skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since most, if not all of the CL "opportunities" involve NDAs I was wondering what are some positive/negative things developers have experienced. I was hoping to gain some insight on how to approach such dealings and what to avoid.
This is good for Wikipedia, and nice of Google, but I'm also reminded of Nicholas Carr's observation:

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

(From <http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.ph...)
This is true, otherwise why would the first thing taught be Java? (what happens at my uni). The ordering that follows seems to much more promote churning out a Java/C++ programmer who knows how to use and create detailed UML documentation.

You don't do any assembly or VHDL type close to the metal stuff unless your doing a 4 year degree that incorporates EE classes. There is a class called computer systems architecture that's in 3rd year I think. I've seen people in this class just not get it, so in a sense they have been learning to program for years in an abstract way and don't have a clue what the computer does with their program.

Thankfully there isn't to much .NET which I feel would be even more of a specialization than java, especially if it were VB.NET
We can't downvote articles.
The exact versions of the browsers are available when you mouse over the column headers.
Arithmetic, Population, and Energy [video]
Sadly, just like IE8, IEx doesn't matter until IE6 is gone. Unless they allow IE9 to emulate IE6 on command so corp IT departments can install it without fear of breaking old apps. Like Windows XP mode in Windows 7 but for IE>
Sure, they got us all to talk about the lovely site they've built, but I'm not entirely convinced of the premise. Indeed, there are criminals that would take the time to stake out someone's house just by checking up on their Foursquare check-ins, but for the vast majority of folks, I'm not buying it.

We had our car stolen out of the driveway one day after my mom was warming it up in the morning (I'm hearing this is illegal in places like Maryland). She doesn't do this every morning, BTW. What was interesting, though, is that the criminals weren't even smart enough to steal a car that had a full tank of gas. My parents later ran into them (fate is awesome) pushing that car into a gas station not too far from our house after it ran out of gas. I doubt these guys would have been smart enough to case our house based on my Foursquare check-ins. That morning, they were just walking through the neighborhood and saw an opp.

Furthermore, I think the site is also rather silly because it presupposes that everyone knows what Foursquare (or any of the other location-based check-in sites) is enough to make check-in data particularly useful. Contrary to popular belief, there is a whole contingent of people out there who have no clue about Twitter, Foursquare, TechCrunch or anything else we hold dear. :)

Finally, I have a tendency to check in on FS as I'm leaving a location, so I get the points, but I'm already rolling out of the parking lot and back to my house by the time the world knows where I've been.
I suppose I wasn't clear. A drop in raw material consumption is not a bad thing, as long as it is accompanied by an increase in material efficiency to match it.

For example, we may be buying less gas at the pumps, but that's just because our cars have improved. This did not effect our standard of living, because we still have the same individual mobility.
> Thank's Avand, your article is really hip and all. I'd really like to agree with it, and then go about back behind the school yard and smoke a cigarette and tell The Man go to hell.

I almost didn't read the post because you made it sound like mindless rebellion. The tone of discussion was a bit higher than you made it out to be.

> Here's what it really comes down to- you seem to be doing well marching to your own song, Avand, and that's great, keep it up!

In all seriousness - can you cut this out? You've got valid and good points, but adding snark/sarcasm doesn't help them. I've seen more of this lately here on HN, and I don't think it's a good trend. There's a lot of valid critique/counterexamples of the author's post, and I'd really enjoy hearing more of your perspective and others who disagree, but the sarcasm/snark takes away from the point more than adds.
"... but everything at its base is also machine code and bits in registers.

So far.

I don't have any examples, but my gut tells that it would be much easier to replace the "machine code and bits in registers" part with something else than it would be the lambda calc part.

The former is an implementation detail.
Hmm, I had the same problem with those fast food/ supermarket customer service jobs in my teens. Got to the point where I was like well I wouldn't want one of these jobs even if they came after me.

I kinda find it funny now that I probably still wouldn't be able to get one of these lowly paid casual service positions.

I have a mate who takes uni the same way, clearly smart enough to pass programing classes easy judging by what he's done programming for fun, but just doesn't seem to care or apply himself enough assuming it will be really easy.
For a long time too... I know at least the California Ave area of PA will be out until 6pm. I saw on Twitter that the Stanford Hospital didn't have power for some amount of time this morning too, but they must be on backup generators by now.
I wonder if medical insurance would pay for replacement parts, because they sound expensive.
Sure, this seems like it can be useful, if implemented well. Implementation is almost always far more important than the idea.
The differences are not minor, though. 20$ gets you 256M on Slicehost, 360 on Linode. You also have to factor in that you're forced to use 64 bits on the Slicehost system, so you get less bang for your buck.
All that 2D stuff sounds fascinating, but unless they fix all the stupid things that even ie8 renders wrong, unless they implement svg, html5 and a good js-engine, nobody cares. Microsoft is still trying to "lead" the web instead of just admitting they suck at web and doing their homework good (i.e. fixing everything up to the level when it works 'fine').

Of course I realize, it's probably a part of the plan - hold back the industry as long as possible in an attempt to give less advantage to the competitors. But it doesn't seem to work, because people always find workarounds, don't they?
I think it's a clever marketing tool, not an actual tool for committing fraud...
Chrome is exceptionally fast, apparently.
Never heard of Fake Steve Jobs before?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lyons
I flagged the story. Injecting vitriolic editorializing into a breaking story about the death of 3 people is unclassy and flat out poor journalism.
It's true that blind faith in the system is not the ideal recipe for success, however it's also true that being able to buckle down and do something you don't like or see the purpose of is very useful, especially when you're young.
Joke Of The Week: Microsoft Plans To Charge For Its Mobile Operating System
Havard, in this case, is a metaphor for "traditional universities"
Indonesia is next in line to censor the Internet
School's Out, Forever. "School is out" contracts to "School's out", with an apostrophe to indicate the contraction.

I could not bring myself to read an article about education being pointless that has a grammatical mistake in the title, no less. If you make that mistake while slagging on education, I simply cannot give your opinions any weight.
Unless you "cheat" and check in places you are not. Just check in somewhere far away _while_ hiding in your closet with the shotgun. Like shootn' fish in a barrel.
A list of the various HN lists (like /newest): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024293
Some aspects of programming languages are very math heavy - things like type theory and lambda calculus. It's accurate to say some of the field of programming language design and implementation depends on math. Hence, I'm willing to say the field aggregate has that dependence, even if some other parts of the field do not have an explicit dependence.
Sorta looks to me to confirm something we already knew, V8 blows everything else away.
I would highly recommend not bringing your idea / company to seedstart.

I had a bad experience with them and so have a lot of other people I've spoken with in NYC.

Last I heard Owen Davis gave 250k (nyc seed money) to a friend of his and the company went broke in less then 6 months.
Tab Wrangler: Chrome extension to auto-close unused tabs
Yes but those options aren't exactly practical for the most common types of incidents: power failure (especially during take-off and landing) and collisions with terrain due to inclement weather.

From the limited amount of technical details available, I would guess that a combination of the two happened here.

While small duel engine aircraft may be able to sustain cruising altitude under significant strain on one engine, they are notorious for not being able to climb, and particular take off with only half power - certainly not with 3 people and baggage.

This is speculation, but by the looks of the location of the crash, and given that Palo Alto airport has a left hand pattern on runway 31 (that is, they fly counter-clockwise around the airport after taking off in the magnetic direction of 310 degrees) they most likely experienced a power failure during or very shortly after take off on one engine (but maybe both) and attempted to turn back to the airport to land. Interestingly +100ft transmission towers east of the airport are mentioned in FAA notices. These may or may not refer to the ~200ft power lines in the neighborhood. Without of a power failure they should have been +500ft before turning crosswind.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...

The reality of the situation is that, like medicine, reactive measures like Bailout mechanisms will always be less successful than preventive treatments which maintain good health, here in the form of thorough annual maintenances, preflight inspections, and run-ups (testing the full operation of the engine before leaving the ground.)
I couldn't agree with you more... I found this paragraph and the one following it to be in terrible taste. Any journalist who thinks that someone's death is a good opportunity to slip in some snide "toldjaso" comment like this should find a new profession.
"And guess what keeping source control and your IDE seperate is actually a good idea. "

Too true. Killing time watching your IDE lock up is not fun. Nor is the fact that _some_ IT departments still haven't performed the upgrade from TFS 2005 unservicepacked

..
..

cries
No offence, MediaTemple sucks. They can be more cost effective but their uptime and performance is absolutely horrible. I almost lost a big client because of their constant outage and performance issues. I learned my lesson and moved out.

The only thing I can't comment on is their Dedicated server services because I haven't used it. But honestly, there are better DS out there with almost half of MT's price with same configuration.
Yeah I thought about crowdsourcing but that introduces a subjective aspect that I'm not sure about. If my team loses, I'm more likely to say that they game is not worth watching. If there are more fans of my team than of the winning team, then the results will be skewed. It's a tough problem!
It does appear fast, but I'm withholding judgement. I'm not certain if it's doing caching tricks or whether their parser really is 10x faster. It certainly is CPU-bound, which is as good as it gets, and it's more stable in terms of memory use.

See this graph: http://carlos.bueno.org/images/chrome-cliff.png
perhaps the encryption export limit law?
As a web developer I'm keenly interested in any new IE releases. I can't help but wonder, however, why Microsoft need's to mark each release as a major version (7, 8, 9).

Microsoft itself has made it clear that everyone should upgrade to the latest IE version, yet uptake has been slow. Couldn't they just bury new rendering engines in service packs and leave the version numbers alone? IE users would enjoy a better web experience, Microsoft wouldn't be stuck supporting old browsers for as long, and I could avoid going prematurely grey.
Starcraft 2 Beta launches -- Kiss your free time goodbye
Is that Direct2D engine developer-accessible? From my understanding, it's just a rendering technology for HTML/VML (a la Cairo for Firefox).
Social Games spending patterns
Infographic and numbers on how people spend money in social games.
It's notable how little FF improved between 3.5 and 3.6.
I am hoping HN moves to a better host. Is it just me or the site has been going down quite often and slowed to crawl most of the time?
Yeah, that's true. My inlaws though, they have Yahoo! set as their homepage, then go to google to get to a web address. I asked them why not just set it to google, and they said they liked having news and weather on the homepage to check out first. I tried to show them you can do that with google too, they just weren't going for it.
IContact email addresses compromised
> Wrong e-mail. I'm referring to the "it's embarrassing that we can't account for the recent measurements" e-mail. They weren't talking about the tree stuff, which has its own problems, but is not recent.

Please link this email then?

> They can't produce it, so what definition of "not lost" are you using?

They cannot personally produce it, but they can list where they got it and then you can do those sources.

But here's the key thing to keep in mind: neither you nor I know the full story there. There's not enough evidence to suggest fraud, only enough to warrant an investigation. You'are acting as if the science is discredited, but it seems to me like you want it to be discredited so you're preemptively declaring it so.

> I have the person who did the IPCC's work on temperature measurement. You found his work compelling when you agreed with it.

I found the whole body of work compelling. Only a few individual pieces of work are truly compelling on their own, and Phil's never was one. And by the way, I was skeptical until about a year and a half ago. Now that physical observations are starting to replace pure models and showing similar (if somewhat less aggressive) temperature gains, I am less dismissive of it.

> You're overstating things. The recent temperature data is broken and even then contradicts the models. The "tree data is good when it supports the AGW but not when it doesn't" argument is weak. Jones admits that the arguments for ignoring the medieval warming period have problems. The hurricane stuff was wrong. The glacier data is far from conclusive (and overstated anyway). Arctic ice isn't behaving as predicted. And so on.

I'm pretty sure the glacier datais not "overstated", anymore than time lapse photography with accurate scales and a simple chart of ice changes can be. It's pretty obvious that several glaciers are retreating at what can reasonably called a "surprising" rate.

> Good for you - spend your money. I hope that you get rich.

You know, I hope you're right. Because if I'm right the next 35 years are going to be shitty for everyone.
I believe this web site itself should be presented in VSTF.
We transferred from Slicehost to Linode a few months ago. I believe that the Rackspace acquisition turned Slicehost into a zombie company that is not being run with the same common sense attention to care I was seeing when I originally became a customer.
Funny app and a good way to show the dangers of posting everything online...
Ask HN: Startup Data Security Survey
Hi folks,

I'm a former computer security guy that's recently plunged into the startup world. On the heels of Dave McClure's subscriptions are the new black post, we looked into some of the recurring billing solutions out there and found that there's a lot of confusion about what needs to be done with respect to security.

I was hoping to get some feedback from other startups that accept payments on the web to see how they do so, and how knowledgeable they are with respect to security. We'll be sharing this survey with payment providers (and publicly), so it will hopefully be useful for them to get an idea of what startups are looking for.

You can find it here: http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/payment-security-survey-for-startups/

Thanks!
It looks like it's a proprietary competitor to canvas which microsoft doesn't like.
SVG and canvas support would be awesome - and it sounds like SVG at least is likely.
Please Rob Me Makes Foursquare Super Useful For Burglars
Are you talking about the GS? I had a lot of trouble with it when I tried it, but decided to try the DV before giving up on them. It's been a world of difference - it's been rock solid, fast, and seemingly invariate in performance.

The prices listed for the DVs might seem high, but they've been good about bumping up RAM allocation for free. The amount listed isn't the amount you actually get, and with the free extra, it's more cost effective than Slicehost, as well as Linode (at least at the 3 GB pricepoint).

Agreed, their DS is way overpriced.
While I'm not sure I am arguing for a reduction in standard of living, my question is: would you be willing to accept a reduction in standard of living if it were to avoid an even larger reduction for your children and grandchildren?

In many cases (not climate change so much, but other supposed "reductions" of standard of living) it's also a matter of weighing things like "can I eat fish that I pull out of a lake and exercise without getting an asthma attack?" which are normally not taken into account in such statistics.
Tesla Execs’ Death - Conspiracy Theory
There’s no WAY in hell not one, not two, BUT THREE Tesla execs died at once in a single accident.
"MIT doesn't accept anyone who they don't think can make it. This works in part because of the self selection in applicants, although nowadays they're getting 13,000 per year, 1/3 of which the Admissions Office judges can do the work."

If you think about it though, for an incoming class size of about 1000, they're still rejecting 3/4ths of the qualified applicants. Assuming a legacy applicant is qualified (and I'd suspect for a number of reasons that they're more likely to be qualified than the median applicant), that second look can be a big benefit.
Is anybody else having trouble viewing TechCrunch?
Over the past week or so TechCrunch I've been experiencing weird loading delays, and hang-ups. I can't quite figure it out but no other site I use has been affected - on Windows 7 / IE8 browsing - wondering if anybody else noticed . . .
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of environmentalists.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "catastrophe is coming" people.
Subset of AGW people overlaps quite heavily with subset of "regulation is the answer people".
Subset of AGW people DOES NOT overlap much with pro-thorium/pro-fusion people.

You're just making that up... Personally I think a huge amount of people who believe that AGW is happening are huge proponents of nuclear fusion. In fact, I think that almost everyone is pro-nuclear fusion if it is scientifically possible. As far as fission goes, a large part of the Obama administration favors expanding nuclear fission and they also take an AGW position.
The social meaning of the power law
When I had a motorcycle, I would ride it everywhere. I even rode it to the doctors office and carried in my helmet. I sat down with the doctor and when he mentioned my helmet, I was certain he was going to lecture me about it or at least tell me to be safe. He told me about the 900cc Ducati he had and we had a pretty long conversation about bikes and how much fun they were...
I'm a long time Slicehost customer, and really like them. I like the new site layout. If the layout is whats stopping you from being a customer, then I'm not sure why anyone would use Prgmr. Basically, its usable, so I see no reason to complain.

I wish the big announcement was that they were doubling their disk size or some sort. I've had websites die because a valid MySQL connection couldn't be made because the slice ran out of disk space.

Edit: Oh wow, while I was typing this up, they changed back to their old design.

Edit #2: Double wow, Prgrm's prices are amazing. I think its time to check them out.
Eh. And it's not protons that comprise moving current in a circuit. Conventions happen and sometimes we're stuck with them.
Thank you for arguing the issue much better than I could! I'm open to discussions about what to do about AGW (absent loony policy proposals like fusion or "clean coal"), but I don't understand those who say the state of the science justifies saying we just don't have to worry about it.
Your response illustrates an all too common failure of formal education: holding formalities in greater regard than practical matters.

Language is usage is language. Not only was clarity not hurt, the point of the title I took away was a reference to the Alice Cooper song lyric, which as spoken (sung) language, contains no apostrophe.
Adding Evernote as a Search Engine in Google Chrome
I suspect his perceived correlation between the quality of the programmer and lack of education has quite a bit of selection bias.

I have coworkers with and without advanced degrees. There are lots of good and bad ones in both groups, and I get along with most just fine. But I strongly suspect that I'd have trouble working with anyone with a chip the size of the one perched on his shoulder. Which means that he's going to drive away the good educated people, and confirm his own preconception about quality. And he's going to create a lot of problems for himself down the road.

As a concrete example of what I am talking about, consider his four man team story. Given that he posted that with his real name, the engineer who he didn't like is going to be a burned bridge. Any educated software developer he knows who reads that will wonder, "What does he think of me?" There go a few more bridges. Anyone considering hiring him is likely to Google his name. If they turn up this then any interviewers with an education are likely to be turned off.

Technology in whatever town you're in tends to be a small community. You wind up working with the same people over and over again. A knack for making lots of people dislike you isn't a good thing.

Perhaps in several years he'll learn enough to be able to take that advice. After suffering for a bit. Kind of like how he has slowly recognized that a lot of what he refused to learn in school was actually something that is reasonable to learn.
I found this article when searching for information on statistical methods based on power laws. I've been trying to find information on non-Gaussian statistics, but having a difficult time making my way by myself. I even bought a book of non-parametric statistical methods, but even those ended up using z-scores based on a normal distribution when dealing with large samples.

While the blog post is a bit airy, I appreciate its point that the social sciences in particular are more accurately described by power laws than by the bell curve.
Weird, that blog post reads just like a Steve Jobs keynote, albeit a pretty unimpressive one.