skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really hate to see TechCrunch giving credence to the notion that the number of times someone commits to a given codebase is somhow representative of the actual contribution to the project. Granted, the author does say: "The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones." but he then goes on to say that "[the graph] does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project." Ignore the parenthetical, and it feels like the author is ignoring the issue: commits does not equal code quality.

After all, and I know that I'm over simplifying the point, (I think this is safe to say) but didn't Apple build out most of the core functionality -- the rendering engine, while what has been going on for the past couple months to a years is just adding features and extending what the base browser is? You can't determine that type of input based on commits alone.

Edit: Clarify core functionality.
I took a class taught by Lee Ross.

The main real-world topic used in that class to illustrate a lot of this stuff was "peace in the middle east." For example, no matter what was printed in the NY Times it was perceived as obviously skewed as being either wildly pro-israel or wildly pro-palestinian... depending on the affiliations of the people reading it. Literally the same article.

The idea that everyone deeply believes that media (or other people/organizations etc) are deeply skewed/biased, yet the nature of the perceived bias varies in _opposite_ ways depending on their personal beliefs, is kind of depressing.

The meta-theme I sort of got from that class was that social psychologists like Dr. Ross genuinely got into the field wanting to change the world and help people to end wars etc. through applied social science. However, the more research they did, and the more they really understood the deep, deep psychological factors driving things like conflict in the middle east, the more they realized that this is a lot harder than they could have ever imagined. (fwiw, that is purely my personal take on the class, but there was definitely a tone underlying the whole thing.)
Re: the top bar. People shouldn't feel like they need to have an explanatory note on each menu item or option. Which is easier to grok?

* What is Firebug? / Introduction and Features

* Resources / Documentation wiki, FAQ, and other Firebug lore

* Community / Discussion forums and lists

* Get Involved / Hack the code, create plugins

or

* About

* Documentation

* Community

* Get Involved

(And maybe "Get Involved" should be "Contribute")
This is amazing. I'm building a little canvas drawing tool myself (http://kritzl.robsite.net -> 'Mal was') and this is great inspiration. Very slick interface and really fast, impressive.

Although the fill tool seems to have a very high tolerance. Fills the whole screen everytime. You could also add line smoothing for the drawing tools. There are reasonably fast algorithms you can use with bezierCurveTo (http://robsite.net/posts/smooth-path-in-canvas).
Do headphones not work with everyone, or only with a subset of people? It wouldn't surprise me if some people didn't take the hint, but I guess I'd be surprised if nearly everyone missed it.

I know one person who tried a Do Not Disturb sign. Like yours, it was a bit over the top, and that seemed to help. Again, worked with some of his coworkers, and not with others.
I've learned long ago (before I ever touched a computer) not to give the term "Engineer" too much weight, since it was explained to me that the janitors in my grandfather's office were called "Sanitation Engineers".
From the pdf on the site, it looks like it can hold over 1,500 lbs.

[1] 2500 N/m^2 * (2.62m * 1.05m) => pounds
Believe me, he didn't need to buy one.
IE 6 - gave me the best possible incentive to move from netscape.

Let's remember - IE6 was better than anything else (except maybe IE5/Mac) at the time it came out. Opera might be an exception, but you had to pay for it so no thanks.
and climate models predict what exactly? i don't see the various panels making falsifiable hypothesis.
Controversies like this are, I think, just another indicator of the changing face of careers. Here in NYC web developers are called everything from "software engineers" to "developers" to "coders" to "presentation layer engineers." And that doesn't taken into account the front- vs back-end issue.

That being said, I appreciate that many certifications (MCSE, ZCSE) use the term "certified engineer" as, I do believe that the term engineer should qualify someone with a more developer skillset.
There are entire companies formed by bitter ex employees who will never work for Electronic Arts again.

I agree with everything in this article. It just really nails it.
I use the title "Programmer". I think it's much more accurate than "Software Engineer", which brings to mind a bunch of guys with slide-rules and pocket protectors making a UML diagram for some offshore Java developers to "implement".

Remember that Knuth's book is called "The Art of Computer Programming", not "The Art of Software Engineering".
Thanks for the comments!

In our case we would explicitely tell the people who interviewed that we would throw away all their code at the end of the day. It was pretty unlikely anything they did would actually be valuable to us in such a short period, and giving the candidate something mission critical to work on was a no go.

In 1 case, we did have someone come in for a week (on the UX side) and we paid the person for their week of work. She actually was the one who suggested a full week with us, so she could really get to know the team and see if it was a fit (it wasn't, so it is good we tried it out)

It is not unusual to end up spending 5-8 or more hours interviewing with a company - you would not ask to get paid to come interview, and the code exercise was another form of interview.

Finally, this was a great opportunity for the candidate to get to know us as well - how did we collaborate on stuff? What process did we use? What was the team environment? This allowed a candidate to come in with "eyes wide open" (well, more open) regarding our workplace....
Sisc Scheme on Dalvik VM
I'm ashamed to say that it boils down to two factors: Laziness and copy/paste

:-)
Anyone at YC want to comment on if there's a correlation between quiet working conditions and successfully launching a startup? Of the successful startups you've funded, how many had quiet/private working conditions vs noisy/shared ones?
Quoting Wikipedia for legal matters is better than nothing, I suppose, but hardly decisive. In this case, Wikipedia is wrong, as I have noted: many courts have found copyright infringement without any proof at all being presented that anything was copied. With the facts given - two individuals creating by pure coincidence a story that is nearly identical - whoever published it first is going to win the court case, and the court will presume that the other party copied it, even if no one testifies that they saw the other party reading, editing, and copying from the first story.

If you by pure chance happen to have a music file on your hard drive that decodes to play "Thriller" by Michael Jackson, and you claim that you created it independently and have never heard of the song before, I assure you the court will rule against you and the music publisher will not be required to submit any proof that you copied it from, say, a CD of Jackson songs.

The "copy" in copyright is NOT copying the other person's work. It's producing the copy you made. So in the story example, the second person's published story is the infringing copy, "Copying" from the first story is not the copying that is covered by copyright; it's the creation of items that appear to be copies.

Wikipedia is simply wrong here and it's kind of sad that HN is so ignorant about copyright law.
I don't believe that Maths or Physics can really be taught using the traditional lecture format. The lecture may suffice to run through the techniques of various proofs, or tell the student what he/she needs to learn. The only way really to learn these technical subjects is to sit down with a pencil and paper and do it through. The same is true for Computing Science. Until you run through the examples and derive/write things for yourself, you'll never truly understand them, regardless of the format of a lecture, or the capability of the teacher.

For what it's worth, I have a degree in Maths, a PhD in Physics and I am develop software for research purposes, when I don't teach - so I have some experience.

The best way for a student to learn these hard technical subjects is for them to sit with their colleagues and go through group exercises, alongside a lot of hard individual work. The teacher's job is merely to help them over the hurdles they have difficulty with, and to show them the things that are truly worth learning. Although I never went through it myself, I suspect that the Oxbridge system of having indiviual tutoring sessions in small groups as the basis of the teaching is probably perfect for these purposes.
Yeah. Joel Spolsky wrote about this stuff in his essay on pricing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie... :

Notice the gap? There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint, with his airfare, golf course memberships, and $19.95 porn movies at the Ritz Carlton.

In other words, there's a natural price delta between end-user software and "enterprise," or whatever you want to call it, software. People seem to keep rediscovering this over and over again.
When is this online?
Just like a program I wrote in VB 1.0 - we've certainly come a long way.

I see things like this and wonder what on earth web guys are wasting there time on.
Subway hires "sandwich engineers" . . . or so I've heard.
"For the first time this season, Pittsburgh made more rushing attempts than Denver. Now, the usual caveats apply, Denver might make significantly more yards per carry, for example. But, nevertheless, this graph clearly shows that Pittsburgh had more rushing plays."

What constitutes a commit varies between organizations. More than that, look at the area under the respective graphs. Apple has already made a HUGE number of commits. Presumably they've achieved many of their strategic aims. Google has barely scratched the surface, if we're to believe that raw commit numbers matter at all.

Apple's trend line is going down. Should I infer from that that Apple no longer cares about Webkit?

Apple doesn't commit to Webkit as a public service. They also don't commit as a race against Google. They'll commit precisely as needed to achieve their business goals. There is nothing interesting implied by the relative numbers of commits between Apple and Google.
Sort of.

Remember that WebKit comes from the KHTML/KJS work, so they had a rendering engine capable of taking webpages and rendering them to some degree from the start. Compatibility is loads better now than it used to be, but the web looks substantially different now than it used to as well.
Veriﬁed by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode: or, How Not to Design Authentication
very cool. does it have to take so long to deploy or were they just going for dramatic tension?
Chatroulette - video chat with strangers
Its interesting in the sense that it's rare to see many relatively large and competing companies actively making commits to the same open source project.
I haven't decided which I would love to run: Iphone has a better UI and applications at the moment while Android is the new player in the game. Android does have a lot of catch up to do (ex: Better music player, UI experience), but how can one put faith in Google?

The I-phone hasn't been updated much from a hardware standpoint, therefore, is it worth waiting to see what it looks like in June?

I know I sound like a bad Mashable article.
I've got two OLPC XOs

XO1: running Ubuntu/XFCE/Chromium/MugTug's sketchpad.
Painting with XO1 is way fast. No screen drag. None.

XO2: running the native Sugar paint app.
Roughly the same feature set. Screen drag.

Edit: would be nice to have pressure sensitivity for my tablet and ability to edit SVG nodes.
Sounds like fun! Kunming is a beautiful city. Be sure to take a train up to Dali sometime, and hike down Tiger Leaping Gorge. If you want suggestions on what to do, feel free to contact me.
I use Tablet PD with Windows Journal. In addition to what you say, other advantages over chalk are the brightness, the colors, and the ability to instantly post the lecture online. Later I transcribe the lectures into text and just copy the illustrations. Plus, I don’t have to deal with chalk on my shoes, pants, and lungs!
This is some awesome data - I bet we'll be seeing a bunch of social science PhDs based on data sets like these in the next 1-5 years. It will be really interesting to see how this social graph evolves with time, and what it can predict about things like migration, the economy, and the nature of our relationships.
I see some professors use pen tablet input on computer slides during a lecture. This is similar to what you describe for overhead slides. In practice, they also seem to use it for the things you describe for the chalkboard.

My favorite video lectures are Gilbert Strang teaching Linear Algebra with nothing but a piece of chalk and a whole lot of chalkboards (the kind that slide up and down, revealing other chalkboards underneath). I can't think of any way those lectures could be improved by any sort of technology.
I'll flip that on its head: if a company will benefit from layoffs, those people should have already been fired. The fact that they weren't is probably contributing to the dire straits forcing the layoffs.

I think the only other time that layoffs are a good idea is if you're closing an entire business unit/department to retreat from a market and focus on your strengths.
What Rupert Murdoch Still Doesn’t Get About the Internet
That question shows that you didn't read http://www.sens.org.

What needs to be done - exactly what biotechnologies are needed - is established, known, and in some cases within a few years of being trial-ready (e.g. replacement of mitochondrial DNA).
FTA:"The more people know about the iPad, the less they want to buy one, according to a study released Friday. But, are we expecting too much?"

In other words, once the iPad became fact and was no longer subject to early adopters' whims and flights of fancy, less of them wanted to buy it. I can just imagine a hypothetical early adopter angrily declaring 'What do you mean Steve Jobs isn't including a free rhino with every purchase? That's ridiculous, and now I won't buy one!'

I have every intention of buying an iPad as soon as possible in order to develop for it.

I have every intention of buying one for my mom for her birthday (at the end of April) so I can get her off her aging Windows XP computer.

A good friend of mine and her sister are planning on buying one for their 70 year old father.

Bear in mind, these are only a handful of anecdotes, but can you (as an HN reader) honestly say that you would rather support your baby boomer parents on their spyware-ridden Windows XP computer, or would you rather buy them a $400 braindead simple internet access device that can't get viruses or spyware?

edit: oops, typo.
I've tried two approaches, both of which work reasonably well.

1) Headphones + a sign saying "Do not disturb when headphones are in place (I used an ANSI sign generator which I can no longer find)
2) Come in an hour before everyone else

I haven't tried it myself, but have seen other people work from conference rooms, cafeterias, etc with a laptop and phone-forwarding.
"In every state in the United States you have licensed by the state to call yourself and engineer and sell engineering services."

And those laws almost universally ignored.

The trouble is that the laws are so overbearing that they choked off the supply of new licensees. The first people to get licensed, because that was the entire industry at the time, were things like boiler and power engineers. Suppose you were a young engineer and you wanted your PE license to design metal detectors "properly". You'd have had to specialize in something like power systems, sign up with whoever had a PE on staff, spend 6-12 months sizing transformer windings and designing 50 kV relays (because most PEs worked at places like that). Then you have to jump ship to work with a different PE, because you need to accumulate an apprenticeship under four PEs before you can get a license. Only then can you get your license and go back to school to specialize in what you actually want to do. Finally, in your late 20s, with no job longer than a year, and just starting work on your passion, you can try to get a job in metal detection.

Most new engineers sensibly decided to just break the law. Even if the engineering board were certain to catch up with you, it would be easier to quietly move to another state in the middle of the night and start over. And the actual odds are more like one in 10,000.

P.S. IIRC Texas scrapped a lot of their silly PE laws.
Can you play mp3s on a Nexus? Is it as good as an iPhone? How do you transfer the songs to the phone?
Yes. It may be funny to observe that a phrase literally means the opposite, or is meaningless, etc., but generally there is a real meaning which everyone understands.
I passed the EIT exam, worked under professional engineers for four years, and obtained letters of recommendation from them, all so that I had the right to sit for the professional engineering exam. I then took that exam and passed it. I pay $200 per year to maintain my registered professional engineer status in my state. All this gives me the right to stamp legal documents as an engineer ... and be held legally accountable for designs that cause injury to others, either physical or financial. I wear a stainless steel ring on the little finger of my right hand that was given to me to remind me as I sign off on designs, that the safety of others is in my hands.

I am allowed to put on my business card, my website, and my consulting advertisements that I am an engineer. Theoretically, you are not, if you haven't done these things, and a case could be made that you should not be able to, just like you don't get to call yourself a doctor or a lawyer.

The term engineer has undergone serious deflation over the years, which is a shame. I don't see this trend suddenly reversing, so I don't lose sleep over it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't feel a little regretful over it's demise.
The article is incomplete. You can't use the title "Engineer" in Texas without a P.E.
>The most popular web development tool for Firefox

They could probably call it "The most popular web development tool period." and it wouldn't be a lie.

There are plenty of designers\developers who keep firefox around only for firebug.
Leaves Show Looped Networks May Be Better Than Branched
The part about everyone reading bias into a statement immediately reminded me of the recent thread on language advocacy, discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1105087 . Being objective is hard!
Is that relevant? The point I was making is that Apple should not be discouraging it regardless. Be that as it may, you make an interesting one. Are you saying that Microsoft should be discouraged from marketing Office for Mac as Microsoft Office? That does not seem like a reasonable position to take.
I lived in Suzhou, China in 2008 and did freelance work through oDesk. I found it worthwhile to always mention that English was my native language. Other than an initial interview, none of my work required telephone (Skype) communication so the timezone was not a factor. My first job on oDesk was only $8/hr as I just wanted to try it out but after that my rate jumped to over $20/hr and I never really had a tough time getting work. I have found going above $30 to be tougher to find work but then I haven't actively been looking for freelance work since being back. It should be a great experience for you!
In this day and age, when the slides to so many academic lectures are available for free online, a professor standing in front of a chalkboard in the same room as you seems to give more value for money.

What value do you get from a professor reading his slides to you, versus just downloading them and reading them at your leisure? With the professor at the chalkboard, however, you feel like you are getting more of his thought processes with more spontaneity. And more of a feeling that it is OK and encouraged to stop him with questions, and maybe even diverge from the day's planned lecture on occasion.

I wonder if universities with professors standing in front of chalkboards will start to attract the best students over time.
Learn Drupal. There's customer demand, and a shortage of coders who really understand it.
How did he find that job?

I like the city I'm in but the tech industry is very homogeneous here. I would love to find a telecommuting full-time software development position that pays well and where I can work on an interesting project. I have more experience than your friend and have experience working from home. I'd be interested in knowing more about how he came across the position.

Edit: $80k is almost at the ceiling of what a top software developer could expect in my city so this has really peaked my interest.
I knew as soon as I saw the post title, that every comment in this thread would be ripping how it looked. If you're ever thinking of commenting on the attractive appearance of a site, just don't bother. There's nothing hypercritical people hate worse than that.
> "[1] Well, apart from calling Seattle boring, that was deliberate"

Care to shed some light on this? I'm in Seattle right now and I too find it incredibly dull (today was a rare exception) - was wondering what your experiences were with this town.
Why blur the serial number on the money? Is someone really going to find the bill, notice it has cocaine on it, and blame the author of the blog post?
Experience Matters: Flash, iPhone, and Beyond
I run one of the sites that Wiki page aggregates, and also put together a trend graph they don't include, which shows Chrome's market share changes over time:

http://www.w3counter.com/trends

This is based on the aggregate visits to over 30,000 websites.
It was a contract-to-hire position...I think he may have actually found it on Craigslist, though I'm sure that's not the best place to look.
Honestly, if I were you, I'd stop looking for a job, or at least stop looking just for a job. Put together a portfolio of work you've done, some references, and start looking for contract work. Making $25 - 50 / hr should be no problem depending on your skills and portfolio. Once you've done this for a year or two and you have a solid body of work, no one will care where you went to school or when you graduated.
As someone said on the comments to the blog, it seems surprising that he didn't buy a N900 instead. It's far closer to being a full Linux machine than the Nexus One.