skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
programmers who have a good understanding of scheme and SICP are likely to pick up programming in python (or equivalent such as C#, Java, etc.) anyway - either on their own, or through industry experience.

it is a shame that csci is shifting away from teaching fundamentals to teaching syntax. it would be like teaching art with color-by-numbers.
Have you ever been in a moving big-rig at 65 mph? It's terrifying to be a passenger; you can only imagine the balls it takes to pilot one. If you don't think it's any scarier than driving to work, you should talk to a trucker. Ever hear of a runaway truck lane? You think a truck driver going over the Rockies in pitch black night with nobody around doesn't have to overcome a sense of self-preservation?
I'm willing to bet that's AI-Complete.
Did the Earth's lost moon create the Lunar Highlands?
You're conflating two issues. An individual can be in support of protecting intellectual property and against our current laws that implement said protection.
I'm not sure the analogy is entirely wrong. SICP presents computer programming in a magnificent way -- it gets to the core of why it is interesting on a philosophical level and in this way it will never be entirely irrelevant.
No, I definitely agree with this. Scheme is a valuable pedagogical tool.

But that probably doesn't matter. So it's better, on the whole, to preserve what you can out of the current book by adapting it to Python than losing it completely.

Things will get lost in translation and substantive changes will have to be made. That's why writing textbooks is a creative endeavor rather than just updating the English used in older texts.
Hmm, the model I found on their site said 38 and change. Perhaps there is another model? I don't see another one.
pro- or anti-patent aside, this post sounds to me more like Google is really not confident in winning the current lawsuits around Android against its competitors.

As this blog is definitely not just a random rant against patent from some random lawyer. Its intention is more interesting. Is Google crying out loud just because it sees the patent system unjust? or is it really because they believe they are gonna lose most of their android related lawsuits, so they want to cry "its unfair!" earlier before the final whistle? just a thought...
Anti-competition isn't an empirically observable phenomena. In theory it was supposed to serve the consumer, but there is a disconnect between the alleged intention and reality. Kind of a big problem. Preventing a company from offering a free product in no way serves the consumer.

I don't want to imply google is more ethical than the competition, but in this instance calling for an abolition of patents is in line with my personal views, which is markets should serve the consumer. I have no unconditional support for any of these companies.
Gel kinsei
Well a three element array does solve that but there are better ways still.

http://www.starling-software.com/blogimg/tsac/1011/fremlin-t...

In my opinion the idea that there is a division between functional and non-functional programming at all comes because of a disagreement or misunderstanding with the principles of SICP: C is a perfectly functional programming language if you say that each statement is a function from machine state to machine state. . .
I'm not saying your conclusions are wrong, but Microsoft is also setting records every quarter, yet I think many would be skeptical about microsoft's future.
When it was first announced, Steve Jobs said it would be an 'open standard', which is why I said apparently.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/07/apple_announce...
If that's what a school wants to do, then it should just discontinue CS and rename it software engineering.

Actually, my old school had such a major...
This is one of a very very small number of programming-related articles I've ever been glad to read. Programming should be taught as an approach to problem-solving and structured logical thinking, not as an approach to a particular language.

If you can understand the core concepts of programming, the individual languages begin to matter a lot less. Python is great. Java is great. C++ is great. But they are just tools for solving classes of problems; if you don't understand how to, as the author says by way of example, deconstruct problems and understand the advantages and disadvantages of various solutions, then the software you write will never be as efficient or as elegant as it could be.

There is a compelling argument that, in the age of nearly limitless computing resources, it doesn't matter anyway. You will in all likelihood be a glue programmer: you'll rely on APIs and libraries, most of which have been written by someone else, and you will simply string them together by applying the functions that most obviously address whatever problem you're trying to solve. Who cares, really, if you're using Quicksort or heap sort, you're just going to call sort() on your array (or map, or key-value store, or whatever), and define a callback function that will evaluate any two given values in the array to be sorted, and that's it. Who cares if one requires a little more memory than the other, or a little more time to execute?

Just knock it out, and then get back to arguing online about the One True Language, or the One True Framework.

But, I've been programming for about 25 years now, in dozens of languages, and I can't help but feel that this language-specific approach to programming is producing anemic programmers.

Programming can be a craft; in can be done well, and elegantly. I can hack together a decent, reasonably strong wooden workbench for my shop, but it doesn't possess the same craftsmanship as a dedicated wood worker. It does the job, but it is ugly and uninspiring, and nobody admires it.

So, I guess I think that programming is similar, and moving from SICP to teaching Python or Java is just another representative sample of a disappointing sea change away from what I've come to know and love about programming.
VMware has lost focus on where the expense savings monetize for virtualization. VMware captured virtualization of all the small/medium application servers; and built a company. The focus lately has been convincing customers to virtualize all the large application servers. Thus, VMware could claim victory for creating a fully cloud enabled data center.

But, VMware lost the focus on engineering a fully virtualized application cloud; and let the MBAs direct the buffalo hunt. Just like Palm. And now the buffalo are going to stampede all over the product and VMware is gonna bleed.

Vmware should just ignore the largest buffalo -- if your application server uses (suggestion) 64GB of RAM or more; no vRAM is counted against licensing. Those buffalo are tough, not too tasty, and the risk and resource requirements are not worth the pain. The small nimble buffalo are where the tasty hunting is best.
That wouldn't defend them against the pure patent troll businesses without products or research. Also, what would happen with the small open source developers if there's such a stash of legal power concentrated by their competitors. It can turn very bad.
the iPad has no such tool, and that does really harm my browsing experience

Do yourself a huge favor, and grab one of the oldest Mac browsers, still lovingly developed for the iPad:

http://www.icab.de/mobile.html

Turn on filters, and enjoy an ad free experience, not to mention tabs and extensions.
working on a few side projects but hoping Sprint.Im will be my full time job in a few months
i think even a modest attempt would work; besides it's usually the newcomers who troll in a community
What's a fun project to do in Haskell, for example?

I recommend a project with lots of IO and State. You'll quickly come to understand why the monadic approach to such things is excellent (even if Haskell's implementation is a bit verbose).
This is wonderful actually. I don't believe Google's motives are altruistic for a minute but the only way to make this debate stick is by having one angry giant of a corporation against it and lucky for everyone Google is the one.

The system is broken but at the same time I suppose we need patents in some form at least for hardware. Apple couldn't make phones if it wasn't for innovative suppliers. The only thing between them going it alone and taking orders from Apple are patents. It's a bit tricky because if this patent battle plays out, Apple, Microsoft, and HP/Palm would be the only players able to make smartphones on their own without fear of patent suits. That's a near monopoly.

It's enough of a tricky debate and politics usually favors entrenched interests of large corporations. Despite Google's clout they couldn't match the sheer magnitude of Apple, Microsoft, and others. Plus, Google has always had an antagonistic relationship with government, since government keeps trying to pry sensitive personal information from Google.
A smart phone is not needed.

FBI can turn on a phone's microphone: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html

A German politician got a telecom company to hand over phone location data: http://blogs.dw-world.de/spectrum/?p=907

Pretty animation of phone tracking: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
Got it. Yikes. Funny thing, my heart rate rose just a bit when I finally comprehended this. Just the thought of a car approaching head-on.
That was my thought as well. I feel more comfortable taking medical advice from Jenny McCarthy. As far as I can tell her only qualification is being the former marketing director of Facebook. Her opinion on this subject is not relevant.
> ...and the HtDP authors definitely have a point about how much heavy math is involved.

I get why people object to heavy math in programming -- it makes the entire field less accessible -- but programming is heavily based on mathematics, if not entirely a subset of mathematics. Saying, "it requires too much math to learn this" strikes me as a lot like saying "there's too much biology in learning to be a doctor".
Greg Palast has been someone worth looking into when it comes to these issues

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/3956129.stm

http://www.gregpalast.com/2004/

http://www.gregpalast.com/store/?id=13
The merits of SICP have been debated many times. More interesting is the choice of "Dive Into Python." Is that really the best Python book for Berkeley CS?
that won't do. the script has been renamed in a lot of themes it has been included in. try something like:

$ grep -rH "(strpos (strtolower ($url_info" /path/to/wordpress

if you are auditing PHP code, strpos is good to look out for, since it is often misused such as the case here. strpos will evaluate to true is the needle is match anywhere in the haystack, so things like:

if(strpos(strtolower($username), 'admin'))

will match username 'test.admin' etc.
pretty cool. they arent as sheltered as I thought they would be.
Agree with most here here but I think we should break people out into 5 categories for these threads:

Apple zealots

Mostly rational people who prefer iOS

Mostly rational people who like both

Mostly rational people who prefer Google

Android zealots

There should be some way algorithmically to determine the people who are in the extreme categories, say...

extremism quotient:= (|upv| + |dwnv|) / max (1,|net score|)

Then if that exceeds some threshold over a certain period the person's votes could be ignored or diluted.
I respect your opinion. If the points you make are true, I would however phrase that as a lack of product/market fit, not a scam.

Each of us put different meanings into words. I want to reserve the word scam for when there is provably no intent to create real value. To me there is no conclusive evidence of malicious intent here, only a heap of speculation.
Very true! I was thinking of UI art assets. Aspects related to the layout or behavior of a UI (having a touchscreen interface, momentum scrolling, etc.) should be (IMO) neither patentable nor copyrightable.

When you get into issues of truly ripoff UI, trade dress [1] seems like the most natural solution to me. However, the legal standing of UI w/rt trade dress is still being determined.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress
It's a good idea. Would it be possible to even choose the developer to fix the bug out of the developers who are interested ?
You're right — I misread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS/400 to be saying that AS/400 was killed in 2008, but the replacement hardware still runs OS/400. Thank you!

> In April 2008, IBM announced its integration with the System p platform. The unified product line is called IBM Power Systems and features support for the IBM i (previously known as i5/OS or OS/400), AIX and Linux operating systems. Power4 or older hardware ran OS/400 exclusively.
I agree. I didn't say otherwise. My assertion is that Google's position is still an ethical one even though it is also strategic.
Try hooking your computer up through a hub or something and use WireShark on your traffic. You never know on a Windows box. I've had deeply rootkitted machines that didn't get picked up by any scans.

In any case, I'd recommend against changing your MAC address because when you do get a hold of the network admins they may be rather disgruntled that you're violating network policy (almost any university that registers MACs prohibits MAC spoofing, otherwise you could just use the MAC of somebody that you saw on a different subnet).
Do you have any laws in particular you'd like to point me toward? I live in California if it helps you find any.

Blind spot collisions tend to be found to have multiple causation with both drivers at fault. Yes, the truck driver shares some responsibility, but so does the idiot hanging out in the blind spot, and that's how they tend to be ruled.

More to the point, however, if you want to hang out in the truck's blind spots, I'm really not going to shed a tear for you if your car gets crushed.

Most, if not all, US states, at least, have a pretty prominent section in their drivers' manuals regarding proper driving around tractor-trailers and dealing with their blind spots. In theory, you have to know the information contained within this section to be allowed to legally drive. You are expected to adhere to it when driving around trucks and you will share fault in most blind-spot related collisions that occur with tractor-trailers.

And, yes, this does mean that it is possible (albeit unlikely) for a tractor-trailer to be totally not at fault in a rear-end on the basis of blind spots.

At any rate, the truck driver is charged with certain safety precautions when he does so but he is absolutely required to enter his blind spots just to drive the truck.

More importantly, though, the fact the truck driver requires certain safety precautions does not absolve you from having to be safe on the road.
Quantly is woefully inactive: http://quant.ly/newest says the latest 3 posts (not counting the 3 that were posted after the HN post) were 1, 7, 18 days ago respectively.
Propel Has A New Leader
Scheme works great in SICP because it doesn't get in the way. After the first few pages, it doesn't feel like you're reading a programming language so much as reading the direct expression of concepts discussed in the text. The programming language learning hurdle is almost nonexistent.

That fact reduces cognitive load on the reader, freeing up mental resources that can be applied to the concepts presented.
But engineers of the physical world variety learn the fundamentals of physics while learning the pragmatics of building codes, loads, and laws. Shouldn't software engineering aspire to the same level of preparedness?
It's not "what the school wants to teach" but more "what the student needs to know at the end of the semester". I love SICP -- for me it was a revelation which opened a new world, and is still my favorite book -- but not everyone is like that. 90% of my colleague in my university would hate that book.. (As they hated the dragon book and anything less practical). So, as they say, "Hate the game, not the gamers". What a school teaches is a reflexion of what is needed in the society and sadly what the students want.

I do hope however that great professors will still strongly suggest the book to students who want to go one step deeper.

p.s. A new version of SICP could include a couple of pages on python; i.e. make a list comprehension, yielding, etc. :)
Hm, you have links to last year's reports? 10 seconds of googling didn't find it...
True. Gruber is at his worst when he discusses patents. I do enjoy his writings otherwise.
alt-enter = new teminal. http://i3wm.org/
Microsoft: Google declined invite to bid together on Novell patents
I completely agree, but at the same time, it's a barrier to entry that I think might be unnecessary. Some college freshman haven't taken calculus, and SICP would seem a bit daunting at times to those students, I imagine. Unfortunately, I think HtDP goes too far; it's too dumbed down.
> ...if you think that I didn't read it thoroughly enough, just come out and say so...

OK. I don't think you read it thoroughly enough. I wouldn't usually just come out and tell someone that, because it's likely to start a fight, and that won't help anybody. But, since you asked...

The post repeatedly makes the point that SICP primarily presents a language-agnostic approach to understanding how to solve problems in programming. The author even explains that they aren't objecting so much to Python specifically as they are to the fact that there isn't an SICP-type book which happens to include Python for its code examples. The author does make the claim that Python requires more focus on syntax than Scheme does, and exemplifies this with the "and-or trick", but that's not really central to their argument.

Their main argument is that programming should be taught as an approach to problem-solving, not as an introduction to a language, and that by removing SICP from the curricula, future programmers will lose some valuable skills.

And I happen to agree with that.
Preventing a company from offering a free product in no way serves the consumer.

In a general context, a company practicing 'predatory pricing' may do so to drive the other competitors out of business. Once that happens, it's free to raise prices to monopolistic levels which would end up hurting consumers eventually.
I find it amusing that Linus finds what I consider annoying behavior more usable. Changing things up is always painful. I really hate clicking on Terminal and having something new pop up when I might just be trying to bring that application back into focus (to me 'one window' = 'one application' is a fallacy).

EDIT: Seriously though. People are making a big deal out of someone having a different opinion. Silly.
People are simply calling it as they see it.

So is Gruber.
I like the general idea of the post, but I don't think being savvy in business and in tech is enough anymore. At this point in the game I think you actually need to be savvy in design and user experience as well. So much of a product is in the users perception of it and his/her experience with it. This is a major strength of Steve Jobs, who is notorious noir only for his tech insight and sharp business skills, but also his understanding of the end user and visual appeal.
Yes, but PNGs will be easier to deal with than SVG and webfonts. I guess SVG give you the flexibility of turning them into high-fidelity versions of whatever you want. I regularly use nounproject SVGs to create 'icons' in Microsoft's vector XAML format.
Here's the kicker: there isn't one right way to make it work. Gnome 3 is basically changing to fit with how other recent desktop environments have behaved like OS X. Of course people will bitch but it's no less right or wrong. Maybe just unpolished.
MobileMe was a nearly complete failure. The original Apple TV was not a strong product at all. The new iCal and Contacts in Lion are a huge design failure. Their server line was pretty much a failure too.

Those are Apple's biggest failures in recent times. Looking at Gruber's blog archives, I don't think it's a much of a stretch to say that he's a biased writer.
The "World's Largest" Stop Motion Animation Created With A Nokia N8
It's not an either/or. Software Engineering is a part of Computer Science.
Do you think Apple would have decided not to make the iPhone if they hadn't been able to patent aspects of it?

Other companies are trying desperately to match the iPhone, and failing. As far as I can tell, their failure to match it has nothing to do with patents.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking slightly naive ? This site is probably gamed out of existence by sock puppets, social media experts and old Digg users. I am just waiting for the "accidental" porn reference to hit the front page.

There is also a ton of haters on this site who downvote full time because of high karma from the old days. But it is better than part time haters who just got lucky with a funny comment or TechMeme snatchup. Every time I say anything my karma goes up and down like that girl on Jersey Shore the other night. Some commenters get -4 while spammers get -2. Now THAT is the college effect !

Remember, all honesty is brutally punished in academia !
Any site that asks me to share before I've viewed gets a big fuck you from me and I'll just leave. It's ridiculous and completely ignores the point of sharing. I don't see the cover of a film and say "Hey friend, you should watch [film], it's awesome!"... because how can I know it's Awesome? I haven't seen it. The same goes for any sort of web content, I am not sharing content unless I enjoy it and I can't know that before I have viewed it.
Ah. Interesting. I use macros in Textmate and Typinator to accomplish more or less the same thing; for example, command-shift-v will enter "<a href=command-v">, with command-v being paste, and command-i will yield italics, and so forth. Still, having something universal, like Markdown, sounds attractive.
Nike Free Shoes
You have still failed to name the bankrupt company, the company sued, and the patent in question.
Compat mode is still pretty crappy.
um, that is not what that decision says. It says the interface may be covered by copyright to the extent that it contains expression. That would seem to me to have a large overlap with look and feel patents.
> Some college freshman haven't taken calculus...

Yeah, and that's a serious problem, too -- and one that I'm guilty of! ...that is, if I'd ever gone to college. :-(

I am very much not encouraged by a "race to the bottom" when it comes to education. If calculus is too difficult for the student, then perhaps the student should not consider a career in programming. I say that without any malice whatsoever; I'm not sympathetic enough to be a counselor, and I wouldn't expect counseling courses to simply disregard the importance of counseling so that I could have a job in the field.

To bring all this back to a more practical argument: I am annoyed daily by the great and heaping piles of inefficiencies and bloats and bugs and weaknesses of software. I have to, on a regular basis, explain to clients that they should throw out their old computer and get a new one, so that they can continue to do what is, to them, exactly the same thing they were doing with their old one. That can be a rather challenging thing to explain to some people.

I find it difficult to believe that this ongoing pattern of abuse of resources is not at least partly related to a greater and greater ignorance of the fundamentals of programming.
Configurability being added to Gnome?

Ha!
How do they have enough money to do this? Web.com's (WWWW) market cap is only 236.51M according to Yahoo Finance.