skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been watching my fiancé use his Pebble for a few months now and I think it's useful. It's basically the convenience in knowing the time, except you also get more information on everything (his face shows time, weather, phone battery, and calendar info) with reliable one-touch actions (touchid on our iPhone 5s's became moot while we had gloves on in Boston a few days ago so there goes any "one touch" actions on a phone in one common case). For a lot of people a watch is pointless or purely a status item in the first place.

Although... it may be that I want one because my phone lives in my purse/bag since girl pants tend to avoid pockets like the plague, whereas men tend to have pants pockets where they can put their phone. It would take one second to look at a pebble vs a few seconds or more to look for my phone and a lot of the time, it's some trivial message that could have waited but there's only so much sound/notification customization I can do. I could be shaving a couple minutes and a bunch of effort and annoyance every single day with a Pebble.

Unfortunately, as you mention, design has never been their strong point. I don't think I can walk around with one and not have it look like a bulky mens watch.
I do completely agree that there is a lot of overhead on the professor, but I tend to believe that any professor that would like this idea would be able to rationalize spending a weekend to be able to explain what she created all semester. I can't imagine a cooler lesson plan than detailing your design decisions as you made them.
I'm not sure you actually meant it as a joke, but that's hilarious in a cynically-detached kind of way. So these machines are not bought but licensed and they will fail as soon as the manufacturer becomes unable to continually grant usage rights, i.e. during a region-wide catastrophe.
Skipping few pages always helps. Sometimes some concepts are hard to chew through. Black Swan in my opinion is a great book!
the role of language in shaping our experience is a HUGE element of the story. i guess i read too much snow crash.
Military veterans are turning to entrepreneurship as career paths
I agree, and if it would use GPS then they could do the blocking only if it leaves the country, so probably the sensor is just a simpler accelerometer.
Functional programming isn't the answer
Postmortem: it went down last night when people should have been going to sleep before their first day back at the job after holidays. It stayed down until the end of that day, with the last couple of days of vacation insanity erased.

Appreciate the gift of perspective that has been given.
Browsing C++ Source on the Web
I have no idea how many of these machines are in a given area, but assuming it is an IMU [1] triggered lockdown, an earthquake could lock down many (10?, 100?, 1,000?) in a single geographic area very, very quickly. That seems like a big problem.

If the lockdown mechanism is GPS, then it should be clear where the actual machine is, so there shouldn't be any need to lock it down unless it's in a black zone.

And what happens if the manufacturer goes belly-up?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit
His source page doesn't list Obama, for whatever reason.

http://www.anesi.com/presname.htm
I remember discovering that referencing things outside of the local scope cost an extra bytecode back when I did battlecode. Also calling a method cost an extra one too, so ideally you'd just copy paste your methods all over the place!

Surprisingly, Battlecode was much more representative of doing a startup than any hackathon thing I've been to, even though you did silly bytecode optimizations.
Presuming it takes a weekend to solve some sort of problem that at least some other people have. Presuming they're not only a couple weeks ahead of their students in the course's material.
Programmers and Painted Nails
You can just connect to a P2Pool node you know. You don't need to set up your own. Check out http://whatisp2pool.com if you still want to learn more.
A rather interesting/insightful comment from the article: http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/high-end-cnc-machines-cant-be-mo...
This is incredibly helpful. Thanks!

> So, this is web development in general, not specifically CS software engineering, or electrical engineering, right?

We really just want to encourage people to get together and build stuff, but the weekly lessons will teach web development.

It'd be great to expand to other areas (especially hardware) in the future.

> Make sure that students are actually doing stuff for everything after the fundamentals lecture: write a static homepage, write a pong game, write a simple message board, etc.

I totally agree, but how can we do that? My best guess is to have 30-45 mins of lectures then encourage them to spend the next 1.5 hours using the lecture material to work on creating a personal website.
Excellent read! I always enjoy seeing these and am so appreciative that you put them out there. Was 2013 not the year where AR went crazy and called a bunch of people in the middle of the night? I remember reading about that and being impressed with how you handled that situation, but if that wasn't in 2013.... then, sigh, time flies.

Also, I'm almost positive "asterix" (vs asterisk) is used tongue-in-cheekly, right? Just making sure...
Two-factor Verification Using Missed Calls
This is completely beside the point of the article, but I work for a company that makes fairly large precision equipment. A potential service nightmare is when the customer moves the equipment and screws it up. A lot of this equipment is designed to only be installed by the supplier, due to the amount of documentation and training that would be needed for customer installation. And something like a big CNC may have some fairly detailed site and installation requirements.

Maybe the GPS is so it can receive targeted ads. "Customers who machined this part also ordered..." ;-)
I have a Pebble, and I love it. One of the best purchases I have made for the value it adds. I wish that Pebble would come out with a watch design that is more feminine. My wife really wants one, but she thinks the current pebbles are too masculine.
Unless a book shows an actual lack of skill or intelligence behind it, I will persist and finish it, because many of my favorite books are books I didn't realize were as amazing as they are until I got quite a distance into them.
OP wanted suggestions for how to teach it--was just relaying what I thought would be useful.

A simple "How to set up your own website" would be a good opener, and you could get Blue Host (over in Provo) to probably sponsor hosting.
That's a good point, though I am not sure how effective these sort of measures would be against an adversary technologically capable enough to be designing precision nuclear weapons (or against an adversary with enough money to acquire the necessary material).
> but ARM doesn't have this "complete computer on a board" at that size (AFAIK).

Knowing the industry terminology helps: https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=arm+system+on+module
Having also read Snow Crash, I think you're extrapolating a little too far. The composition of words shapes experience, not small syntax choices.

Plus, I don't know that it's a huge element of a story (I can't tell if "of the story" means your story specifically or all stories). The culture shapes language, and the culture shapes the story. The language's influence on the story isn't anywhere near the culture's.
Great I cant wait for this to catch on, Check your tech privilege.
If anyone wants to go digging through the Nintendo GX API, the link is below.

[1]: http://morukutsuland.free.fr/data/GX.pdf
I know 'within one month' is the next exciting milestone, but I can't wait for days with multi-launch schedules. I assume the launches will be from a large number of companies - which makes it even more exciting.
Actually, my understanding is that the tolerances, at least for implosion-type weapons, are extreme and required scientific advances to achieve during the Manhattan Project, not to mention the fact that Uranium and Plutonium are much, much denser than any material that would be encountered at a typical shop.
Four Information Security Stories of 2013 You May Have Missed
Cards on table...

My main knowledge of , er, building nukes (hello GCHQ) comes from the widely accepted to be well researched book by Tom Clancy, The Sum of All Fears. Apparently it is a very good account of how to make a nuke, but with some very crucial details missed out of changed. And, yeah, very fair enough.

What I got from reading that book only once was that, even for a nuke bomb made from the remnants of an old nuke missile ("hacked, if you will") was that a fair amount of very, very high precision machining was necessary. In the plot, it was a massive big deal to get the right machine tools (Swiss, IIRC), and that alone was a massive task. Not just getting the tools, but getting one person with the skills necessary to do that machining.

Now, could well be the case the the precision needed to make a nuke is much higher than the machines mentioned in the article, don't know. Also could be that in that book plot, they needed very high precision to maximise the yield from old material, and of course perhaps a relatively small amount of material. So, its quite possible my point is redundant.

Another thought. Might be that the machine tools in the book were manual, not CNC. Might be that you needed high precision tools and a highly skilled machinist. So two things to required to make the bomb. Might be that now you dont need the skills because high spec CNC enabled less skilled people to do the work. So, that might be even more reason to keep tabs on the machines.

And thats all I know(, or think I know). Im merely suggesting that this might be a good reason to bolt down high precision CNC machines tools.
I might have retold that story in 2013, but off the top of my head I think it was back in November 2011 or so.

The great thing about being a good writer is people assume your spelling mistakes aren't! Maybe I'll eventually level up to Shakespeare Tier, where words come into being just because I liked the sound of them.
No, I'm saying that it's used as a blowoff answer for something that sounds important because it's outside of what one in said job would normally do, but when asked about it (to see how generalist the person is) they wave it off as something for another person to handle.
I missed the original posting of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015438 and it's right up my alley (now it's tomorrow morning's reading :) )
No, the first functioning nuclear explosives were built in 1945, before the transistor even existed.
See my other reply--you can probably get Bluehost (Provo lol) to sponsor some server time or little VPSes for people to play with.

I think the idea of lecture + lab is exactly the right way to play this.
I think can definitely be done if it's taught quickly. Much of that can be condensed into 10 minutes then taught again when people are starting to get the hang of things.
What Does 2014 Hold For The IoT & Information Security?
I try to do the opposite. I ignore the books I have when selecting the next book to read, and try to determine what's most important. Then, if I already have it, I'll read it, and if not, I'll get it.

It takes a relatively long time to read a book, so it's worth it to me to get the one I want to read most, and pay for it if I have to.
Ah yes, that was another point in the book. Its took them ages to very slowly and precisely machine the material to a very high tolerance. IIRC, the tools didn't last long at all.
Right, suggestions on how to teach it, when most of the audience doesn't have a technical background...

As for "How to setup your own website", I think that shouldn't be the first thing, but close to the first thing. I think making simple HTML pages (and maybe a tiny bit of CSS) would be better first.

Also, I don't know if Binghamton has hosting for students, but some colleges do. It might be worth asking, even if it's not generally available, you have a sizable number of students, and you're doing something the University might like and think looks nice publicly.
I've never been chatted up by a pretty girl whilst browsing the electronic shelves at Amazon.
IThe real world is shades of gray, not black and white. There is no 'good' only 'less bad'. This is definitely less bad. They now know their foundries, can put a face to their supply line lower levels, and can ask questions. No Nobel prize, just one step that others should follow. And they did not pull out of impoverished regions, they made sure the foundries they work with are responsibly resourcing raw materials.
Reflecting on the Absence of Privilege
I didn't say that I stop if I find a book difficult. I stop if I decide that I don't like the book. But you're right, some times skipping some pages can get you going again with a dry spot in a novel.

(And I wasn't commenting on Black Swan, just on the concept of not finishing a book. I'm unfamiliar with Black Swan.)
I am sure pg is going to write an essay on this :-)
NY Tech Scene Hot
Of hundreds of comments I have made on this site, only one has been snarky. Here's my second: chill your tits.
it reads more human and familiar, like a friendly IM conversation when you don't capitalise.

ya gotta use lines breaks smartly and break your sentences well though or it can be confusing.
I'd love to teach Git and Github but I think that'll a bit complicated for the non-CS majors.

And I like the web hosting idea. Who are the non-evil web hosts and registrar's nowadays?

Do you think we should just go with one and encourage them to FTP everything?
Find reliable way to obtain the litigation works in the parts of Ahmedabad
That's cool, I don't begrudge you for the sentiment.
What specifically is your moral objection?
First xkcd comic explained - "i wonder where i'll float next"
Not really. There is a lot of logic failure in this comment.

What does the fact they don't install them on US machines have to do with them not using it as a business opportunity? This is a non-sequitur.

Since this guy hasn't heard of them being used to enforce finance deals means absolutely nothing, how could anyone cancel out a point because of that?

And his third point skips out on the fact that adding this functionality to the machine can cause extra problems.
I, School Shooter
Interesting that your perspective is locked into one side of the globe. ;) HN was down during the day my time, when we had already slept before returning to work. :)

Appreciate the gift a new perspective gives you.
First I would ditch any notion of teaching back end programming and focus on front-end only [0]. The things you can do with, and are required to learn and master to be good with, HTML/CSS/Javascript are so extensive and deep that alone could be overwhelming to people new to web development. So, first and foremost just focus the course on frontend technologies (and feel free to use things like Coffeescript or Clojurescript instead of Javascript, they probably make better teaching languages than the wtf-laden JS).

Also, if 2/3 are non-CS majors, you're going to need to teach basic problem-solving and analytical thinking skills. Teach and reinforce the basic problem solving process of taking a complex problem (or programming objective) and breaking down into its component parts, solving each, finding multiple solutions if possible, then building it back into a whole again. Set expectations of multiple possible answers, of hacking at the problem till you start grokking it, etc. It's not about getting that one right answer, it's about getting something that works then continually improving it. Learning programming carries a lot of frustration which can be very off-putting and demoralizing, so ingraining the expectations, problem-solving skills, and habits needed to overcome that is crucial (and also a super general life skill).

Look into using platforms designed for teaching like Processing [1] and its JS version Processing.js [2]. Also see if you can find teaching-oriented stuff around D3.js and/or Canvas. Programming visualizations is one of the more fun and rewarding pure front-end web activities students can do, plus makes for nice portfolio sites, and there's a legit job market for it.

Finally, consider adopting Salman Kahn's approach of the "inverted classroom" - have the students watch video lectures or read the texts for homework, and spend every second of classtime programming with teacher/expert supervision and guidance. The old days of sitting in a classroom being lectured at and then having to go home and do the actual practice on your own without immediate feedback are a total anachronism now, imho.

[0]: Though I might make an exception for Scheme per the essay "A Scheme Story" linked at the end of PG's essay "Beating the Averages" (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html).

[1]: http://processing.org/

[2]: http://processingjs.org/

[3]: http://d3js.org

[4]: http://updates.html5rocks.com/tag/canvas
Tesla and Adobe: Why Continuous Deployment May Mean Continuous Disappointment
Really clever promo add for FitMob! Hard sell something known to be successful, then criticize it just a bit and substitute something "better" at the end.

About FitMob, I might signup after I find out what's in my area but not _to_ find out what's in my area. But then you know there probably isn't anything in my area. Yet. :-)
I'm not an expert in internet architecture, but shouldn't a site this important be running on redundant servers? The irony of a tech site going down due to technical issue is making me grin, however. Glad to see it back :)
It'd be ... nice? useful? different? ... if I could get the video to play.

Edit: Well, waddya know, it's downloadable. And in Ogg format ("Ogg data, Skeleton v4.0" per file(1)). So, no, doesn't work in my browser for whatever reason, but I can download and play it locally, which works better for me anyway.

Of the changes, the depagination is probably one of the more useful to me. I've actually written my own CSS to drastically reformat how NY Times pages render (a few screenshots here, among others: http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tm4ox/user_site_res...)

The side-to-side viewing stuff I've found really annoying on other sites, especially if it's tied in to arrow-key navigation or other stuff. I tend to find myself sliding off the page I want to be on.
By the logic of this blog post, a page like status.heroku.com should return a 503 when heroku is experiencing downtime and a 200 otherwise.

200 means that the page loaded as intended (which it did).It turns out that some of the page's content (the interesting stuff) was unable to be loaded, and the site's content reflected that.

A 503 would be appropriate if there was a server problem, which might have actually been the case, but with Cloudflare's landing page there was not actually a server problem (since cloudflare served the substitute content properly w/o error)
It's CloudFlare, not CloudFront.
Well, I know it took me ages to get my half decent hobby lathe (Myford) perfectly setup for my own hobby use, which is possibly the least accurate form of machining out there. (No, Im not making bombs, I'm making parts for silly, RC usually, models!!!) So, I can well see high end CNC machines having to be very precisely set up, and I can also see that being a fairly long, PITA job. Frankly, if we are talking maintenance on CNC machines worth $100k, or whatever, I'd want some lock down and historic data. Does make sense.

So, I think where contracts are in place, they have every right to lock the machine down. Which is probably part of any contract. But, putting aside what I was saying about nukes, I can't see why, if there is no contract, an owner has to have his machine bricked if (s)he wants to move it. Again, unless these machines are specifically restricted by law or international treaty type things.
"Write the shortest regex that only matches programs that successfully generate the shortest regex given lists of inclusions and exclusions."
USB powered DNA sequencer now (selectively) available
This is a dupe. It's already on the front page of HN as:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015440
Slum children of India go to school for the first time 
See how enthusiastic they are about going to school for the first time and how happy their parents are !!!
Maybe. But even over IM and text messages I use proper punctuation and capitalization. I know I'm weird, but my thought process is this is supposed to be a novel -> novels are a form of formal writing -> formal writing should use proper capitalization (and punctuation, but this uses proper punctuation).
Lost Ask HN: Where to begin when learning hardware hacking?
Levitate things with sound
What's wrong with leaking un-exported element? Your code wants it to be exported. If you care about it, please return an interface type.
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but: I would love to subscribe to NYT digital editions, but why must the digital edition cost almost as much as the paper edition? Imagine the waste involved (in energy and materials)! Current home delivery rates are $8.75 for paper, and $5.00 for internet. That is simply too much. Bring it down to $1/week and we'll talk.
These industries will be disrupted in 2014
CES 2014: Intel CEO Unveils Big Wearable Technology Push
See if you could get your university to give you some web space and FTP access. It'd be the cheapest route.
I've reposted a link to the original here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015767

I really don't want credit, I just want the original question and the couple of responses to have the opportunity to see the day of light, despite the HN outage. So please vote up the original post!!!
Really? I thought the vendors just can't sell to Iran, not that they have to build in lockouts that enforce compliance by their customers.
I was a watchmaker before I started hacking on code and realized it had a better future. Yes, one of those guys with a loupe and tweezers, and even an itty bitty lathe assembling small parts in the back corner of some old shop.

Watches greater than $20 is (hopefully) every single fucking watch in existence. You're deluding yourself if you think that manufacturing costs of these things will become so low you could buy one instead of lunch, and have it work at least until dinner the same day. If you want a quality, but commoditized watch at a bargain price, you'll be looking at $150 to $250, which will last you for 4 or 5 years, and can be serviced when needed. (Isn't this place the same place that bemoans Apple every time a new iPad or MacBook Air comes out on how unserviceable they are?)

Watches over $300 are arguably jewelry (and I'm being very generous here). Watches over $1,000 are starting to become timepieces, and people still pay good money for high quality watches that can last generations. The watch on my wrist right now is has been running constantly for over 10 years old, and has been serviced once (basically an oil change). What other mechanical device have you ever owned that has run constantly for ~5 years and not needed service? Your car can barely go 50 hours of continuous use at 65MPH before it's recommended to change the oil.

And round face? Really? Years (centuries, actually) of watchmaking have given us a round face because watches have always been manufactured on a lathe, which has a habit of producing round objects. Round faces are not "clearly more attractive". In fact, marketing of high end watches suggest that a half convex rectangle (width sides are straight, length sides are convex) is the most attractive watch shape, which is precisely what the Pebble is.

Sorry for the rant, but seriously, $20 is the worst number you could have pulled out of your ass, along with the round shape statement. Listen, I own, and probably dislike the Pebble (as a watch) just as much as anyone else that dislikes it, but your comment here is just completely uneducated and lacks any facts whatsoever.
If I were to sit down and listen to all the books I have not yet listened to on Audible 8 hours a day it would almost be Valentine's day. I hear you.