skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reliable backups: How to backup Linux, BSD and other Unix-like systems properly
Maybe it's just me, but Kubrick, Clark and chess--TRIFECTA!
Right indeed, a $16 million fine is ironically small considering the uproar cut $10 or $20 billion from Toyota's market valuation.
I don't understand, why would "ee" contain less information than "hh"?

He's not talking about "information" in the sense of "facts" in this case. Do some reading on Shannon entropy for the details, but broadly, take the following example.

$ grep -c ee /usr/share/dict/words
10620
$ ^ee^hh
grep -c hh /usr/share/dict/words
132

Suppose you're looking for a given word out of some arbitrarily defined set of words, such as a dictionary file. Suppose further you're given either the clue that it contains the sequence "ee", or the sequence "hh". There's a much lower probability of any specific one of the 10000-odd words in the set being the match for "ee" than one of the 100-odd for "hh". In information-theoretic terms, that probability gives you useful data, or information, about the word you're looking for.
Soon after I started driving, my father said at every point in time I should have a mentally planned "exit path". That is - some way to escape oncoming or concurrent traffic that is not aware.

As more hacks like this come out, and with the amount of distracted drivers, I think the best "hack" for driving is knowing to escape someone using an ipad or an iphone coming at a closing speed of 200kph.
Just saw Wolf talking about in CNN about 30 minutes ago.
Wow. Soundman. These guys are in my town. I pass them on the way to work. I hope they got the data version so they can use maps. Regardless of the distraction potential, I think it's a pretty clever hack. Let's just hope he doesn't get distracted and kill me on my way to work.
The Moderate's Position on iPad Openness
The Mobile Web vs. the Objective-C Web
Huge Collection of High Quality Social Media Icons
256 MB of RAM. Same as iPhone 3GS.

This is the SDRAM inside the A4.
Yes, that's a Samsung logo. No,
that doesn't mean Samsung designed
the A4—just the RAM.*

http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/i41Jh6tuFo6RFBVE.large

There's also a great side-cutaway shot, showing the 2 RAM dies.

http://www.ifixit.com/Misc/iphone_processor_crossection.jpg
Startup Mixer with Will Wright [April 6th in Berkeley]
Robot that autonomously folds a pile of towels
Where did that diary entry come from? Was that entered into public record as a result of a lawsuit against Facebook or something?

If it's real (it's a pretty apalling read into the guy's mind), what a great example of why you shouldn't keep all your private thoughts online...
They are doing something kind of similar to what we're doing at Forrst (http://forrst.com) for developers (and designers, too.)
I think this is missing the point. Facebook's attorneys don't care about the technical details. They already know that whatever is technically possible is entirely subordinate to how they can threaten the owners of the technology.

It hasn't been tested in court, and there's a truly excellent chance Facebook would lose - either in terms of the court or in terms of what's left of their privacy reputation - but that doesn't matter one little bit. They have attorneys and money, and that's all that matters in this instance.

Really. The facile assumption that "it's possible to aggregate thus it's OK to aggregate" is exactly the way normal people think (by which I mean, tongue-in-cheek, us), but corporate attorneys see all this in terms of power relationships and contracts. As far as they're concerned, the poster took pictures through their front windows, and they're damn well going to threaten him with kneecapping until he gives them his negatives.
Here's the published paper [PDF]: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/papers/Maitin-ShepardCus...
Google can do it because Facebook doesn't really want to go up against money in making this a test case, and Google has baskets of cash.

Facebook doesn't give a tinker's damn about prohibiting your value creation.
If they are released, even accidentally, or stolen, they cannot be enjoined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
Immortal Jellyfish: The Turritopsis Nutricola
That's exactly the reporting I mean. I've seen that same article (or blog posts linking back to it) cited as evidence of that (false) claim many times. It's exactly how and why I informed myself in the first place.

Even the title of the story is "Apple says jailbreaking is illegal". But it is regardless of what Apple said. It's a half-truth, and the half that's left out changes the implication of what is left. The lede repeats this. They also leave out the relevant detail that Apple's filing was a response to a proposed class of exemptions, not an activist effort on their part. Indeed, the relationship between the two documents is not made clear at all. Where you say "and Apple responded" in your summary, you're not getting that from the EFF's article. Read it again.

If the EFF claimed to be an unbiased news organization, I'd believe that it was a simple mistake, but they don't so I don't. They want to make Apple look like a big bad bully (which is their right and natural from their position, of course), but the way they chose to do so has perpetuated misinformation. I think that sucks rather independently of my disagreement with them.

I don't think it was intentional deception, just a nasty side effect of opinionated reporting. The EFF even hosts a copy of the same document under the link title Apple Reply to Proposed Jailbreaking Exemption (on this page http://www.eff.org/cases/2009-dmca-rulemaking), which manages to say in six words that the blog post managed not to at all.

So anyone who jailbreaks their iPhone should be considered a criminal?

I said I don't agree with the EFF. If someone has a better argument, I might agree with that. In principle, I don't agree with the notion that buying a device means you have the right to infringe on the copyright of the software it came with any more than buying a book gives you the right to infringe on the copyright of the text.
Still falls prey to other animals though :-P
What is lion haditat?
Doesn't apply. "If you collect information from users" is not equivalent to "if you collect information about users". Pete collected information about users that Facebook freely gave him without requiring any binding agreement from him at all.

It's probable they would lose. But it's far, far more probable that Pete would be bankrupt well in advance of that point in time, and that's how the court system works.
My Facebook Interview Saga
Don't know about the States, but where I'm from they're known as 'petrolheads' (i.e. those who truly appreciate driving only drive petrol (gasoline!!) cars and wouldn't be caught dead driving a diesel, or god forbid, a hybrid). I'm a petrolhead myself naturally. As regards manual transmission, I couldn't bear the thought of not being able to engine-brake in icy condiditons, slipping the engine into neutral and freewheeling down steep hills, dropping into 3rd and gunning past those annoying 'Sunday-afternoon' type drivers and articulated trucks. An a car's ECU will never outsmart the greatest computer in the world, the iPad. I mean, human brain.
Cool. Which college are you studying at?

I have a bunch of ideas. I'm sure every one does. I have become less of an idea person overtime because I know they are a dime a dozen. To me it's more important to have the right people to evolve and execute an idea.

I'm imagining a process where we meet once a week, brainstorm an idea, build a mock-up/prototype, test it and iterate. My experience tells me that many ideas will get thrown out of the window.

How do you feel about that?
> Information wants to be free.

I think the full quote is something like "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive". As I recall, it was about the dichotomy between the fact that you could copy bits for free, and that information was very valuable.
It's still Facebook's data (by which I mean "data that originated at Facebook"), and I guarantee you that their lawyers will still threaten a lawsuit. What do they have to lose?
I have a bunch of ideas. I'm sure every one does. I have become less of an idea person overtime because I know they are a dime a dozen. To me it's more important to have the right people to evolve and execute an idea.

I'm imagining a process where we meet once a week, brainstorm an idea, build a mock-up/prototype, test it and iterate. My experience tells me that many ideas will get thrown out of the window.

Do you know anyone who would be interested in doing that? Or should I change the process a bit.
I saw that too but I think that the reason that guy got kicked off the app store was for getting a lot of chargebacks. I think the people buying the app were confused as to the actual price because it's hardly the case that a game would cost $350 maybe $3.50. When most of the purchasers were all confused it hardly seems fair to extrapolate a unified theory about how bad the app store pricing is. But that is just my interpretation of the article.
A Re-Birth for Enterprise Software? [video]
A couple notes:

1. Load averages are not directly comparable across different versions of Unix's such as FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.

2. Load average is a good way to quickly check if there is anything else to look at.

However, a far better series of tools is sar plus iostat , vmstat etc. which should help you more quickly determine whether your problem is CPU, disk, or network IO .
Apple approved destinations, like the magical land with no porn, where storks deliver babies?
Barratry.
Agreed.

I was in Blacksburg at VT for five years, and there is a huge amount of talent in the engineering school and CS / math departments there. If DayOne is right in the CRC, it's a fertile ground for hiring great candidates. Best of luck to them, I'd love to hear some success stories!
MIT Engineering: Ask An Engineer
California Movie
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235994
Not true. Factory jobs have gone down, but production goes up. That's due to efficiency gains.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-n...
Dean Kamen at TEDMED 2009 (Story of Luke arm)
Why are you holding the contract? You're an airline hedging against rising oil prices? You're a multinational corporation locking in a reasonable exchange rate when dealing with overseas manufacturers? You're a speculator who thinks the market isn't properly anticipating the impact of a weather pattern? All these seem fairly reasonable to me.

I define a "flipper" as someone whose sole purpose in owning a security is to pass it off at a higher price to another "flipper" down the road.

It was an offhand comment and my terms were non-standard, I apologize. I wasn't so much defining "flipper" by the length of time one holds a security, but the motivation for doing so.

If most of the trading boils down to huge groups of firms selling back and forth to each other, it doesn't seem to matter to me whether the spreads shrink or not. It's a zero sum game and it's just a matter of one side ekeing out more money or the other.
Ytljit, an experimental Ruby native bytecode compiler
Chrome share gain outpaces browser rivals
I've encountered this. A project I worked on was a API site that helped members of another site track their account milestones, using info gathered via a public API. Though the information was all public and available without any authentication, some people felt like it was an invasion or privacy and that others would use it to 'spy' on them. We could have actually used more telling and personal info, however, and chose not to - if someone was really interested in gathering data about another member, they could have done a lot better than to use our site.

Same principle, anyhow... public data made more accessible was considered a privacy violation. This does make sense, as lowering the access barrier to make other people's data attainable quickly and easily has a significant impact on whether third parties will view it at all.
I think that shows that the author may be a poor interviewer (at least on a first glance).

It is the job of the interviewer to make the interviewee to feel at ease, and relaxed as much as possible.

Some people get very nervous in interviews, and panic a bit, and some of them can be very good engineers.

It seems the author's "surgically honing", is more of a "look at me, I know more than you do", ego stroking type of thing.

Since I do interview people often (not google, but another top company on the valley), I make sure to make people at ease.

When I was younger and stupid, my first instinct was to find the interviewee weakness and 'hone' on them.

Looking back, that was plain stupid. It helped me make myself feel good than actually do any good to the process. I gained later on some insight on my behavior once I was on the other side. Since then I made sure to be really really fair and unbiased on the questions I ask. You need to find both strengths and weaknesses of a candidate, but make sure not to trigger a panic induced 'coder's block'. Otherwise you failed as a interviewer.
When I was briefly involved in doing research as an undergrad, Pieter Abbeel (the Berkeley professor behind this robot) was my grad student advisor. Back then I was just trying to pick up dry-erase markers off a table, and even that was extraordinarily difficult to do. To me, this video is nothing short of mind-blowing.
Most people connect that word with basketball.
good move. :) I don't use my ipod while driving because I skip songs on it too much (no built-in ipod control in my 15 y/o celica).

And in fact - I'm pretty sure this would be illegal for me: Rule 299 of Victoria's road rules states that it is an offence to drive a motor vehicle with a "TV receiver or visual display unit" if the screen is visible to the driver of the car or "is likely to distract another driver". In-car navigation systems are exempt.

(( While it's a bit of a nanny-state law - I'm pretty much in favour))
I occasionally watch a video if the description is compelling enough, but more often than not the only videos you find are humorous or better off being text. I enable flash so rarely these days that I might as well uninstall it. Also, the majority of the videos I run across are on YouTube anyways, and other than them the three sources of video I use the most are netflix, Hulu, and TED, all if which are iPad compatible.
"The main thing I get is that this guy is thinking about UI optimization in terms of how can the UI be optimized for the guy implementing it, rather than how the UI can be optimized for the person using it, which is exactly the wrong way to think about optimization."

Agree 100%. The boogers don't give you any context at all, this was a big improvement.
The Next Crisis: Municipal Markets
Supply Demanded
We get a different CNN in Europe which seems to contain more news and less celebrity gossip. It is actually worth viewing.
Maybe they dusted off the old Newton code?
Committees are good for one thing: making sure that risky decisions aren't made. In some cases that can be good - for example, in some cases (eg: safety committees) risky == bad.

Note: Obviously, in some cases risky == good, too

Note 2: Group-think (eg, bay-of-pigs) is a counter example.
..do yourself a favor and buy this thing now or you'll be screwing yourself out of 1-2 years of an awesome cutting edge experience.

And how much cash, awesome sunsets, emotional epiphanies or whatever is this "cutting edge experience" worth??

You're saying I'll missing out terribly on the opportunity to ... not do very much?
New Baseball Season Brings Tech to Track Player Skills
"Average life span has grown at rate 6 hours per day"
A Primer on the Great Proton Smashup
I think you missed my point. Concern about killing innocent Iraqis is far, far off from the American political center. I suspect the army is actually held to higher moral standards than the average American citizen would choose to enforce. Americans are strongly biased to empathize with our own troops' fears and frustrations and to blame Iraqis for any encounters that end badly. For instance, in the case of shooting up the van and the people who tried to help the wounded man, we would say that they didn't do anything to identify themselves as not being insurgents. Plus, they were clearly scared and in a hurry, so they knew they were putting themselves in danger and were therefore responsible for the consequences. There are all kinds of ways to make excuses and avoid siding with savage foreigners against our poor scared boys. Should Americans stand up to their government and demand what they want? Between the opinions expressed by Americans on this page and the opinions expressed by the soldiers in the video, the (mythical and/or aggregate) will of the American people is closer to the latter, so mass democratic action would not help anything.
Amazon.com seeks 'seasonal campers' for holiday workforce
In my opinion original (i.e. "wordy") sentences are much better. Too many technical books that are dry. Keep it wordy please!

Short & concise isn't fun after 100th page...
Was there "a commercial real estate bubble in India too"?
What do you consider "bullshit interview questions"? In my interview I didn't get any of the "how many pennies would fit in the pockets of all the window washers in Seattle"-type questions.
One of the gentlemen who run Directed Edge, the recommendation-engine-as-a-service startup, pointed me to his list of recommendations research at Mendeley:

http://www.mendeley.com/collections/796791/Recommendations-r...

(I suspect "all the good research from the past N years" is a broader answer than you were looking for, but perhaps this will be generally useful.)
Anyone who's ever worked retail on the fitting-room -> shelf/hanger treadmill is now thinking feverish thoughts...

Edit: Oh. Swing and miss! Feverish was the wrong word. I was not at all implying that this is a "teh robots took our yooobbss" scenario, rather, as someone who has folded and restocked many shirts, I'm excited about the prospect that this kind of drudgework could be spared us by robots.

Philosophically, I think this is a very good thing. Sure robots do more important things than fold shirts, but this kind of AI is an important baby step to a much better world for people.
> Sadly, 98.5% of Americans still wanted this war, since they voted for Obama or McCain.

Blatantly wrong. You are throwing away the rest of your point with this garbage.
good catch - that's no camera.
I agree that quality takes precedence over speed, any day. Having said that, I would like to make the following points:

1) From the experience of close friends, it is not an extra week. It is typically at least an extra month. Some times it's even longer.

2) It is not clear to me whether the extra time is being spent on improving the selection or simply being wasted because everyone on the committee has other things to do which introduces delay in reaching quorum+agreement.As an outsider there is no way for me to tell one way or the other, but it's something for Google to think about.

3) Humans hate uncertainty, especially in important life decisions. Many people, given a choice between an uncertain prospect of getting a job at Google and a certain job at a company that is slightly worse than Google, will choose certainty. And there are many companies who are not obviously worse than Google competing for the top talent.
thanks for this link to another HN page involving the exact same video with zero discussion on it.
As bad as smartphones were before Apple came along with the iPhone, car audio/navigation is a thousand times worse. Whoever turns out to be the Apple of autosound will have a license to print money.
posted 17 minutes ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/middleeast/06baghdad...
Is Apple destroying a generation of tech whizzes?
You mean CNN International? I think it's a pile of garbage that's full of stuff like "CNN Backstory", "iReport" and that really, really annoying Richard Quest guy who looks like the freaky G-Man character from the Half Life games:

G-Man:

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/images/7/78/Gman.jpg

Richard Quest:

http://images.hollywoodgrind.com:9000/images/2008/4/richard-...

Also, what the fock ish with my achent? Shoundz like I just came from the dentisht.
I've seen some weirdness with my signal meter today, but haven't seen network performance be too bad. Maybe just a problem with the meter data/display thereof?
HP Slate to cost $549, have 1.6GHz Atom Z530, 5 hour battery?
It's so astonishing that what takes this robot over an hour and a half to do can be processed by our brains in a fraction of a second. I am looking forward to being witness to the tightening of that gap.
There's a great comment over there:

"Do you know what iPods have now? Wireless and more space than a Nomad! Not only was he correct about the iPod, but his comment directed Apple on the course that ultimately led to the iPhone. You fanboys owe Rob Malda for everything."

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1607692&cid=31...
Is it just me or does this guy look like Mack from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia?
CNN has it on the front page now
Really? robots already "do" a whole lot more important things than folding clothes and they have "threatened" industries and work sectors far more significant than that.

You must think the AIBO also threatens the ailing dog-pound, and animal shelter "industries" ..
this doesn't actually tell you anything about the processor, just that it's in the package, under two ram dies, and that it's single core "so must be an a8".
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET introduces Server Pools for Web Applications
The US Army released some lightly redacted versions of the reports on its investigations (linked by Salon: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/04/05/wikil...)

http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%2...

In hindsight there were clearly mistakes made, but it looks like the Army took the incident pretty seriously, and there was no big cover-up. One also gets a bit of a sense from those reports of the broader context in which the events were happening, which the video on its own does not show.

I'm not so sure that the histrionics from Wikileaks does anyone much good.
It's currently the #2 story on Google News.
You can't copyright somebody's name and address, but you can copyright a map showing where everybody lives. That actually sounds like what Pete was doing, but Facebook could make similar claims about some of the information they provide.

Everything from stock prices to the temperature is in theory uncopyrightable, but you can still run into trouble if you just scrape some site and republish it.
Does anyone else feel that Reddit is becoming increasingly hostile as of late?
I had a strangely similar problem to this in college with the network admins and filesystem permissions.

This was back in the day when everybody was using the unix network (pine for email, etc). Many people had webpages on their university accounts and would also store homework online. A very popular thing to do was to go into someone else's home directory and copy their .fvwmrc or .bashrc file (yes this was a few years ago).

The IT people came up with a new policy that said you were not allowed to look into other people's directories without explicit (possibly written) permission from the owner. They said that copying files could be considered "cheating" and possibly copyright infringement and you'd be referred to the university disciplinary court. I assume this all stemmed from fear of cheating.

In any event, I got into a long debate with the IT people about the whole point of unix file permissions. Basically: if you don't want people to look at your stuff, don't let them. As you might guess, when dealing with university IT, I was on the losing end of the argument.
Just a small nitpick, it's not FOIR it's FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act)
Wow. I didn't realize an innocent question would get hated on.