skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure whether Ruby is a good intro to programming.

It doesn't have first-level functions, instead it has blocks (which can take parameters to serve the same use as functions but aren't). What would syntactically be a reference to a method in other languages instead invokes the method with no arguments. It doesn't have namespaced imports, instead its imports effectively behave like includes (i.e. the "dump truck" approach to imports). I could go on.

Ruby isn't widely used in practice (although its users tend to be vocal and particularly prevalent in the web startup scene). Installing it requires some amount of care and technical knowledge (don't even bother installing it with a Linux package manager -- you're almost guaranteed to end up with the "wrong version" of ruby and rubygems).

I understand that Ruby programmers tend to be very emotionally invested in their programming language and that this book is probably written for Ruby programmers looking to teach their kids programming (using their favourite programming language) but it would be nice if there were well-written books aimed at a more general audience.

I'm not sure what the "best" first programming language is. JS has its merits -- it's becoming increasingly important, can be used throughout the entire stack of a web application and all you need to try it out is a modern web browser. Python is a lot more straightforward to learn and has consistent and mostly unsurprising concepts that are generally very compatible with more mainstream languages (plus it was intentionally based on a language developed for beginners). If market use were the main concern you could probably argue for Java or C# (although I think starting with a class-based language locks you into the wrong mental model).

In any case, I don't think Ruby is the best choice, even with its quirky community lore and the general emphasis on "play" and expressing yourself in code (although this seems to have died down a bit as the community matures).

I guess it depends on whether you want to teach programming as an art form and toy, or as a general skill (like maths, biology or chemistry). Both can be fun and entertaining but maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.
Ha! Funnily enough, I thought the whale was awful. I'm guessing you and I should never split a meal in a restaurant.
Essential Prestashop Functions – Day 3 – NemoPS
Oh I'm absolutely not saying it's wrong for other people to do this or want to do it, it just shouldn't be assumed that everyone is looking for something like that.
This artwork in this article is amazing. Does anybody know who did it?
Which Creative Commons licence is right for me? [pdf]
Scientists Discover a 6th Taste – And It's Quite a Disgusting Mouthful
I like this - is it similar to c2.com?
New research shows non-wetting surfaces promote chemical reaction rates
Thanks for the notes, will definitely take them on board.
Auto-submit is probably going to be the first feature that gets added. I currently have a separate bookmarklet for it, but it's much easier if it's just part of the generated bookmarklet.
On the Displacement for Covering a Unit Interval with Randomly Placed Sensors
Illustrations by Tim McDonagh :)
Very nice, but IMHO too much of clutter. Why 3 abstracts?

Wouldn't it be better to have one abstract and leave arXiv abstract and GitHub abstract in their places (or import them)?
while I agree with part of what the author says, I feel a very important thing is not being considered: cartoons, books, toys, videogames, food, comics, soft drinks were all better when I was younger.

I feel "A Link To The Past" is the best ever Zelda.
My brother, who's younger than me, swears Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda.
I am sure there are kids in their teens now that feel Skyward Sword is the best Zelda.
A Software Engineer’s Learning Goals for 2016
German Car Makers Buying Nokia’s Maps Business for $3B
Getting stagnant in your field is never an option for a software engineer. One of the core aims of a software engineer/developer ought to be updating your existing skills and learning new stuff.

Thus, it’s time to learn something new and improve upon some of my half-baked skills that will take me into 2016, with the right boost to my skillset and my career.
Eigenclasse, had to look that up:

"A hidden class associated with each specific instance of another class."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eigenclass#English

https://gist.github.com/jfarmer/2625060

Yep. Makes perfect sense that if everything is an object, and class methods belong to a class, and a that class method has to be attached to an object -- you'd need an object to attach it to...
Funny to find one of the most systemically insightful comments at the very bottom of the pile. It makes a nice meta-point about communities (that has been mentioned before), which is that they have a strong need to be ideologically homogenous.

In the same vein, look at how the article's second recommendation, "Appeal to all kinds of people", which is described as a "necessary aspiration", is utterly unadorned with empirical proof. We can assume that diversity is rather just a strong part of the value set of the researcher's own community.
>The only measure of correctness for language is use,

I'd posit the only measure of correctness for language is the ability of being understood, even before the use. So when I read and understand USian, I don't really care that much that it's less used than American to deem it "incorrect".

If you don't like it, say so, but limited usage is a small reason to consider something "wrong".
Podcasts. They're the indie web that has long been forgotten.
Playing with ClojureScript: Illustrating a Monte Carlo Experiment in Browser
Really interesting and spot-on article, I really liked this insight, though:

> But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. (...) When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos.

Never had thought about it that way.
If you are not well versed in reading math then you have two options. One is to forever remain fuzzy and imprecise in your understanding, the other is to learn the notation you need, see how it matches your internal understanding, and then use it as an enabler.

If the notation destroys your understanding, then you didn't understand it in the first place, you only had a vague sense of satisfaction with a pseudo-understanding. This is akin to thinking you understand an algorithm, but not being able to code it.

I have every sympathy with people who find the notation a barrier, because so did I. Over the years, indeed, the decades, I have come to appreciate notation as a way of concisely expressing deep and complex ideas. Try not using notation - your brain quickly turns to mush as you try to follow hundreds of words that could otherwise be expressed in a mere dozen symbols.

Archimedes in "Measurement of the circle" wrote:

The area of any circle is equal to a
right-angled triangle in which one of
the sides about the right angle is equal
to the radius, and the other to the
circumference, of the circle.

Today we would write:

Area = (1/2)⋅r⋅(2πr)= π⋅r^2

People have a phobia about notation, but the solution isn't to avoid notation, it's to show that it is powerful, and that overcoming the phobia is one way of gaining access to that power.

Edited to change the example from Newton's Principia to Archimedes
Thanks for the explanation. In general, is this considered an anti-pattern? In other words, It's interesting but not advisable to consider in production programming?
micropayments aren't easy for the average user yet

And never will be. Information assessment costs integral to the payment decisionmaking process are too high.

Bundle. Don't disaggregate.

(But allow for exclusion of high-cost items on request.)
is for kids. I found you post quite strange.
Every language has good parts or bad parts. so, because ruby does not have first-level functions is a bad languages, also because does has block is bad. The same for namespace. But let me put it this way. Are you an expert in language design and are you an expert on how children learn new stuff?
Or you just don't like ruby as a language.
Also, Ruby developers tend to be emotionally. Again very biased against the people that use ruby
See Merideth L. Patterson's "On Port 80".

https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a
There can be reasons for grouping a set of elements in the DOM with a parent div besides styling. But sure, it's a "violation" but web standards do not say "you must only use elements that are essential to the semantic structure of the document." I'd say the guideline is "start with semantic elements, add others as needed for styling, programmatic access, componentization, etc."
Hellogenie – Make a wish with Genie
Personally I prefer my users to get
to use the best providers of the
services they want to use

If the car manufacturers don't have a BATNA [1] Google could ask for loads of money per car - or only offer their famously shitty customer service.

The car manufacturers need an alternative, so they can walk away from Google if this happens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
It is neat and a nice implementation. Not sure I'd prefer it in place of real glsl, but I guess it can make shader writer more accessible for some that prefer JavaScript and have reduced use cases (because of the lack of flexibility that comes with using a translator like this.)
> You just need millions of computers

But far less if you don't personalize everything?
I found Python's rule of space and tab is the most confusing thing that will happen to a kid. They open a command prompt, then instead starting writing the real code, they have to <space><space>, blahblah , <enter><space><space>...
to do something that they hope to run.
It's a waste of time.
Wow, that's totally opposite to my exp.

I was in Krakow for unsound festival and i needed a place to stay super late minute, all that was left was this one plausible place south of the river, looked nice, okay reviews but in hindsight there were some mentions about about privacy etc. when i turned up late at night the room was not a private room but a couch in the kitchen and the actual tenant of this one bed flat was completely not cool with his landlord renting out the couch like this. so after one awkward night in krakow i rang up AirBnB, they refunded me the whole amount and gave me €50 credit.

My scenario was common i expect so it was very one-to-one with the rep, you must have gone from pillar to post.

Airbnb use Adyen for their payment processing which is a pile of shit when it comes to dev support imho.
Of course paying estate taxes limits growth. So does paying any tax, haha, this is why companies actively avoid them when they can.

I thought it was interesting where the survey referenced 'paying off taxes will involve selling all/part of the business". This was around 40% positive across the categories. While firstly I'd take results with a pinch of salt as the people answering likely have an agenda to push, and a survey is not always reality. But having to sell some of a business is not a bad thing from a community POV. It keeps capital circulating in an economy. This offsets one on the main weaknesses of capitalism, that capital keeps concentrating. This conversation is about an equal society, so in that context I feel this is a good result, stopping people forever accumulating assets without having to release them. Hence it would be an easy argument liquidity problems from estate taxes could be a good thing for ensuring an equal society.
When I first put video on 'the web' I got a really nasty email from one of the backbone maintainers that what I was doing was 'improper use' of the internet. I actually agreed, but it was an un-stoppable thing from a technology point of view.

We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now. The ease of consumption is a very large factor in this, video is much more passive than reading.
No, podcasts are also audio/visual media. The web was text only in the beginning.
Or better yet, search right from the location bar of any modern browser, without any intermediary pages.
The Unemployable Programmer
I like the koan.
I was working on a closure implementation this weekend. When wondering how to clean up the captured variables in the closure, I realised that the most natural way (to me at least) is effectively to store a 'destructor' pointer in the closure, which is very similar to the idea of a destructors and virtual methods in c++. As such I was enlightened :)
Good post, and well done for finding the numbers.

However the point of Mars Direct was to avoid some of the endlessly-extrapolating-upwards budget numbers by avoiding big technology developments (building a giant ship in orbit / launching from a moonbase / exotic engine technology); making use of elements present on Mars to produce rocket fuel on-planet from a smaller feedstock sent from Earth; and making use of automation, by preceding each manned trip with an unmanned fuel-production vehicle, with there always being one more lot of return fuel than human crews on Mars.

I quite agree with "beyond non state actors" - much of the above appears in Mars One's plans, probably because it's the only way they could even start to appear plausible on a below-shoestring budget. But for a state actor, or at least for the USA or some as-yet-unbuilt alliance of developed countries, Mars is possible with 80s technology, at a viable price. You don't need to multiply the numbers up forever, so long as you resist distracting proposals from those who in reality want funding for a moonbase, or nuclear rockets, or whatever other technologies that promise first you have to solve a difficult, expensive problem, then Mars is cheap and easy.
Can you add the best of Nikola Tesla section?
Asia-Europe container freight rates fell 22.8% last week
http://googler700.blogspot.com/2015/03/subnet-calculator.htm...
Productivity 2.0 – Become a productivity machine
Automatic Deployments to JFrogOSS/Bintray/jCenter/Central via TravisCI from SBT
Fascinating! I had no idea that he was father to Aaron.
Here's a crude starting point:

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
html,body { margin: 0, width: 100%; }
body, input { font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 1.4em; }
form { margin: 20% auto; width: 26em; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<form action="https://www.google.com/search" method="get">
<input type="text" name="q" placeholder="search" size="30">
<input type="submit" value="google">
</form>
</body>
</html>
Encryption a growing threat to security
Maybe to my point we should rebrand it as 'deferred tax obligations'.

Could even even give people the option to pay (for easy example) 2% estate tax yearly while alive or 30% at death type deal. I bet most would happily take the 'deferred tax' option.
5 Steps to Finding the Perfect Business Partner
Improving OpenStreetMap data on GitHub
> Trying to beat Google at their own game is a failing strategy.

I don't think Microsoft ever even dreamed of actually BEATING Google with Bing...

Realistically speaking all they wanted was to mitigate their dependence on Google services... and stealing SOME market share.

They probably hoped for more than they actually got at the end (especially outside of the US, where Bing isn't doing that great), but I find it difficult to believe they expected catching up with Google, much less beating them
I think one of the major differences is in how the content is generated. The more software that is used to make the content the larger the pages will be. If you hand-craft your page it will automatically be small and fast.
The 6th point is very interesting:

"Adversarial examples generalize across models trained to perform the same task, even if those models have different architectures and were trained on a different training set."
India blocks 857 porn sites and Liveleak, CollegeHumour
Grothendieck’s gribouillis
They failed to release to Windows Phone, though.
Yes. Extensively.

The entire rest of the Internet can be considered the control group, if you like. Everywhere else allows silly one line puns to stand unswatted. And it is unbearable. Enough so that you and I are here instead.

QED.
You can order 1913 Mondaine Helvetica watches not 1957 in 1 transaction
Ironic that the article ended with a "recommend" heart button.
yeah, they have different pricing on load-balanced and single server stacks. But i'm not sure does Heroku provide "auto" scaling like AWS does or is it "manually" scaling?
I did some testing using http://yellowlab.tools/ to find the slow parts of http://www.clarkeology.com/blog/ and I'm pleased with the results so far.
Ditching jquery was quite a big win.
Having no content to speak of makes it fast too...
How I understand this, for this system to work, all data on the server needs to be encrypted with the same key. If I were Alice, I think I would still be reluctant to put my medical records in the cloud, if the key used to encrypt my data is shared with every other user in the system.
My point was, that the way notation is just thrown at you in the video can only add to the phobia for the uninitiated. The video is clearly aiming at basic pedagogic explanation, and it is all destroyed in the end. The math versed who easily read that math without explanation do not need the bead juggling. The pedagogy fails in the end.
Podcasts are a refugee camp for radio.
But unlike print, the web is never not code. There are still people who design for the web making Photoshop comps that they throw over a wall to "web programmers" to make it work but while some say you should design in the browser, most say the designer making comps should have some understanding of what works on the web.

Print designers also have to think about the platform their design is presented on e.g. what kind of color bleeding will happen in the press when an image is used on newsprint.
How SVG can be used to optimize non-vector images
You're forgetting about Google's huge display advertising network. Even if no one used Google search anymore, Google would still be making a lot of money through display ads.
What's the difference between path tracing, ray tracing and photon mapping?

I'd never heard of path tracing before now and the video makes it sound the same as ray tracing/casting, but what I've read implies otherwise (but I'm not sure how). Clearly it's different to photon mapping, but what ever happened to that: Was it too computationally expensive for the pay-off?
Very powerful. I read this article at the same time as this one [1] this morning, about the powers and limitations of content platforms. Both say the same thing to me: many people think the web today is inherently broken by middlemen, like the music industry was up until very recently. But as of yet, there is no solution to middlemen, because they are where the audience is, therefore,where the money is.

[1]http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/in-no-charts
EMM386 only became the defacto standard for games around 1993 or so. Prior to that developers would purchase or create a solution from scratch to deal with the rapidly shifting PC development environment. A decent chunk of the market was still on 286, and this was the most likely target for the first Wing Commander (1990) - later games from Origin such as Ultima 7 and Privateer continued using memory extenders branded "Voodoo" and "JEMM" that were known to run in unreal mode[0] - they were generally a nightmare for users as they were less stable than EMM386 and typically had a huge conventional memory minimum requirement, but it was tolerated as what one had to go through to play high end PC games.

[0] http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager
I'm willing to bet that no significant (say, 10%) portion of the Google/Bing userbase will switch to an alternative engine in the next five years, regardless of whatever documents may be released.

If some revelation like that were to happen, people would be outraged, they'd demand regulation, and meanwhile they'd continue to use Google/Bing; maybe some would switch to Incognito windows, but that's about it, in my opinion.
Does this properly account for rooftop solar as it's not a "plant" but tends to show up as a demand reduction? It's still probably not all that large.
It's great to see focus on performance, especially after all the recent stories on web bloat.

I've noted a few techniques I've used on my blog to get pages served in a single request to users, including using SSIs and avoid cloudflare's "rocket loader"

http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/web/about/#performance
I'm working on it too. Going for a fairly simple design, plan to release it as open source hardware.

Haven't started on the software side. Do you plan on releasing your own software for your loom, or adapt something that currently exists?
Everyone seems to assume that Google's dominant position could only be undermined via free market competition.

In America, perhaps, but in whole-world perspective, not necessarily.

Google is having some anti-monopoly issues in European Union (not unlike Microsoft in the past), and Russia threatened to ban Google altogether.

They always had a hard time in China, too - their services being suspended or blocked from time to time, their market share decreased several times over the years.

So if we're talking about "what can happen in 10-20 years", then absolutely there is a possibility that Google's world dominance gets crushed by governments which gang up against it at some point rather than by competitors. And replacements will just fill the void.
Apache has support for HTTP/2 today. A switch to nginx would mean to wait until they launch support later this year.
It's interesting to combine that with traffic stop data to get an idea of how risky it is for a person who is pulled over.

There are at least 17.7 million people pulled over for traffic stops per year in the US. If we attribute ALL of the deaths to traffic stops to get an upper bound of 3.5 deaths per 100k for people in traffic stops per year.

That puts the probability of getting killed during a traffic stop in a given year at about the same as the probability of dying that year from stomach cancer. It's about half the probability of dying by suicide from firearm, and 3 times the probability of dying by influenza.

That's a very generous upper bound. Only 2% of the descriptions at Wikipedia mention traffic, but that is too low because some do not have descriptions. Let's be generous and go with 10% to get a more realistic bound than the 100% I used earlier. That would give a death rate from traffic stops of 0.35 per 100k.

That would put the probability of dying when you are pulled over as similar to the probability of dying that year from Hodgkin's disease, and about 1/3 the probability of dying from malnutrition [1].

[1] malnutrition deaths are way higher than I would have expected in the US!
So they're getting 20k from YC to get valley contacts, at the cost of a percentage of the company, when they already have pharmaceutical and NIH funding?
Or is there a different deal in place for biotechs?
> Based on the investigation, the attacker bypassed multiple layers of authentication and gained unauthorised access to an administrative panel provided by one of our infrastructure providers.

Sounds like a VPS provider screwed up? If that's the case, would love to know which one it was. :/
We already had the solution: a decentralized web. But do note that the author used 'medium' rather than to use his own platform and so effectively adds to the value of the medium content-silo.
Smartcasual – Meet real professionals around you
President Obama on America's Clean Power Plan