skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spoke last week to 50-60 middle school students (ages 12-14) during a day long S.T.E.M demo day. There were 4 sessions with 10-15 kids in each hour-long session. My theme was "Learn to Program" and why everyone should learn to read and write code.

For the first 20 minutes, I reviewed some slides (the "who", "what", "why" of programming). For the rest of the time, we built a Flappy Bird game using the tutorials on code.org. This made everything "click" for them, since it was hands on and practical. Suddenly, abstractions like variables and events make sense when you think of them like "background scene" and "click".

After they loaded their personalized Flappy Bird game to their iPhone, we spent the rest of the time going through CodeCombat. Lots of kids really liked this because it was a game you play with code.

I wish I had a bit more time to do something purely creative (there's a "Frozen" movie art tutorial on code.org, but it's slower paced and would've taken up too much of my time)

---

A few takeaways:

1. You HAVE to make it interesting. Kids today need to go from zero to awesome in 2 minutes or less. I don't see this as a bad thing. When I learned to program, I wanted the same thing. Being able to write some stuff in Notepad and see a webpage in Internet Explorer in 1995 is what got me interested in programming in the first place. I wanted them to get that same feeling.

2. Focus on them. How is computer science going to help them? Basically, these kids (or their parents or teachers) are your customer and you have to make the benefits obvious. I talked about the creative aspects ("stretching your mind"), the career path aspects ("Bill Gates and Mark Z started when they were in middle school"), and the long term impact on the world ("Bill and Mark are two of the most generous people on the planet"). Again, this is aimed at middle schoolers so I'm not going to get into the politics of anti-trust lawsuits or over-reaching privacy concerns.

3. Only about 10% of the kids in a classroom are going to be really enthusiastic about learning this stuff. You'll have 80% that are indifferent and 10% that are bored/lost. That's okay. Not everyone is going to be interested in computer science just like not everyone is into music.

4. I didn't get too deep to quick, just focused on helping them seeing results. I didn't get into any nitty gritty like is JavaScript better than Python or anything too technical at all. Keep it as high-level as you possible can.

5. I also let them work things out. "Oh, your Flappy Bird isn't flapping when you click your mouse? Hmmm, which piece of code do you think handles when you click your mouse? Do you see any actions that you could attach to that event that might make your bird flap?"

---

Overall, it was well received and there were a few kids that used their "Genius Hour" (a set time where they could further explore the STEM topics they learned about on their own) to go through more CodeCombat lessons.

I would definitely do it again, but really needed a nap afterwards. Teaching is HARD!! :)
Yes.

Now, in the spirit of personal computer magazines of 1980's, you should pause the Youtube video, type in the source code from the screenshot, and run it. Good luck.

(Us wimps, we get it here: http://www.ioccc.org/2012/whowon.html )
Apple's Secret Lab Lets Facebook Fine-Tune Apps Before the Watch's Debut
Interacting with SVG
Maybe related..

http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insider...
There a good book about the whole history of MySpace: http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Websi...
I can't even begin to think of how I would replicate this. Truly impressive and equally beautiful!
I guess that's true, although in theory it would be quite easy to install a lighter WM and/or DE. I don't know why they picked Ubuntu default and Unity.
Yes! The sooner you can upload some recipe ideas the quicker you'll pick up a pre-order from someone like me. Sous vide is a pretty popular concept right now- I'd hitch your product to "enhancing" its use (eg. Post and Pre sears). I'm incredibly curious in seeing the applications of this product.
Its really a totally different kind of hit though. Rugby tackles tend to be at sharp angles or from behind while football is often heads up direct or nearly so. But even so, studies seem to show that its the constant impacts from blocking on the line, something rugby doesn't allow, that is a large contributor to the mental problems developed later in life.

Honestly I think facemasks are the biggest problem with the equipment and contributing to problems with it.
This is awesome! I created a small go client for it here

https://github.com/johntdyer/anybar-go
Ask HN: Unit testing best practices
What is the best practice to get a web application feature that requires login?

I want to test a feature that is behind login and requires user authentication:

1) In the pre-setup have the unit test login and create a session
2) Code in a work around to login check
3) Call code after login check
4) First unit test login and keep session for all other unit test (Breaks the ability to randomly select one unit test)

2 Being my least favorite.
I want to test the feature not the ability to login for every unit test.
What do others do for this? Or is there another option I'm not accounting for?

Thanks
While they are more legally oriented, I don't think they're focused so much on licensing, they provide many services for their member projects: http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/
I just donated $40. If there is nothing to stop large companies completely ignoring the GPL then what good is it?
Not that I disagree with you, but illustrating your point by comparing a madly cost-effective ASIC today to a madly overpriced PC several years old is a bit misleading.
The treatment of cholesterol could use some clarification.

As the author notes, statins reduce MI risk and they reduce cholesterol (LDL cholesterol specifically).

He then addresses torcetrapib, which was designed to raise HDL-cholesterol. This was testing quite a different hypothesis from that of statins. I don't think it makes sense to lump these two together and say "sometimes cholesterol works and sometimes it doesn't". Rather, it's more fruitful to see the biomarkers separately.
Apple to Replace AT&T in the Dow Jones on March 19
Very neat. Is this using actual physics?

In some examples, I get the feeling that the conservation of volume is not correctly modeled. And in the clock example, how can the fluid escape the hourglass?
Looks superficially simmilar to https://github.com/aphyr/tesser anyone know both and can give a comparison?

From a brief examination tesser looks a lot simpler (probably because of encoding most of the folding using various monoids). Does onyx have a similar abstraction model that I missed?
Why does it break the torrent model? Does it rely on having a "randomized" block download order?
Crunched by the Numbers: The Digital Skills Gap in the Workforce
Having listened to nearly all the StackOverflow/StackExchange podcasts, there's as much Spolsky as Atwood in StackExchange. Spolsky was the grisled veteran when it came to building products and companies. Atwood more the tech hotshot.
"I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop."

i hated auto-playing music until it didn't exist anymore. now i miss the individuality. not specifically the music but also the other ways you could customize the page. in case anyone isn't familiar, you could basically just embed arbitrary html/css/js.
Same here. I worked at a creative agency some time ago and nearly every employee, men and women, at some point told me, "You know, you don't really look like a coder to me. You're too fashionable and you're not socially awkward."

I just take it in stride. What's the big deal? I just don't make it some huge issue that's related to my gender.
The good reason for working at below market rate is to gain skills and experience necessary to move on and up and possibly building your own business/startup.

Slaving from startup to startup in hope of a big payout is no different than Vegas.
The idea of a black swan event is that it's beyond normal expectations. This is a bit misleading because we all know such events will occur. Because we know this, how should we act?

Suppose you are on a small island with 50 other people. You know that there will eventually be a tsunami. What percentage of your time do you spend on tsunami preparedness vs other productive pursuits?

When it comes to regulation, we know catastrophic events will occur eventually, but the time horizon is distant enough (where the probability of such events approaches 1) that we collectively decide to roll the dice and accept the risk.

Then when such an event occurs we pretend that nobody knew it would happen. We did know it would happen, we just blindly hoped it would not happen during our lifetime|tenure|time-in-office, etc.

The further we are from a previous event, the easier it becomes (politically) to erode the protections that are in place. So much lobbying successfully attempts to do this.

This is predictable, and as our society evolves in finance more and more risk can be arbitraged, and so transfer of risk from the individual or firm to the state is easier than ever before. Not only will a firm fail but its pension fund will go away and the insurance company that insured its pension fund's underwriting capital is only sufficient to handle two such events per year because firms lobbied to have the requirements reduced. The capital freed due to lessened underwriting requirements now funds some other industry which is propped on this risk transfer.

So over time we move in lock step to ignore systemic risk and to double down and double down again on existing assumptions about how much underwriting is necessary, etc.

Quantitative Easing is the intentional erosion of risk capital standards, intended to put more capital into the economy to do exactly this.

While it's a relief that the bailout largely worked, it's discomfiting to think about the many perverse incentives that have now been added to the mix.
Successful Entrepreneurs Nurture the Hidden Leaders
Hands-on with Vivaldi, the new Web browser for power users
That's correct, I've recently made the move myself.
I don't see the commonalities except that both are about copyright. Has there been any information that the kernel API is being claimed to be copyrighted, or header files, or are VMWare claiming that no copyrighted code has actually been distributed?

The above extract mention "substantial amount of kernel code". If that code is implemented algorithms, data structure or full kernel features, then this case has nothing in common with the core issue between Oracle and Google.
So many people hate on the GPL. I personally like. It will protect your freedom as an open source developer. It is a good thing.
> EA was named the worst company to work for in the US, but that was years and years ago

Apr 09, 2013: EA wins Consumerist's Worst Company in America poll for second year in a row

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/9/4205402/ea-wins-consumerists...
My previous company went to conferences.

When I joined them they were looking move the business (power monitoring) from residential to commercial.

They ended up going to some specific conferences associated with trade groups I didn't even know existed eg: RFMA (Restaurant Facilities Management Association).

They set up meetings if they could before hand. In the three years I was there they went back to some conferences, dropped others. It was about building relationships and they met some interesting people that actually became customers. They got leads that didn't pan out. Overall it was a positive.

Don't forget to start early with prep. Shipping conference booth stuff out is a pain and slow and often needs "Freight" class shipping. (Its big and heavy).
For anyone else who didn't know, he wrote this Daemon Tools:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemontools

not this Daemon Tools:

http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
Make things.

There's no substitute for having a concrete problem to solve, then hitting the docs, reading around and implementing a solution.

You'll also find out what it's like when things don't work, which is something you rarely get from documentation.
I'm ignorant - is reattempting the read(NOBLOCK) the way to confirm the block is available? Does that amount to polling? Can I issue multiple async reads and then wait for the first of them to complete?

As described, I can't tell if its possible to have a single read-completion thread that processes any async reads as they complete, which is a powerful design pattern. Or better yet, specify a completion callback.
How is it misleading? Do you think everyone running uTorrent is going to have the latest and greatest hardware specially tuned to mining Bitcoin? What we're comparing is what uTorrent could be getting versus what they will actually be getting with hardware their users actually run. Perfectly apt comparison, in my opinion. The idea is to show how useless this endeavor is.
Email is great because it's very simple, robust, easy to understand for users, and platform agnostic. I don't think it should be replaced.

I do think that the tools around email are insufficient though. GMail improved email usage, but the bigger problem with email is still spam (which is only solved by machine learning, and never 100% solved). I wonder if IMAP could be improved.

I wonder if there could be a system that uses cryptography to remove spammers from the equation, like an automated voting system, but I'm no expert. A solution might be to build a distributed database of digital signature, which would be make account creation a little more tedious. I guess you could call this a "signature whitelist". Your account would be made worthy the longer it is in use.

Another thing I'd like to have is more interoperability between GSM/SMS and email. For example I'd love to be able to receive a text message once I receive an email labeled "important" in my gmail.

The one thing that would greatly help users, is to let automated email label itself as not being sent from an human.
Apple Will Join the Dow Jones Industrial Average
Ask the team at ChatRoulette what happens when you mix live video, hypergrowth
My understanding is this is primarily about driver code. Is that correct?

One way out for VMWare would be to import FreeBSD drivers, although that wouldn't do the Linux community much good. From what I've read, VMWare does provide the source for the drivers, but not the core of their kernel, so Linux would still benefit from any improvements they make. If they switch to another set of drivers, that won't happen.

I can understand the principle of the position, but given that releasing the crown jewel core of the vmkernel as GPL seems unlikely, I'm not sure what actual benefits will be realized here. Something of a Pyrrhic victory.
i agree it's not that hard, however even if it takes 5 minutes you're valuing your time at 0.99*12 = 11.88$ / h .. i'd rather just pay 99¢ .. i thought about this because lately i've been been coldmailing people a lot and it does take its time.. thanks for your feedback however, always appreciated :)
In for $50.
https://wiki.vuze.com/w/Sequential_downloading_is_bad
those are not 3D
Here's why Indian Government banned the documentary on 2012 Delhi gangrape
How are you going to celebrate Pi day?
Ask HN: My startup has concealed from me that it raised funding. What to do?
I'm a founding engineer at a startup and just found out that the founders have concealed an investment from me leaving me with a potential tax bill on $10,000s of income that I had not received.

I did my best to keep my story within 2000 words but I couldn't shorten it anymore without leaving off important details so I posted the full text here: http://pastebin.com/xLLNUF0H

I feel so disgusted and cheated right now. I had worked for this company for almost 3 years doing everything possible to maximize its chance of success: from working overtime to meet deadlines to answering support emails on weekends, and now I find out that they've kept this investment (and the tax implications that go along with it) hidden from me for over a year. I'm left thinking that they concealed it so they wouldn't have to give me a raise, but I am more concerned about the tax implications of these shares. I had to leave work early yesterday when I found out about this and I don't think I'll be able to come in to work today. What should I do? Should I confront the founders about this? Is there any use in contacting a lawyer?
I really don't like things like this. A lot of these projects ended up as other projects or built into other projects.

Google checkout turned into Google Wallet.
Google latitude ended up as part of the Google+ Identity overhaul.

There's also a lot of projects that are "labs" or "beta." Clearly they didn't gain the traction Google wanted from them.

Google's like any other startup on a project-by-project basis. If the idea doesn't work they pivot and drop it.
Show HN: GeoMood – Global real-time sentiment analysis of Twitter
The idea of a torrent is that if you're only missing the last 5mb of a 1GB file, that's all that gets downloaded. If you're downloading in sequential order, the last parts of the file are going to be less well-represented than the first parts. Not much of a problem if it's well-seeded, but they're not always well-seeded.

Oh how many times have I tried to download a file where the most complete seeder only has 95% of the download because all the people who had finished dropped off.
>Women are a passive gender, so the way they dress is one of the few ways to send a signal.

What utter rubbish.

>Is there a way to look at girl in a cute pink dress and tell whether she is there to just present a tech topic or she is also open to potential dating?

Why are you combining your search for a partner with work/conference. How about you assume no one is there looking for a date?
My latest side project to use socket.io for something. And I love the twitter stream. Mainly built with node (twit, Sentimental), leaflet for the map, socket.io, some jquery.
The point in electricity consumption stands across the board for all hardware. CPU mining is just that ineffective compared to ASICs.

Basically uTorrent folks are willing to turn tens of millions of dollars worth of electricity, paid by someone else, into heat just so they can grab a thousand or so of profit.

I have no idea who thought it would be a good idea. How sociopathic a person must be to suggest it originally?
Upload is 2013, but the code is from IOCCC 2012!
The thing is everyone knows these sports are brutal and can lead to broken bones. It's concussions that are of a larger concern.
Regarding the "this was covered in the application", besides what others have already said here, could it be that the person evaluating the application wasn't actually in the room? Perhaps even on purpose?
Still no M2M for ModelSerializer..? Guess I'll have to just keep using a ton of shitty hacks.
Tl;dr: SSL/TLS downgrade attack forces browsers to the RSA_EXPORT cipher, then MITM attack compromises the session. There is more and better info at https://freakattack.com
Exactly. I've even disabled its ads.
That's the entire point. The point is that bitcoin mining is a lottery, and you get more tickets the more hashpower you have.

In other words, it's a competition. The average person running a MBP that's a few years old gets 2 MH/S (call em lottery tickets). But the majority of people mining are doing so with ASICs that get 1 or 2 million MH/S at a quarter of the cost of the second hand price of a MBP. That's the reality today.

The comparison between the two isn't my point. It's merely to illustrate WHY running a MBP for 1 year, 24/7 at 100% of CPU nets you a fraction of a single penny. It's because many others mine with specialized equipment.

The basic point is that if you get 2 lottery tickets and there are 100 tickets in total, that's great. If you get 2 lottery tickets and there are litterally trillions of tickets, you won't win, and over the course of a century you will earn less than 1 dollar.

That's not misleading it's literally what is happening. uTorrent's average user will generate a fraction of a penny in bitcoin revenue, while generating 10-20 dollars of extra electricity costs, while using up 50% of its CPU. These facts come from data of today's hashrate, not from analogy. I just wrote down the comparison to explain why the hashrate is so gigantic and why running millions of Macbook Pros through uTorrent can't compete with it and won't generate any real money, despite spending loads of money on electricity costs.
To be fair I think this could be made better by integrating the media player buffer with the torrent client. While ever it's able to keep the media client fed it should also try either download random blocks or maybe more intelligently fetch the blocks with the least availability.
The only people hurt by that will be the HR workers, who would possibly be fired if too many people did this, or future workers who may not have an opportunity because the bank had been burned too often.

The banks themselves won't even notice it.
Try Three Times, in Python
> Good news! It's not a hole in your knowledge. It was useful a long while ago

Umm, are you implying these operations aren't used present-day by developers?!
The two are very similar. Conservancy has a pretty tight relationship with the FSF. Indeed, co-founder bkuhn is on the board of directors of both:

http://sfconservancy.org/about/board/

http://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board/

I rather like bkuhn, because he's a lawyer and a free hacker. His opinions on the GPL should be taken very seriously. I would only trust GPL-cowriter Eben Moglen himself more than bkuhn on GPL legalities.

The FSF does more advocacy and handles infrastructure for GNU packages. For example, they handle our GNU Octave donations. Conservancy handles similar tasks, plus legal services. They handle the donations of the other big project I like, Mercurial. Oh, and they do the same for git.

I also think bkuhn's writings are saying pretty much the same things that rms says, but in a different way that alienates fewer people, e.g. here is one on a fairly recent event you may remember:

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/11/11/groupon.html
Autodesk’s Latest Allows (Almost) Anyone to Create 3D Models
Look at GPU hash rates, CPUs can't compete at hash rates that much is clear.
"One officer was employed simply keeping her finger on the laptop's trackpad to make sure it didn't go to sleep. Later, police cyber-specialists would spend many hours examining exactly what was on the two computers."

... cyber-specialists that can't even disable sleep mode ...
+1 for The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics. I remember learning that system decades ago, and have always kicked myself for lending my copy of the book. I never got it back, and have stopped lending any books I value no matter who.

Funnily, after applying the Trachtenberg system for many years, I came to realize the traditional methods were pretty good too.
I keep all my games on a huge, slow 2TB drive rather than an SSD because SSDs are expensive compared to HDDs, and they're also smaller. And modern games are big. I keep Windows on the SSD and the big files on the HDD.
> suspect the complex helmets and padding are actually the cause of brutality and concussions in football

They aren't the cause of brutality, but they probably are the cause, in a way, of concussions and lots of the cumulative damage -- but still an improvement over not having them. Specifically, the modern "complex helmets" are a direct result of a past crisis in fatal brain injuries in football, peaking in the 1960s, and directly reduced them, you probably wouldn't have so many people surviving with brain injuries during football when instead they were dying from much more serious brain injuries.
India fails to silence a BBC film exposing the New Delhi bus gang rape
There is some research to support the hypothesis that helmets change the way linemen tackle.

http://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2014/11/keeping-their-heads-out-...