skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Design Patterns is mischaracterized as a "classic text of computer science". It's only 14 years old (which rules out some definitions of 'classic'), not nearly so profound as TAOCP and SICP (the other two books in your list), and it would be a stretch to say it's about computer science.

Computer Science != Software Engineering.

I would follow up by saying that, no matter how wonderful Road to Reality is, it's also not about CS, and GEB only overlaps the field.

An incorrectly titled post, perhaps?
Sister of Python Hacker arrested for protest - His essay on protest and change
These seems like a variation on Internet Rule 34.

No matter what you think is a down-side or turn-off, someone has or will soon make a Web business off of it.
I honestly think too much emphasis is placed on fixed questions and a particular style of interviewing. I've had a huge amount of success with improvised interviews that have both conversational elements drawn from the candidate's resume and some kind of problem solving task drawn from the type of work they will be doing.
Introducing the Online Desktop
Let me fix my question: if theres no downvote, how is it possible to have -1?
> Furthermore it was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the internet.

Good thing no other company offers this trifecta. Or if they do, they must be really small, for the German government not to have heard of them.
There are downvotes. You just haven't acquired enough karma yet to be able to do so.
This is pretty cool. I like the dashboard vs. the basic one. I can use this.
Really agree with the substance of this article - I'm always keen to jump to a DSL when looking at a problem.

Even if thinking about it is as far as I get, it invariably helps me clarify the solution (more than most techniques I've tried).
Interesting.

But what if they starting just charging me out the nose again?
I feel like this has been done before in the early to mid 1900s with the industrial revolution. It seems like there are a lot of benefits to this, but also a lot of problems.

For example, the company may be 'generous' in housing its employees, but the employees are de facto owned by the company when their housing, food, etc. are derived from their workplace.

Furthermore, what happens if the employee is fired or the company goes out of business?
It's completely full of junk and I sit in the living room with my laptop in my easy chair. Except today, as I'm on the BlackBerry sitting outside by the garden with the dog in the sun. :)

Actually, my room is fairly full of electronics stuff: oscilloscopes, computer hardware, small electronics tools. I'm too ashamed of the mess to show it, as I haven't cracked the organization aspect yet. Insofar as I have, I'd say small organizers for binnable items (LEDs, resistors, little rubber feet), and pegboard for cable management under the desk, and horizontal surfaces (layered when possible) seem to be key to making it work. I would say having a place for everything is 90% of it and keeping everything in said place is 10%.
Ubuntu 8.04 on my Dell D830 has decent hibernation (never use sleep or suspend, so I don't know it they are good).

It seems that assorted issues come up because of various hardware configuration: video card, wifi, sound card, etc. But as of now I'm quite happy with my Kubuntu laptop.
Dropbox Invites for Clever Code
Microsoft is trying to build a large ad business also. Why would they release an ad blocker?

I doubt we will ever see an ad blocker from any commercial entity. Unless, of course, ad blocking is the only motivator behind the entire business. Somehow, I don't really expect that either. Consumers of ad blocking software probably wouldn't be the kind of people who pay for things like that :-)
How Twitter Will be Worth $1.5 Billion by Next Year
Google at 10: Larry, Sergey & Me
Last laptop purchase had me seriously looking at macs, but I ended up getting an OS-free Dell D830 because it offered 1920x1200 15in screen and the clit mouse, both unavailable on macbooks.

I did spend a fair amount of time dicking with things to get a few things working Just So, though Ubuntu 8.04 seems to have fixed most of my previous annoyances.
Is Search Really 90% Solved?
24 hours without Google
I was always told I was smart when I was a kid, and very little focus was put on seeing things through or being a hard worker (other than conceptually).

Anecdote in support of the article's hypothesis: I'm blabbing about myself instead of working on a cool idea I had this morning. Sigh.
http://twitpic.com/ao6r
No there is no guarantee. However in the past it is safe to say that, on average, the human evolutionary path involved an increase in intelligence. Whether that is 'the tale' I will leave to poetic license. I did this to disprove the notion that beings could not produce beings of greater intelligence in the parent post. To disprove a general statement you only have to show one contrary instance.

Here is a link you may find useful

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84655
Central Planning fails. Sorry to break the bad news.
DSL's are great as long as you don't take them too far towards the "natural language" style of coding.

For example, I find RSpec's story runner uncomfortable to work with because of the overly English-like syntax it uses.

This blog post has some "before and after" code showing the same tests/specs implemented at unit tests, and as Rspec stories:

http://evang.eli.st/blog/2007/9/1/user-stories-with-rspec-s-...

To me the heavily DSL-oriented story code is easier to read as far as intent, but as a programmer trying to figure out what the code is actually doing, it's sort of a big WTF.

Dave Thomas has an interesting writeup on "DSL's going too far" at:

http://pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com/pragdave/2008/03/the-lang...
"Python advocate"...pft.

I'm an advocate of open source tools. Who has the time or the motivation to be an advocate for one specific technology unless they're developing it themselves?

Don't get me wrong, I use Python on an almost daily basis and like the language. But the only "advocacy" I practice is by example.
I've always worked on the floor - I think it's regressing to childhood where I did homework on the floor in front of the TV. Good to see at least one person is similar.
The fact that they are trying to build an ad business can be countered with the fact that they have not yet built an ad business _successfully_.

As such they don't really lose anything by taking away Google's core business in the form of an ad blocker. Microsoft has always been very worried about Google, and Balmer has compared Microsoft and Google as rivals in the software industry. If Microsoft can leverage their control over browsers in IE8 with an ad blocker, then they can potentially take a large chunk out of Google's bottom line, and make Google a much weaker 'rival'.
Ask YC: Where to find a movie, restaurant, music or hotel database?
I'm wondering if anyone has found or licensed for commercial purposes a good data set for movies (e.g., IMDB, allmovies), restaurants (e.g., infoUSA, yellowpages?), music (e.g., allmusic), hotels, or any other area where you might want a reference file with item names and details.

Whose data sets were good and bad? What terms could you negotiate?
someone knows btw if there is an alternative to google adwords for web startups? for instance, what ad platform would suit Hacker News?
> Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.

It is also possible that each individual neuron in the brain is stupid! They don't have any idea of whatever task is being processed, human intelligence is just the result of random connections being made and reinforced by positive feedback.

> But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.

I think it would accurate to say that the fitness functions are more difficult to define and perhaps they are not available at on such a constant basis. But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.

I general I think that whenever a decision making process is automated it tends to lose it's mystic and people then view it less as intelligence and more as a dumb process. Yes chess is just a baby step but it does demonstrate that something that humans used to think of as a significant indicator of intelligence can be achieved.
Long-Term Capital: It’s a Short-Term Memory
I was replying to a comment not the parent post. The one where the guy proposed that it would be impossible for humans to create anything smarter than ourselves. Sometimes the indentation on comments can be a little tough to keep up with.
I was in the exact same position you are now. I went to the University of Florida and received a degree in finance. I have always had an interest in computers, physics, and mathematics.

It took me three years to finally make the decision to go back to school. I am now pursuing a second and third BS (mathematics and physics), however, I am applying to grad school for 2009. I am hoping that the work I have done since returning to school will be enough to get me into a program for which I don't have an undergraduate degree.

My recommendation is this: If you are really interested in mathematics and computer science, pick up a copy of How to Prove It by Daniel Velleman. Work through every single problem. If you don't enjoy doing the proofs, scratch mathematics off of your list. I can't speak about the computer science side of things, but maybe someone could add a respone to mine for a suitable computer science book.
I don't understand what your trying to say here...
Another example: Applescript
the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect) says we are getting smarter in a very real sense.

Are Flynn-Effect gains g gains?
At some point, AI researchers are going to have trouble breathing Earth's atmosphere

Why might that be?
Great look for stealth site, according to Scobleizer
I assumed he means "advocate" in the same way that someone is an advocate for their favorite music/movies. I see nothing wrong with that.
is it even legal to create an ad blocker or use one?

assuming it's altering the content of the site it's directly violating the copyright of the site.
Haha, fine, an avid Python fan.

In my world, which is dominated by C, C++, and Java, advocating agile technologies can be well worth my time.
Tell YC: Mjam West Coast Tour
We're a startup from Vienna, and in September 2008 we'll be touring the West Coast to

* meet friends.
* hang out with cool hackers.
* attend a wedding.
* do serious internet business.
* eat lots of burritos and cupcakes.
* court investors.
* give talks.
* show off our robots.

If you're active in the local tech scene and passionate about what you're doing, we'd love to meet/visit you during our trip! Book quality time with us!

Please also tell us if you know people that you think we should meet!
The article isn't too controversial, although it's a bit idealistic about DSLs -- In a previous job I've worked in an environment with a DSL (incidentally, it was wrapped in a really restrictive GUI that was the first to go) that was ok in the trivial case but was greatly restricted by the language designer's lack of forethought. For example, it was not possible to operate on certain things using the inbuilt looping construct. We ended up replacing the DSL with Perl for this and performance reasons.

Perhaps slightly off topic but vastly more interesting to me is the root of the trouble with GUIs. We saw that GUI demo in the 60s, nothing happened for 20 years until PARC and we've spent the next 30 years moving the close button around and deciding how to word the Save File dialog box. Where is the innovation here? Why are virtually all languages implemented in 7-bit ASCII and a monospaced font? Why is programmatic control or recording of GUI actions almost always an afterthought?

In a former employment life I saw mockups of brainstorming effort to envision the future of the command line. The team's efforts mostly looked like trivial window decoration changes -- the terminal window itself was still ASCII (utf8 or whatever probably), 80x25, and monochrome. Why?

Much as mankind's hand has spread invasive plant species to virtually all soil on the earth, rendering it largely similar on most continents, the curse of POSIX is that it has choked out a lot of computing/OS design. Mindless (or unambitious) mimicry of the Mac/Windows in the GUI world has given us beige on that once beautiful frontier as well.

I guess it's not a bad place to be, but you wonder how else it might have turned out.
Chrome is an OS in the same sense that the Java VM is an OS. In other words, none to speak of.
OK, well that would not work in this country (Australia): 3 words: "Fringe Benefits Tax" - most likely would end up behind tax wise (definately will not be better off), and most definitely with a much greater compliance burden.
Kind of a form of golden handcuffs. Although not golden.
I think that depends. If Chrome actually enabled features otherwise impossible, they might. At least they'd have a rational reason too (as would all developers). Maybe Gears is more of a candidate for this.
Negative Karma-points for each duplicate post.
Look, there's merit to this article, but if it's really necessary to post it to the front page of Hacker News, I'm sure SICP deserves mention as well.
Yes, Dweck's work is pretty cool.

I wrote something (with a cool graph by Holmes) about this a while ago:

http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mind...

Still gets the most hits on my site after over a year..
So if we can have something that is just like the person who invents an equal-to-humanity intelligence, but operating a hundred times faster, with perfect recall, and able to shut down senses or arbitrarily reorder goals, you don't think we could tell this being "Do what your meatspace predecessor did, approximately" and have something even faster, in less time than the original took? And that this process couldn't be repeated?
I agree that using a DSL isn't an automatic thing.

However, I think there would be an equal number of counter-examples - cases where a problem has been shoe-horned into an existing language to the point that it become illegible.

(In fact, you could argue this happens more often than not).
The once clear meaning of "operating system" has become vague with today's software stack, but that's a semantic debate.

The web is undeniably an application platform and in that capacity, it is improved significantly by Chrome.

The most successful web applications, social and communication apps, would likely have never existed on the desktop.

There is also a broad class of desktop apps that have no forseeable migration path to the web such as rich media editing (photo/audio/video/etc) and games.

Which apps will make the leap from desktop to web is a subject ripe for speculation, but it's not going to be all of them. Such hyperbolic revolutionary fantasies always go unfulfilled.
btw feedback on the tour idea is very welcome! what can we do to make the most of our time in and around the valley?

also it looks like there's a news.yc bug triggered by our domain? (.mjam.at) instead of (mjam.at).
There is no such thing, in this economy, as a qualified home buyer . . . who MUST have a mortgage to purchase.
Can I ask what you mean by this?

Just trying to get a better understanding of your position.
Clean desk. neat bed, organized room enough for desktop, server and laptop. Creative posters. Fans for cooling.
Cutting-Edge Tech Startup Founders Tell All (1775)
I expected better comments here. I think Marc's right to be excited and I've also been waiting for this for a while. Now that it's here, though, I'm underwhelmed. I think if they had worked with Firefox instead, the outcome would have been great, but as it is, it doesn't offer tangible benefits that are apparent enough to any normal user that would justify a switch. In other words, this is one of those exciting things that no one will remember in six months.
Before: http://fuzzyshot.com/dkokelley/post/zpeM5KGvvn/photo/6PnHjhM...

After: http://fuzzyshot.com/dkokelley/post/HQsw5xt2yd/photo/1ZSu6IQ...

And the desk: http://fuzzyshot.com/dkokelley/post/vDo6FGezfF/photo/TRLWCje...

It's a little private (it's my room), but I figure it would be neat to share here. Having things organized helps me to think, and my room was not organized (but now it is).

Some background info: I live at home while I'm going to school. My brother just moved out (we shared that room, and the desk was where his computer used to go), so I now have 'ownership' over that room, meaning I can't expect anyone else to mess up or clean the room but myself, so I'd better make sure it's clean.

Finally: The mess on the top of the bed is stuff that belongs to my brother, so I can't really clean it up. He'll get it later. Also, there's a closet to the right that isn't as clean as the rest of the room. I just shut the doors when I want to think.
this is old...the "reward the work" meme has been floating around for a while

but make sure your kids' school emphasizes this....your kids spend forty hours a week, their most alert and focused hours at school
Of course it is legal. Is it illegal to throw away the advertisements from your newspaper before you read it?
Right on. This is where lisp shines. Since inbuilt special forms and added libraries are indistinguishable from each other and since advanced functionality like macros are available, it allows one to write a DSL in lisp.

Its very nice.

PS. This is also why GUIs will never beat the terminal. Now if only someone would apply this to web services. ubiquity et al. are a nice start.
Clojure's approach to Identity and State.
That seems sad. I wish someone had a solution as to a viable method to effect change in government.
You may want more recent resources about Python, because Python has changed significantly since 1997.

Mark Pilgrim's book Dive Into Python (Also free online at http://diveintopython.org) is a pretty good intro to the language, and does a good job of exploring its strengths.

(And, seriously, people. #1?)
No politics, please (especially not of the whiny-extremist variety).

The fact that the guy has occasionally whacked together a few lines of python doesn't make it relevant.
Back at ya: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

Sexual activity aside, human creative activity did not 'produce beings of greater intelligence'.
Finally, a post on anarchism on HN that doesn't imply anarchism means "being greedy."
More Artists Steer Clear of iTunes
Why no politics?
My workstation. My wife calls it "the bridge".

Posted once before in the "screen shots" thread. Seems appropriate here as well.

http://www.jonandkarrie.com/images/P8087198.JPG
Never? It's open source. I'll give it a month.
He thinks Google is unlikely to invest much in enterprise applications, because profit per employee is much lower than in its advertisement-financed consumer business.

I know this isn't the article's centre of gravity, but...

It bugs me to hear this thrown around so easily. There is no existing business model that produces that type of cash from online advertising. Search is the exception. Not the rule. Google's hedging bets, tying their hands but at the end of the day, these free web services will either need to be:

1. subsidised by a giant (like google does now) for whatever reasons they can get together

2. very cheap to run. IE web-services will replace companies many times their size, taking only a fraction over the revenues. You can always get some revenue from ads.

3. paid for by users

4. a business model will emerge that will do for apps what overture/adwords did for search.

I wouldn't be putting all my shells on 4. Unless i'm missing something.

Gmail is probably one of the 'best-bet' ad-supported apps. If it was a yearbook, they might get 'most likely to succeed' Anyone have an idea how much they make?
Dude, second law of thermodynamics at work. Its not your fault that the disorderliness of the closed system tends to a maximum.
I prefer Pages to Word, but page layout is a part of any modern word processor.

Zoho is the worst. It's ugly and unpleasant to use. Part of being a word processor is not a matter of features, it's a matter of appealing to users. I'd pick Notepad to Zoho. Anything that doesn't have that horrendous aesthetic.
I guess it would depend on how you define solved. I'd say it's close enough that I don't find myself trying search engines other than Google these days.
I've developed a handful of things using APEX and their webservices API.

I've found APEX is a weird combination of a Java-like language, and you query their database with a goofy, SQL like syntax. But the language isn't Java, and the syntax isn't SQL. This is very odd, because you are locked in to their weird crap, and it is pretty much crap, for a task that could easily be done using regular sql and a regular database. Instead you trade simple and known techniques for something obscure, incompatible and poorly documented, which is basically just different enough from sql and java to be incompatible (you use single quotes instead of double quotes in APEX, to make writing the weird sql like queries easier for someone who doesn't know how to escape a character I guess).

And what do you get for all this tradeoff? Basically simple CRUD operations on simple 'contact' datatypes.

It is a miserable piece of shit, hodgepodged together with seemingly no rhyme or reason, and the 'documentation' is basically a list of examples you can cut and paste and modify without really increasing your understanding.

Visiting their forums, you suddenly realize the meaning of the term 'cargo cult programming'. I have seen many examples of code submitted as 'answers' that even a cursory glance at revealed line upon line of unreachable or otherwise no-effect code, and so on.

Salesforce.com is, in other words, MS Access for the internet age.
I agree with the kid.

School is supposed to teach you things. The important part is whether you learn those things, not whether you are willing to demonstrate repeatedly, ad nauseam that you have already (and usually long ago) learned those things. I was the kid in the example; I excelled on tests, and continue to, through a combination of basic common sense and having actuallyunderstood the subject matter, and found my own uses for it, outside of the curriculum.

When you can understand, and apply, concepts just by reading the textbook (or the appropriate Wikipedia article), this obviates the need for both teachers, lessons and homework. Those in power like that even less than the teachers themselves, and created the No Child Left Ahead act to "fix" this.
If the government is going to file charges against the protesters for "conspiracy to riot", shouldn't the people that were maced for holding a flower file charges against the government for assault? I would. The way you "beat the system" is not by standing around holding a flower -- you beat it by ruining the pepper-spraying guy's life. Once people's lives start getting ruined for hurting people exercising their right to free expression, they're going to stop doing it. (As an aside, I have some savings that I call "fuck you" money. It's so that if I'm ever arrested, I can pay a good lawyer to get the charges dropped quickly. Generally a good idea, I think.)

BTW, at the '68 DNC, the government lost its case against the protesters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven

Unfortunately, the charges against the cops didn't stick either, which is probably why things like this keep happening.
The idea is a very limited universe. Telling the same story with the same tools. Repetition without repetition. Repetition is one of the most effective ways of changing how people feel about something.