skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I kinda think that everyone learns differently to some extent, and that there isn't one universal "best way". So what worked for me, or anybody else, might not be right for you... so take this with a grain of salt.

My preference is to just pick a project and start hacking, and force yourself to learn what you need to know to complete the next step of the project. I think it works better if you are actually enthusiastic about the project, but just picking something "at large" to have a focal point is fine.

It doesn't have to be something big and elaborate, especially in the beginning. You don't need to say "I'm going to write a Facebook clone" right away. Start small, but grow it as you learn.

Maybe you just want a program to randomly generate D&D characters or something. Fine. Write that as a command line program. Then come back and slap a UI on it using wxPython.

Later, port it to being web based using Pylons/Pyramid, Turbogears or whatever. Once you have a web based version, add login/logout, multi-user capability, user profiles, an activity stream, a REST API for external users, XMPP notifications, etc., etc., etc.

Then build an Android app version that uses the REST API.

Anyway, you get the picture. Just starting building and "jump in over your head" and force yourself to learn as you go. Go to the reference material, Google, Stack Overflow, mailing lists, whatever, if and when you get stuck, then build some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That's more or less how I've learned most of what I know about programming, other than a few times when I just decided "I want to learn X" and picked up a book on it and ran through the example code and read the book... but inevitable I get to a point where I need to actually take that and try to turn it into something tangible.

Like I said, this approach may or may not work for you, but maybe give it a shot and see how it goes.
I'm also interested in finding an answer to this. I started web programming in Rails primarily because the whole community seemed to have a lot more beginner friendly materials than Django, especially for someone like me who had no web dev experience at the time. I do prefer Python to Ruby, so finding a good (and up to date!) Django tutorial would be great.
It really is funny how many posters are holding up Tarantino as a bar-raiser of creativity in story structure.
How many people would think twice about posting what you just did on the internet in light of the recent NSA revelations.
I work with a ton of investors -- both angel + VC -- and this kind of opportunistic self-dealing is not condoned or tolerated by any of the professional / career investors I work with. It takes a long time -- and the help of many people -- to build a real business and folks who want to stay in the early-stage game don't pull shit like this because it undermines trust among both founders and fellow investors when you need it the most.
That was a great waste of time. Now back to the rest of my HN feed...
I made up a phrase I use to describe situations like this: "There is nothing new under the sun."

OR, to sum up the RMS<->Joy debate about open source: "There is nothing GNU under the Sun."
This guy and Kafka...
> Obviously there are exceptions, but most poor schools do not have internet access for the students or computers for them. If they do have a library, it is generally inadequate and most are not encouraged to use it.

I appreciate your response, but I believe that your experience is based of your childhood in Africa. In our local county library we probably have 30-40 computers available for free internet access. This was not the case 10 years ago, so perhaps you should visit the public library in the area of the U.S. where you believe that there is a lack of internet access and I would be surprised if at least one computer is there with internet access that could be used. I would bet that there is, and I doubt people would be discouraged from using it.

> Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are...

You missed my point entirely, I'm afraid. I don't think that poverty is genetically linked to lack of success. Poverty is not genetic. What I was saying was that if you have a group of people that are less intelligent because they are genetically predisposed to being less intelligent, then that group has a greater likelihood of being less successful and therefore poorer.

> Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child.

Everything I've been arguing about is about the U.S. I am definitely not speaking about Africa or other parts of the world, and I'm sorry that you took it that way. I think that there are a lot of places in the world in worse condition than in the U.S. I am only making the arguments I make here because throwing money at poverty does not help. It must be applied with care and education and guidance are even more important, at least when people are willing to listen and be taught. Unfortunately, some cultures and peoples are not interested in changing.
> Companies are at their most vulnerable just before a new financing, when cash is short and all hands are required on deck to get the next round closed.

I think it would be more accurate to write "Companies are at their most vulnerable when cash is short and they're not generating enough of it to support their operations and growth."

When you play Build A Business With Someone Else's Money and your execution (or lack thereof) leaves you in position where you need more money from Someone Else, you can lament the fact that Someone Else has significantly more leverage than you or you can acknowledge that this was a possible outcome of the risk you decided to take.
Town of Deer Trail considering hunting licenses for unmanned aerial vehicles
I saw these appear a month ago and then they disappeared from iCloud.com for me. Am I the only one?
Long, amazing read -- I remember it from the SA forums years ago when I was in high school --

I remember wondering then just how long I'd be able to take a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment.

Well fortunately for me, that opportunity came a few years later while working for one of the large banks! The answer to my earlier question was six months; I had worked a few years through various positions into operations, only to fall into a role with little managerial oversight and no responsibility, it got boring so fast...
Good stuff.

"Adults know when they’ve made mistakes, and instead of shying away from the memories, they use them to get better."
For it to really be "3 acts", you should be able to stop watching at any of the act ends, and feel like the story had closure, for at least some notable elements.
In this context, it sounds like he's using "stretch goal" to mean something like what Jim Collins calls a BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goal[1]. I like the concept, and need to make a note to myself to sit down and define what our BHAG at Fogbeam is. We've been so heads-down working on tactical stuff lately, there hasn't been much time to stop, back up, and think about BHAGs.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal
It doesn't have to be an either or proposition. Check out highscalability and you will see that it is common to use 2 to 4 types. Types being key/value, columnar, relational, document, and graph. All have serious pros and cons over one another.
Google Glass: On threshold of a technological revolution
Beautiful - Keynote for iCloud crashed my Safari on 10.8.4...
Google used to be awesome. Ever since they went public, they've slowly but surely started sliding down the path to sucking.

They're probably too strong in search to be dislodged right now, and will probably remain so in the short-to-medium term, but some of their non-core services are ripe for disruption by startups.
Futile Marketing (A.StJohn on a model for game virality)
Thin, flexible glass for energy storage
Microsoft’s Stance on Indie Games is a Problem
My guess is that it's because browser support is inconsistent, and Apple needs to have a 100% flawless experience on ahem less-well-engineered browsers. Positioning the SVG elements precisely ensures that nothing is cut off, and there aren't any visual oddities. Writing your own layout engine is a great way to ensure a consistent experience across multiple rendering engines.
Care to discuss how you use SNMP for centralized monitoring?
Ubuntu forums hacked; 1.82M logins, email addresses stolen
> a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment.

Welcome to most jobs, ever, in every historical period and culture, ever since humans have had jobs distinct from whatever else they did with their lives.

Progress seems to consist of reducing the number of those kinds of jobs and, eventually, finding other things to do for the people who aren't suited to anything else.
Here's an idea. Now this might sound a bit crazy, but hear me out:

How about working to prevent terrorism by not murdering innocent civilians in other countries and inciting massive hatred towards the US from those affected and their fellow countrymen?

Can you imagine what would happen if another country was carrying out drone strikes in the US, with similar numbers of casualties?
An amazing read. Loved it.
Counterpoint: I'm a several-times-weekly user of Word and PowerPoint in Office 2011, and I don't find them troublesome to the extent you do. My workload is small documents and presentations (usually < 50 pages, but with lots of graphics, typically 0.5-40MB all told). Typically exchanging documents with Windows and Mac users.

I often use PPT to lay out simple diagrams, for instance, in preference to Illustrator.

I could see how some things can get on your nerves (auto-formatting, reformatting of pasted objects, and I don't like the spelling and grammar check either) but I couldn't call it infuriating. And it did not approach using OpenOffice. I think you must be exaggerating there?
`contenteditable` has a lot of issues once you go past casual text editing. Sounds like it's doing something similar to Google Docs (using the browser simply as a dumb renderer, and doing a lot of the calculations/layout in JavaScript).
Did he keep his red stapler?
I certainly agree that it undermines trust but don't VCs routinely change terms at the last minute in a series A or B?

Is that really uncommon when you get to the professionals? I've never had to deal with this myself but I am told that it happens all the time. You think you have a deal and then you get a last minute call that says we can't do that evaluation or we want some extra warrants. The rule I have always heard is "you don't have a deal until the check clears".
I'm guessing it's a bluff anyway. Presumably they have their own money on the line, so sabotaging their investment is against their own interests. If the CEO caves the angel walks away with more equity for nothing. If he doesn't, no harm in asking, right?

I think the appropriate response is to thank the angel and be appreciative of their contributions but explain that there is no more equity to give.
And everyone that can only invision this can piss off.

Yeah, they're excited about a spinning 3d cube on an electronic screen. Surely they're not excited about a ubiquitous, open platform that doesn't require lockin and selling our souls, nor does it require to write n+1 fucking mobile apps.
WebGL returns in Internet Explorer 11 thanks to security improvements
If you want to distribute online, sure. "Movie" is loosely defined: To get a showing in full-size theatre screens across America, for whatever that's worth, most indie/Youtube/Vimeo filmmakers don't have access, even for content that is vastly more popular than the bottm 25% of what does hit the cineplex.
Instead of downvoting, how about listing the ways the Second Amendment has checked the power of the government in the real world?
Full-stack Ruby Web and E-commerce Engineer at Pebble
I imagine he burned the building down when they didn't let him.
I was _convinced_ that the globes were hiding drugs and that the "seeds" were something else... but it was just globes.

Engrossing read.
Huh, I guess I never stopped to think what "Ms." is short for, and it very well could be "Miss". However, for those non-native English speakers on HN, it's pronounced differently: "Miss" is pronounced with an unvoiced "s" at the end, "Ms." is pronounced "Mizz".
Sorry Reddit, Digg’s new model proves community rule is overrated
> What should I do to practice [programming]?

Write programs.

> Any advice for an aspiring programmer?

Debugging programs is a big part of how you learn. Don't be afraid to put print statements in your program to see what the values of variables are at various points in time. Don't be discouraged when something doesn't work -- any good programmer has spent hours or even days finding and fixing a bug that's turned out to be trivial.

Don't be afraid to throw out a project and start over. Your second attempt is often much better than the first.

Learn version control. Git is the de facto standard, and if you master it, it will improve your productivity greatly as your projects get larger.

If possible, find someone online or in real life who's also interested in programming, you can bounce ideas off each other and work together on projects. It's sometimes easier to get and stay enthusiastic about a project if someone else is relying on you to make progress on it.
Huh? WU is hardly even noticeable in 8, at all.
Google, Yahoo urged to act on child pornography
If Canada wants to attract start-ups, they should get rid of software patents.
I like to think these internal whistle blowers have gained moral backbone by Edward Snowden's example. May there be more leaks to foment righteous outrage and correct this disregard of slaughtering innocent foreign civilians. Whistle blowers and the net are now the new 4th++ estate.
Polycode looks remarkable! It's like Unity3D for creative coders.
Linus, Sarah and the Linux Civil Code
Pictures of earth and moon taken from Saturn
Twitter isn’t dead – it’s misused
I was trying to find this a few weeks ago. I often wonder what I would do with so much time and free money...

EDIT:
>I placed a sign on the wall next to the bumper, seen below.

Does anybody have a backup of the picture?
> "What sort of military intervention should we use? We could send in soldiers to try and arrest the terrorists, but that is slow, risky, and expensive (we need holding facilities, transportation, etc.) Drones are the obvious alternative. Not only are they cheap, they are pose about zero risk to US personnel"

So what you're saying is that the lives of US personnel are more valuable than that of innocent Pakistani civilians, including the 94 children cited in the report?

Yeah, let's just go for the cheap & easy option. Maybe a few kids get killed in the process, but who cares. At least the US can save a bit of money on expensive military installations and have their soldiers sitting comfortably in offices using a remote control terminal for drones, then go back to eat with their (still alive) family in the evening.
that was equal parts hilarious and depressing. I dislike how completely CONTENT the author seems to be in DELIBERATELY wasting his life away. Come on man--you can do better!
Switching from iOS to Android, Part 1
The reality is that the NY Times was going to have him focus on politics, with the odd foray onto TV to promote his own brand.

Or, he could sign up with ESPN/Disney, and do sports on ESPN, politics on ABC, and so on.

He'll have a much broader level of impact at ESPN/ABC. I suspect NY Times just couldn't match that.
Mea culpa: a few hours after I posted this comment, I got my "Your Leap Motion order has shipped!" email.
This reminds me of my two years working for the U.S. Defense Department as a contractor. For a few months I worked with one of the highest ranking individuals in the building, I did a great job and finished much faster than they expected... and then after that there was no work to do, no matter who I asked, and all I could do was come in late, leave early, lift weights in the building gym, and pretend to work. No one really knew what I did.

The only thing that doomed me was when I eventually found myself unable to keep from falling asleep and snoring in meetings. Tried everything I could think of... chewing gum, drinking water, screaming inside my head. No use; the dozing and snoring in plain view of everyone else continued. I think that clued them off that something was amiss, and I started being told I didn't need to come to meetings anymore... and was gone a few months after that.
You're endorsing a pro-cyclical elevation of pure violence to solve a problem of violence. If you're smart, you'll see where this leads, and it's not someplace a non-sadist would want to go.
This shows nothing.

The more appropriate way, as it was described before, is to take any real-word public data set, import it inside Postgres, then make an app with your favorite stack to lookup and display a set of entries on the page. For more real-world example - add authentication and provide lookups only for authorized users. Then do simple web-server benchmark no these pages.

The improvements with NFS is due to redirecting lots of read operations for OS components form HDD to NIC which means different PCI device, different interrupt, different set of ports. Of course, it helps.

Cheap sharing tenant setups with one cheap SATA HDD for all will never perform well, no matter what virtualization one is using.

Thoughtful partitioning of I/O requests between different PCI devices will help, as old-school system administrators always did, but what is the point of having virtualization then?)
Honestly reading this makes me a little bit sick to my stomach. Do you know what most people would give for that amount of spare time? I could build so much, learn so much, do so much... or would I just sit there and play snake?
In my experience the startup community (both founders + funders) is heavily skewed toward people who believe that creating value takes time and teamwork, and that any premature + asymmetric effort to capture value is just counterproductive. Very few really big companies in tech have been built by bootstrapping -- it offers the illusion of control, but typically at the expense of impact.
You gave up at that point, or they let you go?
Show HN: USA hellbans HN
Bypassing the kernel created a curiosity for me; Why not develop the whole software under kernel space? It does provide the huge problem that any crash can cause a kernel panic, but no longer have to worry about performance related to virtual memory, page-miss, swapping, context switching, etc... And depended on the hardware, after a crash, it can reboot in less than 10 seconds.

Am I overlooking something?
Not yet - it's in the works.
yeah, starting/stopping the server works without a problem. rebooting the vm on which the server runs is what causes the problem.
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Non-Working WiFi
Remember that the people who make these discoveries are scientists. It's one thing for a person on the street to be skeptical it's another thing when a scientist in the field in question is skeptical.

Now these guys don't even have a hypothesis on how to turn the machine on. Forget the engineering. They can't get an idea to work. I'm with the GP, this is not very exciting. Even having a working idea on how all the parts may work would be more exciting than this article.
when you say kill the server, do you mean kill the server process or kill the box that the server runs on? I have no problem with the former, but I have a problem with the latter, and I can't tell why. It's pretty consistent.
Leap doesn't work (or at didn't work during beta) well or at all if you had solid object blocking it's viewport. Even if blocking object was behind your hand.
Might be because the discussion is about iWork specifically, and you haven't really explained why iCloud is an abysmal failure.
Because Pages is not a web page editor, it's a word processor and page layout system. The intended output is essentially a printed document. In fact (checking out the beta) when you share a document you can choose to email in Pages, PDF or Word format. HTML is not presented as an option.
For the first time, other than for my own app, I am one of the first 50 to try a new app :)
We built a voice messaging app called PhonOn (its on play store and iOS appstore). This was one of the pivots we were considering before opting to pursue another idea.
Do you stream the content to the server or is it record the whole thing and then upload the file?
"Intelligent knife" tells surgeon if tissue is cancerous
But a lot of these are jury trials, aren't they?
I'd love to know what Moonshine's doing now and how long he managed to keep up the subterfuge.
> He quit after some months of being bored.

Talk about a lack of imagination! Just think of all the dinky hacking projects you could do with a guaranteed paycheck and no responsibilities. I'd probably spend 12 hours a day writing qml.
We have now fixed this and it should be available on tablets as soon as the Play store propagates the new version.
Seeing as there are CloudFlare employees monitoring this discussion, what would you say about CloudFlare's relatively poor showing on the Cedexis country reports http://www.cedexis.com/country-reports/ (e.g. average response time for US is 179ms vs 96ms for Cloudfront).
Guys. If you ever think you might be stuck in a meeting as described in part 2, you can set up a rule on ifttt.com to call you if you send them a text message. That way, you can pull the same trick with a single phone.
^C, ^Z, ps, fg, bg
Even if your friend's numbers are off by an order of magnitude it is an interesting thought experiment to try to reverse engineer the business.

According to SPS' FAQ customers receive product within "4 to 10 business days." Let us assume the partner in China ships directly to the end customer. SPS has one shipping price for all orders - $6 - which seems cheap for international so for simplicity let's assume SPS makes no profit on shipping.

Their cheapest products -- Mini Squares and Prints -- are both $15 for a set of 48. Each is roughly the equivalent of 4 sheets of 8.5" x 11". If the cost per sheet of glossy thick 8.5" x 11" cardstock is about $0.05 and the cost to print, cut, package and prep for shipping is $0.05 then the cost to print an order is ~ $0.50.

Let's use $10M for their annual revenue. If their average order is $25 (including $6 for shipping) that's 400,000 orders.

$25 (gross revenue) - $6 (shipping) - $0.50 (printing & prep) = $18.50.

x 400k orders = $7.4 million

Let's say each employee costs $100k/year. They have 10 employees, so now SPS is left with $6.4 million.

Their next highest costs might be: marketing, office space, servers, employee computers and professional services e.g. attorney. Add to that other costs of doing business like chargebacks and returns, and call it another $1 million in annual expenses.

Even if I am now overestimating actual profit by an order of magnitude, the founders or investors of SPS are still doing well. This in a market I would have bet was oversaturated. But most startups competing in this space probably do not think to run their supply chain and distribution from China. Not to mention the other areas of the business that SPS appears to be executing nicely on.
Something must be wrong here.) If it such a good idea, then there will be a long queue of big shot investors, like that one before the Apple store.

It seems that Canonical have only good concepts, but not a world-class engineering team (like Google's) to make it real.