skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Introductory computer science is a tough subject to teach in colleges, because the students coming in have a vast range of different preparation. Even at top engineering schools like Harvey Mudd, some incoming students have never written a line of code, and others have been programming at a semi-professional level for years.

If you present people with highly abstract material that they haven’t seen the like of before, without developing the intrinsic motivation to study it, you can end up weeding out even very smart and capable students.

There’s no harm in taking some of those first-year college students who don’t a priori “find the science of computation self-evidently beneficial”, and showing them its benefits first-hand. Even the ones who go on to concentrate their studies in biochemistry or structural engineering or pure mathematics will surely benefit.

Project-based group work doesn’t have to be easy. Indeed, I suspect the new curriculum at Harvey Mudd is objectively harder than the standard curriculum at most schools.
[...] loosening admission rates

Citation fucking needed, pal.
An ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Haskell
This looks interesting but does anybody else think that the code of conduct might drive people away from the project?

http://oden-lang.org/code-of-conduct/

My gut feeling is that an early stage project such as Oden should simply focus on the technology, grow the community and then at a later stage consult with the community if they want to introduce a code of conduct.
Police chief: “reasonably good chance” not much is on seized iPhone
Nope. The gofmt-contract is a purely social one. But it's one held by nearly the entire go community which probably gave you that impression for good reason.
Sure, but

- Twitter highlights impressions when it's a particularly useless metric for their platform. Why not expose uniques?

- Why include a user's own activity in their analytics data? Does anyone really want that?

- A tweet doesn't even have to appear on the screen to acquire an "impression". It could be far down the timeline and out of view, but as long as it's included in a batch in an API response, the counter goes up.

- This number is exposed to everyone, not just ad industry insiders, and is subtitled "number of times people saw this tweet" - but that's not what's counted.

The implementation may be technically correct, but it is, I think, misleadingly biased toward higher numbers. I can post a tweet and it can get 10 impressions in less than a minute, just from my clicking around. If I expand the tweet and click "reply" to attach another 140 characters, that's two "engagements". If I click a link to make sure it works, that's three. Honest values for those numbers would probably be zero.
It's not incredibly advanced: It mostly just consists of measuring where exactly the current text box is in the scroll view, how high the text box is, and then having the scroll view scroll to that location, followed by fading in a docked text input right on top of the underlying one. It's pretty slick, but I'd encourage the community to recreate it in a reusable component and open source it.
This is about removing death threats and abuse, not humour.

Reddit is absolutely not a sanitised part of the internet, and I see far more people complaining there about political correctness than actually restraining what they say. I see dry humour as more of a product of geekiness and a text-only medium, causing non-literalist humour to get a bad reception.

Randi Harper's essay https://medium.com/art-marketing/putting-out-the-twitter-tra... is all about improvements to the mechanism of twitter to enable the users to filter out toxic behaviour - at the moment, if you're a prominent woman on twitter and you offend the wrong people, you'll get drowned in toxic behaviour.
Is nobody willing to acknowledge the reality of genetically inherited IQ? It's like all of our political system is designed around subverting this reality. I suppose society that openly accepts this reality would lead to instability? Is that why we hide the truth, that in fact, yes your genetics do matter? Why do we know about how evolution works, but turn a blind eye to the fact that different pools of genetics have different inherent abilities?

EDIT: As a general statement (Please argue logically I am interested in the counterarguement):

Some how over thousands of years of almost complete separation, people managed to genetically grow different facial structures but stayed completely the same on the inside? So only physical characteristics are heritable? That's how evolution works?

The whole tenant of evolution is that great effective genes are passed on and reflected in offspring. By arguing that there is no genetic difference you are arguing that IQ cannot be passed on and that different environments did not select for and need different levels of IQ. If you are arguing that, then you are denying evolution as a theory.
> it's helpful to have an editor that makes the difference between tabs and spaces visible....

I do this for any and every language. Mixing tabs and spaces always sucks.
Okay! (see above)
There's an even simpler explanation you get when you control for upbringing. But instead we prefer Occam's Butterknife to the razor. (https://polymathblogger.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/occams-butt...)
I'm a bit disappointed by the double colon; it's my least favorite part of Haskell syntax (I probably shouldn't care, but there you go). It also bugs me in PureScript. However, Agda, Idris, and Elm, all of which have syntax heavily inspired by Haskell, all do it the "right way", so there's no reason a Haskell-inspired language can't. Plus, this doesn't look that much like Haskell, certainly not to the point of being derivative.
The "prosecutors" of the title are the ones who were "authorizing" (along with a "single state court judge").

This is a voluntary reduction. Neither the judge nor the prosecutors authorizing the "likely illegal" wiretaps have been charged with any wrongdoing.

There is nothing in place to prevent a similar thing from occurring again.
U.S. extends drone war deep into Africa with secretive base
I guess I still just associate "driver" with an INF file that you right-click -> install to make some hardware work in Windows.
Signpost.com's backend was Lisp. Originally, when the company was named Postabon.

I know because I worked directly with their cofounding CTO, Shaneal Manek, during the early buildout phase. I wrote their launch iPhone app, and it talked to a web service Shaneal made, in Lisp. Our app was featured on live TV during some morning business news segment, major network. It was pretty exciting. Anyway they later shifted the feature set and, I believe, rewrote the backend in Java, after Shaneal went to Greplin. Pure speculation for the rewrite was because it was considered as being easier or "cheaper" to find Java devs. Though I'd argue a sharp/solid engineer can work in any language, and Shaneal was definitely that.

I'd suggest also that perhaps the biggest strategic win was that the combination of our slick iPhone app and the Lisp backend with the CxO's pedigrees all helped them to eventually land investment from Google Ventures. Runway and eyeballs are king.

I also worked at Orbitz as a senior engineer back when they used ITA and ITA had not yet been bought by Google. So I can +1 confirm on what is probably the most famous commercial application of Lisp.
> I can't tell the difference between a native app and a JS Cordova one

Sure, what kind of app are you writing ? games ? a video player ? a messaging app like Telegram ? a background activity on Android ? of course if it's a basic CRUD app, you're not going to notice the difference. try to make a 2D or 3D game with Cordova and see how it runs. The question you should ask yourself is, do you need a webpage in a native-shell at first place when you could just develop a website.
It pains me greatly that the tech industry lacks diversity from minorities like blacks, hispanics, and women. However, I strongly believe that looking at the tech companies and asking why they don't hire more minorities is totally missing the real problem.

This is of course one datapoint, but the university I went to (top engineering school in the Northeast US) hosts a big panel for computer-field majors at the annual admissions event. Any students remotely interested in technical majors are invited to attend - you don't even need to be accepted to the university. The marketing for the event makes it as clear as possible that no prior programming experience is required, they just want to get people excited about computing. When I served on the panel as a CS student, I looked out the audience and saw a fully packed room (300+ people) of almost entirely white/Asian male prospective students and their parents. At that point, how do you recover and get diverse people? How do you get people interested when everyone showing up fits the same description?

In my view, the problem starts way before college/job seeking. I was lucky, as a white male, that my parents noticed and encouraged my technical interests at an early age. By the time I was entering college, I had years of programming experience, not even at any company, but just working on my laptop in my bedroom. It kills me that so many minorities and women never even get that opportunity. Parents of young girls don't seem to see/nurture those interests, and sometimes actively encourage them not to go into technology. It makes perfect sense that later they're not interested in pursuing college/careers in computers.

I have worked at companies where the people doing hiring have literally whispered (since it is illegal to say so) that they are desperate to hire minorities and women. I once heard someone say, "Man, I would love to hire this person, but I have to be fair, and if they were male I would have rejected them immediately".

Yes, tech companies need to be as accepting as possible towards minorities and women. Yes, minorities and women need role models in the industry. But we've got to start at the source at the problem and get parents to allow their children to be interested in computers in the first place!
Talk to your friends. The advantage you, as a young person, have over game studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees is that you and your friends are the customer for this sort of thing. So you should work on understanding what you and your friends want.

Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game studios, which might be hard to get. But https://www.humblebundle.com/ built a good business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there are probably more possibilities.

The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.
I'm his grandson, not his colleague, so far be it from me to say he was a great man, but he was a great grandfather and an inspiration. He taught me an enormous amount, from logic to just how hard it can be to get people to adopt new technologies -- he eschewed word processing, writing every document directly in PostScript even up to the present -- but most importantly he showed me how important it is to love what you do, and for that I owe him a ton of my happiness and career.

Fare you the hell well, Gramps.
I think the article mixes non-tech hiring problems with tech problems. I think tech is one of the only fields where your skin color really does not matter. We hire people from far-flung countries who can barely communicate in english; we hire 17-year-olds who have not even finished highschool; we hire total misfits; etc., based solely on their technical expertise. So it bothers me to read crap like this:

Research has found that during hiring, managers are biased against black-sounding names on résumés, for instance, and interviewers weigh too heavily whether they’d want to hang out with someone.

This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this. Go to any good tech company, and see the odd folks walking about. And yet they'll have an issue with black or hispanic folks? I doubt it.

Network does play a role, I will agree. But what plays a bigger role is your technical chops; and it is very easy today to demonstrate your skills via SO or Github.
I put most things in Asana. Except groceries, for that I use evernote (just a list with checkboxes).
Programmatic and Direct Manipulation, Together at Last
Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills.

Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.
True, however Twitter doesn't expose uniques at all, only impressions and "engagements", which also include your own activity. Hence the analytics tools they offer are "pretty but pointless".
Likely illegal doesn't mean anything. It's the judicial branch that decides whether it is or is not legal. It's not until that point.

For some reason there's a lot of leeway for the government to push boundaries in this regard. The running outcome is that if something was not expressly illegal then there's no prosecution but a slap on the wrist. The judicial branch should start taking a much harder line against overreach; they should begin operating the other way: if it's a case of citizen rights and privacy then it's not legal unless it's expressly legal.
>learning mobile development requires you to not only learn new language APIs in objC/swift, but you also have to learn some new design patterns (delegation, etc.)

Delegation has been a standard feature of desktop APIs for decades. Not just on things like Smalltalk and ObjC -- it has been the standard .NET model for UI events since C# 1.0.
This comment should be deleted. There are many more rss services, and 'more' free than feedly.
I see. OK, so the goal is to get publisher content because it's less intrusive than blatant ads.

What you said about CPMs and minimum ad buys is true. The solution, it seems to me, is to simply go to smaller publishers. There are a million small blogs out there that might pay you $100 for some content marketing. The thing to think about is what your unique value proposition can be that will get them to spend their ad dollars with you. Perhaps it's something to do with the full-page sized ad format. It reminds me (from the advertiser standpoint) of the StumbleUpon model, which is very successful for certain kinds of sites.
> How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview?

A lot of schools don't teach anything about interviewing. Its not academic. In fact, a lot of the training videos used in schools that do teach "job skills" to prepare students make no mention of white board interviews. They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.

Judging an academic program on if they have ever been exposed to a whiteboard interview is fairly silly. I never saw on in 20 years.

As to your last paragraph, I'm not sure what role culture would play in introducing people to whiteboard interviews. I guess I grew up in a different environment, but I don't remember any of my urban white friends extolling the annual whiteboard festival. I can see it being a economic function of better schooling though.
You are right, but today it is very difficult to get an extension to the 45 days period, unless you can provide a release date, as it has been abused so much in the past.
Took me reading this 4800 words of instructions to get it: Twitter is the Dwarf Fortress of social.
Sun web server is a Java web server, and ColdFusion is a Java application.
This is a good article at covering various business metrics, but I just have two things to add:

1) Relative valuations can be slippery, and I personally sleep better when I make an investment I am comfortable with on an absolute basis.

2) Most often, success in investments is more dependent on the accuracy of your judgment of the business at hand than on your ability to wield spreadsheets. If you are good at the former, you can be middling at the latter and do well, but generally not vice versa.
ColdFusion runs on the JVM, I think.
I think those using Haskell can learn to use a single colon plus they will appreciate it better as the double colon steals too much visual attention.
First problem: anonymity + some assholes = mess (the Penny Arcade version:[1])

Facebook dealt with this by requiring "real names". Except from some whining from drag queens, this has worked well.

Wikipedia has an ongoing struggle with this, but because everything on Wikipedia can be undone, users have reputations, and the asshole fraction isn't that large, Wikipedia continues to work.

Any system where fake identities can be created in bulk at low cost suffers badly from this problem. Email, especially. Interestingly, if you have conversations, and not much happens based on single messages, it's less of a problem. Twitter and IRC are examples.

Second problem: once the bulk junk identity problem is under control, how do you get people to behave reasonably well? Wikipedia does this surprisingly well, with a complex set of rules and an explicit requirement of civility. (Many new editors complain that it's hard to edit Wikipedia, but that's because they treat it like a blog. Think of it more like checking out something from Github and submitting a pull request.)

Newspaper comment sections do this badly. Karma-based systems such as the one here and on Slashdot do it reasonably well. Fancier karma systems are possible; Civil Comments seems to be using something like the ELO algorithm. It takes a lot of user time to crowdsource such rankings, and that's a scarce resource. Not many people want to do Mechanical Turk work for free.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
The bigger underlying problem is that we associate those games with happy periods of our lives. The once where we could play games, do projects and not worry about anything else.

By playing an old school game, your brain extracts these happy feelings from the memory. However, it's not a sustainable source of "fun" per say. As opposed to the newer games where "fun" is being caused by the game directly.
Beeminder! And, yes, we have a whole blog post about why we're better than Don't Break The Chain apps: http://blog.beeminder.com/seinfeld/

(That post also includes a link to what we think is the best Don't Break The Chain app, if you decide the complexity of Beeminder's graphing -- not to mention the whole commitment device angle -- is too much.)
I like the idea for WordBrewery! That's a clever model for optimizing language learning.

Yes, you will need to incorporate your company to raise seed funding. A really easy way is using Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas - they will do all the paperwork for you to get a company legal structure.

You're probably at the stage where it makes sense to apply to accelerators. Any major accelerator program will help you with the legal structure as well as providing funding.
"The general distinction between an interactive web site of any kind and a 'web application' is unclear. Web sites most likely to be referred to as 'web applications' are those which have similar functionality to a desktop software application, or to a mobile app."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application
Embedding Git Revisions in Ember Apps Deployed to Heroku
emphasis on group work,

It's very questionable that this is a positiv change. While it is
important (and difficult) to acquire teamwork skills,
in practise, most groups gravitate towards one might call "Pareto Groups" where 20% of the participants do 80% of the work. Usually the strong programmers in the group do all the programming, thus getting all the learning experience.
> This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this.

It's typically called "culture fit".

EDIT: Not all culture fit is bad, I think it's important that people can work together. But it can easily disguise any number of subjective biases, many of which you may not be aware.
You can do medical school with minimal to no debt from many state medical schools. No way any one rational should chose programming over medicine in terms of dollars per calorie spent working, given they can get admission to medical school. Chose it because you like programming and can't stand the sights and smells of medicine. Not for the money. An average doctor makes more than an average programmer, with better job security, and more prestige, more choice of where to live, less politics at work, less selling your soul for money. Even free time is improving. Many medical sub specialties now offer shift work, part time work etc.

Edit: there are literally medical gigs available where you can sleep all night and get paid $100 / hour while sleeping (specialty surgical hospitals, where many nights there may not be a patient overnight, but they require an md on site). Many emergency rooms in rural areas may not see 2 patients at night, but need an er doctor on site.
Thanks for this comment.
I was thinking about Gaskell first, but the "gas" prefix was weird.
There is a big Diode D5 near the micro-USB power connector.
Interesting how many people here think that the problem rests solely with Black/Hispanic students. I am a black software engineer. As I see it, there are systemic problems, as you can imagine. But one reason that may be missed here is that sometimes people get weary of being the "only black person in the room". So some of the students may be opting out simply because they want a more diverse workplace, and tech is very very white. Just take a look at this thread, in which we have jimmywagner asserting that Black and Latino people are liabilities, and michaelbuddy asserting that systemic issues are "ghosts". They are of course entitled to their opinions (however much I may disagree with them), but honestly that type of hostility masked as objectivity gets old really quick.

I can expand later if anyone is interested in a real conversation.
Why not?

If I fund my own research, and ask Springer to publish it for me, then why are we forced to make it unrestricted?

Does this rule only apply to journal articles, or does it also apply to books on a research topic?
Hacker News Enhancement Suite Chrome Extension
Next up on HN... "GOfurr, a gopher client written in Go" ;)
I dunno. I just set up DreamSNES for my son the other day and he played Metroid until we basically had to threaten to burn all of his toys just so he would put down the controller. But yeah, I guess speaking of myself there's not a lot of lasting interest there.
Where "culture" really means class. Lower class culture vs upper class culture. Poor people make non-poor people very uncomfortable. The bar scene in Good Will Hunting is such a good example.
There's this: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/03/how-to-build-your-own-c...
The lore is it was a part of Microsoft hiring process in early 90s and then spread out. Google "microsoft manholes".