skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CS is not like an English paper where you can just turn it in and there’s not a way to say if it’s a good paper or not... at 3 a.m, you can be looking a program and definitively say that it’s not going to work.

The ignorance I encounter among fellow CS people in this area never ceases to amaze. A strange phenomena in a group of otherwise intelligent individuals.

Trust me when I say that you can evaluate a paper the same way you evaluate a program. In a functional sense you (the writer) can definitively say whether a paper will work or not [1]. Most people who make statements like the one I've quoted simply never have been taught the appropriate skills.

[1] Creative writing is a different story.
I think one of the reasons that Lua gets less attention (outside of certain niches, most notably the game industry) is that, to get the most out of it, you need experience with C or C++. The libraries available for standalone Lua are somewhat small compared to (say) Python, because in most cases you'd just use C libraries anyway. In exchange, though, you can leave each layer to focus on what it does best.

This probably rules it out for people who only know Python, Ruby, PHP, etc., which in turn limits exposure among web developers, who seem to have disproportionate presence on blogs.
Mashup REST, Groovy, GWT on GateIn (video)
Unfortunately not full honesty. It's easier to complain about embarrassing problems with internet anonymity than it is to complain about the same things to someone at bar. There are something that will be hard to say so someone else face-to-face whether or not they are a complete stranger.

Bar conversations are probably more along the lines of complaining about people without your 'real' thoughts about them getting back to them. Or dropping a persona that you put up for certain people (and keep up with others just so that you don't ruin the charade).
Should be http://ee380.stanford.edu
I think Chris, the co-founder, has this in mind for people who want to use short videos to sell.

I wonder why he doesn't open it up to long content.
Answer: You can't, and no, you shouldn't try. You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there.

Sorry, but this whole thing is a whole new level of idiocy I had not previously encountered: Even my mother (whose sole computer skill is that she can get to amazon.com to buy gifts for people) would be able to determine whether or not she was at amazon after searching Google and clicking a random link.

My God! RWW isn't even BLUE for heaven's sakes.
Forgot! I'm in San Francisco for the week in 2 weeks. I'll smuggle one out. =)

(I'm good for Chicago food fedexed any time. Alinea hot-potato-cold-potato coming right up!)
It would be pretty difficult for RRW to out-rank Facebook in organic search results because of linking.

Constant news articles are another thing.
> These people are anonymous, i.e. far away from societal pressure and judgement, and so their statements are much more likely to be exactly what they think.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of people that say things just to piss off others, things that they might not actually believe themselves (i.e. 'trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls).
The OP was simply pointing out that 4chan is an exceedingly bad example to hold up for online anonymity: it is difficult to point to anything that even a small portion of the public would find to be a "good" use of anonymity and there are a lot of examples that can be pointed to by many as "bad" uses of anonymity.
Lua attracts a lot of devs with a pretty low-key, humble attitude. If you go to a Ruby mailing list and ask people "should I use Ruby for x?" the answer will mostly be a resounding "yes." On the Lua list, people will often tell you "that depends," will advocate for lots of other languages, or even tell you "no, I don't think so." I think that's in part because of Lua's history as an embedded/glue language: many programmers who work with Lua don't use it as their primary language, and so they don't have the same urge to hard-core advocacy and evangelism that many other languages' users have.
I have to admit that I used to do that in Firefox, back before I switched to Chrome.

Firefox address bar used to make it really convenient. It did a kind of "feeling lucky" search, taking me directly to the first result if it was the "right" search result, or to google's search otherwise. I don't know how google determined if it should display a results page or not but it used to work very well. I stopped caring about bookmarks and and memorizing URLs and just used keywords to get where I wanted.

Of course it's silly for really popular pages like facebook, but it worked fairly well for pages I used to visit ocasionally.
Maybe the porn ones?
Reminded me of the stories I used to read about US riders who joined pro cycling teams in Europe. They invariably explained that in Europe, cycling was a blue collar sport, akin to boxing here in the US. Cycling is much more of an upper class activity in America. This discussion would then lead to interviews where American riders would describe their Euro teammates tastes in literature as either non-existent or at the juvenile comic book level.

It's probably not a fully symmetrical situation, since I doubt that basketball is of a much higher social standing in Europe than it is here.

But I did find it interesting that the "outsiders" were called out as being the intellectuals of the sport.
>very clearly should be objects, such as classes, are not objects

Well classes are objects themselves, but not necessarily related in a useful way to the objects which they instantiate. You can't do as much with them (other then look at them, or load new ones) - or do you mean more a prototype based OO?
You relentlessly simplify. You collect data and look for errors or opportunities for misunderstanding, then eliminate them. You tell people how to succeed with the app three times. You make the defaults close to success. You aggressively segment your users, giving the hard stuff only to those that can handle it. You provide an easy way to talk to you and pipe that straight to the dev team to automate or eliminate responses to the common issues.You implement game mechanics and award people features for learning or mastering other features.

This is not trivial but it also is not impossible. Trust me if my users can do it then yours can too. Help them succeed and take their money for it.
So someone makes a webpage that looks exactly like the iPad home screen, puts a bunch of icons for apps on it, one of which is the facebook app icon. All of the icons link to the same page2.html that looks exactly like the facebook app login screen, which then gets stolen.

Given how uniquely unobservant you'd have to be to have this problem, I'm willing to bet that would successfully phish a few hundred credentials. Alternately, this all an elaborate hoax that we've fallen for. (Please?)
When you say:

> "This will create wealth. Wealth will mean that art, health and relaxation will be in high demand."

Yes, I agree to an extent. But I must ask, wealth for who? Certainty not for the people no longer employed in the jobs that were "automated away". Other labor markets must exist to absorb those that became unemployed as the result of automation.

> Now 2% of people work on farms, does that mean we have 88% unemployment?

%2 of the population is capable of producing the the labor of 88% (or any number > %2) because of the introduction of technological and methodological advances in farming. Roughly from the middle of the 19th century to the present, the production of food fundamentally changed in character from relatively small-scale primitive production (think horse-drawn plough and peasant or slave labor) to large-scale, technological production (mechanical threshers, high-yield genetically modified seeds, effective pesticides, etc). Agriculture became much like any other industry, and as such, was revolutionized. It was inevitable.

I think as someone else on this thread already pointed out, the other 88%, for the most part, had no other choice than relocate to the population centers seeking work. Many found it as unskilled factory labor. The pay was universally poor, and only through the gains made by widespread unionization of both trade (American Federation of Labor) and unskilled or semi-skilled workers (Congress of Industrial Organizations), were workers able to achieve a livable wage.

> "The more we have robots automate the more wealth we will have, the more wealth we have the the greater the number musicians, artists and yoga instructors we will have"

So basically we will have a society where current industrialists will own the overwhelming majority of robotic labor (property), whereas the rest of use will be "employed" as small scale artisans?

> Creating wealth doesn't destroy jobs long term, "A rising tide raises all boats", however short term many people will be displaced and have no jobs during the transition. (Short term could be many years).

As I said, only if other labor markets exists to absorb the newly unemployed. Whether such markets already exist or are created, is up for society to determine. It may take years for new markets to form, leading high unemployment for quite a while. Historically speaking, when power looms and other such mechanical devices were introduced into factory production, new labor markets did manifest to absorb some of the unemployed in the from of engineers and repairmen. Of course the introduction of machines was not without struggle (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots as an example).
You're right, but I think this is much less true now than it was a few years ago. With the libraries developed by the Kepler project (for example) you can do quite a bit of useful coding without ever touching C.

http://github.com/keplerproject

I do quite a bit of work with Lua and never use it with C.
I disagree that being non-anonymous on the Internet via social networking (etc.) is harmful. You can be non-anonymous and still be anonymous when you want to.

For example, it's clear that I'm jrockway. It says right above my comment. If you Google the name, you will find that that is pretty close to my real name, and you can reasonably make a guess about who I really am. (And where I live, and who I work for, and how old I am, etc.) But that's not really important -- what the world knows about "jrockway" is completely under my control, and anything posted under that name is intentionally designed to be linked back to a certain real person.

The important question is, "what other online IDs does that real person have"? And because of anonymity, you will never know.
This also highlights one of the big problems with the App Store - there is no way to get in touch with that user to find out why he hasn't upgraded to paid.
I'd imagine if your food came with instructions on how to cook them you, as a poor cook, would at least know enough to read and follow the instructions. I can't cook worth a dime normally, but I can follow directions in order to make Mac & Cheese or Ramen.

I daresay, if something I am not familiar with pops up with an error message, I would at least read it!
There are different styles of play. I have been in games that essentially were board games with a visit to shops in between the exploration and combat. I have also been in games that barely touched the dice at all and combat was handled by DM fiat after the players laid out their strategy in very broad terms. Both types can be fun, depending on your personality/mood at the moment.

The Storyteller System used by White Wolf for the old World Of Darkness series struck me as a very good balance between the two, back before children and grad school essentially put an end to my playing.
That was the thing I was thinking would make this whole plan inoperable.
Most papers aren't graded with some pass/fail grammar and punctuation rubric. I had many CS assignments for which no credit would be given if the automated submission site couldn't compile the work.
I am still waiting for node.js for windows.
Afterthought (telegraphic): Avatar 3D -> car accidents -> lawyers -> millions -> kibosh
Then we'll see a wargame targeted to the Surface specifically. Then the Surface will be completely dominant and unbeatable.
Static analysis finds everything. iPhone App Store was using a static analysis tool to screen out apps using Apple's closed APIs.
Sighs Ok..time for the neo-eco-holistic-minimalism movement.
I would await my trial, where all the illegally-collected evidence becomes inadmissible, and the charges are dropped with prejudice.

But of course, it would never get that far, because they wouldn't be allowed in my house, and they wouldn't be given the decryption key. (Any EULA they wave in front of you is invalid in the face of piracy; when you install pirated software, you are only violating copyright law, not the EULA. Let the police deal with it.)
It is not possible.

Look at the interfaces exposed by any general public machine/gadget outside of computing, and the layers of abstraction that the consumer needs to grasp.

Automobiles are one of the rare gadgets that expose an internal system layer (the engine) and right there you clearly see a divide between the users who can only interact with the general purpose (simple wheel, pedals, key, gear shift) interface, and the automotive geek ("grease monkey") who also has a clue what's going on under the hood.

As soon as any sort of symbolic interaction is required (remote/vcr programming) you again lose a whole chunk of the population that simply can not get it.

A "consumer product" has to be an appliance, not a general purpose computing machine, hosting a general purpose operating system, hosting a general purpose application (web2.0 browser), hosting yet more general applications.

The fact that the "farmville" crowd even manages to get to interact on the web (and leave hysterical comments on RWW) is by itself a major accomplishment of the geek set! ;)
Why I hate everything you love about Java
Ed Thorp: It is realistic to multiply your capital by 1000 using Kelly Criterion
"But, she's totally lost on Facebook."

Is that really so bad, though? I don't know about anybody else, but I've never liked the Facebook UI. I always thought it was a confusing mess. Lite Facebook is about as close as they've gotten to something user-friendly.

Granted, that's a bit different from the ridiculousness involved with the RWW post, but they're already trying to log in to a confusing website that has been changing it's interface recently.
Problem is, most cook books are dreadful. They leave out all sorts of important details, and assume you are a master cook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9CJdBugDxE
I understand that most of the cheating is done in the first cs course, but why on God's earth would you sign up for a major notoriously difficult if cheating can be a problem and you are the cheating type. I mean- If you have to cheat during the CS course, I can very easily see you never be a good programmer.

A CS course isn't even like the real world programming jobs.
Conversation Hackers: How Trolls Work
Maybe not for the Surface specifically, but how about just multiplatform but with built in support for Win7 multitouch? For that we'll have R.U.S.E.:
http://ruse.us.ubi.com/index.php?page=news&newsid=10422
See my post below.
A program that doesn't compile is not the same as a paper with a typo in it. A program that doesn't compile is like a paper that never got printed; there is no finished form for the grader to interact with. Regardless of discipline, no credit should be given if the grader has nothing to work with.
+1.

Quoth the article: There is a higher incidence of cheating people that are not CS majors — the ones that are new to the field and potentially find themselves being in a situation where they can’t handle the assignment.
Not really -- we didn't know the Facebook team all that well. Your argument would make more sense if we had sold to Google, but even then it would be false.

If your point is that people can build future success on top of past success, yes obviously that is true, but there is nothing wrong with that. It means that you need to work at it for a while and not expect people to simply hand you whatever you want because of some imagined "merit".

Edit (because there's not reply link for some reason): Where do you think reputation comes from? You have to start by doing something, and over time if you keep doing things that makes you more valuable.
As my Cordon-Bleu trained chef friend likes to say, Stuff That Comes In A Box Is Not Cooking!

Are you really that positive that there is no subject which is so baffling to you that you wouldn't even attempt to diagnose something related to it? 'Cause I've met plenty of programmery-types that don't know a fuel pump from an alternator, and when their car breaks down, they're as stuck as everyone else.

You're ignoring the fact that computers are filled with text. Menus, window titles, commands, icons, etc. etc. -- your brain has already been trained to filter through all that. You do it without even thinking about it.

Lots of other people do not. So, to them, the directions, or that pop up, is just more words on the screen.
I think the original poster might be referring to the strength of a paper's arguments rather than grammar. But I basically agree with you... most Stanford CS projects are graded almost entirely by automated tests (which test the output of the program, not just whether it compiles or not). When there are automated tests, you can predict how your program will be graded with much higher accuracy than you can predict the grade your paper will get, even if you are very good at evaluating papers.
Of course in college you are punished! For a whole boat load of students this is their first time programming (a bad time to start imho). We want them to learn. Not to hack something together! =]
It certainly isn't _most_ users, but there are enough people that do this to register on Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+facebook+login
Yes, but in the real world you are constantly faced with novel (albeit simple) problems, whereas in college you're doing the same trivial thing tens of thousands have done before you. If you can't put forth the effort to figure things out on the canned problems how will you ever become competent to ship working software?
The nice thing about bar conversations is that in almost all instances, the only pictures are the ones a raconteur paints in your mind.

Much easier to purge from one's mind if desired.
This argument gets trotted out in all sorts of internet discussions re: CS education, and it's bogus. You have to be able to stand on your own before you can contribute meaningfully to a group. More importantly, individualized assignments don't scale to classes of one or two hundred students.
"There aren't that many driven and talented people out there"

I beg to differ, if you assume that there are an equal distribution of talented/driven people, then how come there are more millionaires (talented people) in silicon valley than the rest of america, and america more than europe, and europe more than the rest of the world.

More likely is that rich people are cliquey and luckier/lazier/less talented at spotting opportunity/investing than they give themselves credit for (otherwise you'd see a more equal distribution of investment to where the talent is).
...most of these are good people, and many of them have accomplished more in their lives than many of the denigrating commenters ever will.

While true, I'll still be prejudiced against people that leave comments like (#14):

wtf is this bullshttttttttttt all about. can i get n plzzzzzzzzz

and I'll actively argue that many who spell and act this poorly in public are probably at least as much of a detriment to society as they are a boon. Most of those smart-but-not-tech-savvy people can at least communicate properly.

edit: the comment prejudice applies to bashers too. Poor behavior is poor behavior.
Ahh, 4chan.

I don't think 4chan, and /b/ in particular, get enough credit for being the... unique sociological artifact that they are.

There are many that extoll the virtue of "free speech", but how many are able to gaze unflinching at its unrestrained exercise? The teeming, faceless horde that is 4chan's population is perhaps the truest, purest exemplar of the free exchange of ideas; unshackled from the restraints of purpose, propriety, coherence, and even (at times, on /b/, at least until the moderators notice) legality.

It is likely impossible, in the course of normal social situations, to escape certain limitations; be they social, cultural, or even biological. Reputations are built or destroyed, relationships formed, a complex and pervasive network of interconnections. A person may be taller than you, or shorter; younger, or older; attractive or ugly; hesitant or confident; wealthy or poor; or any of countless factors that subtly, deeply, and inevitably color the way people interact.

But in an environment like 4chan, all that is stripped away. No status games, no authority, no obligations, no expectations. What you say one minute matters not at all the next, crude obscenity and pearls of wisdom alike slipping into the seething, aimless morass. Cloaked in anonymity, where even the flimsy identity of a pseudonym is cause for mockery, what emerges is a shocking sort of honesty. Revolting, yet oddly beautiful; an ever-shifting, ephemeral monument to every embarrassing thought, guilty pleasure, squelched impulse and repressed desire--in short, an expression of humanity, in basest form.

...well, either that, or it's just about porn and cat macros. I'm not entirely sure.
I understand but that's actually my point. I consider it an individual right, regardless of whether it contributes something to society at large.
I still stand by the belief that it is the professors' responsibility to create interesting and unique problems that cannot be solved easily with out-of-the-box libraries. Seems very basic for the amount of money I spend to attend college.

Another solution is to use an unfamiliar language, such as Scheme.
I would guess that most cheaters don't know they're the cheating type until the moment they cheat. Also, one of the points made in the article is that most people attribute the honor code violations largely to non-CS majors. The mindset is probably that they never want to be a programmer, and all they want is a good grade and the general ed requirement out of the way.
And I have learned recently that "their" is acceptable in this context as well.

I probably wouldn't have made the comment other than the fact that I did some work with him back in the 80s.
Yes, but instead of waiting for a response, the answer arrives in your IM window seconds later
Surely this happens any time some new technology is introduced.

If you look at the people who mistook the RWW article for Facebook they're almost invariably over 30, and I didn't see a single teenager or college age person.
I just used Facebook as an example because it's topical. She can find her way around Quickbooks well enough, since she uses it as her POS. Other than that, it's all a mystery.

The point was, let's dispense with this notion that intelligence and general ability are somehow related to computer literacy. If anyone's not sure about this, I'd be more than happy to talk about one of my other clients, a guy who used to build floating homes -- not little houseboats, but multi-story works of art, on water. And he's completely lost on a computer.
Got a link?
@Andrew Warner

It would be interesting to find out if the 25% are regular viewers or not. My suspicion would be they are not regulars.

Can you determine how many people click on the sponsor links to exit vs close the window.

Also, Do you have any stats for the videos without the advert at the start?