skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's only just started happening, so no.

Though you are not clear on your reasons for asking, I can only conclude you are trying to make a point. I detest this type of argument, it's equivalent to 'only people who have something to hide...'. The potential consequences so massively outweigh the potential benefits that it's almost a moral imperative to stamp this practice out.

In the very best case scenario it could be the cause of future embarrassment. It will destroy careers, snuff out potential great leaders, break marriages, finish friendships. Lies are a regrettable but essential part of a happy society.

In the worst it will be the basis of whether or not you get sent to a death camp by some future government in your country.

Even the best case scenario seems distasteful to me.

As for the article, glad to see I'm not the only one thinking those thoughts. Credit companies are a modern invention of quite freaky consequence. As for someone like Tesco running round with the shopping habits of a large majority of the UK, very worrying.

Trouble is it's all so overwhelming when you actually think about it, it's very easy to file under 'problem someone else should worry about' in your brain. It is one of these things that people will only lament when it gets abused.
Guilt-Oriented Programming?
I agree with this, I'm not sure that Linux is ready to beat Widnows for the desktop environment. However, I do prefer the bash shell and highly recommend cygwin (with mintty). To me, this is the best of both worlds.

If you are set to install Linux as your desktop, Ubuntu is as good a choice as any, if only because it is the most popular and thus probably has the largest support base. In reality, the primary difference between the various Linux distros comes down to where things go, how applications are installed/upgraded, default settings and the like, so your first choice shouldn't make much of a difference.
Yes, and it was my favorite part of the program!

(Sorry about the multiple login, I mistakenly logged in with clickpass last time)
I am an experienced Startup CEO. Ask Me Anything.
I was already considering a full jump to Google Voice. This may seal the deal.
Don't go to a school that teaches programming.

There are many fine schools besides MIT, CMU, Caltech, etc. Saying you should disregard CS as your major because you aren't able to attend one of the elite schools is downright depressing. There are many great schools for an undergraduate that have an excellent CS curriculum.

Any programming at the schools I attended were optional 0 credit labs. And except for the CS 1 and 2 intro classes, there was no designated programming language, you could use any language you wanted. Some chose Ruby, Python, or Java while some others chose C or C++. They were more concerned about your ability to design and implement a proper working solution to the problem given.
the scribd version and Gnomes epdfviewer had terrible resolution, so I assumed it was a scanned document.

Evince displays it correctly.

The scribd version seems to be terrible for everybody though
I don't think we'll ever get around having to build software with code and highly trained developers. The world is still very much custom engineered, from architecture to civil engineering, electrical to mechanical engineering, even mass produced items have relatively few interchangeable parts.
Saturated fat is bad for you beyond the number of calories you get from it.

This appears to be an unsubstantiated claim, one that the study cited by the article is trying to dispel.
Lucent in theory didn't, although that was a result of their union contracts which required people not covered by them to have college degrees.

This seriously screwed over the undegreed Ascend employees after the acquisition; anything that might bring them to the attention of the union like putting them in for a promotion risked a grievance (or whatever) filing that Lucent would lose.

Companies that do contracting work for the Federal government generally need to hire people with degrees, and that's probably generally to universally true for consulting companies in general, where they're selling appearances to get their foot into the door.
I'll add those tomorrow or Tuesday if I get a few spare minutes.
That brings up the question; when did they get into the industry? Back when there was no such thing as a Computer Science degree, you of course didn't need one to get a job as a programmer

I'm sure there are some people still who get into Google and Microsoft with no work experience or degree, but I suspect that number was higher when these things were new and all. I also suspect a good number of the people you were thinking of when you made that post had good work experience to help them land the job.
How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs
I am a failed entrepreneur. Ask Me Anything.
Or something like AutoHotKey, since most people run Windows.
Ask HN: Web app microtransaction vs. subscription?
Instead of a monthly subscription, anyone can use the site but advance functions require credits/micropayments. For example, Basecamp - if you add more people its $2 per month per person. if you like to add 50mb or 100mb add $2 or $4 month. Would this work? This has happened in the MMO space. whats stopping it from working in the web app space?
Meaningful answers to questions such as "Should I study CS?" are critically informed by the questioner.

Obviously, if you want to make a living in IT and already know how to code, heck, get to work and make money instead of giving it to some corporation masquerading as an "institution of higher learning".

But if your ambition in life includes 'solving the tough problems in computer science', then by all means, pick a top notch school and be diligent in sucking brain content from peers and faculty. Its is not a trivial intellectual domain, and the "primitiveness" of the discipline is actually indicative of how early in the game this thing is.

So , wanna to be the Plato of Computer Science? Either way, you'll need to get that "computer science" education. From the ground up.
Hurricanes Versus the Oil Spill
In any successful field of engineering, the job growth explosion will be among the assembly-line workers. Cars and aircraft, now solar panels and semiconductors. Extrapolating from that to say that an engineering education is worthless is a huge extension of reasoning. Those assembly-line jobs only exist because of years of research by well-educated engineers.

If your school's Computer Science curriculum is a series of courses on the LAMP stack, that's one thing. But in the fields like algorithms, distributed computing, machine learning and information extraction, to name just a few, there is plenty of room to build a career around a degree.
Sure, at the time of sale. But you will spend/disburse the money you receive in short order and be left with a looming debt on your balance sheet.
You can dole out 40k/yr and isolate yourself from the real world for "culture", or you can go to your local library (where they still are funded) and read a book. Your call!
According to Wikipedia, "the authors noted that randomized controlled clinical trials in which saturated fat was replaced with polyunsaturated fat observed a reduction in heart disease, and that the ratio between polyunsaturated fat and saturated fat may be a key factor."

The actual paper is "under embargo", so I have no idea if it actually says this or not. YMMV.
My main regret about university isn't that I studied CS, but that I didn't study mathematics. Coming out of high school, I didn't have the faintest idea what mathematics really was. I did study philosophy, but the parts that appealed to me most were, frankly, the most similar to mathematics (symbolic logic and proof-writing). And then when I studied CS, my favorite parts...were mathematics again! All quite ironic for someone who always hated what he thought mathematics was.
Seems to be talking more about Software Engineering, Business Systems, and Information Technology degrees which started to replace CS (and the awesome CS/Philosophy double) during the late 90s.

You can test the depth of CS for yourself when you take your first formal methods course.
Five reasons Australians should quit Facebook
I'd say nearly every company whose focus isn't software (they employ more programmers than software companies and they use the degree as a screening tool).
As a csv file http://dl.dropbox.com/u/481380/top1000.csv
I agree. I went through my junior year of a CS degree and dropped out because it wasn't worth it. If I was to do it over again, I would definitely have chosen a different degree. I'm 100% certain that doing a different degree, I would have turned out a better programmer and better at something else. CS (or any programming degrees) are not as intellectually challenging as they should be. If you want to learn how to program than, I have yet to find any degree that will teach you much about becoming a good programmer, so I would recommend going to school for something else.
I did come across a discussion on HN recently about "Get Started" that inspired me to do it.

Although I check that particular comment was 4 days ago and I ran the test before that so maybe it was one of your earlier comments?
> You my friend, are an idiot. I hate to tell this to you, but your lack of education makes you that way. Your failure to expose yourself to literature, art, poetry, science (real science, the icky kind) has made you stupid. Another data point against you is that you learned to code and you are questioning whether you can get something out of a university education. How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to learn from 2000 years of Philosophy, Biology, Physics, History? Nothing?! All you need is code?

This is inaccurate, but excusable since I assume Zed hasn't been to high school in a good number of years. Things have changed greatly from then—high school courses are far more rigorous than what he describes as "failure to expose yourself to <x>"—and if you're going to a top 30th percentile school, chances are that you took an AP class as well, if not more than one.
Ah ha! I just guessed and confirmed that that's a requirement for ABET accreditation. Which of course doesn't mean the program as a whole will be infused with a mathematical or engineering ethos, I'm sure you can get ABET accreditation while still (mostly) doing Cargo Cult Computer Science.
Which netbooks have better battery life? I have trouble getting 2 hours out of my Eee. I guess you can lug around a 9-cell battery, but damn.
I think that there's a big factor that goes largely unacknowledged. Lots of non-Computer Science students have to take introductory programming. Given the choice between teaching a mechanical engineer something like scheme, which he will in all likelihood never use again, and python, which is a lot more widely useful, the choice is clear.

Introductory programming is all about what functions, variables, etc. are. I doubt many intro-level students ever grasped the fact that they were working on more or less the raw AST or the "code as data" thing anyway.
Yep, as I mentioned in the article it worked so well primarily because green was used on multiple parts of the homepage. So the red was a significant contrast to the rest of the layout.

It's like 7UPs logo, they put a red dot so it draws your eyes attention when your scanning a row of cans.
I agree. However, it is worth examining places like Dubai -- the tallest building in the world, and indeed practically an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day.

That's a compelling case for commoditization of talent, but in the end I think it's just a heuristic improvement. It gets you pretty far, but at the end of the day you still have huge teams of PhDs and M.Archs doing the actual engineering. (If that was commoditized it would be a scary world indeed!)
regarding question 2: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/08/18/...
Without knowing more details it's impossible to know what this means. If this is the same paper the article we are commenting on talked about, then the article appears to have misrepresented the conclusions of the study.

In any case, not all saturated fat is equal. Not all polyunsaturated fat is equal, either. For example, I'd bet it would make a big difference whether the dairy fat was from homogenized milk or some other form (cheese, yogurt) that was not homogenized. It usually doesn't seem to even occur to the authors of studies that such details might make any difference at all.
I started University in Computer Science, and then after some time abroad in Mexico, I switched to International Relations and studied politics and economics.

My plans to go into International Business haven't yet materialized and I'm currently in IT, including both web and Windows client development.

Being a one-man programming team means I have to learn a lot by myself and don't have the expertise of others to lean on. Because of that, I feel I'm held back from my potential. For example, I'm having a hard time teaching myself how to do TDD, or learning new languages or techniques.

I think a CS degree would have given me a great background to be a better programmer. So, I wouldn't discount it and I think you still learn the culture because of all the GenEd classes you have to take in University.
It would be somewhat less irritating if his Scala program didn't look like someone took a dump in his editor.
I agree with this article about CS to some extent but I don't fully agree.

I already knew how to program in Java (poorly) before going to university to study a double degree in Commerce and Software Engineering (which is just CS + 1 more year).

So you have someone who's a proto-programmer - learning programming but not quite getting there yet.

I don't go to any of the few places like 'MIT'. We have `learned` python, C, Java and c++, so far. (I put the learned in quasiquotes because my classmates tend to completely forget the language after the course finishes.)

Sure, some courses like Project Management is completely useless, but I do study courses about machine learning, and how to design algorithms.

I'm now in third year and I feel that going to university to learn software engineering has made me a much better programmer than I would have been without it. Stuff like Object Oriented Design and unit testing, I wouldn't have gone and learned it myself... It would take a university to teach me that.

Funny... I was just having a discussion with my lecturer the other day... He was complaining the university's courses were too `theory` and didn't help students get jobs... especially compared to competing universities. I was telling him the point of university isn't to get students jobs but to teach them how to think. If students wanted a place to teach them so they can get jobs they'd just go to technical colleges. I think he was convinced... hopefully.

What about my commerce degree? Well its mostly boring but occasionally something really interesting comes up... like e-business and economics. I've only done commerce because my dad made me to.

The article makes me think though, maybe I should've gone for a Commerce/Science degree majoring in Mathematics instead. Or a Commerce/Engineering majoring in Electrical engineering...
A few DBs within Yahoo which require threading use this pattern (the one I worked on used hyphens as the separator, though).
Hmmm, an interesting point. I'll note that my high school in the late '70s had only one term of the calculus at the end, and the fact that the teacher refused to teach, full stop, wasn't caught by something inconvenient like the independently administered AP tests.

My school system had dropped its honors program because it was "discriminatory", but somehow nowadays they offer 12 AP courses including Calculus AB, the sciences, literature and foreign languages, music, US history, etc.
There is more on saturated fat from the same blog author here:

Saturated Fat and Health: a Brief Literature Review, Part I
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/saturated-fat-...

and

Saturated Fat and Health: a Brief Literature Review, Part II
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/saturated-fat-...
Facebook has more pageviews than the next 99 biggest sites combined
Seeing "1%" or "2%" on the lower-fat milks suggests a lot of fat has been taken out -- you might even naively think 98%+ of the original fat content. But in fact 'whole' milk is only 3.25-3.5% fat -- not much difference.

And, the process for creating 1% or 2% varieties involves stripping all the fat out -- taking out other things as well -- then building the milk back up to the desired fat/vitamin/milk-solid levels with additives.
It's easy to get a degree. It's mentally challenging (in most cases) to get a good degree with a good GPA.
Well, they would have better battery life if someone would build one.

The ultimate coding/writing machine for me would be a full-size Lenovo chassis/battery with a 7 inch screen and a 500mhz arm CPU.

Plus maybe some solar panels on the back of the screen so I could conceivably go a summer without plugging it in.

I'm seriously considering hacking one out of one of the cheapo Android tablets, but if Lenovo would just release the Skylight already I'd just buy one of those and probably plug a real keyboard into it.
Ah, the dreaded phrase "it turns out", offering assertions with no evidence ( http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out ) :-)

I believe the author's point is that using these recursive SQL queries is more efficient, as the DB engine is inherently faster than your (presumably) scripting language. So this solution is for when the in-memory method is failing to scale.
It's better to live in the east since you don't have to look at the sun on your commute.
I've heard a lot of people rave on the NPR app, but the skinny text column kills it for me. I have a nice big screen, but NPR limits text to about a 3" column. This is true even for stories without an image which is especially maddening (a half empty screen with some silly share content buttons). When I first used it I thought it was a bug, but apparently that's what they want it to look like.

I greatly prefer the NY Times app.
I doubt this is actually what happened, but I can picture Zed finishing a post suggesting that students take some time to learn about culture while at university.

Then he decided that he wasn't going to piss off and fire up his usual quota with just that so he added an opening and closing attacking a CS education. I'm in pretty decisive disagreement with him on what he says about CS here, but there's a valuable point in here.

CS students, and engineers in general, are a little too dismissive of the liberal arts. There are some genuine reasons for this, but Zed is right in that it's supreme arrogance to think we have nothing to learn from thousands of years of human achievement in the arts. Ultimately, culture is how humanity expresses itself with the time and energy we've bought for it by making life easier with technological progress. Taking some time to understand the human condition through culture before we transform it would be a good thing.

Plus, on a personal level, meeting people who aren't fellow engineers is generally a good thing. Guys, there are a lot more girls outside of CS than there are therein... Hell, girls, that goes for you too if you just want to talk to another girl for once.
I agree, it's outrageous. I say you are entitled to a full refund!
They need to redesign their site. I clicked it, thought it was a placeholder domain/seo page and closed it.
The Oracle equivalent of this functionality if called CONNECT BY PRIOR:

http://ss64.com/ora/connectby.html

I used it back in 2002 to build some messageboards and it was pretty effing magical. Glad to see equivalent functionality finally make it to OSS.
BZZT!

6.001 was never a service course and while it was taught the EECS department even stopped teaching their service course due to lack of resources (MIT doesn't let departments get too big for a long time until they're sure they aren't going to suffer a crash like Aero/Astro, which of course turned out to be very wise after the dot.com bust).

Other departments taught and still teach their own relevant for their fields programming service courses, and surprise, surprise, the EECS department has started teaching a Python based service course ... although partly because the new 6.01 course doesn't have the time budget for students to learn Python's syntax and other irregularities (you can't take 6.01 without proving you can program in Python, as I recall).

ADDED: that said, there are a lot of students outside the EECS department who are very upset they can no longer take 6.001, which in times past quite a few did.
Relatedly, I thought it was interesting that Microsoft owns #3, #5, #6, #13, #23, #26, and #30 (as well as a chunk of #1).
In Australia, where the prevailing winds are also westerlies, the opposite is true. i.e. the east of most cities is more prestigious than the west.
> Chances are you'll end up going to some crappy Java school
...
> This is what Universities do ... they train people to think ...

So your average university can't teach me to code, but it can impart to me the wisdom of the ages. Not my experience.

At least at a state university, most kids are there to party and walk out with a credential that (they hope) gets them an agreeable, good paying job. That is the culture that the university has to share, at least by default.

Yes, you can get more out of university than that, and some do. But the idea that your horizons will be broadened and you will acquire culture and Learn How To Think just because you had to pay a pile of money get in the doors . . . no, I'm afraid not.
[video] How to Lean & Build a Startup
I guess I shouldn't mention the coffee shops I know that simply refrigerate their hour-old coffee and then put it on ice when someone asks for an iced coffee...
Did early hunters cause climate change?
I think lots of readers here are getting confused with the two kinds of "computer science." We all know CS as a theoretical discipline, close to math. But most American universities, it would seem, don't teach that. This is what Zed is talking about, the "computer science" that makes up one of these degrees.

Maybe, I'm just overly bitter, but he's absolutely right about the current state of undergraduate level curriculum.
While this is interesting from an academic sense, I found it difficult to apply to my own startup. Maybe it makes more sense for corporate companies who can invest time in strategic planning.
Out of interest, is that typical on both coasts? Just wondering if the river direction has anything to do with it.
I also like it. Pretty. A bit busy though. Once you got the basics polished, need to get actual data in of course, the chicken/egg problem will be large (it would seem) in a site like this. Any thoughts on how you'll tackle that?
Nice reasoning. (Though only applicable to 'newer' cities, or at least more recent expansion of cities).
Is Facebook building a Q&A product?
Sam’s Club Personalizes Discounts for Buyers
I wonder, how many universities and colleges can you attend and not be able to learn "the wisdom of the ages". All it takes is a few dedicated professors who are dying to be able to teach someone, anyone, who, in my case (this was MIT in the mid-80s), could identify the French Revolution. After that seminar session my professor said he would have retired if no one could have answered the question ... then again, history is my humanities specialty. Hmmm, I still study about as much history as I do CS and software engineering.

I've observed this directly or indirectly at 2nd and 3rd tier schools as well (and MIT's humanities departments aren't by and large first tier as far as I know).
So if they stopped selling the oil in the US, there's no other country on earth that would have a use for it?

They would maybe take a % hit, however they'd still sell all their oil. Banning them in the US would not cause that $130 billion dollars to just "vanish"