skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This issue is a fundamental one that everybody teaching programming or computer science must answer. Is it better to teach CS from the ground up or top down?

The ground up approach is something like SICP, with fundamentals in lambda calculus or Turing machines. Students learn rules such as how a Lisp evaluates an expression and write programs which apply the rules. It's not necessary that this be taught using Lisp, but it seems to be popular, because it greatly reduces distractions when understanding and writing actual programs. In any case, the ground-up approach generally teaches first a system of rules, and only once the rules are understood does it move on to programs.

The top-down approach, on the other hand, starts with programs. Often the students are given a partially written program and are asked to improve it. The curriculum doesn't focus on rules because they all have exceptions. It's much more like engineering and less like mathematics. As the article says, nowadays "a real engineer is given a big software library, with a 300-page manual that’s full of errors. He’s also given a robot, whose exact behavior is extremely hard to characterize...."

What's better? Some schools (such as my alma mater, Brown) have two intro classes, one for each method of teaching. I chose the rules-based bottom-up approach when I was an undergrad, and it was very good, and I was convinced it was the better way to go.

But I'm losing my conviction, partially because MIT is changing it and they must know what they're doing (heh), and partially because I'm coming to the understanding that everybody uses libraries and this is not going to change. The top-down approach doesn't really provide any sense that there should be libraries, that code should be organized, that you can write to an interface and document your code. People can learn these sorts of things later, though.
Ask HN: A Local Media Company Wants to Use My Content, What Should I Charge Them?
I'm not sure how relevant this is to Hacker News, but I guess it can always be deleted.

I'm a freshman CS major and I've been running a local web site for concert listings in the Philadelphia area as a little side project (it's a Rails app that scrapes venue web sites to aggregate events).

Recently, the site has become somewhat popular with local show promoters and members of local press to the point that one of the local papers contacted me about integrating my content on their site.

Which brings me to my question, how much should I ask for from them?
I mean they'll be making money off of my content seeing as they have ads all over their site.

Also would I be taking a big risk in losing traffic directly to my site if I let them use my listings? (I'd clearly want some kind of link back to my project or something on their site)
Integrating Scala with Erlang -- Initial steps
Some day, we'll have IMAP for files and this will all go away.
Yes, and the clip was hilarious despite being inaccurate, though the inaccuracy doesn't change the point.

And since I don't visit reddit, I must have found it here ;)
How To Market To The Jewish World - Part 1
Do you have a product or service relevant to the Jewish market? Here are a few tips that will help you market effectively to the Jewish market.
I think that the point is that the ratio of framework to functionality code is a relevant indicator when evaluating overall code quality in an application or system.
The title is a bit misleading. The gist of TFA is that MIT is switching from Scheme to Python in its INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING course. That would seem to me to be a bit of a no brainer. I find python to be a much more acceptable alternative than BASIC in introducing people new to coder in a way that is more in line with sound computer engineering practices.
Nethack - Best Game Ever (2000)
Furniture retailers seem to do it all the time.
Southern Ontario could probably support 3 or 4 teams.

The issue is that the NHL wants to expand in the US market, and get more TV contracts there. As a result, they are willing to have teams lose huge amounts of money in garbage hockey markets just to satisfy that.

If you wanted strong teams, move one to Ontario. If you want to lose a whole bunch of money for a while and potentially do better in the US market - continue on this path.
Andrew, how about, Should all the cool kids, who have 100,000+ followers/readers (guy kawasaki, louis grey) randomly choose some relatively unknown start up and give them an exposure boost just for the hell of it? What do they have to lose if they promote an up and coming app or site with no expectation of being compensated? Most start-ups need promo as bad as they need cash. I am talking about a real promo, something beyond just a tech crunch or mashable mention. Sort of like Oprah, but in the digital space. Hmmm maybe YOU should do some interviews of someone who has yet to achieve success, every now and then.... I wish I could give you a suggestion of who might---oh, I can! Jeff Wurtz of lymabean.com
SF-area Computational Complexity study group
I want to start studying computational complexity, and it would be nice to do so with a group. Probably meeting somewhere in SF/Berkeley/Oakland, on Sundays, with a pace that's steady but accommodates full-time employees, and with the following textbook. But that's all up for discussion. Email me if interested.

http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Complexity-Approach-Sanjeev-Arora/dp/0521424267.
yes, and pretty smart move for him to get noticed and land his next job!
I thought you could use a single process with multiple threads to run on multiple processors.
Look up "more" in the dictionary.
why should you go back to school?
According to http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1127 these guys have been shuttered.
But we have had processes with multiple threads that enable concurrent calculation in a single process for quite some time now, haven't we?
It depends on how much you care about this project, is it your baby? or just something that happened? - if its your baby, you say - "You can link to my site from yours..I'll even design you a nice big banner ;)" and thats the best you can do.... - cause that gives little chance of losing it all - if it's just fun and games; or you dont see yourself doing it for 2-3 more years, let them do it for free and then release it totally opensource.....

- you could also try to hit a home run and sell them the "tech, trademark, domain.." for 2k-15k ,

Good luck
CEOs using Youtube
Most people do it by affiliations with ticket vendors, and you get a cut of their cut.

It's tricky if you're doing it locally from small venues that only have at-the-door sales. But if you can branch out into recorded music and merchandise, those sell well too.
You Are A Brain
What Killed Smalltalk: Sometimes Balls can be Useful
Managing windows is a big pain? Is it 1980? :)
Note that `let` was introduced in Javascript 1.7 and is not available in other browser implementations.
Digital Field Guides Identify Tree From Photo of Leaf
Assuming you're using a Mac, opt-cmd-h will hide all windows but the one you're using...

Personally, what I find worse than 'distractions' is being blinded by whitespace caused by Firefox (/whatever) being way too huge.

And, full-width emacs!? On my monitor (with a rather large font size) that's almost 250 columns, I hope you don't have any code over there! If you're vertically splitting emacs, then, I think we're on the same page. It's not about windows themselves being any specific size, it's about making them an appropriate size for their content.
67% of British Families would rather cut back on food than internet access
Narrative hook is not the point. Having a sense of real contentand cogent argument leading to a useful conclusion, is.

All too frequently missing.
As far as I can tell, Dropbox has actually solved the desktop file-sync problem. It's the first sync product of its kind that I've used that works out-of-box.

Yes, sync is hard. Where I think things fail is mainly around user experience. You just have to make smart decisions and let users recover if they see something they don't expect. Dropbox does this quite well.

I learned this when I was at Microsoft on the ActiveSync team -- we actually were trounced by RIM not because our sync was worse (it was probably superior) but because we initially made the mistake of OVER-reporting status (even minor conflicts that normally you would want to just ignore.)

Sync should be a silent, no/very little UI experience -- a utility that just works in the background. Any attempt to make it more than that will cause the product to fail miserably.
Did you mean "The bottom-up approach doesn't really provide any sense that there should be libraries, ..."?
I'm not sure I understand you. You like the switch from Scheme to Python because Python is better than BASIC?
Sorry, I wasn't clear: he failed to get it working in 90 minutes.

The title's not incorrect, as it doesn't claim he managed to do it, it's only ambiguous because of all the linkbait titles like "Making a Rails twitter clone in 28 seconds" that are out there.
Many, if not most, of these factors are strongly correlated with wide income disparity and particularly greater poverty levels. Greed, obviously, but also those pertaining to crime rates (envy, wrath), arguably lust, and potentially gluttony.

It would be interesting to see these charts adjusted for wealth levels in some manner.
I work as a developer of embedded systems for automotive purposes, and I have got to ask: what fields of programming are you working in where you actually write code for prolonged periods of time? I would say that less than 20% of my time go to actual programming, and probably less than half of that involves typing a lot. More thinking.
Yeah, I do have ticket affiliate links but I make barely any money off of that. Although all the local venues do use Ticketweb, most people buy tickets at the door (or at the local box office depending on how popular the show is).

It doesn't help that I marketed the site to mostly broke college students who probably go to venue box offices to avoid nasty surcharges.
delete can be useful, but it's not nearly as useful as it sounds. delete's only purpose is to remove a property name from an object. that is the only advantage it has over just nulling out a reference directly, and in most cases, the two techniques can be used interchangeably with no negative side effects.

let is not useful to anyone doing browser based javascript work, because it doesn't work in any browser other than Firefox and derivatives. Getting a slightly different scope behavior is hardly worth throwing out 70-80% of potential users.
Yes - my first reaction was "Why don't they give her something interesting to do?".
At first I wouldn't call it my baby, but after seeing how much it brought me into the local music scene here and how many contacts I've gained off of it I would probably say I'm very attached to it.

The web site that wants to use the listings is owned by the paper but seems to have its own management. The girl that runs the whole thing is very with it and whatnot.

In the end I really think it might come to her wanting to somehow integrate and the paper's IT department telling her no because she has to use their crappy proprietary listings from the paper.
I find this justification downright weird. Yes, a class like 6.001 is an extremely purified and unrealistic view of modern software engineering. But the same could be said of any theoretical subject. The people at the Large Hadron Collider are probably spending a lot more time reading 300-page technical manuals than they are reading Feynman.

A lot of the charm of academia, to me, is that it gives you some breathing room to step back from the mess, and look for unifying principles. There might be a bit of a shock when the student first graduates, but in the long term they're often better off with the kind of knowledge that they couldn't easily pick up through osmosis.
Thanks for the suggestion. The problem I have with interviewing startups is that they're full of sh*t. They talk up their product like it's the next Google.

But what I want to get to is the the honest parts of their stories. I want to hear how they're up nights worrying that they'll go out of business.

I want to hear that one of their motivations is that couldn't get laid in high school and business is their way to finally be someone in this world. And they won't take their eyes off that dream for even a second.

Or something like that. But I'm not a good enough interviewer to draw that out of them. Yet.
Is your site currently making money? Is theirs? Are the venues going to give you grief for scraping their sites?

You are in a very good negotiating position since you don't need to sell to them, and they are approaching you.

The numbers you need to know to negotiate effectively are how much it costs you to provide the listings; an estimate of what your listings are worth to the other party and an estimate of how much it would cost them to do the same things you are doing.

You should look at their circulation report and rate card (they do give these out to advertisers) to derive those numbers.

You may want to consider selling the entire site to them too.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.
I've never heard this characterized so well. There was a <something> that I had always been trying to put my finger on when I'd read these sorts of articles and the top-down/bottom-up description is right on the mark.

My own feeling is something like this. Before Newton there was Kepler. Now Kepler was no dummy and he used the exacting measurements of Tycho Brahe to arrive at a very accurate model of planetary motion. He found that planets traveled in ellipses not circles, and he knew that they swept out equal areas in equal times (among other things). In short, he had a very firm "top-down" grasp on what planets did.

Then along came Newton, a "bottom-up" thinker if there ever was one (calculus was invented in what was perhaps the most supreme feat of yak shaving ever http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html ). He found that there was an underlying and unifying idea, gravity, that explained why the planets behave as they do.

So to cap off my analogy, I've found that if I've worked in a sufficiently bottom-up way on something then sometimes what seems complex or intricate collapses down into some small and elegant solution that I wouldn't have seen if I were coming from the other direction (or at least it would be much more difficult).
Why should we have good taste in things, if we are happy with the low quality stuff?
It's been interesting watching visualization (and similarly, intuitive usage of data mining) struggle through what appears to be a very long and very awkward infancy stage.

Academics and developers continue clinging to things like hyperbolic trees and treemaps as flagship tools for understanding large data sets. Most of these have never seemed particularly useful to me, from the first time I saw a presentation of "cutting edge" visualization techniques in 2001.

Similarly, people have this seemingly endless fascination with tag clouds, which are often of dubious utility. This article mentions Wordle, a tag cloud generator that adds typographic design to the equation, and the audience is wowed anew.

It's always amazing when excellent, conscientious design meets large datasets, and when the end result promotes understanding and insight. I'm blanking on current examples at the moment, but two chestnuts are from information-laden maps such as the New York City MTA map and Gapminder's world data visualization.
Why is this guy being voted down for a decently formed comment?
See, you're thinking from the fans' perspective. That's just about the last thing anyone at the NHL is thinking about. If they let in a Hamilton team, the NHL would be sued so fast by both the Maple Leafs and Sabres. (Yes, franchisees can sue their franchisor.) Territory rights are golden to sports franchises - it's their one sustainable asset, even more valuable than their logo/brand.

Again, the $750 million payment to Glendale, the KC arena, and the desire to be on ESPN are all issues that would have to be resolved before we even get to a territorial rights fight. Balsillie is hoping that bankruptcy court solves these issues - and court certainly does help him overcome these actors - but they're huge, huge issues.
Which text editor do you use? (Launched new site. Interested to get comments)
From what I've been reading about this issue, I think many people are missing one important point: 6.001 was an introductory course, the contents of which would be rehashed and expanded in several later courses. That the contents of this course has changed does not mean that MIT students do not learn about these concepts anymore.
Liking good tools isn't the same thing as being an upyourself arse.

Being the most discerning doesn't make you a better person, it just makes you less happy more of the time. The recent X-Men: Origins film is a good point - look around the net at some reviews, there's an awful lot of criticism going on.

I enjoyed it, discerning people didn't. We're both out two hours and the cost of a ticket. Which is a better situation to be in?
I made an app called "Recall". It's a simple Simon-style game. I made it not to make millions, but as sort of a full-stack "hello world", from design to implementation to submitting to the app store to the first update.

I'll probably do some more stuff with it, but I'm already designing my second app.
I'm not making money, they're making some kind of revenue seeing they have paid staff and all sorts of web and print ads.

As for venues giving grief over scraping, I haven't heard anything from larger Livenation venues (but they have an API for event information). The smaller venues that I scrape seem to love it. One of the well known show promoters in the city was nice enough to shoot me an email telling me how much he likes the site and is now testing out the iPhone version for me.

I highly doubt they'd want to buy it, I'm pretty sure the woman that runs the site wants to integrate and didn't really talk much to upper management.

Thanks for mentioning the rate card, I'll be sure to find out what they're charging for ads before I might them this week.
Donald Knuth says: [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html]

> Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. [...]

And Richard Stallman doesn't use a web browser: [http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/]

> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

Closer to here, Paul Graham also recommends Disconnecting Distraction. [http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html]

Maybe we should try learning from them.
So classic. A few years ago I told my dad what I was playing and he told me he had played Hack (from which NetHack is derived) on his first PC.

Roguelikes have aged better than any other games I can think of.
Perhaps because people are dumbfounded by him introducing BASIC into the disctussion for no obvious reason whatsoever.
Darpa: Heat + Energy = Brains. Now Make Us Some.
From Calvin and Hobbes: "I find life gets a lot easier if I lower my expectations to the point where they're already met".

I used to think it was funny, now I wonder if that's the secret behind Buddhism.
I have a little bit of taste in coffee (not much) and despite not especially liking Starbucks coffee, I drink a lot of it. When I'm late to work or needing to wake up to get a bunch of stuff done on my lunch hour, I don't really care what it tastes like. Starbucks is reliably strong, convenient, and ubiquitous. When I'm enjoying a nice leisurely morning, I much prefer the stuff I brew at home, but how often does that happen? Rarely more than two mornings a week. Likewise, when I want to sit for a while, I strongly prefer the coffeehouse down the street, but sitting quietly and enjoying myself happens far less than deciding to sleep in and rush to work.

On another note, I don't understand the connection between Apple and Starbucks. It seems impossible for someone to think of one without thinking the other. Why? Starbucks has no snob appeal and no fan base who sincerely believes it has the best product. McDonald's and Starbucks long ago identified each other as their primary natural competitors. The only thing I can think of is the sterile styling and image of superficiality, which is to say, the connection is made by people who are fans of neither.
"Say a hacker who's suddenly become wealthy from a Linux-related IPO approaches you and says, 'Here's a million dollars. Let's make a full-blown, graphics-rich version of Nethack to rival Diablo. Interested?'"

That would really kick ass. Anyone having a spare million dolars?
Regarding Sync should be Silent, In a perfect world it would be so, but this is far from it.

There is no way to automate this conflict resolution for binary files (if the same file is modified in two places). You can simply pick the latest modified version, but this is less than optimal (the other modifications will be lost then). Even dropbox isn't totally silent, in a conflict such as this, their server keeps revisions (so you can pick and choose the correct one, making it not silent).

Silent Sync (in a automated no-user-interaction way) has , is, and always be a dream (at least for the foreseeable future).
I find it pretty amusing that the Bible Belt states tend to be pretty "sinful".
I don't want to spend my entire life developing software, actually. Eventually I want to transition to authorship of the fictive.
A lot of people who didn't and have never got mashable/techcrunch/rww mentions didn't get the coverage they deserved.

For example I have been trying to tell people that we now support facebook stream API in FriendBinder and since this is only about a week since facebook released it, it should be semi-interesting, but no one seems interested.

P.S. liked the show, watched it on Friday, live.
For those of you who might be looking for something similar in a strategy/empire-building game, Dwarf Fortress is available for free at:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

With a free graphics front-end for the game at:
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php

It's donation-ware, still under development, and the learning curve is a right-angle, but the game is really fun and addictive.

A wiki has been put together in lieu of proper documentation with this page:
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Your_first_fortre...

providing everything you need to start.

If you enjoy the game, please donate. This is a startup which really deserves to succeed.
But this is exactly where Dropbox is genius. They just keep both files - they don't scream at you that there's a conflict. In the case that you open up a file and it's not quite right, you're going to look into it. You'll find the alternate file and then copy/paste your changes in. Then you'll re-save and ta-da, you're OK. But there are going to be all sorts of situations where you'll have minor conflicts, and the user will never, ever notice.
This might be true for a theoretical perfect strongly typed language (SML comes close), but whatever C and C++ might gain by static typing, they lose by things like casts to (void *) and of course their unsafe pointers. Even Java isn't very type-safe, especially when it started - collections held Objects, which you had to downcast (bye static type-safety, hello runtime errors).
Calvin was talking about his expectations of himself, not of the products he consumes, a completely different thing morally, though not psychologically, which is quite unfortunate.
chrome and Chrome? They need to change the name of their UI.