skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you're not taking a major part in the final tasks of a project, how can you be so certain you are good at preparing it for the future?

I'm not the parent, but I'll answer, from my own experience.

The "final tasks" of a project aren't important, in the grand scheme of things, at least, not the way that I work. If I have an idea, let's say "Github" for example, what's the core of the application? Whatever your answer, I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that it isn't "the login page", or "the frequently asked questions", or "what color the navigation bar is".

The 'core' of the application is the interface between git and github. That's also, generally speaking, the 'hard part'... and the developer that can take you from a blank screen to a demo, by his or herself, and can deliver that product to market, is the ideal developer. If you can hire a guy that can take you 95% of the way there, and then outsource the fiddly bits like login and navigation to oDesk or whomever, then you've got a real talent. That is the type of developer the parent seems to be describing, at least to me.

As to his self-understanding, I dramatically prefer working with developers that know where their limitations are, and know where they're not good. I find myself getting bored with the result of a QA report, and it doesn't excite me. Solving a problem excites me. Tweaking an animation to prevent flickery scrolling on IE7 does not excite me. It took me a lot of years to get from being the 95% guy to the 100% guy, but even my 100%ness is qualified -- it has to be within a given set of parameters. For somebody to acknowledge their weaknesses, in my opinion, demonstrates a higher degree of self-awareness than the average person who doesn't.
I was about to say the same thing... I thought JRuby was king for long running Ruby apps (like a Rails app) for many years now... seems very suspect.
I'm building a dashboard interface for a REST API I built allowing folks to work game mechanics into their apps or processes for really cheap - https://gamify.ws
It's wiser to adopt the view that it's not really about "entrepreneurs", "business models", and "venture capitalists". If it ever were that, it sure ain't anymore.

Instead the dynamic is closer to student-apprentice applicants and admission committees.[1]

[1]: "Entrepreneurs Are The New Labor" by Venkatesh Rao:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
This might be a little harsh, but I feel like this kind of risk-aversion is actually a negative signal/filter for YC and other investors. The fact that someone would let a small risk (<1% chance of getting caught if you're smart about it) deter them from applying in the first place. That's just the illegal route. I know founder who have found ways to make the legal route work (O1, finding a co-founder who will stay in the US while the other co-founder travels back and forth, etc. etc.)
Ugh, had to go scurrying around to find this info (really wish they linked it directly), but here's the actual proposal (and its press release):

1) In the next three years, every high school will offer a foundational “Exploring Computer Science” course. (This is a survey course - my note)

2) In the next five years, at least half of all high schools will also offer an AP Computer Science course. (My note: AP CS is a Java based course that looks roughly comparable to first year computer engineering courses, including algorithms and data structure... I've never taken AP CS, but I bet lots of people here have, and they can probably elaborate on its usefulness)

3) Chicago will also be the first US urban district to offer a K-8 computer science pathway, reaching one in four elementary schools in the next five years.

4) Within five years, CPS will allow computer science to count as a graduation requirement (e.g. possibly as a math, science, or foreign language credit). Only thirteen other states have elevated computer science to a core subject instead of an elective.

http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/...

And for reference, here is CPS' current requirements for highscool graduation:
http://www.cps.edu/SiteCollectionDocuments/PromotionPolicy/H...
I really don't see webo making that point, but I could be mistaken.
Awesome story, and what a cool guy. =)
I trust that you are aware of Mylyn?
Keep in mind this is a government agency that does the screening here. I knew someone who was not a "prominent person" in their field who got an O-1 visa with the help of their VC investors / angel investors.
I find it kind of annoying we still use diagonal dimension to describe the size, particularly when the monitors come in different aspect ratios.
>>But in my experience, the vast majority of apps do NOT require those things.

If you are making a service like Cherry (On-Demand Car Wash) then you need to maximize the responsiveness of the app. HTML still can't do this although HTML->Native could. On the other hand many people want to write new functionality.

HTML is restrictive and results in a subpar product. You get easier development, but its not time saved if you need to redo all your work.

Frankly, if your requirements fit into HTML the your app probably sucks! :-)
Then your comment upthread is especially pointless, isn't it? Why am I meant to pay special attention to Bill Gates the man, rather than the 40 billion dollars that has been put to using entrepreneurial strategies to end global disease and poverty?
Yep, that's my profile. Strange, I didn't even think I'd need to check it. I should've known better. Perhaps the mods can update the link?
It is also a tax status necessity for non-profits.
I've never found an IDE a distraction. Visual Studio Pro has saved me tons of time. Coding in a terminal editor can feel a little suffocating in comparison. In VS I almost never have to look up syntax, with good OO the autocomplete almost makes the code feel like it's writing itself, and all the project's files are in an organized spot on the right instead of having to trawl through directory listings.
It's not dickish nitpicking, it's expressing genuine concerns. Language is meant to be used properly.

"Basic knowledge of programming" doesn't actually mean anything.
As a 5th grade teacher who teaches "computer science" among other things, I completely agree that this is great news. Kids love learning about basic programming concepts, and they deserve the opportunity to be exposed to programming at a young age.

If there are any other computer science teachers on HN, I'd love to hear about what you're up to (especially if you are using Scratch with young kids).
and the insights are only insights if you are a fifteen year old

I suppose if you only read a couple of the early Discworld books, before he really got rolling, this could be a valid statement.

But I simply cannot agree with it in the context of where the books ended up going; for example, the last few Vimes books have dealt with some rather mature themes, and not just the sorts of things tvtropes refers to as "adult fears" (though there is some of that).
If Mother Teresa is the one modern venerated person you've heard of, I guess that would be a reasonable summary of the meaning of Catholic sainthood. I agree though with the underlying point, which is that "sainthood" is a political concept that isn't relevant to the work being done by the Gates Foundation.
Of course language is meant to be used properly. But judging by the bastardization of other technical phrases, (e.g. hacker) and their criticism, these discussions will amount to nothing.

And in taking part in these discussions, we're really only shouting into an echo chamber. I seriously doubt many non technical people browse hacker news.
I think "clean, organized" is more about what is in your head. For the author, a clean desktop helps him keep thoughts and ideas clean and organized. I totally agree in that I've seen some ridiculous slobs come up with brilliant code and ideas - but their thought process is always clear, focused, and organized. To use a nerdy analogy used at work sometimes, our brains have a limited stack size and having to figure out where a file is, what tab to search for, etc, can take up valuable stack spaces. But for some, being organized can help keep that stack clean of everything except what is essential for what you to do your job.

I'm similar to the author in that using a window manager, killing all my chrome tabs periodically, and writing down meticulous notes in Evernote help keep me organized and focused on the task at hand, but obviously this will look different for different programmers.
Thank you for finding all of that. I think it squashes a lot of the negativity and objections elsewhere in this discussion. That is a legitimate sounding computer science curriculum and it's incredibly refreshing that it puts the discipline on a par with traditional fields.
Also, add Switzerland.
Anyone who's cheering this proposal should remember how well making mathematics compulsory has worked out for us. How many kids are (justifiably) disgusted with advanced mathematics because it's forced on them?

It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many.

I think the quickest way to destroy a future programmer is by forcing them to learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers during their formative years, and it seems like this proposal will lead to that. It's hard to understand why people trust the modern highschool system to teach kids anything. Most of the kids aren't there to learn; they're there because they're forced to be. If an ambitious highschooler wants to learn programming, why not give them a way to learn it in a university early?

I really hope I'm wrong, but in my experience the highschool system is a grim situation for nerds, especially in the Midwest.

EDIT: Regarding highschool teachers vs CS professors: I meant that teaching programming requires programming ability, not just teaching ability. Maybe highschool teachers will become good programmers first. I don't know. And certainly, awful college professors exist just like awful highschool teachers exist. It just seems like the average CS professor has a higher chance of imparting useful knowledge to kids than a highschool teacher who has to learn it from the same book as the kids they're teaching it to. Worse, the kids have a high chance of becoming disgusted with the idea of programming if it's taught poorly, so this proposal seems at least as potentially dangerous as it is potentially helpful.
Cotton gins are obvious in retrospect - you basically strain the cotton through a mesh that's smaller than the cotton seeds and have an automatic brush that cleans the mesh to prevent jams. Put the straining process on a wheel instead of a straight belt and mess with some gears to make everything work off of turning one crank, and you're basically done. In retrospect it's straightforward, but we went centuries or millennia harvesting cotton without figuring that out.

Most things are obvious in retrospect - you can look at a traffic light and say "yeah, I'd obviously think of that - you need a bright and clear signal positioned where all can see it, and you need to have a warning light in addition to stop/go since cars have a braking distance" but it took years for someone to come up with it.
> This doesn't necessarily mean they'll work directly as programmers, or that they'll have high-paying jobs.

Being a "9-to-5 enterprise monkey" means having a job, and given the demographics of the pool here, if many get to that state as a result of this effort, its a big win.

> There's lots of average coding jobs that are unremarkable.

And it would be great if Americans from low income backgrounds were able to get the skills to do them rather being dependent on kinds of physical labor that are easily automated -- which likely means unemployment.

> The workforce will also end up becoming diluted, a natural consequence of making a craft compulsory.

I don't see how this follows. Making learning basic programming skills part of compulsory education might (though I don't see it necessary that it would) increase the number or proportion of people choosing to enter the programming profession that have a fairly low ceiling on how far they could go in the profession, but even if it did why would that be bad?

Where is the evidence for any kind of dilution that really is a "natural consequence" of this being harmful in any way.

> Everything has trade-offs.

Its actually quite possible for some options to be strictly superior to others. But, sure, most real choices have some degree of trade-offs. But where is the argument -- not just the bare assertions -- that the trade-offs here aren't desirable?
That's a fifteen year graph, and does appear to depict a decline at the end. I'd like to see this data rescaled to just the last six months (unfortunately his data files are 404ing now).

If you want to find out if TV sales are declining, you don't compare against the 1950s.
Yeah, fair. I should really have replied to one of the top-level commented describing Gates as a saint, or waxing lyrical about his greatness; my objection was not to the article itself, and that wasn't clear.
The set of numbers that can be uniquely defined in the English language in a finite number of letters is a countable set, because the set of finite sequences of English letters is countable.
Google+ Memorable Moments in 2013 [video] • vlogg.com
Ask HN: What blogs do you read for management?
Management can be a touchy subject. But I can't even remember reading one this year.
I have seen the Penn and Teller series and I would say it doesn't really offer that much in teaching about illusions because the ones that they bust are usually pretty obvious and if they aren't P&T will just say they know how it was done and won't give it away.

The tricks street magicians are performing these days are what amaze me. Dynamo has some stunts that are mind bending. Even watching it on video in slow-motion its magic. I love how unintuitive magic seems, but I suppose there must be a logical explanation to everything.

This is a good video that breaks down an easier trick Dynamo and I am sure other magicians perform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhYHB_XLuRo
Hipster PDA's 1Password
Unrelated: Don't go to UChicago if you want to study CS. The department isn't built out.

Consider UPenn SEAS or Columbia Fu for a similar tier CS program.

It's really excellent for economics (which I was considering), but ended up not going to Chicago after talking to some of the comp sci majors.
I gave a talk at an informal event for YC cos a month or so ago, and the audience was both large and diverse. There were definitely African Americans in attendance.

Youth seems like the more troublesome homogeneity here. For whatever that's worth.
Love's Labour's Lost: How Robots Will Transform Human Intimacy
What languages fix
> That's the thing though. As I understand it, or as it's said to be: points have zero extension. So, no amount of points, not even an infinity of them could ever have extension.

This isn't true for an uncountably infinite set of points, assuming by 'extension' you mean what is usually called 'meausre' in modern mathematics. Modern theory is perfectly fine with saying that a line of nonzero length contains an infinite number of points of zero length, and trying to draw on Euclidean notions definitions of 'point' and 'line' to find conclusions about real analysis is going to be unhelpful.

I'm not sure what that Peirce quote is trying to say.
That was a way more reasonable response than the tone of my comment merited. Thanks! :)
WTF is my IP??
How does "basic knowledge of programming" not mean anything? Almost every book on programming starts with "basics" section.
I have been guessing that
the nuns that taught Melinda
got her highly devoted to
'charity' in some general
sense and that she and Bill
had a 'deal': After he worked
his tail off at Microsoft to
make a lot of money and, thus,
necessarily spent a lot of
time at the office instead of
at home with her and the kids,
he was to back off from an
active role at Microsoft, e.g.,
be just COB, and, then, join
with her in using much of the
money for charity. So, in this
way Melinda would get to pursue the
goals and values of charity she
got from her nuns. Just a guess.

I could make this guess because my
wife, her sisters, and their mother
were all highly devoted to a life
of charity via 'volunteer' work,
and much of the origin of their
interests in charity was from
Christian religion, although in
their case Methodist instead of
Roman Catholic.

But, 'deal' with Bill or not,
the record seems to be that
Melinda is one heck of a 'super
fundraiser': She also got
Buffett to hand over much or
nearly all of his fortune. Then
she publicized the value that
any really wealthy person should
leave 50% or so to charity.

So, I'm guessing that the nuns
got Melinda to get Bill and others
to cough up $100 billion and
counting.

And what is Melinda's
'sales pitch?" My guess is
just total sincerity with nothing
for herself, no money, of course
not, but neither fame, status,
prestige, etc. It seems to me
that in charity Melinda is fairly
closely following the values of
the nuns.

And she did one more: As we know,
just having the money and giving
it away does not necessarily do much
to 'alleviate human suffering' or
'improve the world' as the nuns
might want. Instead, giving the
money away in effective ways is
hard work. So, Melinda got Bill
dedicated to the work, and Bill
is a bright guy who knows the heck
how to get things done.

I'm suspecting that heavily Melinda,
and before her her nuns, are
the real driving force behind
all of this. Instead, Bill might
be driving/racing Porsche cars!

Finally, we have to suspect that
'hard hearted', no nonsense,
bottom line oriented, take no
prisoners Bill is totally taken
with, in awe of, head over heels
in love with, and has awesome
respect for Melinda. But then
some such fits: Supposedly
Bill's mother was a big influence
on Bill, and a boy with a good
mother tends to look for a wife
much like his mother.

It's nice that tough guy Bill
is now harnessed as a very bright
and capable horse pulling the
wagon of Melinda and her nuns!
> I've never taken AP CS, but I bet lots of people here have, and they can probably elaborate on its usefulness

Well, when I took AP Computer Science, it was still Pascal, but it was pretty much what it says on the tin as far as being very roughly equivalent to an introductory college class (of course, the quality of introductory classes varies a lot by institution.)
Rolls-Royce to plot a course to the future with drone ships
In SEO, all PR is good PR, the amount of links they are getting from all this news coverage could easily make them rebound from this. They need to cease these practices, disavow links and they'll be back, even stronger. Reminds me of that sunglasses website that was ranking really well even after the negative press. Obviously in that case Google had to do something drastic to save face.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?_r=...

This is nothing but a media trial. If this didn't blow up on HN, it would have been largely ignored by Google and they would have just gotten away with a slap on the wrist.

Google likes to do this to send a message, but the funny thing is they do this to ACT like it doesn't matter who is breaking their guidelines, could be Fortune 500 or even Google itself, they will penalize you.

But the reality is that in each and every case, once the media moves on to the next shiny thing, the penalties were reversed:

http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-...
http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe...
http://searchengineland.com/google-chromes-paid-link-penalty...

Spamming and grey hat SEO practices are like speeding, everyone does it, but only a few get caught.
There is no such thing as "proper usage of language". Language means what we all agree that it means which is a consensus that evolves over time. Unlike programming languages, it has no fixed or proper meaning or usage. I think that most of us can agree that while it may not be precise, "basic knowledge of programming" does actually mean something. It is distinct from, say, basic knowledge of French or basic knowledge of juggling – hence, it means something. And from the number of upvotes my original post is getting, it seems that at least a few people agree that some of the commentary in this discussion is, in fact, dickish nitpicking.
> It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many.

I had some -- none in my programming classes, though -- but that wasn't all too different than my college experience. If anything, the high school teachers seemed, on average, better teachers, though perhaps in a worse teaching environment.

The college professors obviously had more formal education in their subject area.

> I think the quickest way to destroy a future programmer is by forcing them to learn dumb ideas from half-interested teachers during their formative years.

I think the quickest way to destroy a potential future programmer is to have them learn nothing relevant from anyone during their formative years.
Ask HN: Is Google responsible for returning 'fair' results or 'good' ones?
By now most regular readers of this site have heard about how Google has bombed Rap Genius from orbit after they sought to game the system[1]. Beyond this specific case, do you think that Google should be prioritising the punishment of those who seek to inflate their search results over whether or not the results are of high quality? After all, Google is much more than simply a search provider, it's an institution for almost everybody who uses the internet.

In their public begging for forgiveness[2], RG submits that they want "to create an amazing experience for users and hope they prefer us to all other lyrics sites," which they appear to have done. Certainly I prefer RG to other sites for lyrics; the UX is generally just better and the additional functionality of the annotations would appear, in my eyes, to only increase the value. I've gotten malware from other lyrics sites in the past, and I've had to deal with other sneaky tactics from other sites (like embedding a link in the lyrics when I copy them). I submit that RG is almost categorically a better result for if I Google something like "whoa lyrics earl sweatshirt" than another site.

Does Google have a responsibility to the users the best possible results even if they tried to mercilessly self-promote? Or does such blatant gaming of the system deserve such a crippling blow?

[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized-rap-genius-for-link-schemes-180777

[2]http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-founders-open-letter-to-google-about-rap-genius-seo-lyrics
My High School AP CS class was C++, with a very heavy focus on data structures, up to and including balanced binary search trees (we had covered linked lists, doubly linked lists and other more basic data structures, including pointer math, in CS 3/4). Second semester was a self-directed team project. This was in 2001-2002.
"It's also important to remember highschool teachers aren't college professors. You may have had awesome and passionate HS teachers, but from what I saw, there don't seem to be very many."

So, because you had some lousy high school teachers, that means college professors are passionate and high school teachers aren't? Why are high school teachers inferior to college professors?
Local college basketball notes: UC Davis ends losing streak
Are you testifying based on personal knowledge of the actual work Snowden was doing for the CIA in Switzerland? Please, tell us more.
Agreed. I think a pardon from the Queen is a nice gesture. Of course, it can't take back the wrong. But it is a nice gesture.