skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was ~9, my parents bought me a book called "Wrote your own adventure programs for your microcomputer" [1] (Well, the Spanish version [2]) I remember reading and reading and reading it, and not understanding it... I tried to replicate some of the ideas, but I think it was quite dense (and the translation was not very good).
The curious thing is that, when I properly started learning programming in college, I remembered that book, and a lot of things started make sense...

I say all this for two thing:

- I think is brilliant that there are books specifically teaching basic programming to kids, so more of them is great news

- Making a good programming book at that age is challenging, so please let it be good

This is, IMHO, an entry point, to give a taste of what programming is, so kids can try themselves later in front of a computer. Not sure what the best approach is, and I'm not convinced about the "story" approach, as I am not sure if it's interactive enough (as showing exercises). But, hey, there should be some options, and giving Linda's experience, I guess she has a better knowledge about teaching than me. So I'm sure it will be great

So, kudos to Linda... ;-)

[1] http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3384/5718165821_2ce65d26fd_z.j...

[2] http://www.paraquenoseolviden.com/gallery2/v/electronica/pro...
Tags are probably more sensible for this - tag major versions and then people can specify what tag they want.
11 startups from the YC W14
Through skepticism. What you're doing there is faith.
Someone should have given him a 3D printer.
What an incredibly important book for little boys, to normalize learning from women early on so they don't grow up to form stereotypes like "programming is for men". Bravo!
Those are some really low salaries
Hmmm... I was expecting a more controversial article. Basically the author likes Go and gives a brief list of features. (Not that it isn't a good article but for some reason the title set my expectations at the wrong level).
I'll start with a few things.

-To increase legibility, I would make the background image more transparent. The higher contrast will make it easier to read.

-Bring the content on top down a little bit, and bring the content on the bottom up higher.

-The animation on the rotating text is way too slow. Speed it up a bit.

-I would line up the large display text with the content on the bottom. Or center it. Right now it's kind of somewhere in between and it looks awkward.

Great start tho. Clean, direct and responsive. I hope this feedback helps.
I think you overestimate what humans are capable of doing (comparatively) well. By your definition, computers should be terrible at Air Traffic Control, Driving Cars, Logistics Planning, and even playing Chess. But computers are incredibly advanced at those tasks...performing well above their average human counterparts, and in some cases even better than the best human specialists.

Humans have developed a large skillset through evolution, and it is a skillset that includes highly sophisticated heuristics for problem solving, communication, and physical interaction. Even 15 years ago, the top Ops Research and Artifical Intelligence researchers and their computer models couldn't outperform an ordinary truck driver on the Traveling Salesman problem on average. Now, there isn't a human in the world that can outperform their models. 15 years ago, there wasn't a single robot in the world that could compete with an ordinary human in the task of walking. Now we have Boston Dynamics.

The idea that humans are special at making decisions with incomplete data is short sighted. It assumes that computers can't improve at the task. They are certainly a far ways away from making general purpose decisions with incomplete data, but there are several current systems out there that make very sophisticated (even unparalleled) decisions in specialized domains, and they do it with incomplete data.

That isn't to say that your saying is wrong. It is just to say that it isn't a given that something that humans do comparatively well today may not be that way in the future.
I'll second this, though I use the Firefox version:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearly/

Indispensable for coercing over-exuberant webpages into readability.
Wonderful! Good on you for taking action.
My advice: send the notification. It sets the tone of your relationship between yourself and your user. You send that notification (which most companies do not) and you're sending the message that you want to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers rather than just make a quick dollar.

Yes, you'll make less this way in the short term. Automatically charging but offering a refund if someone is upset will convert more, and automatically charging with no refunds will convert more than that.

But I suspect that if you look five years down the line, setting a good tone between yourself and your users will pay the most. Those who decide not to subscribe immediately are still potential future customers, and know other potential future customers.
I may have misread your disappointment. I thought you were critiquing this IOCCC entry on its merits as an IOCCC entry.
The simplest counterargument to the Luddite Fallacy I have heard is: Animals (e.g. horses), the lowest-skilled "workers", have been completely replaced by machines.
Long-term nonprogressor
Thanks for this comment. I thought I was the only one feeling this.

I'd say this is a perfect example of why there aren't more women in computers. From what I've seen, a lot of women have a low tolerance for this level of overt critique, regardless of whether the critique is correct or not.

There is nothing horrible about this project that warrants a negative view, particularly one that doesn't present any alternative.
No, I think you inferred it.
Actually no, I'm painfully unaware of these things! I usually go to Dorkbot when it's on. One of my colleagues goes to the testing meetup in the Rutland. What are some other good ones?
Just donated. Very cool.
Google should provide data to Federal Police even w/o court order in Brazil
A transparent background adds too much visual noise in my opinion. The same is true for line numbers.
Did you choose to take Judith Curry's word

It's telling that you twisted what I said in that way. I don't take her word any more than I take Mann's word. I read a variety of sources and try to reason about them to create my own world view.

Since I don't have an oil well in my backyard, I don't really have a dog in the fight besides my general interest in the "success" of our society.

I really don't spend enough brain cells to understand the issues as well as the climate scientists, but I am good/have relevant experience in two important ways.

1. I've worked with simulation enough to know that they aren't worth crap if they don't have a track record for predicting reality. Climate models have had no appreciable success at predicting long range climate. As much as you may want to, you can't put the cart before the horse. The validity of the model has to be proved before they can be trusted. Before that happens, you're using religious thinking and trying to label those who don't agree with you heretics.

2. I'm good at spotting bullshit politics masked as scientific authority. I've found the IPCC, Mann, et al. to be extremely political in their approach to Science. They trash people who don't agree with them and they don't just admit it when they and their models are significantly wrong.
Do not work for me too. Amazing the site name is "not broken".
I had a similar issue with my 4S where it would shut down when battery got down to around 30%, and only boot up if I reset it (normal boot would show the battery discharged icon) after using it for about a year.

Doing a full charge cycle of the battery (fully charge -> fully drain -> fully charge) fixed the issue.
W/o generics you lose two things:

1. Type safety
2. Convenience

(1) is certainly no worse than a dynamic language, where you don't have type-safety anywhere. (2) doesn't seem that bad to me. You'll write code like this:

x := customStack.Pop().(SaysHello) // error here if x isn't a member of the interface SaysHello
x.Hello()

As opposed to a dynamic language:

x = customStack.Pop()
x.Hello() // error here if x doesn't define hello

Disclaimer: I've just poked at Go a little bit. I'm thinking about trying it out as a replacement for some Python code I have.

Further disclaimer: As a C++ programmer back in the day I used to make a lot of fun of Java for not having generics (it's had them for a long time now, of course). Lately I've been doing Objective-C (where the situation is like Go, but worse -- no generics nor interfaces; it's all just dynamic), and I've been surprised at how not having generics is Not As Bad As You Might Think. It's basically equivalent to a 'dynamic' language.
I'm working on something to solve this problem right now - a drag and drop stripe form builder.
Also relevant: http://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/

(American junior developer/researcher outside of Frankfurt here -- also very happy)
5 metrics to run your business
No, through the better scientific work. Without it, it's just trolling. Better scientific work isn't produced by deniers simply because they aren't actually interested in the science. Just like in the article. Please read the article. Have you?
Why do you this?

;; these patterns allow a new frame to open for their matches
(remove-hook 'same-window-regexps "\\*info\\*\\(\\|<[0-9]+>\\)")
(remove-hook 'same-window-regexps "\\`\\*Customiz.*\\*\\'")

It appears the default value for same-window-regexps is nil... Do you have a package installed that is adding those or something?
Userfox (s11) acquired by AdRoll
No, because the audience is clearly unsatisfied with only having those options.

What a bigoted comment. OP is praising diversity, and you are suggesting what, exactly? That there isn't an issue if everyone in a field approaches a problem in the exact same way? Are you really that small minded?
I think it's heartening, in a sense - and this goes beyond nuclear weapons - that as close as we are to danger, dangerous events are pretty rare.

Of course, whenever I have that thought, part of me fears that I'll ironically be vaporized by an errant nuclear weapon, moments later. I reassure myself that, at least, it will be a quick end.
I can only hope that this doesn't lead to another AI winter.
Agreed! Who wants to organize one? :-)
Probably shouldn't be telling cops to fuck off then?
$140k is standard for a developer in the bay area?
"To suggest that Nokia should offer Android phones implies there is some subtle quirk or distinguishing design element that would make a Nokia android preferable to the seven existing Android manufacturers' offerings."

There is: Nokia's Android phones would be the only ones with a Nokia name on them. Despite the problems Nokia got (itself) in, the Nokia brand still is very strong for some.
Create a Twitter retweet BOT in minutes
Thanks, that was my suspicion. But you've now given me reason to expose it as an option for our next release :)
let's also enact policies societies and economies more robust to whatever that answer is

I agree completely with that. As a first step, I'd be happy if our federal government could somehow balance and claw the debt back to a point where we will have financial reserves against future challenges rather than our current extremely vulnerable position.
I'm just really glad that YC is investing time and money into ground-breaking startups that go beyond popular SV consumer web services.
I'd say this is massive if "ritikk" is actually employed by Google. Would be interesting to trace their IP addresses?
I hope you realize that choosing twenty years is itself cherry picking.

Here's a fun exercise for you: what would the real second derivative have to be in order for it to be clearly positive over a mere twenty year interval?
I'm just waiting for the first robots that can put food on the table on their own.
Command and Control kept me up reading well past when I should have been asleep many a night. I have a friend who grew up not far from the Damascus, AR silo, the story about which the book is structured around, which made it that much more compelling.

After reading it, I'm convinced that sheer dumb luck has been the deciding factor in not having seen so very many unplanned nuclear detonations over the years.
Bundler and "go get" are an apples/oranges comparison. Gems fetched through bundler are hermetically sealed libraries that live in their own little secret area of the filesystem; when you add a gem dependency to your project, you're extending the platform that you're building code on.

Golang's "package" system works more like C's than like Ruby's: when you build a program out of libraries, you have the source to those libraries in a well-known highly-visible place in your build environment.

Think of Golang's package management as a refinement of the "codebase/<package>/third-party" idiom in C, and not as an npm/bundler competitor. Golang third-party packages don't work like gems. They are raw code that you build as part of your application.

You could build an npm-alike for Golang; I'm not sure how widely used it would be. I like having my third party deps laid out in my repo and easy to read/patch.

You can argue that the C third-party idiom is worse than Rubygems, and reasonable people can disagree, but I've had a lot of experience in C (I started my career as a C dev) and a lot of experience with Ruby, and gems have caused me more problems than third-party deps ever have.
They've undermined the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I'd argue that they've harmed every American by doing so. Harm doesn't just have to be physical or economic. They can harm the liberties of Americans granted by those documents.
Now the things are different!!
:)
Icofont: a ruby gem for managing web font icons in Rails apps on a web interface
Rule 34, what have you done?
It's very unfortunate that Emacs' default appearance is so terrible. I slogged through figuring most of this stuff out myself a few years ago.
This is wonderful. I think some of the commenters here are missing the point by insisting that how they learned to code is how everyone should learn. If we're going to get to a point where coding is a basic type of literacy like math or reading (and I'm not necessarily saying I agree with that goal), then you have to start small when kids are young. Really young kids need some kind of framework. You can't just throw existing programming books at them and say, "have at it". Do we throw high school level geometry books at kids to teach them shapes? No, we give them all sorts of fun story books that incorporate shapes (and colors, and numbers...) so that they get the basics. I suspect this book is trying to fill in that early gap with respect to programming.

My youngest child could count to 10 at 18 months most likely because she insists on me reading the infernal book "Deborah the Dozy Duckling" all the time. It's about a duck that falls asleep while playing hide and seek. The whole book is frankly awful and I hate reading it, but that one page where Deborah's friends count to 10 turned out to grab her for some reason. Books can be very, very powerful learning devices.
> Emacs supports inline graphics; you don't see the capability used all that often…

Well, except for every time you start Emacs :-)

(Yes, assuming you haven't disabled the splash screen)
I can easily find plenty of papers using ML for HIV epitope analysis.
Actual graphic at: http://www.cfr.org/interactives/GH_Vaccine_Map/#map
Heck, IBM is actually given as prime example for why big companies fail, with their past failure in the micro-computer market.

Actually, IBM's PC business was one of the few case studies in "Innovator's Dilemma" where the big incumbent got it right. [1] They spun off an autonomous division to create the PC, and put as much distance between it and the existing org as they could -- both physically (down in Florida, with IBM HQ in New York) and organizationally.

Not to malign your overall point though. I agree, not only does the IBM of today fail to engage in offensive product disruption like the PC, they don't even seem interested in defending against disruption anymore. Their strategy with the Thinkpad line, and now their x86 servers, seems to be to sell before the disruption fully kicks in and there's nothing left.

Defending against disruption is really expensive, maybe that's the lesson here.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=SIexi_qgq2gC&lpg=PA43&ots=A...
Cool. Clearly there's a huge demand for this, so good to see it's being done. It occurred to me that this may be just as effective (maybe more?) in promoting coding for women who have kids, rather than just the kids themselves.
no idea but...

i could see another type of event being needed - keyTouch and keyPress ???
After reading the comments here, I am glad none of them are writing this book. If they had their way the kids would have gotten CLRS.
this comment is asinine. please leave HN.
That "average" is not really average. Current info for 2 rooms flat not in the very centre, but some stations from it - EUR 650-800 incl. heating.
In fact, you don't have to live in the very centre (Mitte). The public transport system is amazing, the city is very bike-friendly and a lot of startup companies tend to have offices in the eastern part of Berlin.

UPD: well, for a large flat in the city centre that's a fair price, but that's not average for Berlin.
There's been some speculation that the Bitcoin network model is closely following ones seen in power spikes in a circuit produced by a linear impulse response: http://altoidnerd.com/2013/11/12/bitcoin-bubble-not-this-tim...

Those impulses could very well be driven by global hash rate.
Breach Notifications
People seem to ignore the idea that the super rich and the automated production will get as far away from the democratic masses as possible. They won't bother controlling them or setting up a welfare system, they'll just leave them to scrape by however they can.

Fully automated enterprises will have huge incentives to avoid the taxing power of large states. They don't need a workforce, remember. A robotized manufacturer would set up in some small, possibly autocratic state.

How are the unemployed masses going to get their subsidies when the taxable productivity is on some small island in the pacific?
They may sound low, but compared to the USA, Germany has public health care, free education (up to graduate level), a long, paid parental leave and a lot of other social benefits. This really sums up if you have to pay for all these things yourself.
Have you used the `go` tool before? `go get` handles transitive dependencies. You use that to download your dependencies. From there, it's trivial to check them into your tree and update the import paths.

> Please explain how manual operations are faster

I said that I spend less time managing package trivia for my Go projects than for any other package. It's not like I spend a lot of time on packages for other languages anyway, but you told me my approach "increased friction." But this is contrary to my experience.

It's not like I have a huge problem with how other languages do things. Or even that I think the `go` tool is better. I just know that it works well. So I'm trying to share that experience for people who can't imagine how it might work well.
You only lose type safety if you're writing generic containers. If you don't need a customStack or something similar you'll be fine.

While I think it's good to know how to write containers, and how they work, how frequently do you really need to write a custom container? What's wrong with the built in ones (provided they exist)?
"Bullshit politics"

"crap"

Keep it civil.

You clearly privilege Judith Curry's work over the rest of the scientific community; and even if you gave them equal billing, that'd be inappropriate, simply because she's significantly outnumbered. And her skepticism is always expressed in political forums, never scientific ones, which further takes away from how much scientific credibility she has, at least when it comes to her AGW denialism.

2) is, naturally, an argument from "climate science is bunk because climate scientists are evil because crusso is an expert at saying climate scientists are evil," which is unfortunately a common logical error.
Compared to the VC speculation bubble in SF, sure.
Senior developer, $137k. With college grads getting $100k, it's not far fetched.
Understanding the Mystery of False Confessions
AdRoll Announces Acquisition of Y Combinator Graduate Userfox
Only have to click through three other websites to get to it.
I use go occasionally for minor projects, and I have learned to live without generics. In a couple of projects I ended up implementing $myproj/types which exports all the data structures I want. At that point adding the types.TypeName.Min()/.Max()/... becomes natural. It's already effectively a custom struct, so I have no problem writing the helper functions to deal with them.

Heck, I used to do that in C all the time anyway.

However... The dependency management is my pet peeve #1. I see no problem pulling dependencies from external repositories and building them locally. That practice spans back to at least BSD ports. What I dislike is the fact that I can't specify the version or commit I want to depend on.

I find that the current implementation for "go get" assumes everyone is either a hard-core hacker, always living on the edge (and sometime pushing it) - or they have a full-fledged internal repository infrastructure in place to deal with all the mirroring and continuous integration needs. Go decides internally which revision to checkout and build, using a priority list of hardcoded tag/branch names. If those are not available, it defaults to master:HEAD, /trunk or whatever equal alternative is supported by the underlying SCM. You can not specify "I want to use _this_ version, period" which is a crying shame.

I understand that internally Google doesn't use go get at all. They have their own mirrored repos for everything they need during their builds. Understandable. But ignoring the well-established practice of user-specified upstream component versions is just rude. It forces some "makes sense only in very large organisation" type of practices down the developers' throats.
China's Internet Addiction Bootcamp
Because if the goal is to get a global adversary to pull their punches, then the only way to do that is to foster an auto-immune disease and get the populace to attack it's own institutions.

I'm not defending the NSA. But I'm also not a Snowden apologist. His actions would have carried more weight had he not tried (and so far succeeded) to escape prosecution.

And "deepthroat" took great pains to stay hidden, was in a position to help himself stay hidden, and was still a suspect almost from the very start. He also never went to Russia or China.
Well, there's that.
It is sad. Vaccines are one of the few truly amazing technologies in medicine. Vaccines are both cheap, effective, and most importantly safe. Where else in medicine is this true?
...to prevent charge backs. Ever by anything from them? Ugh...
At first I was annoyed by this comment, but then I realized, I was taken by a very clever joke!

Hats off to you sir!
Furthermore, states can exercise some rights over federal agencies performing these actions, such as withholding state resources (water) and making it illegal for businesses within the state to do business with violating agencies (electricity).

What I would most like to see is states assert the requirement that all wiretaps carried out within its borders to also require approval by a state judge and not just a federal judge. This two-factor auth would add another layer to prevent transgressions and abuse of warrants.
Survivorship bias. The people who were wiped out by dangerous events aren't around to tell us how dangerous they were.
Explain to me exactly when the core Java stack has massively deprecated something as core as database access in favor of a marginally-redesigned but API-incompatible New Hotness. Thanks.