skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From Joel:
Where do they learn to write a program longer than 20 lines?

Oh man, if I never had to write a program longer than 20 lines for my CS degree, life would have been a lot less hectic (and I also wouldn't have learned shit, which is not the case at all).
I can't imagine a better course than writing a Lisp interpreter in C, and then a Java implementation in Lisp.

They're clearly not fads, they're clearly useful, and the kind of knowledge and education that doing such an exercise would require is exactly something that proponents "world-class western liberal arts education" would laud.

It can work, it seems to me.
On one hand, we have talk of learning fundamentals, but on the other, if we teach with more exotic languages, "they'll never be able to find a job because they didn't learn anything useful."

So, which is it? Do schools teach the fundamentals, transferrable to any language, or do they teach what'll be useful in industry?
After reading up on the powerful SPL classes included with PHP5 and developing on top of the very well-coded KohanaPHP framework, PHP development has become very productive lately. Although, I prefer Python's syntax, the deployment speed of PHP is very hard to match.

The inconsistent function library definitely gets annoying, but I guess that's why PHP has such excellent documentation. Using Eclipse PDT code hinting also mitigates the API annoyances.
To clarify, I'm saying that students in a third world country have a much greater incentive to study the hard sciences. If you're brother in law can't get a job in his bank then the only way out of poverty is to study hard.

Even in relatively poor areas of the country (midwest, south) you can make a very good living as a banker (loan officer, etc).
Heroku versus GAE & GAE/J
I dont think thats what he is talking about... and I would put a video demo on your site right where the pic is...
they definitely need to highlight that this isn't just wireless with an arbitrary motion sensor to start the transfer

why? end users don't care how it works as long as its effortless.
"I don't buy the assumption that the biggest problem is teacher quality."

Me either. The biggest problem is the institution (embodied to an extent by administration.) Most teachers are qualified, hard-working. They suffer under 'overhead' like most of us do.

The last thing educators need is a 'solution' from the WSJ.
One can think of moral behavior as a game of strategy where
winning just means achieving your life goals over the long term.

One may have "become rich" as a life goal which seems to have nothing to do with morality... but it actually does since achieving this goal invariable depends on getting along with others.

Because these are long term life goals, significant computation would be required to look ahead in complex and varied situations where your decisions may have ramifications many years later.
Agree with gojomo that cell-tower tracking is more efficient. Besides, why use delivery vehicles? Buses would probably tell you just as much about traffic conditions and that info is already up there for free.
Being the introductory language of choice doesn't make it the language of choice. MIT kids learn the real stuff too.
In Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends & Influence People" he says to never argue with anyone, since you'll never convince the other person and if you do they'll resent you for making them look foolish (or something like this).

The case for wearing a seat belt is my exception to this rule. I was talking to a "libertarian" friend and he mentioned his life is his responsibility and he should wear the seat belt or not if he didn't want to. I told him that if he got in an accident and paralyzed because of not wearing seat belt then it wouldn't be fair to the rest of us tax payers to support him because of his decision. (This was in a modern country with universal health care).

He thought for a second and said, "oh, yes, you're right".
It's also a well-known factoid that the best developers outperform the worst by a factor of 10, and yet despite huge incentives to develop a reliable scheme to rate developers, none exists. Just because we "need" to segment the good teachers (or developers, or doctors) from the bad doesn't mean we can.
So I've been voted down for having an opinion -- way to be open minded hacker news.
My political persuasions have changed radically over the last 20 years... And I used to find politics interesting.
Are you really saying that Python is "not useful"?
That was a mistake: Python is QUITE useful. But I wouldn't call it an industry standard. Corrected.
While php.net is a great reference tool, jrockway opinion still stands. By using PHP, the developer is missing out many abstraction patterns that make life easier.
It's more complicated than just scp'ing files over. That's all I have to say. It's fine to say that it's also better engineering, but that doesn't address the original article. Ruby is also a better engineered language than PHP in a lot of ways.
Don't be too hard on yourself, and don't go too far in the opposite direction. Kids do want boundaries, and they are happier when they have them. Watching my 8-year-old nephew's behavior bears this out perfectly; when he's given lots of input into plans and opportunity to negotiate, he acts like a demon and ends up melting down and unhappy. When given rules he's a happy angel.

I think the trick is to not open the floor to negotiation. If kids have reasonable objection or points you hadn't considered, they will raise the point and you can modify the rule. If they know that they are "negotiating" just to get their own way and that it won't work, they won't waste the time--and everyone will be happier.

That's my experience, anyway.
Not having read the whole article, I will point out that IQ tests generally contain cultural bias and American IQ tests generally are normed against white middle class values/people. So anyone who is Latino, black, foreign (etc) has a good chance of "performing poorly" in comparison to the population it was normed against.
I recently came upon MVC, and similary was enlightened re. the events within ASP.NET WebForms. I highly reccomend checking out thier approach: its incredibly flexible from a very low level.
'cap deploy' is easier than 'scp here there'.
The two are orthogonal, at least in some aspects. The fundamentals can - technically - be taught in any language (practically, noone's going to try teaching a course in BrainFuck). But we try to choose a language that gives them, if not industry skills, a platform from which to reach those skills rapidly. For example, teach them C and an OO language of your choice properly - and they can learn C++, ObjectiveC, Java, Python or any of a dozen others very rapidly indeed compared to someone who dove in, learnt Inferno and then graduated into an industry that never heard of it.

The thing to remember is this - we teach them the fundamentals for a reason, namely to get jobs in industry. At the back of all this academic teaching is a commercial reality that can't be forgotten. But you have to balance that with a long-term view of the student's entire career. We're trying to give them a degree course, not a Sam's book!
both agree and not..

The internet was pretty closed when DARPA owned it and so TCP was proprietary. Fortunately it became ubiquitous, was written up in an RFC and we can all inter-operate now.

Calling it a 'protocol' is useful.
Or they have nothing to add to the discussion/your point.
Through internships, open source projects, research, and real courses (Operating System Design and Implementation comes to mind), students learn everything they need to about version control, bug tracking, etc.

Students who don't are lazy.

Professors who don't gently push students in that direction are lazy too. Good courses have projects so hard that using version control is implicitly mandatory. Further, Fundamentals of Software Engineering at my school requires students to participate in an active open source project (for example: chrome, firefox, scala, eclipse, etc.) and actually have their patches accepted. [Edit] Also, group projects are only collected through subversion (yeah yeah, I know), so students don't have any choice but to learn to use version control.

Maybe it's time for a curriculum upgrade?
Windows 7: The $1930 Upgrade
I'm a programmer but I took a three-year hiatus from programming to be a science and technology teacher. So I speak from having some teaching experience.

Objective measures like the ones proposed are a siren song. They sound really good on the surface, but a deeper look reveals these problems:

* You only get what you measure. Whatever is not measured falls through the cracks. So this means that the teaching goals have to be really good. Historically, they are not, as they are driven more by politics than by people who are talented at teaching.

* Some of the value that teachers add is in intangibles which are harder to measure. These important intangibles will fall by the wayside.

Also, the administration has a large impact on student and teacher success. Imagine being a programmer and having your performance judged on a project that was mismanaged by an incompetent project manager.

I'm not saying we should have no objective measures; I'm just giving a word of caution that this is a complex issue that's not easily solved. Reductionist approaches like these are bound to fail; more holistic approaches that focus on the student-teacher-parent relationship are better.
C/assembly to learn about the machine and because they're everywhere, Lisp to learn about all the paradigms, and a popular scripting language if you need big libraries. Java is so ugly, it'll just confuse them. It confused me, anyway.
"... I can testify it contains less jungle survival knowledge than most boyscouts pick up during their training. ..."

thanks I didn't expect IDF basic to be so "basic".

"... his odds would be pretty much the same as the average young backpacker. ..."

Didn't expect that.
If Gmail turns out to be not what you wanted, GoDaddy is pretty good for e-mail too. The interface is easy to use, and the help files are also very good.

I'm using GoDaddy right now for the startup e-mail accounts and am very happy with them. No complaints whatsoever.
struct {
char somechar;
char somearray[7];
} foo = {'E', "xample"};

printf("%c\n", foo.somearray[-1]); // prints 'E'
// (depending on your compiler and the
// struct-packing directions you gave it)
Instead of focusing so much on standardized testing, we need to start valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication. Just because a school can increase test scores year-over-year, does not mean that the graduating students will make the country more competitive. In fact, so much emphasis on standardized testing is likely to produce less innovation as students and teachers are forced to teach within very strict models. Unfortunately, it is hard to measure creative output, but very easy to measure test scores.

I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving. This seemed to be the right approach.
If anyone is in Boston, Harvard has a (i believe) monthly seminar put on by the iic-cs and last year around this time Boston dynamic was one of the guests. They're usually fascinating talks.
Thanks a lot for taking to time to write me feedback. I really appreciate it and it's comments like these that help me out a bunch!!!

What about if you could copy the program on the site and modify it to exactly what's available to you! I see what you mean about casual and serious workout-ers. I think it has to do with goals. Like, the more serious the workout-er, the more specific the goal. "I want to add 50lbs to my squat" is a lot more specific than "I want to stay in shape". If the goals were clearly labeled maybe that could help.

Also, I think it's possible to find fun workout ideas in the database. I'm not sure what, but comboing swimming and doing other stuff in one workout is fun to me and isn't really standard.
Printing, Digital Media, and Capitalism. Long, but worth it.
[9:28pm:/playbook] DIVISION:tqbf [0:279]% cap deploy
the task `deploy' does not exist
Joel's statement was hyperbolic. The average assignment might amount to 1000 - 3000 lines of code for the more advanced courses, but his point still stands.

Real products (products that actually make money) consist of a few thousand lines of "fun" algorithm code and hundreds of thousands of lines of "boring" code.

But code length wasn't even the main point of his essay - time management was.
Nonsense. You can't rate the countless dozens of things good teachers do with some phony metric. Any more than you can measure 'good' programming, 'good' science research, or any other human endeavor that requires creativity, tailoring responses to the situation, etc.

"Objective" measures are a pipe-dream that's decades old. It's constantly thrown up as a 'solution', almost always by people with little or no education experience.

Teachers have little control over the attitudes / motivations of students. You can bring a horse to water. Again, the evaluation of experienced professionals is worth something ... but good teaching is at least 50% art, and what works is a mystery that has to be solved one class at a time.
this is a sure loser based on efficient markets as this information is already priced in.
That is the best name I have seen thus far for a cloud computing project.
Chaos and Initial Conditions
It's true.

Just color me bitter about how my college neither taught fundamentals nor prepared anyone for industry.
It's not much of a business idea, but I've recently been thinking about a way for communities (esp in high crime areas) to do an online neighborhood watch. IE, neighbors put webcams in their front windows and the site presents combined (customizable) views of these webcams a la security camera displays. What if Grandma could email the police a security camera sequence showing who vandalized the library? You could even imagine communities providing bounties for any tips leading to a conviction, so kids in India can protect Walmart parking lots for us.
Is not so much concealment as protection of expensive equipment, the carpet, and should this thing decide to do the 100 meter dash all on its own, protection of human hurdles that might otherwise get steel toes lodged in their abdomens.
They are just tools, people
Doesn't programming deserve to be the subject of a rigorous, high-level education? It is a rich craft with a growing tradition. We would do well to consider, as Joel does, how to provide students with appropriate experience for the future practice of their career. That doesn't mean teaching the particular, accidental details of contemporary professional programming, but it does mean taking programming seriously as a subject of education. You can study architecture, design, and engineering in universities - not just sciences and humanities. Similarly, the existence of computer science shouldn't exclude programming from our institutions of higher learning.
I think the future of twitter is in effectively tracking what genuine people need, want, and feel and displaying that information in an accessible manner. I have no idea how to execute that thought but it seems like the next logical step.
I'm amazed by how out of context his comment was taken.

His response of “I like to pride myself on thinking pretty long term, but not that long term. So you win,” was a joke. The question had been what were Facebook's plans for storing their data so that 2000 years from now, historians could analyze the it.
Does LinkedIn have a mobile application yet?
In "Mohammed and Charlemagne" by Henri Pirenne, the whole Mediterranean region after collapse of the Roman empire still enjoyed prosperity. The economy went down after trades in Mediterranean sea decreased due to Muslim Arabs had taken control the area.
I'm confused - or you are.

A new option is a Mac Mini with 2x 500GB drives (without an internal optical drive), running OS X Server, for $999.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/server/specs.html
I don't honestly know how to define 'moral behavior' anymore. I know a lot of people do things because they "care" about others. I'm one such person who is wired to care deeply about the welfare of others. I have also raised two ASD sons, one of whom just doesn't have that feeling of caring for others. Because neither of my sons inherently understands social stuff, I have done a great deal of explaining over the years. I have had to hone an ability to explain things extremely accurately because anything less just doesn't compute for my sons.

Like his father, my oldest son is probably one character trait short of the personality profile that produces serial killers. Yet he and I get along extremely well. His lack of caring what other people think is an antidote to me getting too concerned with what others think/feel/want from me. My ability to explain the social stuff is an antidote to his complete obliviousness to such things. He is often described by other people as a very nice polite young man. He has learned to be polite and respectful out of enlightened self-interest (as the saying goes around here "jail time would seriously interfere with his video game time").

And I have learned to stand up for myself and get the "doormat -- please wipe your boots here" tattoo removed from my forehead. I have come to believe that letting people victimize me is more immoral than "bitchily" standing up for myself. I have come to believe that agreeing to be a victim forces the other person into the role of victimizer when that may not be what they want at all. I think a lot of people (at leasts in America) see social interaction as limited to victim/victimizer interaction and many people who desire to be "moral" choose the victim role as the "better" of the two. But choosing that role denies both parties a humane, equitable interaction.

So I no longer really know what "morality" means. But I am generally less tortured by such questions than when I was younger. I do my best to figure out how to get my own needs met without making other people into victims or forcing them into the role of victimizer. It's not an easy path to walk. But it's a lot more pleasant than how I used to live.
Rumor roundup: NYT speaks of 'impending Apple slate,' new SIM tray leaks (video)
just as customers shop for technology products on the basis of whether they like the products or not.

That might be a simplification on your part, if not it's naive. Customers don't have to like a product - they see an advert for it that tells them it's right for them, or their friend has one, or the guy in the shop sells it them because it's got the highest markup.

* I hope the school system begins valuing learners for their capacity to notice when a particular teacher isn't a good fit for a particular learner.*

So, a teacher is a poor performer - do you sack them and have no teacher or do you realise that poor education is better than no education? In order to get better teachers better candidate teachers need to come forward.

Finally, parents have a large part in education - parents that teach respect for teachers will make the job easier and make the classes learning benefit. Parents that help with learning outside of school will help their children learn better.
I was in a french high school during my studies and we had about 1 short project a week, 1 middle-term project a month and 1 to 2 long projects a year for the first 3 years. For the next 2 years we had only middle-term projects and 1 big project (end of studies project).
It was really interesting for a lot of points :

- short projects were for 1 to 2 people

- other projects for 3 to 8 people

- You had to use version control

- if your project didn't match the expectations your score
is /2

- expectations with no way to change dates

- You don't always choose your team

- working with assholes and had to handle that

- there were always a "team leader" who took more responsibilities if the team failed

- some of the projects were corrected by bots using hundreds of test cases and at the first test failing it stops correcting (seriously it was a nightmare, you could have the 1st test failing and the next hundreds working ... anyway you will have the worst score) so you begin to write your own test suite trying to test everything even the unthinkable.
...

I'm not trying to do some marketing, I'm not anymore part of the school and not involved at all in it, just trying to say that all the school don't do bad jobs to prepare you for working in a real world.
How many of those hundreds of thousands of lines of boilerplate code have concepts in them that the average CS student isn't taught in their "fun" algorithm code?

None.

The simple fact is that with the amount of things to teach in a CS course, boilerplate code is just not a good use of time to teach. Students come across it in any major project and know it exists in the rest of the course - but spending equal time on boilerplate and on algorithm code would be like teaching an artist a degree course in chemistry before letting him buy his first tube of paint. He'd be a great chemist, but a lousy artist.

As to time management, Joel's point was nonexistant there. He spent the entire article berating student's time management skills, suggested Scrum supported by his product could fix the problem, then quickly blurted out that industrial programmers have equally poor time management skills and in fact are solely differentiated from college students by the point that industrial programmers have managers to enforce time management on them, and that neither Joel's product nor Scrum can help that.

Leaving aside the point that he's not actually correct about time management skills (long-term time management isn't just down to the programmer, but to how stable project requirements are and other such factors), and leaving aside the query of just how bad the programmers he works with in industry are (because in six years of industry work, I never came across a programmer who both kept their job and had poor time management skills), there's the query of what the hell his post was about at all in the first place if all it did was to create FUD, hawk his product as a solution, then indemnify himself from any failure by saying it probably wouldn't work (in a sufficiently roundabout way that it didn't discourage the sale)?
I'm actually doing something in this neighborhood for a project for a class I'm in. Basically, I'm just looking at tweets in general and trying to classify them as reviews -- e.g. I loved ____ it's great. I had originally intended to make a trainable 'spam' filter for tweets, but it proved to be too large a project for the assignment timeline. Would love to hear more from you.

dave @ davelyon . net
Teach a Kid to Program - Wired How-To Wiki
There's an effort to use Justin.tv as a neighborhood security watch at Ourblock.tv, which is the successor to Adam's Block (if you remember that news report a while back) However, the team coding the site all have full time jobs, and development is moving slowly (but steadily).
Ask HN: Best CMS -- preferably in Python?
I've tired of server-side includes for static web-pages. Django hosting just isn't available for most customers. Essentially I'd love to have Django templates and generic views, and that's it. What are the most widely supported CMS's by hosts? Joomla and Drupal?
I'm a little worried about this - once the USA gets disposable robot soldiers there's nothing to stop them waging war in all directions simultaneously...

Spend $ not American lives - prefect for the MIC.
That's not bitter, that's justifiable anger steve. There's a duty of care involved on the university's part - if they screwed the pooch, that's a pretty major thing.
John Chambers
Introducing Google Social Search