skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's difficult to take this person's point seriously when he claims

>Another way to explain the shallowness of Computer Science is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox. Even mathematics has reams of unanswered questions and potential paradox in its core philosophy. In Computer Science, there's none.

No unanswered questions? Rubbish, 'P=NP' anyone? Correctness of the assumption of the Church-Turing hypothesis (which is falsifiable if not provable) ? Granted, I'm not sure exactly what he means by "eschews paradox", but I assume this is mostly because the author doesn't really know himself. If he simply means "lacks counter-intuitive ideas", than he's dead wrong. I'll put forward the Halting Problem as an obvious example. Counter-intuitive if for no other reason than people are simply used to problems being solvable.
Ask HN: Apple buy Yahoo?
I don't mean to sensationalize this. After all, Microsoft tried seriously to buy Yahoo in order to counter Google. Now Apple is in the same position vs Google. Could this be played again? Obviously, I will buy Yahoo stock if this is probable.
Why an iPad + For i when a netbook + emacs is cheaper, has longer battery life, can have built-in 4G networking, and so on?

If you want to do real work with a computer, get a real computer, not an overpriced novelty.
Why do operating systems let this crap happen? If a Web application mustn't put things on the clipboard, surely that applies to programs not written in Javascript as well.

The idea that Web browsers shouldn't allow Javascript to do hardly anything is a large reason why the Web's "open platform" is getting kicked around like an empty can by closed platforms.
> We are at last resorts.

No we aren't. In one month the well is almost guaranteed to be closed when the relief well is completed. Lets not rush to do something irreversible.
Skype mobile is really a different kind of product. If they want to charge for it they are entitled. Phone calling is getting cheap enough as is.
Way cool.
A very simple tip but one I think lots of people forget!! Thanks.
BTW a hurricane in the area is probably the best thing that could happen. It will totally clean all the shores for us.

It will also oxygenate the water.

Remember the oil is not eternal, it's very biodegradable. If you can spread it out with enough oxygen it will all be gone.
I think the technology is probably that old; it seems to take industry 30 years or so before they are willing to look at relevant research ;)

Anyway, the LLVM and JVM are good examples of JIT optimization. Tracemonkey also has some good ideas, and GHC and SBCL's VMs also show how to write static compilers that do better than C. (LLVM is interesting in that it compiles C to run on the VM, and this C does better than gcc's statically-compiled C. When C is faster than C, it kind of calls into question the validity of the "faster than C" criterion ;)
I haven't read the TOS, but considering how publicly accessible they make those libraries, I can't imagine they'd have a problem with you using them. I know a number of tutorials and web apps use it just like you noted. I mean, read the TOS when you have time, but in the meantime, I wouldn't hesitate to use them. Part of their value is that the more people that use them, the more often the code is cached, and the faster the web is for everybody.
Don't think it's likely. Yahoo might have already reached it peaked, and it's probably overvalued. I'm not sure what Yahoo has that Apple could possibly want for $20+ billion.
tl;dr: Don't major in it unless you're attending one of Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, CMU or MIT.

OK, that's in part my spin---he only mentions MIT---but it's also my considered recommendation post-the dot.com crash. If you plan on/desire to stay programming, I think you really need to be severe about approaching this, seeing as how the normal career of a programmer is over by age 35-40; beating that is going to take a lot more than going to a Javaschool or just starting with your native programming talent.

ADDED EVEN LATER: see this other posting in this thread for two exceptions to the 35-40 problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1391516

ADDED: going into serious debt to attend a Javaschool for the purposes of becoming a better software developer strikes me as a particularly bad bargain nowadays. If you don't have what it takes to be an autodidact after graduation for the rest of your career you should think really hard about getting into this field to begin with.

On the other hand, now that we're in what looks to be a long Great Recession at best, this may be your best bet, it's just probably not a good one if you don't get into the best school you can and engage in serious extra career long effort.
People will most certainly ask you why you studied Art History in college if it turns out that you came out the other end with no marketable skills, especially when articles about your woes show up in the New York Times as though your poor planning and choice of topic did not lead directly to your inability to find work.
Another misinformed post by someone who thinks CS education is useless and that ability to code at age of 19 is suffiecient to become a superstar!

If someone follows his advice I would really sad for that person, CS is an amazing topic! And its main purpose is not teaching programming but whole other things.

It depends a lot on which school you go to though, if you are goint to top 30 schools is US, then i can assure you that the CS departments there will offer you much better opportunities than you can ever imagine!

For rest of the universities their other programs are most likely to be as useless as their CS programs.

Let me put here harshly:
There is NOTHING,NOTHING that programmers have achieved in last 10 years!!

All the advancement in this field has came from people who introduced novel paradigms (which requires creativity and not programming!) or came from CS / CE / EE Academic departments!

The Web, Google (PhD Students), advances in chip design, Virtual Machines (VMWare) etc, came from People who had siginificant university education in CS EE or Physics!

Just because you can write code does not means that you have mastered CS.

I bet all smart-ass programmers on this forum, cannot understand most of the mathamatical concepts that go behind stuff such as Machine Learning or Information Retrieval or even Theory of Computation.

These are uber loosers who think that wearing Star trek shirts and writting Glorified Enterprise fizzbuzz makes them smarter than any CS dept grads.

If you are following their advice, I really feel sorry for you!

If CS education was really so useless, Why would Google take some many PhD's??
I must thoroughly disagree.

First off, I agree on the importance of culture. But equating a CS degree with coding is just plain wrong; Dijkstra has a nice quote on this. CS is and should be applied mathematics, and what more timeless topic is there than math?

Secondly, there are some serious doubts whether university teaches you to think independently. As a counter argument, read "The Disadvantage of an Elite Education"[1]. Summary of this article: university teaches you--if you're somewhat ambitious--to become an excellent sheep. In other words, it promotes you into being the same mediocre person as anyone else.

That said, I still believe there's a ton of things to be gained from spending four years in a university: network, culture, more-than-average-but-still-pretty-mediocre ability to think, fun, and being inside a solid recruitment base for cool companies.

[1] http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el...
I think it matter on what interests you more... the business side, or technical side? Whatever is more interesting, start investing in it right now by learning and taking some risks.
The reason that the curve levels out for biological populations is that the rates at which members start starving to death or killing each-other increases to cancel out the birth-rate. That does seem to be of some concern.
it's kinda sad that you only need to go to #15 to hit below 100mm visitors/month number. You'd think by now, there'd be hundreds of sites with those numbers

also would be nice to see a top 1000 for domain names. i.e. combine all ebay.com/ebay.co.uk/ebay.co.jp etc.
At least the US is getting a modern mobile network.
If you are not going to top 30 schools, then it is likely that the "culture" being taught their is no better!
How can you say that CS dept in non top 30 school is bullshit but other departments would be glorious?? It boils down to whether you go to a good school or not!

Also how many liberal Arts Majors get job?? And then Why not Major in CS It wont do any harm at least!
5,000 to 7,000 psi. At about twenty feet wide.

If my calculations are right, you need about 30,000 metric tons of weight to stop it. And don't forget whatever you put down there will also float because of the water. So you need even more weight.
I disagree with this article. I thought I could code prior to university but had no idea. If you have a chance to go to school, go. If you want to be a software developer, major in CS. Definitely have a minor or double major too.
It was a great post right up until the part where he started talking about computer science. It left me with the feeling that either Zed did not study computer science, and is just talking out of his ass, or went through a very bad computer science program and has generalized that all of them must be that bad.

How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to learn from 100 years of algorithms, complexity theory, language or operating systems design? Nothing?! All you need is code?
And I can't see any non-commercial term in there.
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The thing that grates is that I am guessing he chose not to seek out the multitude of ways that are offered at university to assimilate "culture" (which, by the way, is a rather nebulous term. Does going and partying three nights a week count?) There's the university newspaper. Bands. All sorts of sports classes. Charity groups. Activism. In some countries, you can get minors in things of interest, like philosophy of science or something.

His view seems blinkered, at best.
i agree, culture is important.

but, how much money is it worth? is it worth 20k? 50k? 200k?

on the flip side, not all of us are brilliant alpha programmers with entrepreneur-class egos. the labor-class parents of one of my best friends are incredibly proud of his BigCo software job, and BigCos don't hire without a degree. The cynic in me wants to call a [software] degree an average person's investment.
UK ppl: iPhone version of Gumtree.com
I regret studying CS. I would have rather gone for CE and learned more in depth about how the computer works. It seems like all the computer engineers at my school are really good coders too, and they understand the hardware better. Opens up more jobs where you can do more hardcore coding like drivers and stuff.
This poster is really The Idiot!
What abotu AI, Machine Learning also CS lies on a fine line between engineering and Computer Science, thus like other engineering problems there is a focus on solving real life problems rather than philosophical paradoxes!
CS != Programming. Honestly. No, really.

Personal data points, third party anecdotes even less so, are not a reliable way to extrapolate how CS (or any major) is taught outside of the MITs of the world. Your experiences, shockingly, are one among many, and remain yours.

That said ...

The culture thing is spot on. That is what getting an education is all about.
There is no ban on "shorting" onions specifically - it is just not traded on the futures market at all. Gerald Ford pushed through legislation on behalf of onion farmers in the late 1950s to disallow it on the futures market. It has been an example of extreme market volatility ever since.
This guy is a total dimwit
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A university CS program that only teaches you how to code is nothing more than a technical degree. Some universities do this. Many, besides MIT, do not. They should teach everything from hardware architecture to compiler design to basic quantum computing in a decent undergrad program. Some of those will be advanced options. That's fine. Depth comes at the cost of specialization, and every CS grad should have a tiny bit of depth somewhere. The basic first year courses often do not assume knowledge of coding, but they should have a point besides learning to code.

I think better advice for students choosing a program would be to go to University, spend a year studying as many different things as you can, including CS, to see what engages you. Learn how to code at the same time. You might be happier as a physicist who knows how to code than a computer scientist who wishes he knew more physics. There are plenty of coding jobs a CS grad can't do.
Nice introduction to fractals
> Another way to explain the shallowness of Computer Science

> is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox.

> Even mathematics has reams of unanswered questions and

> potential paradox in its core philosophy. In Computer

> Science, there's none. It's assumed that all of it is

> pretty much solved and your job as an undergraduate is

> to just learn to get a job in this totally solved area

> of expertise.

Zed is confusing software engineering with computer science. CS is a branch of applied mathematics, and it's not different from mathematics. There are unsolved problems and plenty of areas that require further research.
Thanks! That put it into a perspective for me. According to http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=titanic+weight Titanic weight was 53,149 tons.
While I agree that your not always learning useful things in a CS degree for someone to have left high school and said they already know everything the CS degree and industry will teach them would be very very surprising.

Personally I have little interest in the alternate university path he is suggesting, I would probably eventually get sick of it and quit. That's not to say I don't find a broad range of subject interesting, just that I'd rather pick up that other stuff online in small chunks when it interests me and spend the 4 years I have of study to focus on something that really interests me like CS.
Nice execution on the homepage. Very inviting and intuitive to run a search. I love the underlying concept.

Rental screen (ie: http://www.rightrental.com/foxford-county-mayo-connacht-irel...) could use a bit more contrast on the datasheet portion.
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The termination with extreme prejudice of 6.001 suggests that some people mostly agree (http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr...).

Certainly there's an ever increasing role for people pasting together big libraries and frameworks without a deep understanding of what goes on behind the curtains....
Things in efficient markets ARE priced according to the cost of the supplier. But most markets are not efficient. This is not the fault of the customer.
I cannot let comments like this stand. I have seen little difference between students from the top few schools and the rest. If you are only doing an undergrad I see little reason to hold these top 4 on such a pedestal. Any school in the top 20 or even probably 40 are more than a java school at the undergraduate level. The differences are marginal. However, if you plan to go to graduate school I would certainly try to attend one of the top 4 schools.
Interesting. But perhaps people switch from full-fat dairy to the reduced-fat versions after they realize they've made unhealthy eating choices that have already increased their risk of cardiovascular disease? I also notice that "low-fat" foods tend to make up for the low fat in other ways, like by having more sugar and salt. So people think they are "eating healthy", but they actually aren't; they're replacing a bit of fat and its soluable vitamins with high fructose corn syrup. Not good. (And, of course, they don't exercise.)

I also notice that people tend to lump fat from their cheeseburger into the same mental category as fat from things like avocados, peanuts, salmon, and olive oil. But the monounsaturated fat from plants and fish is not particularly harmful for you, except that it's very calorie-dense. Saturated fat is bad for you beyond the number of calories you get from it. Unfortunately, dieters don't realize this, and buy their low-fat-but-high-sugar ice cream while eschewing "high-fat" salmon and peanut butter. Which is bad for you.

(Personally, I drink 1% milk, but otherwise don't bother with "low fat" things. But I do avoid sugar and salt, and that has had a measurable effect on my health. I lose weight faster now that I don't put sugar in my tea, and my blood pressure has gone down since I stopped eating so much salt. Not that either were abnormally high to begin with, though.)

Anyway, the problem with the popular notion of dieting is that you don't get anything out of micro-optimizing away one nutrient.
It's not like software engineering doesn't have unsolved problems either, like why is it still so hard to produce bug free software, why programmer productivity has only gone up a small amount despite 30 years of language advances and why most software still has to be mostly custom. The dream from the earlier days of software engineering where we were eventually meant to have components that could easily be mixed and matched to create whatever we want hasn't eventuated.
to follow up for future readers, i have an HTC incredible, played with a task killer, and didnt see a difference. and, the shortened app startup time from unhibernating an app is pretty awesome.
Out of curiosity, was the change to "get started now" based on my comment here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380017)? I've been lobbying for more people to try that language and to share their results. Thanks for doing that, even if it was independent of my own stuff.
Where did you get your CS degree? Or more importantly, which institutions do you know of that actually teach CS as applied mathematics and aren't just "Java Schools?" I went to roughly a school with what was and still is an incredibly mediocre CS department and, as far as I can tell, this is the case more times than it isn't. I spent time working on a Pure Mathematics degree but eventually switched to CS and I still consider it to be one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I agree with Zed to an extent, but only because so many CS programs focus on the wrong things and are little more than trade programs. For most young people I meet I strongly recommend they steer clear of CS unless they're going to a school with a proven program.
One good friend of mine best said it, (although university may not be the only place to get all your programming skills honed) it is one of the best places to meet future connections in business or just on a collaboration of a tech project.
I find it hard to believe that the article... only briefly mentions...

Wikipedia's math content is really frustrating this way. The linked article was pretty good, but many deserve a disclaimer:

"This document delivers utility bounded above by what you paid for it."
Why are the east of cities usually poorer?
I'm probably wasting my time posting here.

He's completely wrong about CS as a subject of study in general but very right about the problems with CS as a formal academic subject of study. Academia is a religion of sorts. It's primary goal is the replication of the academic system itself, control over a generation who desire an education whereas actual education of people is merely a secondary objective.
Just one quote from Chomsky among many regarding education : "A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's designed for obedience and passivity."

Education is Ignorance, Noam Chomsky - http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm
probably people going there to patch Windows or some other MS software
Oh. Duh. Thanks. I guess the framing of the image gave me the (unconsidered, of course) impression that it was an outside view of the galaxy.
6. Automated website optimizer

You are on to something there. There is a lot that could be automated. This reminds me of Apple commercial, when the Mac came out in the 80s. It was making fun of IBM as being the "morse language" of the past, whereas the Mac and its GUI where the telephone.

7. LaTeX resume builder

Why would anyone want that? On HN there seems to be a community of LaTeX users, and I can't figure out why. Isn't that thing only used for writing Ph.D theses?
You're both wrong--and rehashing an old argument that got resolved a long time ago. Goods and services are priced based on both the supply side and the demand side, specifically upon the intersection of the supply and demand curve.
I should think that industry knowledge has lost a little bit its cachet in recent months.
Perhaps ... but that's not been my experience.

A previous HN discussion where there was not merely no agreement but no strong opinions on what school ranked as #5 suggested to me that there's really something to this.

At the very least they deserve their pedestal. On the question of whether it's not worth going to a school that ranks below them, I'm not so sure.
Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with him at all. I would say that the human race knows approximately nothing about building software. Yeah, we can do it, but we're not very good at it. If bridges and buildings were software, we would have all died in collapsing buildings and the human race would be extinct.
Did your CS program require a discrete mathematics course?
Does anyone know the breakdown of how much time each part of drilling a relief well takes? Prep vs Equip Deployment vs Drilling vs etc?
Thousands of films have already been preserved in digital form at a reasonably watchable resolution (DVD). The impact on future cultural history of having those films at 8X instead of 480p is probably marginal.
What BigCos don't hire without degrees? I know people at Google and Microsoft without a degree. I work for a giant corporation, without a degree.
In the real world, what your friends reveal about you is likely to be much more harmful to your life than what facebook reveals.
First, don't take it as a sign of disrespect that I am not able to elaborate much for you, and won't have time to elaborate further. Ultimately, it is up to you to educate yourself on rationality.

Now, I need for you to be honest with yourself. In which direction are you reasoning? Are you reasoning from evidence, or are you finding evidence after the reasoning?

If you're honest with yourself you'll agree that you're reasoning from the latter. If it truly is the former, then you need more evidence. Then you'll need to figure out why there's dissonance between you and the experts. As a general rule, rationalists trust the experts. It'll be hard for you to gain an audience amongst them, and they're the people you should be trying to make convincing arguments for.

The feeling of adversary is not proof, although it may feel affirming.

Although your assertions lay on the fringes of probability, they are inherently unfalsifiable. But we "skeptics" have no obligation to prove the assertion untrue -- which would actually be pretty hard to do. The burden of proof is yours.

Your claim is a fringe probability. Now think of all the other fringe probabilities that are equidistant from the center of this probability map. Why waste energy brooding over something that is just as likely to be true as a bunch of other crackpot ideas?

I suspect you think believing this is also in some way meaningful to living a good life as an open minded person. That is not a good mindset to have.

Believe in what is most likely to be real.
There is more to Computer Science than Math. Previous posts on the topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606