skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say just the opposite. Variables are hard, in a way that you don't even notice as an experienced programmer, but when we write

x = 1
x = 2

that's immediately very confusing for a beginner - are we saying that 1=2?

If we stick to immutable values and recursion, and functions that are, well, functions, we get something that corresponds quite closely to first-year mathematics, which makes it easy to learn at the same time.
Is Daily Blogging Worth it?
You can click "trouble distinguishing colors" for a GIF version.
They're majoring in CS not Web Development. PHP doesn't really do anything other than web dev which makes it a poor fit for a general purpose CS curriculum.
No, I'm thinking of Chromium. I use Chromium rather regularly. Last I checked, the various prompts for me to log in with my Google account when starting up a fresh install of Chromium aren't my hallucinations.
I was in the second iteration. There were still plenty of people calling for a pony and M&M's for breakfast. I can only imagine the first iteration.

SML worked well because it's more or less dead. All the documentation is basically on a single unsexy website. There aren't a bunch of blogs cluttering up Google results or even much on StackOverflow. Racket also has a single Canonical source and good clear documentation and not much noise.

I can't say the same about the Ruby ecosystem, where I saw this crazy construct in lieu of a call to super posted in a forum question. The TA asked how the person arrived at it. I knew the answer because I had landed at the same StackOverflow page from Google earlier in the week. Which is not to knock Ruby. I understand why people describe it as beautiful.
KDE 4.0 was still somewhat immature when it was released, but I'd hesitate to call it a debacle. From what I remember, it was meant mainly for early adopters, so that issues could be discovered and resolved quickly. KDE 4.1 addressed many of these. KDE 4.2 and subsequent releases have provided an extremely robust desktop environment.

On the other hand, GNOME 3 was a debacle, without any doubt. KDE 4 resulted in nowhere near the level of backlash and response that GNOME 3 did. I mean, GNOME 3 was and is so bad that it spawned two rather significant and ongoing salvage attempts in MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to completely driving away a lot of existing users. We just didn't see anything close to that with KDE 4.
Is this a prototype or the actual website?
Erlang especially, it comes out of the box with OTP, so you don't really need to invent anything or have advance knowledge of design principles. Learn OTP, do things the OTP way. I recommend Erlang and OTP in Action by Logan, Merritt, and Carlsson. I've also heard that Joe Armstrong's latest book is really good.

You can also work through the "Learn you some Erlang" exercises online.
I'm saying in general comments sections on newspaper's websites do not represent the actual majority opinion of a population.
> if you don't have money then the rest of society often becomes the "clean up the mess" of last resort

Case in point[1]. I guess it's fine when Wall Street does it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizatio...
Watch: The best illusion of the year
Xorshift* / xorshift+ generators and the PRNG shootout
Because it defeats the purpose of the field that's checking for typos.
RxJava brings lot of FP idioms to Android, and it's great
> It's pretty easy to name any number of >$100M acquisitions that have been shut down.

In the B2B space in the last decade? Please go ahead! Name 5 off the top of your head and I'll concede the point.

> that have been sold for far less than $100M when they couldn't raise the next round

Sure, but the question was about what VCs _want_.
Bitcoin can currently handle about 7 transactions per second. Currently it averages around 0.8 transactions per second so its a ways to go before it hits that(by comparison Visa does ~2000/per second average).
What good filesystem can't support > 4GB files?
They'll prioritize fixing your bugs with their product management team, but that is basically support. You pay for RHEL for support, that is all it ever was for.

The code is 100% open source.
> There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones.

Really? That doesn't seem likely at all. You can either put the satellites in LEO and you need a hugely expensive constellation, or in GEO and you need a dish not a mobile phone. The best use case for satellite is probably backhaul, rather than cell tower replacement.
2 intelligence + 1 social = blank popup
You're right. I didn't know they could retract money.
Show HN: Hand-crafted event architecture docs for my medium-sized angular.js app
Hi! You have recently submitted the same information from another account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994757 (10 points by thebigone 1 day ago | flag | 12 comments )

The general idea in the comments was to be nice, give a few tips and explain that this was borderline spam. If you continue to resubmit this, the moderators will probably ban you.

I’ll just repeat my comment.

--

There is an official "Who is hiring?"/"Freelancer?" monthly post the first day of each month. They are popular and you should post there. It was only 6 days ago. Last editions:
Who is hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970405 (97 points, 6 days ago, 209 comments)
Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970372 (75 points, 6 days ago, 125 comments)
Funny thing.

Everyone here compares climate denial to other left wing bugaboos: 'creationism' 'ancient science' 'earth is the center of the universe'

So why not compare to things where the left wing is wrong?

Why not say, "if we're not going to give equal time to one thing where science is settled (climate change), we also shouldn't give equal time to..."

1. Economic fact: Minimum wage hurts low earners

2. Economic fact: Free trade is almost always good

3. Economic fact: Unions hurt the poor

So is climate change really something you care about, or is it just another tool to be deployed in the left-right debate?

The left brings climate change - their settled science - the right brings anti union policies - their settled science. Each side has heterodox scientists, each side has the vast consensus of professionals on their side. Yet only one topic gets a zillion upvotes on HN, only one topic gets extensive coverage on our favorite media aggregators.

I wonder why.
There are domains, like particle physics, where models are quite strongly constrained by data. And then there are domains, like climate science, economics, political forecasting, genetics, sociology, etc., where the underlying phenomena are very complex, data are noisy, and quite a wide range of models can be made to fit the available data. The latter sort of situation is becoming more and more common, as machine learning and statistical modeling are increasingly being applied to human behavior and other such messy areas that fall well outside the realm of 'clean' physical laws. So I submit that subjective model choice is, in practice, a very important part of a statistician / scientist's art. (as is understanding the nonstatistical reasons why one might choose a 'worse' model over a better model, e.g., computational tractability).
FWIW, systemd can also call scripts under /etc/init.d if that is really what floats your boat. It is fully backwards compatible, you just lose a lot of the flexibility of systemd when doing that. The redis-server package in RHEL7 (from EPEL) installs an init script and I know that systemctl starts it.
Author here. Thanks for all the feedback, very much appreciated, I wasn't expecting this. Feel free to email me if you have questions you'd like to take off-list (email in profile).

Some stats, which may be useful for anyone doing a Show HN soon and wondering about volumes:

- 11k visits at the time of writing (3 hours in)

- 71% of hits so far are from the Americas (hit the California server), 29% from elsewhere (hit the London server). Given the time in Europe, there is significant bias here though.

- 6.7% of hits used IPv6

- 76% used Chrome, second place was FF at 11%
MVP, melvinmt.
I actually saw "Scaling Sherpa" once. Clever, but lame.
Every intro to CS course I've ever been in has been in C++, it has always saddened me to see Java being the intro level course today. Now to see Python at the top of the chart makes my head want to explode.
The headline on HN is a bit deceptive, since there's only a temporary price cut. It's actually just a promotional campaign designed to get more people to try the service in the near term:

"The smartphone car-hailing service UberX will temporarily cut its prices, making it cheaper on average than a yellow cab, company officials said. ... The price-cuts will be introduced for a limited time."

Also, I'm not sure if it will get them that many new customers, since the demographic that needs to save a few bucks is more likely to use public transit than cabs.
As someone who's stuck in overlap between programmer and business man, I'm not going to lie, I wish I had thought of this idea. Bravo.

I do think it will take some hard work to get it out there, though.

A Github-esque model sounds utterly fantastic. I would start using that today if it was available.
I'm glad we picked Office 365 over Goog
MySQL Performance Tips For Large Scale Datasets
I'd rather it by Python than Java to be honest. In the same time it takes to teach Java you can probably teach Python and C.
It depends what sound hardware and software you use, what the memory layout of the PulseAudio daemon happens to end up like on your system, your tolerance for audio glitches, and how long you go between reboots. The code quality's awful but if you're lucky you can miss out on the worst of the issues.
I think this is a good point. And in this respect I feel like the chosen data may have been cherry-picked or are somewhat incomplete.

As an example, take Northwestern. At Northwestern there are several intro routes you could take, depending on your major. CS Majors are not required to learn Python - it is used in some 300-level classes but not in very many 200-level classes (although that may change in the coming years). I've actually taken classes with projects using Python without ever taking classes teaching Python. CS majors will likely take C, C++, Java, MATLAB, or a variant on scheme for their first language, depending on which sequence they take, whether or not they are double-majors, or course scheduling.

In contrast, non-CS majors may learn C++, Python, MATLAB, or a variant of scheme as a first programming course, depending on why they are learning a programming language.

So while schools like Northwestern may offer introductory courses in Python, I think the truth is more something along the lines of "students may learn Python, or they may learn any of a number of different languages as their first language, depending on what their academic goals/requirements are."
KDE4 was released when KDE3 was still seeing support. Gnome 3 dropped Gnome 2 entirely, and they even dropped the "compatibility mode" old desktop around the 3.4 release I think, well before most people were keen on switching to Gnome 3.

The early adopters of both complained about how different everything was, but at least in KDE land version 3 was still available for a while. It took the Mate project to maintain Gnome 2.
I mostly want it for personal reasons (as opposed to getting a better paying job -- my pay right now is pretty damn nice). I'm just wondering if I spend 4 years getting a PhD if I'll regret it.
Yeah, that's what I've heard as well. Bummer.
If programming language selection for introductory university courses was based on pedagogical research on introductory computer science courses, I suspect Scheme would be nearly universal given its roots and nearly forty year track record.

But that's not how languages have typically been selected for 15 years or so. The direct vocational skills argument has held much more sway.
Hardly.

The Fed has been spending a trillion dollars per year in stimulus to bail out home owners and investors (and businesses and banks too) to prop up the economy. That's a massive new deal style program. It amounts to a hand-out to the vast majority of Americans in one form or another, to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Obama fired off a $800 billion stimulus program in 2009, with broad support.

Bush passed Medicare Part D, a trillion dollar program, with broad support.

Bush also increased the size of the federal government by nearly 60% in eight years.

Obama & Congress passed the ACA, which will end up being a several hundred billion dollar per year program with time.

Social Security Disability and Food Stamp costs have skyrocketed, basically doubling in six or seven years. That's a trillion dollars worth of new expenses over ten years.

How much more new deal could you possibly get exactly than the free spending ways of the last 14 years? Much of that spending has been in the form of welfare programs and hand-outs.
Developing for iOS? RolloutIO is an emerngecy service for your app
> The software itself is usually no more complicated than it needs to be; the issue is that the things we want to do with the software are themselves very complicated.

Ok, take these requirements: I want a web app that counts the number of times users click a button. Users should be able to see the number of times they clicked and I should be able to see a top 10 of the highest click counts.

To do this I must know HTML, some general purpose server language, how to configure a web server (be it directly or through a hosting account or some cloud thing), how to package/deploy/whatever to said server. I must have some database to store the clicks and use SQL or JSON or some specific API. Interacting with the database from the general-purpose language is going to require a library. I might have to download it and put it in the correct place or use a package manager. If I want the interface to update immediately (like an old-fashioned app would) I also have to use JavaScript. If I want to control the position of things on the screen, fonts, colours, whatever I will also need CSS.

I understand how we arrived at this state of affairs, but claiming that it couldn't be simpler is just Stockholm syndrome.
Ditto. Line 28 in links.js:

var title = v["tweets"][0].entities.urls[0].display_url;
I read "pressfarm" and my first thought was "who would highlight a site for paid shills on HN?" The associations are terrible.
Why look! More argumentation and drama. From a new, anonymous account. How could I ever have guessed? Oh, maybe like this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
In the engineering fields (I am an ME), I am seeing steady growth in the use of Python and declining use of Matlab. The trend does appear to be more prevalent among younger engineers.
To address the VC issue the poster and subposters are talking about:

> If you've taken VC money, haven't you already gave up that choice

> if your current VCs aren't able to change your mind, and they get angry as a result,

> Or exercise their Board powers and fire the CEO when push comes to shove.

> if your current VCs aren't able to change your mind, and they get angry as a result, just their absence alone from future funding rounds

Basically, you don't know what you're talking about. Look at the VCs involved, and try to make a case for how this could work!

Fuel Capital is a $20m fund. SVAngel doesn't take board seats. Data Collective does take board seats in A rounds, but its super unlikely they have one here. Crunchfund is a small seed fund.

All of these guys are microVCs/super angels, with <=$200m funds each. They don't take board seats in seed rounds, and I would wager a significant sum that they have basically no way to affect what Inbox wants to do. If the investors get a monthly email outlining the company's performance, they would consider themselves lucky.
Don't use tables for layout.

Why not?
Why Feedback Latency is Utterly Evil or: How To Stop Sluggish UI
Seeing Opportunities In The US, itBit Relocates To NYC, Names New CEO
> Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved?

No, because you need loads of the things. They don't just hover overhead a few hundred km up, they orbit once every couple of hours. And if you want one to remain within that distance, you need a bunch in completely different orbits, launched at different times, to maintain coverage. Iridium took almost 80 satellites at 800km up, for instance. The higher up you go, the less satellites you need, but the bigger the handset gets, and speed-of-light delay becomes an annoyance.
"stiff"
I know you're still working things out, but I feel that your free tier is overly generous and your Business tier is a steal at $20. If it assuages a pain point for someone, that pain point is likely worth quite a bit more.
One thing this article completely ignores (as do many of the comments on the site) is that expectations have also drastically changed. Yes, Hypercard was dead simple to get something useful actually working, but nobody would accept a web app that looked and behaved like a Hypercard app.

I think the author is right: there is a none-to-healthy culture of increasing complexity surrounding web development. But there is also a large amount of real complexity around it. Many of the complexities we deal with today are the result of attempting to put an abstraction layer over deeper, larger complexities. Unfortunately, few abstraction layers work without leaks, and those leaks add their own complexity.

With powerful browsers, APIs-as-a-service and single-page apps, we are almost to a point where the web itself has been abstracted. But, even with that, expectations are still incredibly high. Nobody wants to look at blocky, course web sites; they want beautiful, smoothly animated sites. And that takes complexity.
Fexl now using purely functional evaluation
You make them sound casual, bitcoin has has really only had one hard forking change to enable pay-to-script transactions.
My take on Ruby vs Python is this:

While Python has a healthy web dev ecosystem, Ruby's feels much larger to me. That's almost certainly because Rails is so wildly popular. And Rails is an excellent, mature framework. So for web dev, I would consider Ruby the winner.

Python is the clear winner for scientific computing. That's not really due to anything
inherent in the language. It's an ecosystem thing. If you were using Fortran before,
you might be working in a problem domain where Python dominates.

Both are excellent for miscellaneous scripting work. E.g. reading in a CSV file and doing something with each row; batch-processing a bunch of images; renaming 1000 files according to some ruleset; gathering some system data and sending nightly status emails.

In terms of syntax and features, they're very very similar. Python has meaningful
whitespace, which you may like or dislike. (I think it's good for enforcing proper
formatting, but you're free to disagree.) Ruby has multiple ways of expressing the
mathematical concept of a function (methods, blocks, and procs), which has its pros and
cons. Both have metaprogramming facilities, though I find Ruby's more pleasant. If I remember correctly, it was in large part the metaprogramming that made DHH pick Ruby for Rails.
Sounds like a very good idea. In some industries, Excel is still the state of the art.
Multithreading: Introduction to Process Scheduling
What they want is mainstream orthodoxy like Design Patterns, OOP, etc. You'll want to study the buzzwords, mostly. What are the major principles of OOP? What is a Decorator Pattern? What is TDD?

You won't be able to infer this stuff from studying software that works well. There are specific words they want to hear. Functional programming is probably not going to help at those interviews. FP isn't used at big corporations.
You can say that about lots of languages. Scheme is good for beginners for reasons X and Y, C or C++ is good for reason Z, and Haskell is good for reason W.

But at the end of the day, if you teach someone Python, they can turn around and write Python code to solve problems in their science classes with minimal friction, or they can go on to be software engineers, or write web scrapers, video games, whatever. Python's arguably not the best at any of those things, but it's good enough at all of them.
What was the difference in pay with the 12 weeks of vacation?

Given the norms in the USA I, as an employee, would never initiate such an arrangement. I feel like it would result in at the very least an indelible assumption of laziness by my new employers, if not a retraction of the original job offer.
Not really. ARPANET has existed since '69, and UNIX came into existence in '70. IIRc they were sharing files across ARPANET in '75. People transcribed files :P
Looks nice but did not find any differentiation from what I already use - Pocket http://www.getpocket.com
Apple's New Hire Suggests More Than One iWatch Is in the Works
I'm an idiot, but I'm willing to believe there are still people out there who love what they do, and would stand by it, even if Corporation X comes knocking on the door with a pot of gold.

I'd rather cheer for them and be disappointed, than dismiss them in advance and live my life perceiving the world through a cynical lens.

Huh. I didn't know I can write so dramatically. You catch my drift, though.
Honestly, I'm not surprised, but I believe this is bad news. Learning C programming (first) was probably the most advantageous thing that has ever happened in my life of programming. When you understand C you understand how the computer functions, and in turn can write better software. It prepared me for virtually all programming and has enabled me to understand concepts correctly, the first time, and has made my life significantly easier.
I was speaking of the four I mentioned, not D
Interesting - where did these figures come from?
Welp, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment came out in '92. Probably a distributed plain text file I'd imagine.
I think that's another thing to note: around two thirds or more of the CS freshman at CMU actually take 15-122 Principles of Imperative Computation, which is taught largely in C0 (a type safe subset of C), and then later they transition to full fledged C.
Hi, I'm building this site from scratch I'd love to receive some feedback, you can use and abuse this account, username -> showhn password -> showhn https://bykrs.com/signin.php cheers
No reason to down vote because I prefer PHP for web development. In python you have to learn an entire framework just to do web stuff. PHP everything is right there is that simple.
Well, yes, sure... core programming concepts are the same regardless of language used and/or version.

However, from my experience, most students don't venture off on their own until after becoming very familiar with a language. Not all students are experimental enough to hack on personal projects for fun or what-have-you. I've actually had a fellow student tell me the Java class file he emailed me for a project would only run on Java 6 since that's what the lab had installed -- obviously wrong.

The point being -- students will intern what they are taught. They should be taught on modern versions/concepts so they intern modern ways of doing things. By teaching Python 2.x to students, you do them a disservice by teaching them the way Python "used to" do it... not how it "does it" now.

As an aside -- with all of the major Python libraries now ported to 3.x -- I see little to no reason anyone should ever learn Python 2.x, or use it (with the exception of the obvious legacy codebase support issue).