skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These comments ring with explanations of where the OP went wrong, but I want to add my thoughts. Doesn't it strike you that every "brick wall" the author ran into was a move from learning a language to using a massive framework? PDO, Backbone, and Rails were mentioned in the article.

I've seen this tendency from new programmers: to be a programmer, I must do what programmers do. And that means using "real" languages, "real" frameworks, work on "real" projects. I think that's wrong, and I think we experienced programmers encourage that line of thought.

The author describes enjoying Ruby. He or she had fun going through a book on it, fun solving Project Euler problems with it, he or she ran home from work to play more with Ruby. I can't imagine a better student. But after getting a basic familiarity with Ruby, the author tried learning Rails and was immediately overwhelmed: "In the tutorial, Hartl introduces Ruby, Rails, Git, Heroku, Test Driven Development and just about everything else you can think of, right from the start."

If I had a moment to talk to the author before he or she began this programming journey, I would say something like,

"To many people, programming is first and foremost fun. Yes, it's a tool to solve problems, yes it can be a job and a career, but you already have a job. You don't need programming to make you rich, or to have a stable career. So why don't you instead focus on having fun?

"As part of that, don't think you need to learn all the tools of 'real' programmers: you don't need to make a beeline to Rails, or PDO, or Backbone. These are tools other programmers invented to solve their problems. You might not have their problems, and you might not like their solutions. After all, your goal isn't to solve a problem for your boss by noon; your goal is to enjoy yourself and to learn something new. With time, you may find that you don't need those frameworks and libraries. Or you'll run into those same problems, and then you will truly appreciate those kind souls who made their solutions available to you, at no cost and with copious documentation. But don't worry about that now. Focus on learning, on having fun, on challenging yourself bit by bit and then overcoming those challenges."

I've met programmers whose attitude was, "If you're not using [framework], your code is worthless, and no progress can be made until you fix yourself." That might be helpful at a company where the goal often has a deadline, but to a beginner, especially one looking to learn for personal gratification, that's not really a good option. Maybe your student is confused by all the magic happening in the framework. Maybe your student is a bit afraid of the tightrope of abstraction that they're walking. Maybe you should slow down and figure out why your pet framework solves their problem.
Anheuser-Busch is a very interesting case, I would refer you to Julie Macintosh's book "Dethroning the King", or one of her excellent presentations.[1]

The Wikipedia page on Augustus Busch IV states the following:

>"Press reports indicated that the Busch family ownership of the company had greatly dwindled over the years with Busch's father owning only 1.2 percent of the shares at the time of the takeover. In total the Busch family owned only 4 percent of the company"[2]

I think it is fair to say the the Busch family were able to preserve some of their wealth, but their status has declined drastically over time, and will likely continue to do so. I must admit that the story about this family is subjective, and anecdotal.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXq9Jj4LGCo

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Busch_IV
Sorry I don't understand what is this... is it a bitcoin client for node?
Apple Performance Charts, Market Share, Turnover and Profit diagram
Come to think of it, if you pay with bitcoin, there's no name attached. So just ship to your address with whatever name you want.
I think that's a misuse of the term Overton Window. It has more to do with selective memory.
> That being said, Coraid hardware runs Plan 9, it's embedded, you don't see it.

Some of it. Some of it runs Solaris. http://www.coraid.com/products/file_storage
They better be. It would strongly surprise me if new cars were equally likely to catch fire as older cars, and the average Tesla is way newer than the average car.

To get a feeling of whether my idea that older cars are more likely to catch fire is true, let's compare what the average car in the USA does. There are 250M cars in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...). 17 an hour is about 400 a day or 160k a year. That would mean that about one in 1500 cars catches fire every year.

I don't have data, but I find that very high for new cars.

Also, translating to the about 25k Tesla's in the USA (can't find precise numbers easily), we would expect 15 fires a year or just over one a month. That's within a factor of 2 or so of the frequency with with I read about Tesla fires.

I don't think those arguments are conclusive, but I certainly don't see them as evidence for your claim, either.

Edit: should have refreshed the page. There's some data elsewhere on this page that puts some nuance into this. I still think Tesla cars should be compared to cars of similar age, and don't expect them to do that much better there. Stats on causes do car fires could sway that, though. If many of them are caused by people being careless with gasoline (smoking at the pump, dropping gasoline or oil on a hot engine), things could look wildly different.
This is making the assumption that a sample size of 30 kids in one school year doesn't have anomalies that will skew the average and that the testing for reading levels such as the DRAs are foolproof?
> One cannot be a skilled code-writer without knowing how to read code, and having read a lot of code, but without having written any code, I don't think reading code provides any enlightenment.

You make some good points, but as just one counterexample, the famed distorting effect of BASIC on a beginning programmer is certainly made worse by allowing the student to write BASIC as well as read it. As to, say, Python, I guess this is less of an issue, and writing a bit of Python just to see what happens probably has a beneficial effect on comprehension.

But, granted that point, I think reading and understanding the code of skilled programmers, before trying to write any significant code, is a very good idea. Otherwise one risks becoming trapped in classic beginner errors like laboriously processing individual data elements instead of looping through a list of them with one processing function (an error I saw any number of times while teaching programming).
Thanks for building this guys! It was fun.
It's bad enough having a nearly--but not actually--unique name and frequently getting confused for the other one.
I was about to say that seems quite like an ad hominem, until I read who posted that.

More to the topic (online time vs personality traits), maybe it's why IRC feels like it's a haven for cynics?
Why is it so hard ?

At least in math, spotting areas of difficulty for students based on data on previous exercises and data from other students does seem possible.
People have different skills. We don't actually need that many programmers as web 3.0 winds down.
Shameless plug: https://github.com/cryptocoinjs (Bitcoin JavaScript fork of the original BitcoinJS) Right now, we're focused on Bitcoin, but we're moving fast and will be expanding support for altcoins. Also, if you're interested in the intricacies of addresses and Bitcoin, I'd encourage to read a very detailed article that I wrote on Bitcoin Addresses and JavaScript: http://procbits.com/2013/08/27/generating-a-bitcoin-address-... Doesn't use CryptoCoinJS yet as the article was written before I started CryptoCoinJS.
Teachers weren't replaced by books either. Who on earth thinks that they will be replaced by software?

I learnt from books and was guided by my teachers. I expect my kids will learn from books, videos and software and still be guided by teachers.

And as someone who has spent a fruitless day googling for how to do a relatively simple task I can confidently state that mentoring by an accomplished human beats software any day of the week.
They're also building one in Scarborough.
>Despite hours and hours and hours of work, getting to that “next level” with Javascript feels literally impossible.

Heh... Oh dear... Hours? Um... Not sure how to break it to him but that's orders of magnitudes off...
Please support Dogecoin.
There are many uses to spoof a user-agent that are not malicious though while SQLi is always intrusive (and thus in a way, malicious). Think about privacy or broken website compatibility sniffing etc.
Great analogy, yes.

'On Data and Coding'?
Adventures in iMessage #… who’s counting anymore?
There are different ways people learn.

For me, I couldn't just pick up and use an MVC Framework to build a webapp.

I had to first (a long while ago), write a web app using a bunch of shittily written javascript.

After a while, I started to understand the problems an MVC framework like backbone would help me solve.

My first HTML, written by hand. Now, I use templates.

I got my ass handed to me by Manual Reference Counting, but once I got the gist of it, I could use it very well, and could pick up and start with ARC.

Same thing with C++ and heap allocation.

(Also mixing IEEE and VAX Floating Points... :D)

Part of being a programmer, is getting scrapes and bumps, and learning.

Maybe not. Most the people on HN are Godlike devs.
Give this site a last chance effort: https://www.bitcoinbuilder.com/
Please get us support for Dogecoin. Thanks!
3D Printed Lingerie Corset
Who isn't he replying to?

You see, eventually you realize it's not the spoon that bends, but you yourself.
Hypercanvas.js
That's an entirely separate issue though. Copyright infringement cases are almost entirely civil, and result in monetary damages. CFAA cases are criminal, and get you put in jail for years.
The article says their back catalog will only be downloadable for 25 hours. Is it possible to prevent new downloaders from joining a torrent swarm if you take down the original torrent file? Someone could just repost the original torrent file on a different torrent site.
What he talks about is about learning languages. He says he has gone through seven languages in the past 5-10 years.

School lays a deep foundation for programming. I went back to school to get a CS Bachelors. I took a mathematics course that covered graph theory. In the next class I learned data structures like trees, graphs etc. Another class explained big O notation. Then we learned various algorithms that could tackle things like the eight queens problem, sorting, or using Dijkstra's algorithm on a graph. We saw how different sorting techniques and algorithms had different big O times. We saw how data structures and algorithms interact.

All of this is programming, but all of it could be done with a minimal knowledge of a language such as Java. Learning to program is about more then the learning the ins and outs of a language.

It seems a common misconception to people new to programming that knowing the syntax and keywords of a language is what programming is about. Good CS programs give you an underlying intellectual framework of what you are doing. Most people on their own do not have the discipline to study what is needed. I spent hours studying the theory of computation and the Ackermann function and the halting function and so forth. Most people on their own who have a choice between studying that hard theoretical stuff for months or working on their new game are going to work on their new game.

Also, you don't know you don't know. For example, I had to come up with a hash function recently and was at a loss of what to do. Then it struck me to use Gödel numbers, which I had learned about years before. It worked well (although I barely made it into 32 bits). I would have never thought of that without going to school. Solutions occur to you that never would have without the education.
This is great. It looks like there is already functionality to connect to peers and send and receive transactions. Is there any functionality to store and query the blockchain as well?
This comment makes me realize how extremely lucky I was when I started learning to Program:

I had a friend working for a local medical company; they wanted to robo-call patients and remind them of appointments. They couldn't afford the existing $300,000 + $50,000 solution they were considering, and he told me if I could come up with something they would pay me $10,000. I had done some simple C++ programming in high school and knew I was good enough at programming, so I quit my job at HomeDepot and became an aspiring programming with a goal -- in my moms basement.

I read about Asterisk (open source phone software), then about PHP (which didn't excite me), then about Python. I liked Python. I read the 1200 page "Learning Python" book, but I learned most from the Python chat room on freenode IRC. They were harsh but helpful: "you're code sucks" and "use twisted" and "read this".

I manged to piece something together in 6 months and got the $10,000. From there, I got a entry level job, then job hopped for a 250% pay increase, then job hopped once more for another small pay increase, and now I'm here.

I think most people don't get offer a free contract and a goal to work towards before they even start.
No, if your Mt Gox account isn't verified and your coins were sent to your Mt Gox wallet, they freeze transfers out and you can only trade within their system.
I think you need 500 to downvote.
Wow, thank you for such a detailed writeup! I'll need to digest this a bit and see if it makes sense for our application.
#2 is a bigger problem, in my opinion. it takes a very, very special kind of person to just do textbook exercises or silly pointless mini-projects until they have an expert knowledge of a language.

most smart people, on the other hand, can build a specific something if they are determined enough, fundamentals be damned.
LIGHT SPEED by Chris Dane Owens. Cinematically epic!
Cinematically epic and shot in the style of a Hollywood feature film, LIGHT SPEED is the sequel to the popular music video SHINE.
twenty years ago I was looking into franchises and this came up - there was an army of Chinese painters willing to take a photo and convert it into oils - a couple of hundred pounds if I remember rightly - it was a big and sophisticated operation then.

I said no as I had no idea who would work for me and no idea how to sell. or scared of selling I guess.

but if I was a decent artist I guess a nice sit down job beats most options.
People basically can't just "Google" me. Why? My name is Zac Brown. That's already a pretty common name. But the musician pretty much shields me from everyone.

Interesting side note:

I occasionally get email that is directed at that Zac Brown. Including a guy asking if I would play a gig at their company retreat (I agreed to), a guy asking about boat decals (I didn't like them), and a guy just looking to catch up for old times sake (I informed him that I was the wrong guy but wished him the best).

Somebody who works for the guy even added me on LinkedIn (I accepted because why not).
I like the idea, but something doesn't feel right. The paintings look just like the photos, no emotion, no feeling, simply an output of the input. I don't really see the point. You may as well apply a Photoshop filter to your image and print it out on canvas. It would be a lot cheaper and have about as much Art™ bound up in it.
XOR cipher
Let's take it further. It is an internal COMBUSTION engine. But it is unlikely that your car can spontaneously burn up. Electrical fires however start more easily. For example, in spite of the prevalence of gas-heating systems, the most common cause of fire in residential buildings is electric arcing. Granted that this is not conclusive data about high-voltage being more dangerous than IC engines, but it is not as straightforward as it seems. http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/residential_stru...
You could try Qt, it gives you a pretty good experience on Linux, actually slightly better than on Windows IMHO. Also good support for Macs.

It's C++ though :-)
Silicon Valley Labor Scandals Prove Minimum Wage Hikes Don't Cost Jobs
Lots of happy users is the ultimate VC aphrodisiac.
Well, this is obviously a matter of opinion, not science, but I think one would do well to read (examples) Hemingway or Clemens (a.k.a. Twain) before presuming to write something meant to be read by others.

> My poems are dreadful, my stories silly, but I've learned what makes others so talented.

I think one could learn skilled writing more quickly by reading than by writing, and without the esteem-crushing experience of seeing how badly one's own early experiments fall short. I emphasize that I'm talking about having an unrealistic expectation that one's own early writing serves as anything but an exercise to be quickly discarded -- referring to both programming and prose.
Wow Such cheese Man uses Dogecoin to buy pizza and beer in Hawaii.
This is amazing! And it's something that I wanted for some time.

LazyJS just received stream support, but I'm pretty much sold on to highlandjs.
An app policy that basically informs you are the product.
>the two projects are tightly coupled

Vala is only coupled with GLib for the object system and even that can be replaced by using another profile: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Tutorial#Profiles
I wonder if there's a way to nudge people to submit the "right" type of photo. I'd assume that your complaint rate will be far lower for the landscape type photo than the super close-up portrait.
What a stupid system. If customs is blocking packages, can't the real Stephen Law just have it mailed to Steven Law or Foo Bar or anything?
Note that using `unsafePerformIO` is more unsafe than that, because the compiler assumes that functions are pure and will make transformations which alter the semantics in the presence of side effects. The OCaml compiler does not do these optimisations because it has to assume everything is impure.

And `inlinePerformIO` is much more unsafe, because it requires that you do no memory allocation inside it. This property is specific to the Haskell implementation, and is certainly not easy to guarantee.
Colonialism's Dividends: Why Europeans Have an Advantage in Emerging Markets
Angular Momentum: The Source of Europe's Mild Climate
No. Teachers will be replaced with mentors, who will help guide the students learning. Or teachers will become these mentors.

However, the One to Many lectures WILL be replaced by Software.

Just Watch.
> Power should always be left in the hands of the user, the solution is education.
100% agreement. Of course, in some ways the industry doesn't want users to be educated, since then they would be hard to get to be under their control.
I like that quote. From my perspective, I've mostly seen people complaining about applications of the CFAA that lacked good judgement, in favor of a broadly applied, poorly-written set of rules.
I wouldn't think so, at least in an ongoing plan. For example, I tend to load the dishwasher because many people I've lived with are not good at loading it for best cleaning. So long as I'm not doing everything else as well, it doesn't bother me.
Thanks, I hadn't thought of trying to find the person behind it. This is verified by checking a caches version of 4co.in with google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Gfp7QK3... as the username for the "Hello World!" post is "krnaveen".
The new four horseman.
The ironic thing about Perkins' comment about WWII is that Hitler's persecution of the jews shows exactly the opposite of what he claims it does: that when the masses turn a blind eye, no amount of wealth or scientific achievement will protect you from men whose talent is war and violence. It was an Atlas Shrugged moment, except it demonstrated that it's the ordinary masses that hold up the firmament of civil society.
I'm not a regular G+ user but I'd rather use G+ any day of the week over either BuddyPress or Elgg (because they're terrible) and I am certain that these guys have way better things to do with his time than write a better community portal. It is burdensome and it's presumptive of you to expect him to burn his time on something that benefits a tiny outlier of the audience. To be honest, I'd be less interested if it was populated with people who care that much about waving their Not Google+ flag because trivialities like that should be a very low priority for people in that solo-founder bucket.

Thanks, gregormck and crew! It's a great idea, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it. I'll be looking into it this evening.
People occasionally mail me asking what sort of Japanese rock music they should buy, because my domain is jrock.us. I just search on Amazon and recommend whatever seems popular. (Does Houkago Tea Time count as J-Rock? Probably not. I guess I should change my name to animesong.)
does it implement a normalised transaction id scheme?
Thanks for providing some insight. I guess that's not a concern for me, since my laptop is 1920x1200.
Joltem – Openly collaborate to build and launch a startup
Would it be legal to send a photo of a famous piece of art from hundreds of years ago to one of these services. On one hand the painting would be in public domain. But I wonder if some anti-forging laws would be an issue?
The title of this thread: "Wow Such cheese Man uses Dogecoin to buy pizza and beer in Hawaii." A bit difficult to decode.

The title of the article: "Wow! Such cheese! Man uses Dogecoin to buy pizza and beer in Hawaii." Much clearer.

Hmm. Does the HN software automatically delete punctuation from text submitted as a title?
Sure. But keep in mind pretty much every other photo-to-painting service actually does it overseas, and they charge as much as double our prices.
"Such is the nature of evil, in time, all foul things come forth" :)
The thing is that he isn't scraping the site ahead of time, he scrapes for content in real time. When a request is made to 4co.in he requests the corresponding page from altexplorer.net, does string replacement on the site name and url, and then outputs it to his users.
> "It doesn't help that he was so focused on web development as opposed to other types of programming- more than any other programming specialty, web development involves grab bags of seemingly random and unrelated technologies, some vastly overengineered, some comically underengineered, and none of which were really designed to be used together in the ways that people want to use them."

Doesn't this lead to the simple fact that the way things are built in the browser is in 1 simple word: fucked?

A lot of the passion-based fanboys have justified the existence of at least 5 different mindsets needed to flesh out a single application (eg. some web app using: Ruby with Rails, JavaScript, HTML + CSS and lets throw in the need to write a couple of bash scripts just for petes sake).

I've long been contemplating having a single-language situation or at max 2 languages to flesh out web applications (why the fuck does CSS need to exist?).

If a browser itself could be built on a core of using just one language (like C++) then I don't see why stuff that works in a browser can't be done with that same philosophy.

So now I'll have to find myself a bomb shelter and spend the next 20 years writing a web-only language to solve the pain points of some dumb shit called JavaScript that is great because Node.js is great...
As part of YC business dashboards, are financials ever included? I don't mean Stripe/Braintree/etc transactions (although that's important as well), but burn rate/time remaining data. As you point out, its a critical metric and should be at the front of everyone's mind.
Hot French girl gets tied up
Sexy and funny! Les Bouffons is the grand prize winner of the 2013 Producers Guild of America Short Film Awards