skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"except now people work in minimum wage jobs all their life."

Source please.

"How can people be as selfish as you are is beyond me.There is enough wealth in this world to be shared so everybody can make a decent living,and it wont make whatever you think you are worth less valuable."

Nice try on the appeal to emotion and shame, but the tactic is best left to talking heads on TV and not places where people actually care about this problem. I could respond with your utter indifference to the youth problem particularly it seems in minority communities whose starting businesses cannot afford $15/hr makes you a ..... well you get the idea. This is HN, not MSNBC.

This whole minimum wage foolishness is a cover for politicians that have failed our poor. We need to understand why adults cannot get jobs that employers when jobs go empty. We also need to look at our safety net and see how full of holes it is. Its time for looking at new way to elevate our at risk population (basic income is often discussed here) and education (vocational education to fill the infrastructure jobs that are long vacant and not outsourceble for example).
>spend-four-hours-reimaging-the-machine or spend-unknown-period-of-time-trying-to-fix-new-problem

Definitely. In our case its 8 hours minimum though for a re-image. Somehow the FDE makes pulling the old data off the machine slow.

You've got my sympathies though - I'd not like to be the one doing the IT in these cases. Can't be fun troubleshooting IT with that kind of time pressure.
Finding Node.js modules
Depends on what you're looking for. The issue isn't really "importing" the code references as much as it is a scoping issue. That is, imports are largely used to define scope for the file and mostly for the programmers benefit (so you're typing, say, Button.DoSomething instead of System.Windows.Controls.Interactive.Button.DoSomething).

That and the odd namespace clash that a compiler can't really resolve, but that is more due to implementation and system issues, not programming proper.
> But all too often, I see debuggers used as substitutes for thinking hard; the way debuggers are designed seems to encourage this.

I wish there was a device that would help me think less hard...oh wait, there is! Its called a computer!

The lack of a decent debugging experience in languages like Haskell mandates deep thinking upfront along with powerful bondage-style type systems. I can imagine that a language with a more advanced debugger would push things the other way.
I appreciate your effort to explain in more detail how it actually might be. +1 for that.
At 2,450,000 wpm.
You're registered to one of them at a time. Baseband chips typically only handle 1 network at a time.

Here's an example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw76tsRKa_Q#t=44
Much Faster CryptoJS SHA1
Python is easier for students to learn.

Learning something new is hard, and Python is easier for students to learn.

Really, the ease of learning should trump almost everything else. Especially since Python is actually used in the real world, so it's immediately applicable.

You want students to know more concepts they won't get from just Python? I agree with you. Just not as a first language.
Egypt and Iraq were once the centers of world learning. This should give pause to those considering that Boston and London will be bright lights of intellectualism forever.
The reason for Ruby is that more playful things seem to happen in that ecosystem. If you want to push something you want to be at the edge right? And although I believe Python and Ruby are equal in many qualities, Ruby is closer to the edge of where the next development happens. That was the reason behind my decision to add that.
The first 3 Samsung phones you list were all released 2-3 years ago. The last 2 were both released over a year ago (Jan / Apr 2013).

They're not new models being release with the old OS.
You must have great reasons to be so paranoid. I am slightly jealous.

I mean the chances of putting the laptop to sleep and having your laptop stolen by someone with enough knowledge to obtain access to the keys in RAM to decrypt the hard drive - well, that would be an amazing story! Not to mention the fact that you have data that would be worth all of that trouble!
Yes, however, I sadly suspect he will be remembered as being a bit like this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust

Rather than being up there with this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
>they perceive things I've said as being threats to their culture's exceptionalism.

I find this comment very interesting in light of the recent decision by the Chrome team to excise the ability to have the browser check for certificate revocation[1].

The whole situation left me with the feeling that Google has a really low opinion of anyone that isn't Google. "The certificate revocation process has some deficiencies? We'll roll our own. Oh, people still want to do revocation checks? They're confused, remove the ability to do so."

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=361820
Hacking the MBA program – help?
Skilldom is a website that helps you pick up practical business skills without breaking the bank for an MBA and without making the exercise daunting. Some examples:

1. Valuing a company or project
2. Pricing
3. Product management
4. Graphic design
5. Board/C-level presentations

To better understand the motivations and patterns people have while learning new business skills, I'm have a short survey up at https://skilldom.wufoo.com/forms/skilldom/

If you're interested, help me answer these 4 questions? :)
The problem with a program-as-the-mental-model is that you will invariably hit a barrier (whether that be the halting problem or some simpler manifestation). I'm much more sympathetic to the Don't Kill Math[0] view. You need (abstract) analysis and no amount of IDE bling is going to eliminate that necessity.

[0] http://www.evanmiller.org/dont-kill-math.html
Well, also consider the point she's making. So you had to switch to matlab, but you were able to, perhaps partially because you already had a grounding in programming in a language you found pleasurable.
Well, the shut down button shows if it will install updates. If you don't want to, choose restart, then do a hardware shutdown during POST.
Portugal. The reason I have one is because I have a company-issued SIM card, besides my personal one. But here prices are not actually aligned, since some providers have free, unlimited calls between members of the same plan, but not between members of different providers.
It says not to while it's doing it in large lettering. You'd likely corrupt the installation. How much that would affect the user would probably depend on the update.
IPython Notebooks in Google Docs
It's very good for beginners. Just remember to move on later.
I think he'll be remembered like this guy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

And also I'd be wary of setting MLK as a golden standard- I'd say his image is very whitewashed, and very much used in ways that he himself would have opposed (ie: all the kids who are obliquely taught that he "fixed" racism)
I'd be happy to take the other side of that bet.

At the very least, he's going to be at least as well regarded as some combination of Deep Throat and Daniel Ellsberg. He might actually end up as the Rachel Carson of the issue.

There's an outside chance he could be the John Brown.

There are a few axes of comparison: effectiveness of his action, and "goodness" of his motivation. They're not completely orthogonal, but if he turns out to have been an (unwitting?) SVR asset, or if a big terrorist incident happens which includes comsec/opsec derived from the Snowden leaks, he's probably doomed on both. But I don't think that's likely.
It's remarkable (or depressing) how many of the points in the article that are addressed by Smalltalk -- and yet out of reach because in most environments Smalltalk is just another program, rather than used as the environment in which we do everything.

It includes things like a source browser that allows looking up ways to deal with eg: email, if you have the/some source code, you can easily run it, a built in debugger and a tight write/test/fix-loop etc.
I think there are a lot of things whose appropriateness is hard to know unless you have some experience with it. That's especially true where you're trading short-term costs for long-term wins.

For example, think of restaurant hygiene. Safe food handling is hard work. And if you skimp on it, it's easy to say, "Hey, doing X isn't really necessary; nothing bad happened."

For me, TDD is similar, in that the benefits mainly come later, when you have a sizable code base that you can make big changes to without fear. I agree people should use it when appropriate; there are definitely times when I don't bother. But I'm concerned that people who haven't experienced success (and failure) with TDD will have poor intuition for when it's appropriate.
I thought someone would come up with such an API layer, but by using GNUstep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep

This reads like it is similar to how WineHQ and ReactOS works. (Edit: it's mentioned in the related works section)
Ask HN: I feel like an 'expert beginner' and I don't know how to get better
I really want to improve at programming but I feel I'm kinda of stuck
in this 'expert beginner' phase. I'm familiar with basic data structures
and their complexity (linked lists, arrays, hash tables, queues,
trees), some basic theory (DFA, NFA, CFGs, TMs, lambda calculus etc),
and elementary math (calc I, II, III, linear algebra, ODEs, discrete).

I don't feel particularly confident in any of these areas of study,
knowing the minimum amount to get me by. Sure I know what a NFA is,
but ask me convert it to a DFA and I'm lost.
I lack 'deep', real knowledge and am desperate to acquire this
mythical stuff before it's too late.

In terms of areas of interest, I am interested in type theory, FP,
compilers, machine learning, expert systems and AI.

So knowing this, how would I best use say 8-12 hours a day, every day,
to learn this stuff? Should I be reading papers all day? Should I be
writing code? Should I be doing exercises in books? There's just so
much material I need to get through that I am lost on how to actually
spend my time getting better.
I found some more information here:

http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/projects/cider/

But I still haven't found any released code.
It seems the only argument for pushing Python is that it sidesteps the need to understand fundamental programming concepts. Sure Python is easy to read and easy to write, but that's not really the point. To teach somebody print "hello world" in Python is not really teaching them much at all... Teaching someone the C equivalent would cover functions ("what is 'void main()'?"), entry points and how programs are loaded by the OS ("why do I need void main"), libraries ("what is cout and where did it come from? iostream!", "what else does iostream have?"), operators ("if cout is a function, what is this << thing?"), etc... The verbosity is helpful because it allows the student to ask questions that lead to a more holistic understanding of computer science. If a student with no programming knowledge asked me about how print worked in python, it'd be hard to know where to start explaining!
Completely ignoring errors relating to function calls with wrong argument counts does increase the probability of hidden bugs. That's not quite easy to avoid completely. Every time a function signature changes, all callers become buggy (without even a runtime error to signify this).
The wording of the citation makes it seem like there are vessels traveling along this canal.
Maybe the "lack of a decent debugging experience" for Haskell is a consequence of there not being much need for one[1]? Have you actually used Haskell for any project of a meaningful-enough size to form an opinon? You sling out these accusations and hyperbole, but you don't seem to back it up with any practical examples.

[1] I couldn't entirely parse your sentence as posted, so please forgive me if I misunderstood it.
> I want to just type 'email' and see a list of functions and libraries relating to email.

cough smalltalk, emacs, etc. cough :)
we really need to move closer to mathematics and precision to actually achieve software that you can rely on.

What's meant by reliability?
US drug abuse patterns have suddenly shifted over the past decade.

Prescription painkiller overdoses used to hover around the number of overdoses from heroin. In a few short years, they increased sixfold.

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health...

http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/PainkillerOverdoses/index.html

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in-brief/prescr...

http://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2013/07/presc...

"Lojack in everything" is really cool, could push us towards a theftless society. We still have a lot of work to help people escape drug dependency, though.

Planet Money had an episode on Suboxone, a pill used to treat addiction, that was a pretty alarming look inside the insanity of US drug policy:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157665908/episode-...

They see Suboxone as a sort of "miracle drug," a few people object to that description:
http://www.thefix.com/content/trapped-suboxone

Either way, the podcast does a great job at illustrating just how complicated and intimately political pharmaceutical manufacturing has become.
Ah, thank you for your time on this. :)
I'm sorry to hear it's a browser end problem.
One thing to be aware of when using these fonts as I discovered on a large project today: this font won't work on windows phone 7 devices. Whilst these devices don't have much market share in the US it's quite a bit more in Europe (particularly the Nordic countries).

The reason is that wp7 doesn't support font-face. The fix is to hide the opacity of the :before pseudo selector that sets the content of the dom element. Then you still reserve the space and then set the actual element to a background of the svg for the icon.

It's a lot of work if you are using many icons but the alternative is unusable squares all over your application for WP7 users.
I teach 11 to 18 year olds and I've stopped teaching them Python and started teaching them JavaScript.

My main reason for the switch is to overcome the "What's the point of this?" questions that I used to receive. With JavaScript the kids instantly see a result on a platform they're familiar with - a browser. window.alert() is instantly recognisable to them and seems far more relevant than print"" where the output is only visible in a terminal or IDE.
I don't think this issue really is a big one.

I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". It seems like Snowden's work has resulted in the vetting of mass surveillance.

I really hope I'm wrong.
Global warming: it's a point of no return in West Antarctica. What happens next?
No, downvotes makes the incentive to conform stronger because it makes people risk averse, so it increases the potential for hivemind. A quality filter for the quality filter would be some kind of arbitration, which people currently do in an ad hoc fashion and often prematurely by complaining about the downvotes in an edit.
You mean something like Bing Code Search but with NuGet support? That would be cool.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/17/microsoft-launches-smart-vi...

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9-...
Well, yes and no.

An explicit tax on the company by the local government would still be better than a build-out requirement, since this would at least be transparent.

But even if you want to transfer money from someone to the poor, and (perhaps unethically) you want to take it from someone who's not a voter, it still makes no sense to pick on this particular company. Why not tax any of the other non-voting companies that service a locality? Say, the tax on coca-cola?
Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?
Gretchen Tragdy – I never fall again official Single Version
‘Game of Thrones’ books are written on a DOS computer not connected to Internet
That's a good question. Speaking for myself... I'd settle for some comibined metric of "fewer security bugs" and "fewer unintentional behaviors" (per spec). You could argue about UX and such, but most of the real damage that's caused by defective software is basically about security bugs. The "fewer unintentional behaviors" bit is triciker, but math and precision (about what you want) can help with that. Usually a (mathematical) spec is shorter and more concise than the program implementing it.
I learned Java for my intro to programming. Later, I guess 2 years or so later, I began to take an interest into how and why programming languages work. Java throws an error if my index is out of bounds, which means it needs to check it itself, but what would happen if it didn't? What do I need garbage collection for? Why can't the compiler stack-allocate most objects whose references don't escape the scope of the method? How does the runtime know when it has run out of stack space? Does it check it on every new stack frame? Does the stack grow dynamically, or is it allocated ahead of time into one continuous, monolithic chunk? Can an ideal compiler infer the maximum size that the call stack will have at run time (modulo Halting Problem)?

I don't feel that my curiosity was permanently damaged by learning Java. On the other hand, I wouldn't have necessarily have wanted to learn anything about lower-level languages for its own sake, except perhaps only out of some sense of duty that 'every programmer should know this and that'. But since I have an interest in programming languages - which I of course didn't know that I would develop when I was learning my very first programming language - these things became relevant to me later.
I think that's fine to whet a young adult's appetite, but in higher education, "Why?" should be an ally, not an enemy.
I'm most glad for the fact that dang always mentions why he does something and when he does it. The vast majority of moderators on the Internet are nowhere near as good as you, dang. Thanks for all your work making HN as good as it is today.
And it's now implemented thanks to joallard.
Why do you have to teach them the boring stuff first? The point is to get them interested in programming. They can learn how the hardware, compilation, linking, and algorithms work later.

Above all, get them interested. If you capture their imagination, they'll be receptive to--even independently curious about--the details.

I'm speaking anecdotally now, but please do not bore young students. There's no way I would have stuck with it if C was my first language. Javascript and Python are excellent starting points that easily let kids create games and websites and fun things.

We probably wouldn't start someone off with Haskell, but to me C seems on the same level of impracticality for a young beginner.
HN used to have this problem in a big way years ago, where somebody would say something challenging to the group think and everybody would just dump all over the comment and "downvote the comment to oblivion". I think at some point pg put a cap on negative comment scores at -5 or something, so the point that this "this is an unpopular comment" got across, but didn't drain a user's karma by -100 or whatever.

I've also found that groups of downvotes can happen at different times during a comment's lifecycle. There's no clear pattern, but I've had comments get a bunch of downvotes early on right after the post, then a few hours later end up in clearly positive territory. I think the limit on downvotes saved the comment, it probably would have ended up in double or triple digit downvote territory during the period of time when people were piling on, but the hard limit prevented an irretrievable negative downward spiral.

I also find myself far less concerned about people piling on downvotes, because it might change and end back up in positive territory (and if it doesn't my karma isn't annihilated because I happened to be a bad mood at the moment I posted something).

I also think that not showing scores has helped a lot with breaking negative cycles (as well as breaking overly positive cycles). It infuriated lots of old users when it was instituted, but I've observed that it appears that echo chamber style group think has broken here and that "famous names" don't just get to the top of a comment tree for posting an offhand comment like they did when scores were being shown. Almost immediately, the mix of people at the top of the comments for a topic started to become more interesting and varied.
What amazes me about this point (which should be obvious) is how hard it is for people to even recognize power dynamics. It's so deeply baked in to our culture (and probably our brains) that it's easy to miss.

For my fellow nerds who have trouble spotting it, de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics" is a good book showing power in our near relatives. For understanding it in humans, various books on body language were useful to me, as were some theater books, including the status transactions section in Johnstone's "Impro".

More directly related to mempko's point, I'm also really enjoying "Confronting Managerialism", which basically claims that American business culture has relatively little to do with creating effective businesses, and a lot to do with creating a caste system with managers and executives on top.
I would expect that so long as it remains a project that only power users/experts play with and no one tries to sell an Android phone with it, it will be treated like Hackintoshes. Apple has sued into oblivion companies trying to sell them preassembled with OS X and whatnot but not groups involved in it like InsanelyMac.

Really there's only upside to that: "Hey I love all these OS X/iOS Apps but I'm tired of having to deal with the middleware. I think I'll just buy the genuine article."
Programming languages are tools that are useful to many more disciplines than just computer science.
Ellsberg is far from a household name, particularly outside the USA. 'That guy who did the Pentagon Papers' carries no resonance at all, people don't even know what the Pentagon Papers were (outside the USA).

Most British whistleblowers wrong-footed themselves with 9/11 or decided they were Jesus, they didn't need the media to make fools of them. I don't think that what's his name again? will make this mistake. However, there is a 'now what?' aspect to the story, there is no uprising from the masses, marches on Washington or anything troubling for the authorities.

In some ways Snowden has helped formalise the spying arrangements, it is now just a fact of life like having CCTV everywhere. The social contract has just been clarified.

Also, Snowden did one act, albeit a lot of planning and hard work went into it. He is not recognised as a writer or a public speaker (yet). His babysitting arrangements mean he cannot flourish that way to easily.
The methodology here is quite simplistic, and suspect.

The way they “objectively” decided on “quality” of posts, by which to judge the ‘before’ picture of a poster was via some machine learning analysis of the keywords in the post in question, implicitly assuming that their keyword analysis was a better judgment of quality than the explicit voting on the site. This seems like a very poor assumption to me.

It’s quite plausible (to me) that the posts’ keywords in the negatively-voted posts looked okay to their algorithm while the content still turned out to be trolling or bullshit (hence the downvotes). It would be quite reasonable to assume that posts full of trolling or bullshit were by posters who were inclined to future trolling/bullshit posts.

I’d be very interested to see what results they’d get if they ran the clock in reverse. I.e. pulled some posts of similar “quality” based on their metric but different voted scores, and then looked at the several posts before that, from those posters.
Ha yes, upon closer reading of the article, makes sense.