skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you evolve modern computer science curriculum?
Follow up to "Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950439

From the answers to that question, you can see that the core computer science curriculum has barely changed in 30 years. As for programming languages used, Java has been the mainstream for over 10 years now and C/C++ is still hanging tough after breaking into higher education 20+ years ago.

In '96-'99, the core courses I took (Data Structures, OS, Compilers, Computer Arch, etc.) served me well and I was glad to get a mix of Java and C/C++ at the time. If I was starting my undergrad today however, I'd be a little disappointed to know not much had changed since then. I'd argue a good bit of the curriculum is nearing its shelf life or, to carry on the spoiling food metaphor, at least needs to be put in the freezer for preservation.

Got me thinking about how things could evolve. Some examples:

Data Structures => Javascript or some other web-able Ruby that 70% of folks will actually get a job in. The concepts are what matter in DS, but while we are at it how about a more relevant language choice? Points to those school already using Python for this!

Operating Systems => Teach it in C still, keep it hardcore low level, and probably make it an elective for the minority of folks who want to do performance OS work.

"Browser/Internet as the OS" => Replace the traditional core OS class; class project would basically be this: http://runtimejs.org/

Databases => Replace with a new core course for "Data Science"; make Databases an elective.

So, how would you evolve modern computer science curriculum if you could?
Right. Like I said, if it can be proven that their experiment caused harm of some kind, then that's when something should be done.
Also, the old Songza interface was way better. Look there if you miss it. legacy.songza.com
The Secrets of Amazon's Firefly Button
I get bored very quickly. I filter down to three ideas. One that is short-term but teaches me something new; one that is a labor of love; and one that I have determined could make me money. I will work on each one for 2-3 consecutive days, then take a day off from any project, then move on the next one. This keeps me from ceasing to work, either out of boredom or burnout.
Ashe Dryden gives up on Gittip
So you are not "never have to work again rich" through software? If you have to work on small projects to sustain your lifestyle, that is working. Work is work even if you like it. But thanks for sharing.
Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
With more passionate FP advocates, there's no "people who are not interested in FP after having tried and not finding it useful for their intents and purposes", there are people who either :

- Don't understand it
- Are afraid of it
- Find it too complicated
It is misleading only in that the spending should have been per capita. I don't think that changes the point though which is that however much you spend it is just money wasted. As far as I am concerned money shouldn't be thrown away when the approach obviously isn't working no matter how much you think the goal is worth it. For the record I don't agree that the government should ban substances outright, just make sure they are labeled properly for the harm they do.
I cringe at the money spent on lawyers and the PR firm, but bravo on the the transparency.
Well then nothing is secure.

At least as far as a whole system goes including the soft squishy components designing, developing and operating it.

Even for cryptography the only absolute proven secure method is the one time pad which has very real practical flaws and risks if you try to operate it in the real world.
How is the same post being allowed thrice in 24 hours?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7977960
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972914
You don't have to use the extension. I personally see this as a StumbleUpon for startups, which I think is pretty cool.
Coursera is hosting a tech talk on 7/23 in mountain view where james burke (author or require.js) will be speaking about javascript modules.

sign up here: modular-js-coursera-tech-talk.eventbrite.com
The website is new and rad since last time i visited
Once more data comes in, I would like to see crime and revenue compared with crime and revenue in areas that instead legalized casino gambling.
GRAMMAR: [must have*] not of.
Ask HN: How did you start writing?
I'm relatively new to social media publishing and monitoring (late to the party) but I'm trying to learn. I published one article that got up to 3k views, but that was about it. Now I'm reaching out to the Hacker News community.

Why do you write? Personal or business? Or was it just fun on SM that turned serious? Where is the line?

How do you write? Personal Website or blogging site? What about LinkedIn publishing? Or Medium?

How do you choose topics? I'm trying to put out information that is useful to a target audience, but I'm not sure how. Not a lot of people write comments for the volume of readers I'm reaching.

How do you promote? I use LinkedIn and Buffer for Twitter and Facebook, but without a lot of success. Very few retweets and/or even clicks.

How do you change? I'm using Buffer for analytics, but it's hard to analyze nothing. In the limited feedback I do receive, I don't know what to look for. What does a favorited tweet mean? Nothing? Something? Do I use a 5-1-1 approach to original vs. shared content or another?

Help! I need some direction. I don't want to become one of the people who posts once, then says, "Social media is hard" and gives up.
Improving Twitter's World Cup event detection
That's the same (almost) issue that Mt.Gox supposedly famously had with the actual blockchain, transaction malleability. I've read that Mt.Gox actually lost tens of Bitcoins in this way and it was a red herring for the whole actual giant scam that was perpetrated, but it was still a real vulnerability that needed patching or working around.
Just so folks know, nicknames are very common in Brazil, and formal names are rarely used. That's why you have lots of overlap and whatnot. Slate did a quick primer on this before the start of the World Cup in 2006: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Pfft, there are so many restrictions on stock usage such as proxy agreements to the CEO, founder stock with 10x voting rights and so on that it might as well be useless for that.
PlanGrid is Looking for Non-Engineering QA and QC Software Testers
The PlanGrid QA/QC team currently supports three products: iOS app, Android app, and our website. We are looking for someone who has experience testing mobile apps and/or websites on iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. You must have flawless attention to detail, lots of patience and persistence, and looking to join an organization where you can make an immediate and lasting impact. This position requires independent intellectual judgment and great analytical skills.

In this role, you will:

• Write and/or update test script as new features and product is launched

• Run and execute test script

• Test functionality for each release and communicate issues found to engineering team

• Identify bugs, prioritize and track issues, and report test results to project / product managers

• Identify problems in production environment and elevate issues as necessary

• Help the support team by gathering user bug reports, evaluating information found, and taking appropriate testing procedures on reproducing the issue

• Monitor releases as well as play an active role in researching post-release issues

• 70% of this job consists of QA/QC and bug tracking, 30% will be training and supporting clients

Qualifications:

• Mobile testing experience preferred, which includes apps and websites

• Familiarity with iOS, Android, and Windows operating systems

• Knowledge of web services/API a plus

• Strong debugging skills with eye for detail

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

• Ability to work independently or in a group setting

• Interest in working in a fast-paced environment while juggling priorities and deadlines

Work with a Purpose:

Working with us means getting in with a company that rewards hard work, is truly passionate about building great product and tools for our clients, and reinventing software for the $1 trillion construction industry. You’ll also enjoy a good work-life balance, with all the perks you would expect from a thriving tech company (think free lunches, tasty treats, ping pong, dodgeball, and board game happy hours).

Please send your resume and a few(!) sentences about something interesting you’ve done to help someone: careers@plangrid.com

About PlanGrid:
PlanGrid is a venture-backed, YCombinator company that was founded in 2011 by two construction engineers and two hackers. We’re currently a team of 32 based in San Francisco. Our app is currently being used on tens of thousands of construction projects across the country and is enabling many companies to eliminate waste and save gobs of time and money. Our customers love us, and we’re growing like crazy.
Actually, my hope is that people use this technique more often until it stops looking magical, which is why I submitted the link in the first place. I wanted to give it more exposure.

I've used this technique a couple a few times to deliver presentations, and it seems that all that people notice is the hacker typing, or at least that's what they most comment on, instead of the content of the talk. I don't know if they really are being distracted away from the content, but in case they are, I want the technique to be pedestrian.
I think what the article is talking about is testing microservices in an event based messaging architecture is difficult. If the architecture did not comprise of queues with async servicing of queues it might have been easier to test the microservices in an end-to-end scenario.
They've really shinied up the web site since I last been there. I really like the ability to run Python in an interactive console on the home page too, with a live connection to an actual box on which you can actually run stuff.
First, give this a read: http://practicaltypography.com/

I like your design. I just have a few nitpicks...

* Only center titles; don't center body text!

* Your body text should be 90 characters wide, max. The paragraph under the photo is much too wide.

* Spacing under titles seems too small to my eyes.

* Triangles as bullet points look a little odd (this is really subjective)

* The login button is in a bit of a weird place. Right-aligned is nice, but it looks misaligned vertically with the logo.

My take on this stylesheet would be...

.headline { margin-top: 0; }
.h1, h2, h3 { margin-top: 0.7em; margin-bottom: 0.7em; }

Remove text-center from any body copy. Use <ul> tags for lists.

Regardless of the above, your work looks great.
nice! The many girls thing will rapidly get boring though. Friends thing never will.
The next time the police reduce broadly-based crime rates will be the first time. Demographics and environmental effects control this.
Patatap – With the touch of a finger create melodies.
Fibonacci numbers in finite fields
Kiva’s Julie Hanna on Tech as a Democratizing Force [video]
It looks like one AES-GCM and one RC4 ciphersuite, but with RC4 preferred?

"Support" for AES-GCM doesn't mean much if an RC4 ciphers is enabled and preferred by the server.

1. There are production servers that are still using RC4 only.

2. Consequently, clients can't disable RC4

3. Consequently, servers that prefer RC4 but offer better ciphersuites are insecure because they will negotiate RC4 even with better ciphers available. Client workarounds might be possible (involving multiple handshakes for rc4-only servers) but aren't implemented?
People are "ok" with it because up until very recently software jobs are heavily geography-centric. Microsoft and Amazon collectively own the bulk of the tech industry in Seattle, and both have similar policies. People signed these contracts because there wasn't much other choice.

In places with more diversity in tech employment (say, Silicon Valley) you will find less bullshit contracts like these, since there is more competitive pressure between employers. In Seattle it's Giant BigCorp A or Giant BigCorp B, with a smattering of smaller tech companies (or satellite offices, see: Google).

In the contracts I've seen with these kinds of terms, usually there's a way to disclaim things you've already worked on, such that those specific items are excluded from the contract. So, for example, if you were working on some open source lib already, you can enumerate it in the contract and that won't be covered. Of course, this still greatly limits your freedom to start new things while employed.

It sucks. It's a blight on our industry.
How easy is it to find places to rent is these locations? Through Airbnb and such it seems you end up paying quite a high monthly rent.
Loaning a car to seedy friends has no redeeming value to society. Hosting a TOR node, on the other hand, protects the privacy of whistle blowers and likely contributes to bringing down totalitarian governments.

It seems quite possible to make the argument that the great good a TOR node can do outweighs the bad it can also do.
Sure, and any sane implementation of BitAuth should use SSL.

The point I'm trying to make is that if you can trust SSL to protect a BitAuth signature, you can also trust it to protect a password. So claiming "passwords may travel over plaintext" as a relative advantage of this scheme is disingenuous; in both cases, you need to provide that protection at a lower protocol level.
Since the next GOP prez will be Rand Paul, I wouldn't worry about it. "He's cool, bro."
The Gorillas of eCommerce in Southeast Asia
From the article:

“Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies”

The issue that I take with this statement is that so far, bitcoin is far from a strong stable currency. I reserve judgment on whether it will ever get there, but I am not convinced that doing business in bitcoin is currently safer than doing it in Indonesian rupiah (for example).
Ask HN: How does your startup hire technical people?
We are at a stage where we are trying to grow our engineering team - we have a number of interesting technical challenges that we work through together with our candidates, while at the same time having a focus on their personality to try and asses if they would also be a cultural fit.

I am interested in finding out what other start-ups do when it comes to hiring technical people and what are the key points they try to take away from both technical and non-technical interviews.
I've never heard of dope referring to heroin, I think this is a US centric usage.
I think you need more whitespace on your website. Even the very top banner looks cluttered, with the logo super close to the name, and both right above the buttons, and all of it right above the image. No space to breathe, especially when you mouse-over the buttons.

Farther down, I'd work on the "You need PaperBox if..." section - the way the right bullets are aligned under the "p" (on my screen) makes it look like the title is not centered. I might add more vertical space before the bullets, and potentially also move the bullets all closer to the center / allow them to be more than one line.

The last section, with the colored fonts and images, looks better than the earlier parts. I'd play with adding a little more vertical space before each header and image.

Hope some of this advice is useful to you. I know you asked for advice on the fonts, but I thought since you're looking for advice I might as well offer some.
I think we need to be very careful with how much work the word "practical" is doing in these sentences. Sometimes we say an attack is impractical because it brings the cost of finding a key or a collision down from "cosmically intractable" to "still outside the reach of the NSA". But the RC4's practicality is not like that: here, by "practical", we mean that the attack isn't point/click simple.

('sdevlin implemented the double-byte bias attacks at Matasano, for what it's worth).
Ex-Amazonian here also. Sadly, Amazon looks great on your resume, it's still considered in the "AAA" tier of tech employers, standing side by side with the likes of Google, Facebook, etc.

Realistically I'd argue it's more on the high end of the "B" tier, but that's neither here nor there.

Amazon's attrition rate is insane. Not high, insane. This should tell you a lot about what it's like to work there. I too learned a lot, and it continues to pay dividends on my resume, so I guess that's how they get away with it.
Do you think the manager career path is still worth it, or is the 'technology-oriented' career path better?
Why has Google cast me into oblivion?
Long time Boulder resident here. In regards to change, the homeless/transient situation in downtown Boulder and beyond has gotten completely out of control [1]. I now see transients/homeless where I did not in the past. I am not certain the marijuana laws are the reason for so many transients coming to Boulder, but it could be a contributing factor.

[1] http://www.dailycamera.com/News/ci_26064136/Boulder-councilm...
Whiteboard Vectorization
It is possible to de-anonymise any Tor user if they have JS enabled and you have passive listeners at their ISP. See http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kVKMeKx...

The described attack on Tor may not be well known, but at the very least I told the FBI how to do it myself, so they certainly know about it.
"Functional" reactive programming is the functional programming for events. Reactive programming is actually pretty broad.
So unpack it a little more: why would non-competes ever have been weakened?
Automatic Node.js Clustering with Log Aggregation
I suspect it will be like the lottery money that was supposedly destined for the public schools, and it will just turn into a slush fund the legislature and governor can spend as they please.
As long as i can determine the speed and length of every animation implemented, go ahead, mobile industry. If not, fuck right off. There are already way too many programs that make the user wait for an action to happen just because someone decided the animation must take a minimum amount of time.
That's exactly what they do.

One of the scams involves looking up WHOIS for thousands of domains and sending false domain renewal bank slips ("boletos"). Some will pay and never notice it's a scam.

What the article describes is a more sophisticated method using a malware though.
How to use a super PAC to kill super PACs
Right, or some sort of positive reinforcement. Hardly secure though
I guess you never had the "We're switching from SVN to git" conversation.
Are you planning on lending assistance to Teepee? We are kind of in limbo in terms of http right now and it would be a shame for Teepee to turn out to be vapourware :(

(A hint for any folks experienced with http - this could be your chance to make lasting mark on the Rust ecosystem!)
I am the author of the post.

I think in cases where you are running totally different computations in different systems the Lambda architecture may make a lot of sense.

However one assumption you may be making is that the stream processing system must be limited to non-blocking, in-memory computations like sketches. A common pattern for people using Samza is actually to accumulate a large window of data and then rank using a complex brute force algorithm that may take 5 mins or so to produce results.

One of the points I was hoping to make is that many of the limitations people think stream processing systems must have (e.g. can never block, can't process large windows of data, can't manage lots of state) have nothing to do with the stream processing model and are just weaknesses of the frameworks they have used.
People, especially those in their early 20s, tend to not pay attention to the serving size for alcohol, sometimes to the point of death. Those drinking for the first time often experience a hangover.

People, especially those of retirement age, tend to ignore the serving size for aspirin, to the point of 30k deaths per year.

THC is still rolling with a zero body count.

The patriarchy cannot save us from our own ignorance.
I think this is the first popular Python post with a version number I've seen that doesn't have a lot of comments about the Python 2 vs 3 "battle".
Yup its the result of a design competition. Old relevant post from HN: http://grokcode.com/746/dear-python-why-are-you-so-ugly/
Is this where Tim is going to store his coins?
Inmarsat contracts SpaceX Falcon Heavy
Part of working with motion is always being cognizant of this delay. We never, ever want to make users feel like they are waiting.

It's like that study that showed people get more annoyed at airlines for waiting for their bags so airlines started assigning baggage claims that were further away. Same time to get your bags but you were busy walking over most of the time and didn't get bored. :)
Russian Hackers Targeted the U.S. and Europe Power Companies
I use MyLifeOrganized for Windows. I'm a big fan of creating hierarchical lists of projects and tasks and this tool allows me to do that.

My organization uses FogBugz to manage our releases, projects, and tasks and I can't say enough great things about that software.
Yeah, you're right. I went and watched the entire video and while they hide it well by having really big arenas, it's still just kill rooms.
Thinking about it, they're probably quite useful for spam/hacking/extortion.
That's because this was posted 1h ago, come back in a couple hours.
Function composition is very different from passing one function into another and the latter is definitely a concept that most Algebra 2 students would not be able to grok.
My grandma, who was born in 1901, used to refer to any substance considered illegal as "dope." Of course, she had her 4oz hot-toddy every evening and smoked 2 packs per day. Most people that follow the mainstream view of controlled substances do not care about the nuances; drugs are bad (unless sold by big pharma).
What is an In-Tray Exercise?
I'm confused as to why anyone would invest in Bitcoin companies as opposed to Bitcoins directly. The impression I got was that investing in companies provided added risks (co-founder separation, business failure, legal risks), without providing a significant advantage (risk mitigation, upside multiplication) over just buying Bitcoins directly.
Yes! The government should regulate to prevent you from a "pretty bad time" good use of everyone's time!
While the process was competitive, it wasn't a "competition." There was a bidding process that several firms took part in.
Woah - slow down. I'm not selling anything.

I think you're right about Google's brand, but I think they can simultaneously be distrusted and worshipped at the same time.

I also think that Apple is showing that compromising privacy is a consequence of Google and Facebook's business models, and not some fundamental rule of the web.

But, I don't think any of this changes my view that this particular study is not unethical in the way people are claiming given that Facebook exists and behaves as it does. If you think that Facebook operates an unethical business, I'd still argue that this doesn't make it worse, and that becoming less ignorant about how they affect people is a good thing.
7 Patterns To Refactor JavaScript Applications: View Objects
Farewell Soundcloud. It was nice while things lasted.
Great to hear you're aware of the issue! :D (Now write a blog post just as big about it. ;) )