skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like you fell into the typical CS trap. The problem is that Computer Science is not software engineering, and the dev skills you need aren't going to magically fall out from between the pages of CS books. What you need is more dev oriented knowledge and experience/practice.

A couple books that are worthwhile: "Refactoring" and "Rapid Development". That will teach you a lot of basic skills in terms of development process and how to improve the design of real systems (warts and all). Also, take a look at the Architecture of Open Source Systems, it'll acquaint you with how applications fit together.

Also, take on some projects. Pick something interesting and work on it. Pick some small stuff then move up from there. I'd suggest in your case eventually building a compiler. If you're interested in AI, build some simple games and work on building AI for them. There is nothing more important than actually writing code.
This is interesting and cool, but also scary in a way. In this particular case, the algorithm can at worst fund the wrong company -- think of funding some shady, amoral but profitable corporation.

It's much worse when algorithms will make decisions on boards of, say, weapons companies, or health insurances, etc.

It would be like appointing a cold, amoral board member only concerned with pure profit -- probably not great for society at large, but I could be wrong of course.
Here's what I'm using with my Year 7s (11yo) at the moment. It still needs lots of work and is not at all a finished project.

http://marcscott.github.io/7-WD-JS/

I'm sure there are better offerings out there though.
> Upon reviewing payments starting May 15, 2014 WePay discovered tweets from others retweeted by Eden Alexander offering adult material in exchange for donations.

So essentially, she repeated something someone else said, is that about it?
This sounds like it's related to Operation Choke Point. Basically, the DOJ is looking into whether banks are ignoring high fraud industries, like payday lenders. So the banks have been also preemptively purging all accounts that are porn related, since they have a high fraud rate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7670838
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/16/o...
To me it seems the only way to smarter tools is static analysis, but there's only so much one can do in a dynamic language.

There seems to be this dissonance between dynamic languages, which tend to be popular with new programmers for a variety of reasons, and better tools enabled by static analysis of (usually) static langues.

The static languages seem to present this "hump" that a lot of people are averse to, and if we really want these smarter tools, we're going to have to find a way to get programmers to use more static techniques; we need to get them over that "hump", possibly then these smarter tools would ease things in the long run, but doesn't have quite the same immediate-gratification aspect of dynamic languages due to the up-front effort.
I agree. I prefer the term software engineer. Terms like "coder" and "programmer" (when referring to job roles) trivialize the profession; they set low expectations for the contributions an effective engineer will make to a business. Programming, the art of writing code, is just one piece.

I wrote a comment a while back attempting to capture and explain my thoughts on the greater responsibilities and competencies of a software engineer [1]. The effective engineer has a holistic approach to software and business:

> Engineering in the software field isn't /always/ about building super-reliable things. That is one factor that I think differentiates it from other engineering fields. Engineering in the real, physical space has safety implications that typically require a high level of rigor at minimum. If a bridge fails or a building collapses, that's catastrophic. Physical products are only useful if engineered to a high level of quality. However, software is useful across a wider spectrum of reliability: if a back-office web app used by the recruiting team has to come down for maintenance for 2 hours on Sunday, that may not be a showstopper.

> Consequently, part of software engineering is understanding what level of robustness is needed to meet business goals, and building to it appropriately, with appropriate costs, and understanding the properties of the built system. Controlling the [tradeoffs] is what makes it engineering.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809358

Furthermore, the effective software engineer, who in a corporate environment is also an effective businessperson, understands and influences the strategy of the business, and breaks down that strategy into goals which then influence the design and implementation of software. (Regarding earlier threads about whether programming is a dead-end job:) A wider perspective on what constitutes software development, and its role in business in general, also yields better long-term career development opportunities than focusing on being solely a "programmer".
Not exactly. I read "I know this because of all the money they give me" as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, like he's saying something he wants to believe, that the world tells him to believe, but cannot help questioning the truth of.
I actually find the decline of religio highly interesting in comparison to the growth of stuff about company culture an interesting correlation that I never thought about.

Though I would take philanthropy out of quotes. And I'd be careful about the concept of unchurched (as someone who is unchurched and has no plans on becoming churched)

I do wonder what people will use as anchor institutions now that church going has declined - not everyone can do the corporate only thing
$0.50/Mbps probably isn't bargain basement: Hurricane Electric advertises $0.45/Mbps ($200 minimum).

Also, business pricing is $40/seat... there's going to be a good amount of profit there, I'd guess. It's also not easy to use even 500 Mbps, I would guess even heavy users would rarely sustain that much traffic (although there would certainly be some)
I'd say this one's kind of interesting by being arguably the most boring thing I could imagine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacie_Orrico_discography
You will always have the nagging guilt of passing by the janitor, whose job exists because cleaning bathrooms is dirty and time-consuming, and wondering why your work has more value than theirs.

But what if there is no logic to the system, that it's arbitrary, and random, and has simply found an equilibrium at the moment? You could drive yourself crazy thinking about it. Why are writers valued as they are? Because that's what people are willing to pay them. Why don't they just rise up and demand better pay? Who knows. Maybe people just don't value reading that much. Is it because they're uneducated? etc. ad infinitum.

Why does a web developer making to-do apps lead a better a life than someone researching cancer cures? Beats me. But it would be a complete waste of their good fortune, to be at the right place at the right time, if they didn't use this advantage. Already the system is saturated with hacker school grads, and the buzz is moving towards mobile, I can easily imagine a day where knowing Rails is no longer a golden ticket.

It's as silly as wondering why you got to cross the Atlantic on the luxurious Titanic, while everyone else is scrambling to the life boats. If you truly think that your present value is purely a matter of luck or a bubble, that it's illusory, then there is no why, you'd damned better make sure you find something concrete before everything goes to shit.
The occupation is completely relevant however the declaration is utterly meaningless (I say that with all due respect to JoshWright) on pseudonymous discussion boards. "Because I said so" is the antithesis of reasoned discourse. To be honest if a commenter has personal association with a certain topic it seems that it is even easier for them to find legitimate resources to back up their assertion than it is for a curious bystander/enthusiast.

If you and I were having a lively mature discussion/disagreement about something would you accept "because someone on the internet said so" as evidence that your conclusion was false? Would it make a difference if I told you that the pseudonymous internet commenter signed their comment "Source: I am a XYZ"?
Except it isn't pretty it's actually horrendous. Function and form are equals.
People were selling / donating porn to raise money through WePay, and Eden encouraged it.
Are you kidding me? I think maybe you need to get out of your bubble and go work a real job for a while. Go work in food service, construction, or retail, which is what most of America is doing.

Then maybe you'll appreciate the marvelous advantages you have as somebody who gets paid pretty damn well to sit in front of a blinky box and think about elegant abstractions.
"As officers closed in, the man pointed a handgun in the direction of at least one of the officers; one or more of the officers opened fire, killing the man, the police said."

Why "one or more"? Is this unknown to the police or do the police just not report such things to the press?
If we admit there is no Silver Bullet, how will we ever generate link-baity headlines about programming methodologies to attempt to validate my beliefs as correct instead of being open-minded about different approaches? ;-)
How would PHP be even more powerful?
The relevant case documents:

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/florida/flsdce/9:2014cv8065...
I would qualify myself as an "expert programmer" given your scale, and it actually took me 2-3 weeks to find a job last year.

It did take me six months to find a "senior level" job two years back though.

My point is that it mostly depends on the economic circumstances and it's not quite correct to assume that people will specialize as they grow older - differently from the past, where IBM was giving away 10-year and 20-year presents, nowadays the average tenure at a company is about 3 years, and much shorter in younger companies and startups. The economic incentive is to be versatile, so that's what people get good at.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761346. Not sure which is the better article, so we'll go with the earlier one (which also happens to have more upvotes).
“Technicolour Alaska”: Time-lapse video of aurorae.
I wonder if there are differing schools of thought as to what are the fundamental programming concepts. Is it more fundamental to expose students to, or isolate them from, the innards of the computer, when they are first learning to program? Short of settling that issue, the next best thing might be to expose students to at least a couple of different approaches. Python and C would be my choices. I'd teach C on a microcontroller target.

Some isolation is necessary. I doubt that I could completely explain how either print or printf turns the pixels on and off on the display.
The article didn't ask the question of whether people think climate change is problematic, it asked the question of whether people believe it is man made.

The relevant quote is: "When it comes to global warming, only 33 per cent expressed a high degree of confidence that it is “man made,” something the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has declared is all but certain."
Feel free to check out Eden's twitter and take some time to appreciate how your approach has affected her (ie she's now in hospital), then consider changing the way you deal with issues like this.
Phood: Yelp + Artificial Intelligence
Just speculation (I work at Life360), but we announced our $50m Series C this week.. looks like the patent troll got the news, too.
Nobody except for people running block explorers really needs this information. If you think you need it then you're probably using Bitcoin completely wrong. Address based indexes don't scale, which is why it doesn't create or even need one.
Is it worth keeping drugs off the non prescription market if it just leads to robberies and the killing of those robbers?
She was advocating people break the terms of service for WePay (who themselves have terms of service with their vendors).
I've learnt so much over the years and barely remember any of it. I wonder whats the point of studying all this if I am going to forget 90% of it in couple of months. How do people deal with this? Should I convert everything I learn into some sort of cliff notes for rapid reacquisition of the knowledge at a later time?
> They led to the development of Visual Basic & co

Visual Basic was phenomenally successful as an end-user programming tool. There are entire businesses that still run off VB6. It worked because they nailed the early learning curve. It doesn't matter if your language is faster or more maintainable or less bug-ridden and insane - the majority of people will always gravitate towards the tool that is easy to get started with. This is why VB6 and PHP are so widespread.

The moral of the story is that if you want people to program in a sane and scalable way you must make it the path of least resistance. No amount of advertising or education has ever been able to overcome the fact that most people don't give a shit about programming and are just trying to get stuff done.

> if Anon the intern's problem is he doesn't know how to Google for libraries

Anon the intern's problem is that the information returned by google is incomplete and requires manual effort. I don't want to replace stackoverflow, I want to make it executable.

> I do think that the real resolution to this problem is writing simpler programs whose state is easier to track.

Well, that's where the managed state part comes in. We are trying to separate essential state which is actually part of the program logic from accidental state which is just an implementation detail (an idea expounded in http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf). That's a whole other post though.

> I'd much rather prefer being good enough a programmer to avoid the need for a debugger that can tell me why foo is not 8 despite the fact that I fucking said foo = 8 ten lines above, than being a programmer with good enough tools to help me when I'm stupid.

There is an implicit assertion here that not having a debugger makes you a smarter programmer. Would removing other feedback print statements, unit tests and the repl help too? Why even execute code at all, just print it out and think hard.

Thinking hard doesn't work if part of your mental model is wrong. Being human (unfortunately) my mental model is often wrong and a quick glance at a stack trace does more to enable correct thinking than hours of working the problem out by hand with pen and paper.

The whole point of having a computer is that it can do some of the thinking for you.

> maybe he ought to start with something other than web programming

The goal is not for Anon to learn to program, it's to build lunch_app. The web sucks but it is the only good distribution platform we have. Either we use that or we build something easier on top of it.
When looking to improve your programming ability, it's important to ask for what end you are improving your skills. If your goal is to become a professional computer scientist, then you'll need to choose an area of focus. The field of computing simply has too many facets for anyone to master them all. If your goal is to learn, simply for its own sake, then all that matters is that you are enjoying the learning. It won't matter what technologies you use, or if what you're making actually works, so long as you enjoy it.
In either case, you should choose something to learn that interests you. There are many highly sought after computer scientists, who specialize in computer vision algorithms, for example, who get recruited by companies all the time, despite knowing little to no software engineering and data structures.
TL;DR: Learn anything, it will get you places.
I think this is a missed opportunity. Terms may have been violated, okay, that warrants closing the account, do that, then donate enough money to her to help her out, and bask in the PR.
The homepage isn't dead exactly - just have different requirements. Drudge Report is a big driver and example of this. Arts and Letters Daily is a highbrow example. Basically, there is still demand for a curated home page, just with a lot less fluff.

The other day, I was looking at the WSJ website and wishing they would just put all the content on one page so I could scan it more easily. I want to see everything they have to offer as easily as possible. Bloomberg.com is moving in this direction - about time for the others.

As for handwringing about the content of page one at the NYT - the physical edition of the paper is going to continue to decline in importance until it's gone, so they would be right to stop worrying about it so much. Give readers a page of consolidated links to all current articles - they're likely to browse.
The most valuable developers are the ones that also have a good understanding of the business-side.
A very valuable skill is the ability to talk to the business-types in their language. You become their conduit into the tech-world and they trust you. Most business-types are scared of the technical world.
> We still program like it's 1960 because there are powerful path dependencies that incentivise pretending your space age computing machine is actually an 80 character tty. We are trapped in a local maximum.

Love this (although I don't like extra long lines). He's talking to you Pep8.
I've worked in all of those fields. I know exactly how much easier programming is than roofing and sanding boats and unloading trucks. Nevertheless, outside of a select few, most programmers are assembly line workers with better chairs.
Most of the things DRM is used to prevent would otherwise be classed as fair use.

Copyright law was, until quite recently about granting a monopoly on the large-scale or commercial use of a work. At-home copying for personal use was generally legal - even explicitly protected by law in some cases[0]. Same with multiplexing video on different screens, creating backups and skipping commercials.

DRM and legal provisions forbidding its circumvention change the rules quite a bit, stripping away significant rights from consumers. Losing rights one once had might well be grounds for a feeling of entitlement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act#Exemp...
This, a thousand times this.

Don't go straight for an open source project unless you're really into it. Honestly - debugging other people's code is hell, I hate doing it (but frequently have to). By all means dig through other people's code to work out how something is achieved, but for people starting out, bug-fixing is a bore.

Make your own damn open source project! Pick something you love that has a problem and have a bash at fixing it. An here's the best bit: you'll still get to solve bugs, lots and lots and lots of them. Some of them will be easy to solve, some will take you a week before you realise you missed out a bracket.

You have to enjoy what you do or it won't stick. And don't be fooled into thinking you like something until you actually try to build something with it.
And the patent numbers:

7,031,728, 8,126,441 & 7,672,681 which cover "using a map to initiate a rapid voice communication or text message"
Elisp Intro: Solutions to the Exercises
Linkbait title. "Chicago's Electric Dispersal Barrier and Water Safety" would be much more informative. Or something similar.
I would call the person unproductive instead of shifting the blame to someone else by calling it exploitation unless slavery is still legal somewhere.
It's not javascript, but my daughter loves Logo. She's a little younger than 10, so it's still off and on and a lot of parental involvement.
I think some of it might just be that CS theory sounds intimidating. But if you paid attention in college (which it sounds like you did), you might find that papers really aren't that hard to read. The hairy bit comes up when you don't know enough math, but this is typically more a problem if you're trying to learn something specialized (e.g cryptography).

Also, there's a disconnect between academia and the workforce. You might invent a fancy new data structure that blows up in real use because it ignores caches. Or you might invent something that's cache-aware, but everybody's using scripting languages or the JVM and doesn't have that level of access to the hardware. And so on. If you're strictly speaking about becoming better at the work of programming (rather than CS), that stuff isn't that important. You will spend way more time, especially as you move up in seniority, interacting with people - whether it's designing your system to be understandable by humans, persuading others of your ideas, getting funding, etc.
Would it make a difference if I told you that the pseudonymous internet commenter signed their comment "Source: I am a XYZ"?

Well, yes. Not ironclad authority, but it does actually provide context to their commentary. If the occupation wasn't declared, that context would be missing. It also opens the door for other professionals to say "I also -foo- and we -bar- instead". It would provide a different context had it instead been 'park ranger' or a directly article-relevant 'coast guard in Illinois'.

For comments like this one, about rescue procedures, the scope for fake commentary isn't particularly high anyway. It's not a hot-button topic and the commentary isn't at fever pitch (when you stop believing anything anyone says).
I had my Android stolen, and I GPS located it. The idiot even took a photograph of their medical paperwork, revealing thier identity, address, social security number, date of birth, etc... BUT THE SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT MISSION PRECINCT WOULD NOT LIFT A FINGER TO HELP ME!!!

I finally published the photograph online, in hopes that some identity thief finds it.

FUCK PEOPLE WHO STEAL PHONES
Is there a legal reason for being so conservative about financing porn? Or is this purely a moral stance that WePay is taking.
This is first and foremost a failure of the United States and its dysfunctional health care system. WePay made it worse, but she shouldn'tve had to collect donations to pay for essential medical care in the first place!
.house is in General Availability
.consulting is in Sunrise
This registrar and site has been very helpful to me:
http://www.onlydomains.com/new-gtlds/launch-diary
Or you could just follow the rules with whatever payment processor you choose. Adult content is not a problem, you just have to pay more for it because the fraud rates are much higher than for non-adult content.
Hadoop's Uncomfortable Fit in HPC
Why do people have a penchant for insisting on comparing software engineering (or programming or whatever) to civil engineering, specifically? Isn't there a whole world between the structural engineering of a skyscraper and the engineering of a new todo-app?

Are really all other engineers doing work as delicate and safety-critical as brain surgery? I'd imagine (not that I know, really) that a lot of risk-averseness in more concrete engineering fields simply has to do with the bottom line: if a design has already been put into production, what if there is a fault in that design and subsequently all the final products of that batch? With software, you can just nag the end users to update.
They have a net, but it's in the form of a fence to keep you away.
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I guess you have a shitty job.
Why would WePay risk being in breach of their own contracts because a small customer has a sad story? They are required to put a stop to transactions that don't meet the rules, even if it's sad. Internet poker to raise money for chemo would similarly be off limits despite its noble goal.