skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me it is not a "real" AI. I began a game, and after complete development on my side (about 5-6 moves), the opponent AI did only developed pawns, which shows off its limits.

I am not a javascript expert. but given the size of the code, I doubt there is a great IA underluying. Actually I've browsed the mignified code in order to find the AI implementation. The only clue I spot was a call to the Random() function. I won't state it for sure, because I wasn't able to understand the whole code. But I highly guessed it is the basis of the AI implementation. :-)
Without profits the company doesn't exist; their market share doesn't exist; their ability to provide support for their phones doesn't exist; their ability to update / fix / improve their software doesn't exist; their ability to invest into the expensive infrastructure necessary to provide high quality app markets doesn't exist; their ability to market their phones to drive adoption doesn't exist; and on and on.

Profits matter for consumers as much as market share does, even if they don't realize it. The phone hardware business is a very expensive and difficult market. Companies like HTC demonstrate just how hard it is to stay in the game, and just how expensive it is. Being profitable is a requirement to produce at the massive economies of scale necessary to compete in the smart phone market (or you have to sell less units while charging a lot more for them, but you still require that profit to keep churning out new phones). The only reason Blackberry, for example, still exists at all is that they were so profitable for so many years, and able to build up a cash hoard; without that, they'd already have disappeared.
The case study really isn't compelling at all, it just doesn't look like a good site.

I doubt people will care much about your age and or just don't mention it.

Side note - "Design" is becoming more and more obsolete as the use of design frameworks becomes more ubiquitous. I started out doing design from scratch but now I just search for the best framework to use and cut my development time into a fraction.

Check out Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation (Zurb)
TSV or CSV?
10 Top Impediments to Creative Business Thinking
So I started to work it out, only to discover the link about the problem in the article gives it away - counterfactuals can be used, so might as well read that instead of any thing I come up with. And thus I just wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out which specific one worked (now erased) ... but my hunch was correct! (Although hunches are hardly proofs, tsk tsk)

Also, I want to thank you again for helping me out with awk/sed/grep/command line stuff, from a year ago!
I also feel that the entire spec for HTTP 2 is misguided, so I don't think most of my recommendations would be welcomed.
Homakov, I like your posts, audits and the like but I really suggest you ask someone to review them before publishing because for the life of me I cannot comprehend what you are writing most of the time.
> I started on VB. The whole "it rots your brain" argument is complete bullshit

I started with Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II series and I'm not so sure about the bullshitness of the argument. Dijkstra was not talking about VB at the time. It's nearly impossible to explain recursion in terms of "classic" BASIC.

I'm lucky I also learned C and FORTH (through the wonderful GraFORTH environment). Because of that, the quality of my Basic code (my first job was programming educational software for Apple IIs) was much increased.

In order to properly assess the damage, you must ask yourself how comfortable you feel with concepts that cannot be expressed in your first (or "native") language.
My story:

I founded this a couple of years ago because my school (I was 11/12 at the time) had recently purchased a library system which was horrible and ugly. I thought it could be made much better, so I coded for months on end to get this product working.

I submitted this to a TV competition on national TV and got the opportunity to pitch this product in front of 500,000 viewers. I received a bursary of €2,000 from the show and used that money to grow the business.

Currently the business is thriving and is growing rapidly.

I'd really appreciate any feedback you might have.

Thanks,
Shane
A few Qs.

> WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN?
>
> If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy.

You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused?

> Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month

I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles.

This price point just makes this a default no go. It would take her a lot of time and effort, serious investment, to catalogue all of her books.

The primary use-case is for insurance, and a secondary use-case would be to generate bibliographical entries for her papers and work.

Both scenarios are seldom-access scenarios, and 30 EUR per month seems very excessive.

You probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet. Which has virtually no ongoing cost and can be backed up and shared easily, and Google Docs spreadsheet even means it can be managed online easily.

The only bit of value is to reduce the time to catalogue, the process of scanning the ISBN and resolving the book details from that.

Have you considered one-off pricing based on # of ISBN lookups and then a very low storage price... 30 EUR per 1,000 ISBN lookups, 10 EUR per year storage per 1,000 books.

And finally... is the ISBN database you're using a national one, or a global one? Of course ISBN is global, but some catalogues of data are country specific.
Yes you are creating something out of chaos because you have an algorithm. No algorithm, no programming means you can't create.
I'm teaching Python to my kids (ages 10 and 13) right now, after finally ditching Visual Basic myself last year.

Of course I'm at liberty to improvise my "syllabus." I decided to introduce lists before program flow. I introduced range() as a way to populate a list. And then we started doing things with lists using constructs like [x2 for x in range(-10, 10)].

At that moment, my daughter asked: "Can we use Python to make a graphing calculator?" With my syllabus in tatters, we installed matplotlib and played with it a bit. I've explained to my kids that in programming, sometimes we have to look up and use things before we fully learn how they work.

This approach would probably make no sense for teaching C, where looping comes before lists. But in my idiosyncratic mental map of Python, lists come before looping.

I'm not dogmatic about what first language to learn. My only intention right now is to see if my kids will take an interest in it.
Thanks :-)

At the moment it is targeted towards physical book collections, but we're currently working hard on eBook integration.
One of my professors, Prof. Vineeth K Paleri, at NIT Calicut (http://cse.nitc.ac.in) asks the students to read this article by Djikstra in their first class with him. Was an interesting read indeed.
The percentage of browsers that still require these prefixes are miniscule. I've been using border-radius, box-shadow, box-sizing, and others without prefixes for a while now without issue. Check caniuse.com for their status and you'll find vendor prefixes are dropping like flies.
Toybox, a Busybox alternative with a BSD license
Quora’s Horrible Mobile Experience (In the name of "growth")
Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack Dies At 36
Where's the unobfuscated code? I haven't been able to find it...
We should exclude such people from educational institutes by nature of belief. They're not teaching science if they already have an agenda, bias or belief and allow it to interfere with objectivity and professionalism. In fact any religious school or education institute should be of independent of religion how the church and state supposedly are.

This shit is unfortunately rife.

I had to explain this to my daughter's teacher who refused to teach evolution under science, even though it is part of the curriculum in the UK at primary level. The most annoying thing is that I was called into the (non-religious) school because my 9 year old daughter said she didn't believe in god and the teacher found it offensive and didn't want to teach her!
I would expect the delivery vehicles to cost a lot more, but those higher upfront costs reduce the ongoing costs (maintenance etc). There would be an incentive to maximize utilization as an idle vehicle earns no money. A vehicle owner would want to deliver on behalf of many businesses, which allows combining multiple deliveries for better utilization. Software would allow for a lot of optimization in routing, pickups, delivery and transfers.
I did not see it in a quick look through the site but the most obvious missing feature would be the ability to share book lists with friends. Expanding the loan out feature to support requests would allow you to run your own little library service quite easily.
I think his posts are just fine considering that English isn't his first language and his relative lack of years in English-speaking countries.
Those are all valid points.

However, I am teaching an introductory programming course and I have seen many a student terribly confused by manual memory management and low level data types. My hope is to be able to introduce the very basic parts of programming (variables, assignment, branching, looping, functions) without having to go into any OOP or containers.

There are always people who will never get even those most basic concepts, but there might be some who will get a basic glimpse of what programming means who would otherwise fail at basic C data types. In the end, they will all need to understand all of Python, then C, then (sadly) Matlab.

What you are describing is indeed very interesting. One has to be very careful to not introduce too many concepts too early. So maybe, one should restrict looping to while loops until lists are introduced. And string processing could be taken as the introduction to OOP.
Working on something similar. A free Twitter manager for individuals/teams that includes analytics and scheduling. A couple of screens http://i.imgur.com/0bCOizS.png http://i.imgur.com/rYfCKdN.png Interesting to see how you've done things, good luck! :)
Oh, I have no issue with the people contributing. It's the stars, which I expect we'll start seeing more and more of, who will more and more start leveraging the independent channel for their fundraising, even though they certainly would have far less trouble raising through traditional channels (or, in the case of Lee, could finance that project directly without breaking a sweat).
A really interesting read! I am glad I read this very long article. Worth the time!
Awesome, I have something similar for the game of Go: https://github.com/mapleoin/goboard.js

Unfortunately I didn't spend that much time writing beautiful docs for it.
And that's the thing with Matlab, it does the math part really well

Maybe R and Numpy are getting better, but try to invert a matrix, find and eigenvalue, find the solution to a polynomial, fit an equation, etc Not to mention the most advanced things outside Matlab
Hi!

Have you ever played Conway's game of life? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

It hasno algorithm, only a few simple rules from which order arises from chaos.

Give it a shot, you may like it.

As a practicing Christian, I see no reason evolution can't be exactly what we scientists observe it to be: a process by which beneficial adaptations are passed down to succeeding generations. Much like in software, where design decisions pass down to future incarnations of concepts, like WASD for FPS game control.
I recommend not mentioning your age to your clients until necessary. At least that's what I did. As timmm said, your case study isn't very compelling. If I were you, I'd try to build up a Github with some open source stuff and get more involved in the developer community. Clients will eventually come looking for you.

By the way, shoot me an email at zchlatta (at) gmail.com. I'm currently 15 and am always looking for other young developers to chat with. I'd be more than happy to talk to you about technology and other interesting pursuits.
If you want an interactive system, clojure or common lisp will be much better choices. Part of the reason I haven't gotten into haskell is because as you said, it "isn't quite there yet". Common Lisp has the added quality that an error trows you into the debugger, and that it makes errors much less punishing. If there is one lesson I've learned from gaming is that hard games don't repel the players if errors are easy to recover from and you aren't psychologically punished for them. Haskell isn't exactly a shining example of that, despite it's other great qualities. You want to make the teaching material challenging, not punishing(a great example of this is the game super meat boy).

Not to mention the traditional argument for lisp as a teaching language: the extremely simple syntax. For somebody who hasn't seen code before, lisp would look just as weird as any other language, so the unfamiliarity argument doesn't hold much water. Prefix notation isn't at all difficult to learn, (+ 1 2) would be just as weird as dividing using / or multiplying with *, and using % for modulo division. You just tell the students that this is how you write math with a keyboard(a white lie at worst:).

I'm currently working on a "try ruby" like tutorial to interactively teach FP using racket to college students, as my last year project.
Thanks for the reply

We validate ISBNs on our automated cataloguing feature.

--

I definitely think that would be a sensible pricing model. I'll certainly look into it. Thanks for the suggestion :-)

Send me an email at shane@libramatic.com and I'll see if I can sort something out.

--

We use a combination of international book databases and have a 98.5% accuracy rate.
Erm, so can you legally be employed (even self-employed) in the UK at 14?
They've wrapped berkeleydb as 'oracle nosql', but haven't gotten any traction, probably because they don't know how to approach that market.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/nosqldb/overview/...
Erm, yeah, I think the name collision is a little too overwhelming, name change might be in order.
Or... They simply might not have been as competent as their competition in addressing it.
I realize MS-hating is popular around here but we need not jump to the worst conclusion every time.
> But it would be beneficial for science if code was treated as important as the paper itself.

One could argue that it isn't. In science, the concept is usually more important than the implementation.

But I totally agree. Scientific code tends to be awful and I wish I knew what to do about that.
Evolution does not go beyond the scientific method. You need to take a college level biology class.
Maybe it is so because this is a very wordy article with Dijkstra having just his usual axes to grind? The debate about this article should be a debate about the merits of proving program correctness, even though people nowadays read in Dijkstra many other things he probably did not even mean; anyway, this debate has been done to death in the period when there was still any controversy about using it as a technique for day-to-day programming.

I think the problem with Dijkstra is that A) he views every program as a huge algorithm, where 90% of programming now is doing IO and user interfaces B) he doesn't take into consideration that people can have different brain wiring than he has and be effective with other techniques that the ones he advocates.
No. As a user I would never sign an NDA.

You want virality and promotions, not secrecy.
That's definitely what I'm working on. If you wanna make your eyes bleed check out my old posts ;)

Any corrections are welcome at homakov@gmail.com.
There are a lot of data that are most simply explained by the concept of evolution. Any other explanation for evolution (such as God did it) requires the invocation of principles that have far less support than gene mutations during reproduction/replication.
Wait a second, could you not read my google login session cookie from this page with a seamless iframe to a google domain? Again, like the person above, I didn't really understand what's going on here.
I reread this piece every few years and agree that there's no reason this discussion can't occur every few months/years on HN (so I'm upvoting this too).

And since there's a lack of comments on many of the threads, I'll add my opinion to this one. This was written by a man who's got a long-term love affair with programming. I recognize this because I am the same way, and it's actually rarer than you might think.

Most of the people who were my colleagues have gone on to management, or more likely switched to other careers. I've been in management repeatedly (even C-level) and have had to talk my way back into software architecture and development. I wrote my first program 41 years ago and it's still my favorite past-time.
Unfortunately for that argument, treason carries a very specific, Constitutionally-set, definition. It is the only crime with such a definition, and Snowden is not likely to ever be convicted of it for that reason.
From the paper: http://github.com/rjpower/falcon/
> "What should I do next?"

Become an enlightened developer by learning a functional programming language.
RIP CoTweet! :(

http://mashable.com/2010/03/02/cotweet-acquired/
does recent historical record count, or do you need predictive results? Recent historical examples include the Industrial Moth. If you want to predict some evolution, pick an antibiotic and wait for it to become ineffective. Here's more:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46030115/142-Modern-Examples-of-Ev...

And while we're beating each other with the scientific method, I believe [!] the onus is on those who think evolution to be an incorrect theory to provide a result that falsifies the premise.

FWIW, if you haven't read The Origin of Species, I can't recommend it strongly enough. It is my opinion Darwin is a better writer than Dawkins, Gould or Jones. The man could put together a lovely sentence.
Thanks for the advice, I agree the case study isn't a great example and I will change it soon.
Also the likelihood of a future president using this information to further their political connections is pretty high. If you can destroy members of the other party using all this information you will have to or they will. This will lead to much more inter-party fighting to become the holder of the data first.
Yes, you just can't work full-time. For certain professions, you can earn money at any age.
I agree with timmm, the case study isn't compelling for me. I like the way the logo moves from the red to the white. Not a huge fan of centered text. How good are you at javascript? I might hire you for some freelance work if you know how to work with the prototype object.
The GIL must go!
Why does Google add visitor regional information to the domains on blogspot, in this case .com.es for no apparent reason?

It's intensely annoying to crawl political blogs for Australia, UK, New Zealand and US from my server in Germany and then have all the urls with .de when they go into my news site. As a problem the solution is trivial I suppose, but why do they do it in the first place?
I've had a brief look at functional programming style before but it never stuck. Which language would you recommend to someone of my skill level?
I'm an admirer of Ross Anderson but it seems, based on the reporting, the Garcia et al have got themselves into a slightly different situation - I don't think that the chip and PIN disclosures ever resulted in an actual injunction from an actual court, all the banks were doing there was essentially threatening the researchers involved and the academics as a whole. It's one thing to take on card issuers but you can't just write a letter like Dr Anderson's to the High Court and expect them to say, "well that's OK then". That's called contempt of court and it's a crime everywhere in the world.

Dr Anderson has reportedly been injuncted on other occasions[0] but those don't seem to relate to chip and PIN.

I think that the intrusion into academic freedom is lamentable but without any link to the case documents it's hard to say exactly on what basis the interim decision was made. In any event as it's only an interim injunction it may well be overturned at full trial.

My two cents is that the case for disclosure here, while instinctively convincing, is not as urgent as it has been with the vulnerabilities revealed in financial systems. In those cases, for example, banks were refusing to repay money stolen from individuals on the basis that the banks' systems were secure so it must have been the customers at fault. Dr Anderson and others were extremely convincing in showing that this was not necessarily the case. (I don't know if that has filtered through to the financial world at large - are people still being told there are no security holes?)

Perhaps it's just that I don't feel that bad about people having their Bentleys stolen but probably we can wait for trial here (assuming it's not just a strategy by the car manufacturers to bankrupt or intimidate the academics involved).

[0]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/24/citibank_gags_crypto...
That's a joke right? "Dijkstra" and "humble" just don't go together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KivesLMncs
I'm currently studying High School (In the Systems (sysadmin/programmer) branch)).

Everything in Argentina can be awful, but for sure it's not education: even if we are not learning Haskell I'm really pleased with the education I'm recieving; we use free software when possible (LibreOffice, LibreCAD, MySQL, etc.) and we learn languages like C or Java (OK, not the best in the block, but at least it's not VisualBasic).

Sadly we can't get good programming books here (Such as O'Reilly, Apress or books like CLRS, APUE or SCIP). So we either rely on our teachers or in crappy, old books.

Teaching 15-16 years old to program is not easy, mainly because many of those really don't care about school... we start by learning Algoritms as in little pseudocode programs, then we move to a software called PSeInt which is basically an IDE for writing pseudocode (Pseudocode in Spanish... ugh) and finally we learn our first language, which is chosen by the teacher (We are learning C).

I've been programing since I was 9. And it's interesting to see this from other perspective, the teachers are young (26-36 aprox.) which is good, because they know about the latest technologies are have similar hobbies to us. But it's also bad because they don't have a lot of experience).

But so far, so good, the education in the Systems branch is really good: but beware, not everything is like this, for example we are lacking a Chemistry teacher and we only had like 4 classes of Physics in a year, not to mention our Mathematics teacher is a disaster.

The school isn't in a good condition either, we have leaks when it rains and we are lacking a few walls and windows... but hey, it does it's job.
If you don't want to be edgy, then don't. But please don't complain that the edge exists
you probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet

I've written a version of this app for my own purposes three times. Then goodreads came along. I think they are the main competitor to this sort of software right now.
Censorship, they already explained. They can do country-specific censorship (like: in China, the govt asks for something offensive there to be removed) but leave it accessible from everywhere else. Also, they can inform people in those countries that they can not access that specific content.

Of course, that means that with a little bit of fiddling (change the domain name end, I think) you can read a censored post if you're in a problematic country. It's quite a good idea, actually.