skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a rude wake up call not too long ago when I realized our entire world is filled with consumerism and that a lot of us (including myself) are guilty of participating.
Ask HN: How to get 13yo's excited about programming?
Hello all!

I'm starting an afterschool CS program whose goal is to get kids (ages 13-15) excited about computer science and hacking. So far, I've been constructing a curriculum based on pure CS principles found in MIT's OpenCourseWare classes. My concern is that the kids will either be intimidated or bored by the topics in a college CS curriculum.

Is there any other sort of open source CS curriculum any of you would recommend to get kids excited about programming? If there's any source of "fun and useful hacks for beginners", I would love to hear about it.

TL;DR If you're a 13 year-old who's skeptical about CS, what would you want to see or learn to get you excited about it?

Thanks everyone!
And why wouldn't they? Why should they be shackled to SV, considering the tenuous logistical and geographical requirements of their jobs?

I agree with parent, SV is missing a trick here: it doesn't need to be as soulless as it is.
I wonder if we could make a computer that could understand a simple and made up language like lojban. The grammar is consistent and well defined, the hard part would be trying to get it to learn what words actually mean.
Steve Wozniak Interview on "Jobs" Movie
Can they possibly fix it? They don't have a Shuttle to take the thing in so it can be brought back and fixed. Whatever they say about the Shuttle, it was a powerful vehicle.

Can a robot fix the thing?
It is some link to a youtube video, posted to a public user's facebook wall through the exploit. That's what the screenshot shows.
> So for the ultimate flexibility and automation, the user interface of such a smart appliance will end up being essentially a programming language

No; when a client asks me to build them a website, I don't demand a specification. I interrogate them in regular natural language about each thing, until I'm reasonably sure which things they care about being a certain way (I'll make those things that way to the best of my ability) and which things they don't care how they end up (I'll make those things however I "like" to make them, or randomly if I have no opinion either.)

I think the one thing we're lacking in software UX right now is the concept of a dialogue--you and the computer both asking questions to clarify your mental model of what the other agent currently has in mind, and adding facts to correct misconceptions until those models are aligned.
It sounds like you should get a job at the moment so you can build up your skills. Then you can quit and build your startup app much more quickly, and freelance on the side as necessary.
A while back, I moved from Huntsville, AL to SF. HSV city sales tax + state sales tax brought the tax on everyday things to 8%. The SF + state sales tax is 9%. For that additional 1%, I get so much more than I got in the Southeast.

CA state income tax rates are up to 7.3% higher than AL's, BUT AL's maximum tax bracket is 5% of any taxable income over $3k. CA's maximum tax bracket is 12.3% of any income over $500k. If you're making $38k (or maybe $48k) or less, you're better off, tax-wise to be in CA. The 6% CA bracket starts at $27,897. [0][1]

[0] http://revenue.alabama.gov/incometax/itfaq01.cfm (Search for "income tax rates")

[1] https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2012_california_tax_rates_and_e... (Search for "tax rate schedules")
> Try reading 1800s literature.

Some of the most gripping literature I've ever encountered - thank you :-).

But seriously, why be dismissive (perhaps too strong a word - but mildly derisive at least) of such a wide swath of human culture that many admittedly find interesting to make a point that has nothing to with literature or writing style for that matter?
I was never a Dinkins fan but I seem to recall he started the program that got the cop out of the car on back on the beat which, certainly helped with crime.
That's the NYT editorial style. If I remember correctly, it was notable that they did not use Mr. for Osama Bin Laden's obituary. Short of that, you are getting a Mr.
HN is a pretty negative place these days. Ellen Huerta, if you're reading this, I applaud that you decided not to accept the path that was laid out for you.

Also, I suspect that most HN readers won't understand the maturity & security in one's own self-worth it takes to walk away from that level of career success, and particularly a company like Google.
anyone have an image of a single cell, and how it is assembled from the individual (flat?) pieces?

the paper is paywalled. googling cuboct isn't turning up much.
Well, there's some degree of conscious choice involved. When I graduated from college, I didn't know exactly what industry I wanted to be in either, but I knew I liked working with computers and I just took the highest-paying offer that wasn't terrible.

I'm of the opinion that if you know what you want to do, you should do that. If you don't know what to do, you should take whatever opportunity will expose you to more opportunities in the future. Saving up money is a part of that.
>...breaking up with my college boyfriend. He was brilliant, good looking, respected, and everyone loved him — I even loved him — but he wasn’t the one.

I'm not even thirty yet, but I feel like most people within my generation are just spoiled children. It's like we need another world war so people can learn to properly appreciate what they have, again.
It is a story about Groupon. How can they let their staff get into this situation where they are so desperate as to make threats?
How did they not know about and fix the poor experience with Groupon previously?
How are the staff paid - is the commission component so high that they have to make sales no matter what?
Is the training and are the SOPs so poor that the staff are free to operate on the edges of legality?

Is the culture such that anything goes?

Are the systems that review performance of sales reps not catching up with this sort of behaviour?

Groupon allowed this to happen, and it's for Groupon to fix.

Firing the guy would be a knee jerk reaction that would not to me be the right one. Not firing him and doing nothing would be worse. The best answer is a blame-free full review of how this occurred, and how they can design their organisation and process to make it never occur again.
It's so banal and dull. The White Knightism in this thread also makes me want to vomit.
To sum it up, she wants a freedom in every aspect of her life. A business owner suits her well.
> I stopped watching when she talked about feeling alone in her personal struggle. Some young people really don't have a clue.

I've never understood this weird form of condescension. So because there are many people in the world facing extremely serious personal struggles, we're not allowed to discuss our own, less serious personal struggles without being accused of marginalizing everyone else? What, is "feeling alone" somehow not a valid emotional response unless you're impoverished?

And really, WTF does youth have to do with this? I see people in all walks of life talking about their personal struggles.
- Thanks for the wisdom NonEUCitizen, but what about the time that I'll be losing while working for someone else? I can never get that back. Also, in life, I wont always have the skills needed to conquer a job/project I just have to be ready for whatever n learn along the way. I can never learn everything.
An hour with Larry Ellison [video]
The piece actually seems like a backhanded critique of the optimism shown by the deep learning community (which of course Winograd is aware of). It also seems like an appreciative backward glance at topics that interested Winograd earlier in his career, but are less fashionable now.
Thanks for the warning. That's something I didn't consider at first. I have changed it to a Creative Commons licensed image.
Yeah, but I rarely use the mouse when using either a file browser or the terminal, so switching to it is less convenient than a short terminal command.
I had no idea. Wow, that's beautiful.
Maybe western civilization is not very good at answering this type of general big questions, maybe Indian civilization has a better chance, after all they invented structural linguistics some 2500 years ago (so that was not Chomsky at all ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini

Maybe the problem needs and idle class of Brahmi who can ask questions and ponder about them without end, without having to worry about questions of funding ?
They already have the facilities to recycle plutonium for MOX fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel#Fast_reactors

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Fuel-Re...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/mox-fuel_b_27078...

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/basicmoxinfo.htm
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) tweeted at 1:00 AM on Sun, Aug 18, 2013:
For those asking, @MikeGrunwald's now-deleted tweet: "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange"
(https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/368885133803143168)
OVH does not have a signup fee. It's more attractive than Hetzner if you just need to run an experiment for 1 month. They have servers in North America, so if you're targeting US, their latencies might be better.
I probably resent the fact that she leveraged the Google brand in order to make me read lots of words about a perfectly-normal midlife crisis I had no interest in. I clearly put too much trust in the upvoting masses on HN to weed out this sort of stuff.

I apologize if her (or anyone's) feelings were hurt by my comments.
>this would have gone better for all parties if he had used a test account and included some kind of repro instructions

Clearly, but that's not really something you can control. From your perspective, the other side of the tradeoff with "hurting real user accounts" is "leaving open a huge security hole", not "being mean to whitehats when they screw up". I don't disagree that the guidelines seem quite reasonable prima facie and perfectly fair to to the whitehat in some moral sense, but it's unclear if they're actually working. It boils down to, if you had to choose between finding out about this security hole the way you did or not find out about it at all, which would you choose? How many not-quite-so-aggressive versions of this guy are out there, and how many holes are you leaving on the table? Edited to add: If an important way of finding vulnerabilities is people breaking the rules, then the rules suck, regardless of their intrinsic fairness.

It could well be that keeping not-great-communicator/guideline-follower whitehats from reporting some number of bugs through questionable means is actually worth those flaws sticking around. Of course I don't see the daily flow of vulnerability reports to FB (or all the ones that don't ever get reported), so I don't know. But it sounds like a harder question than you make it out to be.
"The things you own end up owning you." Tyler Durden

I'm enjoying the life of frugality as a college student right now. My summer apartment has little besides my laptop, a couple of books, clothes / toiletries, my saxophone, and food. It's rather nice. It's hard to waste time being idle. If I'm bored, I need to be social and hang out with someone; I can't waste time playing video games or watching TV. (I'm fortunately pretty sparse with my computer use — GChat, vim, and music mostly.)

Every now and then, a friend, upon entering my apartment, will comment on how bare it is. I just smile and say, "Isn't it much simpler this way?"
Because it might be unsafe. See, the human brain undergoes important development until the age of 25 and research has shown that cannabis significantly affects the brain of children and adolescents. Structural changes have been found in the brains of young cannabis users, especially in the prefrontal cortex, the last brain region to undergo maturation during adolescence. I'm for legalizing medical as well as recreational use of marijuana for adults but I think more research has to be done on how certain cannabinoids affect the brains of children. Especially because cannabis might be the only known substance that helps for example with Davet syndrome - it can save their lives.
i don't think he was talking about fixing kepler. just building a new, less-shitty one.

and however "powerful" the shuttle was, it couldn't get to something 3 light-minutes away (which was kepler's distance, the last time i looked)
I think tlrobinson's point is that number-of-tokens renders a trivial objection to measuring code size such as "what if we rewrite everything to have one-letter variables" irrelevant, since that doesn't change the number of tokens.
Exactly, no harm was intended or done. Somebody posting on your wall doesn't even really impinge on your privacy (Hell, for all intents and purposes Facebook do it for profit). Whatever reward, perhaps reasonably reduced, they pay this guy will be cheaper than any bitterness earned from sitting behind a wall of pedantry with big fat righteous grins on their faces.

If they bothered to look at his profile (it's public), they'd see he looks to be a great fan and tinkerer on the Facebook platform.
Is this the startup? http://mend.co/ I know the guys who did that site, but I'm not sure if it's Helen's or not.
It's also really, really dangerous. Imagine an amoral being without that is hundreds or thousands of times more intelligent than humans. Do you think you could control it?

That's not unrealistic. Computers already have clock cycles many thousands of times faster than the human brain (our brains get away with it by being massively parallel), have instant access to the entire world's knowledge base, can be scaled up indefinitely (just add another processor), and most importantly, can modify their code at will. If they see an improvement they can make to their own intelligence, they instantly become more intelligent, and get better at finding even more improvements, or designing even better AIs.
Glad I saw the Twitter-reaction before wasting my time reading it (Not really, I went and tried to read it and nearly vommited several times).

On the other hand, I really do feel bad for people that are this clueless.
It's a fair question. More than anything, I'm looking to learn the relative strengths of the common database systems.

Specific to my particular needs, a database system that allows good integration with R/python/Fortran is a must for research. The ideal system would allow for easy data manipulation and a nice suite of statistical and aggregation functions (e.g. MySQL has average, standard dev, but no median function).
Yes: Algodoo (http://www.algodoo.com/), a 2D physics playground. It used to cost money, but now it’s free.
The grandfather post was whining about the length of the article. It's a completely specious complaint, made with fatuous disdain. Supposing that the grandfather post had read much of works pre-Hemingway, they would have realized that their callous dismissal of "tl;dr" was tremendously ignorant when compared to, e.g., War and Peace, Three Musketeers, or some of Sir Walter Scott's lesser-known works. In other words, primelens, I was preferring to be dismissive and deprecative of the grandfather's twitter-length reading abilities.

edit: Of course, coming out of Victorian works and then reading modern works feels like a breath air of simplicity and prose without a hint of purple... perhaps to the detriment of the moderns.
Oh that third link! "GROUPON King Wizard" -- Survived one year @Groupon. Had to get the appropriate name embroidered on the jacket @indicudominate #indicud #kingwizardFollow

The DOUCHE is strong in this one. Bet he doesn't make a second year at Groupon. Bet he doesn't make Tuesday.
lucky you that your guess went well for you. what worked for you, however, may not necessarily work for others.
This assumes everyone is renting which while probably true in NYC is far from universal. In other places people on fixed income have been forced out though propery taxes but it's closer to here is 100,000$ GTFO simply from the difference in propery values.
please note angularjs passes them both
Hey there,

Thanks for the thoughts. Let me answer to those.

1) That's something I could do but it wasn't really the goal originally as what I wanted to test was not so much the latencies of connection establishment (TCP Handshaking) but rather an HTTP service itself. I will give it some thought though.

2) I explicitly wanted to abstract the concurrency away from the user of the tool. The API is simplified purposefully.
However, I am not sure why you think the requests are sequential. Have a look at this line of code https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta/blob/master/lib/attack.go#...

3) Agreed. I have to think the best way to fit this into the targets file format.

Cheers
So Armageddon was impossible? I am disappointed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)

"American Components, Russian Components, all the same, all made in Taiwan!"
because you can't use coroutines in client-side javascript yet, without some backpiler, and people will disagree on what the proper reaction to that should be.
That bell has already been rung, honey. That bell has already been rung.

He's the one who published his personal cell phone number and office desk number in his written extortion letter, while acting as an official representative of Groupon, from his authentic Groupon email account. Not my problem.

If you really want to get to the root of the problem, you might try cold calling his number, and advising HIM he shouldn't put his cell phone number in email when he sends threats to people. Maybe he'll hang up on you, and you might "sincerely appreciate him hanging up on you", just like he "sincerely appreciated" the owner of the restaurant doing that to him.
They really didn't.

I'm going to be frank, in the 80s, programmers sucked compared to today's programmers. If you took an 80s programmer and time shifted him to today, he'd look like he had no experience and really struggle until he'd spent a lot of time learning new stuff.

You've grown up with software engineering in the last 10 years. Have you honestly not seen the sea change in that time?

Be it programming languages that have shifted dramatically from the original OO in Java/C# 1.0, javascript inspiring massive changes in those languages with anonymous types, closures, etc., with unit testing, TDD. There's so much that's changed, so, so much I can't even think of half of it.

I said it below, who today passes ByRef? Or uses a global variable? 10 years ago that was common.

Just 10 years ago! The field is moving so amazingly rapidly!

And one of the real things I've seen, something you can't describe unless you've got experience, which I've no doubt you have, is that methods now actually do what they say they do. They didn't used to. They used to do other things, and touch global vars, and get passed in variables to muck around with.

And on top of that, people now seem to actually understand OO. Not just blindly recanting what polymorphic means, they can actually split up and create objects sensibly. They really couldn't do it very well 10 years ago. No-one really understood it, it sounded like a good idea but only a tiny percentage actually understood what it really meant.

And yet you think studies done back then, using techniques that would get people fired today, are worth referencing?

LOOK at the dates in the parent post. 1986? No Java, no Javascript, no Python, no Ruby, no C#. But COBOL had just released an update!

You'd better watch out for those GOTOs!

I honestly am perplexed that you can even start to think those studies are still relevant today.
A good number of Americans treat the Constitution the way a good number of Christians treat the Bible. Veneration of its text, deviation is grounds for condemnation, have neither read it nor actually studied it from any useful (historical, ethical, or otherwise) context, asserts meaningless claims about their original intention, and invoke it mainly as an appeal to authority via clobber verses or legal sounding language.

It's extremely frustrating.
Other methods are already supported. However, I wouldn't recommend you to load test non-idempotent behaviour.
POST for instance is not idempotent by definition.
Unless of course, you're ready to clean-up all the side-effects after the test :)
Yeah! Everyone, especially young people, should just learn how to settle.
HTTPs is on the TODO.
This entire situation seems a bit backwards to me. As I read Andy Johnston's letter, I gather that 1) Trip hung up on Andy.
2) Andy thought this was rude.
3) Andy has a lot of friends in SF that use yelp.
4) Andy is going to tell his friends "how [Trip] treated [Andy] as well as [Andy's] feelings about the people who run Sauce."

While this is unprofessional to say the least, I see no extortion or anything like it all as the wording states that this recourse is based on a past event and is not contingent on Trip's future actions at all. Also it is everyone's right to tell their friends if they think a place or a person sucks, that's part of what friends are for. And Andy doesn't say that he's going to write a bad review or have his friends write a bad review, he just says that he's going to tell his friends how Trip treated him. That doesn't mean that his friends will necessarily write reviews for him and because of that there is no guarantee of harm in any way.

What's most interesting to me about this whole situation (and the part that seems backwards) is the Trip's way of dealing with this. So okay, a Groupon employee wrote an angry letter to a restaurant owner that was 100% unprofessional and was probably understood by the restaurant owner to be a threat of defamation by the Andy's network of friends. Trip's response? To publicly post the letters to Facebook along with the Andy's name, cell phone number and other contact information so that everyone else that doesn't like Andy's immature letter can call him any time of the day to tell him how much of a jerk he is? It seems a bit much.

Trip's response letter was well written and had good advice but I believe it should have ended there. By making this whole thing public, Trip is really acting no more mature than Andy was when he wrote the offending letter. Not to mention that it could open Trip up to legal liability as I believe California has laws regarding the publication of private facts (e.g. Andy's cell phone number). Either way, I think this whole situation demonstrates a lot of immaturity on both sides.
What's up with the amount of Ws in this address?
Because 21 is the legal drinking age in the United States, and it's far more politically palatable to say 'this is just like booze' than it is to say 'let's embrace dirty stoner culture.'

Check out the pro-legalization ads that ran in Washington last year when we successfully passed a
MJ legalization initiative: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xja72pL-ZEM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...

Coincidentally, this weekend is Hempfest here in Seattle. The Seattle PD is on hand passing out Doritos and literature on how to stay compliant with our state laws: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/15/us/seattle-police-doritos-...
thanks for explaining (you should have posted this as a top-level comment, imho)
And then they would have paid....
A guide for learning Ruby, Sinatra, Rails and related technologies.
_Generic is a language keyword, not a user-defined macro. It uses an underscore-prefixed name (along with many other C11 keywords/features) precisely because those names are reserved and won't conflict with user code.

Also, that SO post is about C++, not C. It might seem pedantic (particularly given that C actually does have the same rule for reserved names), but that's something to be careful about as there's significant divergence nowadays.