skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience is that of a white male. Does that make my opinions or viewpoint any less valid in your eyes?

I've expressed one opinion on 'the right way to do this'. Help the disadvantaged - and don't vilify those with perceived advantages that they have no control over.

I could ask the exact same thing of your background and why you feel that your opinion is more valid than mine, but instead I'd prefer to address the content of what you're saying, rather than what your background is.

I have also talked with a lot of people that I consider "disadvantaged", and they do agree with me. As do plenty of other people.

The Geekfeminism wiki page that you linked lists Peggy McIntosh's article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", which was the first 'Privilege checklist'.

I'm surprised you haven't even bothered to read the original writing that frames the world view you've accepted as fact.
IBM Invests $1 Billion to Grow Watson Supercomputer's Struggling Business
Don't feel sorry for those people, exchanges exist for a reason. If people feel like they do not want to hold on their cryptocurrencies anymore, they can still sell them. Moreover, as long as there are enough people willing to buy those coins at a higher price, it can only keep rising.

I'm not a bitcoin booster or super believer or whatever the term is (even though I have some), but even if we are to follow your arguments, and assume that Chinese traders got the price that high, we can say that with a market cap as low as $10B, China hadn't likely injected as much money as Wall Street would if they entered the market. My point is that even if the price crashes because of some bad news in China, it still has a chance to rise again when Wall Street comes (if we are to believe that those companies still want to enter).

It really looks like speculation is what keeps the btc/usd pair rising, but with such good news coming, I can't think of a lot of reasons why people would stop speculating. Keep in mind that there is no short supply of people who want to get rich with little work.
Jelly Bean claims 59.1 percent of Android device share as KitKat inches forward
My version: http://www.gamegardens.com/gardens/view_game.wm?gameid=68 And the source: http://hg.ericw.ca/high-king

Building this game (back in 2007!) landed me my first job in the US and set me on the path to developing my first commercial games.
Coinbase aggregates a few different markets to determine the price in real-time.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom makes the same argument more generally and detailed here: www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf

We shouldn't expect easy congitive enhancement through drugs unless there is a strong reason it wouldn't have been advantageous in the ancestral environment that doesn't matter now (e.g. much higher calorie usage).
There's nothing particularly novel or unique about holding the belief that a mathematical model of reality is the same thing as reality. Discussions on HN reveal that many commenters hold this belief, arguing, for example, that a "virtual" universe simulated on a supercomputer would be indistinguishable from a real (or the real) universe.
Gadgets of The Future, Now
Turkish is LTR.
As a developer you can combat both of these dynamics.

Make sure you provide a clear way for them to contact you if they are running into trouble.

Reach out to your engaged users and pro-actively ask them to review the app after you're confident they have had a good experience.
is the Turkish language read from right to left? maybe they are counting stars from the wrong side.
More well-known U.S. retailers victims of cyber attacks - sources
You are such a nigger. You have a small team of retards, not even a low level electrical engineer has been consulted. What is your team 5 psychologists?
It's kind of weird that they want their comment to be at the top, but the only thing they say in their comment is that they want it to be at the top. You'd think if they were looking for exposure, they'd use the exposure to do something other than talking about how they wanted exposure.
Tafl games are indeed cool. This is just one variant of many, and we actually don't even know what exactly the original rules were. Best guesses are constructed largely from off-hand references made in unrelated literary works. Lots of good info in the wikipedia page (as always): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
"Warning! May result in feelings of inadequacy"

Ha ha...yea, usually I get inspired by other people's projects, but visiting worrydream.com just makes me want to quit everything.
How did you conclude that "It seems it's just for Turkey". As far as I can see the OP has not done much analysis either and based his comments on a few comments. The only significant analysis I've seen is done by diziet below.
But is it more rational education? I think his point is that programming as an end itself does little to help empower students. Programming as a tool to enable further exploration of higher concepts is the goal he thinks we should be pursuing, and if code.org presents programming as the goal and ignores why, then I think he's justified in his criticism.

I think it's worth examining history for a parallel. If in the 1920's there was a large push towards mechanical knowledge of the populace (but not necessarily science and engineering) because an understanding of mechanical engines is increasingly essential in todays world, we need 120,000 trained mechanics every year, and the policy at Boeing is literally to hire as many talented mechanics as they can find, I think in hindsight I might also say that it sounds a bit like they are just trying to fill an economic need. Which is fine. But Bret Victor seems to care about teaching and learning, and code.org, from it's main page, seems to care little about that.
The first amendment confers no rights; it restricts congress. The second amendment confers absolute rights; the restrictions on, say, youths and felons are blatantly unconstitutional.
It's curious how HNers can simultaneously say "Serves those banksters at HSBC right -- finally, the government decides to fine them a billion dollars for laundering drug money" and then "Pfft, getting your bank accounts shut down for being in marijuana is a silly problem to have -- here, I'll describe a foolproof money laundering strategy which could get seen through by an eight year old. That should keep things square with the banks and their regulators, wink wink."
You won't find scientific information about it, because like Qigong, it's pseudoscience.
Hmm, I did not know that about Povo. I am religious my self, but of the live and let live, nondenominational, type. I would not want to live in a place where people try to convert me all the time. That's something to consider.
Privileged rich person says other people don't need to worry about obtaining money or power.

Not an article headline from The Onion.

I nominally agree with him about code.org, just found the surrounding context amusing.
They almost certainly store the card number with reversible encryption, because you can make a return just with the card you bought the item with (they lookup the receipt from the card number + item SKU). With a receipt and WITHOUT the card, they can also refund directly back to the card it was bought with.

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?

I think in Target's case it will turn out the hacker was sniffing network traffic on the internal network, and just pulling every transaction right off the wire.
> A big part of my loneliness was I refused to accept that I am actually a pretty introverted, non-verbal person

The author was a senior when I was a freshman in college. He was one of the upperclassmen that I looked up to. He was very smart, good looking and we hung out sometimes when he would give me good advice. It never occurred to me that he's introverted and that he should have a reason to feel lonely. Quite a strange feeling when I saw this post from twitter. I feel guilty for not understanding him enough but it's nice to see this useful and positive post.
Yeah, The first time I saw it was back in late 2011 when Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction[1] was linked. After viewing the main site, and sharing it with some friends and co-workers, the feeling was almost unanimous.

[1]: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
Disclaimer: I worked on Code.org's Blockly tutorials.

I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work, but this leaves a real bad taste in my mouth.

Frankly, I don't believe that Bret doesn't understand the nature of marketing. He must be aware that http://code.org/quotes is a tool to help influence policy and garner support, rather than a statement on the proposed mechanisms of education.

Code.org has lots of empirical evidence that having celebrities involved inspires kids. Having female role models encourages girls to try. Showing national politicians from both sides of the isle eases local policy progress.

I'm feeling pretty good about my involvement, because I've seen a lot of comments from parents and teachers like this one:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=538314902931484&set=...

and videos like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_t3-3vPp-g&feature=c4-overvi...

I taught Scratch in a Harlem classroom once a week in the months leading up to the Hour Of Code and struggled. Once the Angry Birds & Plants vs Zombies tutorials were ready to beta, I tried it on the class and the results were incredible. Kids that did nothing all semester were suddenly cruising through levels and jumping up and down with excitement. When they went back to Scratch, they suddenly were making dramatically more progress and being creative.

Should also mention, that we've got tons of unplugged activities and lots of other educational materials too. Even more on the way: http://code.org/educate/curriculum

I've lost a lot of respect for Bret Victor just now because he's belittling the work of people who genuinely care and who would love to see his ideas incorporated. There's a much bigger battle to be fought before we can even consider what he's proposing, but he seems willing to work against incremental progress because it's not revolutionary in quite the way he likes.

We've got many types of learning materials at http://code.org/learn from all sorts of providers. My contract with Code.org is over, but if Bret wants to show us how its done, I'm sure the team is willing to share our megaphone.
Ah yes, agreed. I meant purely related to the previous comment implying that keyboard literate users are the only audience for bitcoins. And so I meant that my uses are not knowledge about bitcoin regardless of their keyboarding skills, being that they are for the most part quite young.

But I'm definitely pleased to be educating millions of children about bitcoin. Actually it's all I expected when we began accepting it, but that is my way of showing my support. Just doing my part!
I don't have the will to read a 40 page pdf at the moment, but my initial reaction to that argument is that evolution is not perfect and does not produce the same results in all species. Some animals hibernate for months, while some sleep much less time than we do. Not to mention that it seems like a cop out that avoids any possibility of progress through technology.

Why should we expect an easy cure to syphilis in a drug if evolution has not found one? I don't know, but penicillin still works pretty darn well.
Show HN - Lifedots, The Easiest Way To Connect Memories
It’s by design, though I understand the concern. From a design perspective, I like getting a distinct slice out the other end, without having to wonder whether I’ve mutated my original slice. It’s more stateless, so to speak.

Fwiw, slices are inexpensive by design. The elements themselves are not copied. Allocating a new slice is really a small ‘struct’ which serves as a pointer to the underlying array: http://blog.golang.org/go-slices-usage-and-internals

(Gen’ing pointers is supported, which mitigates the potential for allocation.)

It is true that chained operations will be multiple iterations. Whether it will net out to more iterations than otherwise depends on the use.

I’d be interested to see if someone can come up with a pattern where the operations themselves are composed, with a ’.Results()’ method that can intelligently (lazily?) minimize iterations. That’d be impressive.
Porn company Naughty America announces plans to shoot 4K videos
I'm mostly glad that this will help with Alzhimer's(sp?) research. Being able to work 24hours matters less to me, I rather like to sleep, than treating the terrible memory loss that comes with the disease.
Technically this is the transliteration of that ruby code:

(def severity :mild)
(def error_message "OH GOD! IT'S A DISASTER! WE'RE ")
(if (= severity :mild)
(def error_message (str error_message "MILDLY INCONVENIENCED!"))
(when (= severity :terrible)
(def error_message (str error_message "DOOOOOOOMED!"))))

And if we consider that a good transliteration then I'm not sure why this wouldn't suffice for the second one:

(def failed_protagonist_names [
"Larry Potter"
"Doreen the Explorer"
"The Incredible Bulk"
])

(def failed_protagonist_names
(assoc failed_protagonist_names 0 "Gary Potter"))

;; => ["Gary Potter" "Doreen the Explorer" "The Incredible Bulk"]
Gumbo as well:

https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser

(And LevelDB, Snappy, Angular, GoogleTest, tcmalloc and google-perftools, lmctfy, etc.)
Why do you think this is more prevalent in Turkey than in other countries? Is there something unique about Turkish culture that would cause this misunderstanding or misprioritization?
> This is the depth of thought that powers nationwide policy decisions. But hey, congratulations to musician and entertainer will.i.am for at least having an educational philosophy that’s not completely unreasonable or horrifying.

Quite frankly I'm shocked and confused by some of the negativity I've seen expressed (including those from the HN community) towards code.org, and the idea of programming as a basic literacy in general.

It seems like these people will do almost anything to find something about this idea to pick on, ridicule, discredit, and otherwise attack. Seriously, last time this came up on HN the majority of the discussion was about how horrible it is that this movement uses the phrase "learn to code" rather than "learn to program".

Now it's ad hominem attacks against musicians/artists advocating literacy and education -- and what do those attacks say? "Congratulations [...] for having an educational philosophy that's not completely unreasonable and horrifying." What a disgusting backhanded "compliment". Is there something about being a musician or artist that disallows one from having a valid intellectual opinion taken for its own sake, without being patronized?

"Aww isn't that cute! A musician/artist having an intellectual idea that isn't completely terrible -- like a quaint little animal trying to imitate us true intellectuals up here in our high tower of superiority." I exaggerate, but this is basically the elitist mentality I perceive behind the actual quote.

To me, this comes off as a desperate attempt to defame this movement because it threatens to demote the status of basic technology roles from "elite magic" to "basic literacy" -- and to some people, apparently that's not an amazing social good, but a terrifying prospect of power loss. Am I way off base here in perceiving this?

To address the main point: So what if some person never intended to claim that learning to program makes you smarter. Coding is becoming more popular, more socially acceptable, and viewed more positively not only as a career choice but as a basic literacy that will be extremely important in the future (which is true). That's a good thing.
The Asian article was interesting. It is, however, downplayed

I still don't buy the whole white privilege concept as something distinct from being a simple numerical majority. One paper on some exaggerated African sounding names compared to some typical English names does not prove a whole lot. Among other things, There would need to be a control group with some names that sound both (1) white and (2) strange to English speaking ears.

Obviously, there are advantages to being white in this society as Louis CK points out, just as there are advantages to being black, and advantages to being Asian. Yet almost no one talks about black privilege, or Asian privilege. Except possibly Gavin McInnes, and then only ironically, as a comment on white privilege: http://takimag.com/article/tackling_asian_privilege_gavin_mc...
I think the problem in the premise is right on: while each package is created once, there are multiple packages which are all different implementations of the same problem (see Photoshop, Gimp, and all other photo manipulation tools; or really any genre of software, there are lots of similar pieces of software).

My bigger qualm is that I'm not sure it's a bad thing that there are multiple implementations of the same problem. Windows solves the problem of "I need to work with my computer" in a vastly different way from the *nixs; nginx and apache solve almost the exact same problem too, and each has different people using them for different things.

I agree with you that the problem with one solution per problem is that those solutions will become huge behemoths that nobody wants to work with. It's much easier to have small, shared libraries than shared programs, especially when you start tailoring those bigger programs for more and more specific use cases.
Great question. This is a perspective that I had when I first founded my company -- how do I convey to my customers that I'm the best solution for their problem?

What I have discovered is that it doesn't matter. There's room for lots of companies. All things equal, you want to be the best (which is my shorthand for "stand out from each other in a positive way for the customer's context"). But many customers just want to solve their problem, and don't care about solving their problem in the optimal manner.

As hackers, we're obsessed with the idea that the best solution wins. As an entrepreneur, I've discovered that second rate products with first rate sales and marketing will likely outshine a better product that has outreach as a secondary priority.

This used to upset me, because I was focused on the product. As someone trying to run a business, I'm looking at the company as a whole. That means that sales, marketing, product, support, organization, strategy, vision... they're just 1 component of the whole.

It makes the sales side easier if the product is unique or clearly the best.
--

Back to the original point -- companies don't need to stand out from each other when they are the only solution a customer has heard of.

Imagine you are a sandwich shop. When you started, you could just send your marketing by BCCing people through your gmail. Now your list is 2500 people, and you need a way to send to everyone.

You just want to send your email to 2500 people. You don't want to spend a day to compare the relative merits of mailchimp versus constant contact.

Flip the perspective (mailchimp's perspective, looking at the sandwich shop owner). Mailchimp's challenge isn't to differentiate from constant contact, but to simply communicate that they exist and can solve an existing problem.

--

This may be more relevant for b2b versus b2c. I confess I do not understand marketing in b2c much at all.
The Wait Continues for Safe Tap Water in West Virginia
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I'll come right out and say it: learning to program will teach you to think better. It gives you another tool with which to interpret and analyze the world, and if applied well that actually can result in better thought.
It's the same crowd that wants Linux server administration to be obtuse (they want to preserve their power).
Predicting Vehicle Usage with Clojure
No, it's read left to right.

In 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk started a plan[1] to ditch the old form of written Turkish (Ottoman Turkish which was RTL[2]) and implement one based on the latin alphabet in order to fight a huge illiteracy problem at the time.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk#Mode...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet
The oDesk software is great. But I don't like that they force taking screen-shots for you to be paid. For one client (in finance industry) we had to disable screen-shots due to NDA and it caused all sorts of problems.

But, yes, as others have said, it's hard to make a living if you're in a high-cost-of-living country. My rate on there is $100/hr. I get about 1 inquiry a month and maybe a few jobs a year from it. I did have one long-term job on there at $60/hr so I made it to the top %1 of devs though.
I understand what the overall article is trying to present, and I agree that there are differences between each of the labels presented.

I think that understanding each label means more about understanding the person using the label than understanding some absolute definition of each term. My understanding of a self-assessed hacker or coder is going to be far different from my understanding of a person that is labelled by others as a hacker or a coder. I think most of these labels are really interchangeable in most circumstances and it comes down to understanding how each is being applied rather than each having their own definition.
Firebase (YC S11) is hiring core developers in SF.
At Firebase, we're completely reinventing the database. Every database to date has been built using a request / response paradigm, and it has been intended for use only between servers on a local network. Firebase is different. It's built to be accessed directly from client devices, and it uses a real-time synchronization approach that makes building modern applications radically easier. Firebase-powered apps can be written in a fraction of the time, require only client-side code, update in real-time out-of-the-box, and scale automatically.

Over 500,000 devices are connected to Firebase's servers at any given time, and 10s of millions of users use a Firebase-powered app every day.

Our team is serious about computer science as a discipline -- we have folks hailing from Mozilla, Microsoft, Twitter, HP, Adobe, Akamai, Salesforce, and Adroll -- but WE NEED YOU to take Firebase to the next level. We tackle some of the hardest problems in computer science every day: large distributed systems, data merging and conflict resolution, data security, language design, high performance networking, index generation, etc.

If you've previously worked on the internals of databases, spent time optimizing network stacks, or if you feel you're an especially strong algorithms programmer, please drop us an email at jobs@firebase.com.

You can see more about our open positions here: https://www.firebase.com/jobs.html
What? No, it doesn't suggest that at all. The reviewer actually writes that he thinks it's awful and that he would have given it 1 even though he didn't want his comment to be on top.
> A few hundred years later those people united in response to the Viking threat, then were conquered by the French duke of Normandy (which, interestingly, had nobility of Viking descent) and country became known as England and the people there became known as anglosaxon.

Isn't that out of order? England was Ango-Saxon for five hundred years before the Norman invasion.