skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With all due respect, your assertion that software engineering lacks extreme safety requirements is false. Like any engineering discipline, software engineering is applied to both safety critical and non-safety critical domains.

When I was in school this article[0] was required reading. Your life and safety depend on software engineers every time you dial 911, ride an airplane, etc. Not everyone is writing Facebook applications :)

[0] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
Tool time
Very similar to USC's also really-amazing, appropriately named SuperBot: http://waziwazi.com/node/26
Maybe try Kaplan University? I haven't done enough research to know what's good. Would be interested to hear what others say.
Don't even try it. It (Xcode) depends on some of the new libraries in Leopard. I've been trying. Looks like I have to get X.5 this weekend. Sigh. (Always try to be a year behind on major changes like OSs because of bugs and fixes.)
DIY Robotics: The Rise of Open Source Hardware
Yay, perhaps now we'll have a better import/export tool. Or maybe a tool to create more Xobni-like features (most frequent contacts, etc.)
I am in the camp that says keep the abstraction level somewhere in the middle, not too low (painful) and not too high (you will lose a lot of people). There is a happy Buddhist middle there somewhere.

Almost any code meant to be used by other people (i.e not throw-away scripts, but even some of those!), even code written by almighty Lispers, will need to be tweaked by another person at some point - they call that "maintenance" but since that term comes with baggage, I say tweaking.

Great Lisp (and by extension any very-high-level-abstraction) tends to emphasize the elegant proof aspect of it, or the poetry aspect of it, depending on whether you come from the math or the art bent of mind, which, of course, need not be mutually exclusive. "Painters and Hackers" captures this.

But refining code this way can leave out later day tweakers in a state of dread. This is why really great math profs don't just recite the super-elegant proof but actually "motivate" it, with examples, with analogies and so on, none of which will be found in the proof itself.

A medium-level abstraction language will tend to leave in the analogies and examples, in a sense, so the tweaker will find some guide-posts. At the very least, he can turn a little knob here and there, and there is a bit of continuity in his experimentation. With dense, super-abstract code, a single token can hold the hold galaxy but will take arbitrarily long to figure out.

Sorry for the long, rambling comment, but my personal experience (I have shipped a lot of stuff) is Buddha is right. We must avoid extremes and go for the middle.
are you looking for something like this? http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/
Working with the real world is different than software. Shit breaks. Physical matters are fuzzy.

Commodity hardware has already done a great deal for robotics, but it takes high quality tools and intelligent sensor analysis to do smart things.

Yah, it's easy to hack together a Braitenberg Vehicle. It is hard to make something real.

All that said, I think robotics is an excellent education medium for all engineering. More people should make robots. Their expectations need to be realistic. You won't make something that can put away your dishes, but you might make a rooomba for 5X the cost iRobot does. Not Bad!
Amazon To Enter Wine Business
Mwahaha, someday I'll work on an enterprise database, and I'll implement a 6502 emulator in SQL stored procedures... The database "data" will actually be op codes for a state machine; other tables will represent registers. The Java "application" that uses the database will just be a sham for the real program which is 6502 machine code inside a database table. I don't care about job security. I just like the thought of frying people's brains when they figure it out.
From Ridiculous to Revolutionary
There are some fairly strong reinforcement schedules which can create motivation, however they rely on one of two things.

1. The desire for the reinforcer never wanes.

or

2. The reward continually increases in value.

The first is brutal, the second unsustainable.

Highly internally motivated people can also be described as continually discontent. They fall into the first category.

Highly externally motivated people are often lazy in repose and obsessive/addictive in play.

-Ian
Not sure how easy this is to integrate, but this is an interesting read about implementing a continuation based syntax highlighter in JavaScript.

http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/story.html
I know University of Illinois at Springfield has an online CS program.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a great school for CS with an impressive history of startup founders (Netscape, YouTube, Firefox, Oracle, Siebel, AMD, Lotus, etc.) The Urbana-Champaign CS program is usually ranked third in the country, after Stanford and MIT. If you did very well in your online classes with Springfield, you could probably continue on with the MS program in CS at Urbana-Champaign if you wanted to do so.

[Don't get me wrong, Springfield's CS program is the ugly third cousin of UIUC, but it is still much better than Kaplan and UPhoenix and the rest of those online busywork diploma mills. No offense to any Kaplan/UPhoenix alumni ;-) ]
appjet.com has an editor (written in javascript, for javascript)
My product is a hosted CMS. I need a mediocre editor for Editing XHTML / CSS and minor Javascript and or PHP.
Brilliant. I'm working on a video with a similar purpose and my standards for how good it has to be just went up. They're for hire...very tempting.

http://www.commoncraft.com/work
9ne is an e-macs type textarea project.. but it was too buggy for me to consider
Yeah, those are WYSIWIG, I'm looking for Code editors. (like textmate, EMacs, etc
YES. If I could give you another point for this I would. It's been ridiculously hard to find something that is matureish in this area.
Cardboard is under appreciated. It has a favorable strength-weight ratio, is cheap, and easy to work with. That being said:

- How long is this furniture going to last?
- Why does "design" always have to be synonymous with "ignores good engineering, and, for that matter, physics" and "looks like it would break if you actually sat on it"?

You know what was good "design"? The Roman aqueducts. That was good design - parts of it are still holding up in use today. The Coliseum, the Parthenon - good design. It's about balancing engineering concerns with aesthetics. This free form swirly crap that people call design today in architecture and furniture may be art, but us calling it design and them designers and not artists dilutes the word "design".
This map makes me sad. I live in western Oklahoma, where the Starbucks to Walmart ratio heavy favors cheap plastic crap over delicious trendy lattes. Someone gave me a gift card for Starbucks for Christmas and I haven't even gotten to use it yet because there aren't any for a 100 miles, but there's a crappy Walmart on every corner.
This interview was really fun. The questions were quite good.
Isn't always going for the middle an extreme?

Tongue out of cheek, this is an interesting point. Could good tagging in a VCS solve the problem, or not, b/c you don't want to transport the whole development tree every time you reuse the code base?
"You won't make something that can put away your dishes..."

Unless you're like Trevor. http://www.anybots.com/dishwasher2.jpg
how do you define ok returns? 3x/5x/7x?
Hehe, I upmodded you! Take that!
Unfortunately, lists only exist in the pure F# model (ocaml-compat). They don't implement ICollection, and this is required to use lists in most conceivable .net libraries. To get a list that implements ICollection, you need to use sequences.

Sequences are more of a pain, because type inference is a lot more restrictive on them, and they really don't play nicely with polymorphism. You can convert lists to sequences, and vice-versa, but this gets annoying after a while.

In short, F# lists are cool, but you hardly ever use them in real code.
How to: Create a Linux Box for Your Mom (50+ Resources)
By setting your mom up on a Linux machine, you can give her a safe, lean computing experience. Here, the article has listed over 50 of the best resources to help you get your mom on Linux without a whole lot of trouble.
What's the last time that any of Cringely's predictions actually happened?
"When I started my trucking company, it was a one-man venture. So, I only bought one truck, since that's the most I could drive myself at the same time. Buying a whole fleet of trucks would not have made sense."

Apparently that wasn't so obvious to the guys who started WebVan.
I expected no less :) I'd upmod you if I could vote.
My evolution (doing C++ development on Linux):

1. First I tried Eclipse. And tried it again, and again. I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest darn things in Eclipse, hated the interface, and it just seemed too complicated to me.

2. Switched to vim + commandline. Invoking gcc directly.

3. Tried emacs - decided I felt the same way about it is I did about Eclipse. Too complicated and I can't figure out simple things.

4. Switched to GEdit + makefiles; still doing a lot on the command line.

5. Looked for a good visual IDE; discovered Anjuta. Was really impressed and happy for about 2 hours. After 2 days and Anjuta crashed for the 1000th time in a row, I wanted to strangle the programmers who wrote Anjuta.

6. Discovered KDevelop. KDevelop is a pleasure to use. Feature complete, very productive, no problems. Got to first milestone in project faster than expected, primarily because KDevelop was so good to work in.
I can't think of a single time I've ever used C-x C-i. I have my C-w bound to backward-kill-word, which I definitely wish every editable text area would obey. I find it's damn near always faster to kill the whole word and retype it rather than C-h to the spot of the typo.
Oh, it's easy! I just let my classwork suffer. I stay up all night working on our startup project, and sleep through six classes a week. I only take classes with lenient professors who won't flunk me if I do this. But I go to a small university where they let you in if your ACT score is >= 0 and computer science has been relegated to a dejected corner of the business department, so no one cares if I go to class or not.
I find the idea of non linear programming to be pretty interesting. I sort of do this in Lisp, I program in terms of specific functions, but once I'm in the function programming becomes linear. I can do this less effectively in object oriented languages such as Java, since I have to write a whole class at a time. Some might call non linear programming top down or bottom up programming, but really it's about interest point based programming. Sometimes the interest points are at the top or at the bottom, but more often they are at some intermediary point in the complex tree or graph describing how your program works.

So, a 2D layout like Excel offers much more freedom, but I wonder if sometimes you'll want a 3rd dimension? And, if that's the case, is it possible to have a programming space that supports an arbitrary N dimensions, or N-N dimensions, ad infinitum?
What was the deal with that thread? First, there was that string of downmods, then suddenly the whole thing goes dead and you also lose your voting privilege. I had thought the whole thing was in jest, including the rampant downmodding, but apparently people were taking it seriously. But why? Did it seem like we were actually fighting?
I'd like to see the correlation between income and which businesses the masses frequent.

I have a hunch that it will be similar, but it would be interesting to see where the anomalies are.
Thanks! I've been looking for a backup tool.

Linus Torvalds uses git for Linux. Linus is cool as well as Linux is cool. So is finding unintended uses for things. Therefore, if I use this gibak program, I'll be cool^3.

It's simple math.
No one bothered to tell me why I can't vote now -- i just had to notice that when i refresh the page the number goes back down 1 -- but my guess is that it's the same reason as rms: upmodding.

I kinda upmodded your entire comment history. But i read it first and liked them all, so I don't see the problem...

I thought that thread was all in good fun between us, but wasn't sure why people were downmodding it. Don't know why it went dead either. But it might have been dead for a while and we didn't notice -- maybe it only tells you your thread is dead when it's old.

Better threads than that have been turned dead. Meh.

PS did you get the email asking for your AIM account? then we could speculate about why pg kills threads and bans users from voting where pg won't read it and possibly get annoyed and possibly mark it dead too.
Why Python Programmers Should Learn Python
This is a beautiful article. I hated math during high school, but was very good at it. I even skipped a grade of math so I could free up my schedule to do more interesting classes! It's such a shame - I love math puzzles but really hate math class.

Even the introductory math courses in college are terrible.
iPhone SDK: Great if you like Cocoa, but what about us?
What are you working on now? Just curious.
US rural broadband statistics and net neutrality
"a complete white-room rewrite should be done by a team of engineers"

NO! NO! NO!

Never allow your engineers or anyone else to do a full rewrite of anything that currently works and serves the needs of your users. While they're busy rewriting (and it will take SOME TIME) you're not pushing out new features and your competitors are (remember Lotus 1-2-3?). And if you are pushing new features while your engineers are doing a rewrite they will NEVER catch up.

The solution: Make sure your application has tests from the start (and don't allow any excuses for not writing tests) and you can slowly refactor and rewrite small parts of your app, one bit at a time.

There are some exceptions to this, some companies have managed to successfully rewrite their software from scratch. But consider that a statistical anomaly and don't try to replicate it (and chances are it was rewritten by a team of super hackers, not a bunch of engineers trying to find the most perfect, scalable solution).
Vote Ron Paul?

Not to add to the Paulspam on the 'net, but if he was elected it really would make things a hundredfold easier. :-(
BlogUpp! - the easiest way to get readers and traffic for quality blogs
Man, what a great article. Thanks.

I love Lockhart's definition of Trigonometry: "Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds".

Reading this article makes me understand why people home-school their children.
Joseph Weizenbaum died at age 85
One of the founders of computer science, famous for his Eliza application and an outspoken critic of artificial intelligence died in Berlin at the age of 85.
Good thing 37signals.com isn't in the bridge building business.
The map might be a bit misleading. In areas like Chicago there are a handful of giant WalMarts serving millions of people. In areas with lower population density there tend to be more stores (and less people). Take a look at the map of population density by state:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:USA_states_population_den...

The fact that WalMart originated in Arkansas skews the numbers for the south, but for the rest of the country there is a clear correlation between population density and stores per capita. Notice how California (12), Illinois (11), Ohio(9), all have lower per capita WalMarts than North Dakota (47), South Dakota (46), Montana (48), Wyoming (49).

The numbers in parentheses represents the state's place in terms of population density.
It also doesn't work on PPC... yet another reason I need to upgrade my 4.5 y/o PowerBook.
Actually, not remotely explained by Ev. Explained by CommonCraft. Tho Ev links to 'em.
1. try to collect better data if possible. if that's not possible ignore the source of that data (and likely find another source that can provide more reliable data). So I might ignore the automatic resume filter and perhaps judge the fitness of a candidate based on how enthusiastic they seem about work they've done in the past (just an example)

2. You always need to make decision based on data. But sometimes you need to allow your brain to interpret the data for you, even for resumes. If you're getting more resumes than you can handle reading by hand you can implement a spam filter. For example require candidates to solve a sample problem and submit the answer along with their resume.

And as far as gaming by providing stock answer to the coding problems try this: extract actual problems (bugs or new features) from your real application, write automated tests for them and then put the problems online for interested candidates to solve. After a while identify a new problem from your application and put that online. Not only are you finding quality applicants you're solving real problems at the same time.

These are just some thoughts that went through my head by the way, I can't speak for how effective these methods are (or would be).
The abstraction level should be like those apple widgets where as you scroll through the icons, they get bigger.

By default, you should get a fairly high level API that basically does what most people want to do. Then, you should get options to tweak that API or go lower level if needs be.
Yeah, I had a boss who liked to bitch about how NASA can do all this great stuff that works the very first time. I told him we could too if we had millions of dollars, and accepted the fact that it would take a long time to deliver even relatively simple components. And of course nothing would touch the running system without weeks of QA.
IMHO the reason behind the response to Arc is "underwhelming" - because the anticipation has been built for 5 years, but it turns out the implementation is a "just" set of macros. And it certainly don't fit the "iterate rapidly" concept.

Now - this is not a criticism of PG's work - on the contrary, I believe his design matches up with his philosophy in On Lisp very well. Looking past how the process, people now actually start to play with the language and make use of it.

What I'm mostly interested though - are the learning lessons if PG is willing to share them. Why did it take as long as it had? Is it because this is not his day job, or are there additional design changes or problems that he has to solve along the way, etc. Getting a sense of that will shed light for other aspiring developers.

I for one tend to try to shoot for just the right things and have scratched quite a few prototypes so I can go for the perfect one, so would sure love to hear from PG on his experiences.
Being the open source guy that I am: I hope not.
I'm a fan of 'pay to pollute' - charge companies for the right to emit a tonne of CO2. standard business practice is to reduce costs and you can alter the rate of change by steadily increasing the price. it's conceptually simpler but still has the drawback of being a revenue device for govt but that is not unsolvable.
If you are actually determined to use it and develop some software, that should not exactly be a major concern.
Google, Microsoft Bidding For Digg
Acid 2 Test: Browser Comparisons
Safari and Opera are the only browsers that seem to pass the Acid2 test. IE8 is very close but not quite there.
Apple Bans Firefox, Lisp, Ruby, Python, Rhino, Java, Opera, .NET, Squeak, Quake, GCC, Photoshop...
you can say that only if you don't understand the mobile market
Pipe Viewer: Watch data in unix pipelines, give progress bars to program
It's just a bunch of stuff that happens
My immediate thought was hacker is an artist to the engineer's pragmatist... getting something to work is more important than its beauty, elegance or how few LOC are used, rather than something that is ..err.. hacked together(!?)
Apple to allow VoIP over Wi-Fi
I'm finishing up my degree online this year. After a lot of research a couple of years ago, I settled on the University of Maryland. : http://www.umuc.edu/online_ed.shtml

Here's my criteria: I needed a Bachelor's degree program. I wanted an actual brick and mortar school that offered it's courses online. And, I wanted it to be as geeky/CS heavy as possible. UMUC fit all of those.

While they don't offer a full CS degree, their full online degree is Computer and Information Science. That's more of their Software Engineering major as opposed to their Computer Science major. It's a "Java school." So, take that for what it's worth. I wish I had more algorithms/compiler type classes. But, I knew that I wanted to do web apps when I was done, so that's what I focused my schooling on.

I'm sure that you might be able to skate through your degree, but it's far from a diploma mill. I've worked full time the whole way through, and have only been able to carry 9 credits at the maximum. Generally I've only been able to carry 6 credits. The University of Maryland has a decent reputation. For what it's worth, after my first year, I got an email from the National Security Agency inviting me to apply for a full ride scholarship. I doubt that you'll get that at Kaplan, Capella or at U of Phoenix.

UMUC has a big contract with the military, so you're doing a lot of your distance education with people in the military or work for companies that do military contracting. I took classes with other students who were working in the Intelligence community, who were in combat zones, and one guy was doing penetration testing for the State Department. I'm careful with what I post online, and we don't chat about our jobs much. :)

All in all, it's been worth it, and I'd recommend it as long as you use Ratemyprofessor.com. Like any University, some teachers are tools, some are phenomenal. Like any degree, you get out of it what you put into it.
If I were to do a Masters in CS online, I'd go with UIUC. The school has a great reputation, and I've seen a couple of their online lectures. They're pretty good.
What an astoundingly dimwitted thing for Apple to do. I thought they were smarter than this.

Android is going to eat their lunch.
Searchles – I think they are on to something in social search
The US Internet Industry Association, a trade group representing Internet companies and ISPs

USIIA is clearly a lobbyst group. And obviously, ISPs are against net neutrality: they would be too happy to charge premiums for certain categories of customers, at the expense of broadbrand coverage/adoption and open access.
Are You Ready To Start A Business?
Given said 11 year old interesting problems from mathematics competitions. The AMC10/12 and AIME competitions are good sources. Some others are USAMTS and for the really good ones, USAMO and Putnam. Note: Do NOT give the UIL competitions. Those aren't much better than advanced high school arithmetic.
PDF: http://birg2.epfl.ch/publications/fulltext/ijspeert07.pdf

Videos and Photos: http://birg.epfl.ch/page65446.html
iPhone - nice, but not for me
Well... I think they'll do just fine. However, long term, openness does seem to have its advantages, and without it, I don't see them getting more than a smallish part of the market. Maybe that's enough, though, especially if they get to sell phones to companies for vertical apps.
I thought someone was upmodding my comment history. Well, once enough people read that, my comment history will be downmodded a couple times, so I guess it works out in the end.
It struck me while reading this that we should rename the subject we teach as maths to puzzles.

Just about everybody likes having a go at puzzles, and people are pretty good at selecting puzzles with the right amount of challenge. I'm sure as a student I'd have a more positive expectation going into a puzzles class than the current experience.
US officials ban google earth from military bases
I don't quite think Apple has the business hooks as it is stated in the article. Apple has over the last two years turned itself into a company that makes cool consumer products - not business applications.
[...] Thank you! Thank you! Than Timeout

awwwww