skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- CS actually rewards you for thinking outside the box

... where on earth do you work? Dont get me wrong, I love CS; however, I dislike when people romanticize it. Read thedailywtf.com over and keep in mind that there is no shortage of stories ever to get posted on that site. and as for:

- "What invariants must this process satisfy? What's the cleanest way to organize this structure? How should these subsystems work together?"

I know a lot of people who graduated with me that I would not trust to ever answer any of those questions.. I have seen their programs and do not believe they know a good way to cleanly organize themselves out of a cardboard box.
I read it to mean this decade, not the 90s.
Linda Rising on Caffeine and the effects it has on performance
CS majors learn to really program

I have to disagree. People with a real passion for programming will use a CS program to become even better at programming.

Other people, lured by the promises of big $, can get through a CS program with a bit of effort and at the end still be worse then average coders.

That's certainly what I experienced when I got my CS degree. About half the people loved to program and the other half hated it and weren't good at it, but still got their degrees. A CS degree does not make you into a good coder, it can help you be one, but it doesn't make you.
> What?!

He raises a very pertinent issue; it's just not that clear in this context.

Here's an extreme, yet simplistic analogy:

Suppose scientists discover that green-eyed people are used as transmission vectors by a lethal flu virus. A cure can be found, but it would take at least a decade to complete the research and testing. Scientists estimate that the virus will kill 90% of mankind within 5 years.

Should we round up and isolate all green-eyed people? Should we kill them?
The "end" of science isn't the verification stage either. If you're wrong, you use that to refine your theories and research strategy, using creativity, and continue testing.

You hear artists say things like "This work isn't done yet, something is missing", as if that's some kind of exceptional state for the artist, yet they never actually complete it. Do legitimate scientists say that? I wouldn't think so, since continuous refinement the default state of science.
Er, I meant "need to add another IM account to the IM application they are already using".
Your question is based upon an assumption that 'inventing new things' is inherently better than 'studying and explaining existing phenomena'. It might feel so to you, but it is not an absolute truth. Some people (like me) like to explore the vast wonders of nature rather than create an imperfect object that tries to mimic the perfection of nature (most inventions fall under this category).

It's not a question of right or wrong or superiority or inferiority. To each, his/her own.

And it's not about 'creativity' as another commenter explains either. Science, the art(!) of coming up with generalisations and laws expalining a vast array of phenomena calls for a lot of creativity. The top notch people in every field are there because they are creative. Creative in coming up with new mind-boggling explanations (can you get any more creative than coming up with Quantum mechanics? :) ), thinking of new ways to measure things, thinking of ways to put a new theory under 'stress test'.

I don't understand what you mean by
"Many computer scientists devote their time to studying other people's inventions (e.g., social networking, blogging, tagging, etc.)"
but true scientists, the 'smart and ambitious people', are curious to understand everything. So, if they happen to be computer scientists interesting in social networking, etc., they might find it interesting to analyze and understand the dynamics of it; they like to tear things apart and look at the basics.

If you ask for the 'social' utility of it, I could say such analyses form the basis of "inventing new things", but that's actually not the point; the scientists do it for their own curiosity. Just like you would feel rewarding to create an AI, they feel it rewarding to analyze it and understanding completely.

>Why is that rewarding?

This question, IMHO, is inappropriate - things are rewarding because they are. Each one is born differently, grows up differently and has different mindsets. There's no absolute measure on what 'must be' rewarding and what 'must not be'.
I wouldn't use C for web applications, either.
This just seems like vandalism. If the original billboards truly are "illegal" (which I'm skeptical of), it is a matter for the city government, not a bunch of "artists".
How is this different from other mental diseases?
Doesn't google also apply there? I read it as an attempt to exclude them by defining the decade as 1999-2009. Or as I described it, "creatively."
I would still disagree... I think the CS way of thinking, if you're computer-savvy, will be there with or without a CS degree. Better get something else.

If you want a more robust, equally versatile scientific field, I'd suggest Physics or Maths.
> I'd much rather spend my time actually creating... instead of bashing my head against a spreadsheet

The problem is that most industrial programming is a sort of motorized version of bashing one's head against an ultimately meaningless spreadsheet.
How did this get to the top of HN? It seems like a boring blogospam rehash of a bunch of very basic CS concepts, not even well written...
Personally I'm glad it will never be released, else it would invalidate all those analogies comparing something to DNF as a way of saying it will never be released. It would waste a nice well-established meme.

------------------

"The closure came about as a result of funding issues, our source explained"

Oh please. That's just a symptom.
China fears bond crisis as it slams quantitative easing
[X408.8] Open Source Fundamentals and Strategies course - UC Berkeley Extension
We should see this for what it will most probably be. One step on the path to creating a search engine which understands and computes your question based on the sum of all knowledge on the internet.
I had a conversation about refactoring with one of the giants of the Lisp world earlier this week about this, actually. The parts that make Lisp so powerful are the parts that also make it so hard to build reliable refactoring tools. Refactoring is something you need in any language. Otherwise, the implicit presumption is that you always get your software architecture 100% right the first time around.
In his introduction you can replace the word "Academia" with "the majority of programming jobs" and it would still be true.

If you're a merely average programmer, you're going to get stuck in a crappy corporate cube farm. You should either have the passion or genius to dive into startups and/or be hired by cutting edge companies, or you should not think that a CS degree is some kind of ticket to paradise.
(In effort to continue the utter predictability of this thread:)

Of course, to any rationally-thinking being, today is 2009-05-07, which is meaningless.
Detour Patterns in Mule and ServiceMix
Tim O'Reilly - Why Twitter Matters for News
And...

Next year will be Even Day on 6/8/10

or

Decaday on 10/10/10
RightScale's paid edition has prebuilt MySQL Master-Slave configurations with or without EBS. EBS is great if your transaction volume is average, but on high IO disks it can get prohibitively expensive. The RS Manager for MySQL has failover, recovery tools as well. All you need to do is plug in your DB dump.

RightScale's Developer Edition is always free - AND -
RightScale Website Edition is FREE for Ycombinator startups while you're actively engaged in the program.
(and to top it off)

Of course, removing yourself from our human frame of reference, today is just another rotation of the planet, arbitrarily numbered by the current resident intelligent species.
Study finds US air traffic control vulnerable to cyberattack
I'm looking forward to Fibonacci Day: 5/8/13
I agree with you in that Math is more universal and probably a better place to go if you're on the fence.

But it depends on the Computer Science program. I think of CS as more of a theoretical approach to computing, but it seems a lot of schools are placing emphasis on the more practical aspects of development (like actually working? who'd of thought). I've heard complaints that universities have just been turned into Java mills.
I wouldn't call painting over temporary plywood walls covered in movie Ads vandalism.
Wow, I think this is the first article I read on singularity-hub that's so blithely stupid (either that, or it's written for idiots).

Whilst I'm sure this is useful technology, underplaying the risks like that is not respectful to your audience. Paragraphs like:

But wait, you say, you’re afraid of what these viruses might do if unleashed on the world. Can’t they mutate into a terrible disease? Might they stop building batteries and start building weapons of mass destruction? Couldn’t these little electronic-minded viruses one day develop into gasp* Decepticons™?*

...are stupid and seem to disregard 50 years of science fiction authors thinking about this problem. No, Mr Saenz, that's not the main worry with these - the main worry is that eventually a virus of this kind might mutate into a "gray goo" plague. If you don't know what that is, you have no business writing articles on a site called "singularity hub".

Let’s get the facts straight. These viruses are bacteriaphages, meaning they hunt down and eat bacteria, not humans.

That's deeply worrying. Bacteria and humans are not all that different, and the human body harbours large quantities of friendly and essential bacteria.

In short, there’s no reason to be afraid of these engineered viruses, they just want to build you batteries. Won’t you let them try?

Well, that really depends on which bacteria they want to make batteries out of. My bacteria? Buzz off.

Now, I'm sure the scientists behind these are aware of this risk and are taking every reasonable precaution, so this is not an attack on the technology itself - just on this badly written article.
not for full-time programmers, but SM's audience seems to be more designers who may dip into code now and again
What's wrong with charging money for a good product? We geeks are a vocal minority that loves for everything to be free.

Guess what! 90% of the population doesn't care. If it solves a problem and is reasonably priced, then it's a no-brainer and they'll get their credit card out of their wallet. It's not extortion. It's about providing value and charging a fair price.

For desktop software, you can be nice and still charge money. Offer a free download and trial period. Or offer a free version with some limitations and an unlimited version for a price.

For online services, the same applies. Craigslist is free for almost everything except job ads. That works.

Gratis vs. Libre: that may just be the next big thing in the evolution of the Internet.
That is probably very right. My family isn't religious, my friends aren't religious, and I come from one of the least religious countries in the world. I don't think I've ever had a real life discussion with someone that truly believed in God.

So to me the whole discussion seems like a farce, probably because I've never been indoctrinated to believe it from family, friends and society.
I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with his point, but I find the concept that the CS way of thinking will be there with or without a CS education naive. (Note I said education, not degree.)

Once we've learned fundamental concepts, it's difficult to imagine when we didn't know them, and it's easy to assume learning it was inevitable.
I disagree. If you're capable of being a good programmer, you'll get there faster by doing it than majoring in CS.

If I were giving my 18yo self advice, I'd suggest majoring in physics but taking the minimum required courses. With a light core schedule, fill up the rest with economics, writing composition and history. Maybe design.

On the other hand, PhD programs in CS are worthwhile.
This is correct. Even though intuitively it might seem unlikely that hamstrings have anything to do with lower back pain, but they really are linked. There are also other stretches and exercises which help.
> If the original billboards truly are "illegal"

They are. It's called "flyposting". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyposting
Langolab.com
We're looking for a entrepreneurial hacker/maniac to join us as a cofounder at langolab.com. We've been inducted into a somewhat prominent seed capital program for the summer, so we have a nurturing environment awaiting us and a pretty strong vote of confidence in the potential success of the project. If you are extremely smart and creative, please come join us.

A lot of the code is in Java and some is in Actionscript and Erlang. We use Google Web Toolkit pretty heavily. Good programmers can build amazing things using any Turing-complete language, so please check your Java hatred at the door (or, rather, the "add comment" button in your browser) please. You should be located in Boston.

Adam
adam at langolab dot com
Word on the street is that someone has acquired a top secret CIP device and has reconfigured the subcircuit board to connect to the FAA subchannel. Jack Bauer is on the case.
However you slice it, $150/mo is only $1800/year. Let's say you want to launch some new site targeting the public consumer internet where you would like to see hundreds of thousands of people on your site. You're not going to get there first. You have two options - either put forth the engineering effort to properly test your server and get it to scale up to the many thousands of concurrent level or launch in a series of betas with increasingly more people. There is certainly a case for getting the software ready, launching it and then doing a marketing push and if you get a hit on some major service, the site is ready to go - I think it puts forth a more professional air. Now, I have reviewed slicehost more since this discussion and there may be a significant way to reduce cost there... but it is also not as feature rich as the whole AWS suite.
Maglev. It's a "Ruby that scales." http://maglev.gemstone.com/
From the video:

We're trying to make a point here that the public should be the ones using the public space and not commercial and private interests.

This guy lives in a different world. Equivocation aside, those 'public' spaces are privately owned. When this guy says that the 'public' should be the ones to decide, what he really means is that he thinks his opinion of how the space should be used ought to trump that of the owners who pay to own and maintain their property.
And only in one of the calendar systems adopted by that species.
Or reply to comments with more links to Erlang.

http://www.reddit.com/r/erlang
Jef doesn't think you should have to save. It should be automatic. I've been thinking about a system that version controlled a file after every keystroke. It would be a little heavy but, consider that you could undo anything forever.
> In other scientific matters (e.g. If string theory is real) you don't get empassioned pleas for one side.

Uh, have you ever read Lee Smolin, Peter Woit, Leonard Susskind, and Lubos Motl?
Tell HN: Cherrypeel.com is up for sale
They created a GUI interface in Visual Basic to hack the mainframe.
There are two things which can be taken from that graph. Americans eat quickly and Americans have an obesity problem (certainly along with Mexico and the commonwealth). I'm sure that any correlation is a by product of a deeper difference in cultural relationship with food that results in eating slower. My point being making people eat slower in the US would only move their position on the graph horizontally.
> You should either have the passion or genius to dive into startups

For that, you also need some degree of extraversion, and a willingness to put up with mountains of bullshit and to work on problems of zero long-term consequence and of scarcely any deep intellectual interest.

> be hired by cutting edge companies

And if you simply want to work on your own creative ideas, instead of being a servant (whether to established companies or to fickle startup customers), academia is the only remaining ticket. And when it spits you out, you're screwed. Industrial research (say, at Google) mostly hires those with a Ph.D. Thus the gatekeeper is the same.
Well, I never got a formal CS education, but I read a lot of books on the topic. Certainly my "CS education" is far from complete in the way that it would be if I'd done a degree (I know little about, say, how to write a compiler). But the bits that I don't know are the bits that I haven't needed to use, and everything that I've needed to learn, I've been able to learn.

The only thing a CS degree might give you that self-study would not is a good overview of the field. But then, if you're passionate about programming and you've been into it since you were 10, chances are you have a pretty good overview of the field already.

So in that case (passionate about computers since an early age, hesitating about degree) I would strongly recommend something other than CS.
> Perhaps the most surprising thing to hear from a climate scientist writing about climate change is that climate science has for too long had the monopoly in climate change debates.

Maybe biologists and geologists shouldn't have a privileged position in debates on whether evolution is true, and about the age of the Earth. And should medical scientists have the monopoly in debates over vaccinations and disease control? Popular opinion clearly says no.
Verity Stob's guide to upcoming C++0x
A few billion people have direct personal experience of God? I seriously doubt it's more than 0.1% of that, and I would class that a hallucination and some wishful thinking. I have direct personal experience of seeing the fabric of space and time, under the influence of weed, except I realized even while it was happening that it was all bollocks.
It would look pretty much like YC actually:

You have 3 months. Go build something that people want. Figure it out as you go. Iterate, refine.

To be fair, you have to think of business plan competitions as a teaching tool for students. You don't tell a CS student to go out and write an operating system on day 1. You teach them structure first.

The same can be said with those competitions. It's a way to force students to think about all the issues of starting a business or launching a product, without actually doing it.

Personally, I'm on the DIY camp. I learn better by doing. But you need a bit of both.
I was taught by an econometrician that r^2 values don't mean much, but I cannot remember his logic as to why. Maybe something about malleability?
This is my favorite thing about using open source tools: they are driven by the "end of quarter" profits that put so much crap out in the the commercial environment.

Ideally, we could get that mindset to move upstream to customers so commercial software could have the same mindset, but I'm not holding my breath.
This is not entirely true.

You are simplifying thousands of years of research, both experimentally and theoretically. The reason why there is so much debate is because most people have an uneasiness believing in something that isn't entirely proven.

With that said, there is lots of scientific research going into proving atleast the historical presence of Jesus. See for example, The Shroud of Turin.

Also, if you ever get the chance, take a tour of the catacombs in Rome beneath St. Peter's Basilica. This is sure to give you an appreciation for the vast tradition regarding religious beliefs.

YOU may not believe any of this, but you have to agree that the shear number of people over the course of THOUSANDS of years atleast deems that it is worthy of investigating.
Maybe I misunderstood the article, but it seems like he was talking mostly at students with advanced degrees (possibly at the Doctoral level):

Presumably two assumptions are made:

1) Getting a CS degree at some level is not the only degree that they will get

2) They are frickin' smart.

The advantages that the author proposes are as such:

1) You will probably learn how to use a computer to solve problems for you at a level beyond using Matlab or Excel

2) You will have a practical and marketable degree with which you can enter the work force if you decide that academia is not where you want to stay.

3) The abstractions that you learn from studying Computer Science are applicable to many common systems beyond those found in computers.

That is my interpretation.
CS is a subset of Mathematics, if you argue that the CS way of thinking is valuable you're really arguing that the Math way of thinking is valuable and Math would be much more applicable to a more wide range of Professions.

On the fence? Major in Math.
10 little known Mac utilities
There are many possible causal arrows:

* eat fast => no satiety signal => fat

* empty carb diet => fat, fast binge eating

* high density food => fast, fat

* quality of life focus => (enjoy food => slow, exercise lots => thin)

* workaholic => fast, (no exercise => fat)

Also, I think you could draw a plausible correlation the other way, along the Norway-New Zealand axis and consider the US, Turkey and France the outliers.
Have you ever been browsing in MobileSafari and had an incoming call or SMS arrive? Have you ever listened to music and had a calendar alarm fire? Congratulations, you just experienced multitasking.
At work, I try to remember to stand up and stretch periodically. Drinking a lot of water forces me to get up out my chair regularly and go for a short walk down the hall.

When not at work, I try to take care of my back by wearing a back brace when doing heavy work or home improvement tasks and try to remember to lift with my knees, not my back.
squats and deadlifts!

worked for me.
I'd say just the opposite, and not just because I have a degree in CS.

My reasoning is: in the next 50-100 years, there will be a ton of breakthroughs in other fields brought about by sheer number crunching. Biology is seeing this with bioinformatics, physics is seeing it by being able to process the humongous amounts of data thrown off by modern equipment like the LHC, etc. Having a CS degree allows you to work in any of those fields, applying your knowledge of computation to help others achieve decidedly non-useless breakthroughs.

To give an example, the biology department at my alma mater is recruiting CS grad students as fast as it can to help implement some distributed system to simulate protein interaction (or something like that, I know so little about biology that it's embarrassing).

I'm not saying CS should be the default choice of every technical person, but it's not utterly useless to other fields. In fact, I'd say CS is _more_ useful in this case than it is to cubicle software jobs, because in the average Enterprise Doohickey, you aren't doing anything complicated enough to care if your algorithm is O(n^2) vs O(n).
"It is a scientific fact that, statistically, bug density does not change with programming language. So, a denser language means fewer bugs."

I don't agree based on my experience coding APL which is a very dense language. Maybe you get fewer coding bugs with a denser langugage but you encounter other much worse problems. Code you can't understand. Code that doesn't match the requirements. Code you have to rewrite if you ever want to change it. I prefer verbose code.
Android comming to Canada
Rogers just announced that they'll start selling the HTC Dream (G1) and HTC Magic on June 2nd.

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/May2009/07/c9320.html

Of course, the real good news here is that Canadian developers should should be able to start selling their apps on the Android Market within a month or two of the release.
An iPod doesn't help me concentrate, but sometimes music does. Techno sometimes helps me too, but it has to be techno I've heard before. New stimuli will distract me.

Interestingly, a walk around the block can do wonders for my concentration too. This fails horribly if something really catches my eye though. Girls are bad like that :)