skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's so much to say here about the incompetence of the OP that it's better to write a long blog post about it...so I'll just leave it at this.

First of all, check out the source material, which is this Thomas Friedman column:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho...

The OP is suggesting that the Google exec doesn't value the skills in the humanities departments. This is not even remotely true. Read the Friedman column for yourself:

> Are the liberal arts still important?

>
> They are “phenomenally important,” he said, especially when you combine them with other disciplines. “Ten years ago behavioral economics was rarely referenced. But [then] you apply social science to economics and suddenly there’s this whole new field. I think a lot about how the most interesting things are happening at the intersection of two fields.

So basically, the OP basis for argument is a little off-kilter. But where the OP is incredibly wrong is his interpretation of the following:

> I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load.

The OP is aggreieved because he interprets Bock's statement as saying that English doesn't have the same critical thinking skills as computer science. Bock is not saying that at all, he is saying to a student that leaving comsci, because the courses are too challenging, is a bad idea, and that he/she shouldn't prize an A in an "easier" curriculum over a B in computer science, because the value of a grade is not the only measure of skills valuable to Google.

What's really important here is the word that Bock uses: "rigor". I'll refer to the definition that Google's search engine brings up:

> the quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.

The OP interprets "rigor" as being "hard" or "challenging." But Bock is more likely referring to the importance of accuracy and the more rigidly testable questions in a typical computer science curriculum versus an English curriculum. Bock does not at all talk about the intellectual challenge of English versus Computer Science.

The fact that a professor has such a skewed, and in my opinion, wrong interpretation of not just Bock's statement, but of the English word "rigor" is itself a testament to the lack of "rigor"...or "stiffness" in how English is evaluated.
+1 from the systems engineer with over a decade experienceat cutting edge facilities - and a BA in philosophy (focused on recent continental thought, not logic). It comes down to the individual and their passion.
I was an English major in undergrad and grad school and I see these arguments all the time. I learned a great deal in my university career, and much of what I learned in the humanities took real intellectual curiosity, hard work, and deep thinking. You're not going to put together a real, publishable work by copy and pasting work from Stackoverflow, not in a master level English course. And let's be honest, the majority of CS students are lazy and incompetent, just like the majority of all students in all majors. Sure, you get some truly brilliant students that come along, but most of them never really produce anything of value. And most engineers, talented as they may be at slinging code and doing the lambda calculus, are pitiful communicators and can barely write a coherent sentence.
in the chooseTab function you have the following line:
html += "<img src='/static/level3/cloud" + num + ".jpg' />";

the src opens with a single quote and looks for the 'num' var. So instead of num in the URL, you close the single quote and then close the image tag, and then run your script.
Many people also seem to be under the mistaken impression that GPS provides sane routes for 100% of the driving you'd ever need to do.

Every summer I visit a shooting range at the end of a handmade [grass/dirt] road that has no mailing address.

Even if I could program that route into a self-driving car: it can be a very difficult road for a skilled driver to navigate in a truck. You have to know where the ruts are, what angle to have the wheels at [lest you get stuck], where the soft spots are [after a rain], etc.

Attempting it in a 4-door sedan loaded down w/ firearms is another matter entirely [unless you like picking grass out of your radiator.]

For some reason: I can't imagine engineers from California have given much thought to this particular use-case.

---

Google Maps can't even figure out my morning commute.
Google would have me take a _non-existent road_ up to a drainage ditch. Then I'd need to scale a 60% grade up to the chainlink fence that surrounds _the rear_ of my building.

I'll reiterate: I drive a 4 door sedan w/ a 4 cylinder engine... even if I managed the hill I don't know what Google expects me to do about the fence.

---

I'm not saying driverless cars can't overcome these challenges. After all the TerraMax[1] was built by a Wisconsin company.

Not everyone wants to own a brutish truck when a bit of human ingenuity can get a Ford Ka through the muds[2] just fine. ;-)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_(vehicle)
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66yISwURzE4
Maybe someone could have another go at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO_Rocket_Car

More seriously, there is a proposal to use a version of SABRE called SCIMITAR to power an airliner, which could be a more accessible testbed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_A2
Seagate Acquires SandForce From Avago/LSI
in fact, the author attempt to tear down an argument completely of his own invention:

'But then I read Bock’s rationale, and that’s when I nearly lose a mouthful of Cheerios: Unlike English—and presumably other non-STEM fields—computer science “signals a rigor in your thinking,” an ability “to think in a formal and logical and structured way.” He said what?'

from this the author decided to read that ONLY CS majors can learn logical thinking, but Bock's statement was really that CS inherently signals this because CS is entirely predicated on this type of thinking no matter where you learn it.

I'm getting sick of these whiny stupid articles popping up on the front page, like there is a decline of logic in the site votership itself. The amazon tantrum yesterday and now this eesh
Patio11 is tweeting BaconBizConf 2014
Yep, Kirchensteuer ... usually between 8% and 9% if you're member of a confession that collects tax. Many people leave the church because of that, but then try and get your son or daughter into one of the many christian nurseries or schools later, and you have a bit of a problem ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Germany
For me, the problem in English class was that "good" writing was very subjective. It always seemed as if the goal was to impress the teacher. I've only had one English teacher in my life who I felt gave me concrete instruction about how to write effectively (shout out to Dr. Cross!). The technical writing course I took in college was also somewhat beneficial.

In mathematics, there are problems and there are solutions. That is much more logical to me.
Thanks for the response, that definitely makes sense. I guess it really depends on the specific technology you want to learn and the type of learner you are.
There's alot of FUD in your statement there.

BitLocker in it's "click click next" incarnation stores keys in the cloud, but it is fairly trivial to install in a manner that uses the TPM or external media for key storage.

For example, NIST publishes guidelines for FIPS compliant BitLocker configuration that gives some guidlines re: the different operating modes:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/140sp/1...

If you have the technical chops / willingness to download TrueCrypt, you should have the ability to spend 10 minutes googling for instructions on a customized configuration of BitLocker.
how do you conclude that any TrueCrypt version is secure in light of this disclosure?
Don't worry so much: your black guy (or woman) can never escape his (her) fate in America! I don't think you have to worry about the being pulled over while driving, followed by shopping, and arrested when trying to get into one's own house stopping soon.
HN Show: Shortener for phone numbers
>> ...the price of rice skyrocketed from 4 to 36 cents per pound (a 900% increase).

That's an 800% increase.
I think the best solution is to offer a better payment system to merchants and consumers. Merchants accept rewards cards because it is what their customers have and want to use- customer shave and want to use them because they are convenient (accepted by most merchants) and the reward is an extra. If you can offer a secure payment system that is adopted by a significant portion of the market (make it even more convenient than rewards cards), while offering merchants significantly lower fees, eventually most merchants will accept your payment method- and as more consumers use it, many merchants will begin to stop accepting rewards cards and paying the high fees.

This is a long haul strategy, and likely a costly battle to fight. Is it worth it?
I must recommend Jan Gehl's masterpiece, Life Between Buildings http://amzn.to/1jwFtcP
Borrowed words in English: tracing the changing patterns
I was recently in an 11 week class for Machine Learning. 3 of the best students in this course were females. What was funny to me was how gender was never really an issue for anyone. Competent people are typically awestruck by smart people who are displaying brilliance. I was always cracking jokes about "well, I'm not (insert her name here), so I'll have to go look at her code before I can do that."

The big difference in treatment occurred with the lone female in the course who wasn't a good coder. Despite her having more experience than many in the class, she quickly fell behind. I witnessed a vicious cycle, in which she (probably due to the way she had been treated in the past) was ultra defensive when criticism came down, which then caused a difference in how she was criticized, which was then picked up on by her...... She complained to me about being discriminated against for her gender. While I'm very sympathetic to females in our industry who suffer at the hands of these brogrammer idiots (anytime I see anything remotely like that kind of behavior, I don't hesitate to LITERALLY GRAB the guy/guys, pull them aside, and give them a menacing rebuke), this was a case in which gender wasn't actually the issue. It was personality. And I have no doubt that gender discrimination in her past helped create this personality. Such a challenge to deal with this.
It's a very tricky collection of definitions. All descriptions of it are a bit vague. For instance under lock-free on wikipedia we read

"An algorithm is lock-free if it satisfies that when the program threads are run sufficiently long at least one of the threads makes progress (for some sensible definition of progress)."

That definitely sounds like locks would be included. I am pretty sure that if my program runs for long enough that descheduled thread will get rescheduled and continue to make progress. And then there is the hand-wavy 'sensible definition of progress' what is that?

If we take an example from a single producer single consumer queue which is certainly non-blocking. With two methods.

// Returns true if o was successfully added to the queue, false otherwise
public boolean enqueue(Object o)

// Returns null if the queue is empty, otherwise returns a FIFO object
public Object dequeue()

There can only be two threads running. So lets suspend one indefinitely to test that our implementation is non blocking.

If we suspend the producer then the consumer will eventually stop returning objects from dequeue() and just return null. If we suspend the consumer then the producer will eventually start returning false from enqueue(). In either of these cases we could definitely argue that our system has stopped making progress and the definition 'actually enqueue or dequeue some useful thing' seems like a sensible one. But this definition should really just be 'always return from enqueue or dequeue' and this second definition allows us to say our queue is non blocking.

It's pretty hard to pin down what constitutes a 'sensible definition of progress'. For a user space spin lock saying that a thread continues to spin in a tight loop could be a sensible definition of progress, but isn't helpful for our purposes of deciding if an algorithm or data structure is non blocking. This trickiness makes it surprisingly difficult to coherently discuss non-blocking x-free algorithms.

(Luckily, in practice, these algorithms are so much fun that it is worth the difficulty :)
This is no different than what President's Organizing for America did:

The tool kit was custom-built for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. It digitally linked data on millions of American voters, including their email addresses, through Dashboard as well as through social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, to an army of staff and volunteers knocking on doors in the key swing states.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/14/obama-digital-c...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-d...
>But that also seems odd since I am not quite sure that if TrueCrypt people were who we all want to believe they were, would suggest using bitLocker. bitLocker??? Alone that suggestion smells like rotten fish just by its association with MS and the US government.

That's the canary.

Not only is bitlocker backdoored, and most TrueCrypt users would know that, but they also say it is available on all windows versions, which is eminently not the case.
> it's not all that hard to complete an English degree without learning those things.

How do you know this?

(You know, since we're talking about logical rigor.)
Now that we're resigned to never seeing Half-Life 3, I guess Valve felt obliged to come up with another vague "we'll release it some time in the indefinite future" product to keep us on our toes.
Reading about history is usually a good way to educate. ENIAC, the world's first and fastest (at that time) electronic computer, had a full time devops staff of six. ENIAC was a beast of a machine, using a whopping 150kW of power, and broke on a daily basis. ENIAC's devops team was comprised of Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC#Programming

If you program or do operations for a living, know the first of your kind were hard working women who also dressed to the nines when they showed up for work.
Shady little advert there, masquerading as news.
Because this happened to 7.2. Chances are, this is a warrant canary, and people will take the last known good 7.1 (i.e. the one that is being audited) and build their forks from there.
I Got Shipped to California to Date Tech Guys
> They were simply unprepared for the torrent of proofs, deductions, tautologies, De Morgan's laws, etc.

All of which I never see used in a professional capacity for the vast majority of software developers.

What I do see used quite often is the ability to communicate to customers or other engineers in a clear, succinct and enjoyable manner using the English language.
I feel bad that I cant get a job at the New York Times with my cs degree. I might not know any literary composition or journalism techniques, but you can't tell me that as a computer scientist I am not as smart as an english major that learned all these skills in college.

Ok. Now we both feel inadequate and offended, so it's all even.
Bock and the author both miss the same point: the thing that helps you learn to think in a rigorous way is to study something that does not come naturally to you.

I see it as the difference between learning a new skill and practicing an existing one. The former forces you to focus completely, while the latter tolerates inattention.
You Must Construct Additional Skylons!
Ahhh, that's what that was! http://snag.gy/43JI3.jpg
"The fact is most English majors don't enjoy heavy duty math or science as much"

These statements need data to back them up, Mr. Science.
Google has such an arrogant culture for an ephemeral company built around the sole business to milk indirectly their customers with online advertisement.
"Only a fool blames his tools"

This weekend, my dad and I were cutting down a tree. It was taking a long time and we were not making much progress. After arguing for a bit over technique, we decided to change the chainsaw blade. We took the tree down in 2 minutes.

By blaming out tool and changing it, we solved our problem. Sometimes, a wise person blames his tools.

Pointing out that failures can also stem from wider processes does not contradict that.
Ha! Last developer I hired was an English major ...I found out after I hired him ... the degree question didn't come up in three interview process ... just programming.
Those can be good, not sure how reliable they are, and of course you've got to send it to the right carrier.

I'm volunteering for a non-profit right now on a project that sends SMS messages through Twilio, I think their current cost is $0.0075 (for a US to US message), and interfacing to Twilio is easy, if not a joy, their API is sane and the on-line documentation is excellent. This approach gives you the whole 160 character budget to describe the problem.
As the time of me writing this, it looks like you're being downvoted (which I don't think is fair), but I think your answer points to one of the problems. Grading in the humanities is more subjective. By analogy, Olympic gymnastic scores are subject to a lot more disagreements than 100 meter sprint times.
Mobile Trends 2014: a commentary on "2014 Internet Trends" report by KPCB
Might not be messing with both heads, anyway.
Note that log4j2, which can log asynchronously, uses the LMAX disruptor, which is a java implementation of the same technique.
Planting trees and planting a garden call to disparate lessons!

Planting trees is about ecosystem conservation.

Planting and tending a garden is about understanding plant life cycle, the nitrogen cycle, /and/ where food comes from.

Unless the gardens you're thinking of planting self-sustain their nutrients, conserve (or even generate a surplus of) water, and have zero impact on surrounding ecosystems (fertilizer and pesticide runoff), they don't really teach anything about ecosystems other than how we can manipulate them for our gain (greedy or otherwise).
A friend of mine sold a bunch of building supplies, appliances and furnishings successfully on there, my sister sold a van, etc. Just about anything

You might be able to figure out what's popular by looking at the ads, the more polished ones are probably the ones folks have done repeat sales.
pagerduty [0] does this and more. You also don't need to host your own infra for the alert system.

[0]http://www.pagerduty.com/
Which does nothing to improve the core problems with your workflow :)

Offloading tests to 3rd party will not help you ensure that tests run fast as they should.

Working too long on your branch will only make mergers more painful later.

We use svn and git, but the workflow is still local fast tests before even branches commits. No personal branches, only features, and update those often because they're not exclusively your silo. And commit/merge to head often. And head is the only place where you get the 2h integration test run. Because otherwise, you'd wait 2h after every branch commit (which we know nobody can do)
SMS probably won't wake you up or get your attention if you're busy though. if your phone get push email, then email and SMS are more or less the same - you get push notification buzz and something on the homescreen.
No, the market is "consumers of mobile devices, upon which apps can be distributed or installed." What you're identifying as it's own market is actually a brand; a segment of a larger market. A market in which there is plenty of competition, I'd add.

What you're proposing could easily be said about any supply of any good or service owned by anybody or any company. If each company's product distribution constitutes a monopoly of "Product X Market", then "monopoly" has been redefined.

I'm not arguing that what Apple has done in the mobile space is good, or even ethical or appropriate. I'm simply arguing that they do not own a monopoly, in any sense of the word that is reasonable in this context.
Of course you can teach a rigorous English course.

The problem is that you can also not.

I took an intro to philosophy course in which we were graded reasonably rigorously on our logic. But the prof also made it clear via both a bit of text and a bit of subtext that we were getting so graded because nobody really takes the old stuff that seriously anyhow, so there's no sacred oxes getting gored. You can write an essay for this class either endorsing or denouncing Descartes and as long as it is reasonably logical, you'll get a good grade. Don't expect such accommodations if you start getting into what is taken seriously.

I also took a real-deal English history class graded primarily on essays, and both at the time and even now I'm pretty sure I got a 2.5 simply because I failed to correctly echo back what the prof expected, made harder by the fact that she did a reasonably good job of not telegraphing what she expected. However, I never got any other useful feedback on my essays; the facts were correct, the arguments were logical enough, they were to the expected length, they just got graded poorly. (And it's not as if I was going out of my way to write offensive political agitprop myself, I was just trying to answer the questions. But I'm quite sure my perspective was quite different than hers, in ways hard to explain in an HN comment.)

The fact that you run a rigorous course grading logic and rhetoric (based on a computer science degree) is not proof that everybody else does. Yes, they all say that's what they do, but that's not proof either. In practice the humanities are pretty notorious for this sort of thing, and I'm completely unconvinced this essay with its one data point that is almost by definition an outlier (both coming from a computer science degree and being what is probably an early course in the sequence as implied by having a lot of non-English majors in it) provides any significant evidence against the original claims from Google, or that the field's notoriety is unearned in practice.

(Incidentally, to the extent that I rather dislike the humanities we have today, it is precisely that they could be excellent training in logic and rhetoric, but they generally aren't. Postmodernism poisoned the humanities nearly unto destruction.)
You don't think it's a given that, on average, students who
choose a degree that requires "heavy duty math" enjoy it more than students who choose a degree that doesn't require "heavy duty math"?
Um, because I don't know if it's a good thing. How hard is that for you to understand. Seriously, did you read my comment before deciding to lay on the snark.
Have you ever noticed that HN posts concerning gender discrimination tend to attract hundreds of comments?

That's not intrinsically bad. What's questionable is the quality of the comments. It seems that almost all the remarks on this page are drawn from opinion or personal anecdotes. Don't get me wrong... personal stories can be interesting and insightful; it's just that, in most discussion threads, HN tends to balance opinion with links to more objective qualitative and quantitative sources. That's what differentiates HN from sites like Facebook and Reddit.

So, there should be a barrier to participating in discussions about gender on HN. If you have personal or professional experience that qualifies you to discuss the topic, please share it. If you took the time to research the issue and present a substantial, new perspective, please share it. But if you want to chime in with a vague, unsubstantiated opinion that dozens of others have already shared, please consider using another forum. That's what makes these discussions less productive.