skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm a non-CS major. What CS courses should I take?
Me: philosophy major very interested in tech entrepreneurship. Moreso business than computer science, but I've decided that the best way to get my ideas off the ground is to build them myself. Seeing that I have a lot of elective credits, I want to take as many CS courses as possible.

My question to you is: what CS-specific courses should I take to help me build web applications? I'm not particularly interested in AI, higher-level math, and most other "technical" subjects. I just want to build web businesses. But, I would like to get at least some of the "theory" that a CS major provides.

----

Some possible options (that are available at my school). These are after the "intro-to-cs" class. Of these, what do you recommend? And what am I missing?

DATA STRUCTURES

This course emphasizes the study of the basic data structures of computer science (stacks, queues, trees, lists, graphs) and their implementations using the Java language. Included in this study are programming techniques which use recursion and reference variables. Students in this course are also introduced to various searching and sorting methods and are also expected to develop an intuitive understanding of the complexity of these algorithms.

COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING

The purpose of this course is to study the components of computing systems common to most computer architectures. In particular, this class is meant to introduce data representation, types of processors (e.g., RISC V. CISC), memory types and hierarchy, assembly language, linking and loading, and an introduction to device drivers.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

The purpose of this course is to provide a general survey of software engineering. Some of the topics covered include: project planning and management, design techniques, verification and validation, and software maintenance. Particular emphasis is on a group project in which a group of 4-5 students implement a system from its specification.

-----

Also, I'm supplementing this with Stanford, MIT, and other schools' free coursework and various online tutorials/books. Any particular recommendations?

Thanks a bunch.
The founder of Liquid Robotics gave a Stanford EE380 talk in 2009.

The abstract is at http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/091028.html

There's a link to the video at http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0910.html .
This looks good in theory, but if you have a party of 2 or more people, who are presumably seated together, then it is practically impossible to get them to board at different times as the algorithm would want to. I don't know for sure, but based on anecdotal observation I would guess that at least 50% of persons onboard travel with a co-passenger. I think that will throw the algorithm off quite significantly.
Cool. I made a page for my web app. My only suggestion is that I would prefer the icon not to be rounded.

http://app.net/mixnote
RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)
With the density of large cities (though matched by zip codes), I wonder if the 13% live in urban areas and the remaining 87% outside.
Almost certainly going towards hiring more people to build out more stuff, people are by far the most expensive part of any software operation.

I agree with you that expensively developed "value-add" stuff that nobody wants would be a bad use of extra engineers. Hopefully they'll make stuff people want (as obvious as this sounds, this outcome is far from guaranteed).
His own blog post: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/i_ve_moved_again
Deploying a Rails 3.1 app – gotchas
Technology, namely the iPad, is changing the way the game is played
I think this line captures my sentiment:

"What’s likely to happen in the daily deals space, analysts have said, is that a handful of industry leaders will rise to the top, while smaller or niche efforts fade away."

There isn't room for a dozen of these companies. If the sector has long term profitability, it'll be Groupon, a hipper smaller competitor, and perhaps a niche player or two. Or perhaps niche players attached to bigger businesses. Look at search as an analogy. There's room for Google the gorilla, perhaps Yahoo and Bing, and Wolfram Alpha for the data nerds. Not much else is worth the investment.
When you actually master Vim and all its motions it's astoundingly fast.
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Nice!

It's exciting to see what we have been working on being used in the real world. (I am a founder) Your icon feedback is noted.

If you have any other suggestions, let me know. This is our first cut at mobile web app support, so there are probably some rough edges.
Don't most airlines have a separate lobby for business class and first class passengers?

I've never flown domestic, but that's the way its been for international flights.
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Agreed. Their actions made no sense. I suspect management were planning to just throw it all away, but the WebOS Developers begged for a chance to make the software viable on more than just the desktop on their printers (printers?! seriously?!!). This is more or less backed up in the news about the announcements, in which nobody but the very upper management knew it was happening until all the tech blogs were reporting it. The explosion of sales from the reduced price was probably enough to buy the WebOS team some time.

Just my speculation though. All around terrible, terrible decisions with regards to WebOS, the Touchpad and the Pre3. It's been really amazing to see just how badly HP keeps handling all this. I do hope it won't spell the end for WebOS though, as I honestly think it's a contender against iOS, which is something I don't personally think about Android.
I just got meta-copied
Thank you for the comments. I appreciate your insights as an academic living through this. Even still, I have to respectfully disagree.

I'll grant that the economics in most textbooks starts with the assumption of homogenous buyers and sellers. Economists have found ways of breaking down this assumption without giving up the concept of a market. Granted you lose "Perfect competition" but that's ok.

Let's look at an analogy...

Rather than academics, let's talk about programmers. There is as much variety in programmer performance as senior faculty performance. The firms that hire these programmers have not been able to create a monopoly. Yes - Google, Microsoft and Facebook have some high margins, but all of them are looking over their shoulders for the next competitor. The technology firm graveyard is filled with former near monopolists. (Excite? Altavista? Compuserve?)

I'm sure that there are reasons for the market failing, but I think it's more than a lack of homogenous products and vendors.
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I'd be interested in seeing how this works (source, docs, etc.), but unfortunately I can neither get jpgcrush nor jpegrescan to output anything.
Ah. But I'd expect think that they'd limit it to only images, or do some sorta safety checking. I recognize the performance concerns, but it's too easy to add a malware redirect onto their trusted url.
Airlines have been doing their own research into this, apparently. American Airlines is switching to randomized boarding (one of Steffen's proposed solutions) and United is partially switching to window-middle-aisle. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190423340457645...
> You don't need Monte Carlo to understand that boarding first rows is less efficient, or to come up with a much more efficient procedure.

Such as boarding from both the front cabin door and the rear cabin door?
I've signed up for the AI class. It should be interesting to revisit the topic after taking it several years ago with Bob Levinson @ UCSC. There, a good deal of the focus was on Lisp and playing Chess.

I'm likely to sign up for the ML one as well.
There isn't really a difference between first class and business class on domestic flights. If you have the miles or your company pays for it, you can go sit in the sky club or whatever, but that's over by the entrance and there's usually no difference when you get to the gate.
I wish their theme offering was more...creative. IMO, the generated sites are a bit bland.

Another alternative to App.net that was covered here last month: https://www.limelightapp.com/
I participated in an FAA cert airline evacuation test once. Only participants who'd never gone down the slide before were allowed, and only one take was allowed.

(yeah, we passed!)
need GIS

And confused by "one database only". Does that mean CREATE DATABASE databases? If so why?
No if you write in a CFC... N00bs. btw, that's the standard way; use CFC's for db logic, separate out logic & db functions from presentation
The vim tutorial.

Click-and-type is really quite fast once you try to master it. Double-click to select a token, triple-click to select a line, etc. On a laptop (or on a Kinesis Advantage (awesome ergonomic keyboard) with a center-mounted touchpad) the mouse isn't much of a context switch.
I flew a few weeks ago and dialogued (argued? - tried to be good natured about it!) with the boarding staff at 3 different gates about boarding processes. I suggested they try windows first, then middle seats, then aisle seats. 2 out of the 3 argued back that the way they were doing it had been 'proven' by some study some years back by... either a Finnish airline, or some studies in Arizona - I honestly can't remember which they said (but they'd both said the same place). Very odd, because it's demonstrably pretty damn slow, and often the slowness is quite visible - people with window seats having to stop and climb over someone in the aisle and middle seats, causing a backup. Agreed, it's not the only cause of backups, but in my recent 6 flights, 5 of the boarding processes were rather significantly slowed by multiple window/aisle snafus.

As much as someone wants to say "we've studied this already, and this is the best way to do it!", you'd have a hard time convincing me that any major airline knows how to make good decisions about anything.
This is a really fantastic article. Enough detail to be interesting even to hardcore sabermetric geeks.

A good look at how the iPad is changing yet another industry.
Are you taking into account the extensive carbon emissions that come from mining fuel, transport, containment, etc. for nuclear power? As the supply of uranium and quality uranium decreases, the emissions will only get higher.

http://www.energyscience.org.au/FS02%20CO2%20Emissions.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_nuclear...
If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant.

That's exactly, word-for-word, what professors have told me here. Sad indeed.
This isn't that new of a concept. Parents have been lamenting kids being lazy (and too much time in front of the computer, though that's not really being lazy!) since the start of time.

Relevant to this discussion is Silicon Valley Snake Oil by Cliff Stoll. http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Information...

In 1996 he predates a lot of these ideas by 15 years. And he's gone from physicist-hacker to Klein Bottle (Mobius bottle?) Maker. http://www.kleinbottle.com/
The parable of the Toaster
Perfect example of unintuitive Microsoft workflow
I like Curated - that's creative at least. Nice site guys!
Ah, but in Go there is the concept of good shape - you can play along similar strategic lines with both good and bad shape, but if you play your stones clumsily (write your code in PHP?), you will be vulnerable to many forcing plays and clever tesuji that may transform the position into an unwinnable one. It could happen during the middle game - bad shape may allow a group to be cut in half or have its eye shape pounded out of it - or in the yose, where you may need to make a very large number of moves to defend very few points (long development cycles to add features to a poorly written product?).

Therefore the analogy of Go justifies spending time making good shape with your code as you go along.
I can't speak for other frameworks, but I definitely second on Kohana, it's light and gets out of your way when you need, yet affords a lot of the newer best practices. If anything, documentation for v3 is lacking, but the forums are somewhat active and the php code isn't actually that complex. Application structure and the idea of overlays on top of system files is an interesting concept and pretty useful.
Whats so hard to understand the difference between <form> and <cfform>? Everything cold fusion related starts with a <cf... <cfif> If you don't like it, you can also use a <cfscript> tag:

<cfscript>
if(noob)
{
greetings = "Hello Coldfusion N00b";
}
</cfscript>

<cfoutput>#greetings#</cfoutput>
Right, but recouping a $68-118 loss is more feasible than recouping a $168-218 loss. There's a decent markup on their accessories and the potential for app sales. If it drives enough demand and gets companies licensing their OS and selling hardware running it, they have a chance to make it work, and it's probably money better spent than any advertising they do. Look at it this way; before the fire sale, how often did you see stories written about the Touchpad and how many people did you know that bought or wanted to buy one? And how many stories and interested consumers did you see after the fire sale? Food for thought.

Time will tell if they can pull it off though.
There seems to be a big distinction between the technology behind the personal computing revolution and current energy technology that could fuel a green revolution. The basic framework of a silicon processor and magnetic harddrive was rapidly scalable--very different from the current state of solar panels and batteries.
Not if you're the guy cutting the checks.
These are good points (and there are other confounding factors, such as the fact that anybody taking part in the test would naturally be more familiar with block boarding). Nonetheless it seems like it might be worth trying out, as they do have some theoretical basis for the improvements.
DARPA Is Funding Interstellar Space Travel
OOP is poorly implemented by many of the old dudes, partly because Adobe hasn't documented it well. When the defacto standard, Ben Forta barely writes a chapter on it, you know almost no one is listening.
Gravatar uses hashes for privacy so the email addresses themselves do not have to be transmitted.

To maintain email privacy, you could use a straight pass-through when using Gravatar. In this case, your URL could look like:

http://robohash.org/620050a4db5104bae758cd75171d64ca?gravata...
There are other practical considerations too. I can't even imagine trying to organize the passengers in the airport such that they board in the alternating row, outside-in configuration.

And there's the pretty much insolvable problem of when they start boarding the plane, many people just get on and couldn't care less that their row/section hasn't been called yet.
Yes, thank you.

Furthermore, hiding even an unencrypted message still adds entropy, since you're encoding more information in the same amount of space.
Here's a link from DARPA's site as well:

DARPA ENCOURAGES INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS TO LOOK TO THE STARS; ISSUES CALL FOR PAPERS FOR 100 YEAR STARSHIP STUDY PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/2011/06/15_DAR...
I mastered most of the more commonly known motions, including most of the ones on this page (http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressiv...) and some that aren't on it. It didn't seem to be delivering the promised efficiency improvements, so now I only use it for git commit messages, line editing in zsh, and file processing with macros (which are pretty nice--best way I know of to reformat data; much easier than writing a script). I don't think it was worth it--should have shipped product instead and used nano for my command line editing needs.
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You need to quantify "blends in". If I [an attacker] plot a distribution of the entropy in all your files, and some of them are outliers, even by a small amount, I can focus all my analysis on those files.
I flew Virgin last week and they let people without carryons join with "Group A" for boarding.
>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful

This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong.

Europe explored the universe where America did not.
No only that, they have been doing research into this for a long time. Below is an article from 2006, that references an implementation of a mathematical model in 2002.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/business/14boarding.html
Dated February 11, 2011.

Also, given that AT&T is evidently willing to reshape or eliminate messaging/minutes plans on a whim to make sure customers are forced into more expensive tiers, and given that if you have the temerity to change voice plans, they take away all your accumulated rollover minutes, this "bonus" has little value, I would say.

It's especially annoying that they delete rollover minutes because you have to pay for them twice: first you pay for the minutes themselves, then you pay extra if you want a rollover plan that allows you to keep the minutes.

Are you listening, AT&T? Because this is the #1 reason that I will switch to Verizon or Sprint or someone else once my contract is up. And I've been a loyal cell customer for 4+ years, and a loyal DSL customer for over a decade. But you are ticking me off, here.
The first part is easy, color code the ticket (e.g. first red, then blue, etc). The second issue is trickier, but it happens now anyway. I would say that they already know how to handle it.
Incorrect, exaggerated title.

They have 95% confidence that it's not in the 145-466 GeV range.

They haven't searched the 114-145 GeV range. There's still plenty of work to be done, and sensationalist headlines only serve to mis-inform.
I'd argue on the fact that having two business oriented co-founders can sometimes hurt you more than having a lone co-founder.
Ya me too, no mention of PostGIS.
How does this differ significantly from a grille ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grille_(cryptography) )?
"Congress may feel that even though its 1993 decision to cancel the American alternative to CERN—the Superconducting Super Collider—was generally met with chagrin by the American physics community, it may have been the right move one after all: to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful."

I'm a little surprised by that comment. The SSC would have be almost 3x more powerful than the LHC. I still feel like particle physics has been set back decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
1 in 10 Dead Bosses Are Murdered.
Savings from sophisticated method to board plane faster: 110 million dolars

Getting passengers to board when (and only when) it's actually their turn: priceless

(and, I suspect, far trickier)
Frontier does this.
You're 24, in what way do you think your age group would be considered part of "kids".
that's right! they also said with that "Arduino-compatible" and on the box it said "100% arduino compatible" - it wasn't. and they called it "Uno" which is the same name as the latest arduino :(
Woot.com has a "woot off" every few weeks, and one of the items that goes on sale at a random time during the day is a "bag of crap". For $8, you're promised they'll send you 3 leftover products from their warehouse. Some people have gotten really expensive products, like large LCD TVs and laptop computers, so everyone's willing to give it a try for $8.

Every few weeks, without fail, before and after Amazon acquired the company, the site goes down as a hundred thousand people refresh the page trying to get the order form to load when that item is for sale. It's very frustrating and there are thousands of posts in their forums every time it happens from people that were there and tried to buy but couldn't get the order form to load before it sold out.

A lottery would be better.
I should place a long bet regarding dark matter...
I've been wanting a nice version control system for my design projects for awhile. Looking forward to see what you guys come up with!
The original article headline is: "1 in 10 Dead Bosses Are Murdered."

This is a rather crucial difference, to put it rather mildly. You should use the original headline.
Sad to see that Rails is getting more and more complex.
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I don't know how likely other accelerators are to have found the Higgs-Boson, but the article at least makes an attempt to back up its claim:

"Lower energy levels have been accessible to smaller accelerators, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab and the LEP—the LHC’s predecessor at CERN—and neither collider had found it. Perhaps the Higgs does not exist at all."
I guess you don't live near a decently sized university?
In some ways, Valve manages to be more extreme, because it's smaller. 250 employees could conceivably be totally flat, if they are all committed and the boss is ... brilliant.

Google has a few more employees.

The idea that everything is shared, and people do pretty much whatever they want is nice, but doesn't work if you want as many heads as Google has.
What do these things have to do with a framework? PHP's built-in MySQL drivers (MySQLi, PDO, etc) support and encourage prepared statements and parameter binding. PHP's built-in string library supports HTML-encoding output. PHP's built-in filter library supports validating and sanitizing input. Writing apps without some kind of framework might lead to less organized, tighter coupled code, but it doesn't mean you're mashing together strings and ignoring security.
this method seems to assume that people will line up in perfect order so that no one blocks anyone else, but that simply isn't the case. the alternating rows that were called would stagger in random order and blocking would occur as normal.
probably enforcing less carryon would speed the process up the most, but they'd have to make the checked in baggage pickup quick and easy to give people more incentives to check in.. maybe even offer a service that picks up rollies right at the gate and makes the available after getting off the plane..
Getting passengers to board when (and only when) it's actually their turn: priceless

Yes, exactly. I tend to wait for the final boarding call so as to spend less time in line and on a cramped plane.
I am sorry to hear that, my friend. Godspeed.
Really you should only be worried if you're using version 1 apps. I'm a fan of quick prototyping and quick release (in alpha/beta, of course), as long as the team is committed to putting the time in on the back-end. Getting a product out is an important step 1...the real work (and money) is in steps 2-1000.
corrected. thanks!
No and No
Good idea!

I've added this.

Try - http://robohash.org/620050a4db5104bae758cd75171d64ca?gravata...
Sacs longchamp
> Europe explored the universe where America did not.

What did they get out of it? (Honest question.) Also, supposing the Higg's Boson did exist and this experiment found it, how much benefit would the average European derived? How much less benefit would people from other countries enjoy?