skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
School is not about making you smart or giving you a job. It's about giving them the power to drive their lives.

Computer education is important and should really have a more important part. And when I say computer, I'm not advocating for PC, mobiles, Windows, Linux, or whatever thing whose market share will have drastically changed in ten years.

Children should be taught that they can have a computer do tasks for them and, if possible, without practical dependence on whichever architecture/OS you pick. I don't care which system they train on, as long as they get that computers are logical systems with predictable output. I don't care which language they learn, as long as it makes them understand computers are not some black boxes but things they can control.

Also, I would like such an education to teach that the Internet is not some big corporation controlled by shady lolcatz or a box supervised by elders in Big Ben. I would like them to know that the World is vast and that the Internet is shallow; the Internet is in their reach and allow them to go farther than ever (geographically, but also intellectually).

tl;dr: the important is making them understand they can, not necessarily how (they should be able to teach themselves specific skills)
They've made at least one TV show called Betas (I do not recommend it)
PHP 5.5.9 is ready for download
I'm no friend of Bitcoin, but won't disregarding early adopters lead them one step closer to becoming Microsoft?
I agree. It would be much more useful to focus on things like the differences between package management systems in various OS's and maybe point out the strengths. For Linux this would be easy scripting and generic problem solving while in Windows you have a much more "solution" based ecosystem.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't advocate hardcore CS for everyone, but some basic scripting would not hurt the average student.
Italian here (again, for context).
My mother instilled the passion for reading in me when I was a little child. It didn't push me towards anything in particular, but it gave me the possibility to find what really interested me. I'll never be able to thank my mommy enough.
I've had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day and he raised an interesting point.

When the NHS was first being proposed the doctors at the time were strongly against it. The Health Secretary (Bevan I think) just flat refused to listen to what the doctors were telling him. He told them that it didn't matter what their complaints were, he was going to start a national health service.

If we had a system where you had to be an expert in a field before you could be in government then we would lose things like this. We would also lose problems with idiots running things (cough Gove cough). Overall though, we would never have change, our elected officials would only ever vote to maintain the status quo.

Additionally, we vote for people to represent us in government, I don't know that doctors could ever truly represent my views on health care.

I would just like to add a note that none of the things that I've represented as facts above have been checked. I learnt them in the pub, they might be wrong. Let me know (nicely).
My mother comes from a Biology background and my father is self-learnt in Computer Science. Today, I am in my final year of Engineering and all this has happened because I had a strong family background in Science where I learnt every single bit of Physics and Mathematics from my father and my mother taught me every other subject until college.
My major motivation to code comes from my father because he was the one who taught me C++ when I was 13.

My interest has more to do with the effort my parents put into teaching me and providing me with resources to pursue what I liked.

Also, we own an assembled PC which has undergone numerous upgrades and is still with us for over 20 years.
Your Gadget’s Battery Is Swelling Up. Should You Panic?
For full HTTPS / IP-Restriction / Auth / external bug tracker support, please have a look at https://usersnap.com - this could fit your professional requirements.
At least 10 states expected to consider allowing online gambling this year
> And whenever I find a contrived way to do one of those things, more often than not, a couple of weeks later it's taken out by a new "simplification".

This seems to be a running gag for all of Google's services, the past few years. Like moving around and changing the "log out" button (did I say button, it's a link now), then for a while inconveniencing people circumventing that via Private Tab. It's awful.

It's like they're trying to numb you into compliance to go with whatever flow the UI-of-the-week directs you into.
Maybe, but "We want to ship now!" is a VERY different statement than "We want to lock in the API now and refuse to change it later!". I have a great deal of sympathy for the first one.
2 cameras, two sets of identical lenses, grip that can carry two cameras (usually a 3d rig), and the most expensive part - people that know how to work with 3d. That usually means a stereographer on set, more storage, dedicated 3d dailies preview (special equipment, monitors), DoP that knows what he's up to (3d requires slightly different lighting setup).

All combined isn't THAT more expensive on A budgets, but usually they shoot with parallel setups of two or more cameras (double for 3d). With special monitoring, extra step (stereographer) and slightly different lighting techniques you're looking at more time needed for each setup - which then halts everything and costs even more money.

And that's only for production. Postproduction has to work on everything twice, including rendering... so it adds up.
A lot of folks here will disagree with you, but I totally get where you're coming from. Schools, especially at lower levels, should focus on practical skills, rather than theoretical ones.

Future accountants and mechanics aren't going to benefit much from understanding how DNS works, but they can benefit from knowing how to install an OS, or even doing high-level automation.
You stole the words from my thought .. damn you !!
The tablets are not easily programmable _from the tablet_.

The distinction has to be between educating people how to do things on the computer (which really doesn't take all that long, but can turn into "qualifications in specfic version of Word"), versus understanding the technology enough to fix your own problems and develop new things.
What Turkey "the country" and Turkey "the government" wants is not exactly in sync right now. It is always good to make this distinction.
I'm pretty sure I was taught to code in a day.

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

My first hack was:

10 PRINT "IM A COMPUTER"
20 GOTO 10

Now the system was leaking internal information.

The next 30 years have just been variations on a theme. Spawned Erlang processes, in my head, are 20 GOTO 10.

edit: The thing that freaks me out about computer illiterate people being in charge of teaching people computing is that they aren't equipped to choose the experts to hire. She can only evaluate them by their connections, their pleasantness, their respect from peers (who also can't be evaluated), and their massive marketing budgets.
I am the author of the post. The actual intention of my comment was that some companies ask their Customers for their Customer List, such that they can mine that data. At Compile, we do NOT look at our Customer's Customer Lists. We find the right information that our Customer can immediately use, and provide it to them. So we never ask our Customer to share their Customer data as you so rightly suggest.
As we are plugging somebody else's books... I can throw in a book that a friend of mine is a co-author on "Ext JS in action version 2" which I heard has just materialized. Linky below:

http://www.manning.com/garcia3/
CannonBall – The Enhanced OutRun Engine
I have mixed feeling about this. Although Amazon is one of my favorite companies with great customer service, I am asking myself whether the day will come where they'll eat up all the competition, make the cost of entry to any domain prohibitive (by negotiating great distribution deals for themselves -- deals that no one else can strike), and then raising the prices. Just to be clear: if Amazon can buy a pencil at 1c due to bulk orders, and everyone else can only get it at 3c (due to smaller volumes of sales), Amazon could sell it for 3c, make profit, and still not allow anyone else into the market.
As a consumer, what do I care, right? I'm always getting the lowest price. But as an entrepreneur and someone who wants to see things get better, it's an issue if no one else can "disrupt" the market in a financially responsible way ( <-- and I'm specifically phrasing it this way because I think it's in mode these days to get a lot of VC money to "scale," and worry about profit later. I find it hard to believe that with just VC money anyone could "scale" to Amazon's dimensions).
Well, this is for a learning environment for children, so I'd argue getting a language with a good hook is important. Additionally, both environments also offer a more interesting language under the hood to poke at -- for scratch, smalltalk/actionscript, and for logo, the lisp-style language under the hood -- to teach the more advanced concepts. Give interesting, easy results, but then use that to build on how to bring in more and more in-depth concepts.
Streamus: YouTube music made simple by Google Chrome
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of 3D, and millions of sets were sold on the basis of it. The problem with 3D is purely an implementation issue -- people don't want to wear the glasses.

Is your argument that the display market can't be improved? Because of course that is...dubious. It is a huge market, and hundreds of millions of people simply need a reason to spend some of their cash on replacing their current device with a new one, just like every other device market. 4K with adaptive oversampling is enough to sell loads until the content arrives, and of course the content will arrive (increasing resolution in compressed material is one of the easiest ways to improve perceived quality for a given bitrate, obviously to a given floor).

It's interesting to contrast your post with the endless speculation that Apple is going to introduce an actual Apple TV (doing away with the supposed complexity of the modern getup), and this will be their next trillion dollar product.

It's also worth noting that the Engadget article seems to have derived a different take than some others. Others talk about Sony focusing on mobile/gaming/etc, splitting the television division off specifically so when the time comes they can do with it what they did with Vaio. That spin off somehow convinced Engadget that they are becoming the new division.
I'd really like to see this as well. To me, planning sightseeing trips has always seemed like it was a lot more effort than it should be.

I'd love to somehow see comments from other users for specific pit stops, containing the sort of "insider" or "local" information that you'd want to know about: "Eat at the little dive bar a block east, the cheese fries are AMAZING."
This is a whole different perspective. May I ask, why?
Larry Lessig, Off the Grid
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I remember hacking

print "Hello world!"

into

print "Hello World!"

and crossing my fingers, pressing the button, and being amazed that it worked! I was convinced that somehow it would be more complicated than that.
That sounds like a nice idea, actually. I hate those rounds where 11 or 2 occur more often than 6 or 8. I know it can happen, but it can make the game rather annoying at times.
It's not immune, but chances are that, during the time you are googling solutions for your problem, you'll have to learn something about how computers actually work. If the solution points you to a series of "click here, then here" screens, you won't get any useful insights on how it's done under the hood because you spent the whole time above it.
I rib people who wear suits to an interview, but I wouldn't exclude anyone because of it. It's impossible to really know what the dress code of a place is going in. "Business casual" or "Casual" or "Use your best judgement" don't mean anything at a software company.
I've always felt a bit awkward about people from Shiny, who used to create ridiculously creative games back in the day, churning out games based on Hollywood film franchises. I'm not really sure how to feel about this development, too.

(Note: I haven't played anything from Double Helix's current output, so I could be very wrong about feeling awkward here.)
IRC Networks Under Systematic Attack From Governments
Steve Jobs:
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-...

> "In my perspective ... science and computer science is a liberal art, it's something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that's how we viewed computation and these computation devices."

Woz:

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-never-wrote-comput...

> Steve didn't ever code. He wasn't an engineer and he didn't do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs. I did all of the Apple I and Apple ][ myself, including the feature choices. I did all of the BASIC myself (it's in handwriting as I couldn't afford an assembler). The only person who helped write some of the Apple ][ code was Allen Baum, who helped with the 'monitor' program.
Look at Walmart and see if your fears have come true.
I clicked through to compile.com; what do they actually do?
That's a fundamental problem with modern democracy - it doesn't optimize for talent, it optimizes for charisma.
It's already over 55k BTC, added 5k in just a couple of hours. Probably gonna be 100k tomorrow.
A convenience sample is going to exclude women when you're targeting entrepreneurs, VCs, and engineers in the wild.

It could also be that the author was just less intimidated by approaching men than women.

I would feel awkward walking up to strange women and asking them if I could photograph them for an article I was writing.

Maybe the article should be titled "Men's fashion in Silicon Valley", which would be more accurate.
> I as a student would think their using some crap computers.

When was the last time you saw a machine running Linux in person?

> unlikely to run into driver issues when connecting new devices.

I am not a grandma and the last device that didn't play nice with my Linux machines was a prototype Blackberry phone. I somehow don't think it was the computer's fault.
Appropriately, they had Alphas before Betas came out.
I'll have to take your word that the business end is better, because the private banking part I've dealt with has been a massive shitshow.

> You can, in fact, make a person-to-person international wire transfer which is, from the user's perspective, totally automated, by typing into an ATM machine.

Which bank? I want to know so I can switch to them. All the ones I've researched only do them with paper forms or over the phone. Only one that can even do it online was Mizuho if you have a business account.
"You know plenty of women." Great anecdote, bro. I'm sure that represents an accurate percentage representation of the population.
No. Cryptographic applications on Linux should use urandom, not random. Your belief that urandom should "NEVER" be used is due to an urban legend perpetuated by a badly written Linux man page.

Before you listen to anyone "explaining" to you that /dev/random is good for cryptographic secrets and /dev/urandom is good for everything else, consider that Adam Langley owns Golang's crypto code and Golang's crypto/random interface just pulls from /dev/urandom; Daniel Bernstein, Tanja Lange, and Peter Schwabe --- all cryptographers, with a pretty serious Unix pedigree --- wrote Nacl, an extraordinarily well-regarded crypto library, and Nacl's CSPRNG... wait for it... just pulls from /dev/urandom.
Don't forget register files and microcode in the various processing units inside CPU's, GPU's, misc controllers...
Exactly.

Not a cruiser, coastal sailor so far, but never heard about these issues. In most places there are yearly queues to get into a marina.
3d webcam for Oculus Rift
Thanks, just rechecked and it does work.
> Americans elect their legislators. If enough people in their district don't like what they're doing, they can put someone else in office.

Do you think Americans have liked what "their" legislators have been doing for the past 10 years, for example? PATRIOT ACT, SOPA, CISPA, NDAA, hello?

What positive changes has voting brought you?
I don't think she is a civil servant - she is described as "Director" of the Million Jobs Campaign - no idea what the legal status of that is (couldn't find it as a charity or a limited company).

Also, the idea that civil servants are appointed based on "ability to do the job" is, for lack of a better term, amusing.

NB The UK Civil Service is precisely the kind of organization that I suspect Michael Young had in mind when he coined the much-abused term "meritocracy":

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
Jane Eyre spoof
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Aren't there much more malicious or widespread forms of the herpes virus than HSV-2 that could desperately use a vaccine? I'm thinking of Epstein-Barr or even HSV-1.

I'm sure most people would love to eradicate genital herpes, but it's probably among the least pressing and/or widespread health concerns in the viral family.
You can safely ignore people who call it "coding" not "programming". Similarly ICT vs IT.
This is a great point - I think the article really fails to acknowledge that there is a heavy technical presence behind this initiative. Amongst the advisors are people like Rohan Silva, Zach Sims, and several CTOs and founders that are extremely well-placed to direct the initiative properly.

It might have been a clumsy performance, but there's a serious need to address the current under-qualification of teachers to teach programming in schools so we should be glad someone, somewhere has found financial and political backing to tackle it.
You're technically right (the best kind of right) but in practice, that hasn't happened in probably 250 years.
I care about the environment, because it supports humanity. If at any point it fails to do so, whether by its own shifting or by our destruction of it, our course of action should not be to sit back and say "Oh well, I guess our death is for the greater good of the universe.". Our duty would then be to grasp the environment and mold it to best suit our needs.
We had a lot of books, on a wide variety of topics, and I loved to read. Dad was a phone installer, Mom a secretary until my brother was born (I'm the youngest of three).

But both loved to read, and Dad had eclectic interests. Neither was particularly scientific or critical in their approach, but curiosity was prevalent.

One of my favourite books when I was very young was called "Prove It" (a quick Google search turns up all the wrong books, including theology - wha?).

It was basically science experiments that anyone with a little curiosity and the normal sorts of things one found around a house in the '60s and '70s could do. Nothing harmful, nothing risky, just a whole lot of cool.

There were pictorial encyclopaedia, "real" encyclopaedia, Popular Mechanics magazines, a whole lot....

Exposure and curiosity. Those help a lot.
To make it even better, you can declare classes that are exactly the size of your primitive type, and do things like endianness conversion for you. I will often even make functions that convert, e.g., a bid into a specific price type. Having all of the numerical quantities in your trading system strongly typed makes working on it much easier. The strong type system that enables this, without sacrificing any runtime speed is my favorite part about C++.
Dodgecoin Inflation: What does it Mean?
The most expensive e-book
No, no, no, no.

/dev/random and /dev/urandom are two interfaces to essentially the same CSPRNG.

On Linux, unlike FreeBSD (where there is no difference between the two), there are two differences between random and urandom:

(1) random will block when a kernel entropy estimator indicates that too many bytes have been drawn from the CSPRNG and not enough entropy bytes have been added to it

(2) urandom and random pull from separate output pools (both of which receive the same entropy input, and both of which are managed the same way).

It is not true that /dev/urandom is a PRNG and /dev/random is not; it is not true that /dev/random is a CSPRNG and /dev/urandom is just a PRNG. They are the same thing, with a extremely silly policy difference separating them.
They are attempting to produce movies and TV shows, though they're not having the creative or commercial success that Netflix has.

This may have something to do with motivation, and with the resources committed accordingly. Netflix is a TV and movie company, and it saw original content as a life-or-death strategic imperative. So it gladly spent $100M on "House of Cards," right off the bat. Amazon is a much larger, more diversified retailer, for whom TV and movies are but one small slice of a much bigger pie. Amazon hasn't taken this area as seriously as Netflix has, possibly because it doesn't consider the mission to be as central to its very existence. Its output, to date, has been fairly unimpressive and unambitious. ("Alpha House" and "Betas" have high-caliber casts and writing staffs, but word on the street is that the shows were ordered and rushed into production as a competitive answer to Netflix's recent successes.)
Don't read _Design Patterns_ as a novice. It will hurt you.

Or, if you have to read it, please realize that everything does not need a factory, and you almost certainly don't want to have nested and indirect factories (I have three letters for you that should be terrifying: COM), and that not every piece of code you write needs to be from The Book of Patterns, and in fact if you do find yourself leafing through TBoP in search of a pattern to use, you're going about things all wrong and your cow-orkers will hate you and string you up for Pattern Abuse and the best thing that can happen is that you'll look at your code six months from now and say to yourself, "Ewwww, this crap has got to go."
You say that now, but wait until your car is broken down in the middle of nowhere and you really need to get home.

You see, your argument doesn't really work in your favour, either - because cars have been following the computerization model (or is it the other way around) for years .. whereas you once could have worked on your car, now its completely locked down, you need special proprietary tools to work on it, and you're not going to be able to function as a driver without further investing in the infrastructure. A pity, as it used to be that kids in their teens could repair cars, if they need to.

Do you really think your position improves society, or perhaps it just serves to justify its current state of utter incompetence?
How Unhaggle Increased Click Through Rates 378%
Is that really a function of the app being written on top of .NET? It could be, but most often than not, that's due to poor architectural decisions. Pointing fingers without knowing the internal details isn't constructive criticism.
What does compile.com buy me for lead generation over a good data feed (bloomberg for my use case) + getto data mining/machine learning?
> you seed with something they can predict

One of my favorite examples of this ever: Once in Las Vegas a keno machine mistakenly used a fixed seed. Meaning once someone figured this out, he could show up when the game started for the day and predict what the machine would do with 100% accuracy.

http://www.americancasinoguide.com/slot-machines/the-worlds-...
But she is a woman! We need more woman who do software development, coding is irrelevant skill.