skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why, is my question. What's the 'greater good' that everyone sees behind an entire planet of coders? Why not push everyone to be doctors? Push everyone to learn virology? Surely, there's more utility there? Why code?

This is a good question.

As microcolonel states elsewhere in this thread,

The point is that software literacy is becoming more relevant to everyday life. The point of a mathematics class is not to create professional mathematicians, it's to provide the concepts of mathematics to students.

I don't think anyone would disagree. So clearly one reason is that software literacy, computer fluency -- it's all part of life in the 21st century. But why coding, specifically? The cynic in me raises his hand to posit that some of it may simply be a result of an unfortunately wide sense that "computer stuff" all lives in one big bag. And in that big bag we have pervasive entities like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. We also have venture capital, flashy IPOs, Bill Gates, your mom telling her friend that you're "good with the computer", the aloof and touchy priesthood of IT guys at the office, the technician who fixed your FiOS, someone who made a million dollars selling an app, your cousin's addiction to Candy Crush, Jesse Eisenberg sparring in his bathrobe over hundreds of millions of dollars, and the cryptic, cinematic, powerful -- albeit unrealistic -- representations of programming everywhere from "24" to "The Matrix".

So there's mystery and money and young people and bootstrapping and sudden shocking success. There's little about the trades, factories, apprenticeship, slogging through an expensive education, missed opportunities, irrevocable career paths, layoffs, or two percent raises.

I think most people know it's not all really that way. But it's a powerful undercurrent. And when the manufacturing jobs evaporate, or the giant bank lays off 10,000 workers, one's gaze can't help but be pulled over to that big bag. Even the President's gaze. Most people don't understand the bag, but part of it -- this coding thing -- well, we've heard that's something a determined person could even pick up on their own. Maybe even at home. And hey, maybe some of those people will be mysteriously, fortuitously successful. Join the information economy. It's a convenient place to lay some hope. It's a pleasing, if specific, answer to the complicated question of what to do with obviated workforce cohorts. We used to have "retraining" and "job counseling". Now we have "learn to code" as well.

I can't say it's a bad thing. Some will find a passion or predilection, and a new direction. It's good, but part of me believes the reasoning behind it is reductive, convenient, and wishful thinking at best.

Edit: clarity, words.
As an American, I'm not going to downvote you.

I'm just going to make a mocking post that notes that "wrapping yourself in the truth" doesn't insulate your lies from the light of morning, whether you're American or not.
Valencia Street in SF has this, but it's set for 13mph, for bikers.
So what OS should you use? I imagine Linux and OSX are also out of the question as they are also supported by the FinFisher.
They were referencing unique, long-tail content such as blogs or personal sites, not bit.ly redirectors to mainstream content that is widely replicated on CDNs.

Edit: try using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag... or similar extension to find caches/archives of dead links that are no longer online at an alternate address. Agreed that link rot is not the same as offline content, but there is digital content which can no longer be found in any archive or search engine.

http://fileformat.info covers issues related to digital preservation.
> no way it would be pulled off by just two guys.

> it just feels like one programmer can't make any impact any more

Can you explain in more detail what makes you believe this?

Some of the most creative solutions redefine the problem. What you need to do to make an impact can often be less work than you imagine, like work that removes unnecessary layers.

If you can name a few project ideas where you feel it'd be impossible to make an impact, we can try to provide examples of how to attack them.
Coding teaches logic as a discipline. Logical children tend to move toward STEM careers. The intent isn't so that every child becomes a career computer programmer; only that coding is the cheapest, easiest way to teach children the foundations of logic they will need later to succeed in analytical pursuits.
I would like to introduce myself to this group as a former founder and CEO, psychiatrist, and mentor at the UCSF accelerator. My team includes a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and a research assistant. After the suicides of several inspiring entrepreneurs we decided to study the relationship between human factors - including mood - and a variety of outcomes including success/failure, and mental health issues. Over 400 entrepreneurs responded to our recent survey and we are now analyzing the data. We are finding meaningful results that we hope to use to educate entrepreneurs and to develop effective mental health risk reduction / performance enhancement resources for our community. Many of the questions raised in this conversation should be pretty well addressed by this research, and I will be happy to keep this community posted.
Michael A. Freeman, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UCSF and Mentor, The Entrepreneurship Center at UCSF.
"ALWAYS start by writing some code as if you were a user trying to do the thing that the API is supposed to do."

It still amazes me how many times junior devs ignore this. They will spend a lot of time walking through the UX scenarios, mocking it up, etc. But when designing the API layer, they just start creating end points instead of focusing on the "DX" scenarios (developer experience, not theirs, but devs using the API).

I remember reading Cwalina's "Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries" and really learning what that means. It is a book focused on .NET but I wish many of my colleagues in the open source world would get over that and just read it. It would change their view on API design. And that is just the first chapter.
I've tried searching for a replacement for Dreamweaver, because it's expensive, but there really is no substitute if you want a WYSIWYG editor. I've tried everything on the market, nothing came close to Dreamweaver.
OK, in that case, what if I took my camera equipment to a park, got it all setup, and hid in the bushes, hoping someone would use my equipment, that I setup, to take a picture.

You, seeing the camera equipment, become curious, and use the camera to take a picture of yourself.

I created the conditions necessary for you to take a picture of yourself, but you took the picture.

Who, in your non-lawyer eyes, owns the copyright to the picture? Does it make a difference if you're a human or a monkey in that decision?
I would imagine it to be pretty difficult to search for those shapes.
It should be obvious that not all consumers are as technically proficient as HN readers. Some don't know the risk, some don't want the cost, I'd say most don't care enough.
At first I thought this was the stupidest thing ever... then I played it for 15 minutes.
very cool, thank you wmf that first one did the trick! I really can't beleive how hacked together / behind the original specification is compared to 2.
Announcing Transcriptic Platform
> (or exchanging something of significant value)
Movies as Modern Visual Art: Paglia, Stephenson, Cowen
my name : minister
sent me plz , thanks!
My 9 year marriage to HSBC is over  – A case of bad UX
I'm with you on that all the way. I don't see very many people lugging around computers with massive power supplys and complex raid arrays when most data lives on a cloud platform and most modern b2b apps aren't starving for RAM the way they used to.
This is great. I was wondering whether it's possible to have a more formal way of scheduling studying and marking progress (beyond the checkmark, I mean) -- like the ability to create a prioritized list of concepts, set some dates and track completion. And maybe maintain my own little summary notes and maybe even check others' publicly shared notes?
They are also very dangerous: they combine people getting off the highway with people accelerating to get on with people entering and leaving those shopping centers and restaurants. It really creates for messy traffic.
> Ubuntu's popularity is actually a benefit

Except it's often exaggerated. I doubt Ubuntu is even the most popular distro these days. Also, lately Ubuntu (or rather Canonical) diverged from the global Linux community with efforts like Mir and so on. So they are quite controversial, and using them as a recommended distro for new Linux users is now more questionable than before.
Does anyone know if there is a way to disable this without turning off the genie effect altogether? Essentially just remove the slow motion aspect.
Fire Emblem: Awakening – un jeu de role à découvrir sur la 3DS
Home loans would be a terrible example for your position.

Mortgage interest is paid off disproportionately sooner than the principle and the bank still has a claim on the property until the last penny is (re)paid. So long as they didn't finance a home beyond its value, they're ahead on paper well within the first year. (only needing to recoup the costs and commissions associated with closing the sale before the paper shows profit)

Further, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage didn't really exist until the government got into the business of subsidies and guarantees. Before that, the standard were balloon payment mortgages with larger down payments, far shorter terms and the eponymous balloon payments due at maturity (which greatly favored the bank's end of the deal in practice).
TCP/IP networking stack in pure OCaml
Google Map now supported Moon and Mars
Great point - the checkmark is a trivial attempt: quizzes would be better, and as you mentioned, a review schedule. And the "notes" idea is fantastic (or maybe even flashcards with an Anki-like review schedule); we discussed it several months ago but it fell off the radar. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!
What happens when an elite American university kills grade inflation
Probably better to stick to admiring his masterpieces. From his twitter, here's one "innovation":
http://www.kasparov.com/chess-archeology-in-montenegro

He had many innovations and this last one is in quotes because apparently it was discovered 35 years ago.
This is why the web was made. Full fulling the promise of knowledge for all.
It will never be finished. That will be newsworthy. Fiber optic will always be cheaper.
Location: DFW Texas

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Haskell, Python, Clojure, Go

Resume: Available upon request

Email: codygman.consulting@gmail.com

I've been working freelance jobs for a bit and I'm looking for a project to settle down on for some time. I'd really like a team teach and learn from. I spent a year working remotely for a start-up using Python, Django, and Solr and would like to do more of the same.

I'd prefer to use functional languages such as Haskell and Clojure, but my main skills are in Python and I'm open to Python positions.
But it sounds like in the Cryptolocker case that the encryption was pretty good, they just (thankfully) weren't erasing the decrypt keys as promised.

The goodness of the decryptCryptolocker crew will probably make me laugh whenever I hear some other not-half-as-good organization claim "we're the good guys".
"The API is simple because the problem it’s solving is trivial."

I beg to differ -- as ridiculous as the API interface may be, the problem it's solving is most certainly not even close to being trivial. High-performance logging for something as low-level as the thread scheduler is not something you can write in your sleep.
Can a monkey own a thing under the law?

It's an animal. It can be owned, but it cannot itself own something.
My guess may a16z has such great numbers is the perception that they are exceedingly loose with capital.

All the CEOs out there are basically saying "man, if a16z was backing me they'd give me $50m without blinking! They must be great to work with"
Then uninstall the app, nobody's forcing you to keep it.
Emacs has a ton of baggage. I like the fresh approach and especially the idea of hacking on my editor in go. As a hardened vim user I like that influence and I think it shows in edi.
It's too early to tell, they are just 5 years old.
Comments like these make HN not very fun anymore.

Unless you meant that anything which is in the business' interest to do shouldn't be illegal for it...?

It's tempting to leave a sarcastic reply.

Just because a lawsuit has been filed doesn't mean any law has been broken. Would you cite which EU privacy law Facebook broke, and how they broke it?

The article lists the central claims of the lawsuit, which don't seem to reference any particular law. They also seem to be arguing from moral grounds rather than strictly legal grounds. That's why I said they don't seem compelling.

And then I get accused of being both a bad commenter (my response is a "non sequitur"?) and claiming that businesses should violate privacy (when in fact I asked where is the line between a privacy violation and a legitimate business practice). Classy.
The idea that Moore's law is still continuing is a bit misleading. For all practical purposes it's over. See the graph here: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/116561-the-death-of-cpu...

Yes, we can still cram more transistors on a chip, but we can't get the clock speed any faster because we run into power/heat limitations. And actually if you look at the graph in the link I posted you'll see that clock speed peaked around 2005. Around that time AMD and Intel focused more on multiple cores and clock speed became less important.

Tangent: Personally, I like ARM much better than x86/x86-64. RISC based architectures just seem so much nicer. Plus, they are easier to optimize for and more predictable in terms of clock cycles per instruction.
Do you consider war photography to be creative?
funny, the trains start flying and the planes move along the tracks :)
I feel like you are talking up two different things in your post and comments:

1. Making an impact

2. Solving challenging technical problems

These seem like separate problems that have little to do with one another (there may actually be an inverse correlation, see below).

If you want to make an impact then create a product that solves a big problem for humanity. Programming has essentially nothing to do with this, other than the fact software happens to be at the core of most, but not all, products these days. You can make an impact by understanding people's needs, coming up with a great solution, marketing it, convincing others to join you, and creating it. Programming will likely be a part of the above, but not the most important. And its importance will decrease with your product/company getting bigger (as will the impact any single programmer makes).

If you want to solve difficult technical problems then you can find lots of those in Computer Science research, either academic or industrial research labs. These are seriously challenging and can be fun to work on. However, I believe there is an inverse correlation between things that make an impact and things are are challenging research projects. Research projects are often so narrow that not enough people care about the results, and implementation in the industry is usually delayed by 5-10 years (less for industry research within the company).
In 2004 the Tea Party didn't exist.
Moore's law is about the number of transistors, not clock speed.

"The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months." - Gordon Moore: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/museum-gordon...
Angular .constant v. .value
Guy leaves driver's seat in 'self-driving' car
While high speed rail would be great if it could be delivered on time and under budget that is never going to happen.

Why not nationalize the existing rail lines and invest those dollars into increasing their capacity (so that passenger lines are not second class to freight traffic). Remove the passenger monopoly from Amtrak and let market forces have at it, e.g., Virgin Rail or similar.
Steve demoed it during one of the Macworld keynotes, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think it was put there so he could demo the effect. I recall him minimizing a playing Quicktime window to show that the compositing window manager was drawing the video in the 'genied' window.
That's true, but the reason people care about it is because in the past more transistors led to higher clock speeds, which is what I was getting at by saying we can still put more transistors on a chip, but that power and heat limitations prevent that from turning into increased clock speeds.
Very nice. I'll be using this.

* At a glance, some sort of automated progress tracker would be my first request. I'm certain that I'll end up missing sections and/or losing my place and drifting away as long as it's manual.

* Offering an estimate time to completion is great. Leveraging those estimates to give me an option to select 'something that will fit in 5/15/60 minutes' from my current topics would be even better.

* The site snaps, that's great.

* Creating a TOC of the off-site content (video, books) in the overview of each roadmap would be nice. If I decide that I'm going to commit to follow one of these roads I'm going to be looking to source the books and download the videos so that I can watch them on the subway.

* Interactive 'exercises' where possible. This is a major plus of the EdX courses I've done - submitting results or complete Python code and getting instant feedback.

* Suggested background / prerequisites for a roadmap would be nice as well.
Current game engines are still bound by the single-threaded game loop model, although not by necessity. Here's a really cool presentation about it: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...
Any plans on implementing business lessons as well? Searching 'marketing','finance', and 'accounting' came up with nothing. As much as I love studying the hard sciences, I feel that at least some degree of familiarity with the domain of business could significantly help the scientist or engineer when they are out looking for jobs, working within a large company, or trying to start their own thing.

A good business curriculum (or even just a series of classes) is something that I find lacking online, as well as within the STEM majors at my university.
Do you know of a good explanation of Mantle's goals? What sets it apart from DirectX or OpenGL?
You don't have to release the source code to the public. That is just one of the easiest ways to satisfy the terms of the license.
This is a cool idea. I'm surprised it hasn't been done before. It's like Buffer in reverse. Then again, it's basically an RSS reader for social feeds. I suspect the reason that Facebook doesn't offer a newsfeed RSS or API (as far as I know?) is because they would lose out on a lot of analytics and ad revenue. If you scale this, is it possible that Facebook would take some sort of legal action?

How are you getting the data?
I wish Sherlog.js had pluggable backends, so that one could send metrics to Hekad server, for example. That way one storage can accumulate stats from across the whole stack (server-side and client-side events, infrastructure metrics, etc.) and visualize them in useful ways. I like how Etsy does this, though I'm not sure how they deal with client-side metrics, with StatsD protocol working over UDP.
Yeah. I'd be curious to know how much of that is a product of the software/hardware architectures we currently use, e.g. programming languages generally not built from the start with parallelism in mind.
>others would guess what they can possibly mean

Personally, I would not be so arrogant as to claim I can mind-read. YMMV.
Well, the API in question (which I've used, and it was indeed an unpleasant experience) might not be solving something trivial, but it's certainly not well designed.

My all-time worse API is SetupAPI, which despite its name is how you get access to USB devices on Windows. It's . . . pretty miserable. Runner-up is the COM-based stuff that manages the Windows firewall, which is not well specified and has 'interesting' timing issues.

I have mercifully lost most of my memory of the Java stuff I was doing 15 years ago. That stuff made me hate life.
> A key part of this argument is that people are becoming (or are going to become) more shallow than those in the past.

I don't think I agree with this. What I do agree with is that modern society, and especially internet usage, seems to degrade the ability to concentrate.

I know that if I have to spend too much "computer time", my ability to stay focused and think hard about a single task seems to degrade. For one example, it takes me 2 or 3 books until my ability to concentrate and read the book flows rather than requiring actual willful effort.
It's the same nostalgic lamentation that everyone has been telling for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks used to complain to one another about "kids these days" being ruined by the latest trends. And yet, here we are, thousands of years later, casually toying with the kinds of knowledge that Aristotle would have killed to have a glimpse of.

20 years later: "OMG kids these days are so accustomed to 3D holographic interfaces, they can't seem to comprehend any information presented on a flat surface!"

The only solution to shallow thinking is a good education that encourages critical thinking about things that matter. Electronic gadgets are little more than convenient scapegoats that people can safely blame in order to divert attention from their failure to come up with a proper solution.
The second edition of the Framework Design Guidelines book was written in 2008 and seems (from a 10 minute browse of the first chapter) to be pretty up to date still.

It's ISBN 9780321545671 if anyone's looking for it (it's on Safari Books Online, too)
Library is modern technnology
Depends does farming out the questions to mechanical turk count? Or would that be more a hive minds cumulative IQ?