skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read it, but my point is none of this got more proprietary in 4.4, which is the line I quoted and refuted. Cloud services have always been proprietary because it costs money to run them.

If you want to complain that not everything in Android is completely open source, including the cloud services part, that's a different issue. But many of Peter Bright's complaints are just plain wrong:

> The non-Gmail e-mail client has a poor reputation in this regard.

Both it and GMail are based on the same code base, UnifiedEmail, which is maintained: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Unif...

> Right; you can use forks of some of the apps because Google hasn't done a very good job of maintaining the AOSP ones. Which is... what I said.

Yeah, and people are forking Linux because it isn't well maintained. Oh, no wait, people are forking Linux because that's one of the main ideas behind open source software: you can fork it and make it do what you want.

> Sure, except neither of those fulfils the contract of the API. They might be good enough, but if an app has a button that says "share this on G+" and it ends up sharing on Facebook instead, that'd be a little weird, don't you think?

This isn't how the sharing API works at all, and he's clearly never used it. All you do is add a ShareActionProvider to your ActionBar and it works with anything that supports the sharing intent. You don't say "I can share with G+, or Facebook, or..." like he seems to think. (http://developer.android.com/training/sharing/shareaction.ht...)

> What on earth are you talking about? You're railing against strawmen.

No, this isn't a strawman, she's refuting exactly what he said. The Android platform has standards and you have to stick to them, just like any other platform you want to base yourself on if you want to be compatible. The APIs happen to be the standard for Android. Without them there would be no compatibility between various Android distributions. You can, of course, always add additional APIs on top, which is exactly what Samsung, Motorola, etc. do with their SDK add-ons. Really though, you can't complain that "[a]ny platform using Android in this way would have only a limited ability to take the platform in a different direction from the one Google chose" because "[v]arious aspects of how Android is used are determined by the underlying APIs", and then complain they don't provide an API for other, more proprietary things like an IAP system ("Why not ship an IAP system that has code that defaults to using Google's services on the back-end, but could be swapped out without breaking apps"). This point is total insanity by Peter.

> Read Ben Evans' piece on how Microsoft should relegate Android to being nothing more than a stack of debugged device drivers. Sure, you might take bits of Google's userland too.

This is exactly what FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch did to bootstrap. They both took the Android kernel, the input system, etc. So clearly it works, and I think is a much more interesting use of the platform than just taking the whole thing and slapping some new paint on it; why would I use that over stock Android?
That's all true, but even gigantic insurance companies are sometimes overwhelmed by a surge in claims. Is that fraud too?

People need to understand that insurance is a kind of gambling -- a bet that claims won't wipe out the fund pool, that a random act of nature won't undermine the actuarial assumptions on which the pool is designed.
Eh, you lay down with dogs you get up with fleas. I didn't even look at the byline. I just knew it was from Wired.
This article resonated deeply with my own experience. Like Rohlf, I learned to program TI-Basic in middle school, and like him, I've had the ability to see several different teaching paradigms when it comes to computer science.

In the high school computer science courses I was able to take, the programs were relatively simple with an, in my opinion, too-overt emphasis on object oriented programming. It was in java, and very little of the class focused on the "how" aspect of the language.

My first CS courses at university were in Ada. I don't know how many of y'all have programmed in Ada, but I think about it like a wordier C that doesn't let you just get away with shit because it's strongly typed. This was the language we were taught basic control structures in and, to be fair, the way we were taught focused on good styling so that our code would be unreadable mush.

The UNIX class was in C, and it is, in my opinion, the most rigorous course that most of the students will take on their way to the bachelor's degree. The students build, across a series of projects, a shell that can execute commands and run simple scripts. The sorts of problems encountered introduce the students to the nature of C at a very low level, as well as the sorts of structures that can be used to solve practical problems.

Many of the high level more theoretical classes are language-agnostic, and many of the students use either Python or C#. I think that it's good that these higher-level theoretical classes allow us to choose our own language, because I think that the ways in which different programmers attack the same problem might bias them towards one or another language.

Recently, the lower-level classes had their programming language changed. Heeding the argument that Ada wasn't super relevant in the higher-level classes, the faculty changed the language to Python. This was, I think, a mistake. My opinion is that the lower level classes should be taught in C for many of the same reasons Rohlf mentioned. I think it's important that the students have an idea of how their data is being represented on the disk so that they could better understand the costs associated with certain tasks.

The best argument that I heard for Python was that not everybody taking these into classes go on to write the sort of code that requires something fast or efficient. Python makes data processing easy, which is really the most important thing that students should learn in intro-to-programming classes. I'd say this is a fair point.
> What has that taught anyone? Merely syntax.

That is a completely backwards way at looking at learning to code.

Sure you can boil down trivial examples to make the process one of learning syntax, but the moment you do anything of your own design you begin learning the fundamentals of computer science.

They may not be able to explain to you how sorting works, or many other minute details, but they will probably be able to tell you how they were able to get pressing the screen to result in the character moving up.

After that they will realize the character can't move up forever, so what should happen when it reaches the top? etc. etc.

Simple but non-trivial things are exactly what is needed to get someone to dip their toe in computer science, and will certainly work as a stepping stone to more formal processes later.

Pretending that one liners aren't valuable so by extension small programs aren't valuable is asinine. If you want to point out specific examples then feel free, but this abstract focus at the start just makes you seem like you are focusing on things they shouldn't care about.

As another note, sorting numbers 9/10 is a solved and thus uninteresting problem, don't ever make someone do it until they know a ton about computers.
Such a depressing question. I reckon the book "The high cost of free parking" goes into detail on this question.
Gigabyte’s Brix Pro reviewed
What is your domain of expertise? Hit me up (email in the profile) if you're interested in working with Python and/or JS (Angular mainly).
Any chess players want to test this?
I'm a bike commuter and I commute on these streets. I don't think this is as much of an issue in Philadelphia as it is elsewhere. The roads are all small, one-way streets with stop signs at every block. Cars are rarely going fast enough that they need to overtake a bike before they reach the next intersection where they can pass more easily. Less anecdotally, New York has been making these changes with many intersections and finds the roads are safer for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians.
I agree with you, but this somewhat flies in the face of what he says. He is arguing that CS is important, not just learning to code. But I think learning to code is important because it is what attracts creatives, and both creatives and engineers are needed in development.

There are two things that attracted me to programming:

1. Telling something else to do what you want, and it does it.

2. Being able to be creative within bounds in a way that allowed me to learn new cool things each day and build with those new bits of knowledge upon other bits, to great things that were entertaining.

Without some bounds, chaos and floundering reign. Electric slot racing was cool because a realistic (per ratio) speed was involved, but control was possible, and it was a simple control, variable power to the engine. Having to steer those cars without slots at that speed is beyond our abilities. This is the problem today, to me. There are so many options. There are no slots in the track. No Apple II. And, there are now so many prewritten solutions. You don't need to write a game to find what you were thinking of. There is little reason for the younger generation to develop anything on their own. My kids just play games. I know I couldn't get them to develop if I tried, though I tried once and failed. They'd rather be creative with markers and paper- and that's ok. But, it makes me miss my younger years on the first home computers; I can't give that to them; that era is gone, and I miss it.
21 Awesome Mobile App Developer Resources You Don’t Know About
"new PAths through grAss byPAssing sidewalks and Paved PAths" You might consider writing rap.
OSX so no license keys or activation. I had to ask where the disks were kept the first couple times but I was careful to frame it as "I know what I'm doing, I just need the disks." My parents didn't mind.

Also we were covered by AppleCare and I had no problem calling in for myself.

This was in the PPC days so no VMs for me. Eventually I got a used PC from my dad's office for like $45 which has probably been through 80 Linux reinstallations. WiFi was a nightmare though, and I eventually gave up on desktop linux. Still have like 4 DO boxes and have experimented endlessly on AWS.

Since it is impossible to autonomously do payments on the internet before age 18, my parents' willingness to let me use their credit card (and then settle accounts each month via allowance and occasionally debits from my savings) was also crucial. No other way I would have been able to play with web hosting or actually make any projects live.
TeX and TikZ were my saving grace in college. I really don't know where I'd be without it.

Seeing your code work is great, but seeing the results of my TeX and TikZ code personally provides me with an additional level of gratification. It's awesome!

My friends would spend several (painful) hours in Word trying to format our (bio)chemistry lab reports perfectly to the professor's/TA's specifications.

I would just punch in my numbers into a text file, run it through a LuaTeX template I wrote, and would end up with a perfectly formatted lab report.

Now, I work in R&D for an IVD company and employ the same logic for my notebook studies (which require lot #s, expiration dates, asset #s, locations, etc).

I realize TeX isn't for everyone, but you should seriously look into it if you think you can benefit from it.

TeX has saved me days, if not weeks, such that I can focus on more important stuff rather than struggling with Word.
>Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together?

Did you even read the article? The point she made is that feminists are trying to "fix" the gender ratio in tech by expanding the definition of hacker to people who have no idea what solder even is and have never printed a hello world in their life.

>dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in").

These things are in no way relevant to producing good code. They're completely orthogonal.

>Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social skills and no interest outside of technology?

The only person putting forth that argument here is you.
I would hope that Ars' editorial staff realizes that short term gains at the cost of long term losses is not worth it.

Then again, this is hardly the first P.B. story that's caused controversy and caused Ars readership/legitimacy, so I am probably wrong.
Flappy Bird Is Gone From The App Store
Nicely put. Not convinced by the 'special olympics' comment (aren't we working towards complete equality of people here?) but get the sentiment.

I personally think the self-confidence to create or do what one wants, put the head above the parapet etc., should be nurtured in every school-goer and beyond. It's normally the cultural norms of schools and wider society that squash any desire to confidently attempt something unusual in life. It's alright for athletes, coming back to the olympic theme, as that particular abnormal activity is celebrated and funded.

In essence, too many small-minded, anxious bullies and borderline psychopaths in positions of influence. Influence itself needs decentralizing?
It's missing ratings and clock functionality, but I'm thinking about adding those and:
- The ability to fork games
- An asm.js-based chess engine

Thoughts?
Several of these photos depict actual park space. See the second photo, for instance.
You have to allow for exceptions. Talking about apples is not denying the existence of oranges.

It is just very hard for a 20+ to become interested in something that is not related to something prominent in their life thus far. A boy whose life has been about cars and football is not very likely to pick up an interest in butterflies.
It is a remarkably easy to navigate for how unique it is. Really a treat for the eyes! Crown Hall is also very beautiful:

http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/12...
I did work around the neighborhood to buy a license to Windows 2000 Pro just so I would always have my own copy and license in case I needed to blow it away.
The problem being, if you show up and all you know is Delphi / Pascal / Ada, you're going to be unemployable.

[I'm a veteran of a ton of Object Pascal, btw. Done some Delphi, too -- it was nice. But.]

In general, pushing a niche language as The One does not do a beginner a service. Delphi has never been more than a niche.

We had a guy at Apple decide to do his project in Oberon. Super smart guy who pretty good work. He wound up getting fired because it wasn't a smart choice for the people around him who had to take over the code.

I don't know why some people over-index on programming language. You use what's appropriate. If you're working alone, do whatever floats your boat. If you're on a team, using the Latest Shiny Thing or The Most Correct Safest Thing may not be the best choice. If you're a student, using your professor's favorite language (we used to call these little pet horrors PL/Prof or PROF-TRAN) outside of the course is probably a bad choice -- you want to learn what the market is, and you need to know what the weak points of your chosen language are.

It's particularly poignant to see "Java only" kids come out of school who are utterly ignorant of memory models, barely know what XOR is, and who can only express themselves in terms of classes and interfaces. There's more to life than that.
What is your interpretation Paul? What did he say? Do you think Tim did anything wrong or do you advice that Tim sticks to his guns on this one & shouldn't have caved in with that second memo?
> ... when exactly it's not considered "married"?

Easy to test on a case-by-case basis -- either a person can or can't drop one language and become productive in another in a short time. If they can, then they're not married to a single language, unlike cybernetic swans who mate for life.
"Woz was the tech genius, not Jobs....I've never heard of a tech genius who also cared much about the qualities you mention."

I hope you've considered that your worldly experience may not be comprehensive.

I've known plenty of good programmers who care about all the things I mentioned. They just don't self-select with the Linux user groups of the world, so you're unlikely to come upon them if that's where you hang out.
Talk To Your Child On Their ......  SHOELACES
I'm not sure most of gets called computer science is actually science it terms of "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe" as wikipedia puts it. Mostly it would be better called software engineering. I think people tend to call it science because that sounds sexier.

The stuff the writer of the article says he supports in the Apps For Good initiative is even less science like. "competitor analysis, testing, monetizing, building a team, and legal / social ramifications of releasing an app" is business studies, not science.
That's the problem with analogies, they are analogies.
But I bet if we compared core sizes that distinction would disappear, a CUDA core is incredibly compact after all.
It's a good rant. There are concrete suggestions for improvement, and also concrete examples of where some people went a little too far.

I'm less happy about excluding people who are coming into computing late, though.
I wanted to know what HN consensus was on this sort of thing, because it seems to me this is not something that inexperienced programmers do (like SQL injection).

Also, full disclosure: I work for Google.
The supposition is that if enough car traffic or parking would eventually remove the snow on its own, which is accurate in my experience.
I wish driving and owning a car started to become discouraged the same way sin taxes and bylaws are discouraging cigarette smoking. Sitting outside on a bench in Honolulu yesterday, I looked around and saw that half of what I was seeing were roads and cars. This space that could be so beautiful (it's Hawaii after all) was overwhelmingly just about being a transportation network.

I love the feeling of driving a car, but I think the cost is too high -- So much financial and mental stress (not to mention so much death -- A classmate from high school was killed in a crash just last week) is caused by these things and they bisect our physical spaces making so much of our world uninhabitable and depressing. I realize people need transportation but I had hoped the rising cost of oil would cause a paradigm shift in how we commute, and that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
They could make an android phone, but people would not buy it, because people inexplicably hate Apple. These same people are also often Microsoft fans. I know several people who proudly claim that their family is Apple free, and always will be. I am not sure where such venom for a company comes from.
>On the other hand it has a pretty strong "I got mine" component to it, where she laments the negative effects these changes have had on her personally but doesn't acknowledge that while she's in a position she likes that doesn't at all mean it is, or would be, like that for many others.

These special ed for women programming events are harmful to all women, not just women who already program. You can't de-emphasize gender by putting more emphasis on it...
C++ and C are completely different beasts. C is an elegant clean small language with few distracting elements, making it very suitable for a teaching language. C++ is a grotesquerie more suitable for a carnival horror show than something you want to introduce to new programmers.

Unfortunately at some point, teaching OOP became all the rage in schools, and so C++ is chosen instead. That's a mistake, Java or C# should be used for teaching OOP, C should be used to teach data structures and at least some algorithms. Without hands on memory allocation, you're not really getting a full understanding of how data structures work.
Caltech: secrets of the world’s number one university
It sounds like working for a self-insured company is strictly worse for employees than working for a company that offers insurance through an insurance company, risk-wise.
...and if you log in with Twitter, you can see what the authenticated experience is like.
I think C is a great language to teach someone why all of the CS theory matters. When you write Java, almost everything you do will "work" and it will probably run pretty fast on your Core i7. When you write C you have to be much more deliberate. There's no massive standard library to do arr.sort() for you and you have to really think about how to implement some basic processes that you took for granted. I think C made me a much better Java programnmer because I now understand what the most minimal way to complete a task can be. No more HashMap<String, ArrayList<Object>> once you've played with structs and C arrays.
I don't think that's what she's saying. Note that she defines the personality type as an interest in "solving the puzzle or building something." Even if you don't have access to computers to tinker with, the sort of person who tends to become good at programming is the type who has always been innately curious and tinkering with something.
This is why we can't have nice space-things.
Twitter signup not working (http://Twitter.com/signup)
> * Some no loger turn off automatically, tho

And you don't think a kettle burning its way through your kitchen is a fail !
We could start be simply encouraging it less — spending less public money on roads, having more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly laws (and enforcement), and creating zoning codes that require less parking for development projects would all go a long way.
But not totally, and would presumably protect against catastrophic catastrophes by spreading the meta-risk.

You could make the same argument against having home or medical insurance, that it erodes the advantage of having the totality of your take home pay. But it seems responsible to have home insurance and medical insurance, and it would seem responsible for a self-insurer to reinsure.
So "traffic calming" = congestion, frustration, and dangerous driving for bikes and cars. Not a great idea in my book to spend more money (and have a higher continued upkeep cost) to make the roads more dangerous and less useful. I suppose if they put an island there then they understand the snow is going to get piled on it and then expand into the rest of the road, right?
Sin Taxes and shaming are the wrong way to go about shifting away from car-centric cities - people still have to get where they need to go. You first need to build effective public transportation networks, bike lanes, and restructure cities to that long trips are less necessary. Once you've done all that, then you can start punishing people for driving.
Seems to me the author vividly conveys what she means by "hacker" in the very paragraph you quoted:

technologist
addiction
solving puzzles
building things
"victory!" moment
impose will on electronics

These things are done and felt for their own sake and not as a means to an end, like a paycheck. Perhaps that's the main difference.
I agree with you.

At first, I would use TikZ anywhere and everywhere I could just because it was so novel to me.

I've found that TeX's and TikZ's novelty can fade pretty quickly, but their usefulness when used appropriately only grows with time. They are, however, very situational tools.

> I sat down and read most of the manual in one sitting...

Dear God, man, are you sane!? I'm joking. :)

But sometimes I would just look at the manual in my spare time because it really is that beautiful.
Sorry, but reality disagrees. Companies with money bet on a solution usually don't last, and communities build around software do last for decades.

.Net itself is the result of Microsoft abandoning (without even an upgrade path) all their previous developers twice, at around 2000 and 2002.