skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, one could argue that, even if the careers suck, science/technology has a big impact on people's lives, so if it's gender-imbalanced that might lead to gender-imbalanced impacts on even people not in the field, as they're stuck using tech designed exclusively by men. On the other hand, that sort of ends-focused argument isn't a very good reason for any actual women to go into the field, unless they're particularly altruistic and doing it to better society.

But yeah, I think these debates do tend to assume that STEM careers are desirable, which is why there is no similar hand-wringing about how few women get construction jobs (<10% women). Certainly they're well paid, which is probably the biggest reason STEM careers are seen as better than construction jobs, given that level of pay has become close to an exclusive measure of job desirability (e.g. we judge colleges and majors by average starting pay on graduation).
I beg to differ with the hype that 'everyone is getting one'. I know LOADS of people (tech people, even ObjC devs) who are not getting one - either they don't want one from the first production run or they don't want one at all.

I'm building an iPad-orientated site for launch but I'm happy using the SDK and don't have any interest in actually owning one.
I met him on the BART once, when I was 14 years old. I shook his hand, then walked away. I am such a nerd.
It's also almost like it would be logistically inefficient to stockpile enough product ensure 100% availability on launch day.
You should add a poll option for "Design" and/or "UX."
And then, when one of those non-technical users buys a "500GB hard drive", they'll actually be "getting" 500GB [according to their computer], instead of only 465.6. That oughta make everyone's lives a bit less anxietal.
Compilers

javascript
A further problem with the "STEM has a big impact on people's lives" thesis (as a motivator for going into it) is that the odds of you making a really big difference are low and seriously unpredictable. Being perfectly prepared to figure out the structure and semi-synthesis of penicillin does you little good if you show up on the scene a few years after someone else did it....
Ask HN: Where are the Wakemate reviews?
I am so close to buying a Wakemate. I'm completely sold on the concept and it presents a compelling value proposition: sleep better, without taking meds, for $50.

However, I can't seem to find any actual hands-on reviews of the device. The website says the first devices shipped in January. Has anyone here used a Wakemate? Would you care to enlighten me about your experiences with it?
I'm not following iPhone / appmarket news, but last I heard people had problems with (for example) camera apps rejected because they duplicate existing functionality. If it's not the case anymore, I stand corrected.

About .doc files though - I can also open them in OpenOffice on my box. But many lecturers sent me documents which were displayed completely incorrectly and contain auto-shape created graphs. Most students don't care either. That means I have to find MS Word to read them anyways. I don't expect this to be any better on iPhone/iPad, unless you can run OO or MS software on them.
Self-taught? Uni course? What resources are you using? etc.
Just-in-time inventory?
you don't even have to think about schemas or SQL, you can focus completely in whatever your language of choice is.
How about malware? You're practically immune compared to Windows.
This is like the half metrication of the UK. You end up with 2 systems, and twice as much confusion.

Base 2 is far more logical and useful IMHO :/

Wouldn't it be so much simpler if humans had evolved to have 16 fingers instead of 10...
Wow, really nice looking (much better then shapado or even stackoverflow)!
I think you've done an amazing job.
A video showing one of the games would get me to want it more.
There was demand for a pocket-sized music device over 20 years ago. The Sony Walkman was a success which was followed by the proprietary Sony MiniDisc format which flopped. Then iRiver and Phillips had crappy mp3 players. The iPod was the first portable music player since the Walkman that was a success.

I am not prescient, the iPad may be a huge success, but there currently not a large market for tablets. There were large markets for portable music players and smart phones when Apple entered those fields.
Scarcity is a good business model. When it happens all the time its not a bad sales projection, its a business model.

Apple marketing is very predictable these days.

1) Create a new product.

2) Release controlled leaks and rumors.

3) Make a well orchestrated, public release in front of media.

4) Announce a release date and allow pre-order.

5) Announce inventory ran out, regardless of the volume of sales, before the official release date.
Google Wave document format released
Well paid compared to consruction jobs, certainly, but not well paid at all when you look at lifetime earnings. All those years spend as a starving grad student and then poorly paid itinerant post-doc are bad, and if you don't get tenure it's game over for your career, at least as a higher level well paid professor.

It was better when I started playing the game in the late '70s (people weren't parked in post-doc purgatory for hardly as long), but I was under no illusions that I was going to make much money (I pursued it because I had a calling, one I realized in 1st grade).

We ought to mention the elephant in the room: the NSF et. al. decided in the '80s? that they wanted to keep the cost of science low so they pumped the supply big time, resulting in part in the mess we see today. I would have just missed that if finances hadn't brought my budding career as a scientist to a brutal end in 1980.
you shouldn't...go sign a term sheet with someone you can't trust to be reasonable in round 2 negotiations because I'm not a good speller... i love it when snarky people on hacker news diminish honest and candid advice through the criticism of inane points.
I live in a third world country so at least my time is pretty cheap compared to a license.

Some hours reading the manual, web searching or asking in forums vs (26 8-hours working days) x ($15[The average income in my region]).*

Most people use Windows but have it unlicensed. I am not rich so yeah Linux look dirt cheap to me and I don't even use Linux I use OpenBSD. I definitely think the government should push open source in all areas we would be better off. Right now kids are learning to use Windows XP, Microsoft Office, Coral Draw, Flash and Visual basic 6. I have to remark that they are learning all this stuff in fairly mediocre way. Also don't forget government and public institutions sites that are non standards compliant and flash heavy.

*In my comparison $1 = 10 Pesos. The price of Windows 7 Ultimate is 4,004.17 Pesos in Mexico.
I'm not sure if you were just curious, or were you trying to prove that nginx is right in optimising this. But since we have the figures - assuming strcmp takes 37ns, we could estimate that wikipedia spent whole 13 seconds parsing the request verb each day in 2008 (assuming 350M visits). Cutting it down by half would definitely be worth the programming time... not.
What's painful and embarrassing is when somebody who didn't actually read the article calls it "painful and embarrassing".

> Patterns are still patterns whether you acknowledge them or not, and they are not defined by the LOC or number of classes they require in language X.

> Refusing to admit that patterns are used hurts your development team and the community, because patterns (simply identifying them) serve a very important purpose.

> Well, design patterns are just like [agile] metaphors, but they are meant for code, not UI.

> For instance, consider the factory pattern versus the builder pattern. Both are concerned with creating objects, but a builder is also concerned with the assembling of the object. This is a relatively subtle but pretty noticeable difference. Telling someone you are using a "builder pattern" should immediately ring a bell in their heads saying, "oh, it’s not just a factory".

Patterns are specific nomenclature not implementation.
how to stop wasting time online.
Separate from the whole open vs. closed debate is the matter of usability and design.

Simply stated, Apple products are the best at this for most products. Developers are driven to the quality of the environment and the subsequent quality of the products that they'll be making.

I work mostly in the enterprises realm where it's easy to see that the baseline "quality" of the ecosystem (mostly Microsoft, but also other related stuff) affects the quality of the the products built around it.

A quick glance at the products built around the Apple ecosystem shows a stark difference. Ever since I started bringing my Mac to work (since the switch to the Intel processor), the difference has been even more obvious to me.

I think that in this instance, open vs. closed is a means to an end. If people never had any problems with how Microsoft stuff worked, then no one would have been griping about their stuff being closed. And since Apple stuff is generally pretty good, people are willing to forgo the "closed" ecosystem since they are getting what they need out of it.

I also think that the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem is a little overstated. For instance: it's true that the iPhone app store has pretty draconian policies, but on the other hand, nobody has to truly go through it to get an app onto the iPhone. They could just make a web app. However, people choose to create native iPhone apps because they work better. But then again, they probably work better because Apple tends to enforce their strict policies.
My boss does this. Sounds fairly sensible if you often talk on the phone (and don't have a headset so you can talk on one and look at it at the same time).

Would be nice if you could tether an iPod touch to one as a cheaper sidekick for data while talking on the phone one. I guess that will be less desirable with a 3G iPad as sidekick.
It's going to be a yelp vs. facebook showdown.
I'm going to start calling this claim that "its-the-computer-for-most-people-since-most-people-don't-seriously-use-computers" fallacy.

Even if what most people use a computer for doesn't seem serious, they do it seriously and don't want to have to stop doing it after ten minutes because their machine is completely unergonomic (the Ipad is 1.5 pounds, trying holding that with one hand http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/)

Just as much, if you peel students, office workers, tech professionals and artists away from "everyone", you've got a smaller "everyone" than you'd think (especially office workers). A lot of people don't do that much word processing on their machines. But a lot of people would unhappy if they couldn't do any word processing on their machine.

The Internet has been more successful than any walled garden because people's needs are actually more varied than concept "consumer-end" allows for. I expect the Ipad's failure to reinforce this concept.
Because no one ever held a book steady in their hand for more than 15-20 minutes without getting tired...

Hell, I've watched whole TV shows on the bus with my iPod Touch. And don't get me started on games. There will be plenty of problems with the device, it's a 1.0, but there will be plenty of people really, really happy with it.
I'm not getting one, and it's not just because I barely earn enough to pay rent. I don't know what I would do with it. I have a laptop that I haven't even booted up in a year. I might get around to making some apps for it once Flash CS5 comes out with iPhone app export. I'd rather not bother with objective-C if I don't have to.
Phony Products Get Energy Star Approval
Nah, I think a mac netbook is what the iPad should have been!
It certainly seems that the iPad will be a hit. I'm planning to spend most of April 3rd at the Apple store in my mall. I can't wait to just touch one!

But I'm not going to buy one until the 3G version is out later in April. (The cheap 3G service is just too compelling to pass up.)
I've found "Thy Hand, Great Anarch!" by Nirad Chaudhuri to be a very interesting source. He was an Indian civil servant who lived through the independence movement. He has unkind words for both the British and the nationalists alike.

Let me ask, since you seem quite knowledgeable - do you think the British meant well in India, or not? It's fashionable these days to bash colonialism, but my understanding is that the British generally tried to do right by the people they governed.

Chaudhuri's take is pretty interesting. He found most administrators to be generally capable and well meaning. The ex-patriots living in India he found to be quite patronizing and racist. They may have been well meaning, but in that "Bauno cares about Africa" sort of way.

GDP stats are created in a political sausage factory, you cannot take claims of "12% growth" or of shrinking GDP at anything like face value.

It's not fair to compare India to Japan, because Japan had a lot of human and cultural capital that India did not have. Japan's low GDP in 1945 was a result of war time destruction, before the war it was an industrialized country that already was way ahead of India.

But it's also not fair to compare present India to colonial India, and claim that the current government is better because certain indicators are better now. Life expectancy went up because of medical advances in other nations (penicillin, etc) that India imported. We have no definitive way of knowing how a 2010 British ruled India would compare to the actual India. But we do know that the change in government produced immediate political change that generally resulted in policies that slowed growth.
We should use imperial units since they're more natural/intuitive/(insert rationalization here):

1 InchByte = 2.54 bytes = approximately pi bits (Edit: oops, it's about 20 bits. I divided where I should have multiplied.)

1 FootByte = 30.5 bytes

1 YardByte = 91.4 bytes

1 RodByte = 503 bytes

1 MileByte = 160,934 bytes

1 AUByte = 14.7 terabytes

1 LightYearByte = 841 petabytes

So 1 megabyte is almost exactly 2^15 footbytes. (1MB = 6.2 milebytes = 10,941 yardbytes = 32,786 footbytes)

Fun fact I learned while doing these calculations: There are 63,239 AUs in one light-year and 63,360 inches in one mile. So if you want to get a better idea of interstellar distances, imagine everything scaled down. E.G. if Earth was 1 inch from the Sun then Alpha Centauri would be 4 miles away.
It is a bit disappointing but it is the case for everything. There was a recent onion article about that:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-14-trillion-spent-an...

Computers are not nearly the worst of it. People would spend much more on a status symbol of a car, or something silly like a handbag.

You can just take advantage of the situation by not buying an apple product and getting things done for much cheaper.
Step out of your world - Global lives project documents daily life around world.
On the contrary, I feel that they are just beginning to get interested in the user experience: boot process, themes, app installation, IM integration, scanning app, etc... I have high expectations for 10.10 on this side.
I've just installed Ubuntu 10.4. I didn't spend much time in the new theme. I found it just looked ugly against the background of most website backgrounds. It didn't have any delimiter between different parts of the toolbars etc.

I was very impressed with the work thats gone into the boot time though. I don't have any timings certainly feels like my anemic old Pentium M 1.4Ghz laptop seems to boot in half the time it used to! Firefox 3.6 seems very snappy. Terminals load in less than a second. I'm not sure how much of the difference is just having removed all the accumulated crud though.

I'm glad I upgraded, though I was running an old 7.10 installation with a 2.6.24 RC Kernel which was the first one to support my Broadcom wireless card reasonably well.
No. Just think about how hard it is to actually manage the task of production - to get things right and not end up with a bunch of defective or badly designed hardware that gets returned. So you see how scarcity is unavoidable (basic economics), and artificial scarcity is a bad business model (basic economics again: Apple would gladly make more money faster if they could!)
> By the way, are you suggesting me to loose the horizontal lines separating the articles?

yes, separating the articles and in the sidebar. You could consider it. I personally find a horizontal line breaks vertical reading/scanning flow, and people generally overuse the technique to separate sections where a heading in slightly larger/bolder font and a bit of white space is much more pleasant. I'm not a visual designer, just my personal preference. Up to you.
And when adjusted per capata, based on the above Wikipedia articles for the EU, with the US population from the US article for 2010 (i.e. it's high for this calculation):

US GDP (PPP) 14.26 Trillion / 308,951,000 = 46,245 US$

EU GDP (PPP) 15.26 trillion / 498 million = 30,643 US$

Not a small difference....
'Junk' DNA gets credit for making us who we are
This is sort of a big deal, I assume nouveau will keep going, although they are still lacking in support. On the other hand, the ATI / AMD open drivers are relatively recent and are moving pretty fast.
It still exists?
Woobius Eye, HN user swombat's product, featured on Lifehacker
Openfooty - free football API data platform
I have no use for it but a way to close the help bubble besides clicking the icon again would be helpful. Like an [X] where there is normally an [X] on these kind of popups.
Revealed: why hot water freezes faster than cold
If you compare the iPad sales to that of the iPhone when it first came out it looks like the iPad will be at least as popular as the iPhone. Sure you probably can't just extrapolate like that but still, if I had to guess I'd take Apple's side.
isn't that true of most startups? There are a lot of business problems that can be solved by an (from a CS standpoint) uninteresting webapp. If you take one of those, you can focus on solving the business problem (a hard enough thing to get right by itself) without worrying too much about pushing the limits technically.
I think my comment does a rather fair job of cutting to the quick of the issue

Your unsupported assertion about Linus Torvalds being a gifted programmer is one I have no problem with since I think "Linux kernel, git, lots of people respect him, yes I can accept he's a gifted programmer".

That is, I don't question it because I already have some basis for agreeing with it and none for disagreeing. If you claimed he was rubbish, I'd ask for supporting evidence.

But when you say ESR is useless, I can't name projects he's worked on like git, but that doesn't mean they don't exist - for all I know he might have worked on something I've never heard of, or something big I don't associate with his name.

So when you throw your dislike for ESR around, that cuts to the quick of the issue for you, because you already know why you dislike him. "Oh don't read it, it's ESR" is enough for you. To cut to the quick for me, you would need to say something like:

"ESR worked on Projects X and Y which both failed, his results aren't as good as his talk, beware".

I hope all the people who upvoted you did so because they know why they dislike ESR and agree with you. I fear that the people who upvoted you did so because they know other people they respect dislike ESR and want to demonstrate their group membership credentials by supporting the popular view.

I don't hate ESR (as shouted in my earlier post) and I also don't like his patronising village elder tone, but I do like and can fit into experiences in my life the idea that running things from one person's head is the business equivalent of a code smell, and that the pain for them of changing it soon will result in smoother operations for everyone else sooner and smoother operations for them too later.

> for instance, note the timestamps on the comments

OK.
I doubt a third party keyboard will change things.

I'm amazed how much the success or failure of sophisticated computer products depends on their default configuration - this would seem especially true in Apple space where the reason to pay Apple's hefty prices is "it just works", not "it works once you go out and buy an accessory that you now have to carry around and worry about loosing or breaking".
How so? I'd like to hear more about this.
Thanks, bemmu!

I'll be sure to write a blog post some time soon about how we got TC coverage (about a year ago) and now Lifehacker coverage. It's all pretty serendipitous, but could be an interesting/useful story.
Yeah, though my impression is that the current focus is mostly on the good-for-society angle: that it would be better for society if STEM fields as a whole were more gender-balanced, even if not necessarily better for the women actually in those STEM fields.

This is a rather different argument than the more traditional one, that gender-bias/etc. is standing in the way of women who want to go into STEM careers but find themselves blocked. The focus these days seems to be more on women who don't want to go into STEM careers, to figure out why and how we can change that, which is more of a focus on social-engineering/good-for-society outcomes, as opposed to the more traditional feminist focus on personal autonomy / right to pursue your career of choice.
Google's Chrome leaves another hackathon unscathed
Uh well. All my friends are struggling to find the time to do it now. Or they don't have the funds.

And being able to drive is really useful :-)

I do have a car; it's fairly cheap to run and it means I can travel at weekends etc. Freedom.
jazz? comedy? life? ;)
Please do! We'd love to hear.
He's a fixture of Seattle's big Solstice parade: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daffodilious/3646480480/

Keep digging through that photoset and you'll probably see pix of the naked bikers, too.
Why does he need two extra navigation systems in his car that has a built in navigation system?
Less context switching when you're developing web applications that require a significant amount of Javascript code. Less context switching means you get to stay in flow and get more done.
Ask HN: Anyone Looking For a Roommate in San Francisco?
I was wondering whether anyone here on HN knew of any available rooms for rent in SF or were interesting in moving to SF? Looking to move-in with some startup-focused people as I've enjoyed my time at the Palo Alto Hacker House.

druwynings.com has links to anything you would ever want to know about me.

Send me an email: dru@druwynings.com
Congrats swombat!

One of my apps was just featured on Lifehacker as well. The post hit at 11:30am and total uniques for the day were 3,500 the first day and 1,800 the second. I thought they would be a bit higher than that. It would be interesting to compare numbers...
Nothing is blocking creation on the iPad except maybe Apple as the arbitrary gatekeeper of the App Store.
Well, the user experience is more or less the point of Ubuntu, so I'd say they've been working on it since 2004. They've made a lot of progress, certainly, but it's not like they've just turned their attention to these things...
Doing your own thing / startup isn't all its cracked up to be. 90% of the people I know doing it are chasing money, and I don't want to dedicate my life to that. Too short to just make money, I'd rather enjoy the ride, and love what I do.

I won't get into the reasons why I left, lets just say politics and environment. Last year was pre-M$ deal too.

I hope you're doing well, and I you enjoyed the video. I made it as a memento for myself looking back in 20 years :) and for my fellow nerd folk to enjoy.