skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, when MIT moved from 6.001 in Scheme to 6.01 in Python, they also changed later courses to Python because now students wouldn't have Scheme experience.

This results in:
6.005 ("software engineering") in Java
6.006 (intro to algorithms) in Python
6.034 (intro to AI) in Python
6.035 (compilers) in Java

(6.005 was 6.170 which used Java and 6.035 has always used Java afaik so this list isn't all the new curriculum's fault... but it does give a good overview of MIT's undergrad CS decline)

Frankly, this is unacceptable. I'm not sure I would hire an MIT CS grad that did the new curriculum. It is absolutely absurd that MIT (which purports to have one of the best CS programs in the world) is teaching Java and Python in their undergrad CS curriculum even in places where Java and Python are not the best suited (compilers!? algorithms!? AI!?). For instance, one 6.005 pset is to build a Sudoku solver... in Java. Every MIT undergrad should have the ability to learn a new programming language. 6-3 students (CS majors) should especially be able to do this. MIT is getting watered down.

Students don't learn other programming paradigms and they learn to accept the bloat and poor design decisions of the required languages. Where once students would build a text adventure and a metacircular evaluator in Scheme for 6.001, they now build what amount to Lego Mindstorms kits. Seriously?
I think your comment has answered your question quite aptly.
How much would it cost them to pay someone to research this information? Probably it would take up a few hours a week. So maybe something like 3hrs / week * $20 / hr * 4 weeks = ~$240/month.

And don't hesitate to give them a widget linking to your site for "more information."
Can hackers save journalism?
Sort of... I don't think MIT has any required undergrad CS courses that use ~(Python || Java). I'd call that a problem.
The thing I am interested in the most is accuracy and precision.
I think this may be one of the smarter things I've seen in the 'traditional' journalism world. I'd like to know if the opposite is true, as well: are there any newspapers encouraging their journalists to become coders?
The claim that Smalltalk is dead is very much based on how many people use Smalltalk today - and the answer is very little. Arguing about Smalltalk's features, as awesome as they may be, does not refute the original presentation's point.
Because you can be happier with better things. For example, if you never tasted adult foods you'd still be "happy" eating baby food, and be completely unaware that you're missing out on greater happiness available from other foods.

Upthread the point's made that this means you'll be dissatisfied a lot of the time, and that's true. But when you are happy, you'll be happier.

In the context of the article, you might have to drink crappy coffee from time to time, but when you get great coffee you'll have a better drink experience than somebody with no palate will.
Your problem is Observer Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

You're trying to get startups to tell you how much life sucks when all they want is the free publicity. Put yourself in their shoes, and be a little less condescending perhaps?

If you can't get that stick out of your ass, then interview startup founders that have already made it, they're usually much happier to talk about what a wild ride it was.
Brainstorm HN: Outlandish Startup Ideas Pool
Pitch totally unrealistic Startup ideas.

Why do this? Well think of it like a brute-force brainstorming method. Very low SNR but hopefully a few of these will inspire someone to come up with a realistic/sane/good idea.
I'm graduating from MIT (hopefully) in under a month with a degree in CS. The new curriculum is an abomination. If you are teaching some of the (supposedly) brightest students in the world, you shouldn't worry about teaching marketable skills or using popular languages. Your students should be able to pick up a new language easily.

Luckily, I took all old-curriculum classes. If I were a student entering college for CS now, I would not choose MIT. I don't know other schools' curricula in depth but some place has got to be more rigorous (Berkeley? Stanford? CMU?).
I think it's in our nature to seek out better options in everything in our lives.
ADoM is also good, but closed source unfortunately. Can't play it on my PDA.
You must be talking to the wrong startups, then. We've never claimed to be making the next Google. I didn't get laid much in high school, but I quickly made up for lost time afterwards. I already am someone in this world by virtue of existing, so that's covered too.

You seem to want all startups to be depressed and self-loathing. Those stories might be hard to come by since they're two qualities that most entrepreneurs simply do not have, at least not consistently.
I will start:

* Online Grocery shopping with Automated reordering. The service provides a small RFID scanner for the trash can, and all items are tagged with a RFID. Anytime it's thrown away, the items are reordered (such as milk/eggs/drinks). Would work with your local grocery shop.

* A everything recommendations system (such as Amazon's you might also like) except spans all things (not just things to buy, but also places to go visit, people, idealogies, match making, hobbies, cars, music, etc). Data sources would include websites you buy stuff, social networks, your bank information, gps info, phone calls, browsing methods, your private data, your photos, music, everything. (heh, privacy nightmare).
How to Protect Your Home Network
The best modern C++ numerical library I came across is Eigen: http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
I'd like to know a and b, too. But Bob's point wasn't that C++ programs look cleaner. His point was that it's very obvious that if you're not careful in C++, you can can shoot yourself in the foot quite quickly, and therefore, you're less likely to try crazy things in C++ that would risk foot injury.
Why? The original library does not deal with GUI at all. The ChatUser object does not need to know what GUI HTML elements it's associated with. One component of a piece of software extending another should not have to tamper with the original; this is just bad design in general, not OO or any specific flavor.
The part of your argument that leaves me unconvinced is your use of the median income as a benchmark. The article referenced (on yahoo) mentions the high percentage of foreign nationals who obtain PhD's and Master's degrees at US Universities.

So you're comparing someone who was talented enough in high school to hit the ground running with Calculus at university. This student then sleeps very few hours struggling with advanced calculus, differential equations, stochastic processes, nonlinear optimization, compiler design, chemistry, and physics. He scores well enough on the GRE (and perhaps the subject test) to get into a PhD program, and makes it through 6 years + a dissertation.

You compare that to the median. Seriously?

Meanwhile, his fellow lawyers in training breeze through a Poly Sci major. It's tough to get into a top law school, but no harder than getting into a top engineering program (because you don't have to compete with foreign nationals to get into law school in the US on anything near the scale you do in engineering). 3 years of law school or 2 of an MBA program are no picnic, but virtually all students at these programs obtain their degress (which is hardly the case at PhD programs, I know this from personal experience at Berkeley).

Salaries would have to be as high or higher than Law/MBA to convince Americans to do this. Instead, engineering salaries can lag way behind, because it's easy to get foreigners, especially from countries without much economic opportunity, to sign up for this as a way of gaining a path toward US residency and citizenship.

While salaries might not be actively lowered, they almost certainly place a limit on wage growth. When this happens over decades (and wages aren't similarly controlled in other fields where Law and MBA students are hired), you'll start to see a huge wage differential.

To me, this has clearly happened - and now Americans have no interest in signing up for such an intensely rigorous path with rewards that are, quite frankly, much lower than in other professions.
I would agree, even though I consider myself one of those people (for certain things). My problem isn't with the discerning characteristic, it's the attitude of superiority that often comes with it.

Of course I probably give off that attitude sometimes...
of course, there's a difference between being discerning and simply being a victim of marketing aimed at people who like to imagine themselves as discerning.

I think this fellow is the later, as evidenced by his cited taste in products.
The person who is discerning has a more active and challenging experience. Plus, a person with critical ability (one step further) can discuss the experience with another such person. For instance, I can't really talk about a cup of coffee I just drank, but I can talk about a movie I just saw. That adds an extra dimension to seeing a movie with someone: talking about it afterwards.

Of course a lot of the motivation for being discerning, especially in regard to food and drink, is class aspiration. Money isn't enough. Urban and suburban Americans engage in a lot of competition to see who can live the most enlightened and refined lifestyle. It isn't the most productive way that energy could be channeled, but considering it's an expression of some of our basest, most ruthlessly hierarchical human tendencies, we could do a hell of a lot worse.
You're right.

I meant that I wanted more openness, not self-loathing.
In a lot of cases, just use forward declarations to avoid unnecessary includes in the header files goes a long way.
just outsource for one less worry http://mom-sourcing.co.in/
Nice summary. I've often thought about the Japanese interest in "continual improvement" as a reason for their success in industries such as car and electronics manufacturing. The less structured American approach doesn't do so well there, but does a great job in fast changing fields like software and biotech.

>The second character (善) is Zen (quite literally)

Just a quick word of warning- 善 is pronounced "zen" or "shàn" in Chinese, but it's not the zen you hear about.

Zen, as in Zen (or chán) Buddhism, meditation or any other "zen" in common English usage is 禪 (simplified as 禅 after WWII).
This for washing clothes would be good. Put a reader in the hamper and track all dirty clothes going into it. Notify me when there is enough similarly coloured stuff there to do a wash, or when I'm running out of clean necessary items. Also, tell me to start washing stuff in advance of long trips away.
With a poll you need to be taken to the results when you vote... clicking on results while easy is really annoying and makes you feel like your vote didn't count.
I suspect it would take more than a million dollars to make a modern graphics-rich game, regardless of its basis in Nethack.

I'd certainly like to play such a game, though. The depth of the Nethack world is impressive. Put it on the Wii so I can swing swords, throw daggers, fling spells, etc. and I would probably never be heard from in the real world again.
- Arg. I must not have said it right. I didn't mean that entrepreneurs think life sucks. I think we're the most optimistic people out there.

- You're right about the observer effect. I worry about it all the time. That's why I keep asking for feedback.

- Aditya, what I meant in that last comment is that I'm looking for the kind of openness + optimism that you showed here:
http://aditya.sublucid.com/2007/11/
If, on the other hand, you listen to his debate with Richard Perl...

Or you could watch the Harvard debate he had with Alan Dershowitz on Israel where he wasn't particularly convincing, or better yet the passage of _The Blank Slate_ where Steven Pinker completely skewers Chomsky's nonsensical position on human nature in its relation to economic systems.
This is a much better link if you ask me from the original:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven...
Movie Software that provides stock footage of fixed sets (homes, gardens, etc) and places you in those settings perfectly. Also same with cars and so on - the software should be at a level where you could make a full movie without ever leaving your home.
1. Go on a diet.
2. Open [web|desktop] app.
3. Select diet plan (atkins; south beach; XYZ etc).
4. Select number of people in household.
5. Select number of people on diet.
6. Select dietary options (eg gluten-free).
7. Select budget.
8. Add credentials and payment details for preferred online grocery store.
9. App notes diet plan and previous shopping activity to reduce duplication, finds recipes and extracts ingredients
10. App creates shopping cart automagically based on the above (and probably more besides) and purchases.
11. App records purchases.

I've wondered for the last 4 or 5 years since I have had this idea whether this would actually be something to pitch to the retailers rather than the consumers.
Rythie one the things that bothers me is that the "cool kids" can add a stupid little feature to their products and get a ton of coverage in blogs and mainstream media.

But anyone who isn't in the "in crowd" can't get heard.
Hire a bunch of people to walk around large markets in other countries, such as India, with wireless webcams attached to their heads. Shoppers can then direct these people to various stands, barter, and purchase stuff through a web interface.
Keep in mind that a significant proportion of cool JS features described on MDC are typically only available in recent builds of Gecko-based browsers. The baseline you can rely on in other browsers does not include let, getters/setters, comprehensions, etc., etc.
Good tip. We should probably look into that.
Patented training method for teaching pets to do house work.
There are graphic clients available, in various stages of maintenance (see the Wiki article on NH). But I keep going back to the text version. It's like porting Pacman to the Quake or other 3d engine - you don't really gain anything, and arguably the visual distractions get in the way, over-emphasizing the limitations of the square grid and limited view. Additionally, the isometric 3d of some ports makes it too easy to step into the wrong square.

When I was in High School (80s) I used to sneak onto the campus of the local technical college to play Hack.
Plastic bags that are not a pain to open.
Wrt median: Your points seem to support what I am saying. The median general salary is much lower than even the tech industry's supposed depressed wages. Then why aren't people scrambling to become engineers like they did to become realtors or at least encouraging their children to become engineers?

I don't have the link handy, but NY Times had a great graphic with salaries of different professions. Lawyers are paid more than computer people, but the delta is not a multiple (iirc it was about 50% more). So it's not even clear to me that lawyers are paid significanty more (considering the criticality of their work).

Also it's not clear to me why you bring in PhD and master's. Most engineers in tech don't have those degrees.
Teaching has always to do with bringing something really new and perfect to a still quite fresh mind.

So, when teaching, you always need to bring the simple and perfect theory.

Practice is what your students will make out of your 'perfect' theory -- slumming down quite a bit -- but if you start with bringing a 'practical' theory to begin with, your students will never learn to fly high (bringing in some really fresh new ideas).
I envy people with skypeable grandmas :)
A washer/dryer combo that works as a single unit, so that you don't have to move things manually from one to the other.

I see it as a 2 story contraption, washer on top, dryer on the bottom. After the washer is done, a trap door opens and the clothes fall into the dryer, which then auto-starts.

As you can guess, I was doing laundry recently
This one is pretty close to home for me.

My grandfather, Victor Grinich, was one of the founding members of Fairchild. When I was growing up, I remember hearing about how he was one of the "Traitorous Eight" who broke away from Shockly and started Fairchild.

Among the founders, which included physicists and chemists, Vic was the only electrical engineer. It was only after he passed away that I learned from Gordon Moore that he was primarily responsible for choosing the first family of integrated circuits that Fairchild made. He was such a humble man, even though his work with a handful of others essentially created Silicon Valley.I still have a few of those first chips and diodes in my desk drawer as a reminder of his humility and brilliance.

I'm a physics & EE/CS major at MIT, and sometimes I feel like this stuff is in my blood.
Wikiocracy: instead of electing legislators, you use a wiki environment to build a corpus of legislation and manage legal cases, with limited commit ability (eg no more than monthly or so...don't want to make long post). For a small fee, contracts can be registered and arbitrated like a private arbitration service, minus the expensive pay-to-play which usually decides on behalf of the larger entity.

It quietly supplants the the private and later the public legal system by providing a superior open source alternative.
Build an iphone app to alleviate OCD:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=601648

In particular, such an app would help alleviate problems with repeated checking. The user would use the app to take a photo/video of something instead of checking it repeatedly (e.g., you locking the front door).

The photo/video would be tagged with the time and place.

To actually try to cure OCD, one might introduce a probability that the photo/video will not be taken. One can have this probability increase over time as the user's condition improves.

Another possibility is to delete the photo/video automatically after some time interval, which decreases as the user's condition improves.

This is something that I might actually consider building if there is sufficient demand.
that doesn't really sound unrealistic though! :)
Ah, Fair enough.

I was just reacting to The problem I have with interviewing startups is that they're full of sh-t.

But, like I said, opennness is tricky when you're trying to get publicity and the wheels are falling off, right? No one would want to buy from a company that doesn't have enough cash to feed the founders... if they knew that was the case.

This is one of the reasons Venture Voice works, though, much easier to talk about stuff in hindsight, but I hope you can find more startups to profile on your show.
I like the analogy made here between errors/unpredictability caused by numerical rounding, and 'rounding' thoughts down to 140 characters.
Already exists. These are the norm in Europe, I have no idea why they're not popular in the US. We Europeans enjoy mocking antiquated American home appliances and can't believe you still use stovetop kettles and blenders from the 1950s. http://www.gelighting.com/apo/products/appliances/clothes_ca...

It looks like a regular washing machine, you just put your clothes in the front, set the buttons, and 2 hours later they're clean and dry. It's awesome.
Wikipedia Grappling with Deletion of IHT.com
A Woot.com for travel
Unlike other last min travel sites, this would offer just 1 product per day with 0 or 1 options
Example: "2 nights at the Edgewater Seattle 6/1-6/3 for $179 total"
OR "2 RT tix LAX<->Vegas + 2 nights at Bellagio for $379 total 6/1-6/3"

Just need to find some travel companies who are willing to work with you. They just need to agree to block off X number of rooms/flights for that date.

If the site picks up steam, maybe offer products for diff regions each day (west coast, east coast, midwest, south)
No, actually it's the difference between OCD and OCPD (Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder). People with OCD see that their compulsions are irrational; those with OCPD think their compulsions are necessary and rational.
Typing and being able to get an object's identity. Those two things make a huge difference.
If they moved them back to Winnipeg the city would go insane. It seems to me that's a potential alternative strategy.
The right answer, perhaps, would have been to disable HT in vanilla FreeBSD, and then re-enable it for PC-BSD.

I wasn't aware of PC-BSD at the time, but if someone had come to me and said "we're shipping a version of FreeBSD aimed at desktop users", I would have encouraged them to leave HT turned on by default. I always did my best to point out that this issue was not relevant to single-user systems, that all FreeBSD was doing was changing the default behaviour, and that in many cases it would make sense for system administrators to re-enable HT via the sysctl... unfortunately, the nuances tended to get lost as the story spread, so all most people heard was "Colin says that HyperThreading is evil and FreeBSD is disabling it".
A small game programming library/module which just exports your score, and allows you to see your rate of progress in different games over time.
The URL is the modern C pointer. But rather than pointing to objects we control, we now hold pointers to anything we want. We're at the mercy of everyone's ability to keep those objects alive, lest our URLs just become dangling pointers.
The American Press on Suicide Watch
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What kind of kettles and blenders do you guys use in Europe? I want in :(
A search engine for your house. Tag every object that you care about with a tiny electronic label (could be an rfid chip). Some objects could come pre-tagged and added to your library the first time they cross your door.

When you can't find something, find the object on your computer and start walking around the house with a wand that beeps louder as you get closer to the object. Would also work when you lose something outdoors and you can more or less retrace your steps.
Sort-of exists: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/y/yitm/ and several others. I'm always into stuff like this as I'm in film/tv production...and things like this are a great excuse for, er, not going out of the house, raising real money, hiring real people. But there's a vaaaaast price vs. quality gap. As in, to look convincing you need a greenscreen studio and a team of professional CG technicians to come to your house :-)
Cars that drive without a human at the wheel. This is the norm for sci-fi movies, and we still don't have it.
Facts about stamps, as the price rises to 44 cents
Set up inexpensive wireless cameras pointed at all street parking spots in the city. (doesn't have to be wireless cameras - pick any method or device that can reliably detect whether a parking spot is empty, cameras are the most flexible). Feed that data to a server, then dish it out to mobile devices (iPhone, etc.) combined with GPS to find the nearest street parking spot. Bonus points for intelligent behavior like not sending two cars to the same spot, or considering which spots are likely to be filled by the time you get there and what other spots are around. Mad bonus points if you work at a high enough level that this feature gets built directly into new cars.

I guess "outlandish" is a bit strong, it feels like it's only a matter of time.