skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A related question has been bugging me recently: why is there such a mismatch between the expectations of employers and the skills of CS graduates? There turns out to be a lot of research from the ACM SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) community. The McCracken Group paper "A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students" and several follow-on studies suggest that getting students to learn programming is truly difficult, a universal observation not just limited to the US. Student performance are often bimodal in intro classes. Also, our conventional assessment tools do not measure programming skill very well. I haven't encountered any data on this, but anecdotally, it seems the expectation gap is considerably different from say the expectation-skill gap in electrical and mechanical engineers. If anyone has any perspective on this, I am really interested in hearing about it.

Aside: At least in some (advanced?) compiler courses, we do teach students how to implement exception handling semantics in a compiler. This is of course very different from learning how to use exception handling facilities in a given language.
Bullshit. A pressure cooker is probably one of the most common kitchen accessories ever. Anyone who planned to use one for malicious intent would just deny that they have one.
If you have a link to a transcript of Manning's actual words, I would be interested in it. The best I can find is this article from Wired: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/bradley-manning/ which says things like:

"Only after Manning gave WikiLeaks the video of the Apache assault in Baghdad shortly thereafter did he start to hear back from someone in the IRC using the handle “Ox.” He believed that Ox was “likely Julian Assange” or Assange’s then-second-in-command, “Daniel Schmitt” — the German activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Shortly thereafter, Manning encouraged Ox to use a different handle to contact him, “Nathaniel,” after the author Nathaniel Frank.

Manning said his ensuing discussions with “Nathaniel,” often about the classified material, became friendly, enjoyable and long. “In retrospect, I realize these dynamics were artificial,” Manning continued. “They were valued more to me than Nathaniel.”"

and

"But Manning said that no one at WikiLeaks ever encouraged him to leak — which may be significant, if the U.S. government is, as rumored, considering charging Assange in connection to the leaks.

“No one associated with the WLO [WikiLeaks Organization] pressured me to give them more information,” Manning said. “The decision to give documents to WikiLeaks [was] mine alone.”"

and

"...Manning said he first tried to take his information to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico, before contacting WikiLeaks."

and

"“I never hid the fact that I downloaded copies of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A” and burned them onto CDs, Manning said, even labeling and storing them “in the open” in his unit’s tactical operations center. Nor did he hide that he also downloaded compression software to facilitate the transfer, Manning said."

and

"In each of these cases, Manning denied that he was compromising national security. The military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan were often “historic,” with its intelligence value perishable after “48 to 72 hours.” The Guantanamo Bay documents had “no useful intelligence” and did not disclose any results of detainee interrogations. The State Department cables were available to “thousands” of people throughout the government. A Washington Post reporter, David Finkel, had already written about a deadly Apache helicopter attack in 2007, in which civilians were killed, that Manning viewed on video."

I know that most news organizations have a slant to their reporting. Please do find me the transcript of Manning's statement so that I can see where he gives the impression that he was hung out to dry by either Wikileaks, or Assange himself.
Skeuocard
"something like VIM, with a great editor, but subpar compatibility with the rest of your system"

Excuse me, but vim has much better compatibility/interoperability with the rest of my system than all the IDEs written in Java.
$350 Linux-controlled Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot ships Sept. 1
My one beef with the pep still is the one module per line recommendation:

"Imports should usually be on separate lines ... No: import sys, os"

Why not? I don't really spend a lot of time studying stdlib imports, nor need them on separate lines. Pyflakes will yell at me if something was not imported.

After all, one does (and is legal in the pep): from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, ... So how is that different conceptually than doing from stdlib import os, re, sys, ...

I certainly agree with separating stdlib, 3rd party libs, and your own modules by blank lines.. but why should usually trivial stdlib imports need so many lines?
"God Exists!..Maybe!... or maybe even NOT!"

Above statement is 100% accurate... and completely and utterly stupid and most definitely not worth publishing.

Indeed you are accurate as well in saying that we do not know why they visited her house for sure. But publishing an article that adds a "maybe not" to the claimed series of events brings us no closer to finding that out.
This is patently untrue. Political progress inherently involves the combined minor effort of numerous people. Campaign volunteers regularly do everything from making a few cold-calls every night to fixing bugs in the web apps that are used to manage the campaign.

You're right that getting things started is non-trivial, but as other commenters have pointed out there are a fair number of organizations already driving for change who would appreciate "a few minutes or hours every once in a while". Here are a few:

http://1984day.com/
https://www.eff.org/
http://www.restorethefourth.net/

Please add more if you know any!
It's very good, but the OCR font is going a little too far for me.
In Defense Of Leakers: Snowden and Manning
Monopolistic competition? More whining. Fact is, the restaurants exist and provide jobs at a certain level of pay. Job applicants are free to apply or not apply. There is no monopoly. There are thousands upon thousands of restaurants in the country. Dial that attitude back.
tastes like cancer.
From the Guardian report on PRISM data sharing:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

The information the NSA collects from Prism is routinely shared with both the FBI and CIA. A 3 August 2012 newsletter describes how the NSA has recently expanded sharing with the other two agencies. The NSA, the entry reveals, has even automated the sharing of aspects of Prism, using software that “enables our partners to see which selectors [search terms] the National Security Agency has tasked to Prism”.

The FBI have access to PRISM data, and they run JTTF operations. Do you believe that Joint Terrorism Task Forces have no access to the data selected by PRISM searches? I was under the impression that this information was shared, but perhaps you know better? Obviously the local police tasked with following up wouldn't have access, but I'd expect the FBI to have it, and frankly find that a more persuasive argument than a picture of some fireworks.

If the police or JTTF are investigating people as terrorist suspects on the basis of fireworks posted to Facebook on the 4th of July, their resources are absurdly misallocated, but I sincerely doubt they would bother for that alone.
I've asked a few people that I would put in the same class as my clients, and a couple clients as well, if they knew what those terms meant and nobody really knew.
Why don't you just check the names?
The reel was later idea.
Do you want to work in genomics because it's big data?
Thanks. I like "business applications".
Money Isn't Everything
By your interpretation there are almost certainly no true selfless acts. They're all done for the wrong reason. At this point, we can't know that the release of the patent wouldn't have happened regardless of the personal tragedy so stating that it was for the wrong reason is absurd. It's not like they sat on it for 15 years, then suffered the tragedy, then released the patent.
When I flew Lufthansa, I was granted an honorary Ph.D.

My official name is "Aleksandr Feinberg" -- it's transliterated from Cyrillics (hence the "ks") and Russian version of "Alexander" does not put an e between the d and r -- which Lufthansa decided to print on my boarding pass as Dr. Aleksan Feinberg
A 'Google Play' version of the Moto X is coming soon
SEEKING WORK - NYC or Remote

I'm a full-stack developer looking for new interesting projects. So far I have experience with the following:

-Python/Flask/Django

-PostgreSQL/SQLAlchemy

-HTML/CSS/JavaScript/JQuery/Backbone

I'm also a former investment banker, so I'd be happy to talk anything business/finance/financial modeling as well.

Contact: luharris@alum.mit.edu
Jerry Droptable.
I love the idea of Soylent and I think it'll be a big success. One thing I'd love to see is a protein-fat-carb customizable version. That is, one person who is building muscle should be able to get soylent that's 40-20-40, while someone doing a keto diet should be able to get a 30-60-10.

Also, I didn't know they were the LevelRF guys. If any of the founders are reading, care to share why that startup didn't work out?
oh, in that case it seems it seems like you want something to hack out a minimum viable product (i am no entrepreneur i just learn this bullshit from reading hn). in which case, if it's web-based, ruby+rails or python+django. if it's mobile then i am unsure.
> Nudity is more accepted in Germany apparently, and it isn't in the US,

That's the impression I get too.

> that's just something we have to live with.

But I differ with you there.

> The Guardian presents itself as a news organization.

It is. Here amuse yourself and learn about the nature of various newspapers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=DG...

>The person that picked out that picture should have considered posting it

Oh, I bet that photo was chosen carefully to draw attention.

> in light of the fact that they are now, with the Snowden leak, a global news organization, with visitors from Germany AND the US (in this example).

They have always been so, and I hope they don't begin to pander to social conservatives.

> What they should consider is "Who is going to see this article?" and then take the option that attracts the most people to their site.

I think that's exactly what they've done. For better or worse.

>Understand that I'm not trying to say that Guardian should change their site up at all, rather I'm saying that it might benefit them to think twice about what they post, because I'm no longer visiting their site at work.

Not that I necessarily want more breastfeeding in my news but I certainly hope you're in the minority. How bad will it be when they have to pander to even more conservative Islamic sensibilities?
No problem mate, thanks for the reply!

I mostly agree with the touch latency, even with Nexus 4 it's not as good as iPhone. But it's getting better.

API issues: there are different API versions that are backwards compatible. But apart from that, the API is the same across devices. Manufacturers don't change the API. Having to use older API versions can be a bit annoying, but I don't see it as a big problem, and there's also the support library.
Structs are the poor man's classes.
The Volvos back then did not have that, it was reintroduced later and it reflects on the leather straps and buckles the much older ones had, which originated as a means to hold the engine cover down.
Good point, didn't see that. It's interesting how clearly it differentiates between core CPython style and 3rd party style. I'm guilty of thinking of PEP8 as the definitive general style guide. But this not what it claims to be- it's just the core development style guide. So it's reasonable for it to be a bit conservative while saying, this is a hardline stand that you may want to deviate from.
In other words, they're finding ways to follow the law to the letter, but work around its spirit. What's the point of a safety net if you decide to ignore it ?
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Their PLDI paper, "Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers", is an amazing read: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/pldi11-preprint.pdf
Al would be "others", and appears in lower case because it is not a proper noun.

Strictly speaking, al. is actually an abbreviation that could mean any of the Latin words alii, aliae or alia. Which one is appropriate would depend on the gender(s) of said others.
If you want to disclaim facts out of ignorance, go for it. If you spend 30 seconds researching highway death trends, you see that like cancer, there has been a significant reduction in highway deaths in the last twenty years, to the tune of 30% fatality reduction and 70% reduction per mile travelled. This was directly driven by federal investments.

The NTSB budget is a tiny piece of the pie. The US government has sent billions on vehicle safety, road engineering, road remediation, drunk driving remediation, etc.

You keep citing $60B (30% of which is the Coast Guard and Customs/Border Patrol) and 5,000 deaths since the civil war. You're out of touch. What is your threshold number where you care? Do we really need 30,000 people to die annually for you to care?
Apple simply does not engage in anything even remotely resembling astroturfing. The simplest reason is that they don't need to, but the more accurate reason is that it's not in the company culture to do things like that.

As a semi-related example, I'm sure you're familiar with product placement in TV shows and movies. Most product placement is done because the company paid for it to be there (for example, all of the Windows 8 stuff I've seen in Arrow I'm certain is paid product placement). However, despite the fact that Apple products are used frequently in TV shows and movies, Apple does not pay for product placement; all the Apple product placement you see was free.

In any case, I personally don't think Apple is the only company that doesn't engage in astroturfing. I'm sure there are many large companies out there that don't do it.
You assume you will sell close to 100% of the slots. Which you won't. Not even close. If you sell 20%, which is crazy high, you will have to charge them 5 times the price just to break even.
Or because they got tired on a long drive and pulled over on the side of the road to sleep. Waking up to a spotlight, then a gun and flashlight in the hands of a bored cop on the night shift is a tense situation.
It's too bad we didn't get her in 2007!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/asv/1244780876/in/photostream/
CSV is the biggest pile of nuisance you'd never expect from a seemingly simple data format.

- Header line or none?

- "\n" or "\r\n"?

- Is there a newline at the last line? How about two?

- Escape quotes with doubling or backslash? How about both in the same file? How about both, inconsistently, in different fields? How about quotes including a newline and commas?

- Strings always quoted? Only if necessary? Is ,, a null or an empty string, or an error?

- How about mixed line lengths? Are missing trailing entries nulls? How about multiple data types in a file, with the first field being type, and line length only fixed per type?

I have generally found "TSV with a rule that data cannot represent tabs or newlines, period" as vastly superior.
(Shameless plug)

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as a programming language fan, i've never found anything as productive as ruby. it may not be the fastest language out there, and it may not have a bunch of static safety guarantees, but for exploratory programming it's pretty much unparalleled. if i were tasked with making a psd reader, i'd definitely do it in ruby first and then port it over to whichever language the client called for.
Why would "God Exists!..Maybe!... or maybe even NOT!" not be worth publishing? An article that outlines the evidence and arguments both for and against the existence of God would make for a great read.

In fact, your example touches on a larger point. An article like that about God would, if presented logically, have to conclude that there is insufficient evidence that God exists- all we have to go on are people's individual written accounts, and no hard evidence.

Compare that to this situation... where all we have is an individual written account and no hard evidence.
This is 'pre-crime', Minority Report v1.0
Conversely, I know lots of people in their 30s and 40s who don't have a degree, clearly make a lot less and don't (and didn't when they were younger) have access to many, many job opportunities because of it.
New York, NY - Full Time

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We are looking for a talented developer to lead our technology team and be one of our first employees. We offer a highly competitive salary, meaningful equity, collaborative culture, interesting challenges and the opportunity to play a pivotal role in building the product.

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Snake with Foot Found in China
Except in Brazil... :(

People crash tested brazillian made cars (of several companies and models) with several other countries tests...

None passed.

My associate, that is French, but bought a locally made european car thinking it would be well built as the european version, got quite disappointed upon seeing the tests results of the model he bought.
Burn sources? That cat is already out of the bag. Everyone knows what's happening. I bet the leaks are incredibly liberating to intelligence. They no longer have to maintain the facade and can actually use their data to the full extent.
You: "Wouldn't an outcome analogous to the modern-day UK and Ireland be great? People getting along well, no violence, reasonably stable governments? I don't see why you paint this as a bad outcome."

That outcome also included dead British cabinet ministers, civilians and infrastructure and decades of fear and hatred.
Looking at the prototype graph UIs it feels like the design misses the mark significantly. Without organizational or auto-layout features that makes the flows easy to follow it's still spaghetti.

Looking at some other flow chart designs that weren't inappropriately inspired by subway maps

http://www.businessprocessincubator.com/media/catalog/produc...

http://www.businessprocessincubator.com/media/catalog/produc...

http://www.file-extensions.org/imgs/app-picture/2731/labview...

http://www.computer-solutions.co.uk/gendev/images/Example_LA...

Seems there were several design ideas they just ditched? Particularly organizing flows around containers that hold smaller pieces. LabView has this functionality and even then you get some flows that are visually useless http://forums.ni.com/attachments/ni/130/3008/1/Run_away_diag... like their text based counterparts. But simpler flows are clearer than NoFlo.

Meemoo also has a confusing interface. They're twisting flow lines to make more of the UI fit on screen. Is there a clear overview where the flow lines are straight?

Quarz Composer and building Facebook in it is a convoluted nightmare. They could have built a Facebook prototype far easier with Flash Builder and a bit of ActionScript. Keyframe animations are best done in an interface that supports them instead of generic connect the dots.

All that said I believe flow based programming has a lot of potential. But to make it viable for flows that are more complex than straight command lines or 20 elements you need visual tools that are more sophisticated than subway maps. Popularizing flow programming would at the very least motivate programmers to build components that work together.
Is it just me, or is this possibly the best HN post title ever?!... freakin awesome.
Only an engineer could think it's a good idea to remove the experience of eating.
I have ICC-ARM which has out performed GCC for a while. I still use arm-none-eabi-gcc for things which I expect other people to build.
From a developer standpoint, I loathe our calendar/time system.

The world has wasted shit load of time & money trying to fix stupid bugs with our time systems, I would welcome a more linear system.
Certainly problematic, but I wouldn't describe the problem with that as a lack of professionalism per se.

They aren't honest, they aren't trustworthy, they don't act in your interest... but they aren't juveniles either. They don't act like a bunch of out of control children on power-trips.
No, because if you're starting with OO as implemented in any particular language then you can never get to insights like http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-18.html... which, since I know people won't follow the link, I'll quote from:

Developing a useful, general framework for expressing the relations among different types of entities (what philosophers call ``ontology'') seems intractably difficult. The main difference between the confusion that existed ten years ago and the confusion that exists now is that now a variety of inadequate ontological theories have been embodied in a plethora of correspondingly inadequate programming languages. For example, much of the complexity of object-oriented programming languages -- and the subtle and confusing differences among contemporary object-oriented languages -- centers on the treatment of generic operations on interrelated types.
That is average number spread out over all the terrorists and not median. Trying to merge those two concept is a common way to use statistic to mislead.

The question was if a shotgun wielding guy posting a video on Youtube is more likely to kill more people than a shotgun wielding mass murderer who robs liqueur stores. To clarify, he doesn't have a time machine to suddenly transfer himself to 2001.
NSA Director: Don’t Worry, Trust Us
Different colors Soylent? :)
The point would be that the "existing one" itself would change. Many countries adopted the current calendar less than a hundred years ago.
"assuming that the police aren't lying "

Unfortunately, this is an awfully huge assumption to make!
As a person who lifts weights frequently, I'm not sure I like the idea of soy based protein in general though.
CSV format does not define encoding. Also customers usually think about CSV as export/import format from/to Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately each Office localization uses different output encoding and delimiters (and date format). And you cannot suppose that the encoding is UTF-8. The most complete importer of CSV file which I have seen is in Open Office. It is also worth mentioning that Excel can import CSV with other than system locale and different delimiters - but it just not work through open file command.
Yup. U can use Dropbox to host your websites for free.
Even if it was due to her queries, they could have gotten them by tapping ISPs, they tend to comply easier than tech firms.
I wonder if mining bitcoins with JavaScript and/or WebGL could yield a higher return than the cost of the ads. (Not that gobbling CPU power in that way would be ethical, but it would be a fun demo.)
Excellent. I can order a "burner phone" with a credit card. And have it shipped to me.

And the selling point is "because the NSA records everything", followed by a starry-eyed "don't worry, we'll delete your info after we processed your order".

I think some people need to take paranoia lessons there :)