skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fundamentally I agree, but I question why we do not teach computer science/coding the same way we teach music?

For example, when I first learned how to play piano, I wasn't taught how to play Major 9th chords. Rather, I learned simple melodies and expanded into more complicated harmony as I grew older. The reason why I began learning more theory was because I knew of its potential to make me a better musician. This can be applied to computer science learning as well. You definitely don't want to start kids off on learning by trying to explain how a sorting algorithm works, that's totally meaningless. You want them to get things working, make them solve problems, give them problems that are so absurdly hard to solve with their current knowledge that they MUST find an alternative.

This is how you truly educate. By making people solve their own problems, because they have to. It's really funny how people step up their game when they believe they have to do something for their own good.
Spacedeck 4.0 – The Creative's Online Whiteboard
The stock exchange has just become the ultimate casino today. Yesterday, stock exchange helped to build companies, to have some security against bad crops and so on ... but that has changed. More and more money is just made by gambling and the more money is made, the more money is again put into the big gambling machine. It is legal, but just gambling and we all have to pay the price, because the gamblers carry the wealth of the Earth away -- and the others are left empty.
I would love it if a Haskell-like language ended up becoming as widely used as Ruby is today, but I don't think it's going to happen. I've met one or two developers in my life whose eyes don't glaze over when I talk about lambda calculus, algebraic data types, or higher order functions that go beyond mapping over an array-like data structure. Trying to explain monads prompts most people to say they left their oven on and flee the room.

These things are very abstract, to a degree where I think many people just aren't comfortable with them. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as I have a hard time with very low levels of abstraction. We've all got our comfort zone.
Key quote: "Now, what they do is strictly legal".

This article felt like it was written by a college freshman who just took their first class on "social justice".
I'm working for a startup where the primary founder did not perform enough due diligence on his co-founder and the results have been disastrous.

The co-founder constantly brags about his employment history at major tech companies in the area. Only later did we all learn that: 1) His roles weren't as important or high-ranking as he claims and 2) He was fired for non-performance from his last two positions. Both of those points are becoming big thorns in our fundraising as investors want to speak with both founders' former bosses.

This co-founder did work hard for a brief period when the company was started and managed to produce some good initial funding. But when the funding hit our bank, he became a victim of his own success and spent more time empire building than working on the company. Within months of our initial funding he was already working his way into adviser positions with local startups and spending our marketing budget on having a PR firm get puff-piece articles about him into major publications. I think he's spent less than a thousand dollars on customer acquisition and advertising for our product.

He rarely comes in to the office any more, and when he does he can often be found watching ESPN or Hulu in the conference room. He some times doesn't even bother to stop watching his sports games on his laptop with his headphones over one ear while he's supposed to be leading team meetings. It's depressing for the entire office, and we're losing people left and right over it.

The takeaway here is that a bad co-founder can easily sink your business. A bad co-founder isn't immediately obvious. In this case, the person in question is charismatic and persistent when necessary, and has a great ability to sell himself to others in the short term as long as you don't dig too deep in to his spotty past. This was great for securing our early angel funding and dumb money, but once the company tried to secure real funding from the big league VC firms the professional investors saw right through his BS.
We built a Bitcoin Keurig coffee maker this weekend
So you were around a few years ago right? When money for mortgages was easy and people were getting houses left and right, damned if they could afford them. The questionable mortgage-backed securities seemed great on paper. People were buying new houses, the market was humming along. Banks, builders, and anyone else involved was making money hand over fist. What could be wrong with MBS then?

In hindsight, the stupidity of bundling crappy loans for speculation was embarrassing, of course, and anyone not benefitting from the game saw the bubble.

If something looks good on paper, but feels wrong , it means we're missing something. In the case of HFT, it's (quite literally) a breath away from insider trading. Insider trading regulations give the impression that the market isn't rigged. If people lose confidence that they can't trust the market, it will fail. The only way markets work is if they're fair and all the players are playing legally.
15 years ago, in client-server Era, relying on database Access control was the default. It's a shame that all that knowledge has mostly been forgotten, and most programmers don't actually know how to use a database.
The primary function of a market is to set prices to facilitate that ownership. The computer is providing value by setting a more accurate price faster.
But that's exactly what the author is advocating - exploring the process that the teenager came up with! There was no mention of quicksort, mergesort, bubblesort, etc - just that once you start trying to understand how to do something mechanical like sorting, you start to understand how algorithms work.
Actually, HFT is socially useful in the same way that Cold War research, even though most of it never went anywhere, is.

It bids up the price of talent, and that's an inherent social good because it means there is a chance for smart people to get into decision-making positions (which, otherwise, go to entitled, and mostly untalented, incumbents and their shitty offspring). Google and Amazon would not be paying $140k per year for mid-career software engineers, were it not for the hedge funds paying $200k.

VC-istan is terrible, with founders lucky to get 10% and earliest employees getting 0.1-1%, but if Wall Street wasn't absorbing most of the top talent (and it is) those numbers would be closer to 1% and 0.001-0.05%. Instead of very few people getting rich in the tech lottery, it'd be almost no one, because the founders and early engineers would have zero leverage.

The HN crowd likes to assume that talented people will, as if it were a law of nature, have options to rise economically and socially. It's not so. If it weren't for socially useless talent vampires like HFT and online ad targeting, talent would have even less leverage against the good-ol'-boy networks and widespread stagnation would ensue.

(High levels of funding, probably originating from governments at first, for basic research would achieve the same effect in a socially useful way, but I wouldn't hold my breath.)
Excess power is the root of this problem is it not?

It's reductionist, but our society is structured around the idea of limiting powers (ie violence) to prevent exploitation. Limiting law-enforcement power, for example via civil courts and not secret ones, as it has been done for a century before this decade, was very sufficient.

This is the end result of letting the state give itself more power at will, with a faux-democratic process to justify it.
The thing is, most software jobs today don't require much knowledge of computer science. Mine certainly doesn't. I have a both a bachelors and masters in CS, but I'm no better at my job than my coworker who has no CS education but learned to code on his own. I can't think of one time I've used Machine Learning, AI, advanced Networking concepts, advanced OS concepts, Computer architecture, etc in my day to day work. Not to say those jobs don't exist in industry---they are just very overshadowed in numbers by jobs to build CRUD apps.

The world certainly needs Computer Scientists, but it needs a whole lot more software engineers.
The change to the policy would have been understandable if Armstrong blamed it on the financial hit the company took for his $200 million blunder with Patch. He could have apologized and taken a pay cut himself, and most people would have been understanding and possibly even praised him.

Blaming it on Obamacare is a pointless political statement, and publicly blaming it on sick babies means Armstrong is a sociopathic asshole.
How is market makers aggressively competing for positions bad?
Anytime I call tech support, I'm running Windows 7 or 8.1 (depending on which they support) with antivirus installed, firewall on, and the latest MSIE. Hardware does not include an ssd unless that's the item I'm calling about. I will also pretend trying to restart my system and router. Good to know I should add Windows Media Player to the list.
VLC doesn't do anything particularly interesting, though. There are plenty of CDs that already apply this filter to the music, meaning there's no way you can play that CD without damaging their speakers.

The problem is simply that the Dell speakers are piles of shit.
Assuming the speakers are connected through an audio jack, is there a realiable way of detecting specific speaker models?
Maybe that's good career advice, but it feels wrong somehow. My own experience is that while design is hard, it's always simpler than dealing with the nitty gritty. The hallmark of good design is that it leads to simplicity in the lower layer (implementation, etc).
I agree that we could and should treat it as a moral issue, and that avoiding those questions is often a sign that something immoral is going on.

But we can also look at it as a system design question: if we're trying to build an efficient, robust marketplace, what activity do we permit and forbid? What do we encourage and discourage?

Having worked for market-makers, I get the value of liquidity. It's not at all clear that HFT firms actually provide liquidity [1], but even if they did, we'd want to ask, "What is the cost of different sorts of liquidity provided, and which ones do we choose to maximize the value of the market to participants and society as a whole?" So far I haven't seen any evidence that HFT activity isn't purely parasitic. In which case it's reasonable to ask whether we should still reward it.

[1] The most profitable ones apparently remove liquidity from the market: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/teaching/35150...
> Not necessarily true. Parameterized queries generally do and most stored procedure queries should be parameterized.

But that's not anything special about stored procs. Queries called from application code should generally be parameterized, which provides the same protection.
"Critique."
> How about detecting Dell Speakers

How would you do that?

And no, this is not specific to VLC.
That's impractical. VLC is just using the standard OS API to send some sound to speakers. Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior?

Maybe Microsoft could regulate the output for junk speakers, but really, Dell is the one to blame here.
Interesting, I guess my exposure to OpenBSD has been too limited.
Bulding a responsive Forecast app that locates you using JavaScript
Is it really the least bad offering?

Tizen has potential and is more open:
https://www.tizen.org/

The problem is no one uses it on a large scale yet...
Wouldn't she just get paid less with immunity from taxes? Why would her employer pay her twice as much as everyone else?
So HFT is wring not for any particular reason, but just because it feels wrong?

Isn't that circular reasoning?
A well-taught computer science course will not force anyone to rote-learn algorithms. Instead it ought to walk the students through the discovery process of improving from a naive but simple bubble sort, through more complicated algorithms.

Once they understand the complexities, they can appreciate the genius of quicksort. And with the sort problem well established in their minds, they're ready to appreciate the value of more complicated data structures than the list they were working with.

The difference is between understanding how to make computers do things with the tools available (knowing about built-in sort methods) and understanding how computers actually work (learning how sort algorithms have been developed).

You may be right that a programmer doesn't need to, on a daily basis, think about how sort() is implemented. But learning to work out a well understood problem with a knowledgeable instructor will teach her how to solve the next problem she comes up against on her own that no one has yet solved.

Just like any scientific pursuit, the best way to appreciate the tools and knowledge that is currently available and what methods and processes ought to be followed to improve the tools and increase the knowledge, is to walk through the process of understanding step by step, from simple to complex. If rote is involved then someone is screwing up.
Seriously. It's more useful than I suspected :). I do the first sketches of my talks in the shower now; calmness and hot water boost imagination :).
Both blamings probably stem from the common PR rule that any decisions which negatively impacts anyone must be portrayed as a necessity mandated by some external event or force so as to diminish the apparent responsibility of the actor who actually made the decision.
Can Hacking a Website Be Prevented?
Changes in Ethereum scripting language
It's still an improvement; before, the NSA could, and we couldn't.
Arbitrage provides an important financial service to the market... Arbitrage reduces / eliminates price differences across markets. It improves market efficiency.

It's really concerning how little people itt understand about markets
For what it's worth, 'tzs is a law school grad.
This article is weirdly condescending. "Buck up and keep coding, little feller!"
Tizen has it's own large set of problems according to rasterman (EFL guy who works for Samsung).

https://www.tizen.org/irclogs/%23tizen.2013-01-20.log.html

In addition to those issues, the SDK is not open-source and is instead a proprietary Samsung license that severely restricts and takes control of a programmers applications (despite the software being supported by the linux foundation).

Overall, open webOS or sailfish/mer are much better projects.
For Gmail, it is new. Until recently, 'download' was only possible through IMAP and POP3 – and could therefore take days or even weeks due to throttling.
Some areas are going to be more dense with upper middle class than other. Some people are going to earn more than others. If San Fran hadn't stopped itself from growing, it would have plenty of room for both the upper and lower middle class, like Toronto does. Economics isn't a war between the haves and the have nots, it's a manner to allocate resources. We should be focused on increasing production and efficiency, not on making sure everyone in life is equal. That will never happen.
Having the author's face peeking out at me from the bottom of the screen is creeping me out a little bit.
This. There will continue to be improvements to AOSP, but only as that makes driving Google's proprietary apps easier and faster.

Its exactly like Chromium in other words and we see that with Blink.
7 Reasons Why You Will Never Do Anything Amazing With Your Life
I've said it before, but it really strikes me that Ars simply don't understand the universe outside of Wintel at all, and this deconstruction is merely one of many you can do whenever they start commenting about stuff outside of that sphere. You could get away with being a tech commentator like that for a long time, but not anymore.
"When I write my HTTP Applications I don't need to understand all the Network Layers beneath it."

If you want your HTTP application to perform well, be secure, be scalable, work with a multitude of browsers in unusual conditions, and be able to troubleshoot weird errors, then yes, you will at some point need to know something about TLS and TCP and IP (v4 and v6) and even Ethernet and Wifi.

Similarly, architects and engineers have to understand how the materials they're planning to use are made, what their capabilities and limits are, and how they can best be used to implement their vision for a building or a bridge. They can ignore how the bricks are made and how they perform, but their structure will not last.
The new option is great but I am still very happy with a (payware) app called CloudPull. It can automatically backup all your Google Apps data and is not limited to Gmail but also covers Drive.

http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/

CloudPull is OS X only. I'm sure there're are other great options to create Gmail backups independent from Google
C++Now Student/Volunteer program still accepting applications
>>The fact that a media like (e)books become entangled in this mess is totally absurd.

Yes, of course. But it's not Google's fault. The publishers and the governments set the rules.

>> Think of a paper book suddenly becoming illegal (regardless of its contents) as soon as it crosses some border.

One of the principal jobs of US Customs is seizing illegal books and other items that infringe on copyright, trademark, and patent privileges.

The Supreme Court recently reversed precedent to allow importation of textbooks that are legally published under license from US publishers. Until then, it was presumptively illegal and the court gave publishers a simple formula to make it illegal again. [0] It's also not legal to import items --presumably including books -- that may have trademarked logos imprinted on them without the consent of the trademark holder and those trademarks can be used to prevent importation of items (e.g. watches or books) whose function is unrelated to the trademark itself. [1]

>> Sticking to old rules and regulations that fail to catch-up with progress won't solve any problem.

It solves the problem where the people enforcing those rules can put you in jail.

>> I also think consumers should aim to acquire media that is not bound to the delivery mechanism.

Say goodbye to the cloud. Actually, that's not such a bad idea. [2] It sure limits your ability to access media, though. And subjects you to a lot of border searches.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Son....

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_S.A._v._Costco_Wholesale_....

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
Yeah, it reads more like an explanation than a rebuttal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIGtHhAfe8w

:-)

From my experience, the Logo Turtle is a neat idea - but it often got stuck and couldn't crawl around. When it did work, kids used to draw crude pictures!
What I learned at FOSDEM this year
In Boston - VDC: http://www.umb.edu/vdc
In SF - QB3: http://qb3.org/startups/incubators
Right way to cheat Dad uses Internet to do her home work-LOL
Can I ask why you're sticking around? How can a company like this succeed?
Wait. I thought the PS4 is $100 cheaper than the Xbox One. I mean the PS4 is cheaper here (Europe) and it is in the US. So I wonder why the PS4 is so much more expensive in Brazil then.
Hey, I just looked at it, and Jetpack Joyride does not have the same control scheme. It is the "hold button to accelerate up at constant acceleration" controls like other previous games, not the Flappy Bird's "tap to give a sudden impulse" scheme.

Edit: Actually, it's a combination of many schemes. There's a gravity suit that inverts gravity. There's jumping from the ground, which is impulse-based. But the generic jetpack flying is acceleration-while-holding-based. Bottom line, I would not say it's "exactly the same idea" as flappy bird at all.
Torggler door systems
Show HN: argonPigeon – organize your media list
U.S. Census API
Well, if you'd like to be obtuse and miss the point: the difference would presumably be split between employer and employee in a manner determined by the price elasticity of supply and the price elasticity of demand. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
I wasn't aware of this and now the speaker on my 3 year old Dell Studio doesn't work properly. :(

And here in India I hear people say that you shouldn't install VLC on laptops .. (even if its not a Dell laptop) !!
I completely agree with the PS3's problems. But I am quite amazed by the fact that despite its higher price tag, its difficulty for programming, etc., the PS3 did rather well. And equally well compared to the Xbox 360. But Sony have learnt the lesson, and thus made the PS4 a far simpler (and cheaper) machine.
That's true, but unfortunately for the state of application security today, most applications developers today treat the DB as a stupid storage box, despite the fact that more effort has been put into the security model of almost any RDBMS they might be using than will be put into the whole of most applications using it, which means in terms of access control, most applications end up reinventing the wheel, badly.
I had the privilege to participate to the program last year, and it was an incredible experience. If you are interested in advanced C++ and Boost, this is a great opportunity to meet some of the best library developers around and to learn from them.
Excel: The Last Microsoft Office Stronghold
Emotional intellegence is a critical skill. Be clinical and ruthless in you culling of potential co- founders in this regard.

Do not make allowances for bad emotional behavior or lack of ability to reason properly, no matter how much you currently respect or like the person. The stress will make magnify every seemingly small issue 100 times. Try to imagine what the traits you observe early will be like under that kind if pressure.
Those agents need to speak up. They especially need to speak up when they observe their colleagues conducting themselves as the article describes.
By our first post on HN some users criticized us that we call Ospari open source but no one can see our code or download Ospari. We worked hard and released the first version today.
By that somewhat twisted logic bee keepers better start changing their terminology as well [1]. I'm a European and didn't even make the connection, despite being well informed and up-to-date about the state of affairs in Pakistan and elsewhere that US and friends choose to fly these machines.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
"how would you propose that in-app purchasing not go through GMS? Some general platform API to allow the app to do an in-app purchase with whoever wants to be a “purchase provider?”"

Actually, yes. That is how I would propose that an in-app purchasing system not go through GMS.
That “distressed baby" Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter
Ask HN: What a SaaS do you think provide the best REST API implementation?
You assume this "progress" is desirable. Maybe the guy would prefer to take his app store millions and retire in peace. :P
That's exactly what my comment said. (Although fulfilling the license doesn't mean he actually has to fork.)

In my opinion, he still isn't technically in compliance though since the license text says "You must...provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made." I could see this being issue if, for example, Mark Steve removed his code from github, then it wouldn't be clear what license the code was under.
I've discovered, between using Arch, Debian, and OpenBSD, that I rarely need the newest version of anything. The only time it has been an issue for me is really at the kernel level, when a newer kernel supported something that an older kernel didn't.