skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- Coding is not the new literacy.

- Neither is modeling.

- Neither is externalizing mental models or whatever.

It's not the human obligation to become more and more creative and resourceful, when less creative activities become less and less valuable, and fail to help earn a living.

The author of this article claims that people are missing the point. He's right. But he's missing the point as well, or at least arriving at a very wrong conclusion.

We're at a cusp of a very very strange era. This is the era where humans, and the capacity of human intellect, is approaching obsolescence. And the solution is not to train everyone to become like Einstein or, in this case, Knuth, or Steele, or Torvalds, or whatever.

"There can only be so many people in the entertainment industry" as Aubrey de Grey puts it.

Similarly, there can only be so many people in the "coding industry".

These people are missing a key property of coding: Coding eats itself! Or as Andreessen puts it "Software is eating the world". Meaning, coding by virtue of it happening, ends up automating aspects of itself, to the point where, a small kernel of information processing is able to carry out vast amounts of informational activity, as opposed to requiring a vast number of coders as those not familiar with coding tend to believe.

And this trend of automation will keep on increasing, giving rise to more and more serious technological unemployment, all the way to the logical conclusion of technological singularity. The sooner the "people in charge" realize this bitter truth, the better it would be for everyone.
Video - http://www.kerngoldenempire.com/specialreports/story/d/story...
I've upvoted you because I'm noticing a pattern on this topic where anyone questioning the "think of the children!" attitude is being downvoted.

Before you guys downvote me; I'm a parent. The boy is now 13yo and has been growing up with Star Trek, Dr Who, and whatever other sci-fi I like to watch. Even some Dr Who and Star Trek had material some of you would consider to be a bit 'iffy' to show kids. Doesn't seem to have done my son any harm - he's growing into a well balanced kid who goes to the Air Cadets, is popular, and does well at school.

As a parent, I see no harm in showing 11 year old boys Aliens.

Listen - you cannot wrap your kids up in cotton wool. The reality of life is way more brutal and uncaring than is shown in a mere film.

As long as these kids understand that it's just a story, that it involves plastic and latex models, these are actors, and so on and so forth - where's the harm for these 11yo kids?

Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.
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Boilerplate Code to Handle Android's RecyclerView Adapter
I think for freelancers it's very important. I built a couple of Bitcoin apps for well-funded Bitcoin companies, so next time I go to an event, I only have to walk up to some people and show then what I built. That's normally enough for them to hire me.

I'm not sure about entrepreneurs who don't do any contract work, but I think the domain expertise will really give you an edge there because you are much better at determining what problems should be solved in the domain, what solutions there currently are and what potential customers want.
I've used this a few times for posting charts and diagrams on usenet groups where most readers are ascii-based and it's great.

BTW, many non-techies have older browsers, for which the old version is better suited:
http://stable.ascii-flow.appspot.com/#Draw
I refer you to a reply I made before this.

Also, we're not talking about 9yo kids/porn here - stop changing the goalposts - we're talking about 11yo boys and Aliens specifically.
> Even some Dr Who and Star Trek had material some of you would consider to be a bit 'iffy' to show kids

No, people are arguing against films like Saw or their 1980s equivalents.

> Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.

What life lessons is a child going to learn from watching "Hostel"?

Also, "limp wristed"? FFS.
The Unbreakable Bond: Siblings' Lasting Impressions, Explained by Science
I remember being horrified by Alien when it was shown on TV - I disappeared upstairs after the chestburster scene because I couldn't handle it. It haunted my dreams for weeks.

11 year olds must be hardened wee bastards these days.
Visualization of Significant Tech Real Estate Deals in San Francisco
If I shoot you and you die, I have killed you. If I hadn't shot you, you would have not died (by my shot).

You would have (maybe) still died by somebody else's shot. You don't know that.
The SJ4000 and similar Go Pro clones have been finding their way out of China via the usual eBay channels, so I'd be surprised if the same doesn't happen with this provided that they do an English language firmware.
All this discussion remembers me of Brian Kernighan [1] mentioning that Dennis Ritchie was also a good writer (besides a good programmer). Also, Jamie Zawinski (jwz), somewhere in the book Coders at Work [2], while questioned by the author, points out a feeling of mental connection between programming and writing.

I am with those guys in the sense that programming is just like writing anything else. Even in the most trivial cases, you actually think (or could have done it) before putting down a word or two. And you often come back to erase and make it better. So, teaching how to program is also teach how to "build models".

[1] http://youtu.be/uxtKwJZbYr0
[2] http://www.codersatwork.com/
Oops, not sure how I missed that paragraph
Wrote a recursive scraper, yet?
Thanks for getting back to me. I've currently applied only for the OpenSUSE developer/packager position, but I'm curious about several other positions.

A general question I have is if it's a problem that I wrote my application in German. Afaik the HR team is located in Nuremberg, but I'm really not sure if English or German is expected. Personally, it's easier for me to write a formal application in German, because it's my native language.

I'll take a look at the challenges as well. The benefit is, that many of them include technologies I'm not yet familiar with, so I can at least learn something new from it.
There's a bit of footage where the filmakers talk about the death of the executive after the new robot malfunctions, and how censors reacted.

The original clip showed him dying, and the machine just keeps firing and firing and firing. It becomes darkly funny.

Censors didn't like the scene but their suggestion was to cut down the length of time the gun fires. That turned the scene into something less funny and more brutal.
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I'm specifically talking about whether it's 'bad' or not for 11yo boys to watch Aliens. Keep to the subject. Why mention some other film when I'm talking about Aliens?

I despise people who try to 'win' their argument by constantly shifting the goalposts.
I don't think this is really true. Generally all optimization passes are run upon the unoptimized version, hence ALL code paths first pass through the -O0 machinery.

Besides, they seem to manually inspect the assembly output themselves for the final production build.
How to Bootstrap in India
You admit that computer and software are eating the world, but come to the conclusion that it's useless to teach people to speak to them at a basic level.

I'm not sure I follow your argument.

We don't teach literacy because we expect people to be professional writers, but rather, that because the written word is a basic means of communicating with each other and the world around them -- we're having this very discussion through the power of literacy, even.

In what way do you think people advocating teaching programming mean in any other sense?

When I advocate teaching programming to people, I don't envision a world full of software developers, I imagine a world full of slightly more informed software users. People who can interact with the Googles of the world by writing a sentence (or even a Boolean expression!) using correct logic or who can write a small Javascript snippet to automate a simple task like highlighting certain things on a webpage or who can write a simple Python script to get a rough approximation about how some numbers work.

Further, having even a tiny basis in computers - like the level of mathematics we teach in high school (on average) - gives me a basis as a professional to explain how things like Facebook work in a way that I can't now. It's much in a similar way to how once people know what a variable and a function is, I can explain more advanced math concepts using those ideas -- in a way that I couldn't if I had to start at the very beginning with "this is a number".

So again, I'm not sure I follow your argument: if software is eating the world, why wouldn't we teach people to speak basic software in addition to basic spoken language?
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Writing is much more difficult than programming. With programming, I just have to get the program to work, the computer checks my BS by not doing the right thing; I can't lie to it. With writing, I can easily delude myself and it takes extra mental effort or external review to check prose.
And the original Linux threading support.

His report on the Zinc Experiment is well worth reading:

http://gallium.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/Leroy-ZINC.html
What is XPrivacy?
I am trying to read between the lines of your comment and I _think_ you get this but I'm going to spell it out anyway:

"...fundamental programming principles like OOP."

The key word here is "like". OOP is actually falling out of favor as a successful way to express models. Make sure you investigate alternatives to OOP (functional, procedural etc). As a graduate of OOP myself, it's interesting and exciting to approach different paradigms. Experience tells me that the best practices obsess over what things "do" rather than what things "are" (which is a fluffy concept at best).

Anyway, tit for tat, YMMV. Glad you're doing something though.
> I don't know what slumber party means…

A slumber party is a party where the guests spend the night at the hosts house. This typically involves pizza, movies, and the kids trying to stay up as late as possible. I seem to remember going to maybe 1 or 2 slumber parties a year.

It's definitely a special occasion and the late night aspect of it lends itself to movies, since by the time the movies come on it's typically too late to make a bunch of noise outside.

> Do you want spoiled fat bored and boring kids? Because that's how you get that.

No, actually, slumber parties are not how you get that.
Yes, I'd include those.

Life inevitably kills and destroys. Eventually itself.
> And doing useless things sometimes, so that when you DO need more time, you have something left to give up that's not important to you. If you're already maxed out with valuable uses of your time, there's no room to add something else.

That makes no sense. At any given time you do the most valuable things available. When something else comes up, either it's more valuable than the least valuable thing you're currently doing - in which case great, you do it instead of that - or it's not, in which case why would you want to do it?

When I found myself unexpectedly in a relationship I needed more time, so I stopped doing taekwando and dropped out of my roleplaying campaign as soon as there was a story-appropriate point to do so. Losing those things hurt, but I knew I was replacing them with something better. If I'd instead been keeping n nights a week free in case something comes up, what would I have gained? I'd just have been less happy in the weeks before that.
House of Cards' Season 3 on Netflix: A Season 2 Refresher
Ask HN: Looking for a letter(?) by Elon Musk(?)
Some time ago I read an article about Elon Musk where he talks about a woman (in Africa? Doing humanitarian work?) asking him why he is focussing on space instead of helping the people on earth. He wrote a very well-written letter back, detailing on why he thinks that we should look at the bigger picture instead of focussing on short term goals.

I want to read this letter again, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone know what I mean and/or where to find it?
Other people are talkig about films like Saw. Why are you trying to win the argument that nobody here is having?

But, if you want to talk about Aliens: plenty of people in this thread have spoken about the distress they felt when watching Aliens as teenagers. What life lesson is an eleven year old going to learn from watching Aliens?
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Do you need a backend service to talk to your flashy new web / mobile app?

Does your current build and deployment system give you nightmares about the only dev who understands it falling under a bus?

Need a proof-of-concept for your latest, hard-to-pigeonhole idea?

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Sadly it doesn't look that practical for serious work just yet. Taken from the article:

> "Having inline Markdown, equations, and images sure is nice. However, in my opinion, the Bash kernel currently has two issues that hamper usability. First, the output is only printed when the command is finished; there are no real-time updates. This is especially inconvenient if you want to keep an eye on some long-running process using, say, tail -f or htop. Second, there's no interactivity with the process possible. This means that you cannot drop into some other REPL like julia or psql."

This would also rule out ncurses and such like.

These days it's pretty simple to set up SSH access (even view web shells if needs must) so having a proper Bash access is possible without this project.

However I don't mean to be negative about this project as it does bring some new features to the table that SSH / regular terminal emulators don't support.
"modeling" is different.) If we think about oversimplified, or too abstract, disconnected form reality models and especially those probabilistic models, when they are trying to infer the next immediate outcome based on the probability distributions of from the past (which is completely wrong - all you could infer form probability distributions is what could happen on average), then, it is a total disaster. Look at these loses in finance and profound failures in humanities.

Models has to be "just right", like every molecular arrangement in the Nature.

But the skill of "extracting correct models from some aspects of reality" is really important.
Hey, I wrote the article, really appreciate the discussion.

Just want to reiterate that until this point, the market has been healthy and I'm expecting it to recover. The tone of the discussion here is a bit doom and gloom. I still think its got at least 2 more healthy years before it becomes how PHP is now.
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Facebook are now using IPV6 only for all their internal networking ( http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/03/facebo... )

While it's possible to get by on IPV4, most of what we're doing is workarounds. DHCP is a workaround (although a useful one), NAT is a workaround, at least some VPN use-cases are workarounds (e.g inter-office connection between private subnets)

A lot of problems go away when you have essentially unlimited address space to play with.

The downside so far is that very few providers offer native IPV6. This is frustrating but manageable. There are tunnelling providers such as Hurricane Electric ( http://tunnelbroker.net ) and SixXs ( http://sixxs.net )
Hurricane Electric are great, and they offer free self-study and certification. I was unable to open an account at SixXs.

My advice would be to start experimenting with it now. This will give you a headstart over the rest of the field as IPV6 becomes more popular. If you're working with new infrastructure, experiment with IPV6 only. If you can solve those problems, your skills will be in high demand
On Writing was excellent. The bulk of it was his autobiography which was interesting, but included to support the 16 page chapter "Toolbox" which is a must read for all sporting writers. I recommended it for our book club, which inspired one of our members to write and publish several novels.

Get it. Read it.
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The world runs on software now.

Gaining a basic insight into what's going on, at a relatively early age, is important if we want people to gain an understanding of the world around them. Not everyone has to become an expert, but a modern education system at least ought to introduce people to it.
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As a prospective new developer, is ruby/rails still a good bet or are the skills not going to be required in a year or so? Less worried about contracting rates for the moment, keen to work in startups which is where I understand rails is being used constantly.
http://www.irisa.fr/celtique/ext/compcertSSA/ may bring in a whole bunch of optimisations nearly for free. We'll see...
Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned – SciPy 2014 – Greg Wilson
Core-js
The author explained a very useful analogy (reading : comprehension = writing : composition = coding : modelling) but didn't push it as far as he should. The important thing about coding as modelling is that the results are not just external to the author's head, they are formal models that automatically infer or do things. The other way to do that - in one's head and via his actions - simply doesn't scale beyond a point. Historically the ways people scale such models are human organisations. That's why IT is so exciting today: not only it helps an individual think, it helps groups organize at scale that wasn't practical before because of the friction inherent in implementing formal models in people's heads.
Yes, I know that. Currently I'm having a better result using parenthesis instead to completely escaping from the semantic blank lines. It's cleaner than using semicolons everywhere.

Anyway, Haskell is a very instructive example about how semantic indentation creates problems.
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I'm an all-around programmer interested in different technologies and languages. I became a freelancer over 2 years ago, left home in Russia, relocated to South East Asia and since then have been learning as much as I could and had to working full-time. As a freelancer, I learned I could come up with the zinger of a solution to a problem I have if it could be solved at all. And I'm the one who is responsible for it. I'm also stoked about learning functional programming, finance and IT security.