skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the University of Edinburgh, they teach first year undergraduates Haskell and Java (Haskell in semester one and Java in semester two).
Dijkstra assumes that students will already have been exposed to imperative languages before joining university, and will appreciate the change. I think that this assumption might leave behind students that have not yet been exposed to any programming (that stuck).

Over in the UK I certainly hadn't encountered anything more complicated than html before I hit university, and was very happy with sticking with Java for the entirety of first year. I had been exposed to C++, ADA(!), Prolog and had an in depth look at Erlang by the time my course finished...
So your theory is that Bezos spent $250 million of his own money to buy the Washington Post so that he could get more coverage of Amazon in one newspaper?
If you want to become more careful then you have to:

1. Age: the older you get, the more errors you have made in the past, the more careful you are.

2. Meanwhile... make yourself a procedure with bullets (or a decision tree) for critical things and stick to it . Sticking to it is fundamental. Something like "1. Make a backup of the original work. 2. Check the origin of the problem. 2. Check the solution done. 3..."
I think that it depends on what exactly are you tough about. You can have teacher that is strict and tough and happen to insist on less important things.

Made up example would be math teacher assigning two hours a day of exercises and worksheets on simple equations, while other teachers already moved on and successfully teach "difficult" equations.

Made up over the top example would be teacher that checks your notebook every other day whether it is nice, organized and colored. He would assign three hours of work of cutting and pasting and coloring and what not every day and make you rework historical diorama five times.

However, that teacher could still miss that you have no idea what happened during historical period he is teaching and do not remember single name or date.
No, that's not at all like that. First off, they are proposing them to actually be standards, not just proprietary extensions that no one else can use, like Microsoft was doing.

Second, WebM is actually open source, not proprietary.
I agree with the point, but the argument -- that by arbitrarily ignoring features you come up with a simple core language -- can be applied to Haskell (and pretty much any other language) as well.

If you exclude typeclasses, extensions, and IO from Haskell, you get a very simple language. (I personally find the error messages easy to understand when avoiding those)

Related: how GHC compiles Haskell code, including the "Core" language and lots of desugaring.
Seems a little premature to call Jelly "successful"...
Ask HN: Translating copy targeted to software developers to other languages
We have hundreds of pages with marketing and technical copy that are targeted to software developers.

We are looking to translate these pages to various languages (starting with Japanese, Russian and other languages).

Would you have any recommendation for sites who allow to hire translators with expertise such as copy geared toward the software development industry? We are NOT looking for a platform that break down the text into smaller string and send them to different translators, we've tried this in the past and the translations were horrible. We're looking to find an individual or 2 who will be able to work on this as an ongoing project.

I know of One Hour Translation, Proz.com but would love to hear if anyone on Hacker News had any experience with these sites or have recommendations to other I have omitted.

Additionally if anyone here is a professional translator and is fluent in English and one of these languages [Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic) - feel free to reach out to me (my email is in my profile).

Thanks
Adam
They clearly think they've already done this by the "creation" of a new title (non-title?) within the company called lead-links. They've also identified that the ability for managers to tell employees what to do is one of those understandable characteristic.

I don't agree, just stating what they think they've figured out. I'm suggesting a manager (sorry lead-link) who can assign and remove people but not be involved in what they're actually doing to be highly problematic (I'm probably oversimplifying)

While developers may prefer to have their nose buried in code, there needs to be someone else who is coordinating the team and making sure the pieces are fitting together.

Anyway you phrase it, it always comes out looking like a manager.

You might say "why not require the developers to manage themselves" To that I'd say not everyone wants to manage themselves or others, and some folks don't want to be buried in work but would rather coordinate and lead a team.

Let the managers manage! If they suck, fire them. Don't feel the need to re-invent business just because your managers aren't doing their job.
Metaio to integrate 3D Augmented Reality into Intel RealSense Computing SDK
Isn't SPDY encrypted by default? Why would you assume it should outperform the unencrypted HTTP? Is it because Google made that claim, or why?

Either way, security at the application level on the Internet seems quite broken. We need easy to implement strong security at the Transport and IP levels. Google (or IETF, rather) should be experimenting with a CurveCP-like protocols to encrypt all the packets on the Internet to replace TCP. That's what I'd really like to see.
The first programming language we learned at university was ML. It was a very simple language for teaching functional programming, it has a minimal syntax that makes some sort of sense and it was likely that everyone was starting off at the same point with it.

Like Dijkstra said, getting these high-level concepts in there early is very important.
I'm a fan of print newspaper layouts so the closer the digital product can be to that, the better.

This layout (as opposed to a list format)makes browsing and discovering articles outside of my normal focus areas much easier as the headlines don't all blend together.

I'm not sure what the best layout would be, but for a newspaper, the NYTimes current style is better than a Hackernews style list.
That's a problem regardless of the specific language taught first and I say that having personally witnessed the struggles of students who learned in pseudocode (my first semester), Java, Python, and Scheme. Programming requires you to structure your thinking a particular way. It's natural for some people, it's unnatural for others. I tutored a couple dozen people of varying aptitudes through the courses as an undergrad and was suprised at how little a difference Java vs Python made.

I do think that there are better ways and worse ways to teach programming. Brett Victor put out an overview [1] of the topic last year and while that essay in itself isn't the answer, it's at least a better start than anything I ran into as an undergrad.

[1] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
It's possible that they simply have much lower rates of infant mortality. The linked discussion is from pay-walled researchers, so hard to see where they discuss their methodology.

Low incidence of alcohol use, strong communities with a tradition of midwifery, narrow genetic pool (which would tend to exaggerate any gene pool effects) are all things that could contribute to lower rates of infant mortality.
Or you can say: "Don't worry about this now, we will explain it later" :-)
What's the consensus here? http://zx2c4.com or http://www.zx2c4.com ? For a while I did the latter, then I switched to the former, and now I can't make up my mind and am tempted to go back to the latter.

Opinions? Thoughts?
>> OK. Now B:

>> > B: Now I hunt among couples with two children
>> > until I find one that doesn't have two girls,
>> > and I ask: what are the odds they have two
>> > boys?

>> Do you agree that it's 1/3?

> Yes, I apparently misread that one too.

OK, so you agree that this is 1/3. Now on to C:

>> > C: I hunt among couples with two children until
>> > I find one that has at least one boy, and I
>> > ask: what are the odds they have two boys?

Do you agree that this is 1/3?

Let's assume for fun that you do agree with that. The original problem was:

A: I met a man who said that he has two children,
at least one of which is a boy. What is the
probability that both children are boys?

Let's compare that with this one:

B: Among all the couples who have exactly two
children, and such that at least one of their
children is a boy, what is the probability
that both are boys?

Reading this:

> But again, I disagree on the issue of whether
> the form of the proposed analogue matches the
> original problem.

It seems like you're going to claim that these aren't the same problem.

I've made it very clear exactly what my model is for problem B. If you claim that problem A is different, then you need to provide me with a very clear model for your interpretation.
Rust: Add garbage collector to std::gc
When driving will be a driving game
We wrote something at the moment about the gamification of everything, and some manufacturers are taking it to heart. This is the case of Chevrolet, the mighty car producer, which will integrate a new HUD in the Corvette Stingray at the end of this year.
Not responsive.... why even bother redesigning today with a separate mobile subdomain?
The point was that there is no real-word type system that can guarantee non-null pointers (not even Haskell's). You cannot do allocation reliably in the real world, and if your type system guarantees that, it is simply wrong.
Yep, now I can see why this is trilema is "incomplete at best" - c# and other use what can be described as a mixture of these three approaches.

I was going to say that the c# compiler is fast enough despite this, but then I remembered that one of go's selling points is that the go compiler is blindingly fast compared to languages such as c#. Perhaps maintaining that performance with generics is a real issue.
Shoot me an email at aaron DOT omullan AT gmail DOT com
Microsoft is beating Apple and Samsung in the battle for consumer mindshare
Resisting Monoculture
More like; if you spent $250 million of your own cash to buy the WP you might as well use it to get more coverage of your other companies.

Just because it's not the primary reason does not mean it's not happening.
I'm using them since 8.4! Thanks for reminding everyone! =D
I wish they mentioned pricing. Of course IR cameras exist, the thing that makes it interesting is how much it might cost.
> how praise kills kids' self-esteem

That's dramatically over-simplifying. Praising kids for inherent qualities, or for achievements, can kill self-esteem/achievement. Praising kids for effort seems to work quite well.
You can't buy those off the shelf. The cards used in the Mac Pro are a cross between AMD Radeon and FirePro cards. You can step up to "full" FirePro cards, and get 2, 4 or 6 display ports, depending on model.
The Wolfram Connected Devices Project
This is a Malcolm Gladwell-esque article/book in the worst sense; a mismatch of famous studies (I believe I've read about all of them before; many have shown up in HN) that are used or abused to drive a narrative or idea of something that sounds plausible. Too long to comment on all the mistakes she's making.
Obama's father went to Harvard but his grandfather was a cook. Hardly a pedigree.
The author of this piece is a woman.
Google contracts catamaran ferry for employees
> there seems to be quite a few people suggesting that go
> is the correct choice for every task.

Literally nobody has said or implied anything like this.
This is amazing. I had no idea this existed. Almost makes me want to pay the subscription fee.
I strongly disagree with you. Public, static and void refers to three concepts that are not easy to grasp for starters. After a course they might more or less know what is the magic doing but in most cases they don't understand the underlying mechanism.

On the other hand, you will get students distracted by all those concepts and they don't spend time in what it matters on that level (learn how to make the machine to compute)

This doesn't happen in Scheme (for instance) where everything is clear and simple, two qualities that are great for starters and let them to focus in the algorithm part rather on the language shenanigans.
This is a really good redesign, and I don't want to be negative, but position: fixed should never be used on articles.
My Year in Review, 2013 (as a aspiring tech author)
Being the IT guy in war-torn Africa
google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H8-USbN...
There are factors favoring SPDY, such as fewer roundtrips thanks to pipelining, or header compression removing the uplink as a bottleneck. There are factors favoring HTTP, such as being less vulnerable to head of line blocking, higher effective congestion/receive windows, and a smaller reduction on the effective congestion window from a single packet loss.

Without testing, it's not at all obvious which set of benefits is actually more significant in the real world. But if I'd had to guess, I would have expected a reduction in roundtrips to be the dominant factor. So yes, I'm a bit surprised.
Nitpicking: LaTeX is a bad example because it's bulit on TeX, which does have macros. :)

But I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of saying that "TeX & Emacs are somehow more powerful than Chrome because their systems use macros."

Granted, sure. People cope well with not being able to express their problems the way they want to. The existence of so much high-quality C/C++/blub software proves this fact.

But for those of us who don't want to change our thinking, tools that fundamentally extend the language are great to have in our toolbox. Maybe it's our weakness, that we feel uncomfortable when we can't express the problem the way we want. Or maybe it's our strength. I don't know.
I am pretty sure (depending on what company you want to work for), "degrees" and "education" doesn't matter anymore.

If you can do several passion projects of your own, no GOOD employer would discredit you.

But I recommend, double down. Create something you love (no business intention behind it) while taking the MIT course.
That would be Clojure.
A PostgreSQL Sandbox Using VIM and tmux
I've just committed a patch skipping top users if the match was only in the description, with typos. Thanks for your feedback.
Probably, but as the speedometer is just painted on...
Intel introduces Edison: a computer the size of an SD card
You state your opinion as facts, but forget to give an argument. The least you could do is provide a reference.

Prima facie, I don't find your view plausible at all.
Exactly. A boss does a great job of going to meetings so that I don't have to. When I was a manager, it was my job to set priorities, and share information that was relevant to the team's job without distracting them by sharing information that was irrelevant or too much too soon.

I'd be really scared of working in an environment like this because it fosters politics and infighting.
I really tried to give this a shot but it fell down spectacularly.

1. NPM install failed.

2. Registering for an account with github failed the first time.

3 Creating a workspace failed.

4. 'Start Editing' is now asking for a password.

This is not a great first showing for a concept as critical as an IDE. I was genuinely excited to try this but cant trust this until it bakes for a few more months.
Where does HTML5 include SCTP? Searching for SCTP in the HTML spec finds nothing! (And why would it, it is agnostic towards the transport layer!)
I'd rather use Mozilla's Persona and host my identity provider on my web server.
Americans' Tech Tastes Change With Times Internet devices increase in popularity
I would see it more as that maybe the employees of the Washington Post may be posting more Amazon related stories in an effort to do what they think will make the new boss happy without finding out if that's what would make him happy.
Microsoft close to naming CEO, Ford's Mulally stays put
Trying to create a new box but got the error:

Error: HTTP ERROR 200: Error: connect ECONNREFUSED at errnoException (net.js:770:11) at Object.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:761:19) ERROR: Loadfire does not know how to handle that request
they are chemically happy yes, iirc, most (all ?) citizen use a drug named 'Soma'. I presume it would act like a benzodiazepine.
True Grit and 21 Black Hawks: A Tale of Entrepreneurial Leadership Training
Some Notes About Declarative and Imperative Languages
Labels are important to the way people think and the word "manager" has inherited a lot of baggage from American corporate culture at large. Giving the position they are trying to define a new name isn't wrong-headed if what they are trying to do is avoid a clash between the attitude they want their "lead links " to have towards employees and the attitudes attached to the title "manager" that people may otherwise import into those relationships (not to mention qualifications, compensation, etc). This isn't to say that it will take, or lead to the results they want if it does, but I can see how starting from scratch would look easier to the Zappos executives than fighting against a ingrained cultural expectations would.
What year did you enter university? I know the number of kids exposed to programming before university now is much higher than it was when I entered in 1996. I think it's safe to assume (but would love to have some real data) that most CS freshmen these days have dabbled with at least one of the mainstream imperative languages before they hit uni.
Despite the fact that I learned imperative style first (as most have) -- I think that functional programming is also a valid start point. I don't know that you necessarily benefited from starting in Java/some other procedural language.

I actually graduated from UT's Comp Sci school and I know many of the "elements" courses (super introductory, even for non-majors) are taught in python. That, I think is a good introduction, but for people in the major, I don't think learning Haskell/functional programming is a stretch at all.

If one can wrap their minds around functional programming (which introduced correctly is actually relatively easy to grasp) -- it will be MUCH easier to learn imperative programming. In the end, any good imperative programming seeks to be modular (s/procedures|methods|subroutines/functions/g), and will liken itself to something you would write in functional programming (loosely couple functions that do a specific task well). Yes there are places this gets hairy (side effects, I/O based operations), but computer science is not about writing procedural code, it's really more about algorithms, which is why 4 year universities are NOT trade schools, but do prepare you for the real world (in that you're not COMPLETELY useless). Program syntax is easy to learn (a skilled faker can just repeat it verbatim), efficiency/correctness/proper data-structure usage is difficult.
The few people who do want to use the wifi maliciously will find creating a fake Facebook account a very minor obstacle to overcome. Therefore, I don't see what benefits it provides to the business.
I think many degree programs assume you have programmed before even if it is nothing substantial.

I know my university's first class in programming assumes prior experience (though nothing to worry about for a motivated student) and then offers an introductory course in python for students with no experience if they'd like. The University in question is still stuck in Java for the main courses like many other Universities.
OK my apologies that is a fair complaint.

He's compare and contrasting two services for ... who? While claiming it somehow explains why he switched services.

I can't figure out who he's tailored the writing toward. Its not focused, just a list of random things which most readers would consider irrelevant, although each reader would probably disagree on which individual points are irrelevant.

As far as I know it is all factually correct, just audience and analysis free. It could be a good example of data vs information vs knowledge in that its a good example of dense comparative factually correct data yet provides no information and no knowledge. Not necessarily bad, just a peculiar way to explain why he switched services. I would expect an article explaining a business decision to have at least some analysis and some applied knowledge/wisdom.

If I had to rewrite his article it would look like this. First, I think he's a starving student who spins up and down a lot of test systems for learning purposes, so thats going to be listed as his goal. Could be wrong of course, but I'll take this theory and run with it. So I'd start explaining what he's trying to do and whats important to meet that goal (see above). Then gather data, and toss the irrelevant stuff (who cares how many GB per $ in the assumed situation, who cares what CSS framework they selected in this situation, it can't possibly impact his particular goal). Then analyze how the data applies to his goal and how the data pieces interact with each other. Finally some knowledge/wisdom to rank and prioritize his analysis for his situation, like a starving student needs $15/month savings a lot more than long term reliability track record etc. Which leads to the conclusion that in his individual circumstance, it made sense for him to move.
DevOps Blues (Revised)
... which still gives the same impression: code is magic.
I don't think states are sufficiently granular to prove your case. For me, at least, you'd need to go all the way down to individual neighborhoods to show that "a significant majority of the United States' suffers from an extremely high murder rate".

Let me illustrate. The murder rate in Washington, DC is pretty high, at 13.9 per 100,000 (which I'll abbreviate as just 13.9 from here).

I live in the DC area. Does that mean that I live in an area with an extremely high murder rate? Nope. I live in Fairfax County, about 15 miles from downtown, but still well within the urban area. At first glance, Fairfax County is a collection of suburbs. However, this is kind of misleading, as the county has almost double the population of DC proper, about 1.1 million people. In 2011 (the most recent year I could find a figure for), there were 11 murders in Fairfax County, putting the murder rate at just under 1.0. That makes Fairfax County on par with or safer, on average, than every Australian state besides Tasmania.

And this isn't cherry-picked, aside from the obvious bit where I started out with it because I live here. neighboring Arlington County, for example, with a population of about 220,000, had no murders in 2011. Montgomery County had 16 murders in 2011 out of a population of about one million, for a somewhat higher murder rate of 1.6.

There is substantial variation within each jurisdiction as well. Large parts of DC is perfectly safe, with murders concentrated in certain areas:

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/investigative/homicides/

If you live in the northwest part of the city, you're perfectly safe. If you live in southeast, life is even more dangerous than the 13.9 average rate suggests.

DC is a somewhat special case, as a large urban area carved up into many jurisdictions. Other major US cities tend to have fewer local jurisdictions, which makes it harder to see the individual regions. Chicago, for example, has a population of 2.7 million within the city limits and that encompasses a huge range in terms of crime, from places where you'd never want to get out of your car to places that haven't seen a murder in years.

Yes, the US has more violent crime than other first-world countries, but it doesn't much apply to the average person. Much of this crime is criminal-on-criminal violence, and much of the rest is concentrated in poor and minority areas. That's not to excuse it at all, or to somehow imply that it makes it OK, but it is relevant when addressing what most of the country sees.