skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Strong practical knowledge, weak in theory. Where to start?
I've been developing for around 10 years now without any formal training. I'm strong in problem solving and analysis, but feel like I'm not a well-rounded developer without a CS background, or at least that I look worse on paper for it.

Maybe someone can give me an overview of what they'd expect a fresh CS grad to know. Or better yet, a collection of CS topics that you've actually applied in your career.
There's a qualitative difference between a law that mandates an action after something goes wrong (tort?), and a law that mandates an action before anything goes wrong, in order to prevent it from going wrong (most regulation). This is a critical difference to libertarian types: (as I understand) they advocate tort laws -- you are liable for the damage and injury you cause; but not most regulation -- government mandates actions to prevent you from causing damage or injury. Building codes are the latter.

So I disagree with your analogy with the Hammurabi laws. I looked up the text:

"If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death."

"[...] If it ruin goods, he shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and inasmuch as he did not construct properly this house which he built and it fell, he shall re-erect the house from his own means."

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html

It actually doesn't contain anything like a building code -- no regulation for how to build houses, what materials and methods can be used, what standards should be met. It is only tort: how you construct a building, government does not care, but it will hold you liable if it fails. This is a solidly "libertarian" type of law: uphold property rights, but do not intervene otherwise, and do not tell people how to do things.
I hope this is related to an idea I floated about 1.5 years ago on the WHAT-WG working group. Given how mature node.js and evented servers have become this makes even moar sense than it did when I originally tossed the idea about.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-Jan...
I hate LinkedIn's business model and would change in a heartbeat if there was a decent alternative.

I feel like LinkedIn is the MySpace of professional social networking. Now that professionals are comfortable with the concept, it's only a matter of time until a competitor comes along and steals their business.
Not that i've seen, but i've wanted exactly this before, especially to show clients possible tweaks to a site.
Websockets are only useful to talk to a server. At last year google io presentation, they said people wanting to play an html5 game or do a voip call shouldn't have to use a server, especially if they are in the same room. They should be able to connect directly to each other.

More info here:

http://peter.sh/2011/03/css-quotes-mock-ups-of-the-html5-dat...

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
There's not much detail in the RWW article, but take a look at the link to a thread I started on the WHAT-WG mailing group in Jan 2010. In it I cite a real-life potential use case for P2P in the browser.
I've been using EnCase for about a decade (including a large portion of that working with the FBI), and I honestly can't think of any amazing technical innovations.

The support for reading .pst files? The fact that it can finally handle filesystems besides FAT32 and NTFS? Certainly not it's stability.

EnCase is very good at what it was designed for, which is basically an idiot-proof way for an investigator to comb through a hard drive looking for search terms.

I would argue that technically EnCase isn't even as good as FTK, which is something that pretty much every third-party evaluation of the two products has shown.

I won't disagree that there are some smart folks working at the FBI, and that's not even counting the ones who spend all their time developing "zoom and enhance" software for photo analysis.
And, in addition, these conversations tend to be rather shallow and un-anchored by fact. More an exhibition case for general philosophical predilections than a serious examination of the particular policy issue.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use them in that order."
|{low, medium, high}| < |{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}|

where |s| := the cardinality of s
One application I spend a lot of time working on/modifying is my crawler. It uses Python's Beautiful Soup.

Other applications I use/work on are my master control application. It is written in C and handles configuration sharing between systems.
Imagine distant teams riding several buses, working on different pieces, uniting in a final assembly and launch celebration!
Google Person Finder 2011 Japan Earthquake
/16 obviously. Say it aloud a few times and just feel how it flows off the tongue. "slash sixteen, slash sixteen." So much smoother than getting tongue tied saying "class B" out loud...
Definitely agree with you regarding the fact that math is used extensively in many projects but just wanted to point out that the math is very different for 3d animation vs video processing and only a very small subset of software engineers or computer scientists will every need to know it.

I am able to fully understand the uses of and apply hash tables, btrees, kd-trees or any data structure. Ex. although I can't prove to you the correctness or to create a good hash function that still doesn't prevent me from understanding basic concepts such as hash collisions due to excessive entries or the look up speed O(1) of hash vs O(log(n)) for btrees. On the other hand, if I actually were to implement search for a project I would just use MySQL(I don't need to understand set theory at all to be able to write efficient queries with a firm understanding of the role of indexes).

Never tried programing in scala, but I have no problems with functional programming concepts like map/reduce(currently doing a lot of new projects in couchdb because I think its more interesting to writing sql queries).

I also would like to point out that none of the example you gave require calculus, which was the requirement that I found to be a bit ridiculous and all of your examples involve very different branches of mathematics with very little overlap and most computer algorithms can be applied to great effect without a perfect understanding of the mathematical foundation or proof of correctness. At what point do you stop and ask whether you are teaching too much math and not enough computer science?

I would agree that its easy to pickup how to code but nearly impossible to become a good coder on your own without criticisms and feedback from others. The quality of code I've read some really atrocious code from cs graduate students or engineers all of whom have a extremely good understanding of math. And I would also argue that it is very unrealistic to expect someone to download and read tens and thousands of lines of open source code and hop on IRC to discuss why things were done certain ways with the maintainers. I would also argue that a firm understanding in math does not mean that you can just get map/reduce, MVC, design patterns, web services, distributed computing, multi-threading, event driven programming and many more fundamental concepts that programmers now a days need a firm understanding of to do anything significant.
Well, it's certainly reassuring to see that people here don't fall for these scare tactics easily. Can't say the same for most other web communities.
Please don't get mad at this, but the reason I love hackernews is because its not like reddit has become: there are no silly posts or posts that don't relate to technology and programming. This post seems necessary for reddit, but not for hacker news. Please don't let this community change!
$30 is nothing...and you gotta remember that most people aren't tech savvy
My Interview W /Paul Bragiel, i/o Ventures Accelerator San Francisco
MySpace, heck... it feels more like Classmates.com or Friendster to me.
My Interview With David Cohen, Founder And CEO, TechStars
I generally blame it on Peak Oil (and, yes, I am guilty of just sort of skimming this piece).
Haskell and OCaml both typically compile to native code, and since they have REPLs, may fit your criteria for "dynamic" languages (which is a very fuzzy classification). LuaJIT also performs quite well, and IMHO is very pleasant to work with. Either way, Lisp performance is quite good, significantly better than Python or Ruby, which are often good enough.

Lisp's convenient format for data was a HUGE win, for a while, but other languages have caught up. Python has dicts, Lua has tables, Javascript has JSON, ML has its variant types, Erlang inherited Prolog's terms (its parallel to Lisp's s-expressions), etc. All of the above are extremely useful. Expressive data and simple code is far easier to maintain than overly simple data and compensatingly elaborate code. Languages without a good high-level format for structured data either lose out on a lot of functionality, or (sigh) fall back on XML.

Also, Quicklisp is quite nice, and props to Xach for setting it in motion.
"I would like to call it "B.E.S.T. Scanner" so people kind of get stuck calling it "the best scanner". We can figure out what BEST means later."
Turned on my GPS. Works fine.
Take a look at this spec http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
I think a similar effect with LFSR you can have with a De Bruijn sequence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence.
Translation: Look, the VCs are expecting a payout at some point and the only way we've worked out for making money is through ads. Now that's not going to fly if people can just get some sort of 'ad free' client from you guys. Our hands are tied.

PS. Thanks for helping us get this far!
I lived in Phoenix when there was an Earthquake somewhere down south in Mexico and I felt it. The earth was moving back and forth, the blinds on my window moved back and forth and not ever having felt an Earthquake it was the weirdest feeling in the world.

I can't imagine a strong earthquake or what it would feel like, but Phoenix which is definitely not known for its earthquakes moving underneath my feet made me more wary about what I am walking on than ever before.
The Chernobyl accident was a power excursion during low power operation (high void coefficient region) that lead to a steam explosion. The core was not melted but was literally blown sky high because there was no containment building.
I think that's slightly unfair; Greg's expertise isn't in crypto, but in Windows NT kernel internals.
My GIS certificate is ancient at this point and I have never managed to work in the field I trained for, but my recollection is that they are accurate to within only about 10 meters, whether personal or professional, unless you spend quite a lot of time gathering data from multiple satellites (on the order of several hours, depending upon the level of accuracy you are seeking). EDIT: In other words, "I just turned mine on" shouldn't get any reading on any system that is more accurate than about 10 meters. It takes time to get accurate readings with GPS.

Someone with a more recent credential/professional experience want to confirm or deny that recollection -- or even update it with more recent facts? (For reference to my question of "more recent", IIRC, I got my certificate in 2002.)
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As someone earlier had pointed out, the totality of Socialism is not Marxist-Leninism. If you read the article, Einstein also warned that a planned economy did not preclude the enslavement of the individual.

Living is essentially a contradiction - each human being is an individual and as a creature of nature, possesses instincts which guards against others who seek to deprive him/her of his individuality and his chance to live. Yet he/she benefits from cooperating with others to achieve a greater goal larger than the sum of his/her parts.

This is a never ending struggle and it has dominated political discussion for twentieth century. It disappoints me that most people would take an extreme position - i.e. capitalism is good/evil or socialism is good/evil - leaves us no room to negotiate solutions which will work out for the individual and society.
Any particular reason it needs to be an LFSR?

A question I posted on SO some time back may be of interest, it solves a similar problem using an LCG (generating a shuffled range of numbers with no repeats):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/464476/generating-shuffle...
Here's a surprising fact. If you allow after-the-fact reprocessing of the GPS and significantly increased modeling technology, you can get millimeter accuracy from civilian GPS.

For more on this global network of re-analyzed GPS, see:

http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html

Here's a particular time series, near Claremont, CA, a few tens of miles east of LA proper:

http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/all/plots/CLAR.jpg

These plots are lat/lon/height (in centimeter units) versus time. In the height plot, you can see a several-cm drift which has annual/seasonal features. This is due to subsidence due to pumping of ground water in the summer. You can also see some green lines which I believe are large earthquakes.

Besides airborne and (coming soon) satellite radar interferometry, reprocessed GPS is one of the main ways we have to observe seismic displacement fields.
Agreed, this is fluff, people are only responding to it because mentioning Lisp pushes HN's buttons.

If you want to read something good about Lisp, check out _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ by Peter Norvig, David Kranz's _ORBIT_, SICP, Dybvig's _Three Implementation Models for Scheme_, or the Lambda papers (http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html).
identi.ca?
I think that there are still a lot of "socialist" (for the greater good payed for by tax/tithe) programs within the LDS church; it's the US Federal government into what they consider their own sort of promised land they don't like.

Like most successful industrial countries, they have a strong government that works closely with private industry and "the people", as opposed to the naive laissez faire beloved by neoliberals. Think Japan/ Germany -- STILL the industrial leaders of the world.

A friend of mine also said the LDS shifted to republicanism in the seventies because of sexual politics, not economic policy. The genius of Reagan and friends was to use conflicts inspired by seismic cultural shifts of the seventies to push through economic policies that benefit a fairly small minority of the US.
You know where the real business is? Not building web apps, but providing extreme startup challenges. People pay you money to participate in coding and building apps in extreme conditions. Heck, you could probably pitch this as a reality show.

If you like Startup Bus, you'll LOVE...
* Startup Canoe - Each team get's a canoe and is placed on the river. First one to build an app and finish the river course is the winner...
* Startup Skydiving - Build a startup before you hit the ground
* Startup Standing - You must build a startup without sitting down. If you sit down, you lose

I tell you guys, this is the Billion dollar idea...
This is becoming an increasingly common mistake for tech CEOs: adopt Steve Jobs' attitude without being Steve Jobs.
Hey you found our video! We're the fourth one (Moral Fibers).
I'm surprised that no one here has yet pointed out that posts like this are a part of the self-correction mechanism present in transparent communities. Sure, it may be drama in the short term, but I think the fact that we know about these altercations is an important thing in and of itself. I would be highly surprised if this kind of drama didn't occur in the proprietary software world, but we don't get to see it and learn from it.
Fair enough - Open systems explore the landscape of all possible systems through diverse implementation and designs. This diversity sometimes leads to open systems finding the global optima, but even in less ideal circumstances the various different approaches reach a local optima for some subset of user needs.
Closed systems on the other hand try to reach the global maxima by analysis, design and 'vision'.
The original poster laments the competing implementaions, back stabbiness and ideologies. From my perspective that is how open source is supposed to work - people who are full of it trying to take their vision to its maximum limit. Competing implementaions and backstabbiness is not a modern phenomenon - bsd vs linux, emacs vs vi, xemacs vs emacs, n implementaions of scheme, n implementations of common lisp, ironpython/jython/python/pypy.
Interesting. That says to me that their reasons for leaving were more over hurt feelings than reganwald's distinction between knowledge compendium and community. Do you agree, or do you think something else is going on?
It will not greatly affect the orbit of any satellite, because the Earth's center of gravity can't be shifted by any action internal to the Earth itself by conservation of momentum, excepting somehow raising some part of Earth above the relevant orbits which no earthquake is going to do. Otherwise to change the trajectory of Earth's center of gravity requires an external force of some sort. Some small effect from a different mass distribution will be caused and it will have to be taken into effect, but when you care about these effects as far as I know you have to measure them empirically anyhow, because if you care at that level of detail it turns out there's a lot of noise as the Earth warms and cools and has various flows within it and as water moves hither and yon and so on. So while it will have some effect it is merely one of very many such things.

Technically speaking, it won't require any recalibration either, because when the satellites tell you that you are 2.4 meters away from where you were yesterday when standing in the "same location", they're right. (Assuming this number is reliable.) GPS doesn't really tell you where you are "on the surface", they tell you where you are within the sphere they encompass and from there we map that back to the surface location with other knowledge our systems have. If Madagascar took it upon itself to go dock with Australia tomorrow, the GPS satellite system itself would not need to be updated. All the things that use GPS and have some reason to expect Madagascar to be in a certain location would need to be updated.
Depending on complexity and future plans, Common Lisp might be a good choice to create the controller in.

I don't think I'd want to try to reimplement Beautiful Soup without a really good reason! :)
The iPad will never have a USB port.
I've felt a distant earthquake once, in Michigan (not exactly an earthquake zone) - it was deeply unnerving, particularly in an office on the fifth floor of an old factory building. I can't imagine being trapped amidst suddenly collapsing buildings, or knowing that it could potentially happen any time. I hope the worst is over and people have reconnecting with their families by now.

Also, I don't want to trivialize what the Japanese are going through, but why does Japan move in metric while the Earth moves in imperial units? Sheesh.
... And the manufacturer has a reputation for producing subpair products with subpair updating schemes.
The reviews have not been good. It's not hard to believe the public isn't buying. Geeks want this product, not the public.
What was so bad aboout Chernobyl?

Just for comparison:

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster): "It is estimated that there may ultimately be a total of 4,000 deaths attributable to the accident, due to increased cancer risk."

According to http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...: In the USA about 30,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 2000 TWh.

So in the USA each year 7.5 times more people die due to the use of coal energy, than all of the people who died due to Chernobyl.

Unfortunately there is a irrational fear of nuclear power in most European states (and also the rest of the world). It seems that most people would prefer climate-damaging coal energy with a higher fatality-rate per year, compared to relatively safe nuclear energy with an extremly low fatality rate per year (even if you count in the accidents that happen every now and then).

And let's face it: If Japan would replace nuclear energy with other energy types, then a large percentage of those replacements would be coal (as it impossible to obtain all the required energy from renewable sources with today's technology).
My perspective, mostly on UX issues:

The splash page has weird workflow- the only way to go somewhere is by clicking on the tiny red dot and then clicking the button. At the very least increase the click radius for the red button, ideally add an on hover that shows where is (eg San Francisco) and have the button click take them there.. Also, clicking on the states feels like it should do something, since the cursor is the "pointer hand" but it does nothing except change the location hash and make it harder for me to click the back button.

As for the bar view- graceful loading of page elements would be a big help. It took more than 6 seconds for me to load the content on first load, and it takes a fair amount of time to load between the tabs. I suggest some sort of spinny thing that acknowledges the waiting process as something to help stop me from closing the tab right then and there.

(I just took a look at what's making it so slow- it looks like you're pulling down >50 tiny individual pngs- you should probably squish that into a much smaller number of sprites, also same goes for putting all your jquery stuff into one file)

That's really what strikes me most about it right now- usually if a page doesn't load within a second or so for me, you're going to have a hard time convincing me to come back to it, and it would be a shame if all the work you have clearly put into a decent idea is negated by a slow ui.
Also, Marx was really good at critiquing capitalism, but he never actually had a plan for after the revolution. Except to think everybody would be happy and a collective, pretty much perfect, rationalism would be manifest because of the dynamics of history. Then we would all just see the answer, which is to share and be nice. (He was a hegelian, remember, even if he didn't like to admit it.)

Also ... its not like there was some blueprint that the Soviet Union applied as if they were building a machine tool on a large scale. The Soviet State has, in its large scale state organized brutality and corruption, is completely in line with Russian history (no offense to my Russian friends.... Russia is also soulful and brilliant).
I'm making a comment about the field, not about Greg.
Another useful site I've found for helping you figure out where the money goes, etc. is http://www.charitynavigator.org -- IIRC, I first heard of it in the wake of the 2004 tsunami off of Thailand, and it's been a helpful resource ever since.