skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to avoid using the words 'always' and 'never.' I agree with the EFF but the government is never going to give up that kind of power.
Give Underhanded JavaScript a try then. It teaches you how to be an arsehole JS developer :P - published today too (http://leanpub.com/underhandedjavascript/c/NackerHews)

The book is laid out by logical topics (on how to purposely write bad/underhanded code, followed by explanation on why/how they work) instead of keywords (such as IIFEs, automatic semicolon insertion, function calls etc)

disclaimer: I wrote it

EDIT: I skimmed through Speaking JavaScript. It's a bloody good book, much better than mine. You probably should read that

One more EDIT:

Since there was another thread which I gave a coupon for HNers, here's the link:

http://leanpub.com/underhandedjavascript/c/NackerHews
I take offense to your " 'teaching everyone to code' into evil and stupid" comment.

When I say "everyone should know how to code" what I mean is that everyone should know how to open a spreadsheet and do calculations, conditionals, iterative calculations, &c. From there I feel it's natural to then teach them a little of something along the lines of Python to do some simple calculations and algorithms.

I mean that people shouldn't be afraid to use a computer to do (gasp) computations. I don't think everyone will be a coder, engineer, or architect. I don't even think most people will enjoy it, per say, but they should know how to do it (just like someone people complain about having to take math, music, or art), using a ubiquitous tool should be part of a basic curriculum.

>Indeed any consistent argument in favor of motivating people to program would at least mention aging programmers and no such mention is to be found, or at least I never noticed it.

I have no idea what you mean
This is an understandable way to look at the problem, but I think it's largely wrong. You need to capture minds while they're still very open to learning. People are locking themselves into career paths by the time they graduate college, at least in America. Student loans means getting a second degree in something you rather do is largely impossible since you have to start paying down your debt when you graduate. A higher-paying job sounds great, but when it'll take an extra $400/month in debt for the next 10 years, it's pretty hard to justify. This leads to thinking "Huh, let's engage minds earlier".

Most people in high school aren't thinking super-hard about their careers. They're thinking about school and college. Even then, kids learn about "big" achievements - RNA, species classification, electron shells, WW2, White House scandals, etc. You're aspiring to be someone if you're in an area where you have scholastic resources, not just some programmer. You're not looking so hard at money. If you're in an impoverished area where graduation rates are abysmal and you're not even being taught science, the odds of being a professional athlete or pop star look about the same as going to college - a whole different set of challenges. Let's assume we're talking about high schools with resources to even have computer classes.

Paying more money doesn't make it a sexy profession - there are plenty of "famous" programmers that the HN crowd knows about, but none of their achievements are public. Creating a business like Amazon or Facebook doesn't have the same personal allure to most people like inventing a vaccine for polio does. I bet if you asked a classroom of high schoolers who Jeff Bezos is, 85% of the room would have no idea. There's no _personal glory_ to being a programmer.

With law, you can help people's lives directly - same with being a doctor. There's a social value to those professions that seems obvious and immediate (even though it might be far from the truth). Most people want to do good in the world, and being a programmer has no obvious correlation with that. It doesn't entice students because there's no history written about programmers, no scientific experiments you do in classroom, no math taught that correlates with programming. It's in academic isolation until college, and by then, it's too late.
"Proof" is strong word here, given that thirst is a subjective phenomenon and hard to pin down. But, at least along with the assumption that a large body of related knowledge to do with physiology, evolution and psychology, not to mention common sense, is broadly correct, actor reports of thirst seem at the very least to provide strongly indicative evidence for the existence of water.

Since the existence of water is not anyway in doubt, one wonders what the point of the question is. One analogous assertion sometimes made is that the craving for religious experience proves the existence of the divine, but I think this is a far shakier proposition, more like saying "thirst proves the existence of cherry cola."
Let's get "more people to code well" first. Then let's get companies to compensate their employees fairly (i.e. more proportional to the amount of cash they generate with their if and for loops). Then maybe we can start thinking about enrolling more people in the game.
I have a Samsung galaxy gear and I like it. Although the software support right now it pretty lacking. When people ask about it I usually tell them to wait a little while for google to come out with theirs.
You're forgetting that some animals are more equal than others.
I am burned out while still in learning phase
Somehow XML became popular despite being syntactically very close to sexps... Why do you think XML succeeded where sexps failed?
People are overwhelmed by lisp syntax, because they see all the ((()) () ()) Instead of seeing the structure.
The reason I really like Freshbooks is their API. I use it to create invoices regularly.
What this suggests to me is that you'll be able to respond to change if the pieces of code you write can be reorganized. This happens when separation of concerns is properly handled, among other things. Change will not happen if you don't. Whatever the methodology. Waterfall can be great if the problem space is already well defined and understood, as implementing a protocol by spec. The specs will not change, and if they are well understood you can plan and estimate a good deal.
"Problem solving skills" is an overly broad, corporate word, which is just as bad as synergy, in my opinion.

You cannot test for "problem solving skills". However, you can test for more concrete definitions of intelligence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...). I am a decent programmer and I was never amazing at formal schooling. I always scored really high for visual–spatial intelligence in standardized intelligence while in school. My councilors told me I was good at reading graphs and maps and maybe I should go into geography. Fast-fowrard to today when I am a programmer and I've read that visual-spacial intelligence is one of the most clear predictors of a programmer's ability. Too bad my high school consoler thought I should go into geography and not programming. The real advice he should have given me was skip the whole college thing and learn how to program on your own, but that probably would not have flied with the powers that be.
That is a great idea, a series of programming exercises for the Linux kernel. I never needed to do kernel programming, but it always seemed terrible interesting to me. This will probably motivate me to actually do so!
Well... was it a civil matter? Who stole it from you?
Shellconf.py – Simple remote configuration with shell for UNIX/Linux systems
Hi all,

I have created my second Python script, and would appreciate comments, contributions or just someone to discuss it with, as i am sure it can be optimized in many ways, as it is a part of my learning. The script is for configuring UNIX/Linux machines with shell scripts with Python - So pretty much a Python way of Fucking shell scripts.

I added it to Github so you can view it there:
https://github.com/adionditsak/shellconf.py :-)

Sincerely,
Anders
This piece is genius. For those who don't get it, it's dripping in sarcasm. Not to say that the author doesn't think it would work (he may have some misgivings about just throwing money at developers), but that he's calling bullshit on the motives of those talking about "learn to code."

People are paid in more than just money. There's job security, interesting work, autonomy, and (more motivating than people think) social status. The vast majority of developers don't have anything but money, and frankly a lot of them don't even have money!

There are things more important than writing code (even good, well-engineered code aimed at solving real problems). There's: playing with your dog, going for a run, spending time with your family, and going out for a night with friends. People have chosen all these things over learning to code. Let them.

Is it not a BIG RED FLAG that the prime message is "Everyone should learn to code...well, everyone but me, anyway."?
"Like all brilliant ideas, my solution is simple". Too modest.
Code is a tool. We don't want more people to code, we want more people to make cool new things and automate.
So you're in the desert desperately thirsty; you're fairly certain that you see water in the distance. That doesn't mean you'll get water -- you may die before getting there, it's a mirage -- but it's gotta mean that water exists for why else the driving, maddening, desire to drink?

Not talking about achieving, just talking about existing... remove all religious overtones (or undertones); just on a purely practical level -- if there was no such thing as water would you ever get thirsty?
I would say "spaghettiness" is pretty much topology - not whether those interfaces are well defined or not, which is pretty much an orthogonal property.

i.e. You can have a poorly defined ESB and a big pile of spaghetti with well defined interfaces. Unfortunately I have seen both!
All the responses in this thread, plus one-off symmetrically encrypting files.
I'm really rooting for kotlin - it seems like a good runner up to scala without the poor compile times. Looking forward to a 1.0 release
I second that. It's preferable to not give any indication about which emails are or are not stored in your database.
Absolutely, there are many customers left out at +$20k a terminal per year. The questions is, which of Bloomberg's services they want the most. I wished I knew the answer.
The Whatsapp acq is the WTF one, mostly because of the valuation but that is also an example of a and acquisition that fits squarely into Facebook's business model (even though it's only tangentially related to the way they make money).

Did IBM or Microsoft do so much (as a percentage of market cap or earnings) acquiring. Is the tech industry abnormal in this sense. Is it new?

A simple common sense idea is that Google (for example) is now a big company that should be focused on moderate growth, defending their position and paying dividends. OTOH there's some intangibles in growing and acquiring and doing new things, especially for a creative tech company. Maybe it's like empires expanding in their ascendancy and decaying as they ceded territories.

I wish we could hear real opinions of people in the know without all the PR headline hunting noise.
Neat take on the game but if you get a low numbered piece stuck on the bottom row and then covered with higher number pieces it's impossible to use it.
Apparently they almost do: the emergency transponder beacon at the back of the plane can be triggered by G force, and has its own battery. http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re... That leads to the question of why this particular dog wasn't heard to bark when (and if) MH370 hit the water in the Indian Ocean, but that could probably be explained by assuming that the tail section sank fairly quickly: the beacon doesn't work underwater. But interestingly it also highlights what the Law of Unintended Consequences could do to self-powered, tamper-resistant systems: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/18/news/dreamliner-fire-report/
holy hell this makes me hate you all! =P
Bloomberg Should Have Rethought Articles on China, Chairman Says
XML was all about encoding data, not computations. It's far easier to understand data storage than computation. Lisp becomes scary once you start computing and having functional/recursive calls. Look at prolog. Prolog's data storage is very easy for anyone to grasp. dog(fido). man(john), man(dave). The moment, you start computing with prolog recursively, most folks throw up and are ready to stick to their procedural/imperative style.
I'm sorry to clip your rebel wings, but the US isn't going to start a new Cold War on account of a coup in some Eastern European country.

You drastically overestimate the importance of this event for an average American. It's just another popcorn moment on TV. Remember Egypt? No? Well, no one does now.
Pikock: A multi-platform website creation tool for people who can’t code
What is a Webserver? Part 2: Headers and Cookies.
This is awesomely simple and well-designed.
I'm guessing it's something like Xamarin: https://store.xamarin.com/

(Albeit way cheaper)
Guess what? You can now preorder .ninja TLDs and be invoice.ninja!
Not by the general electorate, no.

There are probably some arcane Parliamentary mechanisms where some sort of no confidence vote might trigger that result, but we don't directly elect the leader of our government, who by convention is the leader of the dominant political party in the House of Commons[1], nor the various ministers of state who will have executive authority (who are appointed by the PM[2]). This is probably the most significant of the "arm's length" mechanisms I mentioned before.

This can lead to obvious abuses of the system like Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister in the final years of the New Labour administration, even though the electorate were promised repeatedly and explicitly at the last general election before that happened that anyone voting for New Labour was voting for Tony Blair to serve a full third term and would not get Gordon Brown as PM.

In fact, that situation is a textbook example of why I think a power of recall is long overdue. Whatever your political views or your opinion of the individual politicians involved, the facts are clear, the people exercised their right to vote on the one chance they were given, and then they got something they had explicitly been told they wouldn't get and had no recourse.

[1] Slightly different things may happen in a coalition where no party has an outright majority, as we discovered recently, but the position is still determined by the make-up of Parliament rather than a direct vote by the general population.

[2] Technically speaking, a lot of this is probably up to Her Majesty, but I suspect any refusal by the monarch to follow convention in this respect would start the countdown to our becoming a republic, so I consider this a formality.
Middle ground is possible. Allow anyone access to the records the police are keeping on them. Make exceptions under the supervision of a judge (i.e., still allow adversarial investigations...).

The idea would be that this still creates a lot of opportunity for people to notice they don't like what the police are up to.
At least Romney knows how to run a business - which is more than can be said of a Community Activist.

Obama is going to go down as the worst President in history. Staggering debt, destruction of the Health Care industry, "Common Core", Benghazi, lies, corruption, etc.

I doubt Romney would have put the country in the mess it is now.

Hope & Change my ass...
Ha! Wrong TLA. I meant ultrasound scanners of course.

But there is this:
http://www.medgadget.com/2005/04/handheld_mri_of.html
Really, why is this the top link on this story. What value if any does it add to this article? Especially a topic change like this that's so thoroughly covered in a multitude of places. Hint: President's can be remembered for having an impact on more than one single thing.
"This is an understandable way to look at the problem."

Who says it's a problem?
US Supreme Court looks at patent trolling
I think the "learn to code" movement should eventually evolve into "learn to X", where X is something that does prove to be widely useful, and for which "coding" is a prerequisite skill. Data analysis strikes me as a possible value for that X.
This point was explored more fully in the Twitch Plays Pokemon community, where anarchy vs. democracy in the game caused a significant cultural crisis: http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y8r6d/i...

tl;dr: anarchy produces all the fun crazy ridiculous happenings, it's what makes TPP fun. If it's "taking too long" and you want to beat the game quickly just play solo; beating the game fast isn't the point.
I was initially not a Bitcoin fan. But I saw Fred Ehrsam (one of the founders of Coinbase) speak at SXSW, and it's clear that he gets it: he said one of the biggest things harming perception of Bitcoin is that the media keeps calling it a "currency", which it clearly is not. He seems to view it as a better transaction process that's more efficient than credit cards (the justification being that a credit card transaction cost is 1.5-3.0%, while Bitcoin is closer to 0.5-1.0%).

Viewed in this manner, Bitcoin starts to make sense to me. When all you're doing for a transaction is USD->BTC->USD, it doesn't matter what the price or volatility of BTC is. You're buying $30 worth of BTC which the seller is going to almost immediately convert it back to USD. It's cheaper than credit cards for two reasons: one, the risk of loss in the event a vendor is compromised is limited to the amount of the transaction, and two, the blockchain makes it really easy to automate transaction auditing.

Ehrsam was also pretty adamant that Bitcoin isn't a way around existing laws. The first generation of Bitcoin firms were run by amateurs; the second gen (which he considered Coinbase a part of) are run by people who have spent their lives working in banking and securities. This means they will operate a lot more like banks, which includes complying with all the legal regulations as well as the operational processes like outside auditing and information security. This also means that governments will still be able to restrict the flow of Bitcoin: if China decides that BTC->CNY transactions are forbidden, no trustworthy Bitcoin exchange is going to process them. Any that do are likely to be flagged as money laundering operations by the US Govt which will make it very hard for them to do business with a legitimate bank.

Again, when you look at it like this, Bitcoin is a disruptive new technology -- but it's not revolutionary. As always, the guys making the big money in a gold rush aren't the gold miners, it's the guys selling the shovels...
Show HN: nordlicht, a library that creates colorful video barcodes
Programmers already get paid more than most people. You're proposing a solution which has already been tried.
They're a last line of defence to prevent persistent electrocution, burns and lock on.

They still take 130-500ms to trip which is more than enough to knock you into VF (that only takes 3ms).

Prevention is always the best approach.
Very nice job listing background
We use the API to enter invoice payments from a Stripe-based payment site we set up for our clients... it's definitely convenient.

Of course, we also use the web UI for consultancy time tracking and a couple types of invoice generation, so I'm fond of those features as well.
I don't think we disagree that thirst presents strong grounds for belief in the existence of water, if we assume received knowledge about physiology, etc.
I've heard about it. I have an invite left in fact if anyone wants. As a linux user though it's useless to me currently.

But atom.io is not part of Github. Sure, it's made by them, but when I talk about Github I mean the website.
To me the target is being able to adapt. Patterns are not bad in themselves. What make me cringe is the obsession with MVC and derivatives. That's like trying to fit everything that is merely spherical in the "ball" label. That is "ballish", "ballable", "balloid". Maybe it's just not, and being able to take a fresh look on it might open new perspectives.

Looking for one abstraction to rule them all is is like looking for one word to rule them all. Does it make sense ?
Russia "gave" Crimea to Ukraine well after WWII. The majority of Crimeans are Russian. Putin is defintely taking a leaf out of Hitler's play book but it's more like "Khrushchev gave it and Putin took it back"
In a given context being racist means you are part of the group/family that you really need to belong to in order to ensure your survival.

Emphasis is on `being` racist.
"I have to admit it has way too many bells and whistles"

That just described half the objects in the .NET framework for me.
It is a real problem in Germany where IT market has 0% of programmers' unemployment, so they introduced Blue cards welcoming programmers from Eastern Europe. And it helps them, they get the workforce of moderate price, ready to learn and speak German. Their work language is English. So if it was a Real problem in the US, they would do the same. So far, it seems like another buzz.
I think it's massively less ambitious, which is a good point in its favour.
moving on up in complexity to getting patches accepted into the main Linux kernel source tree.

Any idea how many exercises are involved. I took a class on kernel modules, and this sounds like fun, plus it is moving towards something useful, and not just a set of exercises for learning's sake.
We're working on it, we're waiting on https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF/issues/12
How often do most people write XML?
I'm actually curious at which difficulties you ran into when creating the app without authentication (have been thinking about this myself, just didn't create it yet)
I'm some levels in and this is amazing! You have to be actually motivated to make it and have a Linux machine around to go ahead, but I think it's run by some good kernel hackers.
Only if he is successful.

While personally, I am of the mind that software patents should be eliminated entirely, the concept of patents appears in the constitution[1], which makes it very hard to make substantive changes, and there are a lot of people aligned to keep current laws in place. If you fundamentally believe that an idea on its own that has not been instantiated in a product has value (which is a basic concept of patents), then trolls are very hard to eliminate. What if an inventor sells his patent to a lawyer in order to monetize it (his protected right) because he lacks the resources to litigate himself? Then is that lawyer a troll, or just an enforcer of the inventor's right?

It's easy to say we are trying to eliminate trolls, but it's hard to draw a black and white distinction between trolls and legitimate plaintiffs if you fundamentally believe that an idea without a product has value, and that concept is in the constitution (or at least,the constitution has been interpreted that way to date).

[1] Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8
D3 has a nice formatting helper functions:

> d3.format('.2%')(.223)
"22.30%"

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Formatting

It'd also be cool if mousing over the inner circle updated the coloring of teams, showing their probability of reaching a certain game.
Analyze your non-scalable MYSQL and suggest a detailed distribution policy