skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"C is about as close to teaching the mechanics of the computer as you can get while staying portable"

Why is it important to teach the underlying mechanics of a computer in a data structures course, or an algorithms course, or really anything beyond OS or computer architecture courses (and perhaps a compilers course)? The reality is that the way computers work "under the hood" is counterintuitive in an extreme sense. Pointers are a counterintuitive abstraction. Fixed-width arithmetic is counterintuitive, as is having integer division always round down, as is using floating pointer numbers to represent fractions. Yes, eventually a CS student should learn about these things -- but an introductory course is the wrong place, as is basically anything that deals with purely abstract notions (data structures, algorithms, cryptography, etc.).
> Frankly, posting and upvoting that sort of comment is the behavior of a lynch mob.

Have you been reading the comments on the many political articles that now cross the front page of this site? The quoted comment is fairly tame stuff compared to some of the opinions expressed in those threads.
What is the frequency of these kinds of incident per thousand live births? What I'm saying is should you not be in favour of a much larger risk pool? Is there any way self-insuring corporations can pool risk without the overheads of an actual insurance company?

UK perspective: I'm interested in the concept of 'health analytics' as our present government are sort of dancing round the edges of the NHS (knowing that any form of direct privitisation/move to insurance based benefits would result in prompt removal from office).
Anyone familiar with how netflix sorts and delivers their poster repository ? Their OSS stuff on github has nothing for that.
I'm acutely aware that I'm effectively posting on your territory, but the term "lynch mob" seems to be almost comically inappropriate as a description of what actually occurred.
I'm getting "Service failed to retrieve this item."

For every item I tried to export.
The dependency goes two ways. For example, there is no German car without parts coming from Switzerland. I hope that Brussels does not act offended and stays reasonable. Any action that hurts both parties would just be childish. However, they Swiss already struggled in the past to explain their democracy to the EU bureaucrats. Being used to decide for themselves, European politicians often fail to fully comprehend a system in which the people have the last word.
Other than the seemingly obvious benefit that one gets by starting earlier in life with something, it seems to be that it is a decently widespread attitude that if you didn't start programming when you were 12 or whatever, by some mystical voice that called you towards the terminal, than you will never be a good/great programmer (or "hacker"). Or, that you just aren't passionate enough, or else you would have inevitably found yourself tinkering with computers or whatever. So people like me who started in university (and who never really tinkered with anything other than Lego, when I was like 7) are doomed to a life of sub-par mediocrity, which is kind of disheartening considering that this looks to be what I want to do as a whole career, i.e. a very large part of my life. But I guess I have to get used to a lifetime of being the inferior programmer who gets all the scraps, or just make a mess which the 10X programmers, or rockstar programmers, or whatever they will be called, will have to clean up after.
I didn't start to program until college, but I would absolutely describe myself as a math hacker starting in elementary school. It's the almost addictive problem-solving mentality that I associate with hacking, not 1s and 0s on a computer. I think if someone doesn't have that sort of mentality, they won't become a hacker no matter how early they're exposed to code -- and if they do have that mentality, they'll become a hacker of some sort whether or not code is the thing that ultimately holds their interest.
AOL may be a self insured group where it pays all of the medical costs for its employees. The insurance company merely provides administrative services such processing claims and paying providers.
No. If it was an EU country, same thing would happen. EU would crack down on treaty violation.
> this behavior will be exhibited at a very young age, or not at all

That's so obviously false that I doubt she's saying it. I suspect it's more like: these qualities tend to come up in childhood, so if we want to see more of them, that's where we should focus.

Everything about your comment ("I figured out HTML on my own") makes me bet you that had these qualities in spades as a kid long before you had a computer. All this existed before computers, after all. I remember Jerry Weinberg saying that he knew he wanted to devote his life to computers from the day Time Magazine ran a futuristic cover story about them in the late 1930s. Another farm kid, as it happens. He went to college to study computers and found they didn't exist yet, so he majored in physics and bided his time until programming became a thing.

I wonder sometimes whether any of this is about childhood per se or the fact that children are more likely to do things out of play, to figure stuff out, see what will happen, and so on. If that's it, then we can dispose of the controversy by agreeing that people who come to programming purely as a career or (god forbid) for status will do worse not if they're too old, but if they're too uncurious.
>I'm delighted to hear that this child is doing well, and I'm utterly appalled at Tim Armstrong's attitudes towards the lives of his employee's children. Apparently it's possible to pay a programmer $100K/year, but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I hear from an AOL recruiter.

All he said is they changed the 401k plan because of unexpectedly high medical expenses. He didn't say or imply he wished they didn't save the baby. I can give the kid's mother a pass on two pages of disjointed emoting, but I don't understand why a disinterested observer would write something like you've written.
Even the voting booklets were pretty biased against passing (IMO of course), although I'm not surprised at this result. The type of xenophobia often attributed to hillbillies in american culture is a lot more common in Switzerland than I expected. The sad thing is most people I've meet which hold this belief, could themselves be considered foreigners.
The article I'd really like to read is about the "whistleblower" (or more of them) who gave Easterbrook all the info for that 1980 article. It would be very fitting to today's world.
The litmus test:

Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school? Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?

If not, then what exactly justified reading texts/facebook messages/emails between friends?

>corruptive infos

What exactly is corruptive information?
Half a billion people in the EU have the right to live and work in any of the 27 member states. People from some very poor countries can live and work in very rich countries. That's actually a massive amount of freedom of movement, and dismantling of immigration barriers.
And yet Christians have, at many times, rejected science in favor of dogma. See, for example, Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Nicolas Copernicus, and other scientists who were tortured, excommunicated, imprisoned, or had their works banned by the Church in the 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries, when the Catholic Church had essentially absolute political power.

It wasn't until the Church lost its political power that anti-scientific sentiment diminished.
To quote the article:

"Those in favour of mass migration says the policy will benefit the Swiss economy"

It is kind of interesting that mass migration opponents have a list of reasons while proponents usually wave this one only.
Hmm, 2 out of 5 stars only because the nameservers (which are commonly only queried by recursive nameservers such as your ISP's) don't have AAAA records? I tried disabling IPv6 some time ago, and my site was one of the few still working next to Google services and a select other few. The recursive DNS servers did all the v4 work for me.

Sure, 4/5 stars because I don't have one of the items (v6 nameservers), but 2/5? The second point is inherent from the first, and www.lucb1e.com having no AAAA record is no problem because I don't use it (and it's resolved now, they cache results).
The EU/Swiss deal is (I think) an all-or-nothing deal about immigration/customs/etc where either side can pull out completely. Switzerland might have just pulled out completely.
No, there is no proprietary code in the official kernel as distributed on kernel.org. There is a very long list of companies that have their own version of the kernel, which they keep to themselves, which contains their own proprietary changes, and which they never distribute to anyone else. There is no requirement whatsoever that you give your changes to Linux to anyone, there is only a requirement that your changes be GPL'd if you do choose to distribute them.
Yeah, are the emails from this service sent manually?
Risky - is possible but you would basically be trusting the machine (or anyone else who scans the cup) not to steal all your money. You could limit the damage with a separate wallet I guess, but generally the payer should be the one initiating the transaction, actively and not passively. Maybe when M of N transactions are implemented, this type of thing would be more feasible?
How come UK wants to stop paying immigrants from poor countries unemployement benefits?

If you think about it you'll wonder how they managed to pay newly immigrated poor people unemployement benefits in the first place.
My parents never restricted / supervised me and my brother's internet access much, if at all. I think this gave us an advantage, more than anything else, in terms of learning responsible internet usage from a relatively young age, and knowing that I wasn't being carefully watched everywhere I went online (by them, anyway!) was more or less essential in my getting involved in the communities that led to my developing an interest in programming.

Of course, really this comes down to parenting philosophy more than anything else, but those are my 2¢.
This is potentially good news for immigrants from the rest of the world. Currently, there are very strict quotas in place to make up for the large inflow of Europeans. In future, both categories will have quotas, which could result in more generous quotas for countries like the US. In an ironic twist, this could result in a more globally oriented Switzerland.
I think saying "I'm utterly appalled" on an online chat board is a lot different from joining a mob to kill someone. Let's not make any Tom Perkins-esque comparisons here [1].

And people should certainly be allowed to react when those in positions of power say appalling things. Whether he thinks that is absolutely unacceptable is doubtful, but he clearly thinks that the $7.1M in healthcare spending is something that should have to come out of the workers' 401k. The OP wasn't quoting Armstrong, but what Armstrong actually said/did clearly mirrors OP's paraphrasing -- that health spending shouldn't be the duty of AOL, because it should be passed on to the employees through the form of a 401k cut.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230454950...
The Solo Founders Who Didn't Take No As An Answer
Yeah, my speakers have blown up too... damn Dell and their cheap shit.
Why Nutrition Is So Confusing
I hate to include designers in that maligned category, because their work is actually extremely valuable.

The existence of "women-in-tech" advocates who want other people to program (but not themselves) is baffling to me. Why do we need such people?
Why should foreigners want to bring more foreigners into the country?

It will drive their wages down and decrease living conditions (both short term).

You might argue it would be "a fair thing" for migrants to support migration, but it's not a rational one.
Dan Lynch ported some of pstricks to js[1], which you might be interested in checking out. Don't know if you can do intersections and cuts though...

[1] https://github.com/pyramation/LaTeX2HTML5/blob/master/lib/ps... demo here http://latex2html5.com/
The principle of charity has long since expired and now we are left to ponder whether you've ever even been to a city. To answer your question, yes, the best way to get people to a stadium is, by far, to remove the parking lot. Here's one of the most well-attended MLB stadiums in the country. It's served by two streetcar lines and a mainline railroad.

https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3...

Here's Wrigley Field:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a...

At Yankee stadium they built a parking garage and so few people use it that the garage operator is bankrupt. They are tearing them down. The stadium is served by a subway line and Metro North even has a station literally called "Yankees".

I suggest you get out of Mom's basement and see the country before holding forth on its infrastructure.
You are ignoring the long list of companies that modify the Linux kernel for their own purposes, never releasing their changes, and sometimes using their modified kernel on a web server that runs web apps for their users. As long as they are not distributing their modified kernel to anyone they can keep their changes secret.
Mathematics is a branch of applied Computer Science
Yes, it was the post 9/11 environment that led to the post 9/11 changes. We are still on that footing. But, if it was 9/11 that caused us to form consensus, and thus move so swiftly at that time, then what, exactly, is it now?

Because I would argue that the momentum is categorically not "towards rolling things back". Honestly, I find that an astonishing statement in light of the fact that 12+ years later, we are still engaged in a rapidly progressing surveillance agenda and just learning about the Snowden revelations regarding same. This does not even touch the fact that drone strikes have risen sharply, we're still engaged in extrajudicial killings, Guantanemo is still open, and on and on.

So, it's not just that we have lingering laws on the books post 9/11 that will take time to unwind. It's that we are still engaging in--and indeed, expanding--activity supported by these laws. What is the driver for this? What is the end goal?
4 and 5 show some open space and later, by Gino's steak house a park is discussed (and sort of shows).

Looking at a map doesn't show a massive amount of parks, but there are several block sized spaces within about 1/2 mile.
Sprinkle Some Innovation On It
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...

With most countries with high amounts of immigrants being either quite poor or quite rich (especially those in Europe) and Switzerland obviously belonging to the rich European ones... it's not obvious what good could come from trying to leave this list of the richest, highest-immigration countries.
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ has some numbers for % of traffic to major sites (google, facebook, yahoo, akamai, etc) from each ISP that goes over IPv6.

Some major US ISPs:
Comcast: 20.61%
AT&T: 13.53%
Verizon Wireless (not FiOS): 40.03%
Time Warner Cable: 3.88%
T-Mobile USA: 9.58%
Google Fiber: 71.87%

Very large ISPs have been deploying it because it actually simplifies their internal networks (which can be too large for RFC1918 space) and because carrier grade NAT is expensive.
He's entitled to his (ignorant) opinions, but he's not entitled to be so pointlessly rude and cruel with his method of expressing it.

If this was a dinner party, I'd quietly ask him to excuse himself, and he'd never be invited again. His choice of language was pointlessly cruel and outrageous.
A game to learn a new language
It may impact Swiss nationals in other countries as well. One of my Swiss colleagues is pretty worried about what this means for his Danish job. My understanding is that it's possible he could be deported, though that probably won't happen. The freedom-to-reside treaty is reciprocal: Danish nationals can work and live in Switzerland under equal conditions that Swiss nationals can work and live in Denmark. Now it appears that Switzerland has abrogated parts of its treaty obligations, and is imposing new restrictions on Danish nationals living in Switzerland. It's not clear what this means for the treaty rights of Swiss nationals living in Denmark. They may no longer have any treaty rights if Switzerland is deemed to have withdrawn from the treaty. Though Denmark might voluntarily choose to grandfather in existing residents, or give them an easy path to apply for a new visa (probably the business community will strongly push for this).
I think what makes flappy bird hard for beginners is that there isn't a practice mode which would let you play in invincible mode.

Dying at the first (or maybe second, third, or fourth) pipe makes it hard to get into a rhythm.

I considered making a Flappy Bird Practice iOS game, but am concerned about getting the physics right for the work you do with it to be meaningful.
What is the best programming language in the world
All of that may, or may not, be true. But none of it addresses the issue I was questioning, which is how anybody can claim to understand "Tim Armstrong's attitude towards the lives of his employee's children" based on nothing more than this one news article.

I'm saying we shouldn't be rushing to judgment, and creating this caricatured images of Armstrong (or anybody else) and basically screaming "off with his head", without sufficient information.

Again, I don't know him... never met the guy in my life. He may be a complete douchebag and a total jackass for all I know. But it would be premature to conclude any of that from this story.
How CodePath Trains Developers To Build In A Mobile World
> I think you've benefited very heavily (a lot more than you may realize) from the work of people who did have more formal training, and who used that knowledge to build the systems that you in turn have built upon.

And your point is? Am I supposed to create a shrine to the people who built the first microprocessor?

> You're right, it does take much less effort and skill to run moderately high-traffic WordPress-based web site these days. That wasn't always true, though. In the 1990s and even into the early 2000s, it did take skill to get the most out of web servers with clockrates below 200 MHz, maybe 16 MB of RAM if lucky, very limited storage, and limited network connectivity. Specialists were needed in cases like that.

I'm sorry but it's not 1999. I can't imagine anyone winning a potential client over today by saying "You couldn't do in 1999 what you're doing without someone like me" or "I will architect your website so that it can run smoothly on a server with 32MB of RAM."

> What you seem to consider "ignorance" is usually just considered "forethought" and "planning ahead" by those involved.

So struggling to hire (because you're looking for overqualified candidates a lot of whom don't want to work on a simple website with less than 100,000 visits per month) and increasing your burn rate by paying $140,000/year fully loaded for web developers you can call "engineers" is "forethought" and "planning ahead"?

I know enough people who have worked at typical VC backed startups to know that most of them never grow big enough to have the kind of scalability and performance challenges they'd all like to believe they're going to have. And as a practical matter, if you look at the great companies that have emerged in the past decade (think Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and how their systems have evolved as they scaled, it's pretty clear that if you become a massive success, you're going to need to substantially rewrite your code base anyway and by that time you won't have to hunt for the highly technical engineers you need. They will be knocking on your door.

The biggest risk to just about every new startup is not having a developer who is a little too friendly with an ORM and who might have to turn to StackOverflow for help with a complex SQL query. It's getting a good enough product launched before you miss your market window and/or run out of cash.
I'm not saying that she started from a privileged position, just that she had/has one now.
Doing a sound synth in JavaScript
Why ActiveRecord is great and also a big problem
How I do unit testing in rails apps
The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies
Show HN: Play local videos on your Chromecast
You are right again. But I will complicate the installation.
The PHP files are secure, they are classes ore arrays.
if you execute them nothing happens. We have an .htaccess file in core applications folder. The .htacces file rejects all requests.

We would provide security tips also for nginx users.
Just to repeat all files except index.php are classes ore arrays
and and they don't execute any code.
>If you think about it you'll wonder how they managed to pay newly immigrated poor people unemployement benefits in the first place.

And if you research it rather than just think about it you'll know that the UK doesn't just dole out benefits to newly arrived EU migrants.
The question is: does he or she make fanny packs a cause for themselves outside of threads like this? If not, then they're actually showing a pretty healthy attitude.
IIRC, Switzerland reserves certain rights on immigration.
The Putin Games – The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics Parody Song
From the author's article I got the sense she was talking about workplace sexual harassment.

Yes, my rant was in reaction to a discussion of a workplace issue where my suggestion that the woman in question dress a little more conservatively as just one part of her overall approach to handling the situation inspired controversy and was deleted as an inappropriate suggestion as to what a woman could do when dealing with an overly-friendly man on the job. I.e I was suggesting that dressing more conservatively on the job in reaction to a problematic situation which had already arisen (not as some sweeping policy "just in case") was a means to politely signal "I am not inviting your advances" without making a big stink out of it. I think if you continue to be eye-candy while having a fit about a man being very friendly to you, your behavior is part of the problem. It isn't helpful to say "I should be able to show up at work damn well naked and men should RESPECT ME ANYWAY" -- an argument I have seen (some variation of) before. I think that is completely unrealistic.
According to that list, 28.9% of the Swiss population are immigrants. Even if the proposed quota cuts immigration in half, it will still stay one of the top countries in that regard.
> You are ignoring the long list of companies that modify the Linux kernel for their own purposes ...

No, I'm addressing your prior claim that the Linux kernel is not open-source. The claim is false.

Also, companies that change the kernel, and then release their changed kernels, cannot do so without also releasing their source.

The claim is false, in whatever form it takes.
I consider David Skok's article on SaaS metrics[1] to be the best articulated and actionable source on this topic. It contains definitions of metrics, why they're important and even an Excel template that I've adapted to run my own SaaS business on. His article on the impact of churn on SaaS businesses[2] is also a must read even if you think you have a handle on it.

Another great source is Christoph Janz's blog, in particular his KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS startups[3].

[1] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

[2] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/why-churn-is-critical-in-saa...

[3] http://christophjanz.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/a-kpi-dashboard-...
Still makes sense at the margin. Updated wording slightly to clarify.
I have made my application public:
https://github.com/mustafaakin/cast-localvideo