skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suggest you get an 8 bitter, or an atmel or a pic chip and learn how to program on that, as close to the hardware as possible. So, yes, that means assembly.

This will give you invaluable insight in how a computer works on the inside, then work your way 'up' from there.

That's much easier than to have this feeling that there is this 'magic carpet' that is holding you up in the air but you have no idea how it works.

Almost every high level language will make a lot more sense if you come from the basement up.
It made things more confusing.
Open source partner?
Hey guys, I'm a sophomore student in college and I've been coding (PHP) for about 7 months now & have got a few projects under my belt this year. I have a bit of spare time and am considering working on an open source project (to give back a bit & to improve my code by working with better programmers).

Although I do have an app in mind (a LIGHT team/multi person GTD list-type app : think 'Things' for mac because I had a hard time finding a good lean open source alternative to basecamp), I wouldn't mind working on another project that I find interesting.

I was hoping the good people here at HN would point me in the right direction! If perhaps any of you were either interested in developing a simple open source app (I wouldn't mind doing most the leg work), ARE developing an open source project and need an extra hand, or if you can lead me to like minded people - that would be much appreciated!

Just some info:

- I have a good amount of time to dedicate

- My focus right now is on PHP, more specifically on the Cake framework which I just picked up.

- Would love to be able to work on a project with a more experienced developer.

- Live in the US (but have a wild schedule...so time zones aren't much of an issue).

Anyway, would love to hear your input on this topic. I'll check this thread soon, and if you would like to directly contact me: farhankhalaf@gmail.com
Does anyone here looking for remote system engineer position?
UNIX and Informix DBA. with 10+ years of experience. Performance tuning is a favourite tasks.
Hacking at Random 2009(technology & security conference) started
I went and saw the Perseids tonight with a couple of my good friends. There's an undeveloped lot on top of a hill nearby and we had a nice view. I was worried around midnight - it was pretty foggy and you couldn't see more than 50 yards in front of you here in Los Angeles. But by 1:30 AM, it had cleared up and we saw some really beautiful ones.

They moved fast! It was hard to see and catch up with them. By the time one of us pointed one out, it was already gone. But there was one really big, bright one a little around 2:45 AM Pacific Time - really magnificent.

Never would have heard about it if I hadn't seen it here - thanks so much Dawie, was really a fantastic evening.
Thinking Upside Down
France and Germany exit recession
That sounds like a good reason to travel without bags!
Python is a real programming language. Keep at it!

If you want to learn an advanced programming language, try Haskell, ML (F#), or Lisp (Scheme).

C is a good programming language to learn. It can be quite unpleasant to debug C programs though.
At my previous company. A well know global airlines we just put out a tender for cargo management and loading systems. All the vendors were ie6 compliant but did not certify for ie7 or any other browser. I tested many of the demo applications on ie7 and on firefox and they totally rendered incorrectly.

Even at this time corporations are not upgrading and i guess they wont as long as vendors continue to provide ie6 compliant applications without support for any others. Goes to show how slow corporations move these days, even for something as simple as a browser (in comparision to other upgrades they make).
If you're doing graphics or physics, calculating the eigen vector for the eigen value 1 gives you the axis of rotation for a rotation matrix.

That's a pretty straight forward application that's also obvious from the definition of eigen values and eigen vectors.
Meet Springboard, a new kind of start-up incubator [UK centric]
" but I suggest you get an 8 bitter, or an atmel or a pic chip and learn how to program on that, as close to the hardware as possible. So, yes, that means assembly."

This is a great idea!

If for some reason you don't want to work with actual hardware, I reccomend this book(http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/) . Dr Schocken uses Java to build a variety of emulators all the way from flip flops to a small computer you can write Tetris for, using a compiler you build.

A google tech talk based on the book is here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507

"Almost every high level language will make a lot more sense if you come from the basement up."

Exactly right.
The linux phone we've all been waiting for?
I can't see a date anywhere. Does anyone know how old this is (please, please don't say it's current)?
Is your library (or the governmental agency supporting it) unaffected by budget crisis (asssuming it's unconcerned about energy conservation on general principles)?

I'd probably find the proper channels to report such wasteful practices.
Starting with Django is a bit like learning to snowboard. No pleasure just pain for the first days. Once you get the hang it's bliss.
Spot on! Seems like things are happening a little faster though.
Science questions baffle parents
3D Printers for $750
Twingly prepares ‘game-changing’ realtime social search service
You should go with C#. It uses the classical imperative syntax which lets you learn a whole lot of other languages and is similar abstractly to VB6. It's also got a lot of nicer features that will help you patch towards higher level languages eventually, but it sounds like that is a little too soon for you.
This is a huge leap. Last time I checked "affordable" 3d printers did cost 15k dollars.
I might bear that in mind andf give it another shot. I much prefer PHP for the area's Django seems to be useful for simply because it was painful to get into!
A lot of what you mention was raised in a recent discussion between Paul Krugman and cutting-edge Sci-fi author Charlie Stross.

Here's a copy of the transcript, which is also well worth a read
http://sites.google.com/site/strosskrugmantranscript/

Sample Charlie Stross: It’s going to be one of these things where there is going to be a sudden step change. ... When the automatic self-driving vehicles get sufficiently good that they are less likely to be in a collision than a human driver, your premium will go up if you insist on driving manually. Yeah, that’s going to go up steeply a few years later. I think we may be seeing the end of human beings allowed to drive the public highways within 30 years
Really? Or is this just because you have learned all the necessary concepts to understand Scheme and why it is an attractive language.
Directi's recruitment process is the crappiest, they need people to use codechef to start the process which is a biggest buggy system and no admin replies on the forum.
It's a price vs quality thing.

Makerbot is a great thing though because it makes this affordable, whatever the quality, some manufacturing capability at low quality (resolution, material choices) is better than none at all.
Nuclear bombs worry David Zindell
The company I work for will be needing a PHP developer (that is also proficient in HTML/CSS) to cover maternity leave from approx mid-Oct for 9+ months. We're happy to take on school-leavers upwards, providing your code is up to scratch.

If you're local to Telford, Shrops (UK) get in touch: jem@jemjabella.co.uk (include your HN username)
How American Health Care Killed My Father
Contemporary Pendant Lighting
No matter which style or manufacturer you choose, we ensure that each of our contemporary lamps provides superior color rendition and no backlight leakage.
The accidental incubator
If you want to wrap your head around OOP and Java, Bluej (bluej.org) is really usefull. It's used in my university (in the first half of the year, then we moved on to netbeans fcourse) to teach us the begins of OOP.
What less than a search engine can you build if you've got pagerank? in fact you can't even know if pagerank works unless you have a search engine.
> First of all, it's insulting to intelligent people.

One of the hallmarks of intelligence is not taking offense when none has been given.
You'll need to get involved in a pre-existing project, preferably a large one. Small projects, and projects you start yourself, won't offer a lot of opportunity for mentoring. If you happened to find a project that participates in Google Summer of Code, you might even be able to get paid to work on the project, and you'll have guaranteed good mentorship, since the mentors get graded at the end of the program and projects that don't hold up their end of the deal don't get money in the future.

If you start your own project, you will very likely be the only serious developer on the project for at least a couple of years. This seems strange, perhaps, since Open Source has a reputation for magically bringing developers together to work for the common good...but the fact is, every Open Source overnight success is one that has been in the making for years. And during those formative years, it's almost always one lone developer doing all the heavy lifting. If you start a project that heavy lifter will be you or the project will die.

That said, starting your own project and pushing it along for a few years will also teach you a lot about development. But, you won't be getting help from experienced outsiders for years to come.

Since Cake is quite new, I doubt there will be a lot of large pre-existing projects for you to jump on, but look around. Maybe there's something. I think Mambo had a project to convert to Cake, didn't they? That's still a pretty big project, despite the Joomla mutiny a few years back. I've not been impressed with Joomla, so I've also avoided Mambo, but maybe they've learned their lessons (or maybe it's exhibiting second system effect, by now).

Most Open Source projects welcome additional hands. If you start sending patches, you will generally get feedback. If you take part in the mailing list, and ask to be involved in a more official capacity, it's likely you'll be welcomed in. We certainly don't chase people off when they start sending patches (though we've probably been less good about mentoring and encouraging additional development, in the past, than we should have been).
Insurgence companies are profitable with the current level of risk, so some of them would be happy and profitable to keep selling inshurance at the current rate. The only driver for machine drivers is going to be cheaper premiums and boredom. Once machines drivers become really popular we might end up with specific high speed lanes which only they can enter etc. But, it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers.
Why Open Source Rules And Commercial Drools
Thanks, that was pretty useful.
" please specify whether you could sponsor any work visa in the country where you are hiring."

and whether international tele commuting would be a valid option. (I'd guess not, most of the time, but it doesn't hurt to ask)
You'd save money even if the only place you flew was to Bogota and back.

If I had any faith that Jet Blue would actually deliver on this then I'd do it, but I'm guessing they'll run out of seats in like three hours and then have to refund everyone's passes.
Interesting that he completely failed to predict the possibility of political punditry as an economist's day job. (Or, in the closing sentence, did he...?)
This makes a lot of sense; bikes have a lot less extraneous weight to carry around than cars do, so it should be a lot easier to get a good milage/performance combo out of an electric engine than with a car. There's less room for the engine and batteries, but those are small/dense enough now that the overall ratio should be a win.
http://www.onebag.com/
Depends on what you want. Option 1: web hacker guy (doesn't take long). Option 2: skillful, reasoned programmer guy (takes way longer).

Option 1. Python is not a bad choice, and neither is Ruby. In either of those languages, in a couple weeks, I'd say you can write yourself a "Guestbook" or something. Spanning the Gamut of "Web 1.0 apps" like forum, guestbook, blog/cms, etc. in a language is a nice easy way to get the basics.

Completing option 1: You can hack together simple web apps. A bit more effort will get you enough Javascript to use jQuery.

Option 2. Start with Scheme. Check out HTDP and/or SICP (google the acronyms). You can write real, useful programs in Scheme and/or you can move into Clojure, which lets you write anything you could write in Java (i.e. the libraries are all available). Spend some time here - write some simple games, and then maybe a web app with the existing frameworks. Consider picking up a language in the ML family, or Haskell, to learn about purity. In fact - with Clojure and e.g. Ocaml, you've got enough speed & flexibility than you probably never need to learn anything else. But...

Next, learn C. C is a great beginner's language for imperative programming. It's less ulcer-inducing than assembly, but you're still close to the machine. You'll want to implement a book of basic CS data structures and algorithms in C, and deal with all the thorny issues involved in making them fast and stable. In particular, you'll notice that cool data structures are really just different ways of re-arranging pointers. Conversely - by re-arranging pointers, you can do a LOT of cool stuff!

Eventually, you'll have to learn about OOP despite all the functional craze these days, so go to Java. Much of the online literature about OOP was written for Java. Go to Java before C++ - but eventually, get to C++, because everybody uses it.

At the end of option 2, you will have a good layer of fundamentals. You will hopefully have done at least 1 or 2 projects in functional, close-to-the-metal, and OOP environments. Hopefully, you will have gone through and implemented the standard CS algorithms/data structures in each one, understanding the subtleties therein. You can confidently go on from here to learn the skills how to write video games, databases, trading platforms, custom server apps, etc.
it's going to take at least 20 years to really go from mostly human to hardly any human drivers.

Right, and if it starts 10 years from now that's consistent with Stross's "30 years from now". In time-scale, if not in exact outcome.
Start-up helps teachers learn their lesson
I second that.
The value of having a completely object oriented language descended from Smalltalk yet with the meta-programming capabilities (a la Scheme/LISP/Clojure) will allow you to take on more complicated ideas on a smooth path as your skill increases.
Good idea, great start. I needed something like this in my own app and was considering building it myself. I'd prefer to use some other app to deliver these features tho. You should seriously look at a few of these points. I am breaking my comment into 2 logically separate comments (separation of concerns, too much of a coder :D)
I learned C as my first language, and there was nothing "confusing" about it. I find C to be quite direct - here's a variable, there's a loop, a function, a struct. Even pointers are straightforward one you know about memory and addresses, and you will need to understand them (conceptually) sooner or later anyway.

In fact, the abstractions you mention are what might be confusing for the beginner: Classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, iterators, high-order functions, closures, monads, generators, etc. all require as much book- and code-staring as either void or function pointers do for the first time.

I do however agree with you that C is harder and much less useful to learn than a "batteries-included", modern language like Python or Ruby as a first language.
Geographical expansion to India

- Lots of tech support happens from India. You are too expensive for this market. I would find it hard to sell your service as an addon to my app.

- Telecom is quite cheap out here. Figure out some alliances to bring down the cost (e.g. local SMS gateway, most of them use http api, but there are some SMTP based ones too).

- Additional SMS @ $0.15 translates to ~INR 7. SMS in my mobile phone plan would cost me ~10 times less. Not a correct comparison, but thats the language buyers use (enterprise buyers use it a lot) :)
Service features

- You are assuming direct consumers of your service. Think of indirect consumers too. Other startups who can piggyback on your offering to add value to their own product.

- Give an api where I can tell you the email message, sms message, various escalation options, option to repeat email/sms/phone after some delay if nobody responded. Also consider an SMTP api interface too. Not much of an effort for you if you already have the http api present.

- The api should also accept email addresses, mobile numbers and phone numbers. I might be signing up paying customers and using your app to send them alerts. I should be able to do this without having to register each of these email/phone numbers to you. Think of your pricing in this scenario.

- People mentioned ticketing system integration. Great idea. Extend it further. Also have an option where u will send the response back to the originating application.
Wooden dog kennels
Garden Furniture Direct and Timber Merchants. Hardwood Outdoor Garden Furniture, Discount Patio Furniture, Wooden Benches, Teak Garden Furniture UK
Re: A: I was talking only about the relative effects of a single change: eliminating all tax haven locales at once. The likelihood that exactly zero of those displaced companies would re-domicile and shift revenue to the US, SabOx404 notwithstanding, is basically zero.

Re: B. You're absolutely right. I didn't think that all the way through to absolute effects. For me personally, it would certainly be negative, so I clearly blew it here. Upvoted.
I like Ruby, but I don't think it's the best beginner language. Too little guidance and too much inconsistency.
Getting Out From Behind Your Desk
The implications for journalists from this piece are fun. According to this, the jobs will be shifting more and more back to old-school, face-to-face shoe leather reporting.

Suburban-based newspapers will shrink but stick around and remain profitable once they hit the right size due to having a monopoly. In cities, however, there will be a dozen outlets each going after different tribes of metropolitans with some overlap, similar to how a place like Chicago once had dozens of papers each serving different immigrant communities.
The case against Spotify
Springboard page: http://springboard.red-gate.com/

And just to clarify the TC article: Red Gate are looking for multiple teams of two to three people, not just one group.
Radiation therapy saves lives
> It can be quite unpleasant to debug C programs though.

Yes, but if you can do that, you can debug anything. Literally - Most high level languages are implemented in C, so debugging them eventually means debugging C code.
LaunchSet: Manage Beta/Alpha/Private Access and Data for Startups
view source:

<o:Created>2009-04-10T21:20:00Z</o:Created>
<o:LastSaved>2009-04-10T21:56:00Z</o:LastSaved>
Totally agree. My first day or two of snowboarding were painful. A lot of falling, horrible balance, sore knees... then after a few days I got the hang of it and suddenly it was the most amazing thing ever.

Django is the same. Until you get an understanding of the basic concepts, its painful and annoying, but once you do, its a breeze and you'll have a lot of fun.
Insurance is profitable because the risk is spread across a wide base, including risk-averse people. If the default is high-safety automatic vehicles, only the reckless and adrenaline-junkies are likely to drive, forcing up rates disproportionately.
That's a good summary.

IMO just because a regex is callable does not mean it should be omitted (despite the spec). If it can be serialized in a proper way then go ahead. (I know it has other properties, but just emitting /foo/ would be fine with me.)

A RegExp is probably a special case. The browsers should do the useful thing, and request an errata on the spec.

Wait, are they talking about the global RegExp object, or a specific RegExp?

And they should fork this bug into one just about RegExp.
In most of the companies I've worked for in the last decade, including a fair bit in systems administration I've see the following used as the solution.

USER: I have a problem.
TECH: Let's see...hey! Why do you have Firefox installed?
USER: It works better than IE6. Why are you guys using old crap like that? I thought we were a modern company...
TECH: We are modern, except for IE6.
USER: So I have to uninstall it?
TECH: I can't "officially" support it.
USER: Aaaah.
TECH: OK, your print queue is cleared.
I'm not saying you do, I'm saying a dishonest person could and would probably get away with it for quite a while.
Wow, I just realized it's been a year already since I signed for the pro account..

Keep up the good work Drew!
A lot of people learned C as a first language and a lot of these people suggest others to do the same. "It worked for me" syndrome.

However, that does NOT make it a _good_ first language. Sure, it can be good enough, but I'd argue that you'd get MORE out of learning a language like Python. Python is, IMHO, a great beginner language because it has all the abstractions, but (unlike Java) does not FORCE you to use them until you're ready to do so. It eases you into the complex concepts. It also shields you from buffer overruns and manual memory management. It gives much more useful errors when things crash and finally, an interactive shell is the best thing ever when learning.

You already know that though, since you agreed ;-)
The Perfect Desktop - gOS 3.1 Gadgets
No, because that means you're using different metrics to compare the same changes, e.g. "Over the last five years, one of my stocks went up 75%. One went up 100%. One went up 125%." What purpose is served by making the last two numbers a different scale? (If you'd like to stick with the percentage terms, pretend I'm talking about dividend yield and not stock price)
"identity vectors"... do you perhaps mean "unit vectors", of length 1?
UK Pirate Party registered as politcal party
I'm in. Last time I had lunch with Alaska and Mike, it was tacos in Palo Alto. This time, we'll show them a little 'Burg hospitality at Primanti's with a sandwich that'll last them a few days and a few IC Lights :-)
See also this Q&A:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/interviews/350728/q-a-why-the-uk...
Yes but you are working with the assumption that you must be "on top of [your] game". i.e. that you must "win". Alan Kay said that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Let me give you an example: Suppose you decided to drop out for a year at the risk of sliding back from the top of your game. Suppose you went to a third world country and worked for a charity. Suppose you came back with a different perspective namely: Most of the stuff we do in the west is completely superflous. Its about making life even more convenient and sumptuous for those who already have far too much. That in fact every minute of your amatuer and inefficient time was worth hours of what you were doing professionally because the work you did as an amateur was so much more important. In summary: The persepctive you get is that the game you were trying to be at the top of is a game not worth playing, that really it was doing you and the world no good and that on your deathbed being able to say: "I was the best at X for a while, knew everything there was to know about it" - doesn't amount to much. Note: I haven't done this. I am just saying that I think it is possible based on some experiences I had while travelling (and neglecting my game). Bill Gates seems to have had a similar insight but true to form he went and did something about it.
I agree that a repeat of this post would be much more helpful around February. However, if the students are able to work remotely, then any time of the year works fine.