skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And believe me, if your sales and marketing team are any good they'll be sweating blood trying to do that. But it may not be possible. In fact, pounds to pennies it isn't.

(Won't it be a founder selling anyway? I reckon it's a tremendous advantage if your biz dev person/people know one end of Textmate from the other and can do prototype-building spadework, too. It's hard to really get how a job feels if you've never done it. Marketers gotta code and coders gotta market...)

Big, slow thinking sessions ignore this: in an early stage startup you don't know what you're selling. You don't know until you sell it. So you need to find out by showing people endless variations on your core theme, and an iota of effort put into making one which doesn't sell is wasted effort, and wasted effort is death.

You are going to kill nearly all your features. That's code which gets discarded, but it's served it's purpose - working out what the business really is.
Hands-on: OpenMoko WikiReader is simple, appealing
Ask HN: Confused semi-newbie programmer needs some advice.
Hey HN, this is my first submission, but I've been reading HN for quite a while now.

Last spring I completed my first year of study in Computer Science, at a relatively large American university. I took two courses in CS: Intro To Programming, and Data Structures. Both of these classes taught exclusively C++.

Besides a little Python (that I've completely forgotten), that is my background in programming.

Initially, I was satisfied with the courses I took. I'm taking a year off to travel (currently, I'm living in Japan), and I've been doing a bit of thinking. I've begun to realize, that while my professors preached that they were trying to teach me the underlying algorithms and not the language, I really only was taught how to do stuff in C/C++. I recently have been playing with SBCL, and I realized that I had no idea what I'm doing. I feel like most of the concepts they taught me depend completely on the way C++ works.

I've decided to correct this. I won't be back at the university for another 10 months, and during that time I want to learn a new language.

I've seen discussions about Scheme, Clojure, CL, C, C++, Java, Haskell, Erlang and so many more.

In your opinions, what should I learn, and how should I learn it? I don't really care about usefulness in the workplace, I just want to see what I know, and I want to learn more.

Anyway, I'm just feeling a little discouraged. I hate feeling like I'm wasting my time at a university to a tune of $20,000 a year. I'm sure I've learned valuable stuff, but it all feels very one-sided.

I really appreciate any advice. I've been really impressed with the entire community here, and I dislike feeling as though I have nothing to offer back.
I'm guessing it was just their marketing - tips suggest something you'll need to work at, tricks suggests it's magic in some way, that you'll get a surprising return on your [time] investment.
Looks more like "lets you hold a gas burner" in the pics.
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I'm going to say learn/refresh your python. it'll let you focus on the programming, and not have to worry about language specific constructs.

Good refresher: http://www.diveintopython.org/
I'm don't understand what you're saying. For both white and black, the employment rate approximately halves when you pass each of the two levels of employment. What discrepancy are you talking about?
It's actually quite funny that they fired him for violation of NDA.

It's like an old joke that someone got punished for disclosing military secrets after he said that general is stupid.
You're sort of finding the pleasure and pain of a CS degree: Data Structures doesn't teach you how to program, except in a superficial way in a single language. It teaches you how to manipulate certain building blocks of our field. You'll be thinking in terms of lists, sets, and hashmaps until the day you die, no matter what programming language you eventually end up using.

Now, in C, working with lists requires knowing a bit about how pointers work. If you worked in a different language and used the language's libraries, you might literally never think about how the list is internally represented ever again, and concentrate solely on the API for it.

The biggest suggestion I have for supplementing (not replacing) your expensive CS education is building stuff concurrently with learning stuff, and I don't mean the little toy 100 line projects they assign you for school. Unfortunately, with where you are in the world right now, building stuff is hard. However, if you teach yourself HTML and get ONE dynamic language half-way under your belt, you'll be able to do web programming, which greatly simplifies displaying output to the user. Then all you have to do is do string processing, and blam, you have something FUN to show to the user.

You'd be amazed how far you can get on just combining those simple building blocks. As you grow in expertise, you can go a LOT farther, but for now, learning how to take input from the user, do some crunching, and show them a web page gives you many, many options for doing fun things.
you should just pick a language and build a project. The language doesnt matter.

You will probably get involved with many languages in the future.

Every language has its purpose.
That's why mouse buttons are programmable? I'm not sure if you're joking but that would make 4 buttons (+scroll) optimal no? Or you could have a thumb button as "meta".
If you really wanto to "go low level",
I can recommend to write progs for NES(6502)/Genesis(68000) -
the hardware is simple, processor - simple, and there is a plenty of open source emulators which are in fact a great documentation for target machine.

Modern PC's unfortunately are so complicated...
I would go with Fireworks too
First, don't feel that you have nothing to give back - not everything is about programming ;p.

Here's a bit of my personal experience. almost two years ago I took my first formal programming courses. It started out with Algorithms (DFD, etc.) and Operating Systems. Then we moved on to C++. At first, I felt just like you: aside from the basic programming principles and logic I learned in Algorithms, all I knew was how to do stuff in C++. I took up Ruby (mainly due to Rails, but it helped me discover a wonderful language).

The curriculum progressed: Java, Delphi, SQL, Visual Basic, .NET, PHP, HTML&CSS, (which I already knew), etc.

You'd be surprised at how much these concepts come back and help out. Basically, what you learn in the first couple of classes is not "how to do stuff in language x", rather how to think and develop an effective algorithm, which can be applied to any programming language. Right now, you know how to do stuff in C++. When you learn another language, you'll just have to learn the syntax and some other quirks, and you'll pick it up quickly.

For example, in my class we took up a good level of Pascal and Delphi in 2-3 months of class, which is not too shabby.
Thanks for the advice. I do know HTML. Simple webpages made great income for a highschool student.

Should I go with simple Javascript, or something more? I only did HTML/CSS, nothing at all with dynamic webpages.
Scheme with http://www.htdp.org
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IMHO as a learning language nothing beats LISP. It's a little tricky in the beginning, but the pay-off is great simply in the way it changes your perception of programming.

This is a great place to start: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/
That's what I've been working off of for the past week or so. It's been really fun, I think I was just wondering if it's everything people say about it.

Thanks for the input. I wouldn't mind continuing with CL. Many people I've talked to said they find it incredibly useful for small projects that they need to throw together in a short time.
The comment we're responding to is the one above that talks about young black males being better off changing their color to white, than getting their high school diploma.

This entire thread of discussion is on the topic of @kalendae's comment. The fact that the data indicates that it is literally better for a young man to be anything but black, than it is for a young man to be black, but educated. I was saying that what this data shows is contrary to what I believe about the country. That is, I believed that color doesn't matter, only education does. But color does matter, and to me, that is surprising. That's all I'm saying.

See @kalendae's comment.
Well your coming to that realization 15 years earlier than I did. I developed commercial apps in C/C++ and only recently have discovered lisp and other related languages, and just find them to be much more enjoyable to think and hack in.

If you want an absolute mind blowing trip, grab a copy of scheme or a lisp variant such as Clojure [hip at the moment].. and work through SICP - 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' the classic course by abelson and sussman of MIT.

You can download the lecture videos and the full course is online. Seeing how they introduced lisp programs to calculate derivatives and do symbolic algebra was awe inspiring.

Language does matter : Python Ruby Haskell.. all respectable, but Id go to the source for some subtleties you'd enjoy - lisp is probably the foundation of all computer languages in some mathematical sense.
Good advice. If you don't mind me asking, why did you decide to stop?
I think fear of litigation is probably a significant factor. I have a friend who practices labor and employment law and he's kept on retainer at a few big companies to field calls such as "can we fire this person and not get sued?".

They literally have a point system. Race, sex, sexual preference and disabilities (basically any protected class) are all assigned a certain number of points.

Regardless if you're trying to fire someone for cause, if they are in some dangerous combination of protected classes (watch out for disabled black lesbians) and you want to minimize legal exposure, they'll advise you to keep them and put them in a position where they can do no harm to company.

He has one firm who has an employee who has sued them five (!) separate times for racial discrimination (according to my friend, anytime the person gets a bad review or reprimanded). They can't get rid of the person for fear it'll look like retaliation.

The whole situation is completely degenerate.
'practical common lisp' was a lot of fun, introducing topics through a series of practical hacks.
Skype's Legal Storm Clears up
Just storing JSON in a database is not good enough, you need to be able to aggregate and index that data.

I find XML an easier example of why it's important that the database treats a semi-stuctured store as a first class entity, let's compare Oracle and SQL Server:
SQL Server:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189887%28SQL.105%2...

Oracle:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b142...

MS SQL Server:

"Note the following general limitations that apply to the xml data type:

* The stored representation of xml data type instances cannot exceed 2 GB.
* It cannot be used as a subtype of a sql_variant instance.
* It does not support casting or converting to either text or ntext. Use varchar(max) or nvarchar(max) instead.
* It cannot be compared or sorted. This means an xml data type cannot be used in a GROUP BY statement.
* It cannot be used as a parameter to any scalar, built-in functions other than ISNULL, COALESCE, and DATALENGTH.
* It cannot be used as a key column in an index. However, it can be included as data in a clustered index or explicitly added to a nonclustered index by using the INCLUDE keyword when the nonclustered index is created."

Ok, so that's a pretty constraining set of restrictions. Just look at the lack of grouping, sorting, built-in function support.

And Oracle? Well it does all of that and allows for partial updates (update one Xml node or attribute and not the whole document). Oh, and Oracle fully implements XQuery too.

The difference between just storing something in a database and having the database understand and treat that something as a first class entity is massive.

I've used Xml as an example because it's well documented and understood, but the example extends to JSON/BSON easily enough.
Lawsuit alleges Offerpal co-founder was cheated out of ownership
Am I the only one who thinks breaking this down by race is misleading?

No more misleading than breaking it down by age.

A more apt comparison would be people with the exact same skills and background applying for very similar jobs.

That just hides all the people who would never get the skills or background to apply for those jobs because of their race. These statistics are profiling a society, not judging whether a particular interviewer has bias.
lol, why not to release a full-feature QWERTY mouse :D
Sorry, I originally put this comment in the wrong place.

@dschobel

In Illinois the same rules hold true.

The reason the men are not eligible is because they are not the custodial parent. That is, their children do not live with them. The custodial parent in most of these cases is the mother.

The reason the rules are not made more prominent in the application I cannot speak to. It is tucked away at the bottom of the application in the fine print legalese however:

"As a condition of eligibility, if I am approved for TANF Cash and/or medical assistance for myself and my children, I understand that I may berequired to cooperate with child support enforcement. Cooperation includes establishment of paternity and/or support enforcement andmodification of child support orders. I assign and give all my rights, title and interest of child support and medical support to the IllinoisDepartment of Healthcare and Family Services as long as I receive TANF Cash/or medical assistance. I understand and agree that any childsupport payments paid through the clerk of the circuit court and through the State Disbursement Unit (SDU) may be forwarded to the IllinoisDepartment of Healthcare and Family Services as long as I receive TANF Cash.

I understand that if I apply for TANF Cash and/or medical assistance for my children only, I am not required to cooperate with child support enforcement, but I may request services."

Translation, the woman gets welfare, and the state of Illinois will take aggressive action against the father for the purposes of collecting child support. Which, I think, sounds appropriate in that situation. I would guess most states have this same child support enforcement component. If you read through the application fully, you will find a lot of gotchas, with respect to immigration status, custodial disposition of children, etc. etc.

But we're digressing. My only point was that the, generally non custodial, father is not eligible to collect welfare. Further, it is an open question as to whether or not some of the young men in question even have children. I suspect the majority do not at 15 - 24 and poor. I suspect an even smaller minority of this group are custodial parents. Now I don't have data to back up that assertion, its just my impression, or prejudice if you like, that young black guys are generally absentee fathers. Not saying that's the case, just that that is my impression.

In any case, yeah, no way they would get welfare in any of the 50 states. In fact if they went in and filled out this application their SSN would probably be flagged for child support enforcement.
> They should have also broken it down by the income level.

Don't most unemployed people have an income of 0, or whatever their unemployment checks are?
I live a fairly adequate lifestyle making around $16k a year (I'm a college student and only work ~25/hrs per week). That covers rent, gas, food, utilities, and entertainment. Granted, I don't have kids to support and I have a roommate, but it is in fact possible to live on a very modest income.
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Why Speakers Earn $30,000 an Hour - Confessions of a Public Speaker
This is probably different from the other (great) advice on this page, but here goes.

If you have 10 months before you got back to university, I suggest, you work with one language and build something substantial in that time. It doesn't matter which language you select (and this is where my advice differs from those of people who recommend lisp/Haskell and so on, you could choose C or C++ or Java, it doesn't matter).

The key is to make something substantial, but which also has a lot of intermediate stopping points (a ray tracer/renderer is a good example, it gives you visual feedback of your progress) and work on it every day. Writing a large program is substantially different experience from working through toy examples and you will learn a lot, irrespective of the language you use.

Of course you could still use lisp or haskell or smalltalk (EDIT: if you are already somewhat familiar with them, learning a new language and building something large is tricky) if you so choose, but it doesn't matter really.

Just build something ambitious.

My 2 cents.
Good Luck.
wtf is with this obsession with javascript frameworks ?
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I hate to disagree but I find it rather refreshing to in a way get to know ones co-members.
Who are all these up and down voters?
Purely from a data perspective too - might there be hidden pattern to be found?

Anyways, I agree, that this isn't your reddit clone but still, certainly we can discuss music now and then - without making a lolcat reference?

edit:
Forgot my playlist. I'm honestly currently not listening to music though If I fire up audacious my playlist is filled with...

The Fountainhead - part 16

The Fountainhead - part 17
Startup Riot - Registration is open
I assume that the dominant factors are socio-economic rather than racial. The poverty rate for black americans is three times that what it is for white americans. I suspect if the unemployment rates were broken down by most recent household income that the correlation between race and unemployment would be much weaker than the correlation between previous economic status and unemployment.

In other words, I expect that the unemployment rate for the black middle class isn't a whole lot higher than for the white middle class.

How to grow larger minority middle-classes is a much deeper societal problem and is much less subject to relatively instantaneous fluctuations like unemployment rates.
Emacsers don't use the mouse! Unless it has enough keys we can do without a keyboard altogether, that is.
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"REMEMBER there will never be a fee charged to presenting entrepreneurs at Startup Riot"

Nice to hear.
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I find arrow notation when dealing with references makes things a lot clearer in Perl.

In the example, $r->[$SKUTITLE] rather than $$r[$SKUTITLE]

'use constant' for the numbered fields would also help, getting rid of a few dollar signs.
Javascript certainly works and is convenient.
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Is it just me or can this fact be exploited seo-wise?
Lo and Behold: the Internet Benchmarks
When I started a CS program 15 years ago now our first language was Scheme. This turned out to be an excellent choice, because it put everyone on the same level. The syntax is so simple that those with no experience could focus on the algorithms, and it is a functional language, so those with a lot of experience, typically from imperative languages like C or Pascal, had to effectively start over.

So when we later got to C, the new things were the syntax and the imperative model, but most students had learned enough about algorithms to know what they wanted to do, which made it a lot easier to learn.

After that we also tried out Prolog, which belongs to yet another paradigm, so over the first year we tried a variety of languages that got you thinking very differently about programming than if you'd only do an imperative language.

Later on in the program we had some courses that went down closer to hardware, we did assembly language, and we even wired our own processor, did the microcode for it, and wrote a small assembly program for the "computer" we made.

Over the course of the entire program we never dug deep into one specific language or paradigm, but we went across the entire field of computer science, and that turned out to be an excellent foundation. In my experience, the people I know that are really good programmers have all done this, either through university, or by self-study. It requires a lot of passion for programming to do it by yourself though, but it's an alternative to finding a diverse CS program that focuses on breadth instead of depth.
"But overall, MongoDB is probably well-suited for a lot of web applications -- maybe as many as 50%."

Found this at the end of the article, made me chuckle.
I'm a fellow CS student, but I'm a bit deeper into the curriculum. As a Junior, I'm just now learning other languages in class. I see those first two years as something necessary. It's fairly trivial for me to sit down and read most OO languages now that I've been taught Java for two years in college (plus one year in high school). After learning the syntax, it's far easier to take apart those concepts that they're teaching you and apply them to other languages. Implementing a linked list, for instance, is fairly trivial from one language to another, but you have to fully understand the concept of a linked list before you can implement one in multiple languages. I assume that you still have a stumbling block when it comes to parsing the language, and you're missing out on the concept.

I don't necessarily believe you should keep chugging away at C/C++ until the language kind of disappears and you're left staring at the concept, but if you jump from language to language hoping one will open up things for you, I think you're walking the wrong path. My suggestion is that unless you fully intend to truly learn another language, you should stick with C/C++ and just progress with it. Once you are really comfortable with it, move on to something else. Trust me, once you do have that first language under your belt, the others come a lot more easily.

If you really do want to switch to a different language, I would suggest Python. I learned Python the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, and I felt that the language gets out of your way a lot more than Java (the only language I really knew before then). I think Lisp or Haskell might be a bit too much of a stretch from your C/C++ background. I've heard programmers that have been programming for years stumble over Lisp. It's a different way of thinking, and if you're just trying to broaden your horizons, you should be able to do that without learning a different way to think.

I'd also fallow the advice of some of the other people on here and actually build something. I've had a lot of fun doing web development with Ruby on Rails. Ruby's a great language as well, but I found it a little harder to parse coming from a C++-like language than Python. I've heard great things about Django, so maybe you could try building a web app in it?
That sounds fascinating. I'll dig through the course catalog and see of there's anything comparable.
As a place grows in size, it changes in structure. There are always growing pains. Some places handle the transition better than others. Small, close-knit communities where people know each other well function very different from large communities where most people don't know each other well.