skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is really, really important.
We start teaching students the foundations of chemistry, physics, and various areas of mathematics as early as Sixth grade, but Computer Science is largely ignored. Hell, it's hard enough to find a decent CS curriculum in High Schools. Students who would never dream of studying computing might find that they have a passion for it if they are exposed to it early enough (in a kid-digestible way, of course) I remember reading a study (I wish I could find it to cite) that showed that students who were exposed to CS courses early were more likely to have a favorable opinion of the field ("it's not just for nerds")
Finding people who are capable/willing to teach CS is one of the biggest problems here, I think.
As we go further and further out, the lightspeed delay will become a bigger and bigger inconvenience.
When Steve Wozniak put together a US Music Festival
> "When you think of it this way, BASIC, Python, and every other programming language falls short, because you basically can't create things that ape real programs (interface, no logic) in a few short lines."

Sure you can, c.f. STOS/AMOS, GFABasic, BlitzBasic/BlitzMax, GameMaker, AGS and all the other BASIC-like systems that make it a breeze to program games and GUIs.

With BlitzMax (which is relatively modern), you can get GPU-accelerated sprites flying around on screen in three or four lines. Easier than Flash by a long way.

When starting out in programming it's important for it to be as least abstract as possible. It's basic usability. You want to do something and see the result immediately.
HN: Please review my JavaScript superset, JSC.
I would largely agree with the parent's suggestions. Having an option for just the character would be especially huge, because as a native English speaker it's easy to think of the character as just a visual aid, and as such it's easily ignored.

Since you are in beta, I would find it helpful if there was a "report bugs" feature. For example, sometimes I noticed I would have something typed in correctly, but the application didn't recognize the tone marks I had (correctly) entered, which causes me to second guess myself. Or the voice recognition having trouble with certain words. I probably tried to pronounce the word for ten at least a hundred times unsuccessfully. I would expect to work at least once by accident. It would be great if I could just report this from within the app.

Other than that, I think the interface is great, and it's really FUN to use. Great job so far.
Palm releases Ares, a web-based IDE for WebOS
The names aren't random, tho'. The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc. It costs nothing and makes your engineers happy. Plus it is intuitive, mistakes of the kind of being logged into the wrong box never happen.

I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT...

Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.
Glutamates are in Kombu, soy sauce, Parmesan, Marmite, peas...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid_(flavor)#Sources
The CFO failed to anticipate that humans are irrational, and that people will read all sorts of things into the loss of free sodas. It's not just an economic transaction.

I thought the sales point of "business" types was that they were good at managing the irrationality of humans.
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That site has tons of information. I wonder how come I've never heard of it. Thanks a ton.
A couple things: 1. RSS isn't dying. Whenever you see one site's news stories on another site's page that's using RSS. Plus there are a lot of specialized aggregators that use RSS to work (Techmeme is one I believe)

2. Individual RSS Readers will never die because there will always be a small market for them and they're painfully easy to write. From the programming side every language I know of has a free library available to parse RSS/Atom. So even if Google discontinued Reader (unlikely btw) there would be someone to jump in and fill the void.
I think it's a good point but it shouldn't go to the other extreme either. A lot of people would hate computer programming, so they shouldn't be forced to do it. The focus should be on teaching well and helping kids who are interested to develop the skills.
"We continue to teach our kids French but we don't teach them Ruby On Rails. Which do you think will help them more in the coming years?"

Asked that way, I'm not so sure the question has a definite answer. French will still be French by the time today's middle school students graduate from college, but Ruby on Rails just might be old-fashioned technology by then. And maybe the paradigm of programming in general will have changed by then more than any modern language has changed. I'm not disparaging computer science as a subject of study--in fact my oldest son did learn more computer science in middle school (mostly C through the Eric Roberts texts used by the EPGY distance learning program

http://epgy.stanford.edu/courses/cs/

but also Logo) but foreign language study is important too. As another article submitted in the last few hours points out, schools don't teach nearly enough mathematics these days, either, so the whole curriculum has to become more efficient to squeeze in one more subject.

I homeschool my children to have more flexibility to choose better curricular materials and to have efficiency in teaching so that my children devote the most time to the subjects they NEED the most time for. That allows them to learn programming at middle school age while also being bilingual and well practiced in writing and mathematical problem-solving.
We're talking about soda, but in a culture ingrained with perks, there's no limit to waste, especially as you move up the ladder. In hard times, it sucks to see your boss fly first class instead of coach, take a limo instead of a cab, consider illegal parking tickets a necessary business expense, and all other kinds of excesses. If the business can't afford luxuries, things like free soda can be just one symptom of a far greater problem. In good times, go ahead and splurge. But even then it can create compensation inequities due to abuse and feelings of entitlement.
Part of the problem is that, to replace $200 of company-paid snacks, an employer would need to pay me quite a bit more to purchase the same thing out of a vending machine.

I'd estimate the vending machine operating markup to be, conservatively, 25%. That makes my cash out of pocket $250. To get that amount of take-home, with 34.3% federal and state income taxes and 15.3% social security, my salary would have to go up $500.

Yes, I'd rather have the $500 increase, but an employer would be foolish for doing it this way.
I do agree as a general news medium that will point you to an article, then Twitter works well.

On the other hand, I subscribe to a bunch of photoblogs that would not work well as a Twitter feed. I also subscribe to a bunch of blogs that create their own unique articles of content. That is just not something that can be put into 140 characters.

Generally speaking, I use twitter as a way to come across content not already in my RSS feed. If an article passed through Twitter is from an interesting author, I may add that author to my RSS feed for future articles.
I understand the appeal, but I disagree. Even at my most whimsical, I'd rather have the name a of a machine really be tied to some actual information about the machine. You don't have to use muppet names to indicate that something is a development database server, for example.
I remember reading a study (I wish I could find it to cite) that showed that students who were exposed to CS courses early were more likely to have a favorable opinion of the field

I grew up in an era when BASIC was a standard part of the curriculum at many junior high schools, and I had a nominal course in computer science in high school also. But both were deadly dull. Sometimes it's better for children to learn a subject directly from hobbyists or professionals (as did several of my high school classmates who became professional computer scientists eventually) rather than from clueless schoolteachers who teach the course in desultory fashion.
Your last two sentences are a bit vague. When are the "old days"? 30 or 40 years ago, or pre 2007/8 financial crisis? Automated trading is risky; but then all trading is risky. Do you mean as opposed to another type of trading?
If so, it's wrong. Those two keys would clash - their tonics are only a half step apart. The relative minor for C#(major) would be A#m. You find that by calling C# "1" and counting up the musical scale to 6.
A suggested update to the Powers of Ten movie
Instapaper Redesigns. Turns into a Destination Site for Must Read Content.
What about the smell of asphalt after it rains?
I work for a non-profit where, to cut costs, they initially took out all the water coolers. When people complained, they gave us one water cooler per building.

I'd really like to be able to say that this would make people start leaving, but no one here is really going to do that. I'll bet senior management knew (and was relying on) that.

Lesson learned: In startups, people are more likely to leave on principles. In big companies (even non-profits), almost no one leaves unless they're fired.
For those who haven't seen Powers of Ten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm0bIuAVmOA
If a company is in such trouble that $200 per year and employee will make any sort of real difference, then they have much bigger problems. Not wasting money is one thing, pointless frugality for the point of frugality is something very different.

And really I think you're missing the point by focusing on the soda. If you want the company to grow then you have to keep the employees content and productive. A company full of disgruntled workers looking for a new job will not help your stock go up in value. If the price of that is $200 in soda for some people then that is money well invested, and a direct benefit to you.
You left out the bit in the middle:

"I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences."
It depends on the number of machines. When I have 3 or 4 they get names (currently using Firefly characters), but when I have say 20 or more they get numbers. Or they get both so that my scripts are easier to write. For me it also depends on function. If its just another app server cloned from the master, it gets a number -- it has no personality. But if it is a backup server, mail server, dev or test system it gets a name.
"Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained."

That's true. However, humans do better with names than numbers. Otherwise, DNS wouldn't exist. The real question is who do you want to optimize for?
The function whose values get cached maps a square region at time n to a smaller (concentric) square region at time n+k, for some choice of k. The bits that might be affected by stuff outside the square aren't returned.
I definitely agree. Introducing the material isn't enough, there have to be quality educators who are also knowledgeable of computing. You mentioned hobbyists and professionals and I think this is a fantastic idea. Actually, Georgia Tech's College of Computing has a program designed to take out of work IT professionals and help them become teachers: http://bit.ly/17xgiT [cc.gatech.edu] Pretty neat.
No one cared about my stupid little startup - Mashape's Voice
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engineers are thinking about soda, is a minute wasted

This probably the most often forgotten argument in favor of freebie snacks: time/attention saving.

A good engineer can easily cost a company $1/minute (and be worth much more). Even if going out to ones car to grab some change takes 2 minutes, that $.50 soda just got a 400% markup. Actually having otherwise productive employees think about this as an issue is an even greater waste of talent.

In a large enough company, though, the ratio of dead weight to productive people, can be high enough that charging for soda isn't a false economy.
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I know for a fact that every middle school in my immediate area teaches computer programming of some kind. It's an elective but it's available.

As for it being required of every student I don't know that I agree with that. I work with "non-computer" people who I swear to you lack basic problem solving skills (by their own admission they are "emotionally intellegent"). I'm not sure those people would be capable of understanding and implementing the basic logic structures needed to program and I'm not sure it's fair to set them up for failure.

I think this is the reason that classes like Physics are also elective. Everyone should have a basic understanding of Physics but I'm not sure you can require that of people who aren't math inclined (remember you can graduate High School having only taken first year algebra)
On the very first day of my internship at a very big corporation, they removed the free sodas. Even though this was only part of a large collection of cost-cutting measures, it sent the most clear "F*&# you". (There was a number of other fun things that they did, such as allowing certain groups to use their Engineering interns as QA people without ever alerting them that this would be the case)

Needless to say, Carnegie Mellon students are heavily discouraged from working there by those of us who screwed up, and I definitely think that the huge dump they took on their recruiting pipeline has affected them negatively in the quality of people they'll be able to hire.
I see this point, and can understand it. I'm not criticizing people for leaving the company, either--merely saying that I would be less concerned about _that_ particular culture change. For me, losing my ability to work remotely would be a HUGE deal, and probable cause for me to look elsewhere for employment.
Interesting work. Some questions:

1) Have you have discussed your work with the current ECMAscript committee, or interacted with them at all?

2) Why did you choose to focus on packages and classes? Why not other stuff along the lines of where ES5/ES6 is moving currently? Are there other ways to move forward in JS Programming-In-The-Large research instead of just straight up OO extensions? In Coders At Work, Brendan Eich suggests that academic and industrial influence on ECMAScript needs to evolve hand in hand, but not just directly along the "expected" line of OO features. Do you have any thoughts on that?

-

Small note: Make sure to spell-check your paper and have a native English speaker proof-read it for you :). The first page has some errors like "witch" and "althought" and "avaible".
I think part of what would irritate me here is not just that they've taken away free soda, but they're now actively charging me for it. I wonder if it would've come across better if there just wasn't any soda offered in the office anymore.

Maybe it's totally illogical, but I'd be more irritated with the idea that the company not only took away this perk, but is now trying to make a profit off of it.
"The larger a company gets, the more inefficient it becomes."

Do you have evidence for this assertion? I thought it was fairly well established that most large companies in mature industries are usually quite efficient due to various economies of scale.
Actually, I think this argument (posed by the journalist) was woolly. Given that the high speed trading firms seem to stay market neutral (each trade is adequately hedged) and unwind their trades within hours or days, their inherent risk is less than that of massive pension funds withdrawing their capital as we saw in the 07/08 crash.

As was said in the article, these guys are really just providing liquidity for smaller traders (i.e. you and me) who want to be able to move on a security in small chunks without having to pay for an expensive broker.

That said, there is a crash-scenario if the traditional (i.e. non high-speed) platforms are triggered via stop loss mechanisms to offload lots of stock fast. But again, this shouldn't happen if they do two things:

First: look at the source of the trade. If it's one of the high speed firms, they should just ignore the trade unless it moves with a velocity of say 25% more than the high speed stuff - i.e. if it's dropping by 1.25% of the price per minute rather than 1%, then it should consider selling. (or, for a more general formula - sell if total_velocity - highspeed_velocity = x/s)

Secondly, take wider market movements into consideration - if the entire sector is falling, it's probably not an issue with the security, so there's really no point in getting out at that point - it should recover.*

The one technique revealed in that article which i found interesting - pinging to find the edges of the applicable range trade- guessing the probable worst case purchase by offering and withdrawing stock to see if it's jumped on. I could imagine this getting banned, along with the 'who's trading soon' information.

* of course, this depends on the time period the stock is willing to be held for - if the goal is day trading, then you're not going to want to stick around.
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Sad. Instapaper did one thing and really well. I dont need another news source.
On the Evolution of Technology and the "Second Mover Advantage"
At one job, the convention imposed on us was <manufacturer><number>. So dell001, dell002, sun67, etc etc. You can see why I have issues with this ;-)
@andrew1, In the first sentence I referred to the 2000-2008 hedge fund trading. The second sentence is from the article - it said high speed algorithmic trading could lead to smaller version of the 1987 crash.
In the South, using "sir" and "ma'am" is par for the course. When I lived there, it took some getting used to, particularly because I couldn't help thinking how false it would sound back in California.
This is a very thorough analysis. There are a few code snippets but the majority of the really interesting code is password protected. I probably don't qualify as enough of a "professional" to get password access to the really juicy code.
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The fact that URLs are usually obscured, and the accompanying text on Twitter is usually too brief to efficiently indicate the nature of the link, I generally find Twitter not to be a very effective way of keeping track of things I'm interested in.

And the speed at which I'm informed is usually not important to me. I don't have a professional or personal need to be kept informed about time-critical information. Instead, I'm much more interested in insight, opinion and analysis.
So what happened? In "2 years of constant testing", you ... didn't test it on the device? Didn't try codes outside the area it was supposed to work in? Is there a weather data standard and you didn't meet it, or is there one but it's not always followed, or is there none and you have to do as well as you can?
Instead of calling this a decline I would call it a consolidation. Google Reader does everything I need a RSS reader to do. It works on my desktop and it works on my iPhone, need to synchronize between them since it is all on the web. All the readers I tried on the iPhone sucked and I've never seen a need to try one on the desktop.

As for using twitter, Facebook, etc. for following news -- that doesn't work for me. Those kinds of services are good for news that your social circle are interested in, but for following those uniquely valuable sites a RSS reader is still essential.
I've 'lost' more potential jobs due to not being able to speak French than not knowing Ruby. Also I'm pretty sure I can become competent in ruby on rails a lot faster than I can become competent in French.
I don't know - is it painful to remove? :)
I disagree. I am glad that schools do not teach computer science. Can you imagine what bastardized "Computer Science" they would teach if they tried? You want the same people who brought you "New Math", who teach the beauty of mathematics as a brute-force memorization exercise optimized not for comprehension but for easy testing, and who are blown about by educational fads like a feather in a breeze, to teach computer science?

What would such a "computer science" look like? I don't know, but the odds of it being actively anti-educational are far too high for my liking. Can you imagine what a computer science optimized for testability would look like? I can see it now:

"Fill in the blank with the correct variable name."

"Organize these lines of source to correctly sort the list."

"Find the thirty-three keywords of $CRAPPY_LANGUAGE_WE_STANDARDIZED_ON_TWENTY_YEARS_AGO in this word scramble."

"Which of the following is the definition of 'strong typing'? A: wrong answer B: wrong answer but defendable C: essentially wrong answer from 30 years ago the curriculum officially calls correct D: a more right answer than C but still wrong"
I didn't mean it personally - I obviously have no idea about your own management style. I have found that many managers are unaware of how much a formal relationship hurts open communication, and how much effort must be expended to maintain an atmosphere of honesty. In my experience most programmers - most employees for that matter - tell their managers what their managers want to hear. If that constitutes incompetence and dishonesty, then incompetence and dishonesty are the normal conditions of corporate life (as most any popular depiction of corporate life will attest).
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Do you think the CFO who proposed this dismal change regrets it? She raised her standing with her peer group by proposing a popular cost-cutting measure, and they probably blame the engineers for the outcome, not her. They may even be glad to be rid of the engineers who wouldn't adjust well to big-company culture. Big-company culture is a culture of mediocrity and interchangeability, and the guys on top like it that way. They want all the initiative and excellence to be on their level of the company, so everything that happens in the company is due to their control. Google is exceptional in even trying to avoid that fate.
I started learning BASIC on an Apple IIe in 5th grade when a couple of other students and I figured out that we could write programs on the computer. We were taught a bit of Logo in a 5th grade class, but mostly we just learned on our own, staying in at recess and writing programs at home. (We were blessed with parents who bought Apple IIe machines as well.)

I don't remember the last time I touched a line of Apple IIe BASIC; it was probably around 6th grade. Later, I learned C, and then moved on to a variety of other languages. The learning of BASIC per se wasn't particularly useful, but the fact that I learned to program at all was very useful. I'm not convinced that the long-term viability of the language (or even the particular programming paradigm) is very relevant. It was writing poorly-understood BASIC code that got me into programming, and without that start, I probably wouldn't be writing programs of any sort today.
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