skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As I read it, Bret Victor's critique of code.org is more nuanced than the usual complaints: it stems from a disagreement with code.org's implicit claim that programming should be taught in schools because programming is currently a high-value skill, in terms of the amount of money you can earn by doing it professionally. He seems to think that school shouldn't be primarily about training people to be "useful" to employers or the government in the short term. I'm somewhat inclined to agree.

I'm inclined to agree (with what you explained) as well. But, if this is conveyed by the article/graphic, it sure is subtle. I think it would have been a better article if he just explained his complaint (if it is as you say), rather than making a mockery of celebrity quotes with big sarcastic quotes next to pictures of their faces.

> In the context of Victor's body of work (which is focused more or less entirely on making the incredible power of computers more accessible to more people), I have a hard time believing that any such motivation underlies the linked piece. While I think there definitely exists such a motivation in other criticisms of the learn-to-code meme, I don't think it has much to do with Victor's critiques.

Yeah, I was mostly referring to the negativity towards code.org and coding as basic literacy in general, not this author specifically. But that's good to know at least in this case he's not one of those people.
Hi, I am aware that the post on my blog is pretty shallow but my intention was not to dive deeper into the problem anyway.

As you confirmed, the phenomenon is real. I am an IOS user and I was shocked when a friend told me about the comments people are making at Google Play, so I quickly put together a blog and wrote a post that dramatically exposes the problem. The idea is to catch attention of the people so that those who have the necessary tools and time can investigate it thoroughly.

The problem is real and hopefully somebody in the position to fix it would see the post.
ISense 3D scanner for iPad
You got it. My mother made $27,177 last month just sitting at home answering the phone.
Just to be clear, are you saying that they think Google makes all the apps in Google Play?
Note that the Rust compiler doesn't do any stream fusion; rather the functional idioms are designed around iterators, which provide a functional interface that relatively easily and predictably compiles down to code that's as efficient as the corresponding for loop.
Defying Japan, Rancher Saves Fukushima’s Radioactive Cows
I found this oddly phrased:

"the sleep researchers I spoke with agree that there’s no evidence that aided sleep is as effective as natural sleep."

Is there evidence that it isn't as effective as natural sleep? Why not say there's no evidence either way?
why would staying quiet and motionless during nocturnal predator hunting time be an evolutionary disadvantage?
I don't think this phenomenon has much to do with user misconceptions, it's more of a meme that has spread to many Turkish users, e.g. do a search on "gozuksun diye 1 yildiz verdim" (gave 1 star so my comment is seen) or the eksisozluk link in my comment below.
Jan. 1 has become the birthday for Afghans who don't know when they were born
I programmed in basic on an old IBM dual-floppy thingamajig in like 1999 or something. We actually didn't program it turns out. I dropped some highschool computer class that turned out to be typing or something. I'm not expecting Chris Bosh to show up in my mailing lists, but of all fights in the universe to pick, taking the time to fling dook at a vast improvement on what I had in middle school? This individual has better things to do.

Let's bring up the whole ineffable thing again. It's like a finger pointing at the moon. The finger can only be a pointer. Whatever truth that is in the moon of programming or thinking in general can't be encapsulated in a pill and injected into the liver. A really big pointer directs a lot of attention in the general direction of the moon. Perhaps some of the tech moguls on the list are being realistic about the payoff unless you schlogg hardcore through a product development and your product goes to the moon.

Give me a break.
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make but I've always felt like a professional, maybe because I mostly worked at tech companies. And anyone going around calling themselves "geek", "nerd", or "hacker", probably aren't one.
Honestly, no, you're incorrect, at least in Australian English. A crash course is a turn of phrase, to denote being taught an overview of a topic in a short time, usually informally, with a focus on what is important to the students future endeavours in that area.
Obama to announce changes to NSA surveillance on Jan. 17
CRM is a good example. In the past, only big companies could afford them. These days there are cheap and free alternatives anyone can afford. If there were no cheap alternatives the only alternative is non-consumption for many small businesses.

Even my own product, JotForm, is a good example. Web developers or professional designers don't need it. They can already create forms. People like teachers, secretaries, school administrators, event organizers who use jotform would have never considered online forms if there were no tools like jotform. The other alternative is non-consumption. (paper forms, manually collecting information)
Thom's AMA would suggest otherwise.

I love Radiohead, but... come on.
I wrote a huge mess that, on second thought, I put away just because I don't know Bret Victor and shouldn't shove words into his mouth.

But to me, I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm sorry, but this is a field were our median income is 50% more than the median income of the rest of the country. It's also a field that you don't need to go to college to join, can educate yourself on how to join it by using sites like Code.org and other online resources, and has a ton of demand, meaning you won't be out of work like your Dad has been, several times in the last few years.

To anyone going through school right now, then coming home and seeing the news their parents are watching, or look at the front page of the newspaper their parents are reading, or listen to an adult at their soccer game or the mall or church, all of this sounds like a way out of it, a way to give yourself something better than that.

Why in the hell is it so wrong to want a better life than what your parents had?
I don't think Microsoft and Sony think that way. Look at the extraordinary lengths Microsoft and Sony went to in the previous generation to provide back compat -- Microsoft wrote an amazing Xbox emulator, Sony build a whole expensive mini version of the PS2 into early models of the PS3.

And this generation it seems that Sony is trying to provide PS3 emulation using their cloud gaming system.

Some of the benefits of back compat to platform holders:

1) Encourages customers to upgrade sooner and to choose the compatible platform.

2) Increases the roster of games during the first few years of the new console's life.

3) Extends sales of the previous generation hardware and software. (Software because it can be played on both old and new hardware, and hardware because there's more new software available.)
In a word, leverage.

The janitor can clean one floor at a time, and that's all. No matter how hard he works at it, there's a pretty low cap on the value that can be created by this labor. Even if it's a really important floor, say the main hall of a fancy wedding establishment, only a limited number of customers can fit there to benefit from this labor, and so the job can only be worth a fairly small amount of revenue.

Programmers don't have that problem, at least if they're smart about company and industry and product niche. Joel Spolsky (let's say) can create a timesaving bug tracker, where his efforts incur a huge multiplier of value in leveraging the automatically scalable nature of software. Joel can rightfully get paid by the time saved and value created times a million users, while working less hard than the janitor who's cleaning for a few hundred folks.

CEOs and more broadly all of management operate on yet another level, in leveraging the contribution of many programmers. One programmer might write Microsoft Paint, and another Microsoft Word. Somebody realizes there's another layer of business value in embedding Paint images into Word documents, and coordinates the programmers to make that happen even if the Paint and Word developers aren't necessarily interested in integration. That's where the CEO gets paid, at least until the programmers become sufficiently business-savvy and motivated to do it without additional leadership.
Thanks for pointing that out! It's much easier to pause for jotting down notes, rewind to watch portions of the lecture again, and even speed up portions (between 1.5x and 2.2x is my sweet spot, depending on the presenter) using VLC. As nice as their Silverlight presentation system is, downloadable video files make it much more likely that I will watch all of them, as opposed to only the first few.
This is by far the most interesting science news I've seen for many months. I am glad it made the HN front page. (And because of the very non-descriptive title, I almost didn't click on it.)
I think the point Bret Victor is trying to make is that what he perceives as the real value of programming (its use as a powerful extension of the programmer's cognitive abilities) is absent entirely from the perception of programming as an inherently good thing that code.org and related groups are pushing.

Programming is, and ought to be seen as, merely a means to an end – not an end in and of itself. A movement that gets programming into to schools by claiming code is itself a Good Thing will inevitably bring into existence a programming curriculum that ignores the important abstract stuff about coding-as-a-concept (the new ways in which computers can extend the mind) and focuses instead on the concrete "implementation details" of programming today (text files, the command line, and all that other baggage from 20 years ago with which programmers are still saddled).

Basically: the reasoning is important, the code isn't, and code.org is all about the code.
One Backend Per User (Dropbox.js, GDrive JS, NimbusBase)
Max Tegmark is largely responsible for popularising the idea.
This is so strange to see, especially since code.org's tutorials might be the closest thing we've got to a widely used implementation of (some of) Mr. Victor's ideas.
That's still astronomically low compared to non-bullshit money. The US economy goes through its M1 money supply 7 times per quarter, or over twice per month [0]. If Bitcoin had that ratio, it would now be running $30 billion of meaningful transactions per month, not $30 million.

[0] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1V

[Ctrl-F keyword: "velocity of money"]
Can someone expand the "use Firefox as a trust anchor for services" idea? How would this work?
That might depend on a payment processor service. E.g., when a charge is made, the payment processor returns a unique ID for the transaction. Then, if the merchant decides to give a refund, they put through a transaction that references the sale by its ID, and the payment processor then credits the appropriate piece of plastic with the desired amount. Nothing for a hacker to steal, unless they compromise the payment processor.

>Both features are possible without actually storing the card number; one-way hashes to do the receipt lookup, and tokens to do the refund, but how likely is that?

There is a company, Shift4† ($-sign on a US keyboard, get it?), who provide credit card processing service to smaller merchants. Shift4 itself is not a payment processor. Rather, it provides an intermediate layer standing between the merchant and the payment processor(s). A prominent feature of its service offering is tokenization: the ability to refer indirectly and opaquely to specific transactions and card accounts. It removes the need for the merchant to store card details. Shift4's tokens give the merchant a way to refer to past transactions and card accounts without having to store card details.

†http://shift4.com/
This, but for businesses. Companies should try to avoid e.g. paying something like $5000 per seat to license AutoCAD; instead the consumers of that particular type of software should work cooperatively to fund developers who will build a program with the required features and then release it as free or open software.
I don't know, there definitely seem to be people 10x as effective at cleaning as I am...
I think you need to find your own answer to this, and your answer will determine if you have a product. In other words, you probably need to build contacts with businesses and get them interested in possibly hiring from your boot camps. Then you probably need to find some brave souls who are willing to go through your first round (maybe only charge if they actually get a job?) and see if you can land jobs for these people. If your placement rate looks promising, then you may have something.

I imagine that's a big part of the value these boot camps bring to their students. They probably have awesome contacts, and building those contacts probably isn't easy. Building these relationships is probably more important than the actual teaching of the courses.
The linked course pages contains a good synopsis, but Robert Harper's own blog post "What’s the big deal with HoTT?" [0] gives a wider view about its motivation and history.

Another two pages with worthwhile information on the HoTT book are [1] and [2].

[0] http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/whats-the-bi...

[1] http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/06/the_hott_book.ht...

[2] http://math.andrej.com/2013/06/20/the-hott-book/
I think in the short term, companies that develop these things will behave ethically without any oversight (by making machines "enjoy" what they are doing) because doing something else would be inefficient or counterproductive. Why would you make an expensive thinking machine miserable? Humans that are happy are way more productive - and machines that are based off humans will be as well.

In the long term, if and when these things become mass-produced and cheap, people may want to do terrible things to them, in the same vein as animal torture. That may be when laws get put in place to protect them.
No disrespect, but your purpose for math is entirely irrelevant unless you speak for the majority of research mathematicians.
I'm all for making Computer Science education more accessible, but this code.org initiative and its "coding is easy!" and "everyone should learn to code!" and "you only need basic addition and subtraction" BS is really insulting to people who've actually put in the difficult effort and long hours of study and practice it takes to become a professional:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html

All Zuckerberg, Gates and the other Valley backers of code.org want is more code monkeys who are just competent enough to glue together stuff they don't fully understand and couldn't implement if asked to, so they can drive down the wages of actual, competent programmers. It's the same reason they support immigration reform.

And why the push to flood the market with "coders," when health care, not software, is bankrupting us as a country? Why isn't there a "everyone should learn medicine" initiative? Isn't your health important to you? Obviously because it would be illegal, and US doctors (the highest paid in the world) would never allow it.
We had the same problem, but with Russia. Ours being a paid app and our reviews being in the low 1000s, every 1-star rating was hurting us badly, so we removed Russia completely from our distribution. We added it back a month later and things went back to normal, but that's definitely something that we shouldn't need to have done.
I completely agree. I'm just 23 and I burned out, last year I decided going on my own, freelancing and launching own products. That was a hard year, a lot of stress, anxiety attacks. I made a huge mistake. Hopefully I'll try to change this.
Exciting Systems Software & Trends as of January 2014
Abstaining From Alcohol Significantly Shortens Life
Haha, funny thing: I've seen comments greetings their loved ones. Like it's on TV and their relatives are watching it :)
Is it really the same?

If they have backup (it's MIT.. I don't doubt they do have backup) it's probably clean in less than 15 minutes.

Now they also need to fix the security issue. It's more like I know your door is broken but I use that problem to talk about another problem. Will that make you work more? Maybe yeah because you will have to fix that door NOW but in the same time, the same is true if I told only you, you would still need to fix it now because it can be a HUGE danger for you.
Ask HN: Is there a need to improve the way open source projects are discovered?
> But, if this is conveyed by the article/graphic, it sure is subtle. I think it would have been a better article if he just explained his complaint (if it is as you say), rather than making a mockery of celebrity quotes with big sarcastic quotes next to pictures of their faces.

Yeah – it's entirely possible that I'm putting my own words about the learn-to-code movement into someone else's mouth unwarranted. I think the linked piece is more of a frustration-fueled rant than a fully-thought-out criticism, and that the author is trying to quickly capture the spirit of a half-formed argument that he hasn't yet fully explored.

At any rate, it resonated with me, although it took me a few reads to get the gist of what he was trying to say.
Because learning to code just so you can code doesn't in any way mean you are more likely to be employed in the future, especially if there is a successful push for people to learn to code just for the sake of having more programming literacy. That's not meant as a "let's keep it elite" comment, but as a "you're teaching the wrong thing" comment. As much as it may seem teaching people to code is teaching them to fish, when it's pushed this way it's closer to giving them a fish. Teaching them to reason and using programming as a method to teach them interesting concepts is teaching them to fish.
Write a novel, or poetry, or whatever form you find appropriate. I do disagree with the notion that one can't express oneself without resorting to colloqialisms, but on the other hand I have no problem with using such devices for self-expression if they're what works best. On the other hand, when I read a newspaper like the NYT, I'm not interested in the authenticity of the writers' self-expression; I want a clear and dispassionate report or analysis of current events, just as in an essay I want an exploration of a particular topic.

I'm afraid I find the entire Techcrunch article redolent of neo-Marxist critical theory, which I think is intellectually bankrupt and antithetical to progress, and which brings on an overwhelming desire to projectile vomit upon its nearest exponent, so I'm a touch biased about this.
I really hope this will get solved in the language itself, I like Go quite a bit, but there are quite ugly places, all related to generics I guess:

- No min/max for integers (and Go doesn't have the ternary operator)

- No IsMember for checking if an object is in a collection

- Directly from the Gen page: Go’s sort package requires the fulfillment of three interface members, two of which are usually boilerplate. If you want to sort by different criteria, you need to implement multiple ‘alias’ types.

Also, unrelated to generics, but no multidimensional arrays.
This is just odd. I haven't seen any of his other stuff and when I read this I thought he was against teaching kids how to program. From comments in this thread I see why the post is critiquing the reasoning and motives for teaching kids to program.
I think that overall I think that his post hurts the movement to teach programming, and doesn't really help to clarify or change the reasons for why programming should be taught in school.
Additionally the movement to teach programming before college is making headway (remember whats happening in Chicago?), which is a good thing, and it shouldn't be demonized just because one thinks the motive is bad. Try to influence it positively instead of sending it backwards.
Also addressing the "programming isn't for everyone" argument I had to suffer through all the common general studies classes so the argument that programming isn't for everyone is bs, because English and History aren't for me, but I still had to learn it.
> The second amendment confers absolute rights; the restrictions on, say, youths and felons are blatantly unconstitutional.

Both the Supreme Court and the NRA disagree with you. I think you need to recheck your research.
As it's obvious that they are using the letter of the ban to go around the spirit of the ban.
He's belittling the political stance of code.org as represented by its marketing.

He's not saying "don't teach kids how to program", he's saying "we're teaching kids how to program for the wrong reasons". The implication is, if you're teaching it for the wrong reasons, we're not doing the best we could for the kids.

That's a perfectly valid thing to say, independently of the good intentions and sincere efforts of all the people involved.
In fact, you shouldn't have expected an easy cure to syphilis. It's a dramatic exception. The vast, vast majority of problems the body has are not easily solved by a simple chemical. This is born out by the tremendous difficulty of finding effective drugs which don't carry unacceptable side effects.
You cannot deny that the current high price is due to the extremely high demand in China. Get China out of the picture, add a bit more due to Zynga and Overstock, the price should be less than $300.
The extent to which some people here are feeling personally slighted I think kind of proves Brett's point.
> I have not argued, as you allege, that Mr. Snowden is a hero. I have stated that history will decide.

This is moral cowardice and political pragmatism at its finest [1]. There is no "history" to decide anything only people who live in the future, far removed from the consequences of making a stand or judgement now. You know how the saying goes... with friends like this...

In my judgement, not only is Snowden a hero but he was wise to leave the country as a fair trial seems hopeless, as throwaway420 points out. Given the lack of support for Snowden and the general apathy toward dangerous NSA and other govt programs I am not optimistic.

[1] To be clear, I do not consider pragmatism to be a virtue. Political pragmatism means acting without reference or guide to any principles whatsoever and acting on the range of the moment. There is a distinction between being politically practical, i.e. accepting what is and is not politically feasible, and jettisoning your principles when confronted with a threat to those principles. What does Rand Paul stand for? Nothing.
I'm not denying it, just pointing that some other factors could have the same effect.
This whole issue of adding programming / computer science to the curriculum is overstepping and even outright ignoring the problems with our education system. If huge numbers of students graduate from high school without being able to do algebra, what do you think will come of these schools trying to teach kids to program? Imo, this is just the wrong issue to be focusing on. Though it does make for plenty of good PR for the people and companies involved.
I think the point is that learning to program is not necessarily equivalent to learning to think better. They may learn to program, and not learn to think better. Which is what this whole thing is about. Should we be telling people "you need to learn to code" to possibly fuel an economic hole, or should we be telling them "We want to teach you a valuable way to think and reason by using programming" which may address future economic and social needs?