operating systems already have enough of the basics installed that you're able to get up and running with simple programming pretty quickly anyway. Learning to develop locally and deploying to a live server are very different. Yeah, both run just about identical software but the process is different. Locally, someone who's learning will install MAMP or xampp or something or copy and paste a line of code to get homebrew or rvm on their machine. There's a 50/50 mix of comfortable clicking around the GUI and typing in the terminal. If you're just learning and go right to the vps I think you're jumping the gun. The system may be the same but it takes some experience before you realize that what you were comfortable with when clicking around is almost the same thing you're doing in the vps over ssh except you have to know which command to run rather than clicking "install".

Beginner books always have a section dedicated to setting up your environment and sometimes take you all the way through deployment. Articles online don't necessarily need that as they mostly assume you'll find that information elsewhere and only concern themselves with the task at hand - coding.

Beyond all that I think that your frustrations are something you'll be grateful for in the future when you do get it. I knew how to code before I knew how to run a server. If I had learned the server stuff first and didn't quit then I wouldn't have understood why I was doing these things and I wouldn't have the knowledge of how everything from the language I was using to the server to the OS all worked together which is invaluable. If I were blindly following instructions on how to set up a lamp stack I wouldn't know that hey I don't need these apache modules or oh I can disable this ini setting, etc.

On one level I get your gas stove/kitchen tools analogy. But as someone who understands these things now, on another level I don't think it fits. These topics are so incredibly broad and complex that it makes sense not to lump them together. Besides, there are plenty of places where you can just plop your code and have it run from shared hosting to PAAS's like Heroku and such.

In the end its like the article says - these challenges are what'll teach you. I don't know any good programmers that simply memorized how to do things without having to earn the knowledge of how something works through tons of failure.
I agree with this. I wouldn't be motivated enough to follow 4 courses if it weren't for the synchronous model.
>Every language has a try catch for a reason.

You do realize that not every language has a try catch?
Interesting. That sounds a lot like me.

You make a really strong point. Going back and changing it.
Learning is hard. Self-study is very hard. Incentives matter.

The main incentive to power through a Coursera course is personal enrichment. This is not the reason most people go to college.
A 22,000 square foot data center costs about $5mm to build [1].

And these data centers can be located wherever is convenient. And clearly, forward planning is not an issue when we are talking $100mm+ investments.

[1] http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/data-cent...
Dear God ... I'd like to report a bug.
Last year was the 8-bit Quest world

google images search: http://www.bit.ly/10qcvSy
Sure, but it doesn't scale well when you're looking at reviewing fifty labels every day to decide whether you're enabled for any of them. Cognitive load. Better for them to disappear and then automatically reappear when you've completed the blocking project.
This is pretty bitter lemonade, but I have to agree with If Craigslist would just take a lesson from Google and shut down completely, it would be one of the best days ever in tech.
Fold 180 degrees. Not 90.
The Constitution uses the word "privilege", but it does not mention the concept of privilege as you are using it. "Privileges" in the constitution aren't distinct from or weaker than rights - they are considered fundamental rights. The Supreme Court said so and I think their interpretation counts for more than yours.

That is probably why you got down voted - your citation is factual, but completely misleading in context.

To address the specific example you mention here: the privilege of immunity from arrest for members of Congress cannot be infringed except for specific enumerated exceptions. It's not the kind if "privilege not a right" that may be arbitrarily harshly regulated that you were talking about.

The law is not stupid. Courts understand that words have more than one meaning and that context matters. Given how rude and condescending you have been on this thread, you should learn more about how constitutional law actually works.
Disclaimer: while I worked for a DOE supercomputing lab, it wasn't one of the NNSA (nuke) labs, so I don't have all the info. (And even if I did, I certainly wouldn't be allowed to comment on it.)

You're a bit right in that it's more complicated than they say in the article. The power of keeping it up and running is definitely costly, but there's more to it than that.

* It takes people to run it. They're expensive, and you don't want your people wasting a lot of time on the old super while your new one is being installed and accepted. I don't recall having seen any plans for a new super at LANL, but there's probably something new showing up soon.

* The architecture of roadrunner is outdated and obsolete. The NNSA isn't buying any more, and you can bet that with the new Blue Gene/Q at Lawrence Livermore (sequoia), all their new code is being written for different non-roadrunner architectures. There is considerable cost to porting new code to legacy hardware.

* Kind of in line with the last point, sequoia is >17x faster than roadrunner at only 3.5x the power. There's not a lot of point in paying such a premium in flops/watt by running on roadrunner since the new one is already online.

* 2.3MW is only what the computer itself uses. There's a ton of other supporting equipment needed to use it (chillers, disk, control nodes, etc.)

* This computer isn't being manufactured anymore, so maintenance is going to cost a fortune. When they bought it, they either paid for a hardware support contract or bought a ton of spares and did self-maintenance. If they did the former, IBM is either charging through the nose for replacements or refusing to support it outright. If they did the latter, they're probably running low on spares.
Pacing is incredibly important to motivation. The thing is, there's no single answer. Even in traditional, full-time, in person classrooms where everyone puts in the same class hours, natural ability, different skills at the beginning and better attention mean that students will always learn at different speeds.

The ideal model is one of personalized education. What's kind of shocking is that online education so far has basically ignored this altogether. There's been zero investment in ways to continually pace and encourage students to learn at a speed that is both challenging and within reason.

This isn't too surprising: it's a hard problem, and it's much easier to have users paying a subscription fee forever (for those services that are paid) and blame themselves when they fall behind.

At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) we see evidence that our learning model, which pairs experts and students together much more like you'd expect from tutoring, sees 10x the retention and completion as other online course options.
He seems to be offended by people comparing JavaScript to assembly, but when people say "JavaScript is web assembly" they're usually making a specific point about how you can write languages that compile to JavaScript, not an overall judgement of the language.

Of course JavaScript has more in common with C than assembly, but context matters.
The Bitcoin FAQ does address the issue, albeit briefly:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Is_it_not_a_waste_of_energy.3...

Bitcoins have value because they are useful and they are scarce. In order to keep them scarce, there must be some mechanism to keep supply and demand in balance.

If you can come up with a method for maintaining this balance which requires a lesser expenditure of energy, you could argue that a currency based on it would be more environmentally responsible. I suspect, however, that such a method does not exist. At least, I can't think of one. Can you?
You've identified a very real pain point, one that affects all programmers. One of the most difficult and annoying tasks is configuring the computer to run your darn software. I've sometimes spent days just setting up a computer (either a VPS, or my own computer). Unfortunately, this pain point never really goes away, although it does get easier as you learn more.

I've had many conversations with other programmers about solving this problem. We always fantasize about building an installer that just sets up everything you need for, e.g. Ruby on Rails. And people have tried! Every so often, you see an announcement about an open source project that promises to do just that. Even though this has been going on for years, I don't know anyone who actually uses these projects.

I think part of the problem is that the technology moves too fast for these one-click installers. They can't seem to stay current. Every time you get an update to the operating system, the database, the webserver, the web framework, the language runtime, etc etc, there's a potential for the one-click installer to break.

Another issue is interference from other stuff installed on the computer. I can't tell you how many times a piece of Unix software has failed to install because of something else I'd put on my computer and long since forgotten.

So one-click installers haven't been a panacea thus far. But I will say that the situation has improved dramatically in the last five years or so. Package managers--programs that automate installation of individual components--have gotten way, way better. It used to be that every other package I installed would fail the first time, and I'd have to do some kind of troubleshooting. That hardly ever happens anymore.

Now, this doesn't exactly make everything easy for new programmers. You still have to learn a lot of system administration to get anything done. Which brings me to my last point, which is a bit of advice for people just starting out:

You'll want to read some tutorials on various aspects of the Unix operating system. These will be very relevant to the problems mentioned in the parent comment: SSH, shell, installing packages, compiling from source, etc.. Generally, programming tutorials won't get into this stuff. You need Unix tutorials. This stuff will probably seem pretty boring in comparison to actual programming. It sure is for me. But it's a bit of unavoidable drudgery if you want your code to actually run.
http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=ownwrsbcevb3pjqg...

Although tying these identities to our hacker news IDs basically means throwing anonymity out the window.