skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's your definition of "picking up" a language?

A) Writing a "Hello, World"?

B) being able to fix a simple bug in a program?

C) Writing a small program that solves some domain problem

D) Writing a program that solves a "real world" problem, making use of the programming languages' strengths and conforming to standards (something that other people would let you commit into a repository unchallenged :) )

I'm certain A) takes only a few hours, and B) can be done in a day.

As Norvig says, you can do C) if you write in the new language like you would in a language you already know (not much of a problem if we're talking C# vs Java).

But D) IMO takes weeks/months.
> The skills you use for mental arithmetic are very similar to the skills for pen and paper.

Speak for yourself. Pen-and-paper arithmetic, to me, is a completely mechanical process, pure symbol manipulation, whereas mental arithmetic is very, very heuristic-heavy and involves a much richer mental model that often borrows from geometry.
I got 0. I was using an Apple Thunderbolt Display and it took me a couple of minutes.

I'd say it will be hard scoring correctly without a decent monitor.
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Yes, I was horrified that an educational institution should choose that as their motto. Its little more than an admission of failure.

I guess if its a trade school, some of that would be useful. But every time you rationalize a system, you gain far more. You gain understanding, and maybe the ability to integrate the new knowledge with what you already know.

How about "integration, not memorization"? I'd send my kids to that school.
It's symbolic and sends a message to people who are still alive, similar to posthumously awarding a medal.

You're saying "not only do no longer consider this a crime, but we no longer consider this to be a crime to the degree that we are willing to rewrite the record".

It may well give comfort to both surviving family as well as send a signal to other british homosexuals who are concerned about the security of their rights.
Also, it's good to step back and take a look at the complete gradient to see if any blocks stick out.
$15 billion whole, so I think the mobile division was worth at least 2x that, especially if we consider that when acquired, companies usually pay a premium over the market price. Motorola was like $9 billion at the market price when Google bought it for $12.5 billion.
The link for number 9, the robotic arm seems to be down. Does anyone know where I might find that story?
I never really understood why people needed identities on the Internet.

I never had one, I mean I didn't have too many friends and wasn't very popular. I cannot say for sure how cyber-bullying affects people, well because maybe I just missed the era where elementary/highschool kids really engaged on the net.

I think I have spent more time on the Internet that anyone in a square mile, maybe more. But I opened a facebook account and I don't even have a profile picture. I never really found it interesting, because people are super boring.
I think it's about a TV/game console/entertainment center to compete with others in the home and accomplish what today's apple TV and tablets cannot. I seriously doubt they would give up on desktop architectures given how much effort they have put into it and the plain superiority of the modern x86 PC architecture when it comes to performance. But the specs on the 64 bit chip make it perfect for a home console.
You gloat, standing atop a hill of technologies, all implemented in C or C. Fundamentally you built your blog in C and C++, you just to do so indirectly, much more slowly by inserting JVMS and other bits in the way.
Do you think that would have happened with Nokia? Their hardware designs and cameras alone would have made them a top tier Android vendor. Their distribution channel would have assured that.

HTC, Motorola, Sony and LG essentially make their own beds, and worth noting that pretty much all of them would have been long bankrupt (their phone business, as obviously Sony and LG are much more) sans Android.
> Terrible comparison.

Not as bad as you make it seem. While OS X's kernel is indeed something of a mutt, so is its userland. See here for one reference on the topic: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2008-Aug...

Now Android for the most part may have a mostly pure kernel(although I wonder how you come up with ~95%), but it's userland is mostly BSD based(see libc, libm, etc) as is OS X.

> OS X merely took parts of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the Mach kernel.

Since this is also a large part of how the Linux kernel evolved minus Mach/XNU, I'm not clear where your beef is.
I'm getting tired of the knee-jerk tendency for a small group of people to flag these extremely critical revelations. Yesterday the post about the mass rally on Washington was flagged to the bottom and eventually kicked off the front page. A recent poll revealed overwhelming support for more, not less reports on these spying stories, and yet a vocal minority is able to disregard the community's wishes and ruin things for everyone.

I don't know how this can be solved other than perhaps intense moderation to unflag everything regarding these revelations and let their popularity be determined solely by votes.
Why does it have to be either/or? A systematic approach guarantees that you have seen each capital city at least once.
SO where's the 'open regression test' database kept? The name reveals the critical fault: its just open source, not open project planning, or open integration testing, or open anything that matters.

Anybody can write broken code. Worthwhile code meets SOME standard.
It was more of a desperate move than a well-planned move that needed to happen. Ballmer cared more about not wanting Nokia to go Android, than about them needing Nokia's hardware division and 35,000 employees.
I found this to be really regional. I did when I was a kid, then I questioned our teacher why she did not after the first week or so. She felt the whole standing, gazing and hand over the heart was a bit too military for an elementary school.

I've had a few "super patriotic" teachers threaten me with detention for not towing the line. But these tended to be in urban and ex-urban, lower socioeconomic schools. The type of places that wanted to make you into factory workers rather than college students.
>Oh man, and now even Apple has come to a point where it's taking things that were done well and making them worse. So sad.

When was there a time that Apple didn't do that ocassionally?

Even back at OS X 10.0, there were tons of nice OS 9 features that got lost in the transition.

If it proves to be a major pain point they'll address it. Could even happen in a minor update. Such is the beauty of software.
I mentioned the bible study to highlight how I only spent 3 or 4 hours on real schoolwork a day and still somehow managed to get an education.
If you mean, how to avoid homework, I wasn't taught any of it, it was all stuff I learnt throughout my schooling life.
Before Elop Nokia was worth 270 billion
This might be a weird question and totally based on anecdotes but: are you a good speller?

I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled and/or homeschool their kids. I've also hired some and gone to school with some. One thing I noticed about several of them is they're bad at spelling. I've always wondered why.
Not sure I like #17 (http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Commen... ). While I would prefer working this way, my colleagues probably won't. Reading code you haven't written yourself is tough and time consuming. If the code is accompanied by the 'natural language explanation' of the code, you get into the code quicker. The downside to this is making sure they stay up2date, which was probably why the author wrote the section.
> If the pre-Elop executives had been left in charge, Nokia would most likely be in bankruptcy today.

Everybody agrees Nokia needed a change in management. Or, at least, in course.

> The imminent collapse in smartphones was exactly the reason why he was hired.

I fail to see this collapse now. Unless you mention Nokia's smartphone collapse, on which case I don't see how Elop averted it.

> if they had continued on the Symbian+Meego path.

I keep seeing this excuse as if Nokia would never change course. You know companies do that sometimes.
His daughter is in a high-pressure selective school that appears to market this workload as a feature. It might be the right thing for kids who breeze through their school material and then get bored for lack of any challenge. It probably isn't the right thing for everyone.

His daughter seems like the victim of needing to get into some college prep program where choices are limited, waiting lists are common, and many private school prices are out of reach. I did not see where she was asked about a choice of schools.

Middle school seems way too early for a program this intensive. What is the retention for all this material when the students are high school juniors? The only purpose for the homework grind appears to be to get students that they don't want in this school to self-select out of it.

It seems like what the author is wishing for is a good free normal public school in New York City. Ha! The bottom line is that he can't actually afford to live where he lives unless he sacrifices his daughter's childhood this way.
I am a total musical dunce. I had to look up what a chromatic scale is. Turns out, it's this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Pitch_cla...

If you ignore the semitones (the sharps - # - and minors - b) if you go around the circle 5 or 4 notes at a time it turns out you eventually get back to the note C.

Pardon me if this all sounds very dull and obvious, but something seems to have been missing in my education. This actually starts to open up a new world for me... Which doesn't happen very often! Similar things happened when I sat down to understand exactly what sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant and cosecant were on a circle.

I suspect the same will happen when I finally understand the basics of calculus...
Here's a cache of it if it's still down:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130914013327/http://programmer....
What exactly is attracting you to FreeBSD?

I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port". That is, it offers the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel.

So, depending on what you're looking for, you might be able to gain access to the best of both worlds.

If you're after the FreeBSD experience (i.e. the community, the BSD command line utils, ports, and the preference for permissive licenses), then I guess Debian/kFreeBSD really isn't of any interest to you.
I had read that Tim Cook is an early riser, but didn't know about being up that late regularly. I think the super early riser is a cultural in south Alabama. My mother's parents grew up within an hour of Robertsdale, Alabama. My grandfather, in particular, was always up at 4:30 AM. Even into his older years when he had not lived on a farm for decades.
Thanks for the link, it expresses part of what I struggle to explain quite well.

One problem I have, which Norvig doesn't talk about, is that I'm currently moving from one ecosystem (Microsoft) to another (the Java world), and it's not just about the language, it's everything, all the toolchain is different and unfamiliar.

The way of doing things is quite different too.
Cloud to Butt Plus
Wacko in the Morning 09/20 by The Wacko Network | Entertainment Podcasts
By building their own phones, they wouldn't get rid of a potential competitor.

Without a company the size of Nokia, Windows Phone would be even more irrelevant than it is today.
You could say that for every sport. If anything your avg. Star Craft game is suprising more often then your avg. football or whatever game.

So often you see players doing something strang, and quite often, if you look at Star Craft 1, one change in startagy by one person has huge impact on that matchup. So your avg. match changes a lot, end even if you are in a time where games play out simularly quite often, good players use that and trie to win doing something diffrent.
27 Presentations from JSConf US 2013
> It makes me wonder about the countless other thousands of convictions that remain on the books for things that we hardly think of as crimes today

If we're going to retroactively declare the dead to be innocent, what's to stop us from retroactively declaring the living to be guilty?

IMO we should be leaving past convictions alone, and just treat this as a reminder that the law isn't always the absolute unchangeable definition of what is morally good.
I suspect from the context that the journalist's email(s) was/were fine but that replies from other parents may have been less appropriate.
cmd-F Mechani

Oh, there you are.

Exactly. You can easily make ~10cents a minute, that's 6 dollars an hour. It's probably pretty hard work but the premise of this is just so...

If you're homeless in america, sign up for mechanical turk. You'll make more than enough for food.
British version: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-arse-plus...
You know what, I think you're right too. But I'm just an armchair M&A analyst. It's about risk reduction and this is a much safer bet than say perhaps, Kin?[0] There are so many dynamics to this, as it's not as simple as you may think. Just a few factors that often get missed:

- Cost (and time) of go to market

- Cost of marketing

- Cost (and time) of branding

- Emerging market opportunities

This list goes on and on...

Unfortunately what is produced as an offshoot of M&A is a whole bunch of people who start pulling at the windfall straws.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
I doubt it. Nokia had 60% of Brazil smartphone market, and almost the entire normal phone market, and they lost that only after Elop showed up.

Here in Brazil Chinese knockoffs are king now, because no major manufacturer took the niche that Nokia left.
So no qualms about backdoors in RDRAND? Will they be doing the same as Linux with their random number generator and add additional sources of entropy?
Cheaper, maybe, but this way is probably a faster and less risky means to vertical integration a la Apple; buying Nokia means not having to build out mobile engineering, manufacturing, and supply infrastructure from scratch, as well as (likely) a pipeline of product designs for the next year or two.

Plus, it knocks out some competition.
PE/VC firms are arms of the finance industry, and largely recruit from analyst classes at traditional investment banks (either directly, or after an MBA). The PE/VC firms are typically much smaller than investment banks, and are happy to let them handle basic training. The top 5-7 business schools sit in-between the two.

Why so few schools? Not because anyone thinks you can't get a top financial education at U of M, but because more aren't needed. Business schools don't offer substantial merit aid, so if you don't go to one of the top 5-7, it's either because you couldn't get in, because you didn't do enough research to know where financial firms hire from, or because you're geographically limited to a location outside one of the major financial centers (New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco). All of those characteristics are good filters for PE/VC firms.
I know what A levels are. What does AAAB mean? Does this mean you gave four subjects and scored 3 A's and 1 B? If that is correct, I'm curious what subjects you gave?
I think the better lesson is not, 'how many hours of homework is fair' but, 'teachers, please assign the minimum effective dose of homework'. This is one of the reasons I think labs are effective in high school science classes, provided they don't spell everything out for you and require you to understand what is going on, why you are doing it, and what's the important points are of what is going on. Applying knowledge is far more effective at making knowledge stick than balancing chemical equations.
"Why don't these people get jobs?"

Because: THERE. ARE. NOT. ENOUGH. JOBS.

* The economy crashed a while ago. We still haven't recovered all the jobs we lost, by either absolute or percentage.

* Increased automation and efficiency is slowly removing those jobs you just described. Exec, a YCombinator app, makes a more efficient and automated solution to craigslist cleaning jobs. This is happening in every sector in this country. These changes ELIMINATE JOBS, these jobs will never come back. And the jobs they create do not replace the ones they removed, not in quantity, or in aggregate tax quality (i.e. one well paid programmer does not replace the amount of tax revenue from 4 people splitting the same salary. Let alone the fact that executives often take a cut of that increased productivity for themselves. Let alone the fact that it puts more load on welfare for the 3 lost jobs).

* Every single one of those jobs you just listed likely requires a number of things in today's saturated jobs market: High-school or college education (too many people, not enough jobs, means overqualified hiring requirements), a permanent address (hard when you are homeless), a certain appearance (hard when you are poor, without a place to live or bathe), some sort of experience (hard to get in this job market, especially when under educated, in poor health [mental or physical], and every other reason here), transport to and from work (or even for the work), ect.

I think you need to take a step back and look at the whole picture, it's a dire one.
A misunderstanding.

>> Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students

!(work (J) < work (U))
--> work (J) >= work (U)
--> work (U) <= work (J)

> American students do more work than Japanese kids

work (U) > work (J)
When I got to university the calculus instructor told us "we could use calculators, but they're going to be worthless" sure enough we only had symbols with a few numbers used as filler, but nothing you couldn't work out in your head. ie. (5x+2)^-3n
Be careful of making eroneous conclusions. It's likely that the same model of iPhone contain different makes of batteries, but since iFixit only had one of each any such variance would appear as a variance between colors.
D-Notices limit what the news organisations can report on here in the UK.

Here's some correspondence with the BBC that shows what's going on. The BBC acknowledge they have been asked to talk to the government before reporting on anything to do with the recent security revelations:
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/reporting_on_gchqs_te...
Hey Sean,

learned about your project on reddit and was very impressed. Keep up the good work :)
Generador de enlaces
Herramienta para generar enlaces o backlinks hacia tu sitio web o blog
Where I grew up the Pledge was absolutely a mandatory part of every school day, and was said before morning announcements through the loudspeaker. Every room had a flag in it, so students in that room could Pledge to it. I grew up in an urban area, so my experiences are skewed urban. I couldn't imagine an individual teacher having a choice in the matter.

Of course, as I posted in the parent, the Supreme Court allows for individual students to stay seated and not salute the flag if they choose.
That's how I was taught in the mid-80s at a Catholic elementary school in Pennsylvania.

I believe I heard, probably on NPR, that the new Common Core standard also recommends teaching in this manner.
I don't think you've been following what industry has been doing with iPhones.

First of all, "light browsing, reading, and phone calls"? You clearly haven't been in sales. Entire 2000 word screens are usually banged out on one's iPhone or Blackberry. The calendar app has to manage hundreds of events, etc.

I do almost all of my browsing on an iPhone.

Airline mechanics at at lesat one major global airline have been using them to log their maintenance activities with precise detail.

More than one Class-1 railroad is prototyping iPhones and iPads for crew and yard devices to manage train manifests and marshalling orders.

Doctors are using their iPhones for looking up and editing EHRs in some hospitals.

Everywhere I look in the enterprise, they are killing the PC in favor of the smartphone -- today.
Becoming a Mentor for Per Scholas
"It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care."

It probably doesn't scratch their itch.
I've just replaced the battery on my Lumia 820 after 9 months. They don't last forever. Glue is inexcusable. If they had a half decent mechanical design, foam pads would secure it in place when the device was assembled and allow replacement.

I've had a 4S for two years and have not noticed any problems with battery.

Perhaps the problem is the crap battery that goes bad after 9 months, rather than the way it's attached.

Glue is perfectly fine by me - and by most people apparently.
The Leica legend
Desperation in the common man to keep himself and his children afloat creates opportunities for the wicked man because a desperate man cannot afford to have social vigilance.
Same as iOS; https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/adobe-photoshop-touch/id4957...
how about "25 things to do with a $25 computer"?
Nokia was in deep trouble when Elop showed up, and blaming him for it is silly.

As proof that this isn't merely hindsight: "In a few years, it will be easy to blame Stephen Elop and claim it is unjust for him to be paid even while Nokia tanks. But it isn't his fault that Nokia is in trouble (he's been CEO for 13 days)..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366303
Not disputing that there is some 'voluntary' suppression of facts by the media but a quick search of BBC news shows 5 stories in the last 10 days.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=GCHQ
National Library Service for Blind and Physically Handicapped Releases iOS App
Then they can also get out the popsicle sticks to add up all those groups of eight.

At some point you just need to memorize things.
Have never used FreeBSD, and am curious about using it on my laptop -- so an honest and perhaps naive question for people who do use it as their main system:

Does it JustWork on the majority of average-user things, like connecting to your Wi-Fi access point, displaying your desktop at its maximum resolution without crying, playing your multimedia files, etc? Ubuntu gets this just right, providing a perfect balance between core technologies for developers, and ease of software installation for common activities like, say, watching a Youtube video.

Support for 500 virtualisation technologies and no easy support for, say, playing mp4 files is going to make me not want to use it on my laptop. Then again, the average user might not exactly be who FreeBSD is targeting for their software.
Not if you have the opportunity to smash one big opponent. After all Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide and if Nokia would have chosen Android and produced high build-quality phones, it could have "easily" become the top smartphone manufacturer again, or atleast number 2.

Now Microsoft has one enemy less and gained a company that was known for it's high-quality phones for years.
The Montessori method: take each child at his own pace thru sensory-grounded material, giving enough familiarity with material until it is internalized and the child abstracts it himself - THEN move on to the next step, at individual pace. Therein lies understanding. Not doing this leads to contempt for the material and rote memorization (which the article starts out noting is the plain conclusion) devoid of understanding.
Wide scale Blackberry deployments are in progress of being re-assessed. I know at least one large logistics company that is throwing out all pre-10 Blackberries over the next 2-3 years and allowing iOS devices as the alternative.
I do all my writing on iPad (<3 iA Writer).
That's why it's worth having short methods that do one thing and are meaningfully named.
And from a personal point of view I'd prefer several lines containing short expressions that are then assigned to meaningfully named variables etc, rather than 1 really long hard to parse line of code.