skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My problem is that I believed employment would be within reach after teaching myself for a year.

I was doing paid work within a year of learning PHP. It wasn't good work, but it was work.

The problem is that people want to go from 'learning programming' to 'building Facebook from scratch' - that's why the OP is having problems, when you compare your work to Wordpress, of course your work is going to come up short when you're new.

An analogy to carpentry: nobody expects a novice carpenter to make an entire set of kitchen cabinets from scratch and have them all fit and function correctly, or build a timber-framed barn.

But you certainly would expect a novice to be able to build you a crate or knock together a stool, shim a squeaky table leg, or make you a cutting board.

The equivalent paid work I was doing was along those lines - tweak this so that the tax calculation is updated, change the pricing structure to add a 10% surcharge if the order is over X pounds, those kinds of things.
Which is funny because (according to random citation needed sources), gas-powered cars have electrical failures and resulting fires quite a lot compared to Teslas.
I'm inclined to agree with both your sentiment and analogy.

I only really know Objective-C, but from my somewhat limited position, the turning point for me came when I stopped trying to learn Obj-C by reading, and instead fully committed myself to functional, shippable products.

However, I still run to SO at the sight of a slightly complex issue!
Yes. This would also explain the other comments in this thread complaining about the ruling stating that bypassing a paywall would change their decision; the courts will not allow the legal question of whether access is authorized or not to be decided solely on what a hacker can convince a stupid computer server to do.

And, that's a good thing! I had the chance the other day to be in a legal training session, where the following quote from the Vice Chief of Naval Operations was mentioned:

"No set of rules can substitute for the exercise of sound judgment. Even when something is permissible under the rules, it may nevertheless be inappropriate in appearance." (emphasis mine)

This is also the same reason many hacktivists oppose the NSA's current surveillance programs, whether they're legal or not. Just because it is legal or technically possible for the NSA to do something doesn't mean they should be able to do it. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and such logic applies just as much to us as it does to them.
> It's easy for programmers to forget how hard some of the earlier concepts were

Which is exactly why Zed's and my books sell relatively well.
No, I expect him to sit, analyze the situation and learn things instead of a hopeless "I don't know what to do"

The issue is not "Please advice me what to do", it is saying it in the spirit of someone who doesn't know how he got in the situation in the first place. For someone who builds a site like that, he should've know better.
I think the word for this is "Kafkaesque".
The OP has "dabbled", he hasn't committed himself to a single language nor a good regimen/project to succeed. Let's look at this quote:

"On top of that, there’s a constant din of “Python’s not for you, it’s for them ({scientists, academics, hackers, statisticians, someone else})” out there if you look up stuff about Python."

Really? Sounds like a bad excuse to me. There's a fuck-ton of tutorials and books for Python beginners of all ages and backgrounds. It's one of the few languages I recommend to newbies for that reason, beside the fact it's easy to be productive in. We have a full spectrum of users at local meetups and I chat with the scientist and tutor the beginners. Python users are diverse as a crowd at a state fair.

And coding isn't programming. There's a lot more to know than the syntax of a few languages and APIs. It's a whole universe to explore and learn how to control and leverage. You can find a cool project, then drop down the rabbit hole the rest of your life, enjoying the beauty...
So article basically claims that trolling is modern sadism. We knew that already, in every large enough society there will be people who enjoy discomfort of others.

Real question is: does trolling on the internet help mitigate real life tendencies?
It looks like the intended use is to simply call validate and ignore the result, allowing you to assume from then on it is a valid address.

In theory they should provide a "TryValidate" or similar but it doesn't look like they do at the moment.
> imagine a website called "The House Fell Down"

That's not very Web 2.0. It would have to be something like Ushr.

Sorry, not very helpful, I just couldn't help myself.
Step-by-step guide to implementing a complex project:

1. Think carefully about what behavior you want the project to have.

2. Prepare your development environment.

3. Hack on stuff until it seems to work.
Internet trolls and trolls in general are absolutely not horrible people. They're in fact miserable individuals who choose to be reviled by everyone else in the world, cause at least it means being acknowledged (if negatively) rather than being ignored. Nothing but a coping mechanism.
>>>You can't compare a teacher that has a class of 15 native english speaking, upper middle class, 2 parent house holds kids to a teacher with a class of 32 english as a second langurage, poor, hungry, cold, kids that are children of drug addicts, drunks, refugees especially using test written in English.

Nor should you, but hopefully no one is seriously suggesting comparing those two groups directly. What you can do is compare teachers to their peers in similar schools, and see whose students improve more over a given year. If an average student in Teacher A's class goes from reading at level x to x+2 in the course of a year, that's better than going from x to x+1.
> I haven't seen the movie. Is that message typed out on the screen, complete with teletype noises?

It is. I think it's necessary in this case - it's used as a mechanism to distinguish it from the credits, which are being displayed at the same time (e.g. [1] from the next shot). The typing noise and animation causes the audience to pay attention to it, even if they weren't paying attention to the credits.

In most other cases, it's just foley - audiences expect to hear futuristic computer-clicky noises to accompany their space-text, so it feels weirder to leave it out than to leave it in.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/hrsqgoA.png
C or ASM? You do realise on this site those languages dont exist, only Ruby, Haskell, Bracket-o-lisp variants, Go, Rust, and any other brogrammer ready shiny shiny. I didnt forget to add JS to the list - i dont really consider it a language, just a bad artifact of the web wars that sadly lived on.
It sounds like the author became a programmer many times over, but kept slamming into his own expectations about what the process would be like.

Learning any new language is a process of continuously diminishing returns- it feels like you're moving along in leaps and bounds at first, as everything you learn is applicable to almost every program someone might write in that language, and things that looked like gibberish before start to make sense. Eventually you move past the basics and get into more specialized, esoteric, and less generally-applicable bits, and it feels like it's taking a lot more effort to learn much smaller and less widely applicable chunks of information.

This isn't even taking into account the fact that the more you learn about something, the more aware you become of how much you don't know. Two months in, you might feel less confident in your knowledge base than you did after the first month. It's just the nature of the game.

I really got the sense reading this that the author assumed that the learning process would always be linear (the ratio of effort to returns wouldn't decay as he got deeper into it), and that eventually he would reach an endpoint where he just knew everything and could build whatever he could imagine without continuing to struggle and flounder. It's not like that though. You're never done learning, you never reach a point where you can whip up nontrivial projects without at least a little bit of floundering, and you never reach a point where most real-world projects you take on don't involve learning yet more new stuff or periods of floundering and frustration and false starts while you wrestle with how to design and implement it.

It sounds like he would get to this point of diminishing returns and assume that this must be happening because he wasn't cut out to be a programmer, but really the problem was that he was assuming that things would get easier, not harder.

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.
Hash-History Approach for Reconciling Inconsistency in Replication (2002)
This might even add an extra value if you somehow link the painting to the artist. But I think it's the idea behind the marketplace.
Can self-confessed trolls really be trusted to give honest answers on personality surveys?
I very much agree. In it's simplest form, I see it as a coping mechanism that helps them forget how pathetic they really are.
The Readme says insight requires a running bitcoind to communicate to over RPC, does bitcore require the same? or is bitcore like a reimplementation of bitcoind?
Telling myself I wouldn't "be a programmer" helped me learn to program competently. Counter-intuitive, but it meant I wasn't focused on following so many darn tutorials and APIs and frameworks and could just look at the raw building blocks and come to grips with them.
Crunchie Award Winners 2014
This argument proves too much. Living your life normally, in general, helps stalkers and bullies. The only thing that doesn't "help" them (in one way) is making your own life more difficult for their sake... which "helps" them more directly, by making them feel acknowledged and dominant.

People should not have to compensate for the actions of broken people. Celebrities know how to be functional in this situation: share everything, and get restraining orders.
He doesn't mention why he was trying to learn any of these languages. Just to learn them? Yeah, I dabble in human languages that way, just out of curiosity. Nope, that hasn't made me fluent. I know a bit of conversational German because I lived in Germany and I have German relatives plus studied it on my own a smidgeon. I actually took classes in French, my second strongest foreign language. I know a few words of this, that and the other (Greek, Russian, Spanish...possibly others) but having not taken more than a couple of classes in anything else and having not lived any place else where I could consistently use those languages, nope, I have not become fluent. It has nothing to do with whether or not there are good materials available to learn them.

So, other than "learn to program," what was his goal? He does not appear to have had a real, tangible goal. This is likely the problem. What little (self taught) html and css I know is from working on my own websites and following some lessons in books and on CDs and looking stuff up online. I moved away from hand coding my sites but knowing some html still comes in handy at times. So while I am not very fluent, I do still get use out of it. Thus I don't have some sense of "failure" in this regard because it served the purpose that was intended and has remained useful in other ways that I wasn't specifically looking for.
The study itself is paywalled.

Slate's summary is woefully unconvincing, however.

In fact, some of the described methods they used to identify trolls seemed very inadequate. Something a jolly prankster would latch onto for the sake of humor.
it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet.

Well. That's not good news for ol' sliverstorm.
First of all, being a good programmer is helped by a good foundation of CS/Math/etc.

It's not necessary, but it helps, it gives you confidence to think that the code is just a means to an end, the logical problem you already solved in your head.

If you know algorithms and data structures, have a decent understanding about computer hardware, networks, databases and all that stuff, then programming is much easier.

As far as languages go, the JavaScript snippets just show that JavaScript can be utterly horrible at times.
I'm not sure you understand "irony".

The guillotine was, historically, the symbol of revolutionary response by a victimized peasant class against wealthy, out of touch overlords. Yes, it's obnoxious, but it's basically correct to the situation. If the balance of power and distribution of wealth continue to tip toward a tiny minority, revolution becomes a real danger.

The Holocaust, on the other hand, was not a revolution against a class of wealthy overlords (unless you happen to agree with Hitler, and I'm assuming you don't). It was a racist genocide. The only thing the French revolution and the Holocaust have in common are politically motivated violence. The root causes of the violence are totally different.
I'm not a JS programmer, but doesn't that function do almost nothing? It just decides to use AMD, CommonJS, or "browser global" to do the same, trivial thing.
The thing is, obsolescence is an issue even for desktop software. The company where I work recently went through a fairly painful upgrade process for some software we were using that was no longer supported. We could have kept using it, but it was becoming more and more troublesome as the software failed to keep up with the times.

No matter what software you choose to use and no matter what model the company employs to provide the software, it's really important that the party behind the software is in it for the long haul, because otherwise you're going to have to deal with that.

Basically, look at the business model for the company. Does it look like one that will be around in a few years? It's usually not that hard to tell (in particular, things being given away for free like Doo tend to be transient).
You don't accelerate your car to 100mph and then ask "how do I brake"

If he launched the site, some technical knowledge he must have, however, to then not know (as in, to not have any idea) what to do seems strange.

Thanks for the offence, but it's not me who's hopeless about their website.
Absolutely. As more people crave for personal experience, their live shows will mean more. Plus, if you've never been to a De La show, you're missing out on life. One of the best show's I've ever been to, hands down.
> I do not think it's a bad thing to be able to be Googled; what's a bad thing is to let yourself be a jerk online

Ehhh, it's not always that.

For awhile I was big into writing speculative/science fiction on a popular writing site. Years later after reading some of my submissions I have to say I'm extremely happy that they were done under a pseudonym :)

They were absolutely terrible.
Big Breakthroughs Come in Your Late 30s
It seems a little disappointing that the author had such a bad experience with Python.

The Django tutorial is a 10x faster and more useful introduction than Hartl's Rails tutorial if you want to spend a night or two learning the basics and then toss together a crude blog over the weekend. Even better you barely need to know any Python to do it, either.

(I'm not saying Hartl's Rails tutorial is bad, it's just going to take most people weeks and even then various pieces of it, like authentication/login, won't even be applicable to an actual app. Someone should make a rails tutorial that's all about making something quickly with commonly used components and less about the kitchen sink.)

(I'm also saying this as someone currently developing rails apps.)
They surpass us on many individual tasks. Feel free to call it "not real AI", but measured by what it's getting done it's pretty powerful.
So that means that people using the Play store can dictate what does and does not go into Chrome? Damn, I need to get that $25 developer account.

Again, what does movie distributors selling movies through the Play store have to do with the MPAA dictating what is and is not in Chrome?
There does seem to be a gap in programming education. Synthesis.

Are there any resources that take someone from knowing the syntax of a language and into gradually larger and more complex projects? Not step-by-step walk-throughs but actually evaluating the all-important steps of knowing what to do in the first place and putting the individual pieces in place as needed? Synthesis?

I've seem plenty of tutorials on putting together a large project, but they are all step by step. They cover 'what' and the 'how' but are universally missing the 'why'. And without the 'why' a student does not know what to do when confronted with a problem.
I broke through that barrier by just building my own framework.

By the time I stopped, it was still grossly under featured compared to real FW's, but I figured out how to write an MVC framework with some of the niceties like URL routing, helper functions, validation harnesses, etc. The other part was building a websocket server in PHP, because the concept of something depending on Guzzle and parts of Symfony2 just struck me an insane for something like a standalone daemon.

Those two projects dumped me face first into the internals of a framework, and then into the nastiness of protocol implementation (hybi-17) in PHP. After that came PHP daemons for the AWS SDK, learning how to make shared memory segments work with different processes, etc. Once the floodgates are open, there is no stopping.
Last I checked, exceptions were not widely used in javascript because the try... catch block was a huge performance loss. I forget why exactly -- I want to say that the browser would spin up a whole new interpreter for catch blocks, just like with eval -- and it might be fixed in more modern JS engines, but I've still never seen exceptions used in JS. So I wouldn't be surprised if async doesn't handle them at all.
> Rails isn’t just a brick wall, it’s a brick mountain... By the end of the first month, I had literally no idea what was going on.

This is not a brick wall. It's giving up as soon as something gets hard.

Rails is a great example. It has so much behind-the-scenes "magic" that it's really hard to wrap your mind around at first. Back when I was first learning it, my brain felt like it had been filled with cement at the end of every day. I didn't understand it for weeks; I felt like I was just pounding my head on a brick wall over and over. Then, all of a sudden, the fog suddenly parted and it was like being set free. After that, I never had another Rails problem that I couldn't handle.

Everyone that I've ever talked to that has learned Rails - or any other language - has struggled through this initial pain period. The difference is that the successful ones push through it after it stops being fun.

It doesn't only apply to programming either. Everything you ever learn starts with a "brick wall" that you think you'll never get past. Once you suck it up and break through it, you may find that the road is clear from there.
Feb 14 today. Who is going to code tonight?
RT. I am going to watch movie anyway.
I think OP should start to learn computer science and not just programming languages and frameworks to truly understand the major concepts that he's wrestling with. There are good books and online videos on object-oriented design that would probably be a good place to start.
It's not easy for me to put myself in the mind of an Internet troll, but I have to imagine I'd also be the kind of person who would enjoy trolling researchers by filling out their personality tests in the most shocking way possible. No idea if the study accounts for this possibility.
I skimmed (busy day, sorry). Is this a web front end for Cucumber stories?
I have been programming for over 40 years, have a PhD in computer science, and I'm comfortable in many languages and in picking up new ones. And yet I can relate to what he wrote. In the 90s, I decided to try and become productive with Microsoft's C++ environment for building GUIs, and it was just a long, long list of seemingly arbitrary steps. Couldn't get it. Or at least not without studying mountains of Microsoft literature to learn lower layers, (COM maybe?), which I wasn't willing to do.

I think this guy has two problems.

1) He doesn't know the fundamentals.

2) He doesn't have a project, and so is not directed. Lacking direction, he meanders. With direction, you learn just what you need to do your job. But you learn something and can expand from there.

Addressing at least one of those problems might have got him unstuck.
I recommends Zed's to the absolute beginners. If they can handle LPTHW, they are on a good track for the future.
CircumNews.com | Welcome
Teachers won't be replaced entirely by software, they will be augmented by it.

However their influence and once revered role in society as educators, proliferators of knowledge, will be dethroned by a growing increase of digital information and autodidacticism.
I don't think this represents a change in government mentality. Probably more a shift in technical capability. Before, requiring every bank and merchant to check every order against a list would have been onerous. Now, it's fairly easy.

I find it curious how so many specific powers that have been granted to government were allowed not because they were universally acceptable, but because they were impossible to enforce widely.

As automatic monitoring and enforcement get easier, I suspect we'll have a more robust debate on what types of laws are acceptable, because there will be so little room for leeway.
Funny how a Tesla catching fire always makes the news. Were I a conspiracy loon, I'd swear there is a disproportionately thorough coverage of those events by the media.
The "On Food and Cooking" of computer science, if you will? :)
Can you add a GPG public key to the security section?
I think open source is not the end solution, though is a great solution.

As with any software there are always vulnerability just waiting for someone to exploit. Before we say "oh government contractors suck", judge our any private product out there. Github is not open source and yet people constantly find vulnerability.

What we need is proper security audit, done by the right professionals and done continuously. The problem is security professionals are very very expensive! That may be the incentive to open source since then the crowd can be your testers. But the thing is: how do we apply to private customers? Not every company can open source their work. What can we do? Are security audit tools out there enough? Can we do better?

Should military stuff be open source? Because of national defense? Well, voting system is a national priority and if hacked can mean a big national crisis. So why shouldn't F16 software be open-sourced? It would make system cheaper, more reliable in theory. No one wants to do that. So if you believe in keeping military system private, how should the government keep their system secure and reliable? What tools do they get?

Trade market. They can't open source their trading system. How can they make the system more secure and reliable? What tools can they use while keeping some maintenance cost down? (maybe a bad example since trading system is managing TONS of money).
In double entry this could be termed an error of commission, four entries are required for correction.