skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My dad is, but after trying to teach me basic declared that "this child will never be any good with computers". I left home to become a professional dancer. It wasn't until I was in my early 20s I started learning Perl - I wanted to build a guestbook, like everyone with a website in 1997. So I wasn't mentored by anyone, I just taught myself with the Camel book and asked questions on usenet when I got stuck.

This is the method by which I still learn new things. Get a good book (or online tutorial). Ask questions.
My younger brother has been programming since age 12, got a MSc in CS, and runs his own dev shop since he left college. Most of what he knows, he learnt himself. I instead hated computer games, struggled with maths, became a humanities scholar, but always loved reading about science and playing around with software.

When we were kids (in the early 1990s), together we made websites: he did the difficult stuff, I did the graphics (Corel Photopaint back then). When I went to college and ran a philosophical magazine, I had my brother make me two websites, in “dynamic html”, then in Flash — it was the late 1990s, and those were cutting-edge, especially in the arts department. While in college, my brother got hooked on php, while the official curriculum taught Java and mocked at “website scripting“. Meanwhile, I picked up html and css, and kept reading: TUGBoat, Techcrunch, Wikipedia. I became quite knowledgeable about the newer stuff: Javascript MVCs, NoSQL — but, as with TeX, everything purely theoretical.

Two years ago we decided to work together again, with this new stack of Mongo/Meteor/Sass: he still on the back-end, I on the front, although the difference between the two is fading away, especially with Meteor. One learns a lot, mutually, in a common “full stack”…

Most of what we can, is from self-learning. I can imagine my brother’s formal training in CS sets a background for self-learning, but his insights in code organization and architecture is from hands-on experience. Without the help of my experienced bro, I’d have a very hard time while teaching myself to code. I keep being a scholar, read about Lisp, Turing completeness, try to figure out data structures, helping myself out with Wikipedia. I’m amazed how all that fascinating theoretical stuff seems to have been merely noteworthy in the CS classes my brother took. I studied art history and philosophy: formal logic was the nearest thing to algebra I had in years. I can safely say, I guess, for both of us, our education has very little to do with the software we write, love and live today.

Our father claims to have written software, while he did his PhD in biomechanics in the late 1970s. It’s hard for us to believe that: as an old-school mechanical engineer he’s got this habit of looking down a bit on making websites and apps. What really helped us to love computers and learn to program, I guess, is that when we were still in primary school, our father bought a PC, got an early internet connection, and let us play with those, freely and without any restriction.
Laptop: Mint 15, Desktop: Mint 14, Servers: Ubuntu 13.10
My side project ljsyscall [1] is a LuaJIT wrapper for the system call and other kernel APIs (eg netlink to configure networking). Its not really designed as a shell per se (although you can use it like that), but it is designed to expose Lua data structures for the output of stuff - ls will return an iterator, network interfaces are hash tables and you can modify the components to reconfigure etc.

[1] https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall
Well, I once had a very disgrundled girlfriend after a dinner talk pivoted to an overview of compression algorithms.
Yeah, I was really impressed with the way goyo.vim works. And I absolutely agree about the sad state of hackery we have to go through for such plugins.

A big part of why most such plugins fail is that they don't take into account user settings and the fact that it is their responsibility to "hide" other plugins. If you look through the source of goyo.vim, you'll find tons of lines dedicated to working around other plugins. Similarly, LiteDFM has a good chunk of code dedicated to remembering and restoring previous user settings.
Pretty much this. My old man was working with C and Assembly back in the day, I believe, and I'm an aspiring full-stack dev using Python/Ruby/JS mainly, so couldn't be more different!

For some reason when I was growing up, programming wasn't ever discussed as a thing I might want to do, so came to it myself much later on.
> Both are opt-out and both do not have to do with pornography only. I sincerely do not see how these can be different.

No they are not. The filtering scheme covered in the submission is the Under 12 O2 filter, that is a filter designed for parents to enable (it's opt in, not opt out) when they wish to give their children access to a mobile device. That filter scheme uses a whitelist, every single website is blocked by default until a person at O2 adds it to the whitelist. This service has existed for many many years and has absolutely nothing to do with the government, it's a feature that O2 added for their customers. O2 do also operate a porn filter, but it is not what this article talks about, it does not block tech articles and civil liberty websites.

The article that you have submitted is FUD. Read this: http://news.o2.co.uk/2013/12/24/parental-control-questions-a...
> Sounds suspiciously like "trickle down economics".

That's not an argument. When rich people (or any people) get wealthier that really does benefit everyone; the problem with classical "trickle down economics" was the idea that this meant it was ok to exempt them from taxes, as if tax money was just wasted.

> And that's not the appropriate comparison. The appropriate comparison is, do the poor benefit more from the rich "investing in job creation" or by themselves having easy access to a mechanism by which their wages and savings are not eroded (in a compounding fashion) by fiat?

Policies that increase the value of cash savings (at least, to the point where it's more profitable than investing in stocks or the like) benefit the rich, and policies that decrease the value of cash savings benefit the poor, because the rich are much more able to save than the poor, and cash really is a zero-sum game. If the dollar ever became deflationary, rich people would sell their stocks and buy up ~all the dollars and capture almost all of the increasing value (businesses would probably stop paying wages out in dollars); meanwhile startups would find it much harder to attract investment, which would be bad for everyone.
I have recently switched to XUbuntu. I tried it a number of times over the past few years but never thought much of it, however, since the 13.10 release it absolutely rocks! This is a screenshot of my desktop:

http://i.imgur.com/BK2leWF.png

The whole GNOME 3 and Unity debacle had me searching for a decent desktop replacement and I was stuck with Ubuntu 11.04 which ran out of support long ago.. XUbuntu is definitely the desktop distro for me.
I think so. It is hard to disallow that without crippling the OS.
Opt in or opt out filter. It makes no difference.

Blocking of these sites should be opposed, loudly.
Even if it's not actually the 'porn law' itself that's causing this (rather O2's blocklist it seems) - the fact is that it's the same attitudes and discourse underlying both. Both are censorship and both are maintained and supported by the government's position and policies.
For someone asking for evidence earlier, it's odd that you so like to toss around '99' like it's a factual number.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978274
My mother was programming FORTRAN, my father was a UNIX-admin (mostly HP-UX, AIX). My brother is a self-taught programmer as well.

Yet, I didn't pick up programming before university. Which was good, because I learned Ruby on the side to spice it up a bit. Back then, Rails wasn't released and anyone ever heard of Ruby, which is quite an advantage today.
Yes it's possible in Python, but doing that means working against all idioms and zens of Python.

Languages are not only about what they make possible, but also about what they encourage.
(((price - 100) / abs(price - 100)) * 25 + 75) / 10

Here you go, simple integer math, no programming necessary :)
That said, this isn't optimisation, multiplication and division aren't intrinsically better than branching.
My exact thought. Moreover, there might be other architectural reasons why he was asked to implement the logic at the higher level. I can see what he is getting at, but not his motives.
Yes, but only as an amateur experimenting. That said, I'm very grateful for the start he gave me - computers were always around at home (dating back to a kit-built ZX81), as was the knowledge that they could be programmed and the encouragement to try. I picked up some things from Dad, some more by private tuition (which unfortunately ended when we moved towns), played around a bit, then classes at school.

For me, the main thing I think was being shown it was possible and then allowed the space to experiment. Let kids try things, they can surprise you...
> This is where some of the warts on a higher level than syntax come in, though, to be fair. Your example above fails in confusing -- and maybe even dangerous, depending on the command at the end -- ways if there's spaces in the filenames. One thing I would like would be a more rigid sense of arguments vs. strings and how they come out of such situations. Having to add -print0 to find and --null to xargs to make it safe for that situation is tedious and unfriendly.

Yes, that's one of the problems I'm trying to solve :)

Powershell solves this by having pipelines pass .NET objects, but I found them too heavyweight.
Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit
Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises NSA Toolbox
VLC doesn't even seem to be fully ported to Android yet.
Andreessen Horowitz's Newest Hire Thinks Death Can Be Deprogrammed
Oh those turk hackers. Remember the mid-2000s, when searching google dork on a certain public exploit, one would most certainly find lots of already defaced websites? Even on some forsaken lice breeding forum with 2 users, there would always be mad photoshop collage with star and crescent on dark background, and a message to those few poor visitors, who probably would not even comprehend what is going on.
Anyway, what's up with Turkey and hacking?
I got into coding by playing with our Windows 95 computer in the nineties. HTML then JavaScript, VBScript, VBA scripting in MS Office on the school computers, then VB6. Years later C#. In the meantime, installing and experimenting with Linux and C, Java and Python, eventually settling into Ruby via Github.

Curiosity got me here.
> I believe legislation will be in effect countrywide in early 2014

Source.

My understanding is that the current filters are part of a voluntary agreement with the big-4 ISPs. There was no legislation passed. And even if they started now, there would be very little chance of such legislation being passed such that it would be effective in this parliament, let alone 'early 2014'.
http://livelypaper.com/demo/ . This is just flippage effect, Interactive elements are coming soon!
Same here. I actually had some troubles growing up, because I was spending too much time on the computer (learning Pascal at that time) instead of doing schoolwork. Sigh.
So there'll be a deflationary spiral where the value of bitcoins goes up and up, until the only people who have bitcoins are the idle rich who won't sell them at anything less than extortionate prices. Which is not a situation I see as sustainable; at some point the actually productive people making economically valuable things will realize that rather than funding this bunch of freeloaders, they should stop accepting bitcoins as payment.
I was in Starbucks the other day and a couple of late-middle age Librarians were sat at an adjacent table (I couldn't tell if they were from the local library, or the local university), both with the 11 inch Samsung Chromebook (2012). These were clearly issued by their employer (and quite recently by the sounds of it), although one had been decked out with a bright pink rubberised skin.

After a few minutes of negotiation they were both connected to the free wi-fi and proceeded with a meeting where they collaboratively edited a set of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, whilst sat on opposite sides of same the table (the docs were the focus of their meeting).

There are many use-cases for Chromebooks (I also have the same Samsung which I use for testing), but one is certainly employers managing large portfolios of standardised desktops used by 'information workers', and which are primarily used for editing spreadsheets and text documents, and surfing the web & using web apps (one might argue that these are largely indistinguishable from students, which is a another sector that Google has targeted).

It may have been that they would have been using Google Drive on their old (presumably) Windows machines, but I suspect that what was likely an economic decision for their employer (the Samsungs are £200 in the UK when bought through Amazon, likely much cheaper when bought in bulk), is also driving uptake of Drive (and web apps in general).

What was interesting from my point of view - as a developer - was that here were two reasonably tech-savvy 'civilians' using what is a relatively limited (by design) technology, and doing so in a very natural and fluid way. There was no mention of either the hardware or the OS and its limitations, they just went about their business without any hiccups or stumbles over the tools they were using.

People who question the Chromebook programme - they're just a browser, you can already do the same on any desktop, etc - are all making very valid points. But in many situations the question isn't what magical things can we make this device do, but rather what is the least (both in terms of cost, but also the scope of things that can go wrong) we can provide and still have our people function effectively. Google appear to be taking a bottom up approach to answering this question: slowly adding functionality to ChromeOS until it meets the majority of use cases the majority of the time. The grey area between Chrome the OS and Chrome the Browser is by design: If you find that you are increasingly living in Chrome on the desktop, maybe your next machine will be a Chromebook.
This has everything to do with the Nanny Tory initiative! If you read the article, the point he is making is not that Porn is good, or that O2 are censors, but that: UK Parents are failing at parenthood! And that is exactly the condition that the UK Nanny state is expecting to exploit with such initiatives - and any corporation setting up to serve their government masters is part of the problem. The problem, being, that people do not want to be responsible parents and monitor what their children are doing online.
One day I was playing a game on my ZX Spectrum micro-computer (I was 9 or 10 at the time) when something unexpected happened. The loader threw an exception and I was presented with a weird listing of words and numbers which turned out to be program's source code. Something told me to mess around with it, I changed a few names and numbers and somehow managed to run the program. It worked and funnily enough, the things I changed in source were reflected in new labels in the app (a football manager AFAIR).

This was early nineties and I had no books, no library, no Internet to learn from (my parents had no programming knowledge either) so I had to hack around. I learned to stop programs just before they finished loading and view the source and learn from it (good old days when no one thought of closed-source and obfuscation).

Soon I started writing my first app in Basic. It was a game where you had to get a dot around a rectangular track. Not a complex one but took me a few days to finish.

Things went fast from then. I learned Pascal and started writing more complex programs on a PC. When choosing a school I didn't even consider anything else than computer science. Got my first programming job in a Warsaw-based software house when 21, while still studying. I learned Java and Linux at that company. Then came a few others and eventually in 2010 I started my own company, a movie analyics startup Filmaster.TV which is all I'm focused on right now.

Spaghetti Monster only knows where would I be now if not for that faulty ZX Spectrum program in my childhood.
My dad was a programmer / operator for Eastern Air Lines' SystemOne when he was in college. It was the job that taught him he'd rather work with people.
I prefer rainbow parenthesis based on nesting depth.
My father used to be a programmer, but at the time that I learned to program, he already switched to project management. I got started with some pointers from a nephew (first in Qbasic). Then I somehow discovered CGI (Perl) and got hooked up on web technology. I don't remember how I discovered CGI. I switched from Perl to PHP when I read a magazine article series about it. My current professional programming is still mostly PHP. As a side project, I also learned Python and Ruby. At my current job we're using RoR more and more.
FULL DISCLOSURE:

Im an Expedia employee (inbound marketing director, covering SEO), although Im currently at the end of my notice period. (Im leaving in two weeks).

Also, I worked in the B2B division, nothing to do with the consumer side that this article references.

The author of the post linked above contacted me a couple of days before publishing it, to warn me that he would publish (quote: "damning evidence of expedia spam").

HOWEVER: If I wanted him to not publish it, he would "sell the post to the highest bidder".

That was what prompted me to post this on my personal blog: http://webmarketingschool.com/big-brand-seo-spam/ and for the record, I told him to sling his hook reference to extorting money out of anyone in exchange for not posting stuff about their backlinks.

No doubt that is why I got singled out in the article. You'll notice that at the top I get mentioned as being in charge of this stuff, then right down at the bottom, he mentions that in fact Ive got nothing to do with it.

I'll let you all draw your own conclusions.
I might give this a go, but I've never had great success with distraction-free modes. I tend to work better with as much information as possible - tmux, with vim (multiple tabs) and repl panes, as well as browser open for docs or seeing output if working on a web project. Generally I'll also use something like python-mode and have my code get shoved through a bunch of linters on save.
Seriously? On HN too?
hi jweimusic I understand your predicament. am, or was a non coder. I would advise you to join codeacademy learn a few basics to simplify what you need, go to github and SourceForge to see whether there is enough source code/ projects that are similar or can help. then hopefully you can go to oDesk with a clear plan and clarity on your needs.
If the gold price collapses, all the energy spent mining it and transporting it will be gone too. and that energy is much much higher than the energy bitcoin network is consuming.
Structure of Yoda's subtitles when translated
Another way to view NY Times articles articles without the paywall is to drop the title into a Google search. Going through Google drops the paywall for me.
You mean, exactly like the system we use in the real world?
Sorry but in your original post you specified opt-in. In any event, different providers are either opt-in or opt-out, O2 is not the only ISP in UK and the link you share is just the boilerplate text on O2's parental controls policy, so what?

I feel I explained my rationale and there can be no more constructive conversation in the particular thread. As for the article being FUD, sorry darling I guess we'll have to disagree on this one.
Socialism didn't work the other 15-20 times it was tried as a nations political foundation. But I am sure it will work this time.
Giff Gaff allow you to lift the filter if you have a UK credit card. They make a charge and refund it (or something similar).

I agree that the filter, and its implementation, is hopeless and stupid.
"It's like Windows except it's gratis, more secure, more control..."

It's not really like Windows though is it? I could argue ChromeOS has far less privacy and is less capable. Sure, ChromeOS presents a simplified and streamlined experience that fits with what many people want in a computer: surf the web, check email, write simple documents. But there is nothing in ChromeOS that you can't do in Windows or Ubuntu or MacOSX. Importantly, in those OSes, I can run desktop apps without worrying about usage data being recorded and tracked (if usage data is recorded, it's opt-in and usually described as "anonymous" data collection).

I wonder how many people here would be happy if every action they performed or every app they launched on their computer was recorded by Apple or Microsoft? Yet, this is exactly what ChromeOS potentially does. In ChromeOS, running Google apps is only possible by signing into your Google account. So very quickly, Google builds an incredibly detailed picture of your computer usage: from the sites you browse, to the apps you use, to even the docs you print. They are not capturing this data anonymously either. Knowing clearly what Google tracks and records is a perfectly reasonable expectation. I'm amazed how easily Google have escaped any scrutiny on this matter.

There's barely any mention in this thread (and none in the TechCrunch article) of the privacy implications of using ChromeOS. I guess for many in the tech press and the tech community it's a complete non-issue. As someone who cares about privacy, I find that pretty depressing.
It's not as if..it is truly the case. That's why only nutters use LISP for large projects. Who really wants to wrap every S-Expression in parenthesis? Talk about painstaking and what an eye-sore. If only M-Expressions caught on, LISP could be decent. But really, it's just making you write your program as a data structure because that makes it easier for the compiler to process.

So...

Ruby: good for developers, bad for the JIT compiler (slow)

LISP: awful for developers, good for the compiler -> machine (fast)

Is the tradeoff worth it? Not at all. Most LISP intros start by convincing you that you'll eventually get used to your code looking like a sack of parenthesis. No thanks, I shouldn't need to get used to staring at overburdened verbosity for the compilers' sake - build something better. Wait..we have other languages that are fast and look nice. And many even process into a well-formed AST. Okay, thank heavens.
Lots of GTA V, GT5, FIFA 13, Star Trek: Online, TF2, CS.
Chaos Reviewer
The demo doesn't have a voiceover, but this project looks intriguing. I would love to read a side-by-side comparative review of Raskell and iHaskell (which I've used on someone else's iPad, and liked).
> I feel that when money in the form of paper bills was first introduced, there had bound to be people wondering the same thing. After all, taking a step back, who would consider putting such value to pieces of paper that we do in today's day and age?

The thing with paper money, at least recently, was that it originally started out as being tied to gold. Instead of having to carry around gold for exchange, you would exchange these pieces of papers which were the equivalent amount in gold. However, once the idea of paper money became so entrenched governments realised they could remove the actual backing without many people saying "Hey wait a minute. These pieces of paper are now worthless."

If people had tried to introduce paper money originally without the gold backing, there's no way it would have caught on in the same way.