skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, why can't we franchise a university?

1. One argument is that we already have franchised them: universities have access to textbooks of a higher-quality than they previously had. I'm sure we have more universities per capita than before the printing press... (though I haven't the stats).

2. You can set up a course today based on MIT resources. You have a professor (of lower quality), you have classmates (of lower quality). But the point about these things is that they still are greatly beneficial for learning, even if they aren't the greatest in the world.

3. McUniversity. The aforementioned trademark ("insignia of origin") aspect of a top uni: "Oh, you went to MIT?" etc. Franchising it dilutes it into a McUniversity (appropriately).

4. Facetime doesn't scale. Sure you can distribute face-time of a high-quality professor geographically with web-video etc, but such professors don't have enough time for all their students already.

But... an interesting concept... and surely there are aspects that do scale well, and can be franchised better than before due to today's tech... and therein lies a startup.
Watching it for first few minutes ... but feel there is not enough focus on Garry. It feels more like about TC50 and other things Jason + Mike are doing with Garry as the advertisement.
"Where is the link to download Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, and "Assembly"?

You forgot Ada and Pascal ;-)

"single-implementation languages are the exception in industry, not the norm"

If I may dispute this just a little bit, is this really true?

Perl, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, VB(.net) are all "single implementation".

(Though some of these have implementations on different platforms, there is indeed one canonical and dominant implementation(Guido's Python (vs Jython or stackless) , Matz's Ruby (vs Jruby or Rubinius), Micrsosft's C# (vs Mono) ), a canonical download page (googling "$language download" leads to this page)and download links to that page).

Though there are many variants of C and C++ (mostly for embedded devices) , most people (>90% ?) use either VC++ or gcc I think. I don't know about Cobol (never had to work in it Thank God)but I suspect IBM's variant(s ?) is close to having a monopoly.

It would seem that single (or close to single) implementation languages are indeed the norm and multiple implementation languages (with predefined standards and so on) are the exception?

Again I don't think it is a specially useful distinction, just something to think about.

In my (admittedly limited and subjective) experience, languages with a benevolent dictator seem to evolve better than committee/standards driven languages.

I think this (benevolent dictator/single creator vs committee/standards driven design) might be a more meaningful distinction.
well, you need to measure productivity. One way to measure it is income. I've had close to 30% or so on average if you say I started working at 15 for $4/hr, and I'm 29 now; I can get $150/hr for some short-term work that is within my core skillset. Of course, I'm about half that for longer-term work. still, if you only count my 'long term' work rate, I've got 15%, and I imagine it's not that difficult to be twice as good at improving as I am.

Now, most of my efforts are focused on my business... from here, it's quite possible that I will have another few 'good years' where my income shoots up a lot. (the last 100% year I remember was when I got my first programmer/SysAdmin gig at 17.)

So yeah, I think 30% is possible. I think it's going to be hard, and would require an exceptional person, but I think it's possible.
Worm Attacking WordPress - Watch Out
Windows was originally built without security as a major focus, but has been improved vastly. So has WordPress. Except for a few rare cases where security was a primary goal, such as OpenBSD, most software will be discovered to have vulnerabilities at some point in time.
Jump ahead to 24:54 (when Mike leaves).
Right, but I felt the productivity gains once I got past those problems compared to the ease of getting python running with what I needed (my language of choice at the time) and it's own level of power simply didn't create the right situation to warrant continuing to fight with it after I spent something like 4 evenings just trying to get my environment working how I wanted with ability to download packages I needed via ASDF.
I propose we call these "ghouls"
I think this (benevolent dictator/single creator vs committee/standards driven design) might be a more meaningful distinction.

And it's up to the rest of the world to bet money on one guy's whims and desires eh? what happens when your benevolent dictator has holes in his understanding of programming languages? Not even Wirth could get away with dictatorship, and Wirth knew what he was doing. Your pet language grows up the moment industry and governments want to use it, and they expect their code bases to work for the next few decades, not until the next big epiphany or mood swing of THE language architect.
Reminds me of colorful prompts I used to show off in DOS by device=ansi.sys, (I think - It has been, what, more than 20 years?). Save the current cursor location, go to the top of the screen, show the date, time, working directory (in different colors of course, left, middle and right positions) and then restore the cursor location and show a prompt. In yet more ansi colors.
OK, so it's less rackspace per TB. But it's still more power, and more cooling. And in terms of filling a rack, power and/or cooling become limiting factors long before volume does.
edit: my point is that as I age, I become more focused on improving the things that I want to (and that I think I can) improve. I'm no longer spending time learning what others think i should learn. I don't know how many hours I wasted on handwriting, or learning how to play the piano, or other things that parents or others wanted for me as a child.

I'm a rather different person than I was at 25. I'm starting to get the hang of bending my environment to suit my needs rather than bending myself to the environment. My crazy ideas are 'ramen profitable' now. That's a big step up from just talking about and occasionally implementing crazy ideas, then getting bored and doing something else. My income between 25 and 29 went up almost 30% a year.
Now, part of that was that my income barely changed at all from 21-25, see, I was born in '80. Few people in our industry did well those years.

I mean, right now I'm starting to learn some of the social skills and "responsibility" I skipped when I blew off school to play in the .com boom. Massive productivity increases there (maybe not in terms of coding, but in terms of getting things done, it's definitely worth something.)

I still feel unfinished, like I'm still a child. There is a lot left to learn. My body has begun to go downhill, I mean, I can't stay up all night drinking mtn dew like I used to, but that presents it's own, possibly productivity enhancing challenges. Apparently the retna in one eye is detaching. I mean, the doctor did something with a laser, and it's under control, but from what I understand, if you've got one eye with a detaching retna, it's much more likely that your other eye is going to fail same way. So one of my next projects is to learn how to use audio output from a computer as a blind person does. I figure if my eyes don't fail it, well, I've got another output device, and possibly the beginnings of a discrete wearable computer. And if they do, if I can still use a computer, I'll get a driver and carry on as usual.

(ugh, I actually spent a bunch of time over the last two days going over my backups trying to find one of those abandoned projects from when I was 25. I've got some email from the era, but I don't seem to have the code.)
An approach I really like is to run your blog software of choice locally, then rsync the generated flat files to a server. If you want comments, you'll need to maintain some dynamic component on the server, but it still massively reduces your exposure.
Python is an excellent language in the hands of a competent pythonista: your programming career will thank you if you stuck with one language and learned its ins and outs over 3-4 years.

Libraries are add-ons and most can be ported and rewritten in your favorite language with more natural idioms. SWIG is nowadays the equalizer; it makes the entire C world callable from your favorite pet language. Stuff like LLVM will take you even further, once you know what you're really doing. In the mean time, use foreign functions and web service to bridge the gap where it exists.

My advice to Clojure programmers is to learn Lisp and mine its rich heritage for beautiful designs. A few months spent on a full CMUCL installation will make you a much better programmer for the rest of your lives: I was a Win32/COM guy writing GUIs for a living. When I discovered CMUCL I saw stuff I couldn't imagine. I was able to put buttons in the Unix shell and attach callbacks to all underlined text in an editor buffer. Stuff like that prepared me for DOM scripting with jquery. Look at Smalltalk and SML too.

A personal note to Clojure web framework guys, specially people using Compojure: take a look at Hunchentoot and copy all its good parts. I develop on Hunchentoot and everyday I discover an engineering decision made by its author that just humbles me. Good code makes you respect its author.
The problem with TCO is that it makes it impossible to get accurate stack traces for a function. If you optimize away the stack frame, there's no way to tell the user "this is what was running when the error occurred." You get odd behavior where a function may appear to call another function which never appears in its program text, because the intervening stack frame has been optimized away.

Stack traces are part of the Python language (besides looking pretty, the traceback module lets you inspect them), so it'd be really hard for a conforming implementation to include TCO - at least the type that actually has tail recursion run in constant space.

Java faces a similar problem with HotSpot's inlining, which is why you occasionally get <compiled code> in a Java stack trace instead a line and file number. They seem to have some hack in to avoid eliding the stack frame entirely though. This is probably what I'd do if I were designing language: push a bare-bones stack frame with just the debug info, but pop all the unused temporary working storage. Or punt on general TCO and just optimize tail-recursion - isn't that what Python was proposing to do with the @tailcall decorator anyway?

The languages I know of with TCO - gcc and Scheme - have really terrible debugging support. IMNSHO, I think that giving up debugging info for TCO is a poor tradeoff.
Arrington is way too distracting.
The problem with this article is his list of "Wordpress Problems" could just as easily be named "The Problems Every Web Application Has". Web Apps, by definition, always present a battle between extensibility and security. Wordpress is no different and this author's suggestion (to truncate the extensibility) is an over reaction at this point.

Keep in mind, Wordpress caught the bug before it was exploited. The problem Wordpress has is their users hold off on upgrading because the upgrades often break plug-in functionality. What they need to do is further abstract their plug-in framework so that security updates can be applied without breaking plug-in functionality.

After doing that Wordpress may still need to make the software less extensible but they should at least try every possible way to keep their current functionality before cutting features for security sake.
All of those languages became popular before the web when widespread free implementations of languages became available and the norm.
Excellent point - I stand corrected...
One aspect of VPS's and (eugh) cloud computing, is the additional security. I don't think this aspect gets trumpeted enough.

Instead of having a single big kick ass dedicated server running everything, you can have maybe 10 VPS's each doing a different thing. You can group things together in terms of risk - put wordpress on its own vps, put your customer db on another, etc etc.
At least then, if someone hacks into wordpress, it doesn't really matter that much - they only get wordpress, nothing else, and you just clean off that machine from backups.

(Obviously have completely different login credentials for each VPS, and only grant access from one VPS to another when really necessary, and restrict it).
Because people are watching videos using the CPU-intensive Flash YouTube player rather than their desktop media player...
This is the way they advertise for their wordpress.com version obviously. Stick with us or you get compromised. Bad style. They rather should fix their buggy software.

They prefer new features over security. Have you noticed how with each major upgrade there are new holes in it?

WordPress is like Swiss cheese, full of holes. I'd prefer Swiss banks or watches instead.
+1 for the git branch.

Here's my bash prompt script. It shows the command number from this session (PS_NUM), the exit code of the last command (highlighted red if != 0), the pwd (in cyan), and the git branch (in magenta)

OFF="\[\033[0m\]"
RED="\[\033[0;31m\]"
MAGENTA="\[\033[0;35m\]"
CYAN="\[\033[0;36m\]"

function promptcommand {
STATUS=$?

PS_NUM="[\#]"
PS_STATUS="[$STATUS]"
PS_PWD="${CYAN}\w${OFF}"
PS_GITBRANCH="${MAGENTA}\$(__git_ps1)${OFF}"
PS_PROMPT="\$"

if [ $STATUS -ne "0" ]; then
PS_PROMPT="${RED}${PS_PROMPT}${OFF}"
fi

PS1="${PS_NUM}${PS_STATUS} ${PS_PWD}${PS_GITBRANCH} ${PS_PROMPT} "
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=promptcommand

I probably could have eliminated the PROMPT_COMMAND thing like in the first example.
Determination is great for investors because it increases the chance that they'll get a return. But the number of great ideas is x, and having a bunch of companies bound and determined to do something with x * 100 is relegating them to living under a horrible opportunity cost -- eating ramen for a subsistence profitability level when they could be doing something more interesting and profitable.

A company needs to eventually have an idea that's both unique and compelling. It should optimize on having a sustainable competitive advantage. Determination is incredibly important because few companies start out with the right mix and usually have to experiment to get it right, but let's not over-idealize it. All the determination in the world won't let you make a cake with sand and olive oil. A founder has to know "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em."
It's interesting that Paul believes willfulness is primarily inborn, especially since he now has a child. How would he react if his child were to exhibit lack of willfulness (a trait he clearly admires)?

I agree that among siblings in the same family, one often observes a wide range of willfulness. However, the same family may not be as homogeneous an environment as Paul assumes. It's been shown that elite universities disproportionately admit eldest children and only children. It would seem that the differential upbringing that only and eldest children receive (in undivided parental time and attention, etc.) does result in increased willfulness, discipline, and/or intelligence.

Ambitious people often hope that their children will exceed their own levels of achievement. Empirically, it seems that there is a strong regression-toward-the-mean effect among the children of parents who have done great things. I wonder how much of this is nature versus nurture - could there be a negative effect of growing up in too rich of an environment that diminishes one's chances of becoming a Steve Jobs or Paul Graham? How do you train willfulness and ambition in a child?
wordpress.com blogs get hacked as well, just check:

http://www.google.com/search?q=wordpres.com+hcked&pws=0&...

You'll find threads like these:

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/my-site-got-hacked

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/my-friends-site-was-hac...

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/i-got-hacked-1

where wordpress.com users seek help after they got hacked.
Someone should count the number of times they said 'sponsors'.
This post just shows how desperate these guys are. They don't even address their own responsibility. They assume that having worms is perfectly natural.

They rather blame other people for suggesting the wrong solutions.

There is no other software out there that demands upgrades so often to no avail getting infected again and again nonetheless.

Oh, sorry, there is one: Internet Explorer!
Let me just rephrase that first paragraph a little. "When a WordPress security problem is found, they release a new version with the problem fixed and say everyone should upgrade to it. That's bad. Instead, they should release a new version with the problem fixed." Doesn't something about that seem a little ... odd ... to you?
For the government's information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint. Which this sure sounds like. ("Many researchers are ignoring a 2005 requirement that they register proposed clinical trials in a government database as a condition for publishing their results in medical journals.")
Is it worth arguing over which blogging software is better? Use what works for you. This guy's points -- Wordpress is the Windows of blogging, etc -- some people are looking for Windows. A lot of people host Wordpress on cheap Dreamhost accounts and don't want to think about security; they'll probably just restore from backups if something goes wrong.

It's the sort of thing that I'd figure makes security guys pull out their hair, but it's the market wordpress serves.
This is only pointing to another post:

http://jonathanstray.com/self-replicating-desktop-manufactur...

Also it does not even link the RepRap homepage:

http://reprap.org

Thus I submitted the original source it refers to:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=807627
that's post hoc analysis of what "determination" is defined as. that makes it less useful as a metric of success.
Self-Replicating Desktop Manufacturing: Dreams and Reality
No, either you don't get it or you refuse to.

WP 2.8, WP 2.7, WP 2.5 etc. each were compromised almost immediately and each time several security updates have been issued in the matter of days and weeks.

Nobody can keep up with it so no wonder WordPress blogs get hacked.

Why don't they just release stable and secure versions?
You don't need to run in a browser for "collaborative development and application deployment".
I've not looked at it in a long time but Hunchentoot is certainly an excellent piece of engineering, and one of the things I was certainly interested in using at the time I was attempting to get into SBCL development.

I should go back and look at it's code again, and see what new ideas I can get out of it now that I've come back to lisp style syntax, though obviously w/o CLOS and the MoP.
It's certainly worth understanding what's happening one level down from the level you work at, at least. Sometimes even lower-level effects seep through -- e.g., even if you're writing in something like Haskell it's probably worth having an understanding of memory hierarchy issues. I'm not convinced that "machine code (not assembler -- machine code)" buys you much over assembler, though.

I'd guess that much more software slowness comes from other failings, though. Poorly chosen algorithms that would make for slow performance even if written in machine code and microoptimized by experts. Forgetting that a random disc read takes millions of CPU cycles. That sort of thing.

(Most of the programmers I've worked with have been writing embedded stuff, or close enough to others who are doing so, that they have some exposure to assembler-level thinking. Though I expect those of us who grew up in the age of 8-bit micros could still teach most of them a trick or two.)
Haven't watched this episode but I don't think they've invented numbers that high.

At least when he isn't in full on sponsor loving mode there tends to be a few nuggets mixed into any given ep (the one with the two guys from UStream, as well as the one with the CEO of savings.com seemed worth watching, though I'd do it as mostly background and when something seems interesting go back and rewatch/listen, 'cause god these episodes are long).
So couch potatoes don't need to ever get up again. Combine that with the intelligent fridge that gets pizza automatically and you have a recipe for disaster.
Office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
The author over-simplified his case, it should have been "Windows desktop software vs web apps", not desktop software overall.

Developing iPhone software has a very different set of advantages and disadvantages, as does developing Mac desktop software.
There are still plenty of malicious scripts around that check the version. More advanced ones can't be fooled by that of course.
I'll ask: with Erlang I understand the mechanism it uses for concurrency fairly well. From a quick glance at these slides, I get the impression that Haskell would be very good at doing parallel calculations (it's fast), but am not quite so certain about doing parallel system tasks, like sockets, something I know Erlang is good at. Care to elaborate?

Do you guys have a fast/small web server, for instance? Something like mochiweb?
Movable Type takes this approach, even with comments.

Source:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001291.html
"determination starts to look like talent." - can determination not be considered a talent in itself?
Great post!

I don't agree with "You can keep your Google Docs, Excel is superior in almost every way." Google Docs allows concurrent editing on the same doc by multiple users.

One question to ponder: if Web Apps is so great, why everyone is busy building iphone/android application?
This technique is in a more advanced stage than is apparent from the article: there already are people that control their wheelchairs through prototypes of this kind of technique. Unfortunately, I fail to relocate links that back me up on that assertion.
There's quite a few on Hackage. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#ca...

E.g. salvia: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/salvia

The trick is to use lots of Haskell lightweight threads to hide latency (much as you would with Erlang).
Sadly this post does not mention any alternative. There are plenty good old blog software solutions like Drupal, MovableType or S9Y and a few new ones like Typo, based on Ruby on Rails.

Roughly a year ago I compiled a list with 7 recommendable WordPress alternatives:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/10/wordpress-hacked-7-gr...

Especially Typo sounds great:

"Typo is the oldest and most powerful Ruby on Rails blogware, providing custom templates, powerful drag and drop plugins API, advanced SEO capabilities, XMLRPC API and many more."
I wish Google Docs was better, but that's exactly one point and one point only where it beats Excel. I can't understand why Google isn't putting more resources into Excel -- if they want to beat Microsoft they need to beat MS Office and Google Spreadsheet isn't cutting it.
Open Source Free Simple & Powerful PHP Image Gallery: Plogger
> Very good point! What has really changed with videos, ebooks and the web? Maybe the web has made interacting with other students cheaper and more richer than before. I don't know.

Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.