skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No one who has power really wants to change it.

That's not entirely true. I worked in academic technology for several years and, in truth, no one hates it more than the faculty and IT people who have to maintain it. The problem is that there just aren't always good alternatives.

Students, especially, have certain expectations about what they will be able to do online and through apps. If you, as a school, don't meet these expectations then the students will be very unhappy and will take it out on the professors at evaluation time.

Beyond that, there is definitely an element of ignorance at work. When you have a committee of teachers evaluating a complex software product, it isn't difficult for vendors to lie through their teeth and get away with it (Apple, a "good" company, does this just as often as any of the others, by the way).
> It is more or less impossible to peek under the hood. There is no way to teach integer logic really (Python has auto-growing arbitrary precision integers) and floats can lead to strange errors (x=1; for i in range(10): x+=0.1 does not yield 2).

I believe the same problem applies to C, and any program that employs a float register. 0.1 cannot be defined accurately in a float, there is incompatibility between a base 10 system and a base 2 system. This should be true no matter the size of the register. The larger the register, the more precision you get, but you don't get more accuracy.
I think people subconsciously fill in details. These stories lack so much information that it's nearly impossible to conclude anything from them. But we see more than is there, filling it the holes with guesses and imagination.

One aspect of this is that people vastly overestimate how foreseeable an outcome is. If B occurs as a result of A, we tend to assume that B was an entirely foreseeable consequence of A, and that the person who did A either knew this or was an idiot for not knowing it.
The NSA debacle is irrelevant to this and source code doesn't guarantee any of the desires you state there. I recommend studying software verification if you are unsure of this.

Furthermore they are not rights - they are desires.

You are free to negotiate terms with people from whom you obtain software, and you are free to refuse software without source code.

What the GPL seeks to do is force other people not to be free to choose their own terms.

Whether you like the effects of the GPL or not, it has nothing to do with freedom.
A Quick Introduction to React
Yep my bad, yet hopefully you get my point. I should have said documentary instead :)

I watch a bunch of TV shows with the CIA or FBI in them. I don't for a second think that they depict anything realistically.
"The Elements of Statistical Learning" is great. It assumes an astute reader, but if you've made it through some post-graduate level work, you'd be fine.
Original discussion from two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736037

I reposted it because I think the ideas in it are still important.
How about: don't use if you don't like it?

> [1] If you don't believe me, ponder for a moment sentences like, "But I like Negroes just fine!" Language matters.

I'm pondering and all I see is an american cultular discomfort with the "N-word". A better example would be a sentence like "I like honkies just fine" (or whatever the racial slur for white people is nowdays). Suddenly, if I imagine saying it to a black person, I don't expect him / her to be offended. One needs higher levels of retroreflective offendability to be offended by self-deprecating jokes.

Also, the joke here is on man pages (as in, not woman pages, though we have those in Emacs). Like I suggested elsewhere, let's burn Unix and it's derivatives (and Emacs, one sexist bastard) on the stake of gender issues.

Seriously. Were the "man pages" invented today, I'd expect the same level of gender shitstorm under its "Show HN" thread that I can see here now.
It's less "in theory" and more "in practice" when lots of people are telling you it's not funny, it's offensive. Also, it's not funny, it's immature, it's offensive.

You can continue to be as oblivious and boorish as you want, I can't control your behavior. But I'll be blunt in telling you it's not funny, it's offensive, because you seem to have a self-indulged ignorance that people who feel that way exist in any meaningful way. It's true that those voices aren't as loud and may not exist in your echo chamber, but you can't feign ignorance and claim that everyone telling you it's stupid, not funny, immature, and offensive don't exist/are a vanishingly small minority.

>> Isn't it way more offensive to assume that women are such dainty delicate creatures that like, they won't get the joke?

>> If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,
The wikipedia article for the Connection Machine has a link to manuals.

The one I'm reading is for the CM-5, so maybe the earlier arches were different, but to me it looks an awful lot like modern GPU's.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/
Your point has been raised elsewhere in this thread as well as many, many times in the last fifty-plus years when debating the effect of language on exclusion. I don't think I can add something new to the debate, so I'll direct you to do some research and find out why people do not accept your argument as axiomatically true.

Furthermore, the point that you're replying to says little about whether 'bro' or even 'white power' is offensive, it says that the debate about 'white power' was a distraction to a point about CoffeeScript.

And thus, my advice to the project authors is to change the name. Agree or disagree with whether it's offensive, it wasn't written to provoke you and I into discussing exclusionary language, it was written to help people be more productive.

The name works against that. Fair, unfair, what's the difference if your goal is to make people more productive?
When I read stuff like this, I am glad I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I know this is Yale and not the other schools, but I have heard similar issues with anxiety, pressure and suicide at many other top schools.

Americans are addicted to success. People lie to each other about how good everything is.

"I hate my job, but life after 5pm is okay."
"I have no time to see my family, but my life is rockin!"
"I work 100 hours a week, but I love it!"

Balance is difficult because no one can tell you what it is, you have to find it yourself.
Is the word "bro" sexist? If a woman says, "Hey guurl" is that sexist? They're both exclusionary, right? But aren't they just friendly greetings and anything more you put into it is your own personal baggage? Let's be adults and retain some perspective.
Most professors I know hate Blackboard as well. There's just frak all they can do about it. University wide software purchasing decisions aren't so much the faculty's call.
>“I see JavaScript as the modern equivalent of BASIC. ...because of its simplicity, it is a great language for learning fundamental programming concepts.”

So what's wrong with BASIC? It still exists...
People nowdays get offended about pretty much anything. I refuse to pay Dane-Geld[0] to them by worrying about every single word I use, because otherwise they'll never shut up.

[0] - http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html
Yea but how is this fundamentally different from the millions of self-check out aisles at grocery stores around the world? I mean, yes, you use your own phone, fire up an app, scan the item and use your stored credit card. But a self-check out kiosk works similar enough. Scan item and use your own credit card by swiping it.
Worth mentioning: Perkins is actually on the board of News Corp, the company which owns the WSJ.
Are most of these cases suicides, or accidents of some kind? If they're accidents, it seems like a few cheap IR sensors deployed in the tunnels near each station could be used to trigger an emergency stop for any approaching trains.

If they're suicides then there's no point spending a lot of money trying to prevent them, at least not at such a late stage.
First of all, I think you're confusing me with the people you're arguing against (who explicitly deny that calling some website "bro" is exclusionary). I'm not arguing for that; I'm objecting to your disingenuous claim (as I read it) that you're NOT trying to act as an advocate on behalf of women.

We're talking about a social construct here (exclusionarity), so certainly the more women you find, the stronger your case is. No women is no evidence, one is weak evidence, etc. But even if you find such people, why don't you let them speak for themselves?

And why use the word "mansplain"? It's inflammatory language.
Cinquecento: a programming language to help debugging and reverse engineering
>The group writes software this good because that's how good it has to be.

No, they write software this good because they have enough time (e.g. money) to write quality software.
No evidence? Because "we already scared them away"? Okay champ.
No, it isn't. It's a pun on manpages.
While I don't know that it's difficult to teach OOP in the sense of 'objects exist' in Python, I do think it's more difficult to teach a lot of tthe concepts associated with OOP, because the way it's done in Python is so unusual (explicit self, no real encapsulation, etc., etc.).

In the introductory programming course I took, the way OOP was introduced involved writing incredibly un-idiomatic Python. So in that sense it works fine, but if you're going to ignore the 'spirit' of a language in order to use it as a teaching tool, it seems to me what language you choose doesn't really matter, so long as it has the features to shoe-horn in whatever style you want to teach people in.
Pinterest's Pinball: Building workflow management
My university has been using Canvas for several years now. It's actually not bad -- so much better than Blackboard was.
> 1) Setting up Python, a text editor and a shell is easy on Windows (using WinPython), but pretty confusing for Mac users.

How is this even possible? TextWrangler (or other choices) come from the App store, Terminal is right there and Python is already installed.
Yes, exactly.

To me, meaning is a thing where we try to reconstruct the intentions of other conscious entities. "What does her sentence mean?" is a legitimate use of that. The equivalent, "What does she mean by that sentence?" is clearer.

It can be useful (or at least fun) to apply our machinery for creating and extracting meaning for other purposes. But misapplying a tool puts you closer to the limits where the tool gives problematic results. When I use a butter knife as a screwdriver or a pry bar, I shouldn't be so surprised when I scratch or break something. If I ask, "What do planets mean?" and end up with astrology, that's a sign I've pushed the tool too far.
Open Attribute - give credit where credit is due.
It's not a case of "relevant for hackers" vs "relevant for everyone else" but how you source jobs.

If you're getting jobs via your network then a resume will largely be unimportant, if you're applying through formal channels then you'll likely need a resume.

Portfolio based resumes are mostly popular for more creative roles such as designers than for hackers at the moment. Even if you're supplying a link to your github it's still likely that a potential employer will check your Linkedin.

It's unlikely that an employer will spend a lot of time routing around in your github account to evaluate you so you still need to show up front that you're worth spending the time to evaluate and the best way to do that is still a cover letter or a resume.
I made text captions for Stanford CS193p iOS Development Fall 2013-14 course
> I wonder how some product that is so loathed by clearly
> a number of people, manages to stay in the market.

To paraphrase Milton Friedman [1], when you spend someone else's money on someone else you don't care about how much it costs and you don't care about whether the product works well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_Choose
Apparently feminism is political and anti-feminism is neutral in your world.
%paste is a nifty but simple trick that I find really useful
UK: Split between Blackboard (which swallowed WebCT) and Moodle.

Moodle is GPLed of course and free to download, but you administer it yourself. The Open University decided to hack on Moodle rather than invent their own system some years ago and the code was released back into Moodle[1] (I recollect the 'roles' system and an add on e-portfolio).

"it's getting past all the entrenched educational bureaucracy and unfortunately huge existing ecosystems"

Teachers often work around the structures. Use email/FB/Whatsap/BBM/Other free things to reach students on an ad hoc basis. Who actually needs course management other than the bureaucrats? Its a dialogue![2]

[1] http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/About_Moodle

[2] http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~rjr/dolweb/docs/laurillardmoddoc.h...
Being able to theoretically do 100 million operations per second doesn't make a machine competitive with a Cray 1. You also have to consider stuff like the memory and I/O bandwidth. If you can only get 1000 floating point numbers into memory in a second, being able to run at 100 megaflops doesn't help much. Also, you can't really use all those processors unless you have an algorithm that's massively parallel. Any time your algorithm hits a piece of code that's sequential rather than parallel, you've gone from a Cray 1 back to a PDP-8.
Which is exactly why an 11 inch retina would sell well. There is no small pro.
> Brogrammer culture is hostile to women (at least in the sense that most women would feel less comfortable in a workplace dominated by that culture). It doesn't sound like you're arguing against that point.

I don't even know what that is. Outside the bubble of HN I doubt most people have even heard the phrase.

"Bro" for most people references dumb fratboys. Maybe it's a word that's offensive to fratboys, but I can't see why a woman would ever find it offensive.
We use Desire2Learn. from what I have seen comparing moodle to D2L or even blackboard, is a bit like a space shuttle to a Cesena.
> How about just: don't use it if you don't like it.

But I want to use it, it looks like a great tool. Forking it just to use a different name seems unfair and waste of everyones resources.

> Are you suggesting that people should refrain from publishing things that are contrary to mainstream fashions?

It's not about mainstream "fashion", but about a certain cultural neutrality. I don't ask for this neutrality when you publish articles, essays etc., but when you write tools (or name tools for that matter) I greatly appreciate a mindset where you care about the vastly different context people might come from.

> Also, the joke is about the man pages. Not woman pages (though those exist in Emacs).

But - as said before - man pages have nothing to do with men and everything with manual. To underline the point: I didn't get the joke until I read the third Hackernews comment. I just don't associate man pages with gender.
> bro alias

#An alias lets you create a shortcut name for a command

alias sister=bro

> sister alias

#An alias lets you create a shortcut name for a command

alias sister=bro

>
Genuine question:

Is it never appropriate to tell a woman to lighten up?
Ask PG: Do you review rejected YC apps to find startups who then made it big?
Just wondering.
Both UIUC and UIS (University of Illinois) both have Master's programs that will accept students that are non-cs grads. Like what @jlund3 mentioned, they just need to have some CS fundamental classes or be able to show that you have those skill sets.
I'd say they should care because the Internet only survives through cooperative effort. Breaking something so they can pocket money is greedy and dickish.

But if they are being jerks rather than just being thoughtless, then maybe that isn't enough. In which case, my fallback answer is "bad PR". It would have been easier for them just to deny service to anybody they didn't want to serve. They went to a lot of trouble break something in a profitable way. To me, that says they might not be a trustworthy vendor, and thousands of nerds are now aware of that.
To be a good developer you'll need to learn several languages, but that is beyond the scope of the article. But in terms of a "first" language, are those who learn python first and THEN C, Haskell and C# in the end more likely to be better developers than those who learn the same four languages in another order?

I think it's unlikely that the language you start with has much effect in the end. Those who never use a low lever language or never use a functional language will be worse developers than those who do, however.

So for a first language: just pick a fun one. If you happen to pick JS you can always choose again later.
3 Myths About Setting Goals That Might Be Holding You Back In Life
> Using a term to facilitate a discussion of that term is completely and entirely different from using it in other ways.

Side comment: The technical term for this is the "use-mention distinction". When you're dealing with rational people who don't understand the distinction (taking offence at your mention of a word as if you had used the word), explaining the distinction often helps, and the discussion is able to proceed. Doesn't help as much when dealing with irrational interlocutors, but then, not much does at that point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use-mention_distinction
But some people are actually interested in being competent in computer science and not just whipping out blog engines in the latest fad framework.
Apparently a more informative name for a good idea would be bad, because IT males can be prone to persecution complexes over simple questions. Hell, we IT folks are defensive enough when questioned about bugs that we are responsible for, much less anything more meta about what we do.

And yes, there is that hostile, defensive atmosphere on full display here.
Well, that was my question.

I'm assuming that this was a double-entendre pun on "man" (short for manual) also meaning "human of male sex", and using a word related to the second meaning to give "bro".

It's similar to the situation of how "rake", derived from "ruby-make" gave rise to "hoe", riffing off the meaning of "rake" as a garden tool.

It's not clear to me how a woman using the "bro" tool at her computer would somehow be marginalized or excluded. Puns aren't automatically sexist just because they reference some aspect of maleness/femaleness.
As mentioned, faculty and IT staff hate it as much or more than students do. The problem I've found from personal experience, is that all the other options are equally poor.

User interface is just one area that Blackboard and most of its competitors fall down. Security is atrocious (shhh), performance is abysmal, and their support is a cruel joke. Installation is hideous, upgrades are a nightmare. Stability is not even the right word to use. Need I go on?
Those early departures must have been expensive. Pretty standard to have a 25%/year cliff for a 4 year lock-in.
As mentioned in the article, give up useless timekilling activities (TV, Facebook, etc).

The other big thing for me is cache warming. If you are doing non-mental activities such as showering or driving, use that time to plan what you're going to do next on your project. Pre-solve the problem: write the code, book, whatever, in your head. When you have free time - even if it's only fifteen minutes - dump the contents of your brain into your laptop. Don't spend that fifteen minutes thinking "where was I?" Do that in advance, and maximize your output in short stretches of time.

This approach is literally magical for me.
"against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software or Home-Grown Systems to the extent that such Open Source Software and Home-Grown Systems are not Bundled with proprietary software"

Competitors are not protected by this pledge.
$800/month in maintenance fees? Are you joking or exaggerating, or are you trying to justify your McMansion preference with hyperbole?

My experience of Texas was all in Austin, maybe that is a lower end city compared to Dallas? Not sure, but I was amazed by the poverty versus the worst places I know of in Washington state (where I'm native).
Very interesting! Would love to read about how you did this.
The boy scout rule
Not really, since Google doesn't do anything related to AI (OK, maybe self-driving cars, but that's not part of their public internet services). IBM's Watson might turn into a public AI utility, however.
Joel is on here. Still pops up, occasionally (that I've noticed).

Many presences have seemingly declined, in the last few years. Interests and competing demands change for everyone; there's also some ongoing speculation that as HN has grown and, for lack of a better term, the signal/noise ratio has declined, those more interested in a focused and concentrated "signal" have lost interest, or patience with the noise.

Also, any individual's participation, even if held at a steady level, is likely to decline in prominence at least somewhat amidst the vastly increased HN traffic.

I can't speak for Joel on this (I don't know him, even remotely). But since the grandparent was speaking about presences more generally.
As I am sure you know John, nuclear policy is a bit more nuanced than that. It is completely valid that by having a nuclear arsenal that can destroy any nation, a nation does not need to have a standing army that can repel an invasion (after all if you invaded, you're home country would get obliterated).

The discussion referenced by Defense News though is policy around the deployment of Squad and Battalion level forces which are typically engaged in situations where either the nation-state isn't the target (say Somali pirates, of Afghan warlords), and/or the goal is incompatible with mass destruction.

Your hypothetical suicide inference leaves out the choice of compliance. One could look at a place like NotAmerica' where no one is at risk of horrific death due to killer robots, versus NotAmerica where death by remote action is a more common occurrence, and look at what is different between the two places. In all the theaters of the world today it's pretty clear what action would completely remove that threat of horrific death. (hint: it isn't going to America and blowing yourself up.)
Great idea, can the page be branded under my startups name or is it app.net?
I thought they integrated Picknik into Google Plus.
Yeah, I found it pretty bad. I watched a whole 2 eps, then bailed. I think Amazon has a hit with Alpha House, though. Very, very funny. Good cast, too.
Clever idea.

I think it's based on the artwork [1] of Tim Noble and Sue Webster [2] who create images using the silhouette from scultures made from rubbish.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Miss_Understood_and_Mr_Mea...

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Noble_and_Sue_Webster
Business Idea Collector
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7117725
"It's really hard to get teachers on board in a bottom-up way."

Try getting them to 'score' their idea of what online course elements might provide using the scheme in [1]

Do they want a filing cabinet, an online classroom, or some kind of student led Reddit/HN thing around their course materials? Gets a discussion going.

[1] http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/ilt-ideas/alan-stale...
Some ideas, from one with a small child:

Lunch breaks are great for side projects, even if you have to go work in your car in the parking lot, or the cafe down the street.

Also, if your commute is via or can be via public transportation, or a car pool, you can work on that.

See if you can get up at 4.30 on weekends as well. I bet your spouse and child don't, so it's an instant extra couple of hours.

Hope that helps.