skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The things I've seen built on COBOL, and Visual Basic are awe inspiring. The world is built on them - and for a reason: if you don't need a coder there's a whole new definition of "fail fast" that comes into play.

And maybe eventually some tiny percent of these these little things, succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, and is now critical your business, and you have to drop 10k hours slowly rebuilding it using professionals. That's what success looks like. It's also what not paying for 100 failed software projects looks like.
> Probably the biggest problem on Windows is that OPAM, the package manager, doesn't work there. That will come eventually, though

Wodi [1] is a reasonable choice until OPAM starts supporting Windows. It includes many of the interesting/useful libraries (including, importantly, batteries [2] and core [3])

[1] http://wodi.forge.ocamlcore.org/
[2] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
[3] https://github.com/janestreet/core_kernel
As someone who pays the weekly food bill, I think that is simply not true (about the costs).

A great deal of the vegetables are also grown on small farms here. I think the quality and taste are much better for it, but prices are very high for even simple things.
If you pick a Lisp, pick Racket or Clojure. All else being equal, they are the most modern and pleasant variants to work with.
I think if something is inspirational, it must be realizable; thus, unless we're talking about mining the moon and requiring human's for labor, we're going to miss the point.

Climate change on Earth is a constant, and if time is x, human existince is a speed bump.
Probably not - because these are grown in "in a sterile, dust-free clean room that once built the brains of high-tech gadgets"

Probably cleaner than "normal" produce, with all the pollution it deals with.
Doesn't include the top apparently.

You can search my post history to see how I made a sit/stand desk for less than $200.

Does anyone know how well the legs stay parallel and if this is a problem with the motion components?
Neuroscientists Object to Europe's Human Brain Project
Engineering Long Lasting Software [1] is a book written by UC Berkeley profs who were teaching a great SaaS-class on Coursera (using Rails) two years ago

[1] http://www.saasbook.info/
It did have a commanding global economic position - most other industrial economies had been severely damaged by war, and the nearest competitor, the USSR was strictly coercive, which meant wasting a lot of money on internal security even though it acquired a large chunk of Eastern Europe right after the war.
"(and I won't even mention MS-Windows, what a joke)."

Just in defense of Windows, which I happily use as both a developer and designer -- the latest versions (Windows 7 or 8) are pretty good at doing the two things you've described. If anything I have had many more problems diagnosing the Internet connections of friends' Macbooks.

And with managing external monitors, Windows has a keyboard shortcut to easily switch, plus it remembers screen configurations. Example: I have external monitors at home and at work. At home my monitor is to the top-left of my laptop screen. At work it's directly to the right. Whenever I hook up the HDMI or Mini Displayport it remembers which is which and automatically switches for me.

I would agree that Macbook Airs are great hardware, but the Windows ecosystem is catching up pretty fast too. Some of the new ultrabooks are really nice -- give them a shot at least.
Here's something equivalent for even less money. I have one, and it works great. I actually used a tabletop from Ikea for the desk surface:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005NJUQVG/ref=wms_ohs_prod...
I must say that compared with the CentOS 6 release CentOS 7 is a breath of fresh air. I'll assume for the moment that this is because of Red Hat's involvement in the process. Specically the availability of build scripts and the openness of communication throughout the process.

The delay in releasing CentOS 6 and the delays in updates had me worried about the future of CentOS.
Scientists threaten to boycott €1.2bn Human Brain Project
Scientists Say European Human Brain Project is Doomed to Failure
Chinese Government Banned Microsoft Office 365 Due to Security Concerns
I would assume from context, it is the ability to declare a variable in a lexical scope to have a specific type in that scope. With static typing you would then have the ability to catch use of that variable with the wrong type and make that a compile time error.

That said, I believe that pylint could statically catch some of the type errors that are being referred to.
I've often seen OCaml compared to F#; as someone who knows Haskell and Rust (among others), which is better to learn? I'm not really a Windows guy, which makes me think OCaml, but I've seen that Xamarin now works with F#, which is appealing to my inner app developer.
There are a few neuroscientists on HN. Can someone chime in on this? Does the "computationally intensive" approach that the Europeans appear to be taking, i.e. relying on lots of computer simulations of the brain to increase our understanding of it, seem like a viable one? Is it indeed premature, as the article suggests, for us to attempt to simulate the human brain (or even just parts of it)?
I can see this rationale as an argument if it was an associate's or 1 yr degree, but for four years of study I expect real depth about what's happening all the way down memory etc
Many people have suggested as much. The issue then is finding a large enough volume of customers / missions to make use of frequent flights. I've also heard (tho I don't have a link ready) that past 50 - 100 flights per year on a given vehicle, some more exotic methods of flight into orbit (that have been impractical to date) become cost effective compared to expendables. Not a few studies have suggested reusable chemical rockets are cheaper than expendables, if you can fit at least 50 flights a year on them. I once read that number as around 70 a year for the Shuttle (possibly from Antonio Elias, maybe someone else). If you can manage hundreds, some of the really nifty / whacky launch concepts might become viable, like cannon launch, laser launch etc. etc.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

(I think Antonio Elias, on NSF made the argument that Kistler's now defunct K1 (COTS contract, along side SpaceX) rocket would have been viable at nearly the lowest possible launch rate for a reuseable, far sooner than the Shuttle.)
Q: Why is there so much knowledge in universities?

A: The freshman bring some in, if little; the graduates take away practically nothing; so it naturally accumulates there.
Now You Can Play Dwarf Fortress in Real-Time 3-D
Also absolutely. Python was an influence on Ruby. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)#Ea...)
You are already an adult.A 35 year old adult. Just make more friends, and communicate with them a lot. You can overcome this issue by yourself
[2011] -- but still interesting.
An E-Commerce Site Where You Can Haggle Down The Price (YC S14)
"Stay With Me" – Sam Smith Voice Impersonation COVER
There's an RFC for that...

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2223

There's really nothing at all stopping intelligent people getting together and "fixing" IMAP, rather than building a compatibility bridge between siloed data gatherer A and reticent data hoarder B.

I personally have zero problems with IMAP4. I run my own server. You could too... In fact if you and 10 friends want to each pay $2.00/month, you could rent and share a 48GB Linode - setup your own IMAP server with CalDav and whatever else. All secured with ssh public key only access and a free SSL cert from startssl. So you only get 4GB of storage space each... I wouldn't see that as much of show stopper for me or most people I know.
And C++ is horrible for security. By default it inherits C's no-checks-at-all, give-me-performance-or-give-me-death mentality.
Hasn't Safari had this on by default for 2 years or so?
Watch Our World Change, From Space
In my experience: ask any Computer Science professor interested in undergraduate education whether engineers should take an intro course using Matlab or Python, and they'll always say Python.

Ask any non-CS Engineering professor interested in engineering undergraduate education whether engineers should take an intro course using Matlab or Python, and they'll always say Python.

This argument seems pervasive across many institutions.
Thank you very much for the in-depth reply. I was hoping someone in hacker news would know enough about the subject to give me some ideas.

As far as my interest goes it's nothing specific, more of a general interest. I've been interested in traffic patterns since my first retail job years ago where I noticed that customers tended to enter the store in groups causing long lines. When I paid closer attention I noticed that cars tended to arrive in the parking lot in groups and I assumed that traffic lights and stop signs were causing this. This got me thinking about how much traffic engineering affects every day life in ways other than just commute times, and I find it fascinating.

Just curious--does a masters in urban planning require a specific undergrad degree or would it be open to someone with a CS degree?
I may have made this term up myself; I am on the go and can't check it. As I use the expression "lexical typing", it means that the type of a variable can be ascertained from examining the text of the program, without needing to run it. Python is strongly typed, but dynamically typed: you can only know for sure the type of a value by checking the value at runtime.

This by analogy with "lexical scoping", where you know where a certain name will be bound just by looking at the program's text, while with dynamic scoping, the stack is what determines where a variable is bound, and you can only know about it at runtime.

I guess I should have said "static typing". I probably made the mistake because lexical scoping is also called static scoping, and I was writing in a hurry.
Thanks, appreciate the reassurance. I think my previous comment could safely be construed as a gripe...

Lo, I remember the days of Apple releases, the top 10 ways articles, ... oops. I can no longer remember, and we had some good ones, even plethoras of front page links posted in jest and in retribution... sigh. Getting old.
No kidding, right? I am not sure I can respect his interests and goals as an innovator when this is a week or two after the latest Facebook drama.
It occurs to me that some people who create bots may assume or require that the communicator on the other end is a human who can bring the interaction back on point.

What happens when the security liaison bots for two super powers get into it?
> 2. An argument can be made for starting with dynamically typed languages before moving to static typing.

As much as I like static typing, I agree that showing people run-time errors seems to do a better job of teaching than letting them know ahead of time via the compiler that their code will likely blow up.
Mozart Makes You Smarter... And Other Dubious Musical Theories
PotatoSalad.co – Donate To A Real Cause
I think the net impact is that Kickstarter is in the news again, boosting their mindshare as "the" crowdfunding platform.
Just don't try teaching C++.
Sure, that's possible. When you're passing around the links to other people, it gets old to have a bunch of "[link] and search for 'Keychain|HealthKit|HomeKit'"
Wrong.Customer currently used to google speed.They want very speedy system and fast analytical decision making.Batching is old news,new system must speed 800% because customer paid high end core proc
Typical americans, welcome to the rest of the world. Try living outside of NA for a month or so and see just how many things aren't available to you, or the insane prices you have to pay.
F# is essentially OCaml.NET, so knowledge of either will be very transferable to the other. F# can interface with C# types, but it feels cumbersome at times. Idiomatic F# is very similar to idiomatic OCaml.
The Real Reason For The Forty-Hour Workweek (2013)
I come from a pretty strong web background (started out as a front end, now full stack), but I also struggle with properly managing time when it comes to my front end focused work. My advice is probably very simple, but it's proven to be most effective for me. Focusing on the smallest parts first and making them as loose and re-usable as possible has always made my front end work process go very smoothly.
this is highly variable. in philadelphia, it's illegal in center city where pedestrian density is highest, but legal elsehere in the city. this means cyclists starting their journey in a legal zone may tend to just continue what they're doing, especially as the zone change isn't marked.
It's interesting how she mentions the point of taking a recorded performance and keeping it fresh by introducing guests on stage with each set.

Reminds me of how Louis CK under advise from George Carlin (I believe) throws out his material and starts fresh every year.

For creative people now, the key will be those who continue to be creative, not those attempting to ride on one creation to the end.

The same is happening in the mobile world in app stores now. People expect to get the initial offering, and then see continuous improvement through their free updates for life.

How will people manage to get their continuing creativity and effort supported in this market?
This strikes me as different. This looks a lot like Microsoft Access. A tool for "simplifying" database construction and common tasks like reporting (which doesn't actually work except in very simple cases, because you quickly reach the point of needing to understand concepts like normalization and foreign keys even if the GUI is pretty).
That is an artifact of the current system, which as Gavin mentions, can probably be fixed.
Python has a much cleaner syntax.
I have had a lot of calls that go like this.

But usually I wont waste my time past the first call if they can't put a name on the hiring manager.
Absolutely hated Basecamp (though that might be more because of the incompetence of the team that I was working with). Been using Trello for a couple of months now, and I'm loving it. Granted, I'm one of a two-person team, but I feel like Trello could work for projects of any size.
The point is they do not need a remote engineer.Next, you just need to send resumes to those company who needs remote front-end engineer
When you say you've just started learning to code for building web apps, do you mean you

(a) already know HTML/CSS/JS and now want to learn a server side language, or that
(b) you are going from no experience straight to server side programming?

Regardless of whether you learn Python or Ruby, there is practically no way around having to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for building web applications. You will be reading/writing HTML/CSS/JS in your Python or Ruby projects.

So if you have no prior HTML/CSS/JS experience, I would prioritize those skills first. Otherwise you will learn Ruby or Python then be disappointed to discover that browser technology is a giant hole in your skillset, impeding you from doing the useful things that got you to start learning in the first place.

You can do great things with just HTML/CSS/JS, especially since the browser environment supporting dynamic client-side applications in JavaScript has become so powerful.

Then when you're finally doing something that genuinely requires that logic and/or data be hosted on a server, managed by server-side tools, your knowledge of browser technologies will provide a solid foundation for stepping into that ecosystem.

If you already know HTML/CSS/JS, Ruby vs Python comes down largely to personal taste and whimsy. There are indeed differences, but the differences don't matter till much later, if ever. The greater danger is not that you will learn a language that isn't future-proofed, but that you could waste far more time picking what to learn than you ever might have wasted by picking the wrong language, especially since there isn't truly a wrong choice between two great languages. The debate between them is largely a religious war.

Since you seem focused on web apps, and have already started learning Rails, stick w/ROR. You're on a great path and your current choices won't hold you back. Good luck.

PS If you're interested in learning HTML/CSS/JS, I am thinking of teaching these subjects to beginners (no charge of course). PM me with a contact if interested.
Don't feel too bad; the pop culture side of programming (a lot of HN) is profoundly anti-design of any type.

I think that's a surprising characterization; it doesn't jive with my own perception (as subjective as that may be). I think the past decade has (rightly or wrongly) seen a reaction in our industry against enterprise-style "architecture astronauts" but that doesn't equate to being "anti-design". (I'm thinking of the emergence of Rails-like frameworks vs. the JEE stack, and then the emergence of micro-frameworks like Flask/Express/Sinatra after that.) Simple/reduced structure is a valid design choice (of course there are trade-offs that come with that, and of course they aren't always appropriate, but I don't think that means it's popular to be "anti-design").
But this is the year where we truly start moving to UHD en masse, you can get a UHD laptop already for around $800. Software is eventually going to be optimized for 2X pixel densities, and your 1080p screen will be worthless.
I swear there is no weaker criticism on tech forums than people complaining about how technology X is lame because it has some nifty feature that competing technology Y has been doing for a long time, which is always followed by a complaint that whoever made technology X is guilty giving the false impression that they are 100% responsible for inventing whatever that feature was, by virtue of the fact that they don't include a long list of thank yous to said competitors in their marketing materials.

In previous decades, this argument was every bit as silly when someone used it to claim that Windows sucked because the Mac came first, or that the Mac sucked because the Xerox Alto came first, or that the Xerox Alto sucked because the Analytical Engine came first, or that the Analytical Engine sucked because the abacus came first, or that the abacus sucked because fingers came first, or that fingers sucked because...well, I don't know. Maybe there were a bunch of flagella graybeards on the forums who would get super pissed anytime someone made a positive comment about fingers without acknowledging the evolutionary contributions of their species.
Command line apps in the PHP community are getting more popular. I have NEVER seen one and I wouldn't use it.
Looks fine for me on OS X running Chrome 35.
When the concept of "subtleism" (note the spelling) was explained to me by one of the Hacker School founders, I thought it was brilliant. Precisely because it transformed a "shaming ritual" into an olive branch. The idea is that subtleist remarks are NOT *-ist, individually, but the aggregate of hundreds of subtleisms could be oppressive. So, nothing's wrong with saying "you guys", if only it didn't come in a flood of subtleisms. It's ok, you're forgiven, but we can do better.

Compare the word "micro-aggression". That's an accusation and the beginning of on argument. "Subtleism", by contrast, is a word to promote healing.
I'm not sure if you are asking for sources/apps, but for sources...

I was the TL for Google News many years ago, and I had to read/deal with a lot of news sources. There is a lot of poorly researched noise out there, and my advice is to avoid the noise as much as possible, especially if you are already getting the socially relevant bits via HN/Twitter.

We did some studies. Slower periodicals (e.g. Economist) provide a lot more value per unit time than the breaking news types (e.g. CNN). The "more news faster" types generally don't make you actually more informed (surveys), and generally more depressed (since they filter for attention grabbing).

This could be a multi-hour conversation, but hopefully that helps.
Washington state’s retail pot gets rolling Tuesday
I prefer F#, but only so because it has decent visual studio tooling and .net interop. F# power tools' refactoring is great, and its syntax coloring is very good as well. http://puu.sh/a1vM5/c735f3d319.png (i swear this looks a lot nicer on the washed out screen i program with)

The interop with .net libs is helpful too - but i've found that if there's anything that's really hurting F#, it's all the OOP tacked onto it to make the .net interop work. Decent tradeoff if you ask me, but it's cringeworthy to see people using F# like an oop language when the oop only appears to be there for the interop magic to work.
I sincerely hope these folks get customers & funding to pursue this as it will only help grow the nascent industry.

I'm perplexed by the economics, however. A Falcon 9 v1.1 can do 13K kilos to LEO for $56MM. A Firefly Alpha can do 400 kilos to LEO for $9MM.

That's $5,000/kilo to LEO for SpaceX and $22,000/kilo for Firefly.

Also worth noting SpaceX tried for a small launcher first (Falcon 1) but moved on to larger payloads due to the lack of a market for small payload launches.
The neckbeard is strong with this one.
Yale teaches CPSC 112 (CS non majors) in Java. Or at least, they used to. I think I heard this term they switched to Python. I would say that was a wholly good move. The only downside is that CS majors who take 112, and might prefer to learn Java in a class but Python on their own, do not get exposed to Java in any part of the curriculum.

The "introduction to CS" course, CPSC 201, is taught in MIT Scheme. It's interesting because for CS majors, the first class is functional programming. A sizeable minority (including myself) skip that class though, since it's only offered in the fall. I chose to skip it because I started the major late, already had programming experience, and Scheme isn't actually used outside of education. From what I gather, I missed out on some valuable lessons in simulating circuits and binary logic. My knowledge there is still weak.

After that course, the rest of the core curriculum is taught in C. Scripting languages like Python/Perl/Ruby, you are encouraged to learn on your own, and will often help in assignments. But they aren't explicitly taught as the focus of any course.

I absolutely hated some of my programming assignments in C, but I think learning systems programming in such a low level language is timelessly valuable and makes picking up new, higher level languages significantly easier, since you already know the tradeoffs of the underlying data structures and algorithms. For example, if I had not been exposed to pointers, I would not understand the difference in Python between "is" and "==" when comparing strings. In general I think learning c is a valuable albeit masochistic move.
Agree that the Trackpad is a POS.

Another thing to note: the wireless card is an Intel 7260, which does not play well under Linux (the drivers are really buggy and it drops the connection several times an hour if you are connected to a multi-access point network).

The keyboard is not as good as the older ThinkPads (I love my T510), but it's still pretty good for a laptop.

The battery life is at least 5 hours of practical use for me.