skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the best points for chalk over powerpoint is that it's easy to diverge from the script if you need to. A good teacher adapts to the needs of the student(s). Secondarily to this, chalk allows for a script that is more interactive to begin with (eg, "who can give me an example of an abelian group?" followed by verifying the axioms).

But, while powerpoint may be a fundamentally weaker medium, I think part of the problem is that a lot of people are simply bad at it. Having an optimal presentation requires a lot of attention to things like pacing, and separating content between the powerpoint itself and the delivery. I get the feeling that a lot of people don't look further than content. Hint: if you print your slides and distribute them as notes, they are not optimal for at least one of those purposes[1].

[1] However, optimal slides printed out with room to take notes during a lecture can often be made into optimal notes by a good student.
Whatever else they may be doing, Microsoft is sure digging in its heels when it comes to innovating on the web. Internet Explorer is the primary reason that web devs can't make wide use of standards like CSS3, <canvas>, and WebSockets. Even their recent backing of SVG is nearly worthless, given that most features of SVG are already usable via Raphael and VML.
Computers that aren't computers
It's not nearly that strict. You can't use the title "Professional Engineer" without licensing, but non-licensed engineers can and usually do use the term "engineer", or derivatives like "chemical engineer" on their business cards and resumes. It's the norm in firms with a lot of engineers (like, say, Exxon) that most of the people whose job title includes the word "engineer" are not PEs. It doesn't even really give you any benefit to be a PE in the corporate context, because everything you're doing is on behalf of the corporation anyway; you're not an independent contractor providing services that you have to legally stand behind, but an employee doing work for hire.

edit: This is true for the U.S. anyway. I believe some other countries are more strict on who may call themselves an engineer.
Nick's Mathematical Puzzles
Google Buys Super Bowl Ad?
Having handled both the Android Maps app (sans pinch) and the iPhone Maps app... yes, yes it is. Hitting the "plus" and "minus" buttons work, but so does clicking on the arrows at the end of your scroll bars. To me it qualifies as barely functional, not the right solution at all.
A lot of people are jumping on board to use Clujure, yet it doesn't use the native typesystem and does require a runtime? (I know little about clojure, I'm just guessing here, please correct me if I'm wrong.) So why would people not jump on board with using a Ruby that sat on top of the JVM with non native typesystem and requires the run time?
When I worked there we were called sandwich artists (2003).
May be these developers are able to re-package their pre-existing code in couple of hours?
Then these $200 are turned into $100/hour which looks like a reasonable business model.
I'm biased, but I think you're right.

If you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com) is looking for a product person.

We're particularly partial to entrepreneurial folks that have a technical bent.
You had me until: "Nixon, the criminal, sure looks saintly now." I adjusted for hyperbole, but still.

Maybe it's only because my generation's closest ties to Nixon are via Hunter S. Thompson's popular invectives, but I don't know of anybody who thinks that Dicky M. deserves any more veneration than a kidney stone. But then, I suppose I never have had a very keen eye, when it comes to finding the inner beauty of politicians...
I am a bit confused. What does calling out a negative mean and where was he doing it? Or are you referring to the OP?
That's probably because you're making the erroneous assumption that just because money is your lowest priority, it's also the lowest priority for others.
"if a company will benefit from layoffs, those people should have already been fired."

Or even better, never hired in the first place.

Frequent layoffs are evidence of incompetent management, as they keep hiring people they don't actually need and then must let them go again. Better to just go slow on hiring, adding people only when absolutely necessary. Then layoffs are unnecessary.
FTA: "Honor. Being honor-driven is about seeking recognition from society and your peers."

No, honor is the quality of doing the right thing when nobody is looking.

Or maybe he only pays the snack box at the office when the boss is behind him?
Heh, except Spotify is good enough that most people should be paying for it.. g Barely touch iTunes anymore and don't buy any music as it's nearly all on Spotify :-)
"If you in a declining industry, for example, layoffs are inevitable."

In other words, layoffs are often an indicator of a failing company, so it's no wonder that layoffs do not lead to an increasing stock price.
Very cool. Just used it to play noughts and crosses with a complete stanger!
You're getting honor confused with character, if we believe J.C. Watts - "Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking"

The two are similar; someone with strong character is by definition honorable.
What is the app?
He pointed out there was a 12-hour time difference, which would be inconvenient.
Out of curiosity, have you found that having a PE licence has been useful at all in your work?

I studied Software Engineering at an engineering school accredited by whatever organization regulates the practice of engineering in Ontario. I remember at a few points in the program, they made a point of saying that once we graduated, we could apply for a licence (after we spent time apprenticing), but it was never clear to me why having a PE licence would be useful. I don't know anyone from my graduating class that's bothered to apply for a licence either.
While we're playing with the human body's regulatory mechanisms, we can just make ovulation happen only once per year.
Six Thinking Hats
Research before writing. EA's world of warhammer f/b app got rid of MongoDB, which failed, to use open source Riak. Mochi uses Riak. Collecta uses Riak. These are Akamai guys who make things work at one node or at 400 nodes.

Pls don't be stupid.
'Despite the buck-per-watt announcement, First Solar's share price plummeted more than 20 percent on Wednesday, thanks to warnings from CEO Mike Ahearn about the effect of the credit crisis on potential solar customers—as much as 10 to 15 percent of current orders might default. He recently told analysts in a conference call that "as good as things look for the mid-term and beyond, the short-term outlook for the solar industry in our view has never looked more difficult."'

Sounds like a good time to buy and hold.
For a PE in KS, you complete an engineering curriculum. Take the FE test. Then you study under any PE for four years. (Not four different ones for one year, but I suppose that would work.) Finally, you have to pass another test. It's not really too much to ask for the guy signing the blueprint that says the power lines or building being put up won't kill anybody.
The Oxbridge system relies heavily on lectures to set the scene for the group supervisions though. You only get one or two hours of small group tuition per week per topic, so you need to make the most of it. The system generally goes: go to lectures to be introduced to the core concepts in play, have a sheet of 10-20 example questions to work on per week, bring as much of the questions as you can do to your supervision and go through the correct forms. In between we generally worked in peer groups to make sure we had enough to bring to the supervisions in the first place.
I'm still amazed at the stuff everyone's getting so caught up on. So what if it's not just like every other mobile computing device? Maybe it's time to think about the problem differently. There's a ton of things that can be done without a high refresh rate. Some video games, and videos, are just about the only things that require the high refresh rate, and the Kindle is NOT a game platform.
There is a point, though, to the professor’s criticism, and it’s a subtle one.

The teleported soccer fan probably wouldn’t be able to pass the ball to any player at all. No problem, he says, I will just imagine myself in the same physical condition as the scolded player. But would that be enough?

If you want to be good at playing soccer you need to know about tactics and strategy, you need the experience of hundreds of games. Can the soccer fan just imagine himself having all that and still be sure whether he would have passed to a different player? Probably not. Why would all those changes to his brain keep the part intact with which he just decided which would have been the best pass?

I might be committing a fundamental attribution error by concentrating too much on the brain side of things, though. Situation can be the other and maybe even more straightforward reason why the teleported soccer fan would probably fare not much better than the player. The fan has a bird eye’s view, multiple camera angles and instant replay, the player doesn’t. The fan is sitting in the pub, the player is running around. And so on.

You might want to be careful when using this phrase, then. Maybe yell something like: “The optimal pass which maximally increases the chance of scoring a goal would have been to pass to that other player, you idiot!”
> 3. I agree with JSON over XML, but what about binary data? That is the weakest part of JSON, in my opinion.

Maybe BSON?: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/BSON
We had the OHP handwritten essay style of lectures as well, primarily in maths, but I seem to recall one computer science topic that stooped that low. We definitely had one pre-prepared essay type, but most of these were lecturers would just freely write on OHP reels instead of the blackboard. I found that a lot worse, due to people trying to write legibly/exaggeratedly on blackboards but writing 'normally' (and totally illegibly) on OHPs. But my sympathies for the overhead essays, I've been there.
While the N900 is a nice phone it still requires too much screwing around for someone that wants an easy device to use. The Nexus One is that sweet spot of usability between the iPhone and the N900 and still runs the Linux kernel.
Broadband by DiGi
I didn't realize there was no sound. That's a disappointment.
Player team update here, 6pm Saturday Pacific:
http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/2010/02/flash_bug_repor...
Not sure any of these players are great "buy and holds" as the race is far far from over. First Solar is just one of a handful that look like they're breaking the $1/watt milestone. Another promising one is http://nanosolar.com/

Then you have to look at how cheap natural gas will be over the long term - particularly given the new and massive abundance of shale gas. Gas in particular has the potential to push out adoption of solar. If there's one thing for certain, it's that coal fired power is going to be largely replaced - but the question is by what. Nevertheless, that firms are breaking the $1/watt barrier, is very good news for end users of power.
Well, it's not like they didn't let me in (Chrome). It was just a warning.

The first time was a 'please notify me when the beta is even out'

dude, space is always limited in betas, and not because they don't have enough interwebs.

No offense man, but it sounds like you're getting upset because it's not working flawlessly and just the way you expected right off the bat. It's an early beta from a company that hasn't (to my knowledge) ever even done a release like this before.
This was true for a long time, but I think a case can be made that today Apple sells better than Microsoft.

Of course, Apple sells to consumers, Microsoft to businesses. Again, for a long time it looked like selling to business was the better market to be in, but now it is not as clear.
It is to me. I've gotten so used to all the iphone gestures that when I have to go back to pushing buttons I get really frustrated. I can't even use a Kindle now.
The term engineer has undergone serious deflation over the years

So, do railway engineers (as they are known in the USA and Canada) take the oath and wear the little ring? Or did that "serious deflation" you refer to start sometime around the birth of the railroad? ;)

I think the culprit here is not deflation of the language -- the language has always been ambiguous -- but rather inflation of the scope of engineering education. It's not just for P.E.s anymore. If you believe the term engineer should be restricted to P.E.s you should start by explaining that to every academic engineering department I've ever seen, all of which are happy to hand out "engineering degrees" to graduating "engineering students" who tend to be called "engineers" for short, whether or not they go on to get a P.E. (which, as you point out, is a lot more effort and a rather impressive accomplishment).

I literally had a Ph.D. in EE before I even heard the term "Professional Engineer". [1] Not because my school was training people to practice without a license, but because they're training people in skills -- like my old field, semiconductor laser engineering -- that don't require P.E. certification. Of every EE Ph.D. I know, I know of exactly one who actually got a P.E. certification.

And, only slightly off the subject, need I point out that quite a few Ph.Ds have "Doctor" as part of their name? It's quite common in many countries, including the USA. I don't do this, because I don't work in academia, and outside the academy one tends to get confused with an M.D., but according to this fun article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)

you are required to use your academic title in certain legal situations in Austria, and German Ph.D.s tend to use the title all of the time.

---

[1] Because my undergraduate degree was in physics. I presume that if I'd studied undergrad EE someone would have mentioned along the way that my B.S. wouldn't actually qualify me to design a commercially-available table lamp without adult supervision.
Sorry to correct you on that, but the iron ring doesn't make you an engineer in Canada. At least not in Quebec, where I'm from. They make that quite clear during the ceremony.

The iron ring has moral implications, while the title of engineer has legal ones.
CraigsList architecture by Jeremy Zawodny
I'm starting up my own tiny business and have been spending a great deal of time understanding how to optimize every part of the product infrastructure to minimize cost (to a reasonable level).

$68K per month blows my mind if the number represents monthly expenses instead of yearly given the number of active users. I've an iPhone game with over 3MM active unique users and by my math I can host a multiplayer solution for less than $800/month. Granted, my service will not be sending giant PDFs, notes, voice memos, etc. but still... What am I missing? I am not being snarky. I need to learn.

Also, is the 4 ops guys per 60 servers a non-shocking number? When I worked at Yahoo, the ratio of ops staff count to production server count was IMHO ridiculously high and I never understood why it was required. Sure, some redundancy and so on. Clearly I'm missing something though - what?

I'm eager to correct my misunderstandings if I'm the one off base here. Can you recommend where I might find similar (perhaps more detailed) descriptions of production environments by other companies?
Adobe's response to Flash Crash
Promoting your iPhone app in print
Yes, or he's lying...
I like those listings tbh. They save me some thinking - "Community" and "Get involved" ideas have some overlap and many projects divide the contents differently (for example, where does the source control go? - developer oriented projects often put it in community). While "About" and "Documentation" don't overlap that much, there should be some links from the first to the second for detailed information - which makes you wonder where is the "Getting started" section - it could be in either of them. I think describing sections like that serves a purpose.
CO2 actually is considered a pollutant by the EPA

A political decision, not a scientific one. Made recently by the current administration, and likely to be dropped by the next administration.

I agree on the "natural" bit though. Hell, cyanide is all-natural. For that matter, peanuts are all natural but still deadly to some people.
You should help complete it then... it's Wikipedia :-)
Can anyone find any contact information for the people who made this?
Free Voip Calls, Free International Calls, Cheap Mobile Calls To India & SMS
An example just popped into my head- something like google maps (perhaps even google maps itself) could work extremely well (with the large screen) if you make route finding, zoom, etc, seamless enough you don't need to drag the map around.

(and by seamless what I really meant was 'right on the first try')
I cannot help it.

The number of things that go wrong with their text cum HTML editor does double every year (EN for OS X)!

It's really quite poorly implemented. Plain text suddenly transmogrifies into bold text with a different font, deleting a CRLF causes the current paragraph to randomly have double-spaced lines, etc.
And?

(I think we should deal with euthanasia and suicide anyway as a matter of fairness, and population growth if it becomes a serious issue).
Effect Games has something like this: http://www.effectgames.com/effect/

It was posted to HN a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986196
I have two engineering degrees (Mechanical and Electrical), but make my living from my startup and web-development consultancy. Needless to say I encounter the misuse of the term engineer quite often and cringe everytime. In fact, one of my good friends started to refer to himself as an Information Engineer, not having any formal degree, and when I asked him about it, he said he hadn't even really given it a thought and changed his title right then and there.

I know people don't do it maliciously, and many even do it tongue-in-cheek (e.g. "Sanitation Engineer", "Happiness Engineer", and many others I've encountered). So, like cryptnoob, I don't lose any sleep over it and really don't take it too personally. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me. I kind of wish the term "Engineer" were regulated in the US (not just P.E.), but that's life. And I'm sure someone with a Masters in Engineering would be bothered that I can describe myself as an Engineer, having only a couple of B.S.'s.
Konqueror stays open too!
I hope it's not too much of a plug, but:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

And in this particular case:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hz/correspondence_bias/
For one thing, in the US, you're not allowed to have an "Engineering" company without having a P.E. on board. Beyond that, I've come across a few positions here and there that require a P.E. It typically has more to do with legally needing a P.E. to supervise a project than simply wanting someone with that experience.
What do you think you know that other market participants don't?

You can't beat the stock market by buying companies that look like they'll do well. http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/
A day without X (server)
As an avowed chalkboard lecturer, I can totally understand where the OP is coming from, and I can add a few more reasons why chalkboards are better:

1. Non-linearity---it's easy to reconfigure the lecture on the fly if I'm chalking it out on the board.

2. Interactivity---I can ask for and actually use examples from the students when working through something, and I can even ask the students to come up and write something on the board when appropriate.

3. Real estate---In a good classroom, I might have seven or eight times the area of chalkboard as I do projector screen, and I don't need to erase anything until it's all full. That makes it much easier to refer back to earlier points. It also gives everything I wrote a "place", and I can refer back to what I had "over there on that board" sometimes two or three classes later, and if I don't need the precise content (just a general reminder), that's often enough to refresh it in students' minds.

4. Editing---Have you ever been in a PP-based lecture where there were some errors in a formula or graph or equation? (It might be better to ask if you've ever been in one without errors...) These are hard to edit out, and if the slides for students to look at later, how often does the prof correct them first? I had a theory class in grad school that was terrible for this.

One "big" advantage for PP isn't even unique to it: sure, I could post a PDF of my slides for students to read later. You know what I do instead? Snap a photo of the chalkboards after each class and post that.

The only reason to use projected slides IMO is when there is a long formula that students don't have to write down (e.g. it's in the book) that I need to point to, or a particular graph or diagram that needs to be precise. For these things, I stick a PDF of the formula or diagram on the course website, and pull that up during class to talk about it... briefly, before going back to the chalkboard.
Not really. It's kind of expected when off-shoring.
Climate models predict future climate in response to assorted forcings.
I believe the opposite error is also often made. I suspect many a time governments or large corporations act in ways which people interpret in situational terms, as a reflection of some underlying plans and strategic goals, while in reality it's just a decision made by some person at power based on their individual beliefs and personality traits.
We've tried this at work one time during one of our iteration retrospectives. It took a while for the meeting organizer to explain how it worked, and took a while for people to adjust to it. The consensus at the next meeting was to just go back to "What worked", "What didn't", and "Action items". It was simple, easy to understand, and captured the points we wanted to.
Very cool project. Too bad when I checked it out some dimwit is erasing everything with a big black brush.
They'll still need that spyware-ridden computer to use the iPad.
I completely agree with you. While I still haven't gotten around to getting my P.E. (and if I did, it would probably be more for fun than practicality), I share your sentiment. It is a shame. Probably won't change. But I don't lose sleep over it.
Did your VB app run on 99% of all desktop machines, without installation, and under your complete control?

Yeah, web guys are wasting their time on portability, trivial distribution, standards compliance, and keeping full control over their applications.
Do you know how/why MongoDB "failed" for the facebook application? It's not really clear what that actually means given your comment. Care to share a link to the story or an explanation if there is any?

Also, I'm glad you informed us about Riak deployments, but the last statement is inappropriate: please don't be rude. And spelling please as "pls" makes you seem immature too.
Aviary doesn't seem to work well on my phone, and I have flash (N900). This canvas implimentation works very well.
how many people actually use Flash to edit photos? ~0.

how many people use Flash to play casual web games? Hundreds of millions.

I think your conclusion is misdrawn.
I never made the claim to know or not know where or how this thing was being deployed. (I also never claimed to care.) The point of my post was that the author is doing himself (and the project he's talking about) a disservice by not putting the type of information you've provided into his post.

When I click on a blog post, I am giving that person my most valuable assets: my time and attention. It's up to the author to use them wisely. This author did not, and so I figured I'd post some constructive criticism of their choice of focus for their post. Your response misses the point of my feedback entirely, but thanks for the info anyway.
One wonders how he lives up to this himself.
Did they just add that? I mean, it does appear to have a whitish barrier that slides up to cover the floor.