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I was discussing this with a colleague recently and I figured I'd mention it on HN the next time DuckDuckGo came up.

I feel somewhat silly saying this, but DuckDuckGo is not that great of a name. I love the engine, and have gotten some great results from the few times I have used it, but I really, really wish it were not named DuckDuckGo. It seems tacky to me and it's hard to say. There's a support article that encourages users to "duck it". No thanks. I swear I would become a regular user of this product if it were named something more professional.

I know tech products often have whimsical names, and it's usually positive or at least tolerable, but something about "DuckDuckGo" rubs me the wrong way.

This is great news. Last August there was an article on Phoronix about KDE hoping to migrate to Wayland for SC 4.9:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wayla...

Hopefully in 2-3 months, when SC 4.9 is slated for release, we'll have KDE on Wayland. X is aging and is not very lightweight. Wayland brings some nice innovations, like eliminating the need to switch between VTs to differentiate X sessions.

The FAQ is also worth reading:

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

<Pick your favorite mainstream easy-to-interpret language here> , then. I don't think expecting developers to know enough JS or Python to write FizzBuzz is unreasonable.

The problem I have with this is that Burning Man and the festivals are general-audience events. I'm okay with not getting tickets for Coachella because there are only so many of them and everyone wants to go. Such is life. I'm not okay with attending a low-quality I/O because bad people were able to purchase tickets.

My proposed fix was make people code something simple in JS and then run an automated it before allowing registration. That way, dumb people try to register, and by the time they can Google a solution to FizzBuzz and copy-paste it, all the developers have already registered.

Yes, I managed to claim an academic ticket and then the payment page was timing out and I wasn't sure why. Turns out it was Ghostery, but once I disabled it, it worked. I wonder what happens for all the people who have claimed a ticket but not paid. Will Google release their tickets and sell them? Call them and tell them they owe 300/900 dollars?

It's pretty clear that Google needs to restructure this event if they want it to continue to have meaning as a developer conference. This sort of waste of people's time, only to have tickets sell out in 30 seconds or whatever ridiculous number is just not valuable.

What would Google have to do to maintain the substance of the conference? Simply promise that there won't be any free toys given away? I missed out on I/O 2011 after having attended in 2009 and 2010 because bad people went simply for the hundreds of dollars worth of free and early-release hardware Google hands out.

I would have paid 300 dollars for the conference regardless of whether Google gave me the latest gadget.

It's possible that you're confusing programmers with computer scientists. Not all programmers are computer scientists, and vice-versa.

I understand that the title of the post is about books programmers recommend, but computer science extends far, far beyond programming and learning how to engineer solutions to real-world problems using algorithms.

The important parts to people doing research in algorithms are well-covered in CLRS, and that's part of why it's such an excellent book. It's full of rigorous proofs and a lot of theory, but that's because the point of the text is the design and analysis of algorithms themselves, rather than the application of them.

A university has an obligation to its undergraduate students majoring in computer science to teach them about computer science, and learning to think about designing algorithms, rather than merely learning about using them, is something that I would fully expect as an undergraduate majoring in computer science at any major university.

I suspect this is part of why more and more universities are offering degrees in Software Engineering, where the theoretical aspects of the field are not as important.

I really like most things about Go, and was even going to use it for a bytecode interpreter project I was working on. A problem that I ran into, however, was that in interpreting a dynamic language with a stack machine, we needed a way to be able to store arbitrary data in stack values, which in C/C++ would be done using a struct with a type flag and then a union of various types.

Go doesn't have unions, though, and so this means that we would have ended up using a struct and using about 3x the memory on average, per stack value. You can see this limitation exposed as well in goyacc, the port of Yacc to Go (as the name suggests). Where Bison uses a union for yylval, Go is forced to use a struct.

I think this has been discussed on the golang-nuts mailing list a couple times and dismissed, for reasons of which I'm not fully aware.

I attended I/O twice in high school and received the academic pricing without incident. I do know that not having been 18 either time, I had to get my parents to sign some sort of a waiver form, but it wasn't a big deal.

One of the issues with Google Music, and this is something that I have seen increasingly over the past year or so, is that it seems that I can often roll my own, better solution to problems that these services claim to solve. In this specific case, running MPD into an Icecast stream means that I have remote access to my music library from anywhere, and using flacsync to make lossy copies of my FLAC files means that it's easy for me to manually manage the library on my MP3 player. All this without the pain of having to deal with the issues that this article talks about.

Obviously this setup is rather technical, and requires a nontrivial bit of setup work, but the fact that it is often easy to have ideas for substantial life improvements and then implement them well, with free software, has left me a bit disenchanted with the offerings from large, generally innovative companies like Google and Apple (a similar hack for streaming music to an AirPort Express from MPD can be had with the raop-play module for PulseAudio, for example).

Could you please explain the sentiment about the desktop paradigm becoming outmoded? People seem to say this so frequently and I can't understand it at all. What about people who write code, for example? Do you expect them to be able to achieve the same standard of productivity as they currently can on <insert favorite platform here>?

Yes. I then emailed them regarding my transfer and they responded with platitudes. No real surprise there.

Because they would mirror the site and then add bad stuff, so it looks legit, and then change the DNS record to point to the mirror.

I really like this. As a primary user of Linux, however, mpd has been my default audio player of choice for some time now. Ario has been my client, and could stand to be improved. Any chance you might open-source this in the future so that the GUI might be shanghaied into an mpd client?

Do they have to create a "product"? Reddit is open source, and you can download it if you like, from http://code.reddit.com/ . You could literally build what you are describing on the Reddit platform right now.

Yes, and for good reason. I have seen suggestions elsewhere on the internet that SICP be taught in Python and other languages, and have even seen "ports" of parts of the book to these other languages. But SICP is by now part of a family of textbooks from MIT courses (CLRS and Walter Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis come to mind) that have been utilized and perfected and picked apart and cited for so long that they now are accepted as the "right way". In essence, this is why UC Berkeley's decision is such a sad one. SICP is a classic, and I would go so far as to state that it is beyond critique, in the sense that it does what it sets out to do to the point of perfection.

Yes, but MathOverflow is a website for research mathematicians. Studying mathematics after college is what most of the people on that website get paid to do.

Yes and no. This list makes me sad because it neglects every single computer scientist that's interested in doing work on theory. I am one such computer scientist, and much of the work that I do involves merely pen and paper. There are a lot of people on HN that are web monkeys and make good money doing Web 2.0 stuff, and there are a lot of people that know pretty much nothing about computer science but use computers and program. These people equate CS with programming and the other sorts of tasks described in this article and then forget that there are computer scientists that could conceivably have no idea how to program in a modern language and still make contributions to the field.

But maybe HN is the wrong place to go looking for discourse on this sort of material. The point, though, is that this article is misleading. Perhaps it would have better been titled "10000 things every software engineer-hopeful should do" or "10000 anyone who writes code for the web should do".

Let me start by stating that I think I understand the point of this article. As a student, for example, I often opt to study in the library in lieu of getting work done in my own domicile because I know that the relative discomfort combined with the silence and isolation will help me do the needful.

I understand selling the TV and all that, but I don't understand why OP would sell a bicycle or see not cooking as an expression of a minimalistic lifestyle. I mean, I suppose that if you rode your bicycle so infrequently that it was actually just sitting around and taking up space, it would be good to sell it, but a bicycle seems like one of those things that isn't really a distraction and sometimes comes in quite handy.

Similarly, I don't understand why I've met and heard about so many people that take this strange sort of pride in not cooking for themselves. Cooking is one of these things like taking regular exercise that it seems important to make time for, because by not knowing how or making time to cook, you are exposing yourself to a waste of money and generally worse nutrition than you would be able to achieve in your own kitchen.

Do you typeset any serious mathematical work in Word 2010?

When people talk about TeX's mathematical typesetting abilities, they are often (from personal experience, as a math major currently in school) referring to having to typeset documents with many pages and upwards of 25% being math. It's much easier for me to type \int_0^\pi \sin (x) dx than it is for me to go click-click-click-click in Word. But besides that, when you're writing proofs, for example, and you have to keep referring to the same symbol, say sigma, over and over again, in LaTeX, you would simply write $\sigma$, but in Word, you would have to do Insert->Symbol or some nonsense. Several more seconds wasted, and that adds up when you have 100 occurrences of the character sigma in your document.

TeX has a learning curve, but it's not even actually that steep. Within 4 days of starting to use it I was already starting to grok it.

You cannot compare use of the metric system to use of Dvorak or tau=2pi. While Dvorak and tau may be objectively better, the real world gains to be had by switching to either are slim in reality. I already type upwards of 90 words a minute on Qwerty and I doubt that switching to Dvorak would yield much of a gain to my typing. The problem behind pi is that it is never explained correctly, and this can be worked around by fixing pedagogy without having to introduce yet another physical constant. If the United States switched to the metric system, however, doing business with foreign economies would immediately become easier and we would no longer have to memorize long tables of arbitrary conversion factors. It makes much more sense objectively AND pragmatically to use units that are derived from physical quantities, rather than legends about kings' feet and so forth. With the other two examples, the pragmatic improvement isn't there -- the improvements in quality of life/quality of thought that we would experience simply aren't worth the trouble of switching.

Hold on. Gruber says that videos from the iTunes Store require less CPU to decode. It strikes me that that must be patently untrue. If anything, the DRM should require the decoder to work harder.

Can someone explain by what metric this might be true, and why?

Google Chrome now asks for your permission to let plugins run.

Linear probing will always let you fill a hash table to a load factor (\alpha) of 1. Double hashing may prohibit this, even if it is more efficient for smaller values of \alpha.

Really? In Spaces, I can grab a window with my trackpad and then hit my hotkey to go to the next space. In Gnome on Ubuntu, I have to right-click and hit "move to workspace", and in apps with nonstandard widgets (read: Chrome), even that doesn't work and I have to go down to the taskbar to do that.

It's true that HTDP is a little slow, but Felleisen is a master of CS pedagogy, and it shows in the book. The "design recipe" system that the book presents is actually extremely helpful in designing software once internalized. HTDP and SICP are in my opinion rather complimentary--I worked through HTDP in a couple weeks and am still working through SICP when possible. I consider the background that HTDP has given me valuable, not only as a Scheme programmer, but as a programmer in general.

Monkey Island, perhaps? Or am I wrong?

I've been on winter break from school for the past two weeks, and I've been spending a lot of my time beginning to fix bugs in Chromium, and I've also been honing my graphic/web design skills, studying type, element placement, CSS, JQuery etc.

I also have the TI Launchpad that I still haven't done anything with.

Honestly, it seems like people on HN so often assess things based on their raw usefulness. It makes sense, given that HN is read by many people who think like engineers, but in another recent thread on /r/math, people are talking about how the reason mathematicians study mathematics is not because it is useful, but because it possesses an inherent beauty/logic/whatever that makes the people who study it want to keep studying it. I'm doubling in math and CS and I have to say that the reason I am studying math is not because of any potential applicability to work I might do in software later in life, but because it has an allure for me that is unmatched by almost anything else.

Interesting! I'm curious as to what the "VLC" referred to in the plan is.

It depends in a lot of ways on where you live. In California for example, it's very easy to get a card for about $100 and then you can just go to dispensaries.