skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is AP Computer Science Worthwhile as a student Programmer?
As a student in high school, is taking an AP computer course or just the exam (studying for it, of course) worthwhile for future college applications? Or, would work (such as web applications and open-source code) done in other languages (such as python or ruby) have the same effect?

Up to this point, I have learned programming and web frameworks through resources available online and have created a few smaller and larger web applications and websites.

Is the AP test a waste of time and effort that should be spent finishing another project or is it worthwhile material to learn? It seems, from their course description (http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap-computer-science-course-description.pdf) is they test mostly on OOP, basic list algorithmic, and java itself.
New York City Launches Investment Fund for Tech Start-Ups
It seems that there are people who are able to follow this model and make money by throwing "Nerd Conferences".

In my mind, the key differentiator between mediocre events and great events is who the target audience for the event is:

- A great even is designed for the benefit of the audience.
- Mediocre events are designed for the benefit of the sponsors or the organizers.
I haven't updated my source tree in a long time, but the ARM devices were using bionic/libc/arch-arm/bionic/memset.S. This is pure ARM assembly optimized for the pipeline and cache.

My ARM assembly is a little rusty, but it looks like they implement memset and bzero, the latter just calling memset with R1=0.
I would imagine writing the native register size bytes per iteration would be a win, with a little cleanup for the remaining bytes. For a 32-bit architecture, you'd typically be doing 1/4 the iterations.
take the course. its worthwhile. i took it in c++, its just good practice.
fantastic point. i've been to both, and the difference is quite clear
Just about every callback interface takes a function pointer where the function expects a void * argument. Half the time it's not needed.
Is it wrong that I've been to these sort of conferences and actually enjoyed myself?

Webstock (http://www.webstock.org.nz/) in particular is great if you're ever in my part of the world. Great signal-to-noise ratio, fantastic speakers, very little of the standard tech conference douche baggery ("10 tips to monetize your blog"; any panel comprised of commentators rather than people who make stuff; etc.) and an upbeat sort of atmosphere that's difficult to articulate.
> There are cases where this is painful, such as offline machines. But in those cases you can pack all of CPAN on a CD (with minicpan), or produce a self-contained Perl program + libraries with local::lib and/or PAR.

Which is pretty much what I have to resort to :(

I don't have to do this for the most part with Java or Python.

PAR is good for deployment, but obviously hard for offline development work (sometimes you just have to do the work on those machines).

Thanks for the pointer to minicpan. I might give that a shot, might save me from manually mirroring CPAN.
You might talk to @chrislunt about this. I know that he went through the ringer evaluating options with his last start-up, Nombray.
RMS doesn't use cellphones 3G/GSM for privacy reasons.
Did you try calling up? What did they say.
I joined a local MasterMind group that meets for dinner every other Tuesday night -- the results have been mixed so far. We generally tend to move forward on things but we're pretty relaxed on documenting things so I'm sure stuff is slipping through the cracks.

I'll email you shortly about your new service, I'd be interested in serving on the coach/mentor side. <shameless plug>Outside of MailFinch, my latest startup, I do some consulting for early stage startups on issues related to their back office (billing, provisioning, invoicing, etc) operations and generally keep them accountable through monthly "Board" meetings, if they want.</shameless plug>
> There's a lot of CPAN activity, but my impression is that a lot of it seems confined to only a handful of problem domains.

You can see a list of recent uploads here: http://www.cpan.org/RECENT.html

> There's tons of choice with date libraries,

Most everyone uses DateTime.

> or OO frameworks,

Nowadays choosing this one is simple: Moose

> or unit test frameworks

Test::More is pretty standard.

> For all the talk of CPAN being so killer, there actually isn't much there that other languages don't also have.

That is approximately the opposite of my experiences with the CPAN.
I appreciate your point, but you are confusing users with customers. For Facebook users are a product, advertisers are customers. Same is true for Google.
Well, I didn't say it was perfect. =)
They tried something vaguely like this with the big dome they tried to lower over it, didn't they? As I recall, a bunch of slushy hydrate ice started forming on the inside, clogging up the pipe and making the dome buoyant.
mpd+ncmpcpp!
A very general rule I learned is that png's are best for images with large areas of the same color (screenshots, logos, text) while jpegs are best for images with lots of color variation (real-life pictures, for example).
Apple, Google and the map wars
“fixing” if expressions in erlang
Although I think the cloud is very important in making a great end-to-end mobile product, I think this would be a red herring for Apple. Here's why:

Apple appeals to a limited range of people. There are many people who simply don't identify themselves as being a potential iPhone owner, regardless of superiority, design, range of apps, etc. I would be extremely surprised if most consumers had any idea of what cloud syncing meant or why it would benefit them, let alone have it be a deciding factor in their cell phone purchase. Sure such a feature can be explained, but most users don't even work at that level yet where they need such deep syncing.

What Android phones are offering is choice in identity: tons of different types of phones they can choose from on carriers they are already on (a big deal when you consider family plans), with a big range of prices. These phones run the gamut from the low to the high end of the market.

This is the antithesis of what Apple is all about. It is likely that Apple has always known this would happen, and once things settle down, Apple will position itself comfortably in the high-end smartphone market and pull in higher than normal profits.
By the standards of a high level googler, probably all languages but C and Ocaml are slow.
When you're the pope of open source, you better be a true believer, that much is for sure. Unfortunately, that does lead to a bit of a contradiction when you have situations like this. Live free or die, he'd probably say.

I wonder if he eats open source food.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Murray

"Being very detached from the Hollywood scene, Murray does not have an agent or manager and reportedly only fields offers for scripts and roles using a personal telephone number with a voice mailbox that he checks infrequently. This practice has the downside of sometimes preventing him from taking parts that he had auditioned for and was interested in, such as that of Sulley in Monsters, Inc, Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, Frank Ginsburg in Little Miss Sunshine and Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also regretted losing the chance to play Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he heard that he was considered for the role, which he says he would have definitely accepted."

I don't think turning down major opportunities through outright neglect is ever a good habit, even for those with a surfeit.
I figure Apple's central cloud-computing strategy is not to offer cool services for free, but rather to make tons of money. To do this: sell tons of iPods and iPhones and iPads, the enabling devices. Sort of like Cisco selling hardware during the initial internet boom, and getting incredibly rich, while others experimented with silly dotcoms etc.
I was about to say that it is very useful material to learn. But looking at the syllabus link, I realized that I took the AB course (long ago), which has apparently been discontinued. The course I took was a pretty solid basic introduction to CS.

At the very least though, doing the AP will let you comfortably place out of the "Intro to Programming" course and skip right to the real intro CS course -- for that reason it is worthwhile.
I have a pretty good grasp on SQL+.NET and use those for AJAX backend. Would you recommend switching to app engine? Any particular advice?
2a. It does accept ambiguous syntax!
What you're describing reminds me of the Mathic system in Neal Stephenson's book Anathem. The characters are sequestered in groups defined by the interval at which they interact with the outside world.

There's a good summary of Mathic life at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Mathic_Society (the site contains spoilers, but that page looks safe to me).
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H55 Review
"Our practice of giving games either a "Buy, Rent or Skip" verdict is too vague for Metacritic to arbitrarily take our score and tell its readers what it thinks we meant."
Is the course learning Java or an introduction to programming? It looks like the old course was based on learning C and C++, but now it seems like they have focused on Java for easier learning / usage.
I have gone through some stuff on the C and C++ curriculum and it does look very worthwhile (although it is discontinued), but the Java program looks much weaker, only covering basic algorithms and skipping pointers, etc.
Betterment = Embezzlement?
you are such a fucking ass hole, hire programmers man not book worms. Most of the good programmers are not good scores at least in India because of the super bad education system.
turn it off. then you can quickly whitelist each site as you get to it from the icon in the right of the url bar.

the only difference that i know between this and what you explained is the lack of a placeholder image.
Not surprised. This is the same Ars where they used to rate other things (like iPods) with a numeric scale and ditched it because people were fixating on the rating and ignoring the article.
Of those languages you mention, Groovy has the most java-like syntax. So maybe since its easy to pick up and does what they need, there is no need to learn/use those other languages.
The only party that has access to the information required to do proper scrubbing are the issuers and the banks.

The bona-fide merchants have to make decisions about charges being fraudulent or not in the absence of this information.

If they guess wrong they end up paying or lose a sale.

Malafide merchants don't care one bit, they'll be up and running under a new identity next week, so they never get stuck with these charges, the simply fold and play it again, and in that case the card issuers do eat the chargebacks.

A bona-fide merchant is a sitting duck, and trust me, this comes to a lot of money on an annual basis. Consumer fraud exists and it is a serious problem.
VW buys Italian design firm
I've never seen a compiler issue a warning about "(void)foo;". Even compilers which issue 'statement with no effect' warnings normally recognize deliberate casts to void as a way of saying "shut up, I know what I'm doing".
its not real "proof", but check out the Computer Language Benchmarks Game: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
Maybe, as others have said, it's due to the nature of most startups talked about here are web-centric. I had to write something in Java two days ago (not web related, but image processing) - it was my first real intro to java, sort of a crash and burn intro.

Not only did I write the stuff, it worked, it was FAST (unlike I expected, because you know "java is slow" - I found out it isn't)... and I was damn fast in changing code around, toying with it basically. All of that from zero to hero in a single day (not even an 8hr session).

I'm impressed, and I'll probably look into prototyping work with java in the future. I especially like zillion of libraries out there - great stuff if you are trying to make something fast, prototyping for example.

I've been driving python for the last couple of years for prototyping (I develop in C later), but I found out that python code of any reasonable scale is really REALLY hard to manage (at least for me), not to mention speed issues (which I sometimes need in prototypes due to the nature of image processing).
Instinct suggests 85/65/30. If you felt inclined you could probably have some fun with parsing the reviews for influential words too.
At runtime you can provide a different implementation of ImageFactory. For example, a unit test can define MockImageFactory which ignores the filesystem and just returns a canned Image object. If code everywhere calls the static Image.open method, there is no way to redefine it short of editing the source or the bytecode.
> credit card companies focus on identifying fraudulent transactions

That had me laughing, you really clearly have not dealt with large numbers of $10 to $50 transactions.

Card companies don't care at all about such charges, if you have a valid card number, expiry in the future and a cvv that matches the charge will be accepted.

VBV and its sister programs has been designed to combat this and passes most of the responsibility back to the consumer or their bank in five-way handshake between the consumer, the merchant, the IPSP, the bank and the issuer.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1377333
Yes, but for the most part those will be swipe transactions, not online transactions. And they keep an eye out starting at $100 or so because that's when it starts to add up if you fail to spot a fraudulent charge. The majority of online transactions is pretty small though, and falls right in the gap between 'don't care' and 'card issuer spots fraud'.
I took a course for the A test material, and read a book in a couple of hours covering the AB test material, letting me skip two semesters of CS courses in college. This allowed me to have plenty of free time in school to work on interesting stuff.

The material on the A test seems to be mostly programming in Java, and you'll probably pick up the other skills from working in any language. The AB test gives a good foundation for CS, which isn't always applicable in day-to-day programming, but certainly helps in shaping the way you go about solving a problem.
Four more major laptop manufacturers will use NVIDIA Optimus by the fall
Yea that happens to me too. =/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1378285
> Why? Do you use Python or Ruby or PHP now?

Don't get me wrong. I like Parrot. Its just that IMO complex pieces like JIT, threads and GC take some time to stabilize. So while I am all for Perl 6 being on Parrot and Parrot seems to be quite a feature rich VM I would want to see it used in the field for at least a year before I use it for a critical application.

For the same reason, I would probably pick up the JIT/unladen-swallow version of CPython (whenever it comes out) only about a year or so of being out.

At the moment I use Python quite a bit and have started to use Ruby sometimes. No PHP. Perl 6 and Parrot appeal to me because of their feature set. As for the syntax, I prefer Python syntax much more than Perl 5/6 but thats subjective. I would very much want to try out Perl 6 as it brings a lot of good stuff to the table, I think syntax would be a small price to pay for those features.
You are clearly arguing from the perspective of a 'good' consumer.

But think about it for a second, those charges were inflicted on good merchants, the affiliates are not the merchants, they're in the same boat that you are in, except they lost their goods, the affiliate pay-out and a chargeback fine on top of that.
I am sure that my idea is gross oversimplification, but am also pretty sure that some variation of this would work just fine. It seems to me just a matter of making the cone larger or heavy enough.

Obviously it's not an easy problem to solve, but I guess I am wondering why.
Great comment by the author on making the Apple experience stickier - more difficult to buy hardware from another vendor that won't play with Mobile Me.
They actually have a policy for scoreless reviews:

However, this does pose a problem for our METASCORE computations, which are based on numbers, not qualitative concepts like art and emotions. (If only all of life were like that!) Thus, our staff must assign a numeric score, from 0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally, there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you disagree with the score we assigned. However, our staffers have read a lot of reviews--and we mean a lot--and thus through experience are able to maintain consistency both from film to film and from reviewer to reviewer. When you read over 200 reviews from Manohla Dargis, you begin to develop a decent idea about when she's indicating a 90 and when she's indicating an 80.

http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml
If assertions disappear in certain optimized builds then what do you do, or recommend, to deal with warnings related to unused parameters or values if you don't believe that casting to void has value?
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz Tells Michael Arrington to "F*ck Off"
I missed the original source, which is here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/carol-bartz-tells-mike-arrington-to-fuck-off-2010-5
How real-world corruption works
Here's how RPython is "faster than C":

1. PyPy's Python interpreter is written in RPython, a subset of Python.

2. CPython is an interpreter written in C.

3. When compiled into a JIT, PyPy's Python interpreter is now generally faster than CPython, sometimes by a wide margin.

4. Code written in RPython is faster than code written for a nearly identical purpose in C. The C code in question has been the target of aggressive optimizations for years while the RPython code is relatively immature.

Now, for many applications I'm sure C remains faster than RPython. But for the application RPython is designed for--writing an interpreter for a dynamic language--I think it is safe to say that RPython appears faster than C.

The fact that the PyPy's interpreter is cleaner, safer, and more maintainable than equivalent C code is also a huge win. Again, the point of the original post is that RPython could become an simple implementation language to create fast interpreters for dynamic languages. It could also become a target language for other compilers.

Anyways, as others have pointed out, Lua is a considerably simpler language than Python. LuaJIT is a really remarkable piece of engineering, especially since it was written by one guy, but it's really a completely different project than PyPy. Its aim is to make Lua--and only Lua--extremely fast. If PyPy's Python implementation gets no faster (which I think is unlikely) the potential ability to easily create new dynamic languages that are similarly speedy is itself an amazing achievement.
Red Meat: Is It Hazardous to Health?
Having worked as a game reviewer, they're correct. There's a ton of hidden pressure behind the scenes to positively review some games, for threat of losing the publishers review materials.

Some publishers were great, and some were complete asses putting up embargoes on review release dates to hand them off to the bigger magazines first. Overall it just made the experience of reviewing them rather negative, which has tainted my view of games as a whole.

I used to be an avid gamer, now I'd barely classify myself as a casual gamer. There are some great and truly innovative games in all sorts of terms from gameplay to story, however mostly I just see Arbitrary Action Element 12 followed by Unsurprising Plot Development 8, even in some reputedly great games.
I think I just found some ideas for projects to work on when I get bored. :-)
I'm not sure whether you're joking or not but I've seen code that was in production for many years with mistakes like that.
This might be cool if you are a quasi web-celebrity, but in a business setting it would be downright dangerous. I can't imagine how terrible I would feel if something completely fell through the cracks OR did not receive an adequate response from me. I also can't imagine auto-nagging my boss about ANYTHING.

I guess the biggest problem I would have using this at work is that it is fundamentally based on the idea that people are contacting me about stupid stuff (generally not true) and that I'm way too busy/important to respond directly to somebody (also generally not true).
apparently it can be faster than c.

http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/01/rpython-can-be-faster-t...
Are you sure?

$ echo 'int main(int argc, char **argv) { if (argc < 0) { return 1; } else {return 0;}}' > test.c
$ gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5' --with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.4/README.Bugs --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --enable-multiarch --enable-linker-build-id --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.4 --program-suffix=-4.4 --enable-nls --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-plugin --enable-objc-gc --disable-werror --with-arch-32=i486 --with-tune=generic --enable-checking=release --build=x86_64-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5)
$ gcc -Wall -Wextra test.c
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:1: warning: unused parameter ‘argv’
$

gcc-4.3.4 behaved the same way in my test.
filter out the spam/porn, after a few minutes I saw many spam accounts, clean 'em out
Cheap 8" $137 Android tablet, perfect for hacking.
Here's a pretty good video showing that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIdufnmoeeY

The dome was pretty small and made of metal. It seems like if the dome was very large and heavy it would work.

My point in all of this is to argue that it's possible to contain the spill using a brute force combination of the cap's size, weight and shape. And that the reason that the spill has not yet been fixed in not due to it being un-fixable, but likely other factors.
I put all of the auto-generated e-mails in my drafts folder, so I can edit, modify, or delete before I send on a case by case basis.

There's also a whitelist.

I'll release the code as soon as I disentangle my personal data from it. Patches welcome. :-)
The person who is willing to take the $5/hour job is willing to do so because he isn't able to get a $10/hour job. $1,160/month might be hard to live on, but it's easier than living on $0, which is the alternative forced on him by minimum wage laws.
Cheap Android tablet, perfect for hacking.
If you were waiting for a cheap android tablet to sink your teeth into, here's your chance.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.39448

Gotchas: 1) no app store 2) resistive touch screen (not capacitive like iPhone etc) 3) single-touch

No affiliation.
Being forced to use software on one electronic device to control another electronic device is inane regardless whether it's a PC or Mac.

I can accept that iTunes is not the greatest software written. Being forced to use iTunes, with no other options, sucks ass.
If you're using gcc, you can say __attribute__((unused)): http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.3.1/gcc/Variable-Attribu...
Makes me wish I lived in New Zealand... :)
Remember to separate the JVM from the Java language. Java the language is getting old - its not that Java is bad, its that languages like Ruby & Scala are better - programming languages have evolved since the early 90s.

A startup has to do all that you said, plus one more thing: dont reinvent the wheel. With languages like JRuby and Scala built on the JVM you can reap the benefits of the agile philosophy and still make use of the available solid java libs (Apache Commons comes to mind), and not have to reinvent the wheel, saving the startup a ton of time.