skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apart from your evidence-free assertion that there's "no comparison", I don't see much difference, except in personal attitudes (which isn't the point of my comparison). Knuth doesn't "work" for a living; to him computer science is an obsessive hobby. He has a very strict routine, which even involves using two computers, one with the internet and one without, and specific times set aside for answering correspondence versus writing versus doing other things. He's been working on TAOCP for decades because it's his obsession, not because it's a job. He can't imagine doing anything else, which is why he keeps writing it even in retirement. He has never taken a non-academic job in his life; he became a professor at age 25, and remained one until his retirement.

And really, "whining, privileged bore" wasn't intended as an insult?

Also, how does Russell fare better in your comparison? An aristocrat who wrote "In Praise of Idleness" while never having to work a day in his life? The archetype of the upper-class, socialist professor?
I would say yes; alot in places where security is key. These types of model are also generated when doing different types of analysis as well. Day to day use not alot but when you getting familiar with something its priceless.
>To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like.

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

Plenty of other examples here:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22It%27s+Apple%27s+hard...
Selling the Invisible
this technology wont hurt legal employment because it enables so many more lawsuits. every document on earth holds potential tort value that can be exploited now. after discovery its still a manual process to litigate so the number of attorneys should rise.
Wow, this lib looks so freaking cool and thought out. What are your future plans?
In some ways the GPS device actually preserves some aspects of privacy.

Privacy is not just where, but who and what. If an agent is following someone they also know to some extent who and what.
Not to mention that you could power an ARM2 by collecting the waste heat from a 386 using a thermocouple.
Be your own Google.
More information: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-lists-official-a...
I will draw a Gruesome Twosome for $16
Won't work on iPad etc.
When was the last time that Gruber disagreed with anything Apple did, and didn't have a long list of reasons about why it was good for you, all consumers, and society?

I can't even read his posts. They are simply too propaganda-like.
Science: Good For Anything Else?
Enhancing the quality of automated review tools will significantly reduce the number of lawyers employed doing sweatshop style review.

Just because a technology might enable more lawsuits (which I am not certain is the case here) doesn't mean more lawsuits will be filed. Oftentimes, finding evidence causes parties to settle rather than go to court.

Further, the existing courts can only handle so many cases per year. You can't suddenly up the throughput on the court system.
Could Cornstarch Have Plugged BP's Oil Well?
Can you recommend any particular 'niches'? e-cigarettes?
I suggest that it is rather absurd for the professor to expect the students programming speed be on par with his own--unless he's asserting that he himself is a poor programmer.

The one thing a professor aught to have in spades above his students is experience. And the only thing that speeds up a programmer, simply, is past experience. Being able to recognize patterns and problems and having a general idea of their solutions is 90% of the programmer's ordeal.

It's only reasonable to expect students to require a non trivial amount of "working it out time" as it's something all programmers go through. The first time you experience a problem of a specific nature you need to contemplate, research and explore the subject trying to flesh out the underlying logic of the problem. After which, you can finally devise a proper solution.

Its also important not to forget that as an experienced programmer you have the discipline to break problems down into smaller manageable components. Students, on the other hand, often are stuck blinded from the trees by the forest. Rather, they are daunted and intimidated by the entire problem set.

I also have to reluctantly point out, that the education for programming at Jr. and Sr. level classes is quite poor. It's kind of a scam. It's paradoxically too brief, too broad, too specific too general all at the same time. From experience, anything sub 400 level classes were simply credit padding courses. For programmers, real programmers that are actually curious and excited by programming who actually invest personal time to explore and enrich their knowledge of the subject as a hobby will get very little out of those courses. They have to sit through instruction on conditional programming, worse sit through hours of insane questions of incomprehension on simple if, else, for and while loops. By the end of the course, you get to do one interesting assignment, it's what the entire course was building up to, and all it is is a generic useless implementation of some common design pattern. The apex of those courses for me were doubly-linked lists, stacks, and knowing how to implement Huffman encoding. All of which I could have figured out on my own. The other type of programmer, the programmer by career appeal--the programmer who thinks I'll just take a couple college courses and land a cushy high paying job, these courses offer them basically nothing aside from an introduction to language syntax. The ugly truth of the matter is that the language portion of coding, the syntax and grammar is the smallest most inconsequential portion of programming--It's simply the tip of the ice-burg. What lies beneath is a solid understanding of logic, how to identify, adapt and apply reasoning. It's problem solving.

Overall my point is simply this, unless you figure out how to compress the sum total of you X++ years of experience as a professor [obtained from industry and as a teacher], and then figure out how to impart all that knowledge to your students there is no feasible reason why they could or should be as apt at programming as you as a professor.
"I think that's kind of a weird definition of programming. I don't know why it rubs me the wrong way."

Because a marketer can use it with a straight face to say that when they created a successful marketing campaign they have "programmed". I think you still need some concept of coding in there, even though I would also agree some idea of value delivered to somebody is also important.
"The fact that data has been purged does not mean a human knowingly did it (e.g. accidental guilt). [But] data purging may make a guilty person look innocent (e.g. accidental innocence)," says Bell.

That's just the most asinine statement I've ever heard. They might as well say, "We think you look guilty, and even though we have no idea what you are doing, or how you are doing it you should come with us now."
Leaving aside the particulars of this case since all we've heard so far is what his lawyers are saying happened, the troubling issue here is that somehow attaching a GPS device is an action that does not require a warrant.

I can accept the argument that it doesn't gather information that couldn't be gathered by other warrantless activity such as following him with agents.

But it also MUST require that they entered the personal property of his car. You can't search a car without consent or a warrant, why can you enter it without either?
What accounts for the legendary status of Hungarian schools?
Any idea roughly how much revenue loss this represents for AdSense?
Does anyone else question his choice to give FOXNews the exclusive? If you had made one of the most important scientific discoveries in history, would you submit it to FOX?
I wouldn't call it an optimization. Generally, the fastest way to logically delete data is to just forget that it's there. RAM works the same way, as would any other medium that doesn't have any special requirements for writing.

Flash is the unusual case since it needs to be "flashed" in bulk before it can be rewritten.
>But in this case, if they couldn't plant the monitor, they could just follow him. He'd have no case. It's almost exactly the same loss of privacy. So why it such a big deal in the GPS case?

The reason is that technology has progressed MUCH faster than law. What was not possible or expensive to do 50 years ago is cheap and easy now and can be done in a mass scale. So give some time for the privacy laws to catch up to the potential abuses.

Eg. If a bunch of retail stores, corner shops and 711s got together to scan car plates using ANPR(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognit...) and upload to a server which will make it searchable for paid subscribers(think employers, spouses/BFs/GFs, parents, stalkers) of the site, would that be okay?

After all, it's public data that they're gathering by just 'looking' on public roads. What would be your stance on this? And does it make it different if done by the government?

If such technology were available when the constitution was written or amended early on, would such things be banned?

The potential for abuse is immense, so there must be sufficient checks and balances. Eg. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_Diotte
Oh it's not my library, but I use it in school and it IS awesome :)
We're still a good distance from having the kind of intelligent agents that would be needed to implement your vision (which isn't strictly your vision, I remember reading about this sort of stuff over a decade ago in science fiction books!).

Certainly this would be an interesting world to live in, but so far the only entity which has enough processing power to figure out what you want and act as your intelligent agent is, in fact, Google. Even with Moore's law it might take a while before everyone can have a googleplex in their iPad.
For those who are wondering what the issue could possibly be, if you use the Pascal calling convention in which you push the parameters on the stack and the callee pops them off, then you'll crash when you try to return from a function that was passed the wrong number of parameters. It's perfectly valid for a C compiler to use that calling convention, at least for some functions. It's not traditional, and you need another calling convention for variadic functions, and ANSI C prototypes are a really good idea in that case, but it's certainly valid.

I'm so sure it's valid not because I've actually read the C standard, but because the whole Win16 API was called this way, and Win32 uses a slight variation that passes more things in registers.

Further reading:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/01/02/47184...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions
http://unixwiz.net/techtips/win32-callconv.html
http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/Page_win32/IczelionTuts/tut1.html
Stanford professor Margaret Neale's research shows that diversity, not just women but simply people of different backgrounds, makes a team perform better. (https://gsbapps.stanford.edu/facultyprofiles/biodetail.asp?i...). So there is evidence that Y Combinator companies would benefit from having more women on board, and not just because the gender ratios look better to the outside world.

I love that Jessica is leading the Female Founders group on Grub With Us (let's have more please!). What other efforts could be undertaken to solve the problem? How about more Grub with us dinners where Y Combinator founders can meet women with Y Combinator potential?
Nice rant, but I think developers think otherwise. Since the Mac app store has been opened up we have seen awesome success stories from developers who are now using a second or even primary sales channel for their product. With a lot of success.

I agree that Trials are nice to have. Fortunately in many cases you can still go to the developer's site and download a trial or demo copy.
I probably know the pain. I've been putting food on my table since 2009 solely from Android app development. And not for contracts either, just me vs. the market.
There's totally a selection effect going on here.

- The professor gets to pick the problems; of course he picks ones he can solve quickly and easily.

- The students are taking a class from this professor; presumably they lack certain skills or knowledge which he has, and which will be developed during the assignments.

When we normally observe '10X' differences in programmer productivity, it's not the case that one of the programmers being measured is picking the tasks for all the others, and that the others being tested are selected on the basis of not knowing (or having only recently been introduced to) central concepts required for those tasks. Even if his measurement of the students' programming time is solid, and even ignoring that he and his students have different incentives (his students don't necessarily benefit from speeding through assignments), of course you see a dramatically wider difference in programming speed in this case than in most contexts.
UML and case tools were all the rage 5-10 years ago, but have fallen out of favour with the rise of Agile methodologies. I have a feeling* that the teaching of software engineering at university lags about that same distance behind current industrial practice. So in another 5 years time I'd expect universities to have largely abandoned teaching UML except for in certain niche classes.

* I don't have any facts to back this up, it's really just a guess.
very nicely done. I agree with the last part of this comment. The enemy bullets are a little off.

The player laser beam is awesome :P
I also definitely think delivering value is important! But wrapping that up in definition of programming itself is mixing things up. I think it makes more sense to include delivering value as part of the bigger context of programming as a career and a job.
>"A Mathematician's Apology" is the bitter rant of a man who only valued one thing in his life and had largely lost the ability to do it in his old age.

It's been a while since I've read it, but isn't it mostly a theory on what makes something beautiful and worth doing? It's always struck me as being probably one of the most important essays of all time.

I find it interesting that what Aaron and you took from the essay has essentially zero overlap with my take.
Only to those who can afford it.
Mozilla often says 'wait until the next version, the next version will fix all this.' A few versions later and the problems are still many and I doubt that this legacy will change.
It isn't asinine at all, at least when considered in light of the investigative process. "Data was purged" is a fact. Now, you still need to put that in context, and that context includes hundreds, if not thousands, of other facts. Only then should LE say "It is time to come with us."
Do you mean, because they have no ability to compete, they should have made a move to eradicate superior platforms before it became obvious that their ad product is a waste of money?
For me last.fm died (after years of being a subscriber just to support them, first during the "open for everyone" time and then during the "I'm from Germany and wouldn't need to pay" time) already. Scrobbling makes only sense for me if I actually do something with _my_ data. Which - I don't.

Listening to music on last.fm became unbearable after a while due to their inability to fix their product to distinguish artists by similar or the same name. ABS and A.B.S. is not the same. If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them..
What are you going on about? They're completely different types of mathematicians. Knuth is a generalist/educator/computer scientist. He is not only one of the most prolific in the field, but also chairs journals and programs, develops software, does media appearances, maintains extensive correspondences, ALL while he teaches.

Hardy didn't have a fraction of these "distractions".

You think I'm dismissive of Hardy because of his academic career. I'm not. It's his colonial era, easy ranks and easier money, that I'm critical of.
Yes, all those fashionable computers they sell for what would be years of income in many countries are really helping the non-rich world.
It's an inspiring demo of what can be done in HTML5. Also a fun game.
This should be possible to determine. We should wait for a verification/reproduction of this study which will undoubtedly follow given the claims made.
Sex in College: It's a Buyer's Market
I think there is cause to read it and reflect on your life and say "hey, I should value more than one thing in life".

I think devoting your life to one thing is the temptation of a life in academia, but it also is a path to bitterness.
This is just evidence of the failure of the Facebook ad platform. With the sheer abundance of data that Facebook commands, this should not be the case.
What is this about collecting RAM? Are you saying that if someone's office gets audited for compliance, they'll power off their machines, freeze-spray their DIMMs, extract them, and put them into a DIMM reader to image the RAM contents?
In "Programmers at Work", Bill Gates makes a few interesting comments on programming speed and innate ability (pages 82-83):

"I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it... A lot of people would say, "I want days and days to read this." A really good programmer would say, "Let me take that home with me. I'll just spend an hour tonight and go through the whole thing". The difference of ability there is vast."
I like the idea! Some of those days I've already got other stuff booked in, but luckily I've already started working on The Next Big Thing (cough). Those days are perfect though to get a lot of stuff done.
Because a monoculture worked out so very well the last time.

The more different browser engines are in use, the better the world will be, because that will force the engines to strive for compatibility. I'd love to see Opera gain some market share.
What is being said is something on the lines of there being no URL so to speak. So when you type facebook.com what is it the reason that got you to type that? Most probably being able to see "pics from the party last night".

Now imagine if the pics were distributed on Facebook, Flickr and Picasa along with a few tweets that I had made and pics added via TwitPic. Do you still think Facebook.com is what you should type?

Now think of a setup where the thing to be typed is "username: pics of the part last night /twitter facebook flickr picasa"

Gone is the idea of any advertisement and revenue model based on the content's location/web page.
Ask HN: How would an individual investor buy Facebook shares?
So I've just had a bit of an epiphany or flash of understanding with respect to why Facebook is worth the current $75M and IMO could be worth significantly more.

I see the posts that say that they are trading somehow, but everything I've seen requires a trade of 10,000 shares (at $30 each).

I can' afford that, but I'd happily bet my current available life savings of a few thousand dollars.

How does an individual investor make that purchase? Or do I really have to be in a position to put $300k into Facebook if I want to be able to hop on for the ride?
You really need to consult two lawyers, one who specializes in labor law and another who specializes in intellectual property law. In this case you may want high profile lawyers to demonstrate your degree of concern. If you are fired over this issue, you may have some recourse. BTW, I am not a lawyer and so I am not licensed to give legal advice. (include <standard.disclaimer>)

I would suggest that you put together a moderately short memorandum of the facts. You will need a time line, dates and names of attendees of meetings, summaries of what happened at each meeting and what happened. If you keep an appointments diary, copy out the relevant pages. Collect copies of all the employment documents. This will save time and money if you need to go forward. In the future, when you have a meeting with anyone involving this, write a memorandum to the file recounting exactly what happened with quotations, agreements, action items, etc. Keep everything factual and avoid editorial content and presumptions of intent.

Check your employment and intellectual property agreements. I suspect that your employer does not have approval rights on your excluded intellectual property declaration. The purpose of that declaration is to make the company's job simpler--they claim to own everything you did not exclude--and since it describes your intellectual property prior to the point of employment, they have no say in its content, you own what you own. I can imagine a situation where the company might ask for a clarification of what you are excluding, but they really have no right to challenge the substance. Moreover, I further suspect that the fact that they did not come back to you in a timely fashion and that they went ahead and employed you immediately would be interpreted as _ipso facto_ agreement that the declaration was an adequate description of your excluded intellectual property.
In their quest to copy Apple, of course this feature is only implemented after it appears in OS X Lion. It's as if the developers lack self-confidence or imagination, or both.
Hong Kong Company Moves Swiftly on Ultrafast Broadband
I would reiterate the practice and practice mantra. But I think it's more of knowing where to find information. Being a professor and many years of experience, the information you need to look up to compete your task is just a thought away. If not, you know where to go find the information online quickly.
Whereas, the student struggle with IDE, looking up information from the book that you assigned and google. On top of that, you are confidence that your solution is correct, versus the student may not be as confidence; lacking confidence slows down your progress tremendously I believe. But that's another topic.
I think even with google, the student still have to look for an example that is similar to what they are trying to solve, understand the example, and assimilate to their solution. All of that takes much more time than you having the knowledge in your head.
To better compare, you should ask them how they go about solving the problem and you try to do similar steps. Now, are you still 40X faster?
We're rapidly approaching (have almost certainly passed) the point where it would be feasible for the average worker to do far less than 40 hours a week.

Notwithstanding the cultural & structural reasons we can't get there from here, that is.

But at some point in the future, most of what we now call "work" will not be done by people.

This has the potential to be incredibly liberating, if by then we will have found ways to decouple a persons ability to meet basic economic necessities from their ability to find a job.