skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, it's real alright, as far as I can see.

There are English and German webshops that list them, with prices and delivery dates. I doubt they would do that just for kicks, unless they're using this as some tricky pre-ordering scheme.

I'm not sure why the distribution is so incredibly spotty though, and that alone would be one really good reason not to buy one right now, even if you could get evidence someone has one in their hands.

If you have to RMA one there is no telling when you will get a replacement.

There is also the risk of getting some parallel imported 'B' choice hardware.

These were 3 months late and in much smaller volume than you would expect for a product that has been announced with so much hoopla.

It could easily be another 3 months before that normalizes by the looks of it.

First mention I can find of someone that really got their hands on one is January 10th.
It's not a new release, it's the beginning of development on a new version because they shipped the old one. This is no different than any other development process ship cycle, one of the first things you do after you ship is rev. the version number for new development. That doesn't mean there's any substantial feature difference, the unusual bit when it comes to chrome is the dramatically open development process of the dev team, which gives anyone in the world the ability to install what are basically automatically updated daily builds just by selecting one radio button over another.

By the time that version 5 actually ships it will certainly have new features.
Drones are fine for taking pictures from the sky and sending missiles into specific locations, but to get those locations you often need troops on the group to provide that intel- the enemy knows the drones are out there, so they don't stand in the open unless they can help it. Satellite imagery is the same deal.

Sure, we'll see an increased use of UAVs, both airborne and otherwise in the years to come, but I think you'll find we're a long way off replacing troops with drones.

On a similar note- despite the increased used of signals intelligence, we're a long way from doing away with human intelligence gathering.

Warfare is changing but kenetic warfare involving boots on the ground isn't going anywhere. In fact the modern war zone makes using UAVs harder. It's dudes in caves and villages wearing civilian clothes, walking amongst innocents. War on the scale of the World Wars was probably better suited to UAV versus UAV. These days it's different.
Telco employee tries to steal 1,000 iPhones
He said the client constrained him to stay close to original.
Pricing Drama
But... isn't that what the author says?

Not really. As pointed out above, the author doesn't appear to understand that the associative/non-associative distinction is literally undefined unless we're talking about a binary operator from a set to itself. Saying that < is a non-associative operator is wrong, something like saying that a vector is a non-odd number; as long as we're complaining about parenthesization, I'd suggest the author rephrase his statement and say that < is a non-(associative operator), which at least means something.

An expression like a < b < c should be a type error - no possible parenthesization could make it a valid statement.

It's easy enough to come up with a way to make < work like this, though, by changing the signature of < so that it takes and returns a helper class instead of a numerical value, with automatic type coercions to that helper class from numerical values on both ends and booleans on the right edge. This should be easy in a language like Scala, probably a 10 minute exercise if you know what you're doing.

If we make this helper class hold both the left edges of the chain and the right edges, and use the appropriate edge for each comparison, then the thing is associative.

((a > b) > c) > d is the same as a > (b > (c > d)), since in either case, each element will at some point be checked with > against both of its neighbors, and only those neighbors, and the overall expression will be coerced to true if and only if the strict ordering is preserved at each check. Process left to right, and it works out. Even if we get messier and allow >, >=, <, <=, and == into the mix, we can mix and match everything, and the whole thing will only be true if every neighboring check is true. The author's worry in the blog comments about '1 < 2 > 1' evaluating to true strike me as odd: that should evaluate to true under any reasonable definition of those operators.

So even if we do make < into an operator such that it makes sense to talk about its associativity, it turns out to be associative. Which is why mathematicians don't bother parenthesizing their chained < expressions, there's just no ambiguity.

The article is plain wrong, IMO.
Facebook | Charlynsiitah Sofhia Ashby
er, maybe check the larger Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
Wondering Why You Can’t Pre-Order an iPad? It Isn’t Legal Yet
Check out my app: http://wikipediagame.org :)

Here is how it was written: http://clemesha.org/static/talks/Django_and_XMPP_BoshWriting...
To be fair, I think there are a lot more use cases than that. My last project and my current one both used NoSQL solutions. The former because graph walking is painful in SQL and the latter because schemaless documents enable so many new scenarios (in my case, the automatic mapping of user-created forms to the backend). For me, the performance ramifications of NoSQL is way overplayed compared to its usability improvements. It is certainly not a successor or replacement to SQL, but for applications that handle a lot of unstructured or semi-structured data, NoSQL makes code tighter, simpler and easier to reason about. Which means less bugs and faster deployments.

EDIT: I should qualify this argument by stating that I'm talking about datastores that support custom queries (like MongoDB and CouchDB) rather than ginormous k/v stores (like Tokyo Cabinet). I've found limited usefulness for the latter.
How are complex queries impossible? You could easy write a declarative language for querying graphs.
The problem is that with the internet evidence of your minor crimes is available to a far wider audience than usual.

To expand on your underage drinking analogy, it's the difference between being seen by a member of campus police and being seen by all members of campus police, including the really uptight one and a range of other people (potential employers, etc.), continuing for years after the actual night of drinking.
In short term you are right. But in long term you end up with buggy law system in which you know you can be prosecuted for your daily activities. Such system is fertile ground for corruption ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063485 ) and straight way to totalitarian state when you always know you've done something that can put you in jail but just hope authorities won't find out. That significantly limit your incentive to oppose activities of the state.
It's a slightly different point, and it might be more important. Most of us break the law, right now, and not even including examples of ridiculous laws. A lack of privacy on the data we generate could incriminate us in ways that we didn't set up our justice system to handle.
But it's already in beta, and betas are generally supposed to be feature-complete.
I didn't say I idealistically agreed, but that's the theory anyway. I sort of like Lysander Spooner's argument in No Treason* that social contracts are false justifications because there's no opt-out program. The practicality of such an idea, however, is another question (to which none of us know the answer because it has never existed).

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Treason
How is the relational model inherently better for ACID than non-relational models (graph dbs for instance)?
a cost factor of 14 isn't that high?

that's just mean
A good example of dividend behaviour can be seen in the 16th December dividend from Sycamore Networks (see http://www.google.com/finance?q=scmr). This dividend was announced on the 18th November (roughly a month before the effective date). The share price doesn't change at that point, but on the effective date it falls by $9.70, almost exactly the dividend amount of $10. I chose this example as Sycamore gave out a quite ludicrous amount of cash (something like 35% of the company value) so the price drop is very obvious. Another unusual feature of the dividend is that the pay date is actually before the effective date. The dividend is paid on the 15th December, even though its the people who own the shares at the market open on the 16th who qualify for the dividend. This comes about due to a rule that NASDAQ have that if a distribution is greater than 25% of a company value, then the effective date is set to be the day after the pay date.

I think that while there is a lot that is unpredictable about the stock market, you can be fairly sure that on a dividend's effective date, the share price will fall by roughly the amount of the dividend. It won't be exact due to all the other factors which would affect a stock's price on any day, but it will be roughly correct.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Silly laws exist because they may not be obeyed. Citizens get around them, enforcers get around them and the message never bites the policy makers in the ass - the people that are responsible for this mess are often not even aware that they made a mistake.

So I am claiming that loss of privacy that I perceive inevitable in face of modern and upcoming technology is not necessary bad thing because it may create the demand for fixing some stupid rules that may cause some of us harm.
No more than during The Stephen Colbert Presidential Campaign brought to you by Doritos.

Part of the beauty of Colbert's television persona is that he can shamelessly shill for products, and then pass it off as "just part of the character."
It depends on what you think the point of FizzBuzz testing is.

We use the FizzBuzz (or equivalent) test to get candidates warmed up to the interview, thinking about programming and design and technical issues. A good 60% can't even get it working, so that lets us terminate the interview early. For the remainder, we ask various technical questions that arise naturally.

On of the questions we sometimes ask is this: Suppose you're trying to fit the code on a really small embedded processor. In truth, of course, you'd have to write it in assembler, but let's assume we already have a C interpreter. How small can you make the code?

This isn't a stretch. Some of the systems I used to work on were small (in implementation) for exactly this reason. We wrote a miniature interpreter, then wrote the working code in something nicer to program in. It was possible to save overall space that way.

The ROM in the BBC micro had a built-in BASIC interpreter (of course), but if you look closely, some of the OS on the ROM were written in BASIC. I've been told it was for reasons of space.
While he makes a valid point I am worried about a few things he says:

Say there is only a 0.1% chance that in the next year Google’s servers have a search history leak

Sounds like meaningless speculation; and what does "leak" entail. Even if 0.1% of the data is leaked there is a pretty low chance that his data will be included - or if it is, obvious.

between all their sharing of data back and forth with the US government

Im not sure what this refers to; all data given under a subpoena should be a matter of public record at some point (at least it is here) and I was not aware Google handed out any other data to the government - if he has evidence of that it would be good to see it.

A Google search you made tipped off your local American authorities that you are breaking 16 USC 3370. Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. Instead go to prison for 1 to 5 years after laying out up to $250k on a fine, unless you get an understanding judge.

Is this a scenario that exists? Answer is no. Of course I support the argument that this set up should never exist in the future - but I've not seen a suggestion Google would roll over to this lightly anyway.

Unfortunately this guy takes a good point to a somewhat surreal extreme - while that is often useful for pointing out flaws in things, his fruit example points out flaws in the law (which you could fall foul of in any number of ways beyond google searching) rather than making any specific point about privacy.

EDIT: any specific rebuttals? Did I get any facts wrong?
Possibly. One would hope though that there're checks on that one really uptight cop so that he can't single-handedly ruin your life. After all, the situation beforehand was arguably worse, where it was just random chance whether or not it was the asshole cop who happened to see you when you were drinking.

The employer issue is already like that, at least for software engineers. I don't care if a potential employer wants to turn me down for something they saw in a FaceBook photo, because there're plenty of other employers who don't give a damn.
For starters, Google mints its own money via Adwords, while Microsoft still depends on Yahoo Overture, which Yahoo itself (and everybody else in the industry) acknowledged being greatly inferior to Adwords, to the point that they wanted to use Adwords to make more money out of the Long Tail of search...
If Adobe ever did stop developing / supporting the Flash plugin, it would be a complete disaster from the point of view of people like myself who think once something has a URL it should ideally stay accessible until the heat death of the universe.
I thought the attack was against the application. The article talks about the security of the raw data in the database. I missed that on my first read. Sorry for that.
I reckon I'll be different, here.

I'd say PHP (particularly if the new coder has interest in web programming).

It's syntactically easy-ish, freely available, very well documented and supported, and sets the newbie up for easy freelance or professional work.

- John
The Flash resource would still be available. If you encode your resource in a proprietary format then that’s your choice :)
I think present research shows that 10 hours per week is the minimum required to achieve a body transformation in 3-4 months.
Some recommendations:
1. "Body For Life" if you want a simple way to lose weight and gain strength.
2. "Maximum Strength" if you'r already been lifting for a while and want to get stronger. This is system also has you challenging your own limits so that you feel certain sense of achievement instead of just "wow I look thinner" ...
3. "P90X" if you like intense workouts with results.

I've personally done all 3 in the above order to pretty good results. After achieving the results , you really need to maintain a minimum level to keep it.
This argument also means poetry is better in languages spoken by lots of people, in countries with rich history, and later poetry is better than earlier one all other things being equal...
why not; that's probably their most vocal consumer market for ebooks after all
The book "How to be Invisible"[1] makes a few good arguments for privacy too.

For example, if you are charged with a serious felony, but later released because you are actually innocent - lack of privacy almost ensures that your life is ruined anyway, even though you are innocent, because the media loves to blow everything out of proportion - but rarely seems to go back and correct their earlier stories when you've been found innocent, or if they do, most people have already read the sensationalized news condemning you and the damage is already done.

So, without even breaking any laws or doing anything wrong, without privacy you might find your life ruined anyway.

[1] How to be Invisible, by JJ Luna, http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Essential-Protecting/...
That seemed full of pretty bland "corporate" words until the last paragraph (of the quote) - which makes the point well.
Good article.

As a side-note to anyone wanting to evaluate Django applications, I have had some success by building a JMeter configuration generator into some apps that allows me to test hundreds of different pages very easily and to evaluate the impact of changes not only in performance but on the server itself under load testing.

I am currently wondering how to include something that could reflect page popularity.
if I didn't come back to upvote you again in two years, you are probably right.
I used to think the same way, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea now.

Problem is that it's much easier to ignore bad rules than it is to fix them. You're assuming that if everyone had to abide by the bad rules, they'd get fixed. I'm not sure that's the case - the examples I gave indicate that when you force employees to abide by bad rules, they just start acting badly.

When I was younger, I used to find it very frustrating that the rules said one thing but the way everyone acted was something else. We even have a word for that: "hypocrisy". But as I've gotten older and occasionally even been responsible for creating some of those rules, I've started realizing that the rules are an abstraction. They're there to set expectations. They aren't followed exactly because they can't be followed exactly, and if you try you end up with absurdities like confiscated toothpaste. I'm not so certain that fixing the laws will work, both because it's difficult and because it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.
Ah, but the other side of Mayan medallion has specific instructions to take back two years to honor the Hebrew God Yahweh. So, 2010. We're screwed.
Or photos with elbows likely include boobs.
The last paragraph about marathons reminded me of a PBS Nova documentary about a dozen people who just picked up running to compete in the Boston Marathon starting off from basically couch potato status.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/

I won't spoil it for you but it does not end like you expect.

I personally found that doing away with car and biking two hours a day has done me well. By combining exercise and commuting times I save a great deal of time.
TrackingMaterial for construction project management
iPad therefore iWant? Probably. Why? iDunno by Charlie Brooker
Eagle Total Services
Eagle Total Service L.L.C is a family-owned company based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Welcome to HN or are you posting with a fresh handle so the co-founder doesn't find out?

You'd think they feel guilty, or are they shameless?
I've used Cython for some pretty dramatic results - reducing a run from 1.5 hours to about 20 minutes - but replacing the algorithm with a much more efficient one reduced the time down to about 40 seconds, at which point running it through Cython didn't make any difference anymore (and in some cases made it slower). If you are computationally bound and not I/O or data structure bound (my biggest speedup came from exchanging lists for dictionaries to eliminate linear searching - which was a trade-off in accuracy of my algorithms vs speed, but in that specific case it didn't matter) then Cython can give pretty good results. Its also useful for wrapping C libraries.

As is always the case with optimizations, a good algorithm usually goes a lot further than highly optimized, low level code.
Hire escorts to conquer loneliness
Are you feeling lonely due to the loss of a loved one? Are you deprived of companionship? Why not consider dating? It could be the opportune time for you to discover exciting possibilities.
'Quantum spread' threat to Hawking's bet
A nice post, but it could use some more explanation about designing password hashes.

For example salt + iterative hash works extremely well too, that's what is done in the OpenPGP format (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4880.txt - 3.7.1.3 Iterated and Salted S2K).
Deleting omgs out of Rails
Not if you fact-check. Did anyone actually _watch_ the presentation? To quote: "and it turns out that, by revenue, Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world."
You don't get Colbert, do you?
I found the opposite effect - extreme loneliness and depression. My IRC friends were really only the close community I had. I found phone or face-to-face communication difficult, and unnatural; perhaps the internet is for introverts?
Victims Lost $9.3 Billion To Nigerian Scammers In 2009
Build Firefox Extensions with GWT
Epigenetics: Hacking gene expressions through environmental exposure
Wonder why no one has downvoted this chain?. (I can't)
I'm not really familiar with this technology but I thought the default Ubuntu client Transmission could do this via it's cli interface.

I'd imagine if it's in Ubuntu it'll be available easily in Debian.
How to Not Suck at a Group Presentation
> I'm not sure that's the case - the examples I gave indicate that when you force employees to abide by bad rules, they just start acting badly.

If there is a strong asymmetry between law makers and people who must respect the law (such as in case of employers and employees) people will obey because they have no choice. But even then they will vote with their legs leaving environment that is governed by stupid laws. In case of state and citizens in democracy there is no such strong asymmetry because government must maintain appearance that it works for the people.

> it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.

Same thing with computer programs or any complex system but it should not stop us from striving for improvement and inventing tools that may make such improvement possible.

I think that surveillance is one such tool that allows to monitor how much harm enforcing given law can cause and may lead to fixing the law.
Essentials for Telecom Business Continuity
Telecommunication interruption or failure will be disastrous and cause irredeemable loss to the business. Here are few points to meet such failures.
Immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks
Alberta Immigrant Nominee Program for H1B
I read Coders at Work and enjoyed it. As someone who picked up programming in a post-web age it was very interesting to read about our heritage. I bought the book expecting nuggets of architectural and project wisdom but found less than I had anticipated in that respect.
I started with Ruby, and Python, so I like open and clear reading/writing, but even Ruby/Python tends to lay it on thick. It's like the developers think they have to add all this syntax just to be popular.

define fib_seq with (x,y)
..
end

I guess what I really want is a programming language that's really fucking easy to teach people.

C/C++ and Java are absolutely not it.
Inform YC: SQLite has 690 times more test code than source code
SQLite has 690 times more test code than source 65.7 KSLOC vs. 45409.7 KSLOC

I am speechless!

I wish I would have my programs tested that way. No chance though ;-(
The <pre> tag doesn't stop the browser from rendering the HTML.
I've used Wordpress on two projects and it took me only 3 days to get fed up with it.

It's like having an entire Home Depot when you just need a tool box.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Haiti, From the Frontline.
Blog of a UN official in Haiti.
My Name is Khan: Movie Reviews, Wallpapers
Sure, but the performance would be horrible. That's his point. You can't do some of the things rdbms's do.
Am I the only one that find it a tiny bit ironic that he uses Google Analytics on that page?

Probably.
all data given under a subpoena should be a matter of public record at some point (at least it is here) and I was not aware Google handed out any other data to the government - if he has evidence of that it would be good to see it.

Are you kidding? It would, of course, be covered by a National Security Letter (or whatever they're calling them these days), and illegal to even talk about. I have zero doubt whatsoever that the FBI, CIA, NSA and anyone else who wants it has full access to everything Google stores.
Anyone know if Obj-C garbage collection is turned on in the iPad SDK so that MacRuby can be used to write apps for it?