skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There is a huge anti-CS degree movement, specially (and not suprisingly) among people without CS degrees.

I used to be one of those people until I broke down and decided to finish my degree.

I think most of the people who speak out against college didn't go (or didn't finish) a STEM degree. I've seen both sides (history, and CS). Most of my previous criticism of college is applicable to history (at my institution at least), but not CS.

There are so many little holes that I've filled in that I didn't even know I had.

>The affirmation that almost 100% of grads can't write a trivial program would mean that somehow CS grads are worst at programming than a sample of random people.

You're right that something is off about that story. There is no way that someone could get through the entire program I'm going through without knowing how to write that for loop.
According to the article, password-protected files aren't reasonable grounds for suspicion. What about refusing to log into your machine or give up your login password?
http://www.canistream.it/ appears to do exactly that 'what do I want to watch and where is it' flow. I just installed the app and I love it.
> Clapper was a very sensible decision. The plaintiffs in the case couldn't even prove that they had been harmed!

Seems very sensible, compared to how difficult the search for a plaintiff with standing had been for the case that became Heller. If a civil rights activist (Parker) that received death threats had no standing to challenge DC's handgun ban, as he never tried to register a handgun (unlike Heller, who was arguably a less sympathetic defendant -- an anti-government "gun-nut", etc...), I don't see how Amnesty had standing in this case.

Second amendment is actually a great example of how poor plaintiff choice often hurts civil rights causes. See Miller vs. US -- a felony charge of transporting a sawed shotgun with defendant himself being killed before decision was rendered; the outcome resulted in 70 year reign of "collective rights" interpretation of second amendment.
I don't know why you are taking my word or anyone else's word for it on HN. If you want to read a quick discussion of the court's ruling just look at 2.1.1-2.1.3 on the wikipedia page:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick#Opinion_of...
I think there was a story recently about how Netflix encodes each video multiple times for the various boxes and television sets. If they had their own box they could be more in control of at least one of those encoding formats.
I don't disagree. It could easily be a combination of ordinary senses. Scientists not happy with people poly-filling the knowledge gaps with fictional ideas, have no choice but to improve their equipment for even more data capture and analysis.

It may be that the very act of staring at someone actually alters or influences something in the physical world, as those flowers do we've recently learned....
>"electrical fields—may work in concert with these other cues to provide extremely nuanced details about pollination status."

Along those lines, it's plausible that there's processes at work with staring we're currently unaware of, waiting for science to discover.

Better that fictional ideas about possible nature of matter come from scientists anyway. Having a go at guessing where science may uncover new mechanisms, or where current science deserves more attention, is a good thing to have a go at.

It's the equivalent of drawing attention to a new patch of ground for a fresh archeological dig, he's not actually claiming on the TEDx stage to have dug it up and found an alien artifact.
The tangled world of service monitoring, process monitoring, process launching, configuration management etc etc et bloody c is waiting for a ZFS-style collapsing of multiple fighting tools into a single layer.

I noticed this most of all when I was writing puppet manifests that ... create Upstart scripts.

Why do I have one tool that configures and supervises the bits at rest and a completely different tool that configures and supervises the same bits in flight?
MakerBot unveils 3-D scanner
I'm guessing this is your site?
As an American that lives and works in China, I can certainly vouch that it is a real trick to even download the regular version of Skype, and best I can tell it is impossible without VPN connection. Microsoft belongs to the man, in China.
It's called eBay.
I agree with the value you place in intelligence and like how you qualify your essay as a discussion, but in perspective, your methods are simply imprecise and as you said, anecdotal.

You humorously contrast your essay to a "randomized clinical trial," but to be matter-of-fact, these trials exist: IQ tests or their politically acceptable stand-in, the SAT.

I guess what I'm asking is this: what's stopping you from requesting something like the SAT even if it's only for curiosity's sake?
A good sensible ruling.

Now, given that my data is private and only subject to search under warrant, are my privates likewise private?
A voice of reason! It's definitely a stretch to call it a clone.
It's certainly not a disinterested third party that Heroku knows nothing about: http://news.heroku.com/news_releases/heroku-and-new-relic-pa...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5343512
You raise a good point about the cost of pursuing these cases.

From my naive understanding, this type of fraud would have both criminal and civil penalties. For the criminal component, determining jurisdiction might be an issue, so there ought to be a federal agency to report cases to. The civil components might be "sold" to specialized firms, e.g., debt collectors.

The point is to disincentive fraudsters and recompense victims.
Each one of your employees should fit the bill for future CEO. I see that as the point for hiring smart employees. It's someone who will pick up your stuff and run with it in directions you might not have thought about.
I can say this happens with undergrads at UC Berkeley.
Yes, I also store my dotfiles in GitHub – https://github.com/roryokane/dotvim. To make installation on other computers easier, in the README, I list the shell commands to install the configuration for each OS. Installing my config is just a matter of copying and pasting those commands, and waiting for each command to finish.
"You’re looking for people who are 1) smart and 2) get things done"

Number 2 is a lot harder to determine than number 1 in my experience. You can determine if someone is a good programmer by having good programmers ask them increasingly challenging programming questions. The hard part is figuring out if they are an effective and productive employee.
It applies to the United States as well from my experience of being around other students in Computer Science :).

Many of the less knowledgeable students that are not interested in the subject matter past saying they have a degree in CS, simply copy and paste code they find online or from friends without ever figuring out how it works.

Professors I have had generally say, "You can use a code snippet or library you find and you cite it, but if I ask you to explain how it works, you better be able to do so."
The only thing I asserted in that comment was that you can't ask the computer to help you (effectively) in a naive search when the space is large or infinite. I'm not familiar with how theorem provers work, so I'm most likely wrong anyway.

How does a computer build abstractions on its own?
Killing a game does generate negative customer sentiment, but if you have a game that hardly anybody plays anymore it's probably not enough to keep them from pulling the plug.

My guess is for "cult favorites" after some period of time they'll just push out a patch that removes the DRM and turn the servers off. Then it's just a question of losing multiplayer.
A really well-designed combination lock
Great concept!

I'd suggest offering Vundle[0] as an alternative to Pathogen, or even replacing it altogether. I've found it to be a better system managing bundles by config in your vimrc and running :BundleInstall/Update/Remove/etc instead of git cloning into a bundle dir.

[0]: https://github.com/gmarik/vundle
It's entirely possible to get IP space from one upstream provider and then announce it to multiple upstreams under your own ASN.
Enough about Launchpad. It's perfectly ignorable, and no sillier an interface than FrontRow, which shipped on most of the supposedly better earlier versions of OS X.

Remember when every Mac shipped with an IR port and a little remote? Laptops shipped with remotes. But apparently an optional app chooser interface (LaunchPad) is the most anti-PC they've ever shipped.
How extensible will the 3d files be? Can we convert them to DXF and modify them in AutoCAD now, or will that be added in later?

Even if not, people will still scan and upload scans of common objects, such as the battery cover to a remote control or controller or wiimote. Someone (Google? Make?) will host the Youtube/Github of 3d image scans, where people will freely upload their scans.

And there are all kinds of other prototyping situations where this could be used -- make a model out of clay or balsa or your favorite malleable material, scan it, then print it from the 3d printer.

Which leads to fast physical prototyping -- 3d-print a model, modify it with hand or power tools (box knife, file, dremel), scan, modify the shape file in AutoCAD, 3d-print, modify by hand, scan, modify in AutoCAD, etc.
SwitchCoder – Build Voice and SMS Apps with No Infrastructure
Packing ruby2.0 on debian
My guess is that this will be overturned by SCOTUS http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/a_sixth_sense_6th...

There's a practical problem as well: if the 4th applies, getting warrants just to check a bag is gonna be a paine. Unless they create different rules for airports, you can do this but not that.
Agreed! I wasn't aware of canistream.it until reading this thread and I'm very impressed with it.

I think if I was aware of that site when I started moviepresto, I wouldn't have built it. But, then again, I wouldn't have learned the things I learned in the process.
You can stop pointing me at the Wikipedia article. I've read it, and it still doesn't answer the question. I'd give more weight to a HN comment that does answer the question than to the wiki article that doesn't, even if the comment is just secondhand recollections that somebody qualified clearly said the ruling doesn't affect the legal status of speech that is clearly political. Did Morse overturn Tinker with the help of anti-drug scaremongering, or was Morse actually a narrow ruling on something not covered by Tinker?

Edit: By searching SCOTUSBlog, it appears that the answer may be that the ruling itself is pretty unclear about how broad or narrow it is, though Kennedy and Alito's concurrence clearly states that it doesn't apply to political speech. I guess we can at least agree that Morse might be a pretty narrow ruling.
I use all-free photos from these places

http://morguefile.com/

http://www.photorack.net/

http://publicdomainclip-art.blogspot.com/

(found at article: http://webmarketingfree.com/free/royalty-free-photos-top-3-f...)
I just randomly discovered this similar site: http://vimrc.info/generate. It lets you choose to leave settings out of your file as well as turn them on or off, but it doesn’t include color schemes and plugins.
A SimCity Update
(I work at Stripe, and I'm the author of the tweet cited in the article.)

The visual design and structural layout of the documentation is certainly not of Stripe's creation. That's all Jeremy Ashkenas. He gave us permission to riff on it a few years ago.

I called their docs a clone on Twitter because of the original elements that were copied: the language switcher along the top; sample curl invocations on the right, with sample responses immediately afterwards; etc. Even the tiny details, like the order of the sections and URLs themselves, are shockingly similar: theirs now too live at /docs/api. The strangest detail, in my opinion, is copying the motif of having a blueprint in the background on the homepage.

The end result is that they're pretty much identical.

All of this is fine. This is just a set of arbitrary design decisions, and they're absolutely free to copy them. We assert no ownership. But given how arbitrary the design choices are, the fact that they picked all of the same ones was somewhat surprising to us -- especially since there are many ways our docs could be improved. (We hope to do so soon.)
...all using the Netflix API
Newfound powers?

Laws restricting the political activities of corporations are as old as the nation. The key issues involved in Citizens had already been decided the other way in both Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003).

There would have been nothing newfound in restricting the spending of corporate money on political issues. Yes, even in the case of non-profits.
It's a two-column documentation layout. Beyond that, it looks as similar as any two documentation sets on the internet.

Non-story.
There's nothing "arrogant" about pointing out that PHP and JavaScript are extremely flawed programming languages. It's just an objective truth. It's no more "arrogant" than saying that 1 + 1 = 2, or that Berlin is a city in Germany.

I'd be interested in seeing the "QandA forum" discussion that you mentioned. Please provide a link to it, so we can judge for ourselves what actually happened in that case.
It happens here, but, I think to a lesser extent.

India is just insane - 99% of people are in "IT" or "Computer Science" or "Software Engineering" solely because of the initial wave of people who made it to the United States as programmers.
You're right. The "fake donation" scam is one example. As is the "long lost grandkid, who needs to pay his medical bills". But ... most scams do prey on greed - people assume that it's something illegal, but that it's not themselves getting ripped off by it.
If you ever do any work in Canvas (SVG) from the bottom up, you'll end up probably using calculus somewhat for things like Bézier Curves[1]. It was one of those times I thought to myself, "I'm glad I took 4 quarters of Calculus." Knowing derivatives and such for making a game is also useful when it comes to Newton's laws and knowing acceleration is just the rate of change of velocity and velocity is the rate of change of distance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bézier_curve
Minecraft seems to be doing pretty well. EA can do whatever it wants, that doesn't mean every developer will follow in their path. Sure, lots will sell out, but more show up to take their place.
I'll take "whoever is legally responsible" as my answer.

Did the car crash because of faulty programming? Then I imagine the car manufacturer is liable.

Did the car crash because it was hit by a drunken idiot? Then the drunken idiot would be my guess.

Some combination of the above? Then some combination of responsibility is assigned.

And so on.

It will vary on a case by case basis while the law discovers the common permutations of facts in automated car crash cases. Or until legislatures decide as a matter of policy to introduce a common scheme.

I'm assuming we're not talking about "no fault" jurisdictions. Because in no fault schemes you just skip the civil question of fault altogether and go directly to the question of fixing things up. (There might still be criminal charges). No fault isn't without problems but it certainly saves a lot of court time and money.

(IANAL, TINLA)
My experience of this article:

1) Read opening text
2) See container (presumably a video) with no explanation. I cannot load the video.
3) Read next paragraph to see what the video was about. No explanation. Close tab.
Until you read the reviews on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Lock-1500iD-Combination-Assorte...
I somehow saw this coming as recent as Sim City 4. But all in all, this is proving to be a good improvement, but a bad implementation. What is even the need of the online DRM? is this another of those: " Try to save billions of dollars from piracy, that do not exist " ?

I was planning to buy this game, now I don't.
I've been waiting for the results of this search for a while now. I'm hoping to see reportage soon from a more credible source than one which refers to some country called "Great Brittan"! Do they have interns writing this stuff or something?
This is not even close to the truth. Constitutional rights of expression have always applied to corporations. That is how the New York Times has freedom of the press, not just the reporters who work there. That is how the Catholic Church has freedom of religion, not just the people who follow that faith.
You did, because Mac and OS X are synonymous :)

It has nothing to do with being after trade secrets from Apple employees. The people who sell both iOS and Mac (OS X) exploits do not sell them to people trying to steal Apple's trade secrets.
It's not that confusing, the only confusing thing IMO is the split between hosted and packaged. I'd rather the CWS only allow packaged apps.
The split is not so clear-cut on search and seizure issues. Remember that it was Justice Scalia who wrote the majority opinion in Kyllo, which decided that using thermal imaging devices to search for grow houses ran afoul of the 4th Amendment.
I am curious, would nano particles filled with salt or any other substance also do the same thing? I mean if you can get close enough to the virus, you could kill it anyway you like.
Exactly; way too often in arguments like this (such as with Wikipedia) people point at the places where something worked while totally ignoring the costs of false positives, as if the people who want "different" or "slightly less" moderation are somehow calling for "no" moderation... it's a total strawman.
TLDR: RapGenius (YCS11), in a painful attempt to remain relevant, decides to sue their web host for running their slow code slowly.
It's very exciting if it passes peer review.

There are of course two questions - first of the initial evolutionary path and then the path of long term survivability following its isolation beneath the ice. Still even if all this does is provide credibility to the latter long term survivability case it makes me excited about the potential for life in the sub-surface-ice oceans of Europa.
This is stupid. These are run-of-the-mill websites using standard design concepts none of them invented, they are barely similar.

Of course new, better products will inspire others to try to best them; looking too similar is a sign that the competition is failing at that.
It is going to be interesting when this gets to discovery, and we find out what Heroku were saying internally this entire time about the issue. There are bound to be internal emails that discuss this issue and what to do (or not to do) about it. For this reason I can see this being settled. Perhaps refunds and an apology.
I have a friend I've mentored through their CS degree and they're now a grader for a course. They tell me constantly about some students they have to give zeros to because their simple assignments (2nd level programming course) do not compile.

If one knows they will get zero if it does not compile (and they make this clear in the course), then I would be doing everything to remove code until it does compile and hope for some points versus none. I've seen some of the code snippets and it's just as bad as one would think. One person even wrote rude output statements when a user entered the wrong info (i.e. calling the person an "idiot" and such). Ironically, this person's code also did not compile.
Oh come on, it's easy! "In my opinion as a lawyer, you should release radioactive bees into the refrigerators of your customers."

Now that's bad legal advice.
The biggest fallout for EA will be difficulty attracting and maintaining quality staff. If you keep making games people love, you can ignore a lot of the hardcore gaming community criticism over DRM and survive, or even thrive. (I dislike a lot of Apple's business practices, but still give them a boatload of money for their superior products).

But people don't want to be embarrassed by the company they work for, and the best people who can leave do leave - and it becomes hard to replace them with top level people. (Many of whom will never work for EA due to it's reputation) Eventually, your game quality declines, folks stop buying your games not because you are an "evil" company, but because you now make terrible games.

If EA top brass has any sense, this is what they will understand and act on. The real danger is in the insidious impact it has on EA employees, and what this does to everything else over time.
I think backpacking is overrated... working and living somewhere is a much more genuine experience IMO.
If you were right, then they should have explicitly and specifically carved corporations out of the Bill of Rights, which they obviously did not do. That was not an oversight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering has a list of historic peering disputes, but doesn't really seem to have a good pointer to the details of the Exodus dispute.

Typically, national backbones use hot potato routing when peering in lots of different cities. If you, in Northern California, on Hurricane Electric, have a video chat with someone in New York City, let's say on Verizon, and it turns out to really be peer to peer, what typically happens is that the computer in New York City will send the packets through Verizon in New York City, to Hurricane Electric in New York City, and then Hurrican Electric carries the packets to you in California. In the reverse direction, Verizon gets to carry the packets across the country.

A key point here is that the two providers are equally responsible for the hassle of carrying packets across the country. This is why providers sometimes care about balanced traffic ratios.

Exodus was mostly pushing traffic out, not recieving very much traffic, and so with hot potato routing, they were doing a lot less than what many would argue was their fair share in covering costs of hauling packets across the country, which seems to have been the basis for that dispute.

When traffic ratios are balanced, hot potato routing has the advantage that one network doesn't need to know the details of where another network's individual IP blocks are geographically, thus reducing the amount of information big networks have to exchange and keep track of.

If Comcast were to peer with you near your location, they'd have to eat the costs of hauling the traffic across the country.

http://he.net/peering.html is Hurricane Electric's peering policy, and basically, anyone who's comfortable with settlement free peering is likely already going to have a good connection to Hurricane Electric, and my impression has been that Hurricane Electric's backbone is pretty sufficient for whatever long haul traffic it has to carry.

(And for all that Hurricane Electric claims ``Hurricane Electric expects you to peer at all exchange fabrics we have in common if we peer with you via public exchanges or all facilities we have in common if we peer via private interconnect with you. In other words, if you are peering in the US, Asia and Europe at the same locations as Hurricane you must peer with Hurricane at all those locations. This is prevent problems for your and our US and European customers so that customer traffic does not cross the Pacific or Atlantic twice to return back to the same continent.'', if a lot of their customers are data centers full of web servers, it's possible that hot potato routing might get them out of a certain amount of ``their fair share'' of long haul transit.)

Have you concluded that both Hurricane Electric and Cogent have trouble reaching those Comcast customers, and have you discussed the issue with Hurricane Electric and Cogent? It seems like they'd have better economies of scale in upgrading connectivity to Comcast than you would have going directly.