skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away much of the physical machine. The abstractions can be peeled away in later courses."

I don't know that Java does this all the much better than C. The problem with C for a beginning student isn't so much that you have to manage memory manually--it generally takes a few weeks to even get to malloc() in a C-based introductory course--but that C gets in your way with explicit typing, #includes, etc. Java does away with some of that but introduces its own OO scaffolding to get in your way too. Instead of having to write main()s and #include's, the Java student has to enclose their functions in a class and so forth. Let's compare Hello World in C, Java, and C#.

C:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, World!\n");
return 0;
}

Java:

class HelloWorldApp
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string
}
}

C#:

class Hello
{
static void Main()
{
System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
}
}

The Java and C# examples are even more cluttered than the C example when it comes to superfluous tokens: it has a class declaration, the method signature is more unnecessarily elaborate, and the print command has like three levels of object-drilldown in it. When you get to the simple procedural programs that a beginning student will write, this mysterious crud remains unresolved for longer. It's not enough to explain typing as you would in C or Pascal, but you have to talk about object-oriented programming before you get into problems complex enough to justify that level of abstraction.

If you really want an abstract language to enforce algorithmic thinking, pick one that doesn't have all that extra mental burden when you first approach it.

Perl 5.8

print "Hello World!\n"

Perl 5.10

say "Hello World!"

Python

print "Hello World!"

Ruby

print "Hello World!"

The cool thing is that these languages still have subroutines and classes and so forth, but they don't force you to declare a class, declare a subroutine, and call an object method just to code "hello world".

Java has advantages over C. These advantages don't include "letting beginning programmers focus on algorithmic thinking by using high level abstractions". Java's higher level than C in that it protects you from naked pointers and lets you do OOP, but that's not the type of high-level abstraction that helps a beginning programmer, especially not when it comes at the cost of forcing them to put everything in classes and methods.

If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away as much as possible. We have no shortage of good interpreted languages to accomplish this.
My story is just about the opposite of yours. I grew up in Amsterdam, there were only a few stores that sold electronic components and radio shack (tandy in europe) was one of those.

So, I went there quite frequently (age about 12) and became friends with the store manager. He would give me discounts on all kinds of stuff and allow me to scan his 'to be destroyed' batch for interesting bits & pieces.

When computers arrived (the trs-80 series) he allowed me to play with them as much as I wanted as long as I would help to explain to customers what they could do. This probably played a large factor in getting me on the track to programming for a living, which in turn led to just about everything else in my life.

So, even though radio shack the company has done lots of bad stuff in their time (their pull-out from europe was one of the nastiest business maneuvers ever) some of the people there were absolutely great.
I understand the idea of edgy journalism where the end justifies the means etc. etc.

However I'm struggling to see how this document exposes anything illegal or harmful.
Lets design a system for creating dangerous diseases. We'll take millions of some species we know tend to pass viruses to and from people, say poultry and pigs. Now, lets pack as many together as we possibly can, to the point that they are incredibly stressed, and bonus points if they are physically rubbing against each other all the time, and exposed to each others feces. Now, we need to keep the sick ones alive as long as possible. Let's pump them full of antibiotics, steroids, or whatever else might keep them ambulatory. It's important that any sick animals stay with the rest, so that any disease microbe with a mutation that makes the disease more easily spread are captured in the population, and not left to die in some barn where the animal is quarantined, say. Now, make sure that you keep animals in each location at all times, any gaps where there are no animals in a facility (or merely too few to act as a reservoir) would destroy any mutations unique to that population. Finally, have lots of discrete locations with just a little transfer between them. This way, a successful new disease will have to be virulent enough to invade other locations. This means it will have to either spread to wild birds or other animals, or humans. Finally it also means that it will have the chance to evolve in an environment where the hosts have minimal natural immunity to it. Now you just have to sit back and wait, sooner or later something truly deadly will pop out.

To address the article directly: only factory farming has animals penned so tightly they can't even stand up. Only factory farming makes the air so foul that you still can't breath on the next farm over. Only factory farming requires the air in the barns to be completely turned over every 20 minutes to prevent the animals inside from suffocating on fumes from decomposing feces.
There's really just one thing going on here: the Norman Borlaug/Julian Simon/Bjørn Lomborg people and the enviromentalist people have been talking past each other for the last 70 years and this is just more of the same. It would be refreshing to, just once, read an essay by one side that actually understood the arguments of the other side and seriously addressed them.
Many people don't click links in blogs, they mostly prefer to read their favorite sources.
I much preferred the novella Fast Times at Fairmont High, which had many of the same characters and setting.
I sell you 5 words for 10$. Also my words will rhyme and you can resell them. For each time you resell them you get a discount of 2$.
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Just When You Thought IE6 Would Die…
That's hippy talk. Life isn't about having what you need, it's about having what you want.
Well exactly. What aspect of theoretical computer science is Java better suited to teaching than any other language?

Kids these days don't understand that computer science and software development are distinct disciplines.
> T-Mobile is cheaper

That isn't very helpful either, I'm not in the US.

Why should some guy with a blog be trying to get us to use what they like? What happened to letting the consumer decide on their own?
I think the author's point here is that most people just don't want to let go of the _idea_ of the american farmer. Culturally, we want a farmer to be a guy riding a tractor or milking a cow, not some guy who puts animals into boxes and then churns them out factory style. The image of a farm that contains happy animals in a field has been put into all of our heads at a very young age (remember "Old McDonald"?). The practice of industrial farming isn't only distasteful to think about, but it goes against some of our strongest cultural archetypes.

I think that's why the author used so many examples of unpleasant things that he saw as a farmer growing up. He was trying to say that no matter how it's done, farming is a dirty and bloody business. It's nice to picture farming like it was in re-runs of Lassie, but that doesn't mean we should expect him to run his business based on outdated ideas.

I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. The idea of industrial farming is relatively new, especially when compared to the thousands of years put into mastering regular farming. I don't think it's wise to stand in the way of progress just because we find certain elements of it to be distasteful (but not harmful).
It's up to you to show that central government's national policy only applies to one university...
Though Google Apps has very much less features compared to Office, a small business could well operate perfectly just with Google Apps. I'm not sure what percentage of Microsoft's revenues are generated by small businesses but Microsoft is sure facing a tough competition this time. Any thoughts?
"The problem: you don't delete your superfluous apps"

Yes I do.

"T-Mobile is cheaper"

http://coverage.t-mobile.com/default.aspx?MapType=Data

Yeah... I wonder why?
How a Little 'Friction' Can Change a Competitive Landscape
Apparently not:

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/tennis/tennis-star-to-und...

Surgery to improve sporting performance is OK but steroids are not. Weird, huh?
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Not just operate well enough, but operate better. All their work in one place, up on the web. Easy team-working. Easy sharing with the customer.

Docs still has ties to paper, though. The Google product that fits this model the best is Wave.
Unfortunately, it now appears that there were other fake ATMs around, these at the Rio. These were not removed promptly. A friend of mine is out $200 and some of his friends are out more. Worse, no one can seem to figure out which law enforcement agency is responsible. See @chrispaget on twitter, e.g.
http://twitter.com/ChrisPaget/status/3100154939

and following.
FFS - there is one sentence of actual content: "AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it."
And then you had to debug something which resulted from corrupted pointers into the stack, partially being still good data and partially being nonsense.
RadioShack remembered, via old TV ads.
Mojolicious::Lite (light web framework built on top of Mojolicious)
I'm sure a lot of buinesses (small or large) find the idea of hosting their documents (often containing business secrets or of critical importance) on the servers of another entity very, very frightening.
So can I level with you for a moment?

Nine times out of ten, when someone in my social circles asks me how to study Japanese, it is because they have some vague idea of enjoying anime/manga/video games in the original. (Especially when they start suggesting "Well, I don't need to actually be able to read anything, I just want to be fluent" or the converse.)

Without specific reference to you, approximately 98% of the people I know who went into Japanese with that objective gave up before they achieved any useful level of proficiency. (And one now works at SquareEnix, living the otaku dream.)

Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work.

Two years from now, your fingers will bleed from writing practice, you'll know a few hundred characters, and this snippet from Wiki:

米国Googleは人類が使う全ての情報を集め整理すると言う壮大な目的をもって設立された。独自開発したプログラムが、世界中のウェブサイトを巡回して情報を集め、検索用の索引を作り続けている。約30万台のコンピュータが稼動中といわれる。検索結果の表示画面や提携したウェブサイト上に広告を載せることで、収益の大部分をあげている。

will still be mostly impenetrable to you. That is 6th grade Japanese.

I strongly suggest you find your driving motivation to learn the language which will get you through moments of despair like that one. Which you'll have plenty of, because learning languages is BLOODY HARD WORK.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am fairly decent at Japanese. I can read 6th grade level Wikipedia articles. Yay. I can also give technical presentations to engineers and discuss outsourcing strategy with C-level executives. And you know what? I have a veritable mountain of HARD WORK ahead of me.)

can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip

Self study can get you to the point where you'd appreciate exactly how much you just asked to be able to do. (Here's a trivial example: I watched Monsters vs. Aliens yesterday. All of the military characters speak a cartoony parody of what Japanese translators think Japanese people would think sounds like what Americans think macho military types sound like. Were you planning on learning fake military Japanese? )

(Five second fake military Japanese lesson: 諸君 (Shokun) means "you", in the sense of a form of address used by a military officer to address his underlings as a body. An American writer might substitute "gentlemen", as in "Gentlemen, it has been an honor and a privilege serving with you. stirring music"

This word has no practical use in Japanese aside from signaling that you're trying to talk like you're military (or nationalist). Because this little factoid is 99.95% useless, you are unlikely to ever encounter it in a textbook.)
To say that this is a lame piece is an understatement. He complains that although Gawker linked to his piece twice or more times, and drove significant traffic to his article, that somehow the online world is driving newspapers to the wall. He complains that the extra traffic gave The Post no extra revenue? Oh c'mon, get real, whose fault is that? The real kicker is the fact that newspapers and the MSN in general are all engaged in a constant war to steal each others content and make it their own, they've been doing it for decades. And that's a fact. This article is pathetic, and really shows the desperate state of the MSM.
I don't know that PLT is clean, but it's consistent and straightforward. I still believe it has a long way to go to really compete with languages like Python in terms of presentation, but they've done great work and it's very nice to work with these days.
Just had a look at Google Docs and it's not immediately clear to me how it manages references (e.g. "see figure x", "section s", "page n") where it keeps track of all the numbering for you as you insert new figures etc. Word has done this forever. It's a pretty key feature for anyone working on non-trivial documents.
The AP Will Sell You a "License" to Words It Doesn't Own
When you walk in to Defcon you'd better be prepared at every turn, that includes any equipment you interact with.

Imagine the scoop if they had gotten away with it cleanly. Everybody is concentrating on the latest wifi snooping hack meanwhile some joker walks off with the account info / pin numbers of half the attendees.

If the attendants of a security conference can be scammed like this it is really no surprise that it happens to the general public on a daily basis. I don't use any ATMs that are not 'wall mounted', always check the slot if it is securely attached and doesn't have extra reader heads.

And in spite of all that I still had a card cloned in a restaurant in Toronto... the bank was pretty good about it but it was still surprising to be so careful and still get cloned.

Pretty stupid of the person cloning the card to use it the same evening, that narrowed it down quite a bit.
Ah, well I was not aware of this - you learn something new every day. Glad you explained this to me, because it seems that its a common perception, even if its not true, that Google apps need a 'net connection. I will now investigate the truth (got no use for Google Docs or MS Word, personally) and attempt to correct it when I hear that line again ..
I completely agree with the premise of this article, but this line baffles me: ... Word's document format will always be complicated, even if it is natively XML and completely open, simply because it has to support all the thousands of features that Word itself provides.

This is akin to saying that binary has to be complicated because of all the numbers it can represent. Most features don't require a file format change in any way, even when storing, say, undo histories for new features. Word documents really aren't that complicated, unless they're made to be.
"monoculture is efficient"

This is true, from a certain point of view. In the short-to-medium term, monoculture does allow us to produce more from a given acre of land. In the long run, though, monocultures are more susceptible to disease, pests, or other major environmental shifts, which if we're lucky will only cut growth for a season, but could lead to permanent conditions. For example, the 'Gros Michele' cultivar of banana has now been almost entirely superseded by the 'Cavendish' cultivar.
love that the CEO has the lowest MPG.
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Zoho's online tools are, imho, better than Google's and their Remote API solves a lot of the storage problem(http://writer.zoho.com/public/help/zohoapi/fullpage#RemoteAP...) . I suppose there's still a transactional security issue but with more and more people working at home I think that's an issue no matter what.
Whatever the case I think (relatively) affordable space solutions will be coming soon.
Surely the modern equivalent is the hyperlink?
The other way of phrasing that line is: to garentee that you can display any Word document, you need to be able to support any formatting that Word supports.

Parsing a Word document is much simpler than displaying a Word document, often people mean the latter when they say "open a Word document".
I was not aware that classified ads used to be the main source of revenue. I thought that most of the 20th century, paid advertising (the kind with graphics) was the main source. I'm curious. Do you know something I could read to find out more about this?

Regardless, as you say, the solid news was never the main draw. It looks like journalism has been using a weird, indirect revenue model since long before the "new economy".
The gentleman is right on; in the US too it's far from a new story. The decline started in secondary and then spread up through higher education.

But does the fault really start with the students, as he claims, or is that blaming the victim? Certainly noone wants to work as hard as people used to ... that's a fact. The old culture (50 to 100 years ago) also supported a much lower population, and there were many more resources - many trees to chop, dams to build, necessities to invent ... all that's now paved over.

Many more people wanted to attend college to get 'the good jobs'. Only,there was only such much demand on the high-end. You wind up with an over-educated population, deep in debt, with Great Expectations that just won't be happening. Those who can't be anaesthetized with TV or video games or web-surfing inevitably turn their frustrated analytical skills upon the powers-that-be.

So, well, here we are. Clearly colleges are in for a deep re-organization. We need to recreate eduction - but to what end? what future will we re-tool to create?. And how will we provide opportunities for all that 'computing power' waiting to be harnessed!
Disclaimer: I grew up on a farm. I have personally slaughtered many animals including pigs, chickens, ducks, and fish. I am now a vegetarian.

This article is 90% correct. I agree on most topics.
A main thread here is sustainable farming. However 2 key points are intentionally confusing.

1. "Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread."

2. "the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so."

Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef."

Point #2, when he says we can only feed 4 billion, he is talking about on a typical meat centered western diet. On a vegetarian diet, this world could feed well 10s of billions.
If newspaper organization and culture are killed off, it will be hard to regenerate them.
I think he meant the touch Sense UI on the HTC Hero is beautiful (since thats the image he had in there), in which case I absolutely agree with him.
You must do some research on how complex OOXML is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML .Initially there was a huge opposition in making OOXML a open standard, but eventually Microsoft succeeded in pushing the standard. Ever wondered why a empty word document's size is ~34 KB?
Jobless IT graduate sues her college
AT&T has treated the iPhone special before, IMHO it's very likely this was due to contractual obligations with AT&T.

The key difference with Blackberry is that there is no central Blackberry App Store — regardless of what AT&T thinks, stopping apps from existing on that platform is pretty much impossible.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/07/28/att-om-iphone