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My impression is that computer science education is light-years behind things like physics and math.

I feel a lot of it has to do with the amount of money you can make straight out of college even as a mediocre coder, compared to the low-paying, unrewarding mess that education currently is.

Good on you for trying to do things right :) I was lucky to take the non-self paced version of CS61A, and I do think the class is top-notch. But even then there's tons of room for improvement, but no one has the time. We're all too occupied with our start-ups here (professor was amazing, but it says a lot that he was a full-time employee of Google while he taught our class).

Yep. Maybe we differ in our understanding of the phrase "states' rights argument" but the very first sentence you quoted screams "states' rights" to me - "Today, however, the Court takes the extraordinary step of ordering every State to license and recognize same-sex marriage."

Not sure why you got downvoted because I'm reading Roberts' decision now and that's a big part of it.

Yeah, I just moved into an apartment where the couple recently cut the cord as well. I think the only part where you're wrong is in saying cable TV is getting "shaken up." I'm pretty sure cable TV as we knew it is over.

You might be surprised how much data cookies can hold. Google Ads cookies (anything with __ga, etc.) are in almost every site do indeed appear to hold some tracking data.

But I agree with you that this is some misguided legislation for many reasons.

I find great irony in statements like these when the motivation of every party is considered. The idea is that prices are "in a free fall," i.e., they haven't fallen completely yet. But this will encourage people to buy SSDs and drive them in the very free fall of which the article speaks!

Experienced the same principle in my life a few weeks ago - I moved to a place described as "gentrifying." Realized a week into staying there that I was one of those people who was actually contributing to its gentrification! By no means was it gentrified, though.

This has been reposted a few times now. Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654905

Sure. Of course explaining the why is most important.

I can't edit my original comment but I'm surprised it was unpopular and the repeated concerns are so petty. I can respond to most of the things you guys brought up:

@sanderjd, you may think I'm exhibiting what the article was talking about, but I'd like to know if you have any other qualms besides using the terms tokenizer and interpreter. +@kevinschumacher. Obviously I'm not going to just tell them "ok now let's write a tokenizer and interpreter." The beginners I know know what (non-programming) tokens are and I'm sure they would be 100% comfortable with an explanation. Same thing with an interpreter - they're using the god-damned thing from the start, if they start with anything other than C or Java.

@danso, @Thriptic - I think I know what's happening. You're confounding frustration with confusion. I guess I shouldn't have wasted my time. Every beginner programmer, especially, but hell, even an experienced programmer (! think about this - of course we do), gets frustrated with the character-by-character exactness of programming sometimes. That doesn't mean they don't understand or think it's totally unreasonable. Very different.

Thanks guys for explaining the downvotes. Let me end by reiterating something I've said a few times now since the beginning - this is based on beginners I know. I.e., my bio and econ-major friends taking the same 61A class I did. I'd like to know, @sanderjd, whether you have some extra information about the class that I don't? Because I took the class 3 years ago and I know at least half the students are beginners. This is the first class people learning how to program seriously take. I don't know what else I need to say to convince you.

@danso the reason why I'm spending so much time on this is because I'm a student teacher thinking about going into programming education as well. I think it's very important to make the distinction between confusion and frustration. Otherwise, your efforts may be futilely spent on explanation when all they want is to get things working. If they're getting confused on things like "=" vs "==" or why that missing semicolon annoys the compiler, don't go back and explain that the interpreter is this thing with very strict constraints and everything you type matters. That's not the point. Explain what's wrong, why, and how to fix it!!! "Oh, in this language, we terminate lines with semicolons except blocks like if's and loops," "= is for assignment and == is for comparison." They'll get better with practice.

This is pretty ridiculous, man. I don't think I know a beginner programmer who would be so stuck on "every character matters." (Which isn't even true, to some level, in many langauges - ; in JavaScript and Python? Whitespace in languages besides Python?)

The way I would explain it is to have them take a imagine writing a code tokenizer and interpreter of a simple language themselves. That's what the intro CS class I took at Berkeley, 61A, had us code with a subset of Lisp, with a lot of help, of course. I don't think we needed to know how to use anything but strings, functions, and arrays, although it did involve recursion. This problem will never be broached again once they realize there's code reading their code. Of course it's arbitrary.

(project, in case you're curious: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/proj/scheme/)

The real question is, "if we're in a bubble, how do we take advantage of knowing it will pop?" (genuine question)

Your first paragraph sounds so dramatic that I was expecting you to laugh the idea off as a joke at the end, but you didn't. It sounds like you're 100% serious. Is this actually the case? Don't mean to pry, but it sounds a little extreme, and I wonder if this has happened either to you or anyone you know. I grew up in Irvine (mentioned below as similar to PA) and no one I knew would have banished anyone for getting B's or not getting a nice job. We were normal kids.

Yes, I was confused because that's how your comment starts out - it sounds like you're looking at this reputation like it's a thing in the past. Then you go on to say you'd never apply because you "know exactly how that process would go down." Which sounds like something you're thinking now and even in the future. I'm getting downvotes so maybe this makes no sense to anyone else but I don't see why you'd say "it's a shame" they've ruined their reputation in the past and then go on to say that you're sure things are going to be the same now and in the future.

By the way, since I'm getting the downvotes already anyways, I might as well say that you sound a little salty. I'm sure no one bases hiring decisions entirely on what university you went to.

Furthermore, all of the news articles we read love emphasizing the weird questions you might get once in a blue moon, the quirky perks you get for working there, etc. but in reality I doubt the interviews and work experience are much different from any other company (I asked my interviewers about this as well). Just some food for thought before you go accusing them of having "developed an overwhelming reputation" - a lot of this is the result of media hype, not their practices per se. Even though I agree that being employed at Google is probably overhyped, there's no need to be so antagonistic to the company for it.

I wonder when these "experiences" happened. I went through Google's process this semester looking for an internship position and it was no different than the dozen other companies I've gone through. Things might have changed since the days of random Fermi questions.

Edit: correspondence with the recruiter was no less timely than it was with other companies, and the only major difference I can think of is the host-matching process we went through.

Thank you, very good answer! It makes a bit more sense to me. Also tested in Chrome w/o Javascript, and it does indeed work. Upvoting's just a little more inconvenient.

I find it really interesting that NoScript users seem so vocal and adamant about their plugin on this site, at least. Many sites that don't work with NoScript have condescending comments from NoScript users, and they don't hesitate to proudly let their makers know. They often make comments like this, too. What is it about this plugin that seems to be correlated with these comments? Is browsing the Internet with such a big chunk of functionality missing really so much better? (Real questions, here.) I've heard HN doesn't even work with NoScript, which makes this all the more interesting to me.

I knew even before I clicked the link that it would be discussing e-health records :) I worked with them in a small division of McKesson (RelayHealth) a few summers ago as an intern and the company was described to me as "the biggest company no one's ever heard of." Hope there's finally some agreement on the format and information sharing takes off so we can focus on the important things! So much of my work today seems to involve data munging that I'm starting to wonder if this is all a career in data science really has to offer.

Seems like many of the comments here are/will be railing on patent trolls and disgusting corporate enterprises making money off of ideas they claim to have come up with. I actually don't know or really care too much about those issues, but as a student working with patent data in a research lab, I hope to goodness they address their bureaucracy. The patent data they put out is way behind the technology we have today and it's really hampering research in that area, and consolidating it is something we're still dealing with that doesn't even touch on the disambiguation problem yet!

I don't quite follow your reasoning here. It's got a really bad reputation with devs and people "in the know," but for the average user turning on the computer, it's perfectly fine, and that has to count for something.

Impossible to graduate from Berkeley with a CS degree without hearing this problem :)

There are a lot of replies on this comment, but I just wanted to add my experience and maybe some advice - I'm TA'ing for a CS class this semester, and we have an open forum for discussion kind of like Stack Overflow. Unfortunately it's content like what you posted in your revisions (expletives, open frustration) that make it unpleasant. The plain fact is that saying things like that does affect strangers, no matter how frustrated you might be - no one wants a public forum with that.

I have had questions like yours before, by the way (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24173094/c-polymorphic-in..., for example), and I kind of agree that it shouldn't have been closed like that. C++ is a confusing language and there was indeed a good amount to learn from the answer to your question. But you definitely could have handled it much better; get some feedback and maybe edit or make a new post with that feedback and you'd be good to go!

All this is going to trying to show you that your attitude is a little belligerent (it's showing on this HN thread again, even), and changing it goes a long way. I've come to the conclusion that the people on my class's forum and you don't really realize that there's something wrong with how you're communicating. But being polite isn't very hard, and I think you almost managed to do it in that SO thread. Take some time to work on your attitude, and you will get much further :)

Please don't take this in the wrong way. It's up to you to change if you'd like; I'm pointing out the benefits and you don't have to if you don't want to.

This is awesome! Wonder how it compares with mine (github.com/billyeh/termchat). Would love to share notes with the maker, since audio was something I did not even consider while I was making it. The image processing part is fun, though!

This is actually awesome. I'm in the exact same boat that the writer started in, able to create UX but admittedly clueless about UI design. Putting some principles I've had swirling around my head for a while trying to learn into concrete writing just solidifies it.

I wouldn't call that an insult, much less a passive-aggressive one. Maybe it's time to get a bit of fresh air; the world's not out to get you.

Awesome, always wanted a minimalistic striped shirt!

shirt.codes/?source=------------------------------------------ -------------------------------%0A---------------------------- ---------------------------------------------%0A-------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- %0A----------------------------------------------------------- --------------%0A--------------------------------------------- ----------------------------%0A------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ &style=Para%C3%ADso%20-%20Light :)

Wish there was a warning, because I accidentally clicked this link in class just now.

As an EECS student at UC Berkeley, whose intro CS class is in the same situation, I think it's mostly the latter. There are certainly more people seeking careers as devs nowadays, but that's nothing compared to all of the bio, math, physics, and psychology major friends I have taking CS classes. They want to see what it's all about.

Sorry WhitneyLand. In case you haven't noticed, the one thing Hacker News is most afraid of is becoming anything like Reddit.

"Twitch is site for gaming-related content only. "

Just wanted to point out a typo in the copy.

Thank you for actually understanding what I said clearly and meant.

Seems to be quite a bit of misunderstanding of my original comment :(

@madeofpalk Your comment seems critical of mine. But I'm not sure what it adds except that it may have strengthened my point that Apple has a way to organize their SKUs. Please read the original article and see what I'm trying to address.