skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's always this tension between the pragmatists and the theorists. I figure we just split it in two. CS focuses on research and theory. CP(rogramming) focuses on the pragmatic and artistic nitty gritty of building software. Now, I personally wouldn't advocate majoring in programming, because you really should just R the F'ing M, and make stuff on your own. But it's hard to argue against its validity as a major when there are tons of students clamoring to pay for it, and there are already so many way softer majors. There would obviously be a lot of overlap between the two.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-maddow-crucifie...
Salt lake is a bit different the east bench along the mountains is much more expensive. These areas are also much older. Things get cheaper the further west you go.
> I guess the truck-load of revenue isn't sufficient because investors still expect Microsoft to push fresh and innovative products.

This is the key, I think, to Microsoft's behaviour. and I think it's a mistake on the part of the investors. Microsoft is an /excellent/ cash cow, and not so great of an innovator.

If I was the majority shareholder of Microsoft, I'd demand that they make their first priority delivering me a giant dividend cheque.

Sure, Microsoft still has some good people, and they should keep those people busy moving windows forward, and maybe even doing some original research... but, at this point in their development, they are a cash cow. they need to realise this and start issuing nice fat dividends, rather than trying to 'buy' parts of the console gaming or internet search markets.
Some CS programs are very good, it often depends on the school. Generally speaking, math has been de-emphasized too much and statistics is almost non existent.
I think I did, hmm, three labs like this? None of them produced anything close to a real software product.

The devil is in the details! Stuff you think isn't a big deal As an undergrad CS student might well be a freaking big deal! Example: in my current project, we've found that in the new system version, the vendor's "type and the list selects the matching prefix" functionality kinda works, but slowly. (As in, over 3 keystrokes a second is too fast and the system loses track of the full prefix.) To our users, it doesn't work at all. Their accustomed workflow is disrupted across the whole app, so I have to go and patch it.

In academia, stuff like this is considered a triviality. In the real world, it matters a lot!
I graduated last may as a computer science major and realized the holes in my skills were everywhere. I found that my theory was much better than my actual ability to code. It seems that schools should teach their students one oop language for three years and then start showing them what other options are out there. I found myself in the working world convinced I knew how to code in java, c++, python and php, w/o the real skills to work in any of them.
Whatever the reason, I don't believe for a second this oversimplified fairy tale about the prevailing wind.

Agreed. Here (Twin Cities of Minnesota) the location of lakes and rivers has much more to do with what areas are the wealthiest. The wealthiest towns are west or southwest of Minneapolis, terribly located for prevailing winds or for commuting without the sun in drivers' eyes.
Zed wrote "Your entire world has been this horribly inaccurate model of the real world where you were basically trained to be a good little factory worker." Are we sure that university life is any different? I don't discount the value of the liberal arts, but will a college education really encourage the artist within the coder, enabling him to be better? Is it possible that a college education will simply magnify the 'factory worker' training that Zed talks about? Is it not possible for an employer to take a promising coder out of high school, mentor him in the ways of a professional programmer, and provide a cultural education - all without the need for $xx,000 in debt?
The fog
I would say that an intrinsic weakness of CS (and, probably, any other engineering) education is that a lot of the curriculum is targeted towards a past goal. CS is not just science but also industry, arguably in some ways more industry than science, and a very quickly evolving one. Not all professors can keep the curriculum up-to-date.

Fortunately, it appears to be a relatively small drawback. Particular details may change in a few years anyway; being prepared for the change is more important, as is being capable of learning, and this normally comes with a solid foundation which a good university program can provide to a good student.

This is a very general answer. I apologize that I cannot give a more detailed answer; my exposure to the CS education was through a graduate school which gives a different perspective.
No offense, but I don't think Gassée is someone that can be trusted to judge a company's life expectancy.
Interesting. I'm nearly ready to graduate from Portland State University and I know, beyond a doubt, that had I turned in a project with a flaw that glaring I would have failed the project, for "general unsuitability".

Different schools, different methods, I suppose.
The ltree contrib module also solves this problem in PostgreSQL.
This is not true for Manhattan. The upper west side has seen quite a renaissance lately, but it is nowhere near the upper east side in terms of price.
yep, it does say that quite clearly
Read some more. The support is limited in many respects, and does not include the ability to complain about and get resolution on issues of website performance.
The performance was great, but the report makes it clear that it's very Apples to Oranges.

> The AMD and VIA systems are inappropriate for power comparisons because they are based on desktop hardware.
This actually has nothing to do with repetition.

It's a case of inventory. There is a 'chicken and the egg' scenario in online advertising where you can't sell ads if you don't have enough 'inventory' (aka ad impressions) and you can't pay for marketing to bring more viewers/content without $$$ from ads.

So what happens is Hulu goes out and sells a few advertisers $100,000 in pre-roll ads. The advertiser is used to paying $15 per pre-roll so the Hulu sales people build some crazy equation based off of those two variables (sometimes they'll add in things like 'value adds' which are basically custom stuff that the ad agencies refuse to pay for) and come up with an impression goal.

You read that right, the # of impressions per campaign is solely based on the price of the unit and the amount of the ad buy. It's left to the Adops division to see if they can actually FILL that order.

Generally, you'll find that companies like Hulu oversell their inventory between 25-50%. They either underdeliver, hope for some big Digg's or other traffic spikes, or cheat by outsourcing the impressions to other networks.

You can tell when Hulu or someone else REALLY fucked up when you see the same ad over and over again for a few days.
I can't comment on the author, but I can and will comment on PenTile OLED resolution claims:

http://www.nouvoyance.com/files/pdf/CV%20Application%20Note%...

Please download the above white paper on PenTile OLED resolution. Resolution is found by counting the number of monochromatic, desaturated (black&white or otherwise not fully satatured colors) lines and spaces:

NOT "pixels" or "subpixels"
zed shaw is british?
I agree that on a straight CTR calculation, ad agencies could make a killing on text ads.

However, I also firmly believe that you have to pay more to effectively reach certain people.

Example: Men tune out banner ads. Especially internet-savvy ones. If you want to reach them, you have to either do something incredibly cool (like sponsoring FilePlanet to have no download queues for a day or Virgin America to have free in-flight wireless) or incredibly annoying (like those big 'stunts' you see on nytimes.com occasionally).
I also thought that Atom did very well against ARM. I actually was expecting ARM to do better than what the charts showed. I'd love to see these numbers against Moorestown.
The Y axis on this graph isn't labeled. Moreover, it's scaled so that the rise for Bill Gates looks huge compared to everything else.
The scaling on the graph makes it difficult to tell, but it looks like the stock price fell soon after Balmer took over and has gone up and down since then, but mostly held steady. Why would he be sacked now, if he's survived almost 10 years with similar performance?
I agree to a large extent, but not 100%. Here is why.

You correctly said that Physics majors do not study which details of bridge building. Indeed this is part of a different major (Civil Engineering, I suppose).

In contrast, Computer Science is a very broad discipline. Large portions of it are science; large portions are engineering (or similar to engineering, if we exclude Computer Engineering per se). A good student, or a student with a good mentor, should be able to choose a more theoretical (scientific) or more practical (engineering) path and work on the curriculum accordingly. I understand that it is not always possible (in some places, for example, students cannot choose classes), but at least a student should be able to choose where to focus.

A small point about "picking languages on their own". I think basics of languages can be taught to freshmen, at least selectively, to help those students who may be lacking in previous exposure to computers in high school. (Depending on the university, this may or may not be an issue.) Teaching basics of C or Java or, I don't know, Python, whatever, this way does not turn a university in a Java school or anything like that. Indeed it may be as useful as remedial classes in calculus.
How to make sure the cookies don't burn your fingers?
----

It should be mandatory that all software and hardware engineer do #1 / #2 / #3. All embedded software engineers and ALL digital design enginers should also do #4.

#1 - How to program a computer at its lowest-level? Write an assembly program, then convert it BY-HAND to hex, then load it into a single board computer using one switch per bit of the address and data buses, like an ALTAIR 8800, run it, halt, write down results from data memory. All good software engineers must know things from the very lowest levels.

#2 - Do the above, but use a built-in monitor to download the program via RS232. Use monitor commands to read the contents of memory and perform of monitor tasks.

#3 - Do the above, but download the program via JTAG. Use JTAG to read the contents of memory.

#4 - Do the above but load program in serial-flash / SD / NOR-FLASH / EPROM, then boot from it on a single-board computer.

-----

Study all the popular source control methods, the advantages and disadvantages of each one, hands on use of the most popular ones, configure and setup source control, how to attach to source control via the internet and download source code from completely different systems, including public source code.

----

All the ways to test software. Hands on!

----

Extreme software commenting. Document the heck out of some functions. Learn how and what is important to document.

----

Learn how to write software specifications. Learn how to read software specifications and implement a program.

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Write a manual to document how a completed software program runs.

----

Learn how to communicate with the opposite sex.

Learn how to communicate with managers.

Learn how to communicate with fellow engineers.

----

Learn how to write effective emails...without rambling and not do other mindless stupid things.

----

How to install and uninstall software from every version of windows / linux 2.6 / mac 10.x.

----

likely many other important things that I've forgot to include :)
A large missing element is managing change - and how this relates to maintaining a successful project. I see this as one of the fundamental challenges of developing software in the real world. It's something you can largely ignore during a degree, where it is unlikely that a project lasts more than a few months. The best way to learn what challenges you'll face in the real world is to take on a long-term project. You'll make assumptions and mistakes early on which you can learn a lot from.

It would also be great to observe or join an existing project -- a project that has been around for some time but still maintains a strong momentum -- and learn from the way it works. That is, short cut some of the process by observing others that have overcome some of the challenges.

This should also teach you that there is so much still to learn about successful software projects that you'll be doing it your whole career :).
Misleading headline, since the "Vegas Casino" part is just speculative fiction. Nonetheless, the backing research is an interesting case of neurology.
There's a Y axis on the right. From the numbers there it's clearly logarithmic. The rise in the Gates era is just as striking, if not more so, with a linear scale.
Since Skype uses proprietary protocol and is the most popular VoIP service by huge margin, I wouldn't call the market entirely free. They almost have a monopol, sort of.
I totally agree that CS should be about CS and not software engineering -- with the caveat that more schools should have actual software engineering programs for those that "shouldn't major in CS". Currently, CS tends to be the preferred major for people who really want to become software engineers, which is as silly as pushing people who want to be mechanical engineers or civil engineers to instead get degrees in physics, or only giving a biology education to would-be doctors and veterinarians.
They are using enterprisemission.com as a source? Seriously? What is Daily Galaxy, the Weekly World News of Astronomy?

For those who don't know, Enterprise Mission is the outlet for all the paranoid schizoid ramblings of Richard C. Hoagland, aka Mr. Face on Mars.
Yeah, that feels like a strange middle ground between "founder" and "employee"... You would never get enough equity to make the tradeoff a good deal. I'd be surprised if situations like this happen very often.
The article raises some interesting points, but I don't think it explains why traditional advertising generates so much more revenue than digital advertising. Is print advertising overpriced? Are digital ads an inferior format? Is it perceived value? What explains the huge difference?
Perhaps Gates shall return, Jobs-like, as the founder-savior for MSFT?
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They could do a 6 month course in "Industry practice", where the students learn unit testing, source control, web apps, GUI even loops, design patterns, documentation in industry, and so on.

I'd certainly agree that unis are more competitive at teaching theory (algorithms, math, AI, data-mining, simulations, etc) than practice. When they try to teach industry practice, it's in danger of turning into those nightmare OO courses - all pretension and no idea

oooo, a John isa student (a subclass of person); and Mr Smith isa lecturer (which is a subclass of academic, which is a subclass of person), and our tutor is an example of multiple inheritance!
Perhaps that's precisely why you can watch YouTube videos for a long time?
The fact that users hate microtransactions with a passion outmatched by a thousand burning suns, and that for the same amount of effort to convince a real business to buy $5 of credits, you can convince them to sign up for a $20 a month subscription in perpetuity.
Maybe this woman followed the directions exactly so that she could pursue a frivolous suit against Google. Mostly, I don't want to believe that someone could look at the situation and not see reality.
I've often wondered this too, so I'll take a stab at why it hasnt:

- in mmos the transactions are impulse buys and often not major decision points for the purchaser. The "do I need this?" question isn't a high priority. Of course you need your virtual crops to grow faster.

- with web apps, especially saas apps, this isn't an impulse buy. You've been trying the app out for a while and every dollar you spend is accountable. You're much more likely to ask "do I really need this?"
Meh. Anybody can sue anyone for any reason.
Diversity is helpful, not necessarily essential.

Not just diversity of gender (or, say, race). Also diversity of life experiences, ideologies, etc. One of the best things about having studied in an American university for me was the number of international students actively participating in school life, together with and just like American students. Such a contrast with a Soviet university where I had studied before that and where all international students were isolated in their own academic groups, we had almost no interaction with them.
The last Art course I took was a digital art course: http://digital.arts.uci.edu/arts12/

The impression I got was that not even the scholars knew what digital media was. However, I did acquire a large pool of information of what this grouping of similar people were up to. They were a great source of inspiration and if art is one thing, it's building upon the works of others and the humanities offers a larger pool for you to build upon.

However, when it comes to better understanding how people react to their environment, I turn to the social sciences for a more concrete explanation. My naive understanding of the humanities is that it's based upon assumptions and opinions, but I bet a wiser scholar can show me differently.

BTW, depending on where you go, a CS degree can be more of a liberal art education than a technical one.
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Its funny because I thought the same thing today watching "real" TV. This internet thing, it spoils us.
Because investors' patience isn't infinite?

In Ballmer's defense, MSFT has outpaced NASDAQ over the past 10 years, and has been paying dividends the whole time, so the performance isn't quite as bad as the flat-to-sinking stock price suggests.
In my country => Uruguay is the other way round.. east part of the cities is the richest one.. but i believe it's related with the coast line and the ocean :)
now, ever since Intel copied AMD's hyper transport architecture, people have been saying that it's over for AMD. I don't really get it, as the 12 core AMD systems are extremely impressive, for loads that thread well enough to use that many cores.

In recent memory, it seems that Intel has been following AMD technologically, albeit at higher clock speeds. First, they copied the amd64 instruction set, and then they copied the hyper transport architecture. Right now, it looks like Intel occupies the high end of the market, but as far as I can tell, their lead is based as much on superior sales ability than on any technological lead.

For loads that thread well, they beat the intel chips both in work done per watt consumed, and they absolutely destroy intel chips on cost to acquire, so I'm not sure why people seem to think that AMD is down for the count.
Lasersaur: The Open Source Laser Cutter
He's correct that repetition does drive things into our memory. This is the whole idea behind 'behavioral advertising' (google it for full explanation).

The theory:
If a user has visited Amazon.com and browsed Digital Cameras lately, I'm going to drop a cookie and pass that to my ad server so that whenever he goes to Dictionary.com, I can show him an Amazon.com Digital Camera ad.

It's quite effective (has worked on me before).
I know, but it's still very cool to see a company that isn't even the third most prominent company doing so well. Especially when they make embedded and non-x86 chips, too.

When I say 'third', I'm attempting to make an awkward reference how I see politics. There are Democrats and Republicans (AMD and Intel), and that's where most of the struggle happens. Then you have the Green Party, hanging out as a third wheel (who I'd equate to PPC), and then you have the Libertarians. I would equate VIA to the Libertarians. I don't know how they are doing as compared to the Green Party, but said Party sure got a lot more press when I was growing up.
I think characterizing the courses that replaced 6.001 as exercises in "pasting libraries together" is unfair. The new introductory courses 6.01 and 6.02, are focused on introducing fundamental EECS design principles, in the context of mobile robotics and digital communication systems, respectively.

Having just taken 6.01 and 6.02, I have mixed feelings. One the one hand, you had to write relatively little code within some larger skeleton that had been written for you. But the code you had to write emphasized important engineering design principles without making you write an entire mobile robotics system from scratch (which is not the point of the class).

On the other hand, the problems were somewhat contrived, and didn't allow much room for creativity. There was only really one way to fill in the blank code. This required understanding the structure of the rest of the code to figure out exactly the way in which the professors might want you to write the missing code. The intention seems to be that this is a valuable skill, but for me it was at the cost of stifling any creativity.

Time and again, I would be partnered with someone (we had randomized partners for 6.01) and I would say "this is interesting, maybe we can solve it like this" (and I would start proposing some ideas), and my partners would say something like "I don't think that's how they want us to do it." A lot of times, they were right --- and this was a successful strategy for the class. Ultimately, the final robot did cool things, but I didn't feel like I made a creative contribution to those cool things in any way.
Beware of mistaking knowledge for intelligence.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369781
Then her relatives would have sued anyway.
Pedantic note: MSFT started paying dividends in 2003, 1/3 of the way through the Ballmer period.
i am pretty sure he talks about € not $
With ramifications lined up with this decision, I would still put my money on their Xbox division. I hope they put more capex on that.
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The real world.
The guy who originally headed it up (I don't know if he's still directly in charge of it) is absolutely brilliant, driven and highly market-focused. I remarked to him several years ago that I wished I could buy stock in him, personally. If he's not tapped as one of the next 'Baby Bills' sometime in the next couple years, then it's time to worry.
We may disagree on the degree to the 'helpfulness' of diversity; essential may have been too strong of a word. I think that diversity is 'essential' in that we cannot solve problems as well as we could without it.

I agree with you that diversity of experience is the key ingredient of diversity. Superficial diversity can actually be harmful. However, I would argue that men and women have the most disparate experiences between the most common classifications of people.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN

Most cs students graduate without experience making products that normal (non cs) people can use. That's a shame, especially when you consider that some killer products (iPod, Basecamp) have largely been successful due to user interfaces.
correct. usually with refined carbohydrates. which is a much more probable bugbear of modern health. Along with high omega-6 to omega-3 fat ratios.