skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who cares? If I'm a teacher I don't want to have to update material extensively every semester / year because the language is changing rapidly. Three are plenty of good, stable languages to use.
Can this access my computer's camera?
Five minutes later it's still retrieving my reading list (tried with and without AdBlock). I'm very happy using Nuzzel, which seem to do the exact same thing.
I work with computational chemists at the moment, major offenders are LAPACK and ATLAS in FORTRAN-90
My first reaction to this was that this was definitely less understandable, but I realized there were two pieces to this. One is banal - mapM_ and putStrLn are not near as simple as `for' and `print' (the latter have English meanings directly).

The second piece is interesting: Is something of the sort "<mapfn> <printfn> <list>" easier to explain to someone who's new to programming than "<foreach> <print>"? I've always thought the latter was easier to understand, but I'm curious which one someone who has no previous programming experience would grasp more immediately.
I think there is a general misconception about what this shift in approach by the BBC means and why it is significant.

Scientific debate does not unfold in the same way as political debate, where it is plausible to have two, equally valid "sides" to compare with "benefits" and "disadvantages". Scientifically defensible conclusions drawn from repeated experimentation are complex to understand, difficult to explain to the layman, and require rigorous experiment design and adherence to statistical methods. These are not bite-size headlines, and that is why responsible news sources would do well to coach their proclamations very specifically.

Proper scientific dissent sounds more like "your results were not repeatable in my lab setting to the same degree of certainty" and not at all like "you scientists are liars with an agenda paid by the political establishment".

The BBC is not shying away from covering valid-but-unpopular research. It is simply choosing not to seek "opposing opinions" that are unsupported by statistically valid methods of research.
Fanfiction, Graphs, and PageRank
Unsealed Temporary Restraining Order giving Microsoft control over No-IP.com
Maybe many of the people who take these intro course are not CS professionals. With the numpy and scipy modules there are a number of uses for Python for science/other majors that don't involve building web pages.

This is my best guess as why Python VS Ruby.
Javascript Allongé by Reg Braithwaite was an incredible book, not just for changing how I viewed Javascript, but it also taught me a lot about programming as a whole. It taught me a lot of lessons in factoring functions into orthogonal concerns that have been highly influential on my coding style in all languages ever since.

Available free in HTML form:
https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge/read
The story that I've heard isn't that companies don't like to hire PhDs, but that you can get a pretty solid job with a nice salary, work there for six years, and then you've earned six years of nice money, you have six years of experience, and between that and raises it's not hard to find yourself in a pretty solid job with a pretty nice salary.

Alternatively, you can get a PhD, spend six years living on a stipend, and get hired into a pretty solid job with a pretty nice salary. Best case is that you end up in the same place as the folks who didn't get the PhD, but they have six years of earnings and savings behind them, and you're not getting paid enough to make up that deficit.

I was offered a chance to become a PhD candidate and they were very clear that it wouldn't drastically increase my earning potential and that the opportunity cost would be pretty high; the benefits they quoted at me were things like the opportunity to do the cutting edge research myself instead of reading about it, a chance to meet a bunch of people who would become the titans of the field, and a chance to stay in the environment of academia.
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I think the idea that the simplicity, lax compiler and readability of python will serve as a easier introduction to programming and keep more students from dropping out early. Java certainly has its place in enforcing verbosity, OO, coding standards, etc.

I think the mission here is to ease people into coding so if they don't want to progress any further up maybe they'll just manage a companies small PHP website or something and have the knowledge to do that.
For reference, the ranking used by the author is from US News & World Report[1]. While it's far from objective, it certainly holds enough merit such that UC Davis being the last school you would attend for CS sounds ridiculous.

[1]: http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
The annoying thing is that some of them are commonly-abused statistics (such as the SMB export statistic). Seeing that early on immediately marks this as low-quality political editorial. Look elsewhere for a history lesson.
Ruby has become almost synonymous with rails, Python is used in more diverse areas.
I would hope that no one in a freshman CS program is "completely green to programming".
I'm not convinced that smart people gravitate to quant roles. The hours may be longer on the "soft" side but it is more prestigious and the work is less taxing and doesn't require continually learning new skills.

I don't know how you can enter "soft" finance at the VP level.

> Absolutely. This is completely true. Any idea what we should do about this in engineering? (Or just call it hopeless and exit for finance?)

I think the ship has sailed for many people, you can't get into PE or non-quant HF mid-career. When I was younger I often thought along the lines of "if only everybody..." but I realized the hard way that it is much easier to change yourself than to change the world.

When I give advice to smart kids entering college I tell them they should strongly consider targeting PE/HF: If they hate it they will know from experience and still have superlative exit ops, trivially able to land a management/executive-track job at a tech company or elsewhere.
(Needs better source) Chile Releases Official Study on UFO Photos
"When a recruiter or employer contacts you, how would you like to be addressed?"

Is there really any further scope that should be covered? If there are specific cultural issues, shouldn't that be hammered out later?

Really, the design question for JSON Resume is "For what purpose is a name being provided?"
Thanks for the sarcasm.

We're not talking about egregious examples of bad behaviour. These subtle-isms are vague; they're hard to identify and explain; they crop up unconsciously.

It's not bad manners if you don't know you've upset someone, or you're unaware that you're enforcing damaging social norms.

We should change & we should question our moral compasses. For me, this is an absolute. But the proposed solution only works in situations where all actors are acting in good faith. It's too easily subverted. I have no beef with Hacker School for trying this, but time and again, groups that work within these frameworks devolve into politicking and rules lawyering.
Precisely. Eisenhower/FDR style "New Deal" policies would be ridiculed as Communism in today's political arena.

Modern politicians are just prudent businessmen who only care about the needs of their most affluent customers.
"Legislation" initiated by Congress isn't limited to statutes, it can include Constitutional Amendments.
I also thought SML worked quite well at that level, but I think the initial negativity on the forums about an unknown language reflected what to expect from a larger portion of 101 students.

> I won't say anything about Python.

I will try to learn from your wisdom.
That has been my experience, as well.

It's also important to remember that Java is still in this position even after almost 20 years of development. And this is development undertaken by large companies that were or are quite well funded, and have had very talented individuals work on this technology.

If they've yet to get consistent C++-level performance out of Java or the JVM, it's most likely factors inherent to those technologies that are to blame.
Welcome to HN! Ruby is a good idea for webdev but keep in mind that Python is also dominant in other domains of computing in particular scripting and scientific computing. So in my opinion for a beginner Python is more future proof than Ruby [activate language-flamewar-prevention-daemon] and if you later add a system-language (e.g. C) and a modern general purpose language (e.g. Haskell or Scheme/LISP) to your repertoire you are in a very good position to tackle most kinds of software development problems.
While42 – the French Tech Engineer Network
It's probably some combination of happenstance and various numerical libraries making Python relatively popular in scientific computing before Ruby became well known in the U.S.
It's pretty easy to name any number of >$100M acquisitions that have been shut down. Regardless, that's only a goal of VCs: there's no shortage of VC-funded companies that have been sold for far less than $100M when they couldn't raise the next round at a palatable price.

No startup company can make a defensible claim that their product will be around for the long haul.
Why would you ignore fees? Fees are the core factor of any payment/remittance business. The possibility of such an 'Bit-ATM' network doesn't depend on any technical issues, but on the amount of fees that can be extracted; only the volume and rate of fees determine if it's realistic or not.

Bank accounts also are generally free or near-free worldwide, it makes sense for every minimum wage earners to have a bank account, around here they do unless they're working illegally. If they're unaffordable in some places, then maybe that's the thing to solve - it doesn't actually cost much money to keep a "account" & some digital records; and the clerk-face-time of making such a record is comparable to the clerk-face-time of current money remittance services.
My first language was AS3.And I'm glad it was.

Types dont make things more complicated. Most languages have types and I prefer dealing with them explicitely rather than letting an interpreter do random coercion like Javascript.

Types lead to cleaner programming,instead of shoving random stuffs into an untyped list,a dev has to think about data structures.

Furthermore,as a non native english speaker,I dont find python more readable than staticaly typed languages like C# or Java.Especially when a codebase grows larger. I wish python was statically typed.
Coursera proglang used ruby for the OOP paradigm. enjoyed it a lot. Python OOP really feels like a bag of bolts, both semantically and syntactically.
IIRC wasn't that the entire motivation behind the creation of Python?
I find the type system a great help with remembering what I was actually trying to solve. I can "start at the end" and then work backwards, solving one compile error at a time until there aren't any left, at which point I'll know I've done what I wanted to.
>am i missing something, or is amount of code changed a good thing? Like was there a lot of bad code, and now it's changed to be good...

That's the idea when you're doing a rewrite, especially after years of experience with the pain points, and wanting to address specific issues/bugs.

That the old code was bad, and you add new code that fixes some stuf.

It might not be perfect, but then nothing is.
> Precisely. Eisenhower/FDR style "New Deal" policies would be ridiculed as Marxism in today's political arena.

Which is different to how critics responded to them at the time...how?

The New Deal wasn't exactly universally acclaimed and non-controversial when it was proposed.
And if you think that's bad, you want to see the insurance sector! Data loss is good for insurance businesses in the long run...
And this exactly what everyone needs in the beginning.
Simple and clear syntax where you are able to produce results in a short amount of time to keep you interested.

I just remembered some people i learned with who struggled along time to get behind the concept of pointers and how to use them when they thought us c/c++ as an intro language to programming.
All imo...
Python as the "101" language is a pretty good idea for universities in general because many fields do data crunching of sorts and Python is fairly widespread in the scientific community.

As long as signup to the class is open for all (and not just CS-students) there will be healthy benefits for other departments (economics, biology etc.)

Aside from that I've always kind of defended high level languages as entry level teaching tools. The closer to pseudocode/natural language the better. Once you start to think about solving problems like a programmer you can switch languages relatively painless anyway.

With the advent of RubyMotion etc. I'm starting to wonder if there would be some value in starting to teach programming on mobile platforms in a high level language as 101 (i.e. the first ever code they write is mobile code). From my experience the "app classes" are always popular because there's a certain cool factor in being able to show a friend stuff you did on your own mobile device.
If you'd tailor those classes to low-level phones it would be pretty helpful for certain areas of the world where many families have at least one cell phone but often no computer. Writing the code on the cellphone itself is pretty painful but at least one could write it at a university/school with a computer and carry the stuff that was built home.
1. C, D and Pascal dont have garbage collection.
2. An argument can be made for starting with dynamically typed languages before moving to static typing.
Chip & Pin has the fatal flaw of asking me to trust unverified hardware. I know that my phone is trustworthy. I don't know that your POS terminal is. It definitely eliminates a lot of the issues present in the current magstripe setup, but what I want is something that requires access to a black box I trust.

As long as I'm handing credentials to an untrusted computer that I have to trust to behave honestly, the problem isn't solved.
You usually can't issue a loan to an executive without some sort of director oversight. See Tyco.
The worse would be those that make you watch an ad video then type in the ad words.
In college our intro classes were in C++. While its a tough language I do wonder if it was advantageous to forcefully learn about 1) value vs reference types via pointers and 2) how allocation maps into memory space. Not having that level of depth kinda worries me
Interestingly inbox.com seems stuck in 2003.
Biggest reason is that Python has been around for longer (at least in terms of popularity in the west)
It's not as though students won't dive deeper after their introductory CS course.
I'm more confused now. So what is the major change from the era of "post WWII" and how that affect attemps of "government efforts to produce commerce and innovation"?

Nobody said it "always works" -- it's enough to say that if it worked then, it could also work now.
E.p. Love – put you to bed
What are you basing that conclusion to demonstrate that "business seems to be good"? Numbers? Financing? Hiring? etc
Essential Stuff You Must Get Right Before Marketing A New Startup
This is actually one of the more useable captchas I've seen recently...
What do you mean, "platform"? Where's the RFC?
20GB still isn't something to scoff at if it wants wide-spread adoption. It's huge when you consider that anybody who wants to attempt to run Bitcoin has to download all 20GB just to get things installed. I have approximately a 1.5MB download speed. The space on my HD I can live without, but I gave-up trying to get the bitcoin-qt program to sync after about a week (I ran it mostly non-stop - I obviously wasn't getting anywhere near 1.5MB down, syncing the block-chain is slow) and just bought the little bitcoin I wanted straight into an exchange and then bought the other coins I was planning to buy anyway so I didn't have to mess with bitcoin myself.

The fact is, in it's current state the huge block-chain makes bitcoin anything but user-friendly.
What? If sending emails to the past were possible, we would have seen it already.
It is perfectly fine to learn ruby; Rails is one of the nicest frameworks to get started with --I do prefer python and django, but rails is pretty nice too
I think it's important teach what's relevant in the current day, every likes to parrot the "Python 3 has no support" line but it's simply not true[1].

The developers have said multiple times there will be no 2.8 and the 2.7 line will only receive security fixes. Python 3 is the future of Python and not teaching it to students would be a disservice to them.

[1]: https://python3wos.appspot.com/
I also quite enjoyed Prof. Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State:

"This book debunks the myth of a dynamic private sector vs. a sluggish public sector by providing a detailed account of the role of the public sector in taking on high-risk entrepreneurial investments, from the Internet to the ‘green revolution’."

The book is more thorough but you can get a lot also out of the free pamphlet available here http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/theentrepreneurialstate
>The New Deal wasn't exactly universally acclaimed and non-controversial when it was proposed.

It was far more accepted though -- as were other kind of policies, and even unions back then. It was a different climate.

The fact that it was not "universally acclaimed" then, doesn't mean everything is the same regarding how the public and the pundits react to such things then and now. The deegre and the quality of the disagreement for one, can change over time.
But who is talking about blocking dissent? Not giving airtime on the BBC is blocking dissent, now? Should they also give airtime to the flat-earth society?

The BBC is not a scientific journal, it's a mass-media organization. It's not its job to promote every little scientific theory.
Pretty terrible article as others have pointed out.

You can tell immediately by the quality of the statistics they attempt to sell the premise with, for example:

"95% of the world’s consumers live outside of the U.S."

And ~20% of the world's consumption by dollar value occurs in the U.S. It's likely 1/3 of the world's population won't be meaningful consumers in this century. The 95% number - based on population of all things - is entirely worthless.
I've taught both, and IMHO, the Ruby is less suited for the job of an introductory language because a block (i.e. an anonymous function) is a hard concept for a beginner to grasp and a core part of idiomatic Ruby. Python's syntax simply has "less magic" and is more regular. Ruby's syntax seems to be suited for either folks who don't really want to know what's going on (just give me a DSL and leave me alone) or students who have one language under their belt and are looking for to branch out.

That said, Ruby includes a lot of interesting concepts, and while I don't believe it's an ideal first language, those concepts certainly belong in a CS program.
> Climate change scepticism is not a fringe view, but moderately widely held.

Is it true for the US? That's definitely not my impression for Europe, it always looked to me that was a belief from a tiny minority.
Solid is an abstraction layer.
Currently, it has multiple backends, including a windows one[0].

[0] https://projects.kde.org/projects/frameworks/solid/repositor...
Can someone explain how Microsoft got away with a 200K USD bond?
This is an aside, but I take exception to their figure, "Nowhere to put your money". I find it manipulative.

Look, I quickly rearranged their figure by just reversing the order of the 6 tranches (which is arbitrary, and not actually connected - though they seem that way). Original:

http://imgur.com/6my8mqu

Reversing the order of the 6 charts:

http://imgur.com/mq61KrL

Just flip back and forth! It shows a different impression. I haven't changed any of the data.

The original impression only exists because they sorted the six downward (by end-point of each of the 6 charts - they even make those end-points bold dots). That's an awful shifty way to tell a story of something moving down over time.... Plus - how did they select these six? Indonesian Stocks - Manhattan Office buildings? Could it be they selected six that fit well together? (Mine, lacking this preselection, is way more jumpy.)

That said, I enjoyed most of the article and don't like this sleight-of-hand, which calls it into question for me.
Have you looked into http://www.datatau.com/ ? It's a user-curated list for topics related to data science.

Disclaimer: I started DataTau.
mainly the fact that python was designed to teach programming and its community has pushed that aspect of it; ruby's community, IMHO, tends to be more for cool, shiny things, and faster changes, which makes it less suitable as a teaching language
You don't have to download the whole block-chain to use bitcoin.
Trivial to solve with OCR though, which sort of defeats the purpose entirely. I'm fairly certain the letters would just be in plaintext in the SWF anyway, so it's probably breakable for a malicious person at no cost. Hard for the user, easy for criminals, smells like DRM to me.
> It's 20GB. Many modern games are larger than that.

It's large enough that it can't be stored in a single file on many good filesystems without extra fiddling. While "huge" is obviously a subjective measure, this would certainly seem to apply.

Either way, many modern games come in well under 20GB, so I'm not sure that's the best criterion to use. And storage isn't the problem, as much as the bandwidth requirements to bootstrap a bitcoin client.

And all of these problems will only grow larger over time.
Do you think equal time should be given to all opinions on scientific issues that are not backed by evidence? Should we teach Christian creationism next to evolution? Should we teach about the balance of humors next to germ theory?
Not really. We've got the text of the actual restraining order under which the domains were seized, and it's quite clear on the fact that No-IP wouldn't get advance notice of the fact that Microsoft were trying to seize their domains or a chance to challenge it:

"Microsoft’s request for this emergency ex parte
relief is not the result of any lack of diligence on Microsoft’s part, but instead based upon the nature of Defendants’ unlawful conduct. Therefore, in accordance with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(b) and Civil Local Rule 7-5, good cause and the interest of justice require that this Order be Granted without prior notice to Defendants, and accordingly, Microsoft is relieved of the duty to provide Defendants with prior notice of Microsoft’s motion." (Microsoft's motion in question being their attempt to seize the domains.)

The basis for this was "unlawful and/or negligent conduct". Basically, Microsoft managed to convince the courts that because in their eyes No-IP weren't policing their services well enough, Microsoft had the right to seize all their domains and shut them down without giving them the opportunity to challenge this in court first.
Does this really exists ?
Clickables:

- http://i.imgur.com/anz3UkA.jpg

- http://i.imgur.com/9U0jIUl.jpg

- http://i.imgur.com/dBG821q.jpg

- http://i.imgur.com/zHw4zEm.png

- http://i.imgur.com/49Fbj8S.jpg

- http://i.imgur.com/xBnfzL3.jpg

- http://i.imgur.com/lj8Toub.png

- http://i.imgur.com/Jiti6IV.png

- http://i.imgur.com/WmmLJ24.png

So, would you hire me for your next project? Why not? Here is my email address: vidakovicmiha1@gmail.com
Well, from my perspective, students should learn on current gen tech, be it Python 3.x or Java 8, C++11, etc.

I agree that simply learning some programming has no bearing on the language version, etc... however, as students get familiar and start to experiment on their own, they may learn "the old way" of doing things.

There is no downside to teaching Python 3.x, there might be a downside to teaching 2.7.x.
OP is having a thought experiment, does not literally believe that he can send email back in time.