skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple delivers it-just-works to me. And the price is absolutely ok for that, not a premium at all. Years ago I bought a Commodore, because the alternative was better, but priced at a premium, it was called Indigo. And I was not willing to pay the premium, too much money. The "premium" Apple wants doesn't feel like a premium at all.
What a fantastic idea - liberating documents one by one, whilst making life easier (and cheaper) for people looking for that data!

I applaud the people behind this.
You gotta like an economist article including Lisp, Occam's razor and quotes from Einstein and Colin Chapman.
1) The teacher needs a thorough understanding of the topic being taught. I regularly use the reverse of this as a litmus while mastering a topic: I did not understand it deeply enough if I can't explain it to a complete layman so they can understand it.

2) Having a full duplex interaction. Talking AT people will make them only bored, but not smart. Watch for reactions, ask questions to force the student to explore the topic being discussed. If they can't answer, try to find out where their train of thought stalled, and elaborate. Of course this doesn't work very well in larger groups of students.

Usually, neither circumstances (smart teacher, small group of students) are given in compulsory education.
Almost surprised there was no mention of the "less is more" Unix joke regarding the programs 'less' and 'more'.

UPDATE: (in the original Economist article).
if it's just a one off and you have some experience already in php, then sticking with that might be a good plan.

if you see this as an ongoing evolution and want to explore a framework and language that has some incredibly elegant approaches to the distinct problems and challenges faced in most web applications, then getting into rails could be a game changer for you in the long run. what tends to happen in rails is that the gruntwork goes away, and you're left focusing just on what is unique to the tech you're building. additionally, rails imposes architecture that helps an app over time actually become more and more focused, and accessible, rather than more spaghetti-ish.

once i got into rails, and over the fairly mild initial learning curve, it has been like working with a fine caligraphy pen vs a leaking ballpoint.
Confimation bias in dense networks: Or why Obama is the anti-christ
I quit that years ago (almost).

Start by not biting one nail (left pinkie is good). Get that down (take pride in it. make it your friend :) ), then 'save' the left ring finger too. Carry on up the hand, but jump to stopping the whole left hand as soon as you're confident (become a right hand biter!).

Then move on to the right hand pinkie etc.

I made it as far as my right thumb, which I still chew when I'm thinking.
You are right - doing things just because is a big part of the essence of hacking.

I fully respect all the work of people who work on "hard problems" - I even believe that I have and continue to work on "hard problems" every day. The list of things the OP used were basically "skills" not problems (virtual destruction semantics, references, pointers, etc). It's the attitude I dislike, not the desire to do hard things. The attitude that "these things are hard to understand and therefore more interesting and more worthy" is ridiculous, and shows that the writer doesn't actually understand any of the things he hasn't worked on.

I don't diss people working on hard things - I diss people who call everyone who doesn't work on what they work on weenies.
That's not the point of what I wrote. I was trying to stress that if I leave the nonfiction world, it's going to be through a different medium. Fiction is a great thing. I don't deny that.
Strikes me as dated and pointless; reads like a high school "compare and contrast" essay and the guy is hell bent on flaming Lisp. Apples and Oranges dude.
I don't think this is necessary. SHA1 was designed to be fast, yes - and fast is exactly what you want when you're logging thousands of users into a web site. But that's not even the problem.

Security is all about the weakest link. There is no point dialing one of the links up to absolutely insane heights without taking commensurate measures with the rest of your links - and a salted, hashed, SHA1 password is already pretty freaking secure.

Let me give an example. If your opponent possesses the incredible resources necessary to brute force SHA1 in a useful timeframe - and there are probably only a handful of such organisations on earth, all governmental - then they will not even bother with that. They will simply bug your server and collect the passwords plaintext somehow there. Or they'll subpoena you and force you to start collecting the plaintext. Hell, what do they need the passwords for anyway?

See what I mean? It's solving the wrong problem. Anyone who could actually brute force SHA1 is such a formiddable opponent that they could not care less if you changed to bcrypt or whatever. You have already lost if they even decide to mess with you.

Plus, it's yet another dependency. And then the speed penalty. Forget it. Put the time into setting up SSH keys or turning off root login or something; you're a million times more likely to be compromised by those kinds of everyday flaws than NSA-level shit like this.
Ha! Missed that. Thanks for the link.

Side note - I notice I gave myself negative points for trying to setup a poll-type submission. Is there a proper way to setup a poll on here, or am I just too much of a noob to be able to do that?
I have many bad habits. My absolute top-success in overcoming them was getting rid of smoking cigs. And I really mean, getting rid of it, even in my thinking. You see, the nicotine addiction is just the minor part in smoking, it is not that hard, other drugs are harder to get rid of in my experience. But the manipulation in your thinking that comes with years-long smoking, that is astonishing. And the main factor that makes it hard to quit smoking is a deep fear that life will never again be as awesome as it was with the cigs (even if the smoking destroys so much life moments all the time).

I got rid of it by reading the book "Easy way out" by Allen Carr. I highly recommend his stuff. I did read the book 3 times in a row until all the thinking damage in my head was gone. But then it was gone and after smoking heavily for 8 years I am now out for over 6 years.

If you think about quitting smoking, try Allen Carrs method, I truly recommend it, from man to man ;-)
Watch out for Chantix.. it really messes with your brain chemistry. I couldn't use it: it gave me insane technicolor nightmares. After a week of sleep deprivation I gave up on the stuff.
Economics Is Not A Natural Science
also, don't get me wrong - I'm a technical guy. 90% of each of my days is spent messing around with complicated and complex problems in code. That's what I do, and I respect everyone else who does that. That's WHY I believe the original sentiment is so flawed. Just because you use C and have to deal with tricky memory issues doesn't actually make the problems you solve any more interesting or useful. There's plenty of useless code in any language.
Workoholism.

I enjoy getting away from the computer and having fun just as much as anyone else, but with my mostly-full-time freelancing work + writing most of the codebase for a startup on my own, I have the bad habit of telling myself that if I do some extra work one night I can stop a little early the next night. But the next day comes around and I'll do the same thing all over again.
When a new computing platform arrives, it usually doesn't really replace the existing applications one for one. It makes the old applications less relevant.

A blog is not a replacement for a word processor. But many of the things you might have written, printed out, copied, and distributed to people you wanted to see it, you just type into your blog and you're done with it. And blogs make new kinds of writing possible that wasn't before, meaning even less time spent in front of a word processor.

When several people needed to work on the same document before, they put a word processing document on a network share, or just emailed it around to the next person who had to work on it. Now, a wiki makes a lot more sense for editing and sharing that kind of data.

A desktop money management application can't compete with a web application that can keep your transactions up to date for all of your online financial accounts. I suppose you could implement this as a desktop application, but most of the power comes from the data being available from the web, so what's the point?

People used to use a spreadsheet or desktop database to store and process their financial data, but it makes more sense for the logic for handling your financial data living close to that data, in a way that a lot of people can benefit from without typing in all the formulas themselves. So the use cases for the average person to use a spreadsheet diminish.

The end result, is that people don't really care whether they have a direct replacement for their old apps. As long as they have a convenient way to meet the end result (communicate, manage finances), that's all that matters.
This is where a slow cooker is HUGE. Every Sunday I throw a bag of lentils, some veggies, and spices into a crock pot for 9 hours. Total prep is 20 minutes and I have a week's worth of lunches. The most expensive ingredient is the olive oil, which I buy in jugs from the warehouse store.
As an IT educator and professional for 10+ years, this is actually right up my alley. I've developed both courses for students of IT and music as well as several "Train the Trainer" courses.

One thing I will do is to address the term "good teacher". A good teacher is very different from a "great teacher." I'll simply address good teachers in my post.

I do chuckle a bit when I read the replies that say, "This - you have to do this to be a good teacher." It's all so subjective. I've seen good teachers who were not great enthusiasts, good teachers who didn't give a #### about their students, and good teachers who lived and breathed the technology, loved their students, and were good people.

In my opinion being a good teacher requires wanting to be a good teacher, practicing the techniques of educating the age group you are teaching (there are massive differences in teaching each age group), and knowing the topic at hand.

If you actually care about the people you are educating, that is bonus but there are plenty of good teachers who, at the end of the day, couldn't care less about this group of students or whether they "get it". To give you an example, some of the great teachers know that they are great teachers and know that simply taking a class with them is an honor and they take the attitude, "If you're taking my class and you don't get it, then something is wrong with you - not my fault. <hundreds/thousands> have taken this class and gotten tons out of it and if you don't, too bad."

Just because you are an enthusiast means nothing - I've seen good teachers who barely know the topic. What they are good at, though, is simplifying complex topics and helping students understand the topics. The good teacher does not have to be a guru (and for many people, the more they know, the less of a good teacher they become because they lose the ability to make it understandable for the student).

As for passion, passion makes it easier for the student, sure, but it isn't a requirement to be a good teacher. I've seen lots of good teachers who learn a subject just so they can keep a job. They don't give a ### about that subject but, because they want to be good teachers and they work hard at it, they are good at teaching that topic. Would it be better if they were passionate about it? Absolutely.

All in all, I think it's a combination of several things to be a good teacher but passion and guru-ness aren't in that set. I think the want to be a good teacher is paramount and, along with that want, is a work ethic that drives you to become and remain a good teacher. Anything above and beyond that only makes you better.
I thought one of the most interesting part of the PBS piece was a study where they took clips of classical music recordings to a tribe in west Africa that had never been exposed to music outside what they played in their tribe and asked them to identify whether it was happy, sad or scary. Despite never being exposed to western instruments, chords or rhythms, they were able to identify the emotion in the same way any western person would.

Music is truly universal, maybe more so than math as music and rhythm seems to be built-in to our physical makeup, whereas math must be taught.
Notes from the Metalevel
You gave up smoking when you were 12 ??? Wow, most people that smoke would not even have started by that age...

Apologies if it is too much of a private question, feel free to ignore: At what age did you start ? Were your parents aware ?
Ask HN: HN not accepting YouTube links any more?
I cant seem to submit videos from YouTube any more. Is that a new thing?
I was about there get a landline because my iPhone keeps cutting out in my basement/home office. Does anyone have a better alternative?

Is it worth calling ATT?

I'm tempted to just get an Android phone?
Towards a Theory of Anonymous Networking
Why does it matter whether or not you've heard of him?
I am not sure why the original blogger thinks web programming is any different from any other type of programming. In a web app, we do:

handleRequest :: HttpRequest -> AppState -> (AppState, HttpResponse)

In a GUI desktop app, we do:

handleEvent :: Event -> AppState -> (AppState, [WindowUpdates])

(The AppState is stuff like your config files, or database connections, etc., etc. You have some state in your function, you change it, and then the next invocation of your function uses the new state. You might not always write that explicitly, but it's how you think about it.)

The only difference here is in the format of the "input" and "output". Inside, we use the same programming techniques. We solve the same complex problems, and produce the same valuable results.

(But not, he's right, I don't use UML diagrams and multiple inheritance. There are much sharper tools available to me.)
Oh, now that's clever. I bet Carl Malamud wishes he thought of that.
In the comments he mentions that he used What Cheer (http://www.what-cheer.com) for mockup design.
Great quote. Blizzard has seemed to operate that way as well (taking a very different example).
Some perplexing observations emerge reading von Neumann's unpublished report
"...John von Neumann made a key contribution in his unpublished report...However ... some perplexing observations emerge... important, but previously unrecognized, features of the von Neumann design. The von Neumann Report contains a wealth of insight and analysis which is still not available elsewhere... Few people have had the opportunity to read and decipher the original typescript...The computer defined in the First Draft Report on the EDVAC was never built and its architecture and design seem now to be forgotten. "
I collected some info here:
http://blog.thstart.com/2009/07/first-draft-report-on-edvac-june-30.html
It's a rite of passage.
Because chances are that if I have not heard of him (being something of a music fanatic) and spotify and his fan base do not intersect that there is a very logical explanation for him not being a big earner from spotify.

He is confusing the value of spotify with the earnings from his songs.

It would seem that if this was an artist that had lots of power in the region where spotify is most marketed (note that it has all kinds of regional restrictions on it today) that he would have a bigger chance of being right.

As it stands I just chalk it up to Magnus X not being very popular with the spotify crowd, due to him being somewhat of a local phenomenon.

Before you go and make a claim of 'fraud' (and that is what the article insinuates) you have to have some solid evidence.

Have a read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Uggla

And see if you think he'll make big $ on spotify or not even if spotify would be lily white and pass 100% of their earnings on his 'share' to Magnus.
Mainframe programmers said the same about PC programmers long time ago before PC programmers replaced them.

I see a pattern here...
Online Entertainment Shopping -- the new drug...
11 Sexy And Fun Things To Do With A Man
I'm not sure why this is so important; it's a bit of a fluff/filler piece.

Every major software company hoards cash. MSFT, GOOG, APPL, everybody. So Apple's got a lot of cash... so what?

It's a lot of cash, but they've been doing well lately. :)
There was; it got downvoted a few times and I guess the author deleted it.
like enjoying coding so much I keep over-coding things

I think I may be guilty of this too. And it's inconsistent with, "Release early, release often."

alert("Admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it.")
The Flip Mino is one example that could use more features. Actually if you did not HAVE to use a tripod to remove shakiness, that would improve it ten-fold.
In providing a (usually) free service, there is some understanding that you will provide certain genuine information about yourself in exchange for that service, in the form a registration/signup. By using a generic account, you are circumventing this exchange.

Sure, there's a good argument for anonimity, but it's give-and-take in the virtual world. You're basically getting something for nothing and robbing the site owner of their ability to proscribe the means by which new users are given access to the site.
why didn't i think of gum?
I've probably posted this here before but...

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
--Linus Torvalds
Ha! That's very true. You do get very vivid dreams. Maybe that's a problem if you're the type to have nightmares but for me they were quite .. agreeable, lol.
A Case for WSDL - Why REST is not the only answer
"Domain tasters" bitter as new fees put an end to their games
What this really sounds like is a rant about how Hacker News is not a very precisely named website.

Hacker culture is alive and well, and there are plenty of heroes hacking the night away staring at their monitors (though LCD these days), just as there 'always' has been. There are probably more now than there ever has been, actually. There's just a lot more parasites and poseurs around, because computers are mainstream now and there's a lot more money around.

There is a lot more to hacker culture than web startup culture! I don't even consider virtually anything you mentioned a part of hacker culture. PHP and databases? "Software Visionaire/Ruby Ninja"? (bad) business ideas?

Of course people understand the internals of the Linux kernel. You think the people working on it don't understand it? That's a pretty good example of an island in contemporary hacker culture. You don't have to look far in a sea of recreational kernel hackers to find... hackers. The associated mailing lists generate quite a bit more discussion than HN does...

There have always been poseurs and businessman hangers-on, and there always will be. They are obviously not hackers.

Hacker culture, and the existence of true hackers, can never die out. It's hard wired in.
I think the problem is that product manufacturers try to make everyone happy with a single product. They gradually expand the product's definition in an attempt to get more and more people to use it. The problem is that one of the reasons why the initial users liked the product was that it was simple and didn't have a million features. So you start to lose them, or they like your product less.
It's a common condition.

On my last startup venture I went to one-week sprints, where I delivered something each week. This helped out a lot, as it made me prioritize and triage.

But I think having an active customer base and a team to report to are just as important. I find I have a tendency to prioritize whiz-bang stuff -- stuff I'd like to code, instead of stuff the users actually need. Actually, when you get right down to it, users really need very little functionality. As programmers we end up putting it in there simply because we can. It's fun. We think everybody else is a power user because well, we're one.
This article is just filled with gems. The "Crucible" idea is both aptly named and powerfully explanatory.

I do not think college is terribly good at educating. Even so, I'm forced to admit the cliché is probably right: it's a powerfully life-changing, valuable experience. I came out of it with a radically reshaped worldview, tremendous energy, and much knowledge. My rate of progress while in college (in fact, mostly a few specific years) was much higher than any other time I remember.

...But I don't look back and think of important classes taken or works read. I see myself surrounded by brilliant, energetic peers. That's the Crucible Effect he describes. We talk about it when thinking of "startup-friendly" communities, or hacker groups, or even preserving the "character" of these boards. We're trying to keep the Crucible Effect intact.

Interesting.
1) movies are works of fiction.
It's clever, but we'll have to wait and see how much it actually adds to the collection of documents freely available. The bulk of the Recap repository was seeded with documents Malamud collected. Of course, Recap appears to be a nice way to actually interact with that collection.
Well, it's worth understanding that for sites with no obvious need for user accounts (say, washingtonpost.com) the goal is to learn more about the audience so that they can provide aggregate demographics to advertisers and (if they're smart) target the ads to individual users.

So by messing with the accounts, you deprive them of that data. That said, I would assume they're smart enough to see that an account that gets logins from 100s of IPs a day is obviously not one person.
Why does it need to be a real implementation of a turing machine? Why does the (hypothetical) turing machine need to be implementable? The thing is, if you can contrive a halting oracle for a machine with a tape of length n, then I can contrive another turing machine with a tape of length n+1, and so on. The result is uh... the halting problem.

And once again, I don't see why any of this even matters. Assuming the existence of some Turing machine (with infinite tape) is a garden-variety proof technique for these kinds of proofs. I still don't understand why you are insisting that it must be implementable?

Computer memory is finite - does that mean we've solved the halting problem for all the programs we care about?
Douglas Crockford: The JSON Saga [video]
It's also no problem to track how many different logins per day an account gets and figure out which are being shared.
I had a hard time paying attention to this article. I found myself skimming a lot towards the bottom.

Me too, but for me it was more of an excitement to see the next point. Rather than being poorly written I'd say it was too interesting (if that's possible).
Looking Ahead to Firefox 3.6: Speed Matters
Nothing has changed. What happens when you submit one?
List of last years projects: http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com/2009/01/vote-for-your-favo...