skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the Python community is more mature in terms of the number and quality of applications and documentation. Julia is getting close to critical mass, but it's still "niche," but Python is firmly "mainstream."

I think it's important that a beginner's first "real" language is a mainstream language, due to the existence of libraries and a community which will help them through and beyond the "beginner" phase.

Clojure suffers from the same problem as Julia (not mainstream), and Ruby suffers from the same problem as JavaScript (most applications are tied to web development, which is such a Gordian knot of related technologies all tied together that it will simply overwhelm most beginners.)

EDIT: Seriously, parent was downvoted? Why?
I agree with this. I currently teach beginning programming using JavaScript in HTML, and we currently just provide pre-made web pages for the students to write their basic programs in. They come in already knowing basic HTML as they've taken a previous class.

But I've been thinking of rewriting the curriculum to use Node.JS for about a year now. The only reason I haven't yet is that the students seem to enjoy doing things in web pages.

I think there's something awesome about writing console apps, but I don't know if they really hold the attention that today's students have.
> :(

More like ((((.))))

But seriously, given how much effort the folks behind DrRacket have put in making programming accessible [1] it really makes you wonder if m-expressions are not such a bad idea ..

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_features#Educational_Too...
Sticking it to the man
Lessons Learned From Lead Scoring
Apple fans, here’s how much your tech addiction can add up
Are you seriously putting words "bro" and "nigger" in same category? Do you miss some screws in your head?
I have taught an introductory course for programming in Python, and there certainly are a few areas that are less than ideal for beginners.

1) Setting up Python, a text editor and a shell is easy on Windows (using WinPython), but pretty confusing for Mac users.

2) It is actually surprisingly difficult to teach object oriented programming in Python, since most simple problems are much more easily solved in a functional manner than with classes.

3) 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).

4) It can be very difficult for students to grasp the difference between different types and when or how they are to be used. I suspect that these kinds of problems might be more easily explained in C.

All that said, I feel that the students did learn quite a few things that would have been more or less impossible with C or Javascript. In many ways, Python provides a happy medium between full-on dynamicism and strictness. Four stars, would teach again.
He owns a customized Japanese fishing trawler (called "Dr. No") which he uses to transport his own submarine. He lives in Jimmy Page's former mansion.

The bubble he lives in has its own zip code.
> If someone were, in fact, trying to intercept your traffic, they could almost certainly do so without you noticing (at least at layer 3.)

Then again, doing it like here would give them plausible deniability ("what? we? tracking? no, someone misconfigured a router."). Or maybe, given how those sites visibly disappear, it is an example of Zersetzung[0]?.

Welcome to post-Snowden world. We just cut ourselves with Ockham's razor and now are bleeding paranoid.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung
A Reader Behind Bars
I think cursork was talking about 'use strict' in Perl; he said that everyone uses it. 'use strict' in JavaScript is much rarer than it is in Perl, at least in my experience.
I think that depends on how it's being taught. My cofounder learnt to code via python this year. He just did courses with my assistance along the way. Python is playful, and you feel like you're getting somewhere on your own. I'd wager that if he'd started with c (or c++!) it would have knocked the enthusiasm out of him. I learnt c early at university, but there you're dedicated to learning software full time.
This is also a problem with javascript. Javascript should do automatic variable shadowing but also throw a warning.
Because robot do not need fuel, maintenance, or spare parts.

If you replace 25% of brigade with robots, you will need to add 2-3% of personnel minimum for maintenance of those robots. And that is before spare parts and supplies. And you definitely need to train people to work together with robots, so I think drilling time will actually go up.

So while, there will be reduction and weight and potentially highly increased performance, I do not think it will be pronounced in first few generations.
That's actually hilarious. Very clever. I don't think the people complaining about the name in this thread will appreciate the joke, though.
"Be the best possible version of yourself..." sounds like cult leader speech.
Thanks for the observation. I'm part of the WebODF team. We certainly do not mean to spread FUD. Of course one can build a commercial product around WebODF without needing a license as long as the commercial product respects the AGPL license of WebODF. We have adapted the text on our webpage now. It is possible to use WebODF in a closed source product, but that requires a license from KO GmbH, the proceeds of which will be used to improve WebODF.
Great stuff, just started playing Alchemy, only on 3rd level but it really reminds me of geometry constructions like http://sciencevsmagic.net/geo/# .
Building a multipurpose octree data structure
As a hobby graphics developer I like to write thoughts on different things I try. Here's an article I wrote that can be good introduction to people interested in spatial partitioning techniques.
> Yes it's a sad loss for this family, but this man is a hero in my book.

Out of curiosity, are you married? Do you have kids, or aging parents, or anyone else to whom you feel any sense of long-term duty? I'm not trying to be snarky, just to assess where you're coming from.
"Well, if you want to improve the lifes of millions of people, your company has to make significants profits and grow strongly."

Wikipedia? Mozilla? Ushahidi?

"That's just reality, if you can't pay your employees, they will work for somebody else and all your idealism doesn't help there."

If you can pay them enough to satisfy their utility and basic needs/wants, people will work for you. Again, see the examples above.

You should try contributing open source software to non-profits. Maybe you will see things in a different light and while a cat-photo sharing app worth $50 million may not reach people in Mogadishu (who really don't give a shit about an "angry" cat), your health/water-finder/medicine app will reach the NPO workers who indirectly assist millions.
Paranoid Remix - Ty Dolla $ign ft Tr3Love (Radio Version)
Wait; did you just define calling out a needlessly offensive name as evil?

You do realise that would sort of be making the exact point I was trying to make, right? Or am I missing some seriously self-deprecating joke here?
Except: the joke isn't even directed at women. Women aren't being asked to "take the joke" here because it has nothing to do with women. The only tie to women here is from self proclaimed social justice warriors decrying the fact that someone might call something "bro".
Good catch. I'll update the post.

To clarify, what I meant by three-tier:

11.9" Retina Air - slightly thicker than the current Air

13.3" Retina Pro

15.4" Retina Pro

And the older Air would stick around for a while.

I really doubt Apple would throw away the Air branding or thinner design.
Yes, and a hundred times yes for teaching.
Be My Valentine - Tr3Love (THE Best Valentine's Day Song) 2014 - SINGING
The line you quoted was the filler. The meat of the article was, "Google integrated one of my products, and killed the other", and he had no way to know which would happen. Or 8 years ago Google was growing via acquisition, and 3 years ago Google was just buying competitors to kill them.
His whole point was that what is on that page IS hostile to many women in the community or thinking about joining it. You don't get to decide what offends or hurts other people. If the authors had wanted this to be a cute in-joke for the bros, then why did they publish it to the entire world? Why not just send it around to their male friends, but use a more appropriate (and they KNEW the name wasn't appropriate because they tried to cutely head off controversy in their examples) name when they launched it to the public?
Why would you do that? Both men and women can appreciate the importance of a good fsck.
CSS3 Heart Animation
> introductory
> object-oriented programming

Unless I was mandated to make my syllabus match the language reference's table of contents, I would defer most of object-oriented programming to a second semester. How to use particular objects from the standard library would likely be covered on an as-needed basis in an introductory class -- for example, "you use the syntax d.keys() to get a list of a dictionary's keys" without attempting to explain that "keys" is a function attribute of a class of which d is a member, and thus by MRO rules d.keys triggers a lookup of the "keys" member from the built-in dict class, and d will be passed as the first parameter when the function call operator denoted by the parentheses is executed ...You may be tempted to include such detail for various reasons, but trust me, your students will thank you if you save that content for a more advanced course.

> There is no way to teach integer logic really (Python has auto-growing arbitrary precision integers)

You can still teach binary representation and use bit-wise operators.

Also, I once wrote a storage-efficient bit vector class with the built-in bytearray module, which is a good exercise to tie together object-oriented programming and binary representation. However, a student at the level of doing that exercise is no longer beginner, but firmly intermediate or advanced.

> floats can lead to strange errors

These are a natural consequence of the floating-point representation and this problem exists in each of the article's top three language choices.
I'm sorry, "digits"? You mean like fingers? Why would you put fingers in a headline? What does that even mean?!?
My experience is this:

Some time ago, I wrote a post about CoffeeScript. As you may know, CoffeeScript is a whitespace-specific programming language.

I am black, and there is a small cultural wiggle-room when it comes to black people making fun of colour-based cultural issues. So I thought I could get away with calling my post "White Power."

The response was immediate and scathing. Regardless of whether I was personally offended by my title, it was put to me that my title was inappropriate to go sailing round the front page of Hacker News, &c.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but you know what? These things are about how people react, not what was on my mind at the time. There is room for debate when people are doing these things specifically to provoke debate, as one finds in art and drama. But in this case, I was not an artist trying to make a point about culture, I was writing a blog post about CoffeeScript.

I changed the name, I think I renamed it after a Mondrian composition. A few people continued to rag me about it, but in time people forgot the name but continued to productively discuss CoffeeScript.

In any event, I feel for the authors. We all make our little jokes, and sometimes they land with a resounding thud. The problem, of course, is that unless we are artists provoking people into thinking about culture, these discussions are a distraction from the good work we're trying to do.

So the right thing to do as a developer is change the name and move on. If it is changed, the good things in this library will live on long after people have forgotten the rhetoric expended on the choice of name.

It would be a shame if the library is remembered for its name instead of its functionality.
the asynchronous model of node might be a bit hard to grok for beginners though (when I was in high school I tried writing actionscript(which is basically JS with types) without really understanding event-based programming, and it was pretty surreal)
I found the source code of the remake (DroidQuest), which is no longer available for downloaded at http://www.droidquest.com for whatever reason. Here it is: http://svn.krischel.org/viewvc.cgi/branches/droid-quest/
> Exclusionary behaviour stands between me and my dream, and I will crush it by any means necessary.

I like your sentiment, but I have a hard time imagining women out there who feel excluded by things like the name of a software package. I would love to see more brains in software, but I don't think word play is a major barrier. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I would like to hear from first hand sources -- not a bunch of dudes on a software forum who claim to know what women want.

Edit: Instead of arguing if the word `bro` is offensive, could you point me to people who are offended?
You're comparing apples and oranges:
the 13" Retina Mabook Pro should be compared with the 13" Macbook Air & not the 11" Air.
Well, in the case of certain elite universities, one might argue that they bear responsibility for the mental distress they inflict on their students.

For example, here at the Technion...
> Technology improves over time

Not so much in battery tech. It's really holding back a lot of hardware innovation on computers and also holding back the viability of EVs for many consumers.
> Have you thought about that person's life? about his family?

Yes I have -- and I've decided that for purposes of governing my conduct, in nearly all circumstances, my duty to my own family unquestionably takes priority over my duty to an adult stranger's family.

EDIT: And so there's no confusion, I would expect the same if the roles were reversed -- if I were trapped on a railroad track with a train bearing down on me, I'd be really pissed if some other dad (or mom) were to put his own life at grave risk to try to save mine. Just because circumstances are about to inflict a loss on my family doesn't justify his risking the same for his.
Laravel is somewhat based on Django (at least that is what I recall reading, I can't seem to find the link to it though)

http://laravel.com/

PHP isn't too bad, but then again, I've never written a 100 thousand line app and tried to manage it too.

If you want to, start building it. People will use it, simply because there are millions of PHP "developers" out there.

Thing is though, Python is just so much easier to use (and people are realizing this slowly), so why not just contribute your valuable/limited time to Django itself?
I'd like to see it attempted (or am interested in being the guinea pig if need be) of building almost an entire service the way I described. It works for the project I'm thinking of because I work with the law and it's jurisdictional and categorical. To devote finite resources to a different area of the law or different jurisdiction might not be worth it if there is such demonstrable demand to expand features within an area/jx already present. For example, I could build a product for attorneys and law students in my home state that focuses on a small area of law and never expand outside of that area/jx - if those customers/clients are gracious enough that they can effectively block any attempt to expand elsewhere, why wouldn't I reward them? Conversely, if another area or jx can steal my attention with their efforts...

Sure, you could use surveys and contact forms but even if the amount you're raising is not correlated to the development cost, you're awarding your most valuable customers first - those that are willing to put their money where their mouth is. For example, if every major feature, regardless of actual or estimated cost, had a $2000 Backer page - the order in which the Backer succeeds would determine priorities.

Obviously, I'm just spit-balling b/c I just saw this but it's got me thinking. I wouldn't want it to look like a nickel-and-dime operation but one where it actually makes sense to use this method. I think the law lends itself well in that situation.
>they've gone way beyond being about what any actual women think and care about...

And those articles were written by whom then? Apparently at least one woman actually cares about those issues. Or are you trying to say that by going "that far" she or they are not "actual" women? Whatever that means.
Tom Perkins says Silicon Valley elite treated like Jews in Nazi Germany
Everyone is free to fork WebODF and at this moment there are 19 forks of it on github. So there is no single gatekeeper. We welcome everyone that contributes and we give active contributors favorable license costs for their closed commercial use. KO GmbH has chosen this license model to earn money that makes it possible to develop it further. As others have already observed, it is a large project.
Google Bus issue: a bunch of kids breaking a bus window. Protestors embarrass major corporations into paying inconsequential fee to park their buses on public streets.

Kristallnacht: 91 murders, 1000 synagogues burned and 30,000 put in concentration camps.
> It's immoral for a man to compete in the WNBA because the league disallows it. Not because there's something cosmically immoral about men and women competing in general, and not because there's something cosmically immoral about competing with someone who feels intimidated because you're more skilled than they are.

The league disallows it because we as a society think it's wrong to force women to compete against men in basketball. If you sneaked onto a WNBA team people would call you a dirtbag, and not just because "the league disallows it".

> However, if a woman enters a public (or private!) space and demands men leave because she feels intimidated, that's wrong, too. And for different (and more relevant) reasons.

That's not what's happening here.

> There's nothing wrong with being proud of being Jewish, White, or Asian, despite those being historically successful groups.

That's the spirit! See you at the next Klan rally.

> Yes, young Whites are shamed for expressing the same pride that everyone else gets to express, and that is precisely what forces "White pride" organization underground, turning them into seething pits of Hell like Stormfront.

Because it's a little too close gloating. The last 2000 years of history are pretty much summed up by "not a property-owning white-ish male? Sucks."

Similarly, LeBron can be super proud of the fact that he's probably the Michael Jordan of this era. That doesn't mean people won't give him shit when he starts talking about how he's the greatest at a press meeting.

> Sure, it'd get old. But that doesn't mean women should be shamed for talking about how great it is to be a woman. Let them be proud of who they are. Leave if you want; ignore it if you can't.

That's exactly what women are doing in the tech industry. They're leaving. Or just not entering at all. It's not a good thing.

> Does the fact that a guy making $8.50 an hour might have an internet connection mean that you can't jibber-jabber about the stock market (or about buying yachts) online?

No, it means maybe you shouldn't wonder why that guy doesn't want to visit your website or respond to your comments.
Nope, that wasn't my point at all, and I was very clear about it. If you had read the GP, you'd know that the claim I was objecting to was that it is somehow invalid for men to object to sexism. I used racism as an example because it is somewhat less controversial, and I used an extreme example to make the point crystal clear.
It could be argued that advances in the technology of warfare have sanitized war to a degree, as well as made combat more survivable, than in the past. Surely the more machines and fewer humans the better?
Urban planning 101 teaches one that bigger roads do not decrease traffic, they actually increase traffic.
Sorry, risking a crusade comes to my doorstep and downvote me to the minimum, here is a true rant:

I want to express my paranoia here.

I really hate when people have to bring up this gender issue in every discussion a name that sounds male-only. I am just saying: "stop raising the issue like we are on a crusade."

The author has the right to choose a name and it can be that the author's geninue intent to use the name bro.

Stop taking it as a joke or as a sexist comment.

If this is the case we'd ban every single-gender word on this filthy ugly planet already because someone is going to be super conscious and going to cause a world war 3 one day.

No I am not ignoring sexism, I am saying the only reason we have sexism is because we are so conscious and so paranoid about it. A true equality is when we forget the hell gender we are in and we see no difference in any genders.

When people make comments about another gender and use that against people, that's discrimination. When people make comments about another gender and use that to his or her own entertainment, that's sexism. I can name the project bropage because the software I am making is new and feels more modern. It's like a friend asking me "yo bro you got cigarette?" If that's where I have the inspiration to call it bro page, how is that even sexist!? You are essentially making me a war criminal, against humanity...

Please, stop.
Re floats:

True, this problem is universal. I still wish there was a way to circumvent it, much like the arbitrary precision integers circumvent integer problems. Rationals and fractional integers come to mind, though I don't know their performance characteristics.
Sadly, this is how the rest of the world is (not that Yale or any other educational institution should be like this just because the rest of the world is). Mental problems are frowned upon in our society except when they can be used to profit off of people.

There is NO help for people with mental problems, only abandonment and prosecution. Because of legislation preventing discrimination, this is not done overtly and it APPEARS that one can get help from doctors and mental health facilities when in reality these are just the wardens and prisons for those who are labeled as mentally defective. It's obvious that Yale does not care about its students based on Dr. Siggins' behavior, but this is something that one should expect for the rest of one's life.
Best thing to do is to keep quiet and recognize the lack of help. Occasionally, there are doctors and therapists that can help, but mostly they will just try to push drugs.
I'm not so pleased with the capacitive F keys, but changing the capslock key to a home/end key sounds absolutely great.
The Macbook Air runs on a CPU with a nominal TDP of 15W vs 28W for the Macbook Pro Retina. I'm pretty sure a Retina display could run with the current Macbook air CPU given that they share the same integrated GPU. That will make a difference.
The discussion is not about race nor that word so it's not relevant.

The discussion was about offensive words; it's entirely relevant. And given the context it was used, it was clear the word was not used in a disparaging manner, but as an example of a word that shouldn't be used.
Easy example... in the US, a policeman's word is often enough to cite you for breaking a traffic law. In Scotland, you would need two policemen, or one policeman and a camera, or some other combination of >1 sources of evidence.
I'm not offended, not sure if it's sexist but I think it's immature and unprofessional. Kinda like a fart joke.
Failure Modes
> You don't get to decide what offends or hurts other people

But you do?

Or do we live in a society where whoever is the most offended gets to make the rules?
I wasn't arguing about whether "bro" was offensive. I was arguing over whether it is legitimate for a man to be offended by sexism, please read the GP before responding next time.