skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most notably (and annoying when out in the city), Yelp.

Confirmed! (but I don't use Yelp so I wouldn't notice)
I don't think that calculus should be included in a high school curriculum. Differential modelling is a valuable skill, sure, but I don't think that it will be applicable to 95% of students. There are such a broad range of jobs in the world, and very, very few end up doing differential modelling, despite increasing numbers for university calculus course registration.
In Which I Defend the C Standard for Interviews
I would see loosing a record of your evaluation as a loss for the community. You've gone to the effort of evaluating the content, but your feedback is not recorded and is treated the same as if you had not read it at all. Maybe rather than just ^/v voting, capturing that sentiment is better handled by an agree--disagree scale.
These aren't students transferring to a CS curriculum. These are students in other majors taking the intro CS courses to(most likely) fill out a general education requirement and to get "computer skills" on their resume.

Hopefully, this will end up with more people actually understanding CS, but I'm not so sure that will ever happen...
What the heck is this doing here on Hacker News?!?!?!
Maybe not as a core program, but I definitely think that all high schools should offer it as an elective. I was in the middle of teaching myself C++ when I took it, and I was completely stuck on the concept of pointers. Our teacher made the concept workable for me, and we had some decent programming projects on the side. It's probably where I learned to love being a polyglot as well, since the class was in Pascal. If I ever saw her again I'd definitely give her a hug for helping me cross the bridges I came to.
RIM CEO terminates BBC Click interview
One of my biggest pet peeves are forms that make you enter your address information, including your "ZIP Code", before asking for your country. Extra annoyance points go to sites that then do a clunky page refresh after selecting a different country and having all of your previous address information disappear into the void.
1. OISC VM - A "One Instruction Set CPU" virtual machine and assembler. - http://simonpstevens.com/projects/oiscvm

2. Web Gallery Processor - An ASP.Net MVC project that builds image galleries from folders of images - http://simonpstevens.com/Projects/WebGalleryProcessor

3. Ph-Air Hockey - An air hockey game for Windows Phone 7 - http://simonpstevens.com/Projects/PhAirHockey

+ some other smaller stuff from time to time - http://simonpstevens.com/projects
How David Segal Went from Zero to 500 Employees in 3 Years
It's a bit hard for me to believe that there are programmers, who dont understand Pointers!

Though I am still in school, I feel everyone should understand how Memory works.

My assumption is that everyone should at least know about:

1. Pointers and their physical meaning

2. Difference between Process specific virtual memory and physical memory

3. Difference between Static, Stack and Heap Memory.

4. Also it is important to understand what happens when a disk access is required, and difference between Random reads and Sequential reads.

5. Bonus if you can understand, how swapfs is utilized and L2,L3 cache work.
US senators introduce online privacy 'bill of rights'
The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are?

It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
Why spend money when you don't have to? Go direct to the relevant UK authority at http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/, read the guidance notes carefully and incorporate away. Pay special attention to your articles of association as they're akin to a constitution for your business. Also, you'll need a registered office in the UK that documents can be delivered to.

Experience: UK resident who set his own Limited company up
Will those citywide buses get you out to the suburbs, where you might live? How often do they run? What are the odds of sitting in a bag of someone's excrement?

Honestly, I don't know. I live in town, not in the suburbs, so I don't know the routes all that well. And I like driving, so I rarely take a bus... but from what I've seen, the answer to that last question is "pretty low."

Still, point taken that there is a large variation in terms of the quality of service in public transport...
Yeah right now there's a page that sells the upgrade but people can only get to it after they login. http://tasskr.com/upgrade Know of some good examples of sites that setup expectations?
Is an Incubator Right for Me?
I met a guy (a very early Adobe employee, might have been a co-founder) who, on his 65th birthday, was seriously considering doing another startup.

Every time I think I'm too old, I try to remember that.
Does giving away half your startup for $1,000 in writing count?
Breaking News  Italy Loot To Become Giftable
You're very persistent but I'm afraid you're still wrong :-)

Firstly, I gave unicode as a simple example of the lengths that people could go to in order to swear. But it's actually even easier than that in practice. I you want to ban the word X then I can replace it with a slight misspelling which carries the same intent - and when you ban that a naughty user will just pick another one.

(Bad words aren't the problem we should address, it's the intention behind words which is the real problem.)

Secondly, the Scunthorpe problem is more severe than you realise and can't be solved by considering only whole words. For example, some words have more than one meaning: "tit", "gay", "sod", "knob", "cock", "prick", etc. Some or all of those words would be filtered out by a naive filter.

There's also the additional problem that people may not necessarily agree on whether a word is a swear word or not (even if it does not have multiple meanings like the examples I listed below).

For example, in 1977 the Sex Pistols won a court case about the title of their album "Never Mind the Bollocks" in which it was ruled that "bollocks" is not obscene in the UK (but may of course still be considered obscene in other countries!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Obscenity_court_ruling

And finally, some words mean different things in different coutries. For example, the word "fanny" means one thing in the US and quite another in the UK.

Naive filtering of swear words is never going to work.
Heh, sorry, bro. I almost put FL, but in my mind, Florida has a distinctive culture that separates it a bit from Georgia, Mississippi, etc. Maybe that's just because I tend to think "South Florida" when I think of Florida... since I'm a Miami Dolphins die-hard. :-)
Last time I tried to look at Glassdoor it just required you to provide information to get information. Once you provided a salary, you could access salaries for a year.
You could apply the same techniques to comments. Voting up comments I enjoy reading would promote comments I like (and hopefully drown out the ones I don't). Whether this would look at the contents of the comments or just increase the weight of the commentator is up for discussion.
If I'm reading it correctly (and I'm not a Rails guy so I may be mistaken) they're making CoffeeScript the default scripting language for Rails. This strikes me as a really unfortunate decision.

There's a world of difference between fully supporting something and making it your default. Making newcomers jump through hoops to get regular javascript instead of CS (another language in which they may not be familiar) just seems like a poorly thought out plan. As someone pointed out in the GitHub comments; this is just like making HAML and SASS the defaults over HTML & CSS.

I'm not saying anything negative about these libraries; I'm certainly not an authority on them and can't speak to their effectiveness. However, the net result of a default change such as this one is reduced accessibility to newcomers.

Of course, if I'm reading it wrong and this is really just adding support for CoffeeScript to Rails, then disregard everything I just said. :)

Edit: well, don't disregard it--remember it for the future!
Ted worked at fog creek until very recently. He's also an OpenBSD contribiuter. I'm inclined to agree with his opinions regarding the relative value of C at fog creek.

I did an internship there but didnt ever look directly at wasabi. I know that it's not really in active development (only FogBugz even uses it) though so even if K&R hacked it up themselves, I'd argue it's not really important there anymore.
Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Fortunately, they created a search engine that let me find the class in question: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ It's Java programming.
- Add a plans & pricing section. All I see is "Sign up for a free account" with no mention of prices. So, I assume it's free for full access.

- Add a demo. People like trying stuff before having to sign up.

- Add more screenshots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems
Robert Harper from CMU, eloquently expresses the same notion:
"One of the classic pitfalls of teaching recursion is to try to explain it by referring to some mysterious entity called a “stack” that is absolutely invisible in the program you write. There’s a long song and dance about “frames” and “procedure calls” and “pushing” and “popping” things on this “stack” of which the professor speaks, and no one understands a damn thing. It all sounds very complicated, and impressive in a way, but if there’s one thing people learn, it’s to stay the hell away from it! And in doing so, students are robbed of one of the most powerful and useful programming tools available to them, the key to writing clean, reliable code".
more: http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-dog-that...
Add Your Own Folders to Favorites in Windows 7
Once you open Explorer in Windows 7 you will see a list of Favorites in the Navigation window. Microsoft has previously put some there, but in the present day I show you how to get rid of them and add
There is a tremendous difference between aversion to risk and complete foolishness with allocation of time and resources.
As I understand it it's a salary pool for HN users. I'm an HN user, and I put in my salary. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I'm not really expecting that anyone is seriously going to try to use the average salary of HN users for negotiation purposes. But even assuming they were, it appears there are at least a few others who are in my boat. That's relevant information, yes?
As someone who's been regularly interviewing Stanford students and grads for internships and full-time positions, it's worth pointing out that lots of these CS students don't want to program. I've been surprised at how many of them are getting a CS education as a platform for a career in product management, or even marketing.

It makes some sense, given the makeup of the companies that are exciting to work for nowadays. I think especially if you want to join an early-stage startup, there are lots of benefits to having a technical education, even if your role isn't expressly technical.
The reason the fines are so high is that risk of getting caught is infinitesimal. This is the same reason they had to raise fines for honking in NY in non-emergencies to $500 to get people to stop. The appropriate fine should be something like

(damage to society) <= (fine) * (risk of getting caught)
I think almost everybody would say that there is no age limit for start-ups if pressed. But I do also think that a lot of the people who say that still have the mental image of a startup being a bunch of young adults with passionate dreams.

I don't understand, what's with the grammatical errors and capital letters all over the title text? Is there some sort of wordplay I'm missing?
There isn't be a bubble until Facebook IPOs. If there were really a bubble, Facebook would have IPOed already.
2010 Internet Advertising Hit $26 Billion, Display Grew Twice as Fast As Search
Who are suing the company and why.
I thought the entire point was to become a PGA golfer ...
I never understand why JPEG XR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR) didn't take off. It seems that Microsoft really has some management problem to push things forward or they simply don't care that much about it after all.
Interesting article, but it misses a big issue.

If found out, the competitor may engage in counter Intelligence. It might have been more prudent for the company to keep the garbage man supplying the other side with information.
Hmmmm. Given a language X that is not used in actual development in an organization, at what point does interviewing with whiteboard coding in X become just another credential?

I like (FTA): "So I’ve picked a question that forces candidates to design a data structure" . . . "I’ll continue conducting my interviews in the language of the candidate’s choice"

As an even more general question to hackers here, what would impress you more? A candidate who comes in, whiteboards out an algorithm and data structure in C to solve a problem, or a candidate solves the same problem in Clojure?

Particularly if your org uses neither of those two languages :-) Of course, you have to grok the different paradigms you might use in both languages or you'll probably be unable to make a decent judgment.
I would agree. Though C is far from useless, it really isn't used here at the Creek. Which was a double bonus for me, since after 6 years immersed in C and C++ I could find a job that let me do something new but that I felt very comfortable interviewing for. That said, I really don't believe you need lots of C experience to do well in our interviews.

My full response to Ben is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442696.
I think that AOL/Huff has actually been fairly distinct in how badly they have handled these layoffs. It seems like "Transition 101" to share the fired/staying personell information all at once. To drag it out over any period of time just seems extremely odd.
This looks great.

Ideas for the future...

- improve formatting of the list (right justify numbers
for example)
- slider to allow us to cut off low and high outliers
when looking at averages/charts/etc
- display mean/mode/median/stdev [1] (which take into
account above filtering)
- chart results
- ability to add a timeout for entries (only accept new
salaries for X days before locking)
- countdown timer on entry page
- ability to send semi-anonymous invites from within the
app
- allow tags or something for the user starting the
survey to add things like industry, general location,
etc
- allow OP to write a brief blurb about what to include.
for example, "base salary only", "salary plus expected
bonus",)

This kind of data can be extremely valuable if you can convince your users their privacy is secure and likewise convince your clients (job boards and the like) that it's accurate.

[edit]... I see you're a job posting company so I guess you already know how valuable this sort of info is[/edit]

[1] Nice article on averages (if you're not already familiar with the pros and cons of the different types: http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-analyze-data-usin...
Normally, I'm skeptical of "change the syntax and your life will magically get better, no matter how headachey interacting with the rest of the world will become", but then Thomas showed me Sass and it was lifechanging. (After you've gotten around Sass, CSS looks like Assembly code to a web programmer. I mean, sure, you could write it... but you'd need a damn good reason to. If you haven't tried it yet, make yourself an excuse for a weekend project -- it will make your life better.) Has anyone found CoffeeScript to be lifechanging?
Yup, I'm hoping to get into more complex stuff the more I learn.
Haha I know it was fun writing that title.
At my school, CS is the 6th most popular major (out of 135). That's a big deal, especially since we aren't necessarily a tech school (BYU). They haven't had trouble placing grads yet, but they are starting to get worried too.

Meanwhile, EE and CpE are pretty low. Definitely below the job market's demand.
Yeah, well, hate to be a partybreaker and I personally love that "Goot, not Evil" clause, but in the world of lawyers jokes do not exist. It's cute, but for serious software keep the licensing simple.
Yes, CoffeeScript is amazing. No more headaches over missing semi-colons, callbacks feel significantly less "spaghetti-like". Syntactically it feels much cleaner and I've found that I end up staying much nearer to the left margin than I did with JavaScript.

Debugging has not been a problem for me yet, the generated JavaScript is very clean and easy to navigate.

That being said, I'm a Python fan, so I consider significant whitespace to be a feature, not an irritant.
By default, really?

I don't like the idea neither I'm a Rails developer, but I think that this will increase the learning curve.

Let it be just a choice.
To be honest with you it's a doddle and you can't really go wrong. There's only one relevant kind of company - a private limited company. Forming the company takes about ten minutes and the formation should be confirmed by Companies House within four hours.

You don't necessarily need an accountant. You can do all of your tax returns online and you can use your annual CT600 tax return as your return for Companies House. The annual return is just a few pages and can be completed by anyone who can read the explanatory notes. Hiring staff is only marginally more complex and HMRC provide a suite of software to help you manage payroll, income tax and national insurance. The only real gotcha is remembering to register for VAT if your sales within the EU exceed £73,000 in any 12-month period - at that point you may wish to consult an accountant to get your VAT accounting straight, as mistakes with VAT can get expensive quickly.

As a web app startup your tax affairs are likely to be as simple as they get and I'd suggest contacting your local HMRC office for advice - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how helpful they are and how straightforward tax is for small companies. They run regular training days at local tax offices for new companies and employers which are well worth attending even if you plan on using an accountant.
not one mention of The Social Network movie or if a chunk of this influx is looking for a career at making iPhone apps?
I've definitely received a few e-mails from startups who have launched since I put my e-mail in on their Launchrock page...but I love his idea to e-mail people once a month to update on progress and ask for feedback/help.
I had a lot of fun reading through and seeing the progression of the games. I hope to start something like this someday. Keep it up!!
Great Depression was a period of technological innovation
I don't know if I'd consider it life-changing for the world of client-side javascript (I have yet to use it there), but using it in the callback-filled universe that is Node.js, its simplified and clean syntax is worlds better.
Totally agree - and the HAML/SASS argument is perfect. We talk a lot about web standards and doing things that are "native" to the web, but abstracting things like HTML/CSS/javascript (by default) don't fit with that mindset.

I like CoffeeScript, and it does feel Rubyesque, but I just don't support it being the default.

That said, I'm sure a core member will post about the decision, and I almost hope they convince me otherwise. I do really like CoffeeScript, and patio11's comment about HAML/SASS is a good one.
Remember the whole Hipster ordeal? I think sometimes it's a test of how viral a landing page can be.
This guy.

Switching from Rails (et al) to Express (et al) can be a challenging prospect. Not having to give up your floaty modern scripting language syntax is a serious incentive. That aside from the fact that CoffeeScript almost forces you to write better JavaScript.
The issue behind the scene here is that AOL is creating significant financial liability under U.S. labor law when it tries to shift paid workers to "free" unpaid workers. I'm sure that's why AOL fired the editor, it had nothing to do with the internet blowback, rather legal had to circle the wagons to protect AOL corporate from future lawsuits for backpay.
This seems the sum of most of HN posts.

Any individual who answers these honestly about himself can see precisely where the shortcomings of one's plans are.
Looks like someone forgot an 'o' in the title there.
Facebook hasn't IPO'd because there is no value for them to do so. They have enough liquidity on the secondary markets to keep employees happy and they are able to keep investments coming through alternative means. All an IPO would do would be to increase their paperwork.
There's no C in Wasabi; it's pure C#. That said, keep in mind that Wasabi's only purpose in life is as a compatibility shim so that we weren't forced to rewrite FogBugz from scratch. No products other than FogBugz will ever be written in the language. Kiln, for example, is C#/Python/JavaScript.
Chef and MIT Starcluster
I've had friends who took the intro to CS class (just a basic sample of programming, in python) and they just could not understand the material. They worked hard, but it was just difficult to get concepts as simple as conventional variable naming and keywords (ie, they though every variable had to have a certain naming scheme or the program wouldn't run.)

Some people just don't have an aptitude for programming. Just like I don't have an aptitude for graphic design.
StackOverflow once blocked the entire country I'm in (would just return a 403). I emailed them and was told they can re-enable it:

"It's not a problem, I just need reassurance that there won't be RssNotifiers hitting us 1,000 times a day and pulling down uncompressed data."

To be fair, I'm sure they have more important things to do than work on complex rate limiting and abuse detection code, especially for edge cases like small countries or EC2.
The CS parts may not be directly useful, but there are other benefits. Things like organization and logic are useful for people to be familiar with.
Arguably, newcomers to whom using CS instead of JS would be a challenge are precisely those who should be encouraged to switch.

That aside, yes, I do think you're reading it wrong— since CoffeScript compiles straight into JS, there isn't really any meaningful way for it to "replace" it. It's just adding a layer on top.
Customer Stories: I Want A Discount For Ordering Less
Merlin Season 3 Episode 8 
Merlin Season 3 Episode 8
Merlin's World is back. Merlin Season 3 episode 8 with it. Merlin Season 3 Episode 8 is here and will hit television screens next Friday
The $0 don't really hurt anything. Someone who makes 60K and puts in 100K does a lot more damage.
Blog post length != blog post quality.
Here's the letter I wrote to my local MP. People are welcome to appropriate any bits of it to form their own indignant letters to elected representatives, if they like:

http://www.plsadventures.com/2011/04/i-dont-usually-post-non...
Damn cool video-Aurora Borelias
Nice idea. Topic will always bring hot debates, but glassdoor is doing a pretty good job.

Apologies for a bit off topic, but I built a bit different site in Poland, where you can actually vote on salaries for job offers based on the location / job content / role / company name (if known) for job offers from various websites, where in salary field it says "atractive" or "high" etc. Have a look http://www.jakapensja.pl (in Polish)
Not programming => Programming
Wish I could give you more points for "must mention actual company name (not just the recruitment agency)"

One of the ways I even find out that a company exists and uses technology <insert your favorite> is to look in the job listings in my area.

Do non-tech job boards wind up with the same amount of recruiter spam I see at the big boards? Or is it some magical artifact of tech recruiting that has staffing companies chomping at the 20% bit of salary to do placements . . .