skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Canadian government has been closing libararies and destroying books all over Canada this past year. Relevant article: <http://bit.ly/1a04oY5>
First - this is a brilliant gift to the startup community - thank you. I am interested to know more about the marketing strategy of the company. It looks like you had some very successful campaigns with CyberMonday and Daring Fireball but spent very little? http://pollenizer.com/everpix-have-open-sourced-their-startu...
If you were aware of Bret's previous work, then you would know that he's got nothing against code.org specifically. He's addressing the culture. He's been talking about Mindstorms and programming literacy since before code.org existed. He totally agrees that people should learn programming, and he has no problem with the word "code." He simply disagrees with the motivation—he thinks (and I agree) that people should learn to program because it helps people think, and helps people learn. Not because programming is profitable.

Also, you completely misunderstood the bit about will.i.am. It was a compliment, not an insult. He was saying that will.i.am has a better opinion on programming, as a musician, than all of these other people who should know better (public policy makers and programmers).
Why I bet on CoinDesk — the voice of digital currency
Sadly, I've heard that many non-tech-savvy people in the US believe Apple makes all the apps in the AppStore. "Oh you make iPhone apps? How do you like working at Apple?!!"
Having someone re-write my 7 line Haskell program into 40+ lines of C# is the best argument I can think of for why it's worth learning a functional programming language ;)
Oh, code poetry. 'Ni code, ni poetry' &c.
The frustration and resentment articulated through the comments here towards Bret Victor's post seems to stem from one of two sources:

(a) Bret Victor claiming that code.org is implicitly, via quotes from high-profile figures, supporting a misguided view of computer science education that is overly simplistic and suboptimal towards providing the deeper, more nuanced value that programming can teach.

(b) Bret Victor himself being simplistic and uncharitable in mocking the quotes by these high-profile figures.

I think Bret is correct to point out (a), but the method that he chose to do so lended itself to an acrimonious response by many people who have good intentions, leading to responses towards (b). I myself was initially annoyed by the tone of his post. But after some thought and reflection, I found myself agreeing with the sentiment expressed by this post.

I do think that there is a lot more nuance that could have been communicated when it comes to the value of learning programming. The real debate here, I think, is whether it's reasonable to expect a high-profile figure to comment with such sophistication and nuance, especially within the constraints of a short blurb (which is what I would presume is what their PR person and code.org agreed upon).

Is it justified to expect such a degree of nuance from high-status figures and organizations, given the context that computer science education is currently in?
This is very common.

In Israel, a lot of people immigrated here from e.g. Iraq, and they don't know their birthday. I guess in some cultures birthdays just weren't remembered (at least in the past, maybe that's changing?).
I'm always astonished by the backlash these topics gets in this community. Are we all really so scared by the idea of trying to make coding more accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds? Is there some irreparable harm being done to the community and the profession? Even if you think this is another dotcom craze, which I would debate, it looks like we all survived that quite well if we've come back full circle.

I would ask you, how many of you have actually tried to teach kids how to code? How many of you have the experience to back up your assertion that it's simply "too hard" and only a select few should have the privilege? I would imagine a handful and I would be surprised to hear anyone who has had that experience tell me it's been a negative one (if it was I would sincerely love to hear it and find out what issues you had).

For the past six months I've been teaching kids, at the high school level, with little to no background in programming and all of whom Engilsh isn't even their first language (it's an internationally diverse school), web development skills (js/html/css). What I've found, which is pretty much what I expected, was a varying degree of proficiency, some kids have gotten it really quickly and some have needed a lot more help. But overall I've been amazed at their progress and am totally convinced that this is something that needs to happen in more schools at a wider scale.

There are real problems in trying to tackle this problem. I've met actual teachers that have been involved in trying to teach CS curriculum and there is definitely a lack of professional training among them. What they could really use is the tech communities help and support, not their derision and dismissal, it's so easy to view this from a cynical perspective instead of trying to actually get something done. If any of you are actually interested in trying to teach and see for yourselves whether this is worthwhile and you live in the NYC area take a look at ScriptEd (http://scripted.org/). Their focus is specifically in promoting CS in socioeconomic under-represented groups. This is where I volunteer but I know there are a few other organizations you can volunteer at as well, their names escape me at the moment but you can attend the CS NYC meetup to learn more (http://www.meetup.com/CSNYC-Education-Meetup/). If you don't live in the the NYC area not sure of what other resources are out there but I'm sure at least SF has similar initiatives, and probably a few other large metropolitan areas.
This could be better phrased. How about "don't require people to leave one-star reviews if they want to appear in the comments".
Does this mean we are ~100 months away from 1:1 performance?
Global warming is about Science, not opinions
No it is not clever. Is is beyond idiotic since the system tries to determine the culture I'm interested in for me - without allowing me to easily change that.
|> would be the flip of $ since the arg comes before the function
Does this mean we are ~216 months away from having 1:1 performance?
Okay then.. I didn't wanna post links, because I've been hellbanned here before, and am paranoid about identifying myself for that reason, but just for you I'm making an exception, may it inspire you greatly :)

http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/ is where all the content lives, at http://johann-lau.de/ you should see a photo slideshow which comes from http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/photos/ and be able to toggle a music player that is fed from http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/music/ (the music is my shame, I can't even master myself out of wet paper bag haha, using free beats by people who know what they are doing is one of my resolutions this year), the music player is also shown at http://aww.johann-lau.de/ if you scroll up, hover over the bird and then the musical note. http://ilikehopefulstreetart.johann-lau.de/ only shows a subset of the photos (all photos that have the the tag "ilikehopefulstreetart" in a hidden taxonomy), and there is also http://favouritequotes.johann-lau.de/ which is very simple (click to display a new quote, they all come from http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/favourite/quotes/ ). I'm yet to combine random quotes with random photos. Oh, There is also http://a.sandboxx.org/johann/meta/ which are mini-mashups if you will, that reference : my code is not very D.R.Y., but the resulting website kinda is ^^
And would carry a lot fewer disturbing implications about mistreatment of simulated former neurological patients.
But "coder" is a good signal that they don't know what they're talking about, the term is only used by journalists and politicians.
"Think better" is a pretty nebulous term but I'm not sure you can learn any new field - especially not one concerning a new manner of problem solving - and not have learnt to "think better".
I don't think there's a country like that. Users are lazy and I think 5/5 is "it works well according to me" everywhere and next rating is 1/5 for "it doesn't work/it sucks" for most. Even I do this at times. Most of my ratings are 5 and 1.
In Sweden this has caused issues with uniqueness of the social security number for immigrants.
here's said talk http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes...

ps: I'll add that doing physical activity gives good posture for "free". I'll suggest anybody to gradually go up to sets of 10 {pushups, crunches, squat} and a bit of stretching hip and back, and shoulder. It won't take long, 10 crunches ~= 30 seconds, will make you warm, relaxed and stand straight.
So, like FreedomSponsors:

http://freedomsponsors.org/

http://freedomsponsors.org/faq

http://freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/78/add-other-samplers-...
Hah, here I was thinking the title referred to account sign-up pages, where Afghanistan would be the default country and January 1st the default date. Programmer's first reaction, haha...
Sites you should join to improve your blog
To be fair, C++ doesn't have dynamic statically sized arrays yet either although you can get close with constexpr (but still done at compile time) yet.

Dynarray was slated for C++14 but has been pushed since it really isn't that useful and most people can get away with using vector.
> First, you really don't want to do that division x/y, which is slow, and which fails if y==0. It's much cheaper and safer to compare "abs(x-y) < 1e-10*y".

I might be missing something, but won't your cheaper and safer fragment also fail when y is zero (or negative)?
But if it is an open source compiler - then there are ways to counter the attack: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...
Securing CentOS and Solaris 11 with Puppet
At first glance, it seems very similar to chess.
1-star comments really go to the top...
To be completely fair, HSBC didn't launder anything - they were used to launder money, and were fined for not detecting it. I do wonder if the average HNer hasn't really thought this through. It's no different from the govt fining Google because they didn't flag up people discussing drugs in their GMail.
How GTA 5 makes driving fun
The Goths (actually two separate peoples, the Ostrogoths and later the Visigoths) , as with the Huns moved into central and southern Europe from the Steppe - not Germany - towards the end of the Roman Empire (the Visigoths sacked Rome on 24 August 410). They weren't Germanic, unlike the Angles, Saxons and Jutes that moved to / invaded the land of the Britons, and even tribes like the Francs who moved into Gaul as the Western Roman Empire lost influence.

I think you're right about the use of Viking being early, but some of the other elements differ from my understanding.

Two awesome sidebars from that period - another Germanic tribe, the Vandals, wrought havoc moving through what would become France and Spain. And a tribe of Scots were forced from their ancestral home ... in modern day Ireland. They replaced the earlier Picts in the land ultimately named after them.

[Edit: Corrected the Sacking of Rome date - I was out by 2 weeks. So worth clarifying that this is from my memory of university history courses, not a fact-checked review.]
I don't really agree with the arbitrary world defined in this article, it seems overly simplified and makes a lot of assumptions. I understand this might be just for beginners or people who want to get a simple view of the world but it's totally not how it works.

The "real world" is actually much simpler. A "coder" is somebody who "codes", a "programmer" is somebody who writes "programs" (is this different from coder? Maybe the way we perceive the word is, but deep down it really isn't). A "hacker" is somebody who "hacks", which can mostly mean who engages in playful cleverness[0], it needn't be software or hardware, low or high level. A "developer" is somebody who "develops" software (this might be a step up from a programmer because a developer is usually the creator/architect of that software too, not just a code monkey). A Computer Scientist is somebody who studies Computer Science, which is a branch of math, usually (but not necessarily) with a degree.

Feel free to criticize me, this is my view of this world as opposed to the author's view of his own world which I don't agree with.

[0] http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

ps: shall we add also sysadmins, IT techs, Software Engineers and Computer Engineers in the mix?
This post is a little like programming pop science: an entertaining read, but greatly overstates some small result. The only Turkish-specific problem he mentions is case folding of ı/i. This is a problem unique to Turkish, there are other problems in case folding, like eszett (ß/ss) in German but these are much less likely to trip you up.

The US date format (m/d/y) is used virtually only in US, most other places use d/m/y or y/m/d.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Map

Re dots for thousands separators -- the world is split about roughly evenly on this, with all of europe (except for Great Britain and Ireland) using commas for decimals dots for thousands separators. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Hindu.E2.80.93Arab...
Here in the UK we have an NHS number, which curiously is not the same as your NI number (equiv to an SSN). Unlike the SSN in the US, the NHS number isn't used for anything else, and the NI number is only used for tax.
It has a very... steampunk aesthetic to it.
I did not. I'd be interested to know what the wholesale prices are for 32GB LRDIMM's. My instinct is that there wouldn't be much of a discount until you are buying entire production runs, but this isn't an area I know about.
Lower is better?
Going a little tangential.

> 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 entirely agree; it's something I've been trying to point out for a few years now.

Something people don't recognize about, say, feminist theory on agency and objectification is that it's a subject that applies everywhere. In this case, it's the objectification of people in general as tools for businesses and governments, rather than as individuals with their own particular needs and desires with intrinsic worth. We're uninterested in discussing what a student wants to learn and instead prefer discussing a paternalistic notion of what a student ought to be required to learn.

For some reason, we've lost the vocabulary for discussing things outside of an economic context. It's probably because bringing up questions of morality is scary: between the polarizing force of political religion and the lack of education in forming one's own moral and ethical system, moral claims find little traction unless they're merely repeating something with wide support.
Nice. This quick and dirty trick has been in my .bashrc forever and I still use it:

function md(){
pwd > /tmp/md_tmp

function gomd(){
cd `cat /tmp/md_tmp`

so `md` marks the current directory and `gomd`go to the marked directory. Unlike bash builtins like pushd and popd, it uses the file system to store the marked directory so you can pop up a new terminal and just do gomd. (you can't with pushd/popd since the bash processes of the old and the new terminal are not related)

Edit: I see that your script uses links, I'll check this out.
The pretty printers let you print the entire vector, but do they let you access individual elements within the (potentially very large) vector? That's what this blog post is complaining about not being able to do.
That article you cite is just citing this article...
Ethically? I bet they will kill them thousands of times during development.

Suppose you, at one stage, have a simulation of a brain that isn't quite there; it talks and sees, but it's audio system doesn't work right. What do you do?

Even live debugging to repair it can be controversial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_...)
It turns out this has been uncovered along with a huge list of other horrifying practices on Okinawa by the USA in Sheldon Harris' book Factories of Death (http://www.scribd.com/doc/91284707/Factories-of-Death).

It was part of the more wide-ranging chemical and biological weapons program, Project 112 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_112).

There's a huge community of veterans who have served at Okinawa who research this stuff online and on the island in order to help process compensation claims and lawsuits against the US government (e.g. http://vets.yuku.com/forums/74/Agent-Orange-Heart-Disease-Pr...).

So this isn't new, but it is absolutely disgusting.
It's a so small country that family and friend ties in government and administration are hard to avoid, for one thing.

The examples of corruption I'm thinking of are all related to the financial crash and Icesave scandal in Iceland.
there was the example of small steel mills producing sub par product on the cheap and they slowly moved upmarket destroying the incumbents. So the idea for straight disruption if for you to find an area in the market that is not served by incumbents and use that as a stepping stone to move into the bigger playing field.
Ask HN: How to deal with overserved, underserved, non-consuming user?
What is an example of overserved, underserved, non-consuming user and what are the disruption strategy for each type of user?

What is the strategy for each cases?

From what I understand (still not clear enough for me):

- overserved customer: lower price, provide only the
core features needed to get a "good enough" job done. (ex. user not willing to pay higher for new features, doesn't care about more features, complains about complexity)

- underserved customer: higher price, provide
more features needed than the status quo (ex. user willing to pay more for new feature, current solutions do not satisfy their needs)

- non-consuming customer: affordable price, provide enough features to get the job done. (ex. not aware of new product, product disrupts their old way of doing things)

is this correct or am I missing something here?
Because you are also completely defenceless. If a predator stumbles across you'll probably already be in pieces by the time you're aware what's happening. Ideally you would want to stay quiet and motionless but also awake and alert.
Yes, GDB can feel a little crappy at times. But on the other hand it is quite versatile in that it can debug programs written in several different languages running on several different hw architectures, user space or kernel space, code running on bare metal or in QEMU, etc and remote debugged over a serial line or network. All this comes at a price.

GDB can never be as nice as a language specific, graphical point and click debuggers that some programming environments have which are built in conjunction with the compiler/interpreter for that language.

And the problem is not only GDB, it's the whole infrastructure that is involved, binary formats, debug symbols and protocols, binutils, etc. It is easy to point the finger at GDB but there's only so much that GDB can do in the environment(s) that it works in.

There's plenty of room for improvement but it's not only GDB that would require work, it's the entire software ecosystem.
I ask because English isn't my first language. Is a scientist really considered someone who studies a field? You might have a degree, but does that make you a scientist?
I always thought a scientist usually is at least at PhD level.
My exact reaction too! :-)
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>> "I rather like to sleep"

Personally I agree. I'd also find it interesting to see how removing sleep from our lives would effect things like depression or even how it would just effect people having a bad day. For example if I'm having a terrible day I can't wait to get into bed, fall asleep and end it. The separation sleep provides between one day and another gives the feeling that tomorrow is a fresh start and the problems of today might be less. I'd guess I would be miserable for longer without sleep.
A couple of anecdata here:

- I wrote a (nearly) pure functional Katamari-type 3D game (OpenGL + ODE for physics). You can find the source here[1]. I didn't find the functional style to be a problem at all.

- At about the same time I was involved in a large closed-source project that simulated the criminal justice system of a well-known European country. Criminals, police, judges, prisons, etc. and their interactions with each other. It was written in OCaml in a pure functional style. Again, no problems writing it functionally.

[1] https://github.com/blue-prawn/OCamlODE/blob/master/examples/...
So you say that you asked a bunch of questions to a couple kids and concluded that the whole population of Turkey are idiots? Let me tell you, your cousin's reactions are quite expected, but I doubt yours are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
I'm not sure how anyone could question Gates, Zuckerberg, or Sandberg on their sincere and informed interest in young people studying computer science. The criticism on that page is so infantile, I can't even think of a proper response.
Here's a non-paywalled article:

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140111/us-biolog...

The US army conducted field experiments of biological weapons,
which could harm rice cropping, in the Japanese island of
Okinawa in the early 1960s, a press report said Sunday.

The same experiments were also conducted on the US mainland
and in Taiwan, Kyodo news agency reported, citing US military
documents it said it had obtained.

[...]

The obtained documents mention test sites including Nago
and Shuri, both in Okinawa, but it is not known whether the
experiments were conducted within the premises of US bases
there, Kyodo said.

In the field tests, the army "used a midget duster to
release inoculum alongside fields in Okinawa and Taiwan,"
measuring dosages at different distances and the effect on
crop production, the documents said.
> Density is GOOD — it leads to cross-pollination of ideas and the advancement of the world.

How much density is needed to make progress? At which point too much density becomes a danger and what kind of danger?

I guess that there might be already some answers to these question. And in my opinion it IS important that we start talking about this. Because the only discussion that I hear until now is that many countries have not enough children (e.g. Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy - just to name few that I have seen in print media in Europe) which is seen as a danger. But talking about socially and psychologically positive solutions how to better distribute population density - nobody is speaking about this. I guess that one of the reasons is because we still think in national boundaries. But this is not the only one. I think the deeper reasons might be more on an instinctive level? I do not know, but I find it good that we start talking about un-growth of population instead just having a taboo.