skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I say, "self-taught computer scientist" I had in mind someone, much like myself that did not go through college to earn a comp-sci degree but instead learned on the job and solves problems scientifically rather than by brute force.

I agree with you that it is a bit a self-applied label that could be offensive to those who finished college and earned a degree. Much like someone calling themselves a doctor without getting a PhD.
I'm an iOS developer and I can't believe it has taken Apple so long to implement a security popup when accessing the address book, or that adding address book support doesn't require the developer to declare in the info.plist that this app needs access to it.
This is a clear marketing opportunity for the Android platform, of course since no one really governs its course, it's completely being missed. I suppose cheaper/more features/hotter phones is the way they want to go.
Only if you (admin user) ask it to. Still a bad practice. Also, the premise is that Google trusts itself as an email provider.
Yes. RubyMine pretty much destroys Aptana's offering: better code insight and completion, more reliable debugging, deeper featureset, relatively faster, more stable, and a much faster rate of development and improvement with a much more responsive development team.

Having said that, they both have the same fundamental drawback of being ginormous slow ugly least-common-UI-denominator Java-based frankenapplications.

Still, I tend to start my Ruby coding tasks in a text editor, but move to RubyMine on anything where I'm hacking on it for more than a couple hours. I can't imagine using anything else to do Rails development with all the billions of files and open source gems involved in that king of thing--code insight and smart jumping around within the source saves so much time, cumulatively.
Perhaps a short educational film is needed to communicate this more widely. I'm thinking something with a sinister-looking Gestapo-knock-off 'media agent' coming into a home asking to see their blue-rays' and computers' papers, and those papers' papers.
Just YouTubed this skit. Not funny. Forget the $5, I want my 5 minutes back.
This kind of thing really requires good faith efforts from both Apple and the developers. A system-generated prompt for your address book is not particularly useful if it comes up on first launch of the app with no explanation why the app wants the data, like a lot of apps do with location services today.
Davide - looks like you're going miss it, but if you're ever in Boston on a Thursday you should check out http://www.venturecafe.net/ - it's a very friendly and open entrepreneur-centered event every Thusday.

There are hundreds of events every week (most free) if you want to meet people (see http://greenhornconnect.com/ )
Just as I suspected, this point is rationalized away with speculation. He said:

“And we’re going to take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.”

The reason this rings so hallow is because it is so outside the MO of Apple. If Apple creates something they think is really great (and customers do too) it becomes part of what sets Apple apart. Apple doesn't license their technology, they use it as a key differentiator. The only real contribution Apple has made, in my mind, to open standards is webkit; and they built that on top of KHTML so I'm not sure they really had a choice.
Programmer Self-Doubt: Embracing the Demons
If the focus is more on software engineering than computer science, i'd recommend "code complete" and "patterns of enterprise application architecture".
Gowalla app developer launches his own platform
Probably a draw, as you say, since someone could get ahold of an authenticated link in your email, too.
I highly doubt that anyone confident in vim would even consider going back to an IDE.

Anyway, IF there is anyone I would really like to hear the story.
And now, a different kind of Apple book
IPhone 5 Rumors: What You Need To Know
This sounds in check with the reality. Not sounding like a big corporate nor as an underground start-up.
From the Vimeo page above you'll see a list of the videos on the side that have been published by CUSEC. Some ones that I liked are by Reg Braithwaite, Greg Wilson, Zed Shaw.

Some ones that aren't on Vimeo that I remember really liking were by Dan Ingalls and Giles Bowkett, not sure if they were recorded or not.
The Design Patterns book is not on the list because I have not read it yet. Based on what I know of it, I am sure that it deserves to be on the list.
This is a story about money changing hands, and so, like clockwork, here's Aaron Greenspan to use it as a coatrack for a discussion of his own company.

Cody said it better:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3379164

The kernel of Greenspan's problem: to operate a business that allows random people in California to transfer funds using you as a middleman, you need to (in effect) post a bond, so that when you do something dumb and put yourself out of business, you don't lose millions of dollars of consumer money.

Greenspan would like the amount of these bonds to be more transparent and, by repeated implication, much lower than they are; their current amounts can best be described today as "if you have to ask, you can't afford them".
Seriously?

There have been several posts about it, recently, right here on hacker news, John Gruber mentioned it in his podcast the Talk show, and it was also named one of Time's best 50 Websites of 2011 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29...

How is that not popular?
It's a good question. I am self-taught, and would never call myself a "self-taught computer scientist" ... "self-taught hacker" is just about right. For me the distinction would be that it's never going to get too theoretical, it's all applied (though I make every effort to make my applications efficient, correct and legible)
Months ago on Hypercritical [1], John Siracusa had a series of episodes where he was talking about weaknesses of programming in Objective C vs more dynamic runtimes like C#/Java, like garbage collection, dynamic typing, etc.

One of the advantages he cited & partially dismissed, though, was that since Objective C compiles directly onto the hardware, performance & battery life is better on ram- and cpu-limited phones compared to the added overhead of Dalvik or another virtual machine or JIT. (His theory was that that bought them time in the short term but is still a long term issue for Apple; I'm not sure I agree, but don't disagree Apple needs to be evaluating this stuff.)

[1]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/14
RubyMine is great. A little slow, not Visual Studio quality yet, but light years better than a text editor. Right click a test and you can debug it interactively. That is easily worth $XX to me in productivity.
Could HN have an opt-in to save your outbound link click history?

I've lost count of the number of times when I've unexpectedly wanted to revisit an article from days/weeks/months ago and have utterly failed to find the site by search/browser history (I visit from mulitple machines), etc. I really don't want to have yet another service to sign in to for saving interesting links - and even if I did - they're not always things that I think I wanted to save at the time.

What I'd like to see is:

- opt in to have links pass through a intermediate step so the outbound step is saved in my profile on HN
- include the URL and the HN piece (comments, etc)

Seems very simple to do, and would make it so much easier to refer friends back to what I've read without having to rely on my poor memory or rigorous bookmarking.
I remember this feeling... yes, when Amazon started offering DRM free MP3 downloads at 80% cost of an iTunes DRM'd MP3. Digital video may finally be turning the corner, very exciting times.
Agreed whole heartily.
Here's a subreddit I found, though it seems to be only moderately active: http://www.reddit.com/r/IRstudies

I'd be interested to know of any other destinations people know if.
There are much more valuable files to steal off a computer than a phone. The reason you won't see it (often) is because it's so much easier to watch traffic on your computer. Any company doing this would be taking a huge risk and would likely be caught within a day.
And well done to the Wikipedia editors, who didn't include the updated information in the article until it had gone through the academic publishing process and so been vetted by experts in the field.
So is Ubuntu a new OS since it has it's own window manager?
Law should always be the option of last resort for fixing a problem, never the go-to under most circumstances.

Laws do not go away in the United States - they can get overridden or re-interpreted by judges, but they never leave the books once they're on them. Part of the reason why our legal system has so many pitfalls is that laws written in bygone eras intended for use-cases that no longer exist can be interpreted and applied to modern scenarios.

Consumers should vote with their feet and wallets by using different apps that don't misuse their contact information or perhaps a different mobile platform altogether.
It could theoretically give access to contacts via a contact-chooser button without ever letting the app get to the list. Much like you can upload a file on a desktop browser without letting the site see your list of files.
I tend to agree, math is closely related to science, but it isn't science. A theorem and proof is different from a hypothesis and test (a hypothesis and test is generally what I would consider to be the "scientific method").

But "scientist" has a folk meaning. If you ask "is math science?", I'd say no. But if you ask "how many scientists are in congress?" and count someone with a math PhD as a "scientist", I'd have no problem with it.
Speaking as an actually credentialed computer scientist, this list is ridiculous.

First and for all, only one of these books is actually about theoretical computer science, and even then.

Secondly, (feel free to disagree on this one) K&R is recommended more as a prestige book. So much of C is in the toolkit and libraries that I think it's a little silly to be recommending a 30 year old intro that is actually kind of hard to read.

Thirdly, this question comes up all the time. Here's an actually serious version of this question: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/3253/what-books-...

If you only care about actually practical issues to your life as a programmer, give this list a shot http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320813

Addendum: Although I'm credentialed as a CompSci, I really work as an engineer. The difference? Scientists read papers (Avi Bryant) http://vimeo.com/4763707 and think about the nature of our work (Greg Wilson) http://vimeo.com/9270320
There's a fairly decent vim plugin for all of the JetBrains IDEs called IdeaVIM. Here's a post from the same blog about it:

http://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2009/08/rubymine-for-vim-addi...

And here's the direct link to the plugin:

http://plugins.jetbrains.net/plugin/?ruby&id=164
I am sorry. What did you expect?
Sample Size Planning for Binary Classifiers Using High Dimensional Data
It's just honest to state that they are affiliate links, regardless of he deserves the revenue or not.
Well, Paulo Coelho pirated his own books to increase revenue. So I would guess that 1,000,000 pirates could mean significantly more than $0.

"the physical sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites."
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/28/promo-bay/
The standard rule is that if you give someone binaries of the GPLed program, you must also give them the source (or make it available, or maybe for a reasonable fee, etc etc). You don't have to distribute the source to anyone else who asks - so I think you more or less have it right. If you buy some GPLed product, you are entitled to the source code in some fashion, and once you receive it you may pass it on to anyone else you want under the same terms.

And yes, I would think that if you make it publically available on a blog and I download it then you have distributed it to me and thus you have to comply with giving me the source as well. IANAL, obviously.

There is of course subtlety around whether the theme in question is actually GPLed, which I think has been adequately covered by others.
Apple or the companies that used this "feature"...

Maybe under EU privacy laws?
Oh they caught on to this minor security issue. Well done Apple.
Both the Hypercritical and the Talk Show around that time had in-depth discussions around the book; I believe Gruber started iwth "I mostly agree with Siracusa."

I was also a little surprised by the timing of this piece, because I also felt like I'd seen/heard some of it before -- but I realize the audience for DF is bigger than the audience for the Talk Show & Hypercritical, so it makes sense & is well sourced.
How to Spot High-Quality Learning? The Nose Knows
The big difference between Skiena's book and others (Cormen, Knuth) I've seen is inclusion of his own war stories and real life experiences and less emphasis on rigourous proof.
I tend to go back and forth between vim and RubyMine. I like editing in vim, but when I want/need to use a debugger, I use RubyMine. RubyMine has a vim keymap (I believe they also have emacs), so editing within it is not so bad either.

I think I've adopted this since I went from an IDE -> vim instead of the opposite. Having a visual debugger was one of the features that kept me in an IDE (at least for Ruby). I just never felt like I was as productive without it.
And a few years ago people were telling us that we needed Apple's strict guidelines to prevent rouge apps for doing this sort of evil behaviour. Apple's rules are ineffective.
Your IRC experience is not an uncommon one, unfortunately. Next time, check out #perl-help, which is a bit less hostile.
Who is this "we" you're talking about? How much of Wikipedia did "we" build? A bunch of people got together and used the Internet to replace Britannica. While doing it, they also said, "here's all of our work product, if you want to go do something else with it".

Now here comes 'angersock, for whom that's not good enough. "No, it's not enough that I have the whole Internet to build a new site on, and the whole Wikipedia database to seed it with; no, I want the people working on Wikipedia to build the thing I want, and stop concerning themselves so much with that whole encyclopedia thing".

I'm caricaturing, I know, but really, I don't get where you're coming from here.
I made it because I like to write nice documentation for my projects but I was tired of docbook. I love markdown too :)

I thought of making a github webhook to automatically generate gh-pages using it but moved on another project in the meantime.

I like your idea of documentation as a service and I think you have something great with DocumentUp. We can definitively see if we can do something together. I'm deep in another project for the next two weeks (at least) but we can chat on gtalk (maxime.bouroumeau@gmail.com - I'm in GMT+1) if you want, to see what we could do in the future.
I would send a response back and request that Congress make a policy for the government to ask for my permission to access my location data and other personal information in return.

On the other hand, Apple brings this scrutiny on themselves (as does Microsoft and any other heavily curated repositories). If you're in the business of censoring (for good or for bad) content, you have an obligation to not make mistakes.
Dutch Kids Pedal Their Own Bus To School
On the other hand, having a big security problem wakes everyone up to the fact that there's a problem. MtGox did hire security consultants; whether they hired good ones is another matter but it's not like they fixed the one issue and everything stayed the same. Do you touch any MS products? At least MtGox thus far hasn't allowed arbitrary code to run on your machine!

MtGox is still the easiest way to deal with BTC <-> USD. I don't trust them enough that I have a lot of either currency in the account at one time but I didn't have a lot before the breach either.
I wasn't being entirely serious about people being "nice" (vs. nasty, I suppose) but you still have a fair point.

I would definitely encourage you to go to the main submissions page (http://2011.nycbigapps.com/submissions/), look through and dispense votes as you desire.

The competition right now is dominated by who gets the most retweets- I thought blogging was a slightly more constructive solution, but if independent voters are looking and voting based on independent merit, then that's music to my ears.
What is Kancho? And the kancho position
When Will Being a Non-TSA Airport Become a Competitive Advantage?
"We did this by computing the greatest common divisor (GCD) of all pairs of moduli from RSA public keys on the Internet." For your key to be safe from this method, all you need to do is choose the factors of the modulus uniquely, not even necessarily randomly.
Not to detract from RubyMine, but I've never had a problem with ruby-mode in emacs. I also don't rely on autocomplete at all, so this may be an issue that i never deal with.
Samsung Galaxy Ace Duos Dual SIM Mobile Phone Specifications
Being the truth? I bet you can find an "expert" like the person complaining on the Cronicle, who disagrees whole heartedly about what you belive the "truth" is.

Outside of the hard science "truth" is a very negotiable subject. Just imagine how difficult it would become to find the "truth" between the opposing parties around the currently most popular The Cronicle article ( http://chronicle.com/article/Charles-Murray-Author-of-The/13... ).
>Looks like you'd still need a fair bit of structural steel to support that citycenterlofts building

That's likely, to conform to building code. Still, they stack those things full of goods 7-8 high on shipping vessels.
Wikipedia recreates all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias. This includes doing a sort of OK job of summarizing relevant facts.

This is a limitation for physical encyclopedias because paper, and even more so shelf space, are expensive so some facts have to be prioritized over others. And you can't easily make corrections to a book after it is printed and sold, and since research never stops a paper encyclopedia will frequently be out of date, thus it can never be that accurate - so why expend a ton effort to make it more accurate in the first place?

Electronic encyclopedias, like Wikipedia, don't have the same inherent limitations. Wikipedia just happens to have re-created them for the same reason electronic calendars by default show you one month at a time, even on the 30th and 31st, rather than a chunk of next and last months.

The reason so many people are so motivated to complain about Wikipedia and all it's limitation is because everyone intuitively can sense there ought to be a better way.

1. Notability of facts is a red herring. Text is easy to compress and storage space is cheap.

2. The need to summarize topics is a red herring. Having a summary "front page", or "top", or "above the fold" etc, combined with more in depth, detailed sections, is a standard way of organizing information on the web. An electronic encyclopedia really ought to use that kind of presentation strategy.

3. Primary sources, new research and minority opinions would naturally be part of the lengthy, detailed version of a topic.

And if you want to go completely crazy you could do things like allow voting. Allow people to sort what the default view is by general popularity.

Even crazier, sort by popularity based on experts opinion, work out a way for experts to electronically sign or approve articles, and allow people to choose a set of "experts".

Go totally bonkers and verify the experts so that someone could choose to see the top evolution articles as rated by Richard Dawkins.

Or alternatively re-crate all the limitations of a physical set of encyclopedias.
UPDATE 1-Apple tweaks apps policy under lawmaker pressure
I apologize for any offense that I may have given by using the phase "self-taught computer scientist".

This article is my personal recommendation of books that I often recommend to junior developers that are smart but didn't complete a degree and often find their knowledge of basic computer science lacking.
The author definitely should have included Algorithms in C++ [Sedgewick] and Introduction to Algorithms [CLRS].
That’s really annoying. If so many developers weren’t so stupid and evil, strict guidelines from Apple and social pressure could easily solve this. Isn’t that how it’s solved on the desktop (minus the guidelines)?

Yes, I can see that an App Store makes it easier for people to install all kinds of apps. (I can also see that more people are going to have more extensive address books on their mobile phones compared to their PCs.) There isn’t really a handful of developers anymore (like there were on the Mac for the longest time) who you know you can trust.

And yes, spyware was also a problem on the desktop – but usually not one for high profile apps. If the developer was big and had something to lose you could be somewhat certain that they were not going to sell you out.

But no. More dialogs everyone will ignore anyway. Not a real solution by any stretch of the imagination.
This. Try opening right to Mathew on an e-reader. Then try to realize you need to take a look at another scripture so you keep your finger between the pages you are on flip back a bit read what you need then then easily return to where you were. This holds true in programming books as well.

As pointed out note tasking is less natural in digital format.

In many books, such as DnD books, I know I can find certain rules (or other needed information,) by about where they are in the book.
GuideKit seems really nice. Nice UI. However, one of the reason behind beautiful docs is to keep the documentation as files. That way, everything is in git and readable from the shell/github too.

If you add an "import/sync with github" option, this would be really great.
I have moved from Vim to JetBrains' IDE for Python - PyCharm. In response @netmute in this thread I know my way through vim, have edited in it for 10 years, have a bunch of plugins installed and know all the necessary wizard spells, and still do a lot of other things in it. Yet, in case of Python I have never looked back.

Python support in default vim is abysmal. You can probably beat vim to do useful things with Python by installing a gajillion of plugins, but my time that I would spend on it is not worth 200$ that I paid for PyCharm's corporate license. Even then I am not sure Python support in vim would be anything close to what I have in PyCharm out of box.

For me, the killer features in PyCharm were completion and on-the-fly code-checking. There are definitely some vim packages for the former, but all I tried were slow and/or buggy. And I have never found the replacement for the latter. Other things like built-in graphical debugger with variable auto-watcher and coverage visualization are the icing on a cake (and a very thick one).
Principal, if you're a consultancy.

Or just 'Lead'
What is a "Credentialed Computer Scientist"? Do you mean a college degree in CS/EE? I'd imagine a whole slew of people here on HN are Credentialed in that sense.
Clayton Christensen talked about this idea as integrated vs. modular. He actually used the example of unix as modular and Windows as integrated (though he there was talking about the ability to create different distributions of unix, mix-and-matching components).

BTW: I like his use of "IDE" to convey his point succinctly. Though I had the same reaction as you, he's using it as a word, not an acronym. Also, there's a category error of application vs. OS which I think adds to the wry quirkiness.