skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typically sign-ups are not an end goal, but rather a means to get money or involvement. How has Experts Exchange been doing on that front?

Focusing on metrics and simple minute behaviours while disregarding the big picture lead to evil user interfaces.
To some extent, everyone is "woolly headed" as you put it (did you mean holly headed?). While it's not a good reason to limit artistic endeavours to one-dimensional characters, it is a good reason to pay a little attention to it. I mean, a story full of weak cute girls whose sole purpose is to be saved by strong, muscular, male heroes does kinda sends the wrong message. I mean, girls often can and should defend themselves. Let's not teach them otherwise.

On the other hand, the fact that we tend to see correlations everywhere also mean we should be more forgiving when one happen to irk us. For instance, I once noticed in a season of 24 that "proprietary" was mentioned twice as an excuse for being harder to crack. The Stalman in me translated that by "proprietary -> better", and wondered if there was some kind of agenda behind that. Then, in season 8, I noticed that "proprietary" was used as an excuse for being harder to get used to. Which gives "proprietary -> worse". So much for the agenda. (By the way, 24 features much stronger and much more objectionable correlations. Noticed how human rights stop where Jack Bauer begins? —though again, season 8 doesn't seem to endorse torture any more.)
4 Disciplines of Social Media: Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
Displeasure aside, having access to the source directly benefits people who can read and edit the source.

In the long run this benefits everyone, of course, but it's only the techies who can actually use the source, and that's why it's mostly the techies who care about it being open.
No, redistribution from the wealthy is primarily a shift from investment to consumption.
Out of interest, if the decryption is being done in a client by JavaScript, what's stopping a MITM attacker replacing the JavaScript crypto library with something that captures the source URL and key?
FWIW, I didn't think I was (I don't identify with libertarianism). I'm just looking at alternatives.
I check the license for everything I install. And I always thought the whole Python installation was under PSFL.
I'm not really putting C on a pedestal here. :)

I'm only saying: Some skills are so radically different that you cannot transfer easily from one to the other. To give a counter example in the other direction: When i taught a former Lisp developer Perl, it took him 3 months to get to a good level, and 3 more to be on a very high level. And he's an extremely bright guy.

Then again, he had never done web apps before. Maybe the language matters a lot less if you're staying within the same problem domain.
PRISM yourself with Immersion, an MIT data mining tool
I'm in a very similar position.

If you really like Codeacademy, there are non-track exercises that involve Python in the API section [0] and a couple of Python challenges [1][2] that aren't listed.

What I'm doing now:

* Solving exercises on Project Euler in Python. [3]

* Working through each example in the Python Cookbook[4]. It was just updated to the third edition.

* Watched Guido's Painless Python talks from a few years ago [5]. I found his concise explanations of language features really helpful.

Some things I intend to do:

* Finish working through Collective Intelligence [6]. The examples are written in Python.

* Work through Introduction to Algorithms [7]. The course uses Python.

* Read, understand and give a shot at extending Openstack [8] code.

-----

0: http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/apis

1: http://www.codecademy.com/courses/python-intermediate-en-NYX...

2: http://www.codecademy.com/courses/python-intermediate-en-VWi...

3: http://projecteuler.net/

4: http://amzn.com/1449340377

5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDgD9whDfEY

6: http://amzn.com/0596529325

7: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

8: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
Text of Navalny's Closing Remarks in Russian Court
I see the point you are trying to make, but Google has no special privileges here. They had to submit their ads to Adblock Plus' public forum for review to determine that their ads conform to the 'Acceptable Ads' guidelines -- just like everybody else. What is encouraging to see happening is that the success of Adblock Plus is actually reforming the entire (online) advertising industry: just make your ads non-intrusive and informative and you can ask for your ads to be whitelisted. I don't quite agree that Google is the only platform where such non-intrusive ads can work. Take for example the Reddit community, where ads are also non-intrusive and therefore whitelisted by Adblock Plus. I guess you can say that Adblock Plus has effectively created a marketplace bias the favors acceptable ads. But isn't that the whole point? The economic model of the Internet is allowed to work, but you and I are not accosted by truly intrusive and annoying and unethical ads. It's a perfect balance.
GWT exclusive conference in SF
>What non-Microsoft technologies have you used?

I've programmed in Assembly, Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, Borland C++, Java, Javascript, Perl and many, many others.

>I say that because until I started playing with Perl, Java and, later (as in 2001), Python, I never really wanted to go back to MS stuff.

What "MS stuff" have you used?
Subscribe to the Pycoder's weekly email list [1]. I love looking through the different libraries - you can certainly learn a lot from digging through source code.

I just found out about Neckbeard Republic [2] today - it looks to be similar to Railscasts. I haven't watched any of their stuff yet, but I plan to.

1 - http://pycoders.com/

2 - https://www.neckbeardrepublic.com/screencasts/
Looking at your [1] link I don't see any "download traps" there being served by Google. (No "ad choices" triangle in the upper right.)
Whoah, you're right! If you search for [Hacker News], you get a bunch of junk results now. That's so cool!
Asians in general have a high probability of genetically having less Oxytocin receptors. Oxytocin affects levels of self-esteem and optimism. It also has a strong effect on whether stress causes a person to withdraw from social situations or to seek help from others. It also affects empathy in a society.

The withdrawal symptoms shown in this article, and subsequent scorn by Japanese society (rather than sympathy) could be a indicator of this genetic predisposition.

Here is a breakdown of oxytocin receptiveness across some common racial groups. The more G's you have, the more resilient and social you are.

http://browser.1000genomes.org/Homo_sapiens/Variation/Popula...

Also the wikipedia article on oxytocin might be of interest for anyone who has Aspergers or Autistic tendencies.

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

It's interesting to ponder Oxytocin's effect on Asian culture as a whole... confucianism, book smarts, wrote memorization, suffer in silence, etc.
- Ability to do some scripting, or integrate it into a product/project.

- Webserver/standalone operation.

- Integration with other standard comm buses.

- Option for Better A/D (typical o'scope is 8 bits).

- More/better output options. You could potentially use it to simulate some hardware (in the loop).

- Ability to add COTS hardware.

- Open design insures owner against planned obsolescence.
Are you suggesting that the design would be better if instead Controller was an interface?

I agree that it seems enticing, for exactly the reason you mention. However, I think the interface solution would require setters and getters for every single field, which seems much worse to me.
The problem is that they're changing the license to something more restrictive and less open mid-stream. The clauses in the AGPL, ostensibly made to make things "more fair" result in a lot more needed bookkeeping and management of the resulting software. Utilizing a modified version means you have to provide source, and nearly every instance of bdb has modifications from the Oracle source to patch various behaviors, etc.

Furthermore, there are other, more open libraries that do what bdb does, yet don't have those restrictions. The breach of trust Oracle performed in adding more restrictions makes me not want to use this software in any circumstances, out of apprehension that they may provide more new "freedoms" in the future.
thatswrong0 summed it up pretty well. Of course, if you want to tell me what's wrong with both of our statements, I'd love to hear it.
Done! Not that I am really using it (yet?), but I'd love to play with it, especially the forum feature (reminds me of usenet clients, which I never really got to use because that was before my time) - so feel free to "add me" if you're a "casual" yourself, or even if you're super serious about it, but don't mind playful old me.
> they think that because something is proven in a mathematical sense using their current knowledge of viable routes of deducation that it remains 'true' and unassailable.

That's because it does.

> The threat of someone else having or coming up with a faster physical or logical method of deduction does threaten these assumptions.

No, it doesn't, because there are no assumptions.

> The broader goal, then, is not to trust a single PRNG algorithm, or, if possible, branch of mathematics.

No, if you don't trust something, use something you do trust. The change you're proposing has more potential to do harm than good, e.g. render nine perfectly good PRNGs broken just because you mixed them with one broken one. If you had only used one PRNG, your adversary had to break that PRNG, but, now that you used ten, he only has to break the weakest one, so you've made things much easier for him.

> whilst computationally and resource-wise somewhat more costly, probably a good idea.

Nope, it probably isn't.

> In summary: hedge thy bets.

In summary, the entire crypto community is smarter than you (or me), and any improvement you (or I) think might work has probably been proven hopelessly broken a thousand times over. There's a reason people use a single PRNG, and the reason is that, when your PRNG's output is provably indistinguishable from true randomness, messing with it will certainly not improve it, and will probably ruin it.
Awesome catch, Thanks! upvoted & cc'd
I'd argue HN has seriously degraded over the last year or so, with masses on articles containing low-quality shallow content, including endless stories about the NSA and Bitcoin, burying any interesting in-depth content. This has come to a head over the past few weeks where I'm finding the site nearly unreadable.

I'm not really sure where to go to find high quality content anymore.
Text version, at least until Adam says something more popular: http://www.reddit.com/user/dudethatsmeta?sort=top
Interesting. That is actually an argument to leave the overhead chart as-is (possibly renamed) but change the latency chart to a "higher is better" chart in some way. I don't disagree that a single convention would be preferable, but it would be unusual to represent latency in a higher-is-better fashion.

Thanks all for the input here!
"..., and the pursuit of happiness."

If not having choice is scary (your word), which I would say is a synonym for "undesirable", I cannot be said to have the right to pursue happiness without it (choice).

> "I find it foolish to base a worldview off fear."

The only sense in which I'm basing my worldview "off of" fear is by asserting the right not to live in it. (In that sense, I am also basing my worldview off of starvation - as I am eating breakfast.)
I worked on the Facebook team that did acquihires for awhile and yes, this is basically it. Hire kid doing awesome, innovative new photo startup, have him build your photos feature and then watch them quit the second they vest, repeat. Does it happen? Yes. Is it a good idea? I can't imagine it is.
"then they'll get on that stuff and make it happen providing they have some similar experience and you have an in-house knowledge pool for them to draw on." <-- some similar experience is probably another way of saying that.

If you asked me tomorrow to go and start doing system programming in a language I knew well, I'd probably be screwed. Ask me to work on a database engine, compiler or web app and I'd be okay.

I'm mainly focusing that ire on the typical enterprise stuff LOB stuff, where it truely is all the same and just because you'd been writing Foo v1 for three years doesn't mean you won't be able to write Bar v300
Is United finally caring about delayed customers?
But have they equal tooling? That's why I'd be using C if I were using C for something; it's "portable assembly".
> from parents who recklessly allowed their children access to their credit card

There's nothing reckless about handing a child their favorite game to play.

Once you've been bit with a $100 charge for an in app purchase, you start to question the true utility of the password timeout. 5 minutes ago I downloaded the game on a new device for my child to play. Now they have unfettered access to my credit card account because I just downloaded the game.

Blaming the parent for being "reckless" in this scenario is little unfair. Being a parent is extremely difficult. It requires a lot of patience, thought, and understanding.

In app purchases love to trick the end user into accidental buying. What better demographic than the child who just received the car with the keys in the ignition?

As a parent who's recklessly had this happen to them, I facepalmed and sucked up the extra charges. Mea Culpa, but it does irk me that it's so damn easy to do.
Not so sure. Those tax breaks are designed to benefit the Irish economy. When your nation can't eat, would you side with a foreign government?

Also, if they toilet their economy, who do you think will bail them out? You're aware that they're part of the EU, right?
Slides: IBM Innovate 2013 Session – Continuous Integration for System z
Why The Internet Is Powerful
I can't decide whether this is gibberish or just pretentious. You should give up writing until you have learnt to express yourself clearly (and have ideas worth sharing).
This is interesting because its exactly the kind of code that I thought would be easier in C than Lisp, due to easy bit manipulation, memory access, etc.
Once you're past syntax and basic concepts, he best thing is probably just to write programs. Maybe try some libraries out. And when you do something you've never done before, (at least on small scale things) do a plan that's all your own work (and things from the docs), and then refer to google, stackoverflow etc. when you have problems that you can't figure out.

As well as that, look into some of the advanced language features and idioms, and try to use them in your programs, or rewrite old programs to use them.
If you liked "How Complex Systems Fail", you may be interested in "Normal Accidents" [1]. It's basically the long-form complete version of the paper you mentioned and packed with interesting examples.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tech...
Well I agree that dropbox is easy, but it's also limited.
Space for example.
Also, if you're sending to a group of co-workers you don't have to upload the entire thing to the cloud. it'll transfer blazingly fast inside the LAN.
It's clearly not baseless paranoia anymore.
That's a well-known problem with JavaScript crypto: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/

The short answer is that so long as the page is loaded entirely over TLS, and the TLS isn't stripped or subverted in any way, it's safe from MITM. Sharefest doesn't currently support TLS, so they would need to set that up prior to enabling end-to-end encryption.
A goshiwon is a small room that students will often live in to focus on a test.
5 Startup Culture Crises That Need Immediate Action
Nothing (assuming the MITM is someone who can break HTTPS or Peer5 themselves), which is why I proposed this:

https://github.com/Peer5/ShareFest/issues/30#issuecomment-20...

You can download ShareFest, audit it and store it locally so you can run your known-good version. It's just an HTML page and a few JS files (or at least it was, last time I looked).

I was going to create a version of this that was a single webpage and had as little code as possible (for auditability and ease of saving/deployment), but other projects got in the way (plus it's easier to improve ShareFest than write it from scratch).
If you work with other languages in addition to Python, it's easy to fall back into old habits. You should internalize the content from these two excellent presentations:

Raymond Hettinger's "Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python":

http://pyvideo.org/video/1780/transforming-code-into-beautif...

(pyvideo.org has a lot of other great talks and presentations.)

Ned Batchelder's "Loop Like A Native":

http://nedbatchelder.com/text/iter.html

Python Module of the Week is also an excellent resource:

http://pymotw.com/2/
+1 I agree. I have been dual licensing my little open source projects under GPL/Apache licenses just because I would like wider use, but I don't feel great about doing that. Licensing is a complicated issue and obviously software developers get to choose for themselves.

It is difficult to predict the future, but I would bet that in 50 years software development will flip to either an almost all commercial world, or an almost all AGPL (or other open source license) free and open hardware designs, etc. world. Considering economics, it is hard for me to see a path to a mostly AGPL-like world, but it might happen.
Qute and awesome text editor with Markdown and TeX support for PC/Mac/Linux
That's true, I guess. The funny thing is that the most I ever transfer is family photos and code, but I don't see why anyone should be able to look at even my family photos.
I'm reminded of a very brief period when I was about 10 where my family found themselves "in between homes". Having to foot long-term, but temporary living ourselves, and not knowing how long we were going to be in that situation (a year long lease wouldn't have worked), the four of us ended up at a cheap motel for a couple months.

One of the enduring memories I have of such accommodations was the seedy underbelly of society I was exposed to. Drug addicts wandering the halls, mentally ill homeless spending their panhandling money for a night in a clean bed with a hot shower...it culminated when a local, very high, gang member mistook our room for another, and at 2 in the morning tried to force entry so he could "cut the balls off of Tony". It was one of the few times I've ever seen my father scared, with noplace to run and 3 other people he was responsible for, I remember him rummaging through the room looking for any kind of weapon. My grandmother ultimately convinced the gang member that he had the wrong room and there was no Tony. He went down the hall and tried to force entry into another room. The police never bothered to come.

As appealing as these kinds of places might seem for the startup hacker culture, remember, cheap Japanese Internet Cafes won't necessarily translate into cheap American Internet Cafes, even with the same amenities.

(In Korea, they have something called Goshiwons [1], which are small cheap rooms students rent out while studying for exams. They're usually near universities and would seem like a much better hacker dorm than sleeping on the dirty floor of an internet cafe.)

1 - http://wiki.galbijim.com/Goshiwon
When you add pandoc or lunamark to it, it becomes super powerful:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ or http://jgm.github.io/lunamark/
Travel photography tips from top instagramers
Don't forget Goshiwons as well http://wiki.galbijim.com/Goshiwon
It also presents difficultly for companies that develop a reputation of mostly acquiring, and perhaps eventually all big companies who buy small ones: if they actually want to make an acquisition to keep the product(s), will enough users believe them?

I suppose inertia helps prevent this with the customers are consumers, but I gather it's at least something of a problem in initially gaining traction. With the IPO exit firmly closed for all but quasi-black swans like Google and Facebook, why take a chance on a startup when the two most likely outcomes, failure or acquihire, result in their shutting down?
To me, this post is in the finest spirit of HN's reason for being. It is delightful to to see the endless colliding of important primitive and historic objects written well and become accessible to many. My mind reels with all these fantastic permutations of what is possible and made accessible, and I must constantly refresh and resort the "I want to know this one too" queue.
You know he's quoting Engelbart, right?
‘1984 not instruction manual’: Thousands protest NSA spying across US
The github repo : https://github.com/redline6561/cl-6502
> Let me do the same to you.

<clippy>

I see that you seem to be attempting to argue from a Moral High Ground. Would you like me to:

1) Remove your Ad Hominem attack?

2) Remove your rude remarks/tone that conflict with your desire for others to be less rude?

</clippy>

I'll agree that the 'evil fat cats' remark was probably a bit too far, and I apologize for that. Let me rephrase my comment:

I take issue with the view that someone that doesn't
commit 100% to an ideology (e.g. Free Software)
doesn't care about said movement. The original post
was (in so many words) trying to claim that all of the
web companies using FOSS software and claiming to 'love
Open Source' are being two-faced because none of their
own software is release under a GPL license. This Us-vs-Them
mentality isn't magically helpful when used in a FOSS
context instead of in a, "you're either with us, or
with the terrorists," context.
Exactly. Both sides must initially exchange their public key (called "certificate" in this case).

It's of course the exact same logic as with encrypted email ("public key encryption" or "asymmetric encryption").
The P2P crypto is done by the browser.
But not doubt that we need to load the entire page and scripts securely securely...
I'll keep my 4 year old laptop, thanks.
> My point is that there's no influx of young aspiring programmers entering that world anymore.

Do you have an evidence to back that up?

The reason I ask is because whenever my company is hiring, we get plenty of fresh young faces walking through the door.
Downvote me all you want, it doesn't make it any less true.
Around the World in 80 Days Creator Wronged by Adecco Launches IndieGogo
Reading your comments, you vacillate between taking radioactive heating from concrete seriously, and not.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not an effective strategy.
I would suggest watching any topic you find interesting at pyvideo: http://pyvideo.org/ These are recordings from most of the major Python conferences around the world
So, people can't work for a bank or insurance company and still make a difference?

Why subscribe to such black and white thinking?

I'd argue that by doing so, you have an even better chance at affecting change than you would trying to do a startup, since startups tend to have a very low rate of success.