skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Hardware is not the center of attention anymore.

The iPad is all about hardware ... all of Apple's products are about making hardware look sexy and trendy, even without the UI. Apple doesn't mention the internals because Apple products are often under-powered compared to similar-costing competitors.

>> The UI is everything

I would say that the looks of the UI are everything, to your average consumer. As sad as it is, the visuals are what drive customers to new operating systems (e.g. Aero), new versions of software (e.g. the Ribbon in Office), etc. Microsoft puts lots of new behind-the-scenes innovations in each new OS, but nothing sways customers more than screenshots -- often the least relevant part of the operating system.
Light weight in the sense that adding Latex formatting to a text document is easy and does not (much) get n the way of writing. Also, moving material around, referring to figures, sections, etc. is all easy. I have not tweaked my Latex setup in a long time.
I've had 3 good experiences plus many horrendous, horrible, and painful experiences that make me totally dubious of all recruiters. As a matter of fact I now carry a copy of my resume to all interviews. However, to answer the question:

- A two guy recruiting shop. They were utterly clueless as to what made a good programmer but they had hearts of gold. They showed you what they were sending over to the companies before they sent it and gave mock interviews to their candidates.

- A nice guy from Aerotek who even tried to help get the other half a job in the neighborhood of an offer letter. He was the 2nd recruiter who didn't "enhance" or "embellish" my resume other than adding the "aerotek" thing they all do.

- A four person shop that pre-screened candidates with knowledgeable questions about programming. I couldn't tell if they understood the answers but I liked the effort. Alas, all they had were .NET jobs and I'm not .NET programmer.

I've also had conversations with another head hunter from a different industry that does his own thing, the same way he's been doing it for 30+ years.
I'm in LA and felt it. It was the longest quake I've ever been in, really wavy and rolling.
Given a theoretical million articles, it makes perfect sense to try and remove the articles which you're least likely to be interested in so you've a higher chance of seeing the articles which you will be interested in. You can't brain filter them all, so you will always end up applying some sort of automatic filter which is not context aware.
3D screens coming to mobile phones this year-- without the need for glasses
Beliefs, Not Companies, are “Too Big to Fail”
Give it 10 years, and when the LHC spawns a dimensional rift connecting us to Xen, I guarantee at least one man will come forward and say, "I can't believe nobody else saw it coming". He will be treated like a prophet, when in reality he was just a lucky alarmist.

Either that, or he will be me- a lucky satirist.
does this mean that any website can potentially run code as root on my iPad?
I hesitate to believe the numbers for the iPad and the Kindle are that similar. For starters, the iPad has a more sophisticated processor, and the battery has 4.3x the capacity of the kindle battery (which suggests 4.3x the rare compounds if the batteries are made with similar tech).

Add on power consumption during reading, and things are even more different; the Kindle can be read for 2 weeks on one charge. 24 hours x 14 = 336 hours. The iPad uses the same juice in just 10 hours / (4.3x as large) = 2.3 hours

In other news, I most certainly will be reading more than 50 books in the lifetime of my Kindle, so hooray :)
Or no, you can just purchase a subscription directly from inside the app.
Way to absolutely miss the point. The previous poster is speaking about code generation, particularly that of generating appropriate SQL statements for given programs. He mentions a specific Lisp library as one solution and suggests ORM as another. Prepared statements are a better solution if the database supports them, yes, though occasionally, you might want to do more than just plug in search values.

When you attempt to make a language more like English, you inadvertently make it's parse tree more complex, therefore making attempts to manipulate that code more difficult. SQL, which is often generated on the fly, is affected by this.
From a user perspective, Blender seems to have cleaner code behind it than most of the commercial 3D apps; it starts faster, it crashes less, and I haven't encountered bugs in functionality.

As for the interface - I find it dire for detailed editing tasks(I opt to use Wings for modelling) but not too bad for managing the overall scene, applying materials, lighting, compositing, etc. I speak as someone who's invested a bare minimum of time into properly learning to use it.
Harvard Grad on Why MBAs Stumble Off the Blocks
Yeah, I feel you. I'm looking at http://99designs.com/ and http://www.deviantart.com/ right now.
I think the point of "it's fairly well-established" is that there have been studies. And that is definitely consistent with reality: are their more female novelists, poets, or cryptographers? Your sample size of one is interesting, but not enough. (I, too, am a guy who did better on the verbal portion of the SAT.)
Looking back at the original article it suggests that GS was making collateral calls regularly:

"Goldman checked the market prices daily and made numerous collateral calls on AIG beginning in mid-2007. By September 2008, Goldman had $7.5 billion of AIG's money and claimed it was owed an additional $2.5 billion"

This suggests that it wasn't all in one go, but over a year.
This is from Goldman. Not sure what the source of the NYTimes article is.

"It should NOT be the US taxpayer's problem"
The government decided that AIG was too big too fail and it would back AIG obligations 100% to prevent a meltdown in the economy.

Why should GS then write-off money owed to it by AIG (based on a contract)?
Pimp or John?
Maybe the downvotes are for the second comment.
This could perhaps provide a second wind to space development.

The Air Force has the kind of funding NASA can only dream of anymore, and as another bright side it seems to me the US armed forces are typically excessively rigorous, which might help prevent the flaws that have been giving space flight such a bad rep.

One thing definitely puts a different spin on it though- NASA was a research organization, developing tech and shooting for the moon as an ends in and of itself, while the Air Force is armed forces...
Five developers is the maximum that I will put on a project. That doesn't mean the larger hunk of software doesn't have other teams working on it; just that they need to be separated by a well defined API (service based or otherwise). If the project isn't big enough yet then you don't need that many developers.

So yeah, I agree.
How would you propose making IPv6 compatible with IPv4? Recall that every IPv4 application in the history of Berkeley Sockets has 32-bit address buffers hardcoded into the binary.
The EFF reported that as if Apple were trying to get the law changed, but it was in fact the EFF proposing a change.

I don't see that. The EFF's statement at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking... agrees with your account: they asked the Copyright Office for an exemption for jailbreaking (which probably is illegal under the DMCA), and Apple responded saying that jailbreaking is and should remain illegal.

To be frank, I don't agree with the EFF

Really. So anyone who jailbreaks their iPhone should be considered a criminal?
A lot of reasons can sound totally justified in retrospect. "The Colts will win the Super Bowl because they have superior talent." "The Saints will win the Super Bowl because the Colts' ego will go to their head." A lot of people take actions and have reasons for them -- when those actions turn out to be right, the reasons are often given undue credibility.
I saw Jake give this talk at the Seattle Hadoop/NoSQL/Scalability meetup last week. It really opened my eyes about the usefulness of linear algebra.
Could you source that fact? That seems totally unbelievable to me.

Maybe people are buying pre-jailbroken phones for carrier reasons?
6 developers makes 3 pairs.
In Quest of Innovation — A Practical Guide
You Are Not a Gadget- A Case Against Web 2.0
Visually:

http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/latest.htm

That's the most big blue & red boxes I've ever seen on one of the USGS California maps...
Unit of Sense
You should sell this to microsoft for millions.
But is that necessarily true? Is it possible that there is a middle ground between predator style recruiting and large staffing companies (not that they can't be evil but in that their placement is often more long term because they manage your contract)?
I'm not big on the pair thing; not saying it doesn't work for a lot of people but I just don't care for it in my projects. I like it for doing code reviews or going through to tighten things up, but not as an all-the-time development strategy.
Perhaps because the article has the title "why _men_ don't listen".
I guess 6 coders is kind of like 100 ninjas.

In other news, I don't understand why so many people would up-vote a post which is has almost no content and is ostensibly promotional.
Is there an easy way to get 'ls' to use this ordering?
Felt it in north Phoenix for about 20 seconds.
If that's the case then yes, yes it does, so Apple will fix this like they did when that was the case back with the iPhone.
No way! Another review. Sweet baby Jesus!
Opportunity Cost
How to set up USPS Shipping for your Magento stores
It gets exactly 6 points
It's only applying the regex against the articlee title, no? One would hope, at least :)
Skip to the last few paragraphs and the comments, then if it seems interesting read the rest.
I prefer webrat ( http://github.com/brynary/webrat ) for this type of testing if I'm using Ruby. You can use a browser if you want, or just run browserless for tests that don't rely on javascript.
Only if you exclude the AIG bailout (much of which went directly to the banks as counterparties) from the figures...
I can't imagine this would work out well if he had to do his own memory management.
Cory seems to believe that companies are not in the business of making money, but rather are in the business of controlling peoples' lives as totally as possible, and proceeds from there.

Not at all. I don't think Apple wants closed systems for their own sake, but I do think they believe that closed systems will be more profitable for them. The end result is the same.
The results are actually pretty shocking to me. I'm used to pop-science works stretching their references, glossing over caveats, extrapolating too much, etc., but some of the references here look blatantly fraudulent.

Citing a study that looked at gender-related hearing differences of stroke victims in their 50s and 60s as evidence that typical teenagers have gender differences in hearing is hard to interpret as merely a mistake or exaggeration, unless the author made an error in their citation manager and put the completely wrong study down.
To save you all some time, the author hasn't really raised anything a bajillion other people haven't raised.

Well, he does bring up something most others haven't: he insinuates that iPad users have the computing needs of a 3 year-old.
That was when the market meltdown was already apparent. Those collateral calls from 2007 to 2008 amounts to a minor 2.5 out of 13 billion. $2.5 billion did not make AIG insolvent. $13 billion did.

The source is from Burry, the first person to start buying CDS's in 2005. He even bought some from GS. You can't really expect GS to be honest here when their reputation is on the line.

And yes, GS should have written it down as a loss. Because if it was you in their shoes, you would have been forced to eat the losses since you don't have their government connections. Why does GS get a free pass?
A fairly minor point of the video, but interesting for me, was when he spoke about paranoia and bound checking. I often cannot decide if I should check if strings are NULL, numbers are negative, files are open/closed, etc, etc. I'm often unsure if I should spend, often long stretches of, time worrying about every possible boundary condition of all my variables, which is no simple task when dealing with constructs more complex than integers. When I do this it becomes apparent my functions are getting larger and larger, however; more return values, more if clauses, etc, etc. He offers no solution, but suggests there's a tradeoff, which is strangely reassuring. The problem doesn't make me feel so bad, now I hear that from him. More and more I'm coming to the conclusion it's best to transfer all that checking to a wrapper function, or leave it to the function's user, which will have to become, in effect, the wrapper function.
I was driving from encinitas on my way home. Felt the aftershocks when I got home!
Sure node.js is asynchronous, fast, and fun to work with like rails. I downvoted you because your comment was nearly useless to someone who didn't already know what you were talking about. If you've got some advice, provide supporting information.
This is ridiculous.

Let's just deconstruct it:

"Do you like a linear approach for doing things? If so, the iPad is perfect for you."

I can already feel the condescension.

"Everything about the iPad interface is linear. Every desired final action is accomplished through a series of taps."

As opposed to what, chords? Those are the only non-linear interface I know of... otherwise most inputs are processed sequentially in time.

"Want to read a book? Cool. Tap the home button. Tap the iBook app. Tap the library view. Tap the book you want to read."

As opposed to...? What? Seriously. Someone help me out here. Someone name a better way to launch a book in a reader. Would "tapping" each key to spell the command to launch your uber-l33t CLI reader and the path to the book be better? Would "tapping" a combination of keys to bring up your GUI app launcher and then "tapping" the first few chars of the book and "tapping" enter be demonstrably better?

"Hopefully, you’re getting the point. Some will call this brilliant. I call it rudimentary and lacking, especially when you consider that you’ll be doing a lot of tapping since there is STILL no multi-tasking functionality. Yes, just like the iPhone, you can’t switch between apps."

You can switch between apps... Any app worth its salt saves and resumes its state as quickly as possible.

"If you’re watching a movie and want to tweet a comment about it, you’ll need to exit the movie app, switch to the twitter app, tweet away, close the twitter app, re-launch the movie app, tap to resume the movie…etc."

Again, the alternative is...? Pausing the move, switching to the Twitter app, tweeting, and then switching to the movie app? What? You think you can tweet without pausing? Well I hope you stay off the road, because I bet you think you have better multi-tasking skills than the average luser and can text and drive just fine thank you very much, don't you?
Those were the days...
Argh. Nothing against the submitter since this is relevant to HN, but for those of us who truly feel that every single relevant thought regarding the iPad has already been uttered and heard, it would do us a huge favor to mark iPad submissions as such.

I'm a fan of the device, I'll be getting my 3G one soon, but for the love of all that is holy, make the voices stop!
If the Colts did indeed have superior talent and then win the super bowl then obviously the reason was justified. If the Colts' ego is obviously making them overconfident and does indeed go to their head and cost them the game then again the reason is justified.

The point is that the reason isn't justified because the person correctly predicted an outcome. The reason is justified because the reason was based on true fact and is demonstrably capable of causing the effect.

Now if the Colts win the super bowl despite having worse talent because the opposing Saints team members all got drunk the night before and were playing with hangovers, then you would be justified in saying the predictor was lucky. It's not enough to say someone could have been lucky and then dismiss them. You should show they were lucky or accept they were correct in their reasoning.
Unfortunately maven has a reputation in the "enterprise". So, one of my coworkers chose it as a build & configuration tool for a production system which is physically firewalled. He happily ignored fact that maven won't be able to download dependencies.

Yeah, production system had to be built on place and subsequent configuration changes have to be driven by maven (think of all mandays purchased so that devs could write their plugins for stuff which could be done in makefiles in minutes).

So how this guy delivered his app to production? By uploading about 600MB of .m2/repository.

Guess what. Nobody complained.

Luckily I don't contract that company anymore.
Blenders interface is built with power users in mind. They've made some progress in reducing how steep the learning curve but they still have a ways to go.

Your right about how clean/responsive and fast it is. They have justifiable pride in how many features they include in such a small binary. When I was hacking on it Blender weighed in at under 10 megabytes with features other apps needed 100s of megabytes to provide. I think they still come in under 20 but I haven't checked in a while.
The ribbon is about a lot more than just looks - it finally groups like operations into clusters that account for Fitt's Law - as does the big "Office" button on the top left corner now. It's disingenuous to claim that Office's new UI is primarily a visual facelift - ditto for Aero (again, many Fitt's Law improvements among other tangible, quantifiable changes).

I think you're infantilizing the consumer too much - your users are a lot more than dumb bricks that react to "Ooooh Shiny!". When geeks (more specifically, geeks who have no appreciation for UI) rant about how people buy the shiny UI, they're not really grokking the fact that people like it not because it spins and moves, but because it actually better conforms to how they want their computers to work. Animation between switching windows? Geeks call it eye candy, I call it necessary preservation of context.
A Sobering View Of Macro Economic Reality
I didn't think the post was particularly useful for startups, so here's my take.

Opportunity cost is basically what you give up when you decide to take one option over another. Costs aren't limited to literal cash outlays, but usually more importantly include costs regarding time, focus, and lots of other intangibles. For example, lets say you decide to go to grad school instead of taking a job. An opportunity cost analysis shows you'd might be giving up a $60k/year job, an experience working with a top firm, networking opportunities with colleagues, ability to own a car, affording rent to live on your own, etc.

For early startups, you can use opportunity cost to help weigh which direction to take your company. Using opportunity cost can help you look at what your giving up when you forgo one option for another. Its really the strategic non-tangibles that matter most, so don't forget to consider things like happiness, employee morale, product focus, etc.
80% of the subprime mortgages came from meeting Community Reinvestment Act standards

Where did you get that number from? I was under the impression that this whole argument is a Limbaugh-Beck-Hannity canard. The last reference I heard to it was a few days ago in Michael Lewis' interview with Diane Rehm, where he said the impact of this law on the financial collapse was negligible.
Great! The FAA needs a new radar system. You six can tackle the software portion. Let me know when you're done.
I think that by linear he means there's only one way to get there - that exact sequence. You cannot get there via a custom bookmark, or from another application that somehow links to the book, or by having many instances open with different books and by app switching.

That said - I don't know if that's true, but that's how I understood him. This way it kind of makes sense to complain about linear approach. Can anyone confirm?
USB Power 5V or 12V
Cody Brocious (HN's Daeken) interviewed on StartupAid at 6:30PM PST
This looks very interesting and substantial, but I don't understand it. What are the standard texts one should read in order to gain the necessary background?
The Superstar Effect
Late Bloomers in Science, Engineering, and Entrepreneurship
The Age of Frugality takes a holiday
It is a fucking conspiracy. fed is run by the banks, banks didn't want fed to intervene bc they were making big bonuses and it was good for the people there. duh.

This is an obvious case of corruption of our government. No one was regulating because they didn't want to regulate it.

This is why there needs to be things like campaign finance reform and people should seriously go to jail without chance of being pardoned for these types of crimes.

Willful ignorance of this shit should have been considered aiding & abetting theft.

But no, no one will go to jail because the rich and powerful never go to jail. They didn't get rich and powerful by not being corrupt.
The one problem with using Clojure on App Engine is that the time for a "loading request" is at least 5 seconds. It makes your app look bad for the random user stuck on the loading request.
America is about to undertake "its biggest transformation in decades"
Even if it's what he was saying, the OS supports custom URL schemas for just this purpose. I used custom URLs to jump to records in our app from other places in the system. Granted, it's not a quick keystroke or an on-screen quick-launch bar, but it works.
Brain Damage Prevents Moral Judgment Of Intent
The unreasonable effectiveness of data
Datalog is more or less equivalent to SQL with recursion. I don't know of any serious, database-backed implementations but there are a lot of in-memory implementations and some interesting extensions for distributed databases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog
Control Pong with your face
Internet of Things: Augmented Reality
go fuck yourself guy who down-voted me, you are part of the willful ignorance.

Greenspan was a goddamned Rayndian.
Stephen Friedman had super strong ties to goldman sachs,
In fact, almost everyone high up in the fed has ties to banking in one form or another.
None of the people involved are even interested fair in regulation.

I don't understand why this is controversial.
it is a fucking conspiracy and I'm calling it as it is.

Would my post have been better if I had suggested execution, or is the real reason it is downvoted because it is unpopular to call something a conspiracy?

we all tell ourselves these fairy tales about how the world is fair and there are no conspiracies and closed door deals between those in power, but it is all a lie.
Fly-by-night brokers were writing mortgages for anyone who could fog a mirror, and not because the CRA forced them to. They weren't banks, the CRA didn't even apply to them. They wrote the mortgages because every single one was quickly profitable. If you know Wall Street is eager to buy every MBS anyone can put together, and it no longer matters to you how stupid those loans are (because you won't be on the hook for any of them and you know some bent appraisers), you want to write as many mortgages as you can possibly unload before the music stops.

Even for the banks to which the CRA did apply, it required the same lending standards for buyers in redlined neighborhoods, not lower standards.
Nice presentation - I had not played with Mahout for a long while, but I just installed the new version and reviewed the docs for clustering data in Solr indices - really useful!
Yes, there is always some conspiracy, but calling it a conspiracy is not nearly enough to actually explain the situation and your gut reaction is lowering the quality of conversation. Also the threat of jail is not enough to fix the problem.