skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Im interested in what Mozilla mean by: "the mockups they cite were an early proof of concept created by cut-and-paste, never final designs." (mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

According to the wiki history [1] they were added as late as 12th/16th Feb 2010. Admitedly posted as Latest Mock-ups and Screenshots but there are no other designs or alternatives proposed.

It's easy enough to call these concepts now: but without a complaint from metalab (which was handled poorly) would they have made it further towards "final design"?

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Labs/Jetpack/Flight...
I like the idea a lot... And I think we can draw some interesting parallels to other kinds of artistic activities. Let's see... My mother's a scupltress. Anybody :)?
This is beyond awesome! Perfect interface, perfect mix of Yammer and IRC and data importing, perfect across the board.

Are you guys going to have a Yammer import feature? If you could import all our past messages from Yammer into that right-hand column then our team would switch in a tenth of a second flat.
The Mind's Image Processing
He wouldn't have needed to say anything if there was no traditional media. They were the ones that implied the LHC was broken.
Am I the only one getting really tired of the adjective "epic"? Particularly in the case of "epic fail", which just seems so self-righteous.
What does everyone think the timeframe will be for this to hit mainstream news? I feel like it must be soon.
That depends on whether you consider the Smalltalk and Self research at Sun and Xeroc PARC to be "academia". Much of the JVM optimization technology came directly from those.

http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html

The paper "An Efficient Implementation of Self" (http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/implementati...) is a good overview.

Lua is another language with a great JIT compiler, LuaJIT. There are several papers about Lua (http://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf, http://www.lua.org/papers.html) and a bunch of good mailing list posts about LuaJIT (e.g. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908).
Your analogy does not follow from your description.

"One does not need to "connect"", "Your right to connect..."

A more apt analogy (of a link) would be posting instructions (or a floorplan/map) of how to get to the stockroom.

I can believe the statute covers that. The US DRM Copyright law does similar.
You mean "does not have encrypted disk", right?
Is there some sort of digital welfare that we need to set up? Is the fact that non-agile workers can always fall back on retail jobs good enough?

First step, since we'll need to go there anyway: half of all economic growth goes into a basic income fund that everyone gets; no strings, no questions, given to rich and poor alike. Asymptotically, this means that no one will have less than a 1/2N share. Eventually, we'll be able to get rid of other entitlement programs once this basic income fund is sufficient to eliminate poverty.

We're destined for sub-20% employment* in 50-200 years. The best we'll be able to achieve is a state where most of those who are unemployed are studying up for their next career. This eliminates the "fall behind" problem. People fall behind today because they still have to work when they do, often in more taxing jobs than we work (retail sucks). So they have no energy to push forward.

Second, we'll need to improve human intelligence either through "transhuman" advancement or eugenics ^. Not to sound like a dick, but a lot of people are "falling behind" on technology because they aren't smart enough. It's not that they are lazy or disadvantaged, but that the skills required to master advanced technology weren't necessary throughout most of our evolutionary history and are therefore uncommon.

^ On "eugenics", please understand that I'm not excusing the horrors that have been given that name (a misapplication thereof) in the past. I'm not advocating harming anyone, but I think there should be strong incentives (e.g. free education) for smart people to reproduce.
10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dotcom Boom and Bust
"Third, all of the questions listed, no matter how trivial they seem, are dispositive. I've interviewed engineering candidates with PhD's from top tier universities who couldn't reverse a linked list when asked, or who couldn't even explain basic concepts in their putative focus areas. You have to ask the seemingly stupid stuff -- it's a continual surprise."

While there are certainly idiots with PhDs, if you've got a candidate with a PhD from a top-tier institution who "can't reverse a linked-list", it's most likely because (s)he is under-prepared at the art of technical interviewing. Idiocy is clearly not impossible, but the conclusion that the candidate is an idiot should be on the low-prior-probability event list.

One thing that drives me absolutely crazy about technical interviews today is that most interviewers have completely lost the bubble on what they're trying to accomplish. It's become a bizarre, nerdy form of Kabuki theater, wherein candidates are madly trying to cram their heads full of list- and string-algorithm esoterica, while hoping that they're not presented questions so unfamiliar that they can't derive the answer in under 30 minutes, at a whiteboard. If the interviewer doesn't take this into account (and few do), the interview becomes little more than a random, high-pass screen, wherein lots of smart people are eliminated from positions based on bad luck, and little else.

Joel (on Software) has it right, but it seems like few people are listening: you want to make sure the candidate is smart, and can get things done. That's it. The goal is not to see if they're the next human incarnation of Alan Turing, and it's certainly not to see if they can derive fiendishly difficult algorithms during a whiteboard lecture (call me crazy, but I'm reasonably sure that Turing didn't come up with his theories while talking continuously in front of a whiteboard, while some asperger-y geek sneered at him from across the room.)

When you're interviewing, you want to make sure that the candidate can write code, that they're reasonably smart, and (IMHO) that they're not an asshole. It seems to me that our industry has taken "coding puzzle" and turned it into "crappy intelligence test", while largely ignoring the "not an asshole" part of the equation -- the part that's usually the most important in real life.
CELTIC CROSS vergoldet - Made by www.ANTIK-GROUP.com
There are, of course, more interesting things to do with physical access to a computer than grabbing password hashes.
Looks interesting, will certainly check it out. One of the weaknesses of other project tracking tools for Victus Media has been the speed at which we change priorities. Continual user feedback helps us manage where we want to go long term, versus what we hack out tonight.

Would appreciate any tools that change as fast as we do, while keeping th big picture highlighted
This is a smart move by Google. Hopefully, they will take this model and apply it to an apps marketplace for consumers so that anyone with a Gmail account can add third party apps to their Google account.
I think you capture the issue perfectly. The things you value determine your opinion of software. From where I stand, I value good design (reliability and security are natural side effects). I find the aesthetics of well designed software beautiful.

On the other hand, if I had deadlines and a decade of backward-compatibility to worry about I might have different values. I don't mean to be the highbrow/ivory tower security dude, I'm just speaking to what I value.
Company Offers Tours of Prague... For Your Teddy Bear
There is something strange, in the Arabic article both the human and the Google translation say "[..] soccer great Diego Maradona" where as the original arabic there is no mention of anything resembling "great".
Was the human translator influenced by the Google result ? or is Diego Maradona always referred to as "soccer great Diego Maradona" in English press and google is picking up on that?

Edit:I suppose it is the latter since the Human translator was not trying to have a correct reference translation for testing the engines. He totally skipped translating the words " in South Africa ".
Imho, this makes the results much less interesting.

Also in the french translation it is interesting that "Le premier soir" translates as "The first evening" if you type it in google without the rest of the sentence, but becomes "The first night" after you put it in context.
>How would you explain what a database is to a 5-year-old?

>How would you explain computer networking to a kindergarten kid?

I have had to answer both of these questions - but to an actual five-year-old, not to recruiters.
Ask HN: Quality of questions on Vark plummeting?
I'm not sure if it's due to the Google buyout, or if that's just a coincidence, but I've noticed a huge decline in the quality of questions asked on Vark. My wife finally canceled her account today thanks to this final straw: When will new Dr. House episodes air?

I keep getting slammed with random questions about video games I've never heard of, all tagged with "games". Be specific, people. To me, "games" means dice, some pencils, and a character sheet.

Anyone else seeing this phenomenon, or am I just being a "I was here first" curmudgeon?
Biking directions added to google maps for usa
The Microsoft partner in question actually launched their design.
Hi! Thanks for the feedback. We're sure planning to make the conversion as easy as possible, and Yammer import is on top of our list. We will announce new features in our blog and on Twitter, stay tuned. :)
Does this affect people who use Chrome of Firefox?

(get the message?)
Since all my entertainment is through podcasting, I was relying on Hulu's RSS feeds. Now they're gone, I had to "pipe" together my own:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=85fec6c2bde9b5525...

and

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5f8d5d516ff18a791...
Homer: The Blogware-agnostic Feed-based Homepage Creator for the 'News Blob'
Estonian government starts blocking foreign gambling sites
Arguably, Malcolm McLaren was the entrepreneur in the Sex Pistols story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_McLaren#The_Sex_Pistols
In Unixes that uses the shadow system you just mount the partition and simply delete the string between the first and second colon to clean the password (in the /etc/shadow file), the string before the first colon is the username, but this only works for the users that do not use another authentication system (such as NIS or Kerberos). Mac OS X (>= 10.5) uses a different system (10.4 uses the netinfo database), the user information (And I guess that the password, as well) are in /var/db/dslocal/nodes/default/users/ in separate .plist files, I could not check if the password hash are included there since my Mac is at home, if I remember about this later I'll try to come with a password cleaning to OS X in this article later.

In lilo there is a way to not let the user log in in the single user mode without providing the password, I think that grub could be configured to do the same. So I believe the method that the article describes will not work for every linux installation.

By the way, what about some others operating systems, *BSDs, and some that are more exotic (if they use shadow, the method described above works), such as OpenVMS? I do not use windows since forever, so I cannot say much about how the system handles passwords.
Linux struggles to make a dent in desktop
Write code that returns the length of a string without using any built-in functions.

It took me a while to realize that they're probably not counting infix operators that behave like functions except for the syntax. Accomplishing this task in Lisp or Haskell would be nearly impossible.
Ask HN: Protecting HTML5 video and audio
I know HTML5 doesn't allow DRM in video and audio files (which would be a pain anyway), but is there anyway to stop a user downloading the file?

Can you forbid downloading, but not playing? Can you hide the URL from "view source," "inspect element," and the activity window?
Comment #4 (which I subscribe):

My favorite principle from CNP was that when an enterprise constructs its own headquarters, its demise follows not long after.

It's in chapter 6 of the Parkinson's Law book, titled "Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block".
I've been asked some of those questions at other top-tier tech companies (that the author isn't criticizing).

Conducting good interviews is hard. Watching someone attack a problem or write some whiteboard code is a not-bad system. Pick a problem that's too small or familiar and you're not filtering enough. Pick problems that are too hard or long and nobody will succeed. It's a balancing act.
Building Scalable DBs: Are Relational DBs Compatible with Large Scale Websites?
Full list of the blocked sites includes Pokerstars, Partypoker etc: http://f.postimees.ee/f/2010/03/10/329436t55hf931.jpg

By using DNS-based domain blocking, of course our lovely government also blocks all non-monetary gambling and casual games on those 175 sites. So it's not gambling, that's prohibited, but also content. What's worse, besides licensed in Estonia, the demand is also for them to have servers physically in Estonia.

Of course it's no surprise that before this blocking an internet gambling license was issued to one local casino, which started their site just now.
uh...the alternative to government intervention is more severe government intervention?

the alternative is to stop having the government directly subsidize higher education through grants and loans. instead let taxpayers keep that money and fund schools themselves. do you know how the ivy leagues got to be the ivy leagues? by raising prices until demand and supply met instead of artificially low prices and quotas^1.

the best plan would be to raise prices until demand is slightly lower than supply so that you have room for poor merit students.

1. colleges were quite a bit different before WW2. that's when public funding of university research really took off, due to military interest.
50 CSS Tools:Frameworks Generators Ads-Ons
Yes! Someone standing up against opacity in this!

Now if we could only get the USA to do the same. Maybe they've gotten over their neutral stance on transparency, maybe not, but in a friggin' (ideally a) democracy opacity in something like this is unethical.
HR's Big Lie - Best Practices
How to you get specular lighting in a particle system? You need a surface normal but there aren't surfaces.

Plus the unlimited thing bugs me. How does any algorithm that is O(N^0) work?
the deed is done ;) I think I maybe have had too big of a smile walking into my boss' office though!!
Cool, looking forward to it! Consider yourself followed :)
Linking Passion and Career: The Perils of Nonprofit Recruiting
On this:

"Once upon a time, literacy and numeracy were the paths to social mobility in its broadest sense; now, technology appears to have raised rather than lowered the barrier."

Where is the evidence that the barrier has been "raised," as opposed to just still existing? Why is the inability to use the internet different than the inability to use a slide rule or to understand references to Shakespeare? The evidence presented just shows that people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are also at the bottom of the technological ladder. This isn't surprising, and it doesn't seem to me to be a novel state of affairs.
That's disingenuous. When they say "no built-in functions", they really only mean "don't use a library function that makes this task trivial." Which eliminates 'strlen' in C, 'length' in Haskell, 'len' in Python, etc.
You Should Hire A Dev Shop Too
So you and the rest of your team are slamming out code, features rolling down the pipeline but you're starting to accrue technical debt and you know that things are slowing down a little bit and the releases are getting buggier and so you ask management for some clean up time.
On "eugenics" - what if the most significant factor in differences in intelligence is social rather than genetic? What if intensive parenting practices like near-constant eye contact and talking to infants and toddlers, long hours of reading to preschoolers, and a steady stream of enriching extra-curricular activites for schoolage kids accounts for larger intelligence gains over the generations than could be explained by genetic variations alone?
Samsung E6 eReader ready to hit the US market
No more than you can protect an image in a page from being downloaded. e.g. you could escape the URL or check referrers, but that's not really going to stop anybody.
3 month to end of the quarter was more common in past in germany. And it goes both ways. Its actually to protect you as an employee. Its a contract thing. If you had wanted you could have changed that before signing. But its not unusual for reasons mentioned in this thread to let people go earlier. But both sides have to agree to that. Usually a pay-off is involved when youre fired and asked to leave erlier.
I don't know about you, but writing code standing up at a whiteboard while others watch just doesn't feel very natural to me.

Why not give them a PC and a small development task and leave them alone for a bit and then talk over their solution once it is complete?
Wow, it's amazing that Microsoft actually went all the way back to 5.01 to see if it was affected! I guess Windows 2000 is still supported for security bugs right?
Web interface for Rhythmbox
"Gets-things-done" people prepare for technical interviews, such that they don't flub simple questions. The danger for the employer is that lots of Computer Science PhDs end up not writing much code during their research, and may not be a good fit at many tech employers.

"Interview for Smart and Gets Things Done" is an accurate explanatory abstraction over what good interviewers do, but it's not prescriptive enough to tell people what questions to ask and how to judge the results.
Not worth reading in my opinion.

Article -> You can reset the passwords on Windows using Ophcrack. And you can reset the passwords on Linux, and OSX by using single-user mode. You can't get the original password or access to encrypted files.
On Learning Haskell
I was thinking Strongtalk + Tracing + Type inference.
Is it me or does the nodeta image on the left look like a bong at first sight?
Glad I'm not paying that insurance bill.
It's a good idea, and I think it would make an excellent supplement to current interview practices. There would be some difficult logistical issues: Unfamiliar dev environment, etc. It wouldn't replace whiteboard coding, since you lose the ability to test for culture fit, give hints, examine thought process, ask about small decisions, get a gut check and other aspects of whiteboard coding that have nothing to do with the specific question asked.

Some companies ask for a small code sample "that you're proud of" in advance of onsite interviews, I think that's another good practice.
> not arguing with your general point, but the difference between pre and post increment is very useful when writing things like stacks and queues with pointers.

Of course this only applies to ephemeral variants of those data structures.
Exactly. Interestingly, 5.5 isn’t supported any more as it was only shipped with Windows ME, which is long out of support.
I recommend a test team that people can join.

You'll have to think of a way to prevent it from becoming a wasteland of "asdlkfjsakj" posts though.

Looks good!
You've probably seen too many bongs. I didn't make the connection.
addendum: http://wikis.sun.com/display/WebStack/Web+Stack+Getting+Star...
Questions Answered: Invented Languages
Here's my user plist file. http://pastefree.pjkh.com/pastes/87
Google's advice for newspapers: "Experiment, Experiment, Experiment"
You could start by helping him with his website. It looks awful from here.
Paul Frommer (the developer of Avatar’s novel tongue, Na’vi) and Arika Okrent (author of In the Land of Invented Languages) jointly take on some very interesting questions submitted by readers. I learned about some new resources on linguistics through this article.
Chelsea Houska
I'm also super impressed. You could have gone in any number of crazy directions but you kept it simple (dashboard, incoming, searches). I love it. It's like Campfire on steroids.

Personal feature request: preview youtube URLs, images, and tweets pasted into the chat area. Less important: let people select a range of chat messages and tag en-masse so they show up together in a search.
If it doesn't include transmission losses, then how can you meaningfully compare the net efficiency of a colocated device vs. a remote power station?
You need to quit trying to boil things down to conservative ideology talking points -- the size of government is largely irrelevant to the choices faced in an economic downturn. The only people who care are right-wingers who try to drag it into everything.

1) Oversimplification, read an intro to economics book about how the chain of lending actually creates more dollars and wealth without just printing them
2) Not addressing what I was saying. The size of government is irrelevant here, we're talking about stimulus spending -- totally orthogonal.
3) Not addressing what I was saying in the slightest.

It is in fact almost universally agreed that in both of those cases, the government spending was too little too late. By the vast majority of economist who've spent their lives studying this.

Maybe your "gut feeling" is smarter than their decades of research. But I'd suggest you read this: http://www.xkcd.com/675/

EDIT: I'll add a history lesson so we can all learn something today.

1929 - stock market crashes
29-32 - hoover does nothing, economy spirals downwards
32 - FDR elected, massive counter-cyclical public works projects, economy recovers
37 - FDR raises taxes and cuts back on spending as an austerity measure, too early, double-dip

In the case of Japan, similar story except the high savings rate exacerbated it, leading to deflation -- the government printing money and handing it out on a street corner would have been more effective than what they did
Yes you are right, they double the full-duplex bandwidth

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=188948&;
With the upgrade, Cisco can run 140 Gbit/s per slot, with switching capacity of 4.48 Tbit/s per chassis. (The latter figure is doubled to count ingoing and outgoing traffic at the same time, as the industry tends to do.)

If you don't mind me asking what did you work on (juniper, ALU, etc.), and what exactly was your role ?

I work in support for the mobile core router side where we use carrier-grade routers but nothing as big as the big Internet core routers.
Nice dark UI, I love the tooltips in the bottom left by the crab minigame.
Wow. Where I am, the notice is 2-3 months and contractual so there is no negotiating it.

How do you contract this sort of thing? If I wanted to quit and I had a contract like this, I would just stop coming to work, or I would come to work and do a bad job.
I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK a PhD is usually awarded based purely on research - there is relatively little cutting edge research that I am aware of that hinges on manipulating linked lists. :-)
How to quadruple your productivity with an army of student interns
Maybe a thermal transistor, thermal logic gates, and thermal memory, too: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24222/?a=f
That settles it. I'm trading in my Segway.
How to Nominate a "Best Startup Not In Silicon Valley"
In-road recharching system for electric vehicles developed in Korea
I'm a little skeptical of this advice, since there are two tracks in newspapers I see right now: Bunkering down and hoping for a savior (Bailouts! Strong copyright! Google!) and experimenting and hoping for a savior (Micropayments! Internet Magic! Google!), but I'd love to see what advice the HN community would give to non-NYTimes/USAToday/WSJ local papers.

Is "Experiment Experiment Experiment" just an appeal to throw spaghetti on the wall or is it a viable business strategy?