skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting.

It looks like a interactive document/hypertext backed-up by a schema-less store ( much like JSON, with hierarchies ). Also I liked the idea to build "views" from the document(s).
"it's also true that being able to program could improve pretty much any job. Even a janitor could develop, say, a logistics application to optimize his path through the building he cleans, or build a roomba to vacuum for him."

If a janitor develops the skills to go that far, why would he still be a janitor?

I'm not saying that to be glib. I'm saying that because coding is a specialty that requires a great bit of practice to get functionally good at. The time and effort invested in getting good at programming just isn't worth it for many professions, whereas hiring specialists to do the programming is.

Sure, our hypothetical janitor would be able to do some cool stuff if he could develop apps. But if he can develop apps, economically speaking, he should be transitioning into higher-value and higher-paying services. (Unless he wants to disrupt custodial services with a startup -- but not every janitor should found a startup. That would be impractical.)

Saying "everyone should be able to code" is a bit like saying everyone should be able to do college-level statistics. I can't think of a single profession that wouldn't benefit from a college-level understanding of statistics. But not everyone's cut out for it; it's not fundamentally necessary to every profession; and in the context of a market economy, it functions better as a knowledge-specialty than as a broad foundational skill. (This isn't a flawless analogy for any number of reasons, but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)
I learned a lot of valuable math skills in public school. I was interested and paid attention. Just because some kids don't want to learn doesn't mean we should deprive the rest of the opportunity.
The article says that the city is working on a permitting system, and that one does not currently exist. Which means that these buses are parking illegally everyday and instead of fining them, the city is coming up with a plan to accommodate them. Think they would do that for your parking tickets?
There is no solution to it, all big cities that I am aware of have a cycle of gentrification of urban renewal. To think SF is some special snowflake where it wouldn't happen is naive, to think that it wouldn't happen in SF when housing is so constrained and the economy is booming is just crazy.
I think you are confusing things. Nobody wants the entire world to be CS experts. What most people are advocating is that an entry level CS course be given to all students. Just how we make them take Chemistry, Physics, literature.
between Nimbys and public sector unions and the fact that the Bay Area is essentially under one-party rule...no. It's just not going to happen. Private initiatives are the only hope.
Table Stakes
> Unless it's part of your job, the odds are vanishingly small that it will ever be of much use to you.

There are very few, if any, areas of knowledge work (which is broader than STEM, but subsumes it) to which a small amount of programming skill cannot be productively applied -- even the ones where institutional IT policies have restricted the available means of applying that skill to, say, Excel macros.

> Nor is it something that's useful in its own right because it promotes clear thinking. Nor is it a steppingstone to other, more broadly useful skills.

I'd have to disagree with this pretty strongly. There are probably ways you could develop some coding skill without learning broadly-applicable problem decomposition and analysis skills that are usable almost everywhere and not usually taught in other contexts, but you'd have to make a special effort.
It's just a lisp variant with a procedural/matrix mathy bend. It's super easy to pick up if you've written any lisp.
Can the government force TextSecure server admins to provide access to user messages?
What a very cute and clever thing to say.
At least in France, I've found that people are a lot more accepting of realpolitik from the french state. The limited time I spent talking to people in Japan about politics makes it seem like nobody can be an idealist about the japanese gov't with all the wheeling and dealing that happens there.

I'm not saying that the US is some shining standard of gov't, but that the citizens seem to care a lot more about their ideals than in some other countries, sometimes at the cost of seemingly sound things (healthcare, gun rights, whatever).
You don't teach kids how to cook or manage their finances?

And people wonder why you are so obese and in debt.
The non-blocking script loader pattern
It's quite sad that this post is even necessary. That said, having a proper training/cross-validation/validation setup is sometimes not that obvious, as you have to stop and think about possible sources of contamination -- some sampling biases, for instance, can be quite tricky to detect, or your algorithm design might be flawed in some subtle way.

Personally, I wish people emphasized more the importance of a general understanding of econometrics when doing machine learning. In most of the introductory courses I've seen, the link between both field is never made explicit, despite the obvious analogies (coincidentally, there was an article by Hal Varian on the front page two days ago that discussed how both fields could benefit from sharing insights [1]).
Understanding the idea behind minimizing generalization error is one thing, but I find that thinking in terms of internal/external validity and experiment design often gives people a more intuitive understanding of validation procedures, both regarding why and how we should do it.
The same goes for understanding effect size, confidence intervals, causality (and causality inference), and so on.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6870387
There are plenty of finished space-exploration games with very similar scope.

The Frontier series, for instance, featured a life-scale galaxy with seamless planet landing, each one entirely unique. It was released in 1993, and we're much better at making games like these now.

Here are some other games that will "never be finished":

- StarBound - http://playstarbound.com

- Rodina - http://elliptic-games.com/

- Elite: Dangerous - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangero...

- Drifter - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/celsiusgs/drifter-a-spac...

- Star Citizen - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen

- Limit Theory - http://ltheory.com/

And there are still many more.
This op-ed does a better job at explaining how some non-tech residents of San Francisco feel about the buses.

When your experience of a big city is a seamless parade of hip restaurants
and privately funded transportation, it's easy to overlook the things that
cities need, like filled potholes and a reliable transit system. San Franciscans
feel resentful about the technology industry's lack of civic and community
engagement, and the Google bus is our daily reminder.

http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/Why-we-re-invisible-to-...
Psychology of performance (2009)
There are already several reasons mentioned in the comments here:

- AFAIK currently the companies don't pay to stop at the MUNI stops.

- A working public transportation system for everyone would be greatly preferred to a system that's only working for employees of certain companies.

- By offering these shuttles companies contribute to more people living in SF, driving up rents (I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to offer this, but it's an argument one could reasonably have)

- These shuttles might actually make an improved public transportation system less likely since none of the Google (and other companies') employees would most likely use it, even if something better than Caltrain existed.

BTW: I'm not generally against these shuttles, but you were asking for arguments against them and I think there are several.
Probably not the right venue, but I'm a bit disappointed addressing the plugin versioning situation isn't listed as a thing for 1.5. There are plugins for managing plugins but they're really less than ideal.

I'd honestly just like to use bundler for it, since it's almost certainly better than anything anyone's likely to make to replace it, but using bundler to run vagrant is currently considered bad for some reason and outputs a frightening warning.
Doesn't that pre-suppose that there would exist a 'public' bus fleet that went between San Francisco and Mountain View (or Menlo Park, or Palo Alto, etc). There are at least three different transit districts covering that region.

Now if you want to argue that we should combine all of the bus transport services, from San Rafael to Morgan Hill, and from Morgan Hill to Livermore into a single huge transportation system (all of those places are served by Gbus and presumably the other guys as well). That is a different conversation (and probably worth having)
Linked [0] "Time Scheduler" is pretty cool but it crashed twice on Chrome, and also the time brackets can't be dragged. I had an idea a couple days ago for this exact 'app'; if it was a little more accessible/reliable, I might actually use it.

[0] - http://timesched.pocoo.org/
Hmm perhaps. Still seems like such a minor issue to protest over.
Just noting that when Google switched to using the Hangout app for SMS/MMS messaging, it broke MMS for me - so that problem is hardly unique to TextSecure
I like vagrant, but would love it to work with VMWare fusion, but cannot justify paying more than the cost of fusion for a vagrant plugin.

Anyone aware of an open source alternative to the official VMWare provisioner?
"encouraging curiosity" this.

I've tried to talk to younger kids in my family about building things with computers. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get them interested, even if they play Minecraft all day.

For many of us, we got interested in programming though randomly hacking a game at one point in time. Telling kids that they can build their own games or apps and helping them potentially get interested is a big deal in itself.
I am so fucking sick of this false equivalence between Facebook having my data and the government having my data. The government has big fucking guns. If they see something in my data they don't like, they can shoot me, or threaten to shoot me until I walk into a cage. Facebook can't.
Seems to me it's actually writing to the database twice for each page view; once to update the render_started_at property on #845, and once again on #881.
I know what you mean... However, the upgrade process has gotten a lot more reliable lately. At least less problems for me.
BBC-News team writes great code apparently!
Hah, so the woeful state of the Bay Area's public transport system is the result of private buses being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Surely the issue is a bit deeper than that.
From what I figure there are two benefits of widely publicized start ups:

1. Interest/brand recognition interesting tech naturally generates.

2. Attracting high profile employees that are interested in your product.

So going stealth assumes you got a handle on both of those problems. If not, I think, chances of success are slim.
Nice example. I think proxies are really going to clean up a lot of the Javascript binding libs out there.

Any idea what's been holding back the adoption of proxies? It's still only implemented in firefox: http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/#Proxies
Medicine’s Answer to Instagram, Figure 1, Raises $2M
Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language
There is an increasing amount of peer pressure though.
> The best government is the least government

is not actually a fact, though you stated it like one.
Would be, are not currently.
Yes it is, depending on where you go to school. 50 states are not all the same.
> These companies are just straight converting BTC back to USD which in the long run does nothing positive for true widespread adoption of bitcoin as a means of exchange.

That is truly an absurd statement. Following your logic, 10 million companies using bitpay to accept bitcoin "does nothing positive for widespread adoption of bitcoin" -- compared to say.. 0 companies using bitpay?

This is actually amazing for widespread adoption; it teaches companies how they can use bitcoin as a secure, chargeback free, negligible fee payment system without being exposed to volatility of the underlying asset (which speculators are quite happy to do themselves).
What I want to know is: when will w3c update their site?!
Credit cards generally have merchant rules that prohibit higher prices for credit card transactions. As alternate paying methods get more common, there will be increasing pressure on credit card companies to loosen this restriction, since right now credit cards are by far the most dominant payment method online.
Seems like HN is causing them problems. I saved the articles text at: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s360/sh/4e19f93c-8425-440c-b9...
Rise of the 'new rich': 1 in 5 Americans reach affluence
It was quite literally a weekend project and I did not want to waste much time making custom controls. The sliders are jQuery's UI sliders and as such not particularly well suited for what this should do. Might spend some time replacing this with something better.

As of why it would fully crash chrome I'm not sure. Maybe it runs out of memory? I think it wants about 80MB with DOM and everything and builds that out of 3MB of payload (which is about 20MB more than the google search page).

//EDIT: code is also on github under a BSD license in case someone wants to work on it: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/timesched
They deserve the anti-development bed they create.
Am I crazy or does he look terrible. His eyes are all red like he was just crying.
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Maybe, but also our technological environment may very well be influencing how we think.

We are certainly striving to solve a plethora of scientific and technical problems, but we are left to wonder on what kind of problems we are missing out on.

Other preeminent scientists were famous not to be desperately connected with the rest of the community and reaching results in a particular "calm" environment -- the most famous of which is Einstein working in the Swiss patent office.
Yeah - looks like it's emulating a lock so only one page can be rendered at a time (plus the overhead for database IO to maintain the lock). Is this really the best way to go about this?
Mo = Less Cartoon
How does the brain generalize to data it hasn't seen before? Any theories?
Pretty useful, but http://sourcegraph.com provides examples & automatic docs for a much larger set of libraries and languages.
Gatekeeper only applies to applications that were downloaded to an HFS volume by an application that sets the quarantine bit. It doesn't apply to applications installed by other means. It's bypassed by simply choosing "Open" from the context menu instead of double clicking. It's entirely a security feature.
Large employers (or any other corporations) don't see labour costs as an end in it of itself, but merely means to an end: the ends being (whether in the long term or in the short term) making money. They could pursue the ultimate "throw more bodies at the problem" strategy, but per Brooks it is known not to work; companies that do so are penalized by the market.

On the other hand engineers can't choose between working many low-satisfaction jobs simultaneous or working for one high-satisfaction job -- so they choose jobs that maximize their satisfaction. While there's low marginal value in higher salaries past a certain point (so other factors, e.g., for me it's working on interesting things take over); however, significant sub-market compensation (in terms of both salary and stock) -- compared to what an individual of similar ability, experience, and location would get in a company of similar size, age, etc... -- does greatly decrease satisfaction.

That gives: engineers want to maximize their satisfaction which requires not being underpaid; companies want to maximize the money they make, but can take many different approaches to this.

So at the end, the market "chooses" to hire fewer, but strong engineers through a combination of university recruiting (and paying high salaries even to new graduates), tolerating a certain degree of churn among early-career software engineers, and also aggressively going after a smaller cadre of experienced programmers who can also mentor talented but less experienced new-hires and interns.

So no, I don't see the scenario you describe as happening. Instead, I'm not alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over) in thinking that similar trends will occur (or, rather, are already occurring unseen) in other white collar jobs, as well as many skilled blue collar jobs. Company finance departments will want to hire workers who are able to write VBA and not rely on clunk recorded macros; manufacturers will (and already do) want to hire workers who can program a CNC machine[1]. This will not make them software engineer any more than me being able to solve a differential equation makes me a mathematician or understanding logic circuits makes me an electrical engineer (to take it one layer lower, knowing Maxwell's field equation and even using it on the job, doesn't make an electrical engineer a physicist). Circling back, this is exactly why it makes sense for people to learning programming -- if robots are automating large parts of people's job's, there will jobs that require knowledge of both the job and programming, to be able to write "userland" programs on the robot, as oppose to program the robots' embedded systems (or to write Excel VBA scripts as opposed to build Excel itself, etc...)

[1] Language they use is G-code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code -- note the date, it's nothing new), and yes, it's Turing-complete: http://callenblogi.blogspot.com/2011/03/bf-interpreter-in-g-...)
Andrew Ng emphasized this quite clearly in his Machine Learning course on Coursera.
A static site generator for a wiki?
They should be protesting city hall and public unions for their anti-development behavior.
PA still has a fully functional turnpike system today. It is government owned, but our current governor was trying to sell it off a while back.
Oh yes, I'm aware of several. My comment was strictly targeted towards the person I was responding to, who either has little imagination or was moving the conversation in a different direction.
You're welcome - good luck.
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote. I'm not a professional coder, but I program as a hobby.

I'm of the opinion that broad spectrum exposure to programming is a good thing, much like exposure to foreign languages in high school.

I don't expecting everyone to take to programming, or German, but without some exposure, you may never know this wonderful world exists. And without knowing, your latent talents might go to waste.

My sister and I had the same exposure to computers as children. I learned to program shortly thereafter, and she never did. I think the main difference there being that I am a self-learner, and she was an other-learner. Meaning she did better in a teacher/student environment and I did better figuring stuff out on my own, asking questions only when I was ready for the answer.

If a brief course in programming had been taught in school when we were growing up, she might have discovered a knack for it. Who knows. Maybe not. She's a doctor now, delving in that messiness that is people, so maybe programming wouldn't have been attractive to her.

I couldn't not program though. I read Neuromancer in 4th or 5th grade, and while I had been programming before then, that book sealed the deal for me.
Jeff Atwood wrote a piece on bias lighting[0] for computer displays. I've been a fan of the idea and have been using the Ikea Dioder[1] colored, also in plain white[2], LED strips mounted behind my monitors both at home and work. It really makes things easier on the eyes when you aren't in a completely pitch-black room, not to mention the color effects are rather soothing. The Ikea strips are easy enough to mount to the back of monitors with a bit of velcro tape.

[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias-lighting.html
[1] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50192365/
[2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20119418/
When I think about the practical skills that I learnt in my education, years later there were only a few key concepts which really mattered: rudimentary arithmetic in Mathematics, good writing/reading skills from English, understanding of empiricism from the Sciences.

I think the question is: is there a foundational skill or concept that learning coding gives you?

I think perhaps there is and it's something to do with the application of symbolic logic, however I am not sure whether I had this before or after I started coding. (I do, however, feel that I grasped it far better from constant practical application than I did from mathematics lessons.)
Do you think, as a lawyer, it would be helpful for everyone to know a little bit of law? To be able to more effectively navigate day to day things like contracts, leases, understanding of rights etc.?
Well I could comment but I'm at work
> Is it common for people to still swipe cards in some counties?

I think this is Square's biggest problem when it comes to global expansion. It's relatively easy for a company like Stripe to launch in Europe: fundamentally the problem is one of paperwork, negotiation, and contracts. For Square, it's all this plus hardware - EMV hardware that needs to be certified by the card issuers, and that's considerably more complex and probably can't be given away for free.

I wonder how close Square are to having an EMV solution that's cost effective and can work for them...
I think everyone should know enough programming to know where programming is an appropriate tool, even if they are not also to wield it, so that they can bring in someone else to solve it with programming, instead of throwing manpower at problems like copy pasting between documents.
Probably because the city realises that having companies bus their employees around is a shitload better than having 20 extra individual cars on the roads?
Elsewhere in the thread somebody mentioned that a particular location in China around when you got your phone is likely the phone being tested before being shipped to you.
It's interesting that they decided to write their own wiki. If I remember correctly, they used to use MediaWiki which has fairly straightforward built-in support for scaling used by Wikipedia and its sister sites. (Replicate your database so it sends all read queries to replicas, set up memcached to cache I18n strings and parser results, use Squid so that logged out users don't even hit the app servers, enable APC, etc.) I'd be interested in knowing why they went with the option of a rewrite.
Brazil's child sex trade soars as 2014 World Cup nears
There's a reason social networks spam more than Viagra merchants.

LinkedIn is pretty bad on this. Just when you think youve opted out of every mailing list, its seems like they invent or create some new 'feature' which opts you in. Again.
0 C-level employees have left. The only C-level employees are the CEO Lucas Duplan and the new COO, Barry McCarthy.