skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python has a pretty distinctive programming style (what's considered "pythonic"), and code that makes idiomatic use of tail calls tends to be structured quite differently. While it may have been a good addition early in Python's history, retrofitting it now would make the language more complicated and messy, and avoiding having a dozen ways to do the same thing (as in Perl) has been a goal from the start. Python's design seems to argue that any incremental improvements gained by using one coding style over another will be lost due to dealing with several different coding styles. (Particularly when somebody is actually trying to write Scheme, Haskell, etc. in Python.)

Questions about whether it'd be better if Python supported tail-call elimination, type inference, macros, etc. need to consider not just the theoretical power advantage, but the extent they would tend to fragment the existing community, make existing code harder to use/maintain, etc.

FWIW, Lua (http://lua.org) is stylistically quite similar to Python, and has an equally strong focus on keeping things simple, but approaches it differently. Its designers kept the core language extremely small, yet easily extensible in Lua or C. It's very interesting to compare and contrast its design with Python's. (It's also a great language in its own right, and it has TCO.)
U.S. declares public health emergency as swine flu spreads
One of the things I did with my kids was to push them to take courses at the local community colleges while they were still in high school. They got better quality instruction, more advanced topics, and college level credit. My son had credit for all but two math classes in EECS at UC Berkeley. My daughter was able to graduate in four years at UCLA, rather than drag on to 5 years because of schedule conflicts and oversubscribed classes.
I thought this news was important enough to break the submitting rules about non hacker related subjects
Exactly. He starts with saying that Sergey Brin wouldn't pass Google's phone screening, but (at least when I interviewed with them for an internship) Google phone screens with engineers. The conversation was good, the problems were an interesting/fun challenge, and it would certainly have been effective in deciding whether I was cut out for the position.

I think that the argument should be rewritten to say that the only people that should be judging competence are the ones that work in the field. An HR person shouldn't be trying to decide whether an applicant has passed a screening. They should get an engineer to talk to them instead and decide.
Anyone running an accelerator will certainly have people around that understand how to set up a corporation.

The programming equivalent would be trying to fight off competition by not showing them your ~/.emacs.
Promtional Mugs for Every Promotion 
Promotional mugs, Business Gifts, Promotional products, Promotional Items, Promotional Gifts, Corporate Gifts, Promotional flash drives, Promtotional Umbrellas, Promotional Tshirts
Link to the Cato Institute, where you can download the report they sponsored: http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
The "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" paper shows a still-timely example of when you might want to express a state machine as mutually recursive functions. Granted, they compare to the actual GOTO, but you can't make state machines of any manageable size with iteration, either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Escape_Systems
In Sweden we have something called Sidewalk Express where you can sit down at a computer and browse the web for €1 per hour. If you want to use the WLAN in the same location (from some other company), you'll have to pay ~€5 per hour - and then the computer isn't included. Weird.
When clicking on "private" and then canceling out of the box that pops up, "log in" changes to "og in." A minor issue, but an issue none-the-less.
I'm guessing you're excluding Quebec? I can consistently download at 800k/sec (if the server will push the bits this fast) with Videotron. Is that really considered impossibly slow nowadays?! I don't even know what I'd do with more bandwidth, though now that I have a server the 100k/sec upload limit is a bit more of an irritation.
I love problems you can solve by thinking. But I've often had simple facts, which were not covered anywhere, on tests.

These are dry, unrelated, having nothing to do with puzzling out facts. Facts, which were not in any reading material and were never mentioned in class, and no recommendation for independent study was made.

This is not about learning or teaching or thinking. It's about sucking at teaching and testing. And testing stuff you meant to go over but never actually did.
The thing is, usually when you want the stack frames, /they are there/. They're present because they form part of the continuation of the computation.

Tail calls, because they don't form part of the continuation, are usually not interesting at all in stack traces.

To put it another way: a python backtrace doesn't include statements that were already executed. "Of course it doesn't, they're already executed!", you say -- well so have the tail calls! They are exactly equivalent (google for CPS transformation).
I'd imagine the government subsidies and not needing to pay for their chunk of the FM spectrum probably have a lot to do with it, too.
History and the implications of network neutrality (covers AT&T and Verizon in depth): http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/network-neutrality-w...
The whole idea of unschooling is a little too utopian for me. Teaching is a skilled craft. A good teacher will work a classroom to keep all manner of kids involved and engaged. We've all had teachers like that. I had a 7th grade social studies teacher who was fantastic and an accounting professor in college who made accounting exciting. Accounting!

The problem in this country is well known. We have too many poorly trained and poorly paid teachers. And unfortunately with No Child Left Behind, we've stiffled the good teachers as well.

You can't just remove the teacher. Even the author's experience of independent study still relies on teachers to create the curriculum, produce learning materials and monitor progress through tests. That's a far cry to "go learn on your own."
Help Docs as a Design Tool
Back in the day, CompuServe, Delphi etc. used to charge for connections by the mnute (not to mention for emails). Major phone companies like Verizon etc. still segment customers dependent on whether they're calling inside or outside the network (as if I care what carrier someone else sues, or are going to ask them to switch for my benefit!).I hope this model is doomed.

I'm glad the current administration is committed to a broadband plan for the US, although I'm worried that the FCC has set it sights far too low. Personally, I'm OK with some taxes going towards this; Broadband is nowadays as important as a well-functioning road system. It seems to me that the poorer or less economically developed parts of the US would derive big long-term economic benefits.

http://www.fcc.gov/broadband is the central FCC page for the electronic superhighway and related policies. Though very dull looking, there's a lot of substance at the links on the left.
>It's not that bad. I'm in 10th grade right now, and here's the way I see it: I spend a few hours in school every day, where most of the time is wasted,

Your standards for "not that bad" are low. Wasting half your day sucks. Why not just take the GED and go to college? If your state (presuming you are in the US) is anything like Ohio, you can go to a local college on the public school's dime and get both HS and college credit. No GED required.

I wasted so much time in school. When most people make this statement, it's blatant anti-intellectualism. For me, it's a testament to the inefficiency of public education in the US.
Ask HN: Learning C
Throughout my career, I've viewed C as the sleeping monster that mere mortals such as myself dare not waken. However, as I increasingly seek to achieve more complex goals in my projects, I find myself encountering C libraries (such as GMime) which will answer all my questions, if I could actually program in C. I have a copy of C Primer Plus Fifth Edition at hand, a development FreeBSD server as well as my Mac, but would like to ask of this community if they are aware of any other references, such as old CS course materials, which may help. Many thanks in advance. I realise that this is a long term goal, but feel that with my taste in server platform and operations software, C will prove a boon to me.
Yeah, I hated school too. It's not ever going to change because it's for the masses. That's its sole and express purpose. Why is anyone trying to redesign the system or otherwise shoehorn exceptional people into a system designed for the masses? Either drop out or shut up, in my opinion. Massive social structures don't have time for unique butterflies. That's the Reality of the situation with a capital R.

The optimum solution is to just get it done at an 75-90% level until you graduate HS or college and get on with your god damn life instead of fighting it for years and years and years and pulling yourself and others down in the process. Just give them the bare minimum of what they want while pursuing your own interests. It's politics 101.

This is why many, many successful people say "I dropped out", or "Oh, I was only a B and C student" instead of "I spent every waking moment of my life trying to rebel against the system in which I had no place in, attempting to reforming it form the inside to suit my specific needs to a tee."
Indeed, the first thing I thought after reading the article was 'Google has HR do their phone screens? Really?'- apparently not.
The author seems to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a phone screen, you don't ask trivial questions to see how good the engineer is, but to filter out the really bad engineers.

If someone doesn't know what a hashtable or a pointer is then there's no point in wasting their time or yours in bringing them in for an in-house interview. Many companies reject as many as 70-90% of candidates at phone interviews due to candidates lacking basic skills.
Can't imagine how I could confuse those names. :)

More to the point:

"This presentation and the reaction afterward is being taken as INDICATIVE of a problem that is neither recognized nor addressed."

I don't see a single presentation out of whatever total number of Ruby talks as coming even close to being indicative of a problem.

Nine years of Ruby conferences. One comes along that demonstrates notable poor taste. That's a good record.
If I encountered code like this on the job, I'd feel obligated to let someone higher up know about it. I know this isn't a very constructive comment, but I don't really have much else to say :)
Three books have really helped me:

1) Getting Things Done by David Allen gives you a system that works for keeping track of things and choosing what to work on when.

2) The Now Habit by Neil Fiore teaches you how to get rid of some stupid things we do and think that keeps us procrastinating.

3) Tribes by Seth Godin inspires you to go out and do great deeds, big and small.
Disable The Annoying Thing In Ubuntu Jaunty
> I wouldn't want my pacemaker running a garbage-collected language and yet most web apps are written with GC.

I'd prefer GC over memory leaks...
Nothing amazing, but I'm sure a very useful script as sometimes if you need to add multiple domains vhosts would be a pain without some automation.
PhoneGap At JSConf 2009
Also, they're not afraid of getting replaced in a shareholders' revolt.
Because it fit his hypothesis better?
A reasonable point. Then again, drug use is arguably the primordial hack to your own wetware, and drug policy indirectly says something about how the state approaches individual cases it might not understand - consider the history of PGP, or whether Linux would have been developed in the US. So I vote for relevant, although only very peripherally.
DTrace And JavaScript Presented at JSConf 2009
K&R
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_(boo...
I believe the plurality of money comes from pledge drives, not the government. But point taken.
Sure! Knowing C can definitely help with your overall understanding of how things work. It's especially helpful when learning new languages.

I uploaded a copy of K&R ANSI C for you. In my opinion, it's probably the best way to learn it.

http://whitepaperclip.com/files/ansi_c.pdf

Have fun!
NPR may be "thriving" in terms of audience size, but just a few months ago they canceled a show and announced layoffs due to a lack of funds.
The Cairo-powered http://www.aeracode.org/projects/graphication/ is well worth a look - unfortunately the only documentation is examples at the moment.
C isn't hard, don't worry! It's actually a fairly simple language. But it's medium/low-level and there is a lot of power within its simplicity. Fast to learn, but a long time to master, as one might say.

I don't know what people are using to learn C these days, but the standard has always been the white book http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Prentice-Hall-Sof...

You will find yourself spending more time thinking about programming concepts rather than dealing with C syntax, since it's pretty concise. I don't know how difficult it is to learn about pointers if you have already been programming for a while but haven't had to use references directly, but it's very important to learn. C does not do too much for you on its own, so handling references yourself is an important skill. It will also help you understand how higher level languages and concepts work.

If you are working through it and find that you're enjoying yourself, congratulations, you're a programmer :] Then it's time to pick up the 1st volume of Knuth and start working through that.
Cute.

So suppose I want to know who my visitors are, but I do not want to resort to underhanded tactis like this. Any ideas on how to get to know my customers yet respect their privacy?
I finally engineered this for myself at age 14 or 15. I discovered that I could get into both the advanced courses and a dropout prevention program that let me out of school at noon to go work a job doing programming and animation.
People left the cities because of the rise in crime. Crime can always be prevented by a reasonably effective government. Read this book to get a sense of what happened in Brooklyn: http://www.amazon.com/Canarsie-Italians-Brooklyn-Against-Lib... The same story was repeating itself across the country.
Singapore also have an excelent system to minimize drug use.
Interesting. Both Zen and Analysis fascinate me. But I could have done with more information on the process, and less on the person undergoing it.

But possibly it's all so personal that you can't get more than that.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777
Text of Steve Jobs Deposition
Brentwood, Westwood, and Holmby Hills and Bel Air (the areas that surround UCLA) are some of the wealthiest areas in the nation and world, right up there with Palo Alto, Woodside, Stanford, etc.

I have no idea where you or any of your friends got the idea that it would be dangerous there.
ah right, there is no cop that will arrest you for it, nor is there a judge that will sentence you if you do get arrested.

sorry that I thought it was legal, what was I thinking ;-)
It's luck of the draw. Roosevelt students that lived in camp snoopy got a summer camp experience, while Sixth and Marshall kids live in prison dorms.
The caps on all residential videotron offerings are all ridiculously low though.
I'll just mention that in Romania I pay $15 for unlimited bandwidth at 5 Mbps (it even gets speeds of 10Mbps and up for connections from inside the country) and they give you free install and fast costumer support also.

Romania was smart/lucky because people started their own micro-ISPs (Block/Neighborhood Networks) with 50 to 3000 customers each. Buying from bigger ISPs very powerful connections and selling it to more users that shared that connection. Thanks to competition, it brought the prices down a lot and even the big ISP had to adjust.

Edit: There is a side effect like having this http://www.roconsulboston.com/Media/Artists/DDBuchJly08/Wire... on almost all streets in Bucharest, but I find the benefits much higher. Also Wireless Internet is free in pubs/bistros/coffee houses that provide this service here.
Wind essentially IS sound - but with a very low frequency.

Sound is air moving, wind is air moving.

You can use a turbine that spins forward and back I suppose. You'll have a hard time with this - you'll need to match your turbine to the frequency of the sound. Using a microphone works, but only for frequencies in human range.

If you want to catch more energy you'll need to handle infra-sound. Meaning a massive microphone.
One of the coolest uses I've seen of this vulnerability is to look at the users history to only show them the digg/reddit/HN/technorati/etc share links to websites they use.

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/
Owen Van Natta’s Infamous Tenure At Project Playlist
I would do something like this if I were running a school as well. There are many obvious benefits to having older kids help younger kids. Besides, partitioning large groups of children by age is a weird idea if you think about it from a human point of view (as opposed to an industrial one).
Just about everybody who answers this will say that K&R is good, and I agree, but in addition to this I found that learning the basics of assembly was helpful. You can really see what's going on with the stack, what a pointer really is (pointers are really the only tough part about learning C, everything else will be the same old same old if you already know how to program), and the difference between a system call and a regular function call, and it doesn't take much time to learn.

Books by W. Richard Stevens were old when I was learning, and older now, but they were the best guides to taking it to the next levels. You can pick up a lot of tricks and stylistic pointers from him while learning about UNIX features and networking. Maybe somebody will chime in with a more up-to-date resource that does the same thing.
The modern history of China is phenomenally interesting. If you want a good overview, read "China Since 1919: Revolution and Reform". It covers the last century using almost entirely primary source texts--interesting primary source texts--since there's surely no better way to learn what Mao was saying than to read what Mao was saying. For a more analysis-based approach, there's also Schoppa's "Revolution and its Past."

Today's China, regardless of its successes, is in part the result of many years of mistakes, some avoidable, some not, which have led to all sorts of problems. A somewhat telling example is the case of scientific research.

The Communists were always obsessed with science and technology, especially Mao, as they realized its critical importance in terms of becoming a world power, and it fit their worldview in terms of the importance of production. But Mao was also deeply distrusting of intellectuals, which didn't fit well with the concept of institutionalized science for obvious reasons. Mao also strongly disagreed with the concept of "basic research"--that is, research that advances the core knowledge of science--research necessary for future, more-applied research.

Today, despite decades of attempts to increase the number of graduates in technical fields and improve science, the current system is surprisingly awful. They spend enormous sums of money on new facilities and then don't even have the funds to staff them. Scientists quickly learn to focus on publishing as many papers as possible for recognition, even if it means making each individual one nearly useless. There are very very few first-class scientists relative to the number of researchers as a whole--and much like the situation 60 years ago, many of these first-class researchers were trained abroad anyways. Despite enormous expenditures, Chinese science is still, to some extent, going nowhere.

One theory is that the Chinese government still doesn't fully understand how science works--that you cannot merely throw money at big, expensive labs and have discoveries just "happen." Often it seems like here in America the politicians don't understand this either...
This is an intellectually lazy position, like dismissing a the findings of a scientific paper on the basis that the authors began with a hypothesis and sought evidence of its truth. Of course that happens, which is why the quality of sources and methodology should be taken into account.

I haven't real the full paper yet, but the sourcing is impeccable, using government statistics and peer-reviewed papers rather than private surveys or anecdotal evidence.
This book have copyright and you can buy it in libraries.
You should absolutely learn C. A good knowledge of C is a very valuable asset for all sorts of work, especially on Unix.

Thankfully, C is straightforward to learn. The major concept you need to understand is pointers; once you've done that, there are some syntactic oddities to absorb (typedefs, function pointer syntax, arrays vs. pointers), and you should skim through the standard library (which is tiny compared to Java, or even C++), and you're most of the way there.

In addition to K&R, I've hears that Steele and Harbison's "C: A Reference Manual" is very good, although I haven't read it personally.
If you look around the world ~100MB/s residential connections are fairly common and a few places are rolling out 1Gbit/second. However, in the US you see everything from ~80MB/s down to 256k/s depending on your location. The fastest connection my mother can get is 256k/s which plenty fast for web surfing but don't try and watch HD video streams on that thing. And that's the problem 30 vs 100 MB/s is not that big deal but when much of the US can't get 1/10th that we have a problem.

Edit: Mine is 20MBbit down, 2MBit up.
A great resource I have enjoyed while brushing up my C skills has been CS107 at Stanford University on the web.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs107/

You can find the lectures on academicearth.org, or on iTunesU if you prefer to download them that way.

Jerry Cain is a great lecturer. I wish they'd post the assignments with the files they provide the students though. Maybe someday.
I love your satire!