skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forget about egos for a minute and consider; 9 years in and still at a stalemate, moving at a snail's pace? If the US wanted to conquer Iraq, it seems like it would have been over already.

Don't get upset and emotional over me saying this; Nobody's blustering and beating their chest here. That's just my honest opinion.
MMT: Exploiting Fine-Grained Parallelism in Dynamic Memory Management
I initially thought the same thing, but then I realized that the iPad may actually inspire more kids to become hackers and programmers.

They may start with the iPad because it's the number one tablet but that doesn't mean they will stay with the iPad.

Future hackers will probably be inspired by the iPad and want to figure out how it works and how to program for it. Then these hackers may get tired of Apple's tightly controlled platform and may move to an open platform like Android to hack on.
The extra month could be a few things:

1. Extra interviews required. This has nothing to do with the HC. In many cases, interviewers themselves screwed up here, and told the HC so. The alternative would have been "no-hire."
2. Candidate got redirected to a different department. This resets the hiring clock. This is unfortunate, but the alternative would have been a straight "no-hire."
3. HC too over-committed. I wrote a bit about this in my book and won't go into it here. It's not an easy problem, and Google's scaling problems came into play here.

Reed Hastings makes a case that as a company grows, hiring standards should go up: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. I agree, and if the consequences is that you have a harder time making a quick decision and have to lose some otherwise good candidates, I think the quick decision is the greater of the two evils.

This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait. Bear in mind that many candidates aren't really waiting: they already have a job and an extra month of latency won't reduce their interests. My brother worked at Intel while applying to Google. It took us 3 months to hire him. While it wasn't fun for him, it also wasn't costly either. (And yes, he took the job)
I thought it meant that Mr. Information was locked in a dungeon, yelling "Hellooooo? Can anyone hear me!???" to any passerby inside the walled garden. He wants to be free. He wants you to free him!
No - because they are expensive.
It's like claiming that Mercedes is destroying the hot-rod industry because kids can't get the engine management codes.

Macs were never for hackers now iApple isn't - so what?
Now that's a compliment. Thanks!
You don't waive your copyright by having a robots.txt, and while I believe most people think Google style indexing and searching is fair use - that doesn't mean anything you do with the data is fair use.
You're correct in that, but civilian or not is a technicality, not the issue.
Ejection Seats, Cooking Dinner, and Vuln Disclosure
Since this was a male CS Phd student presumably the real research was discovering that towels:

a, needed folding

b, needed washing occasionally so they could be folded
280atlas.com
I don't get it. How is arbitrage supposed to increase liquidity, if it is in practice increasing the cost of transaction? Isn't the middleman increasing the friction in the system?
Apple has demonstrated ingenuity in a segment that showed little of it for years. I had and still have reservation about this device, and as it stands, after playing with it a good amount, I will hold on till version 2 (soon i am sure) or when a real credible competitor surfaces (soon perhaps).

This is not to distract from the fact that the Ipad is pretty amazing, and i think anybody who engages with technology, and is able to look beyond his own personal passions and biases will concede this is a ground breaking elegant device.

There is much to like about this brilliant device. but for me, who relies (and prefers) Linux, the reliance on Itunes is a complete no for me, and many other aspects are giving me pause. The centralized approach Apple projects as a philosophy is very troubling to me, on level that goes beyond just tech. it gives me the creeps (while Google still at a level that merely annoys me and keeps me suspicious)

Open source models largely failed (don't bite my head on this one) to gain a real substantial piece of the desktop environment, however, on specialized devices such as pads and phones the platform demonstrates stability and capabilities that give it a real chance.this approach is by and large promoted by Google, and it certainly has the potential for a very strong showing.

in terms of stability and capability of the engine we can argue on merits here and there, but the end user experience is largely successful when there is a tight coherence in the metaphors used, that is the winning ticket.

Apple understands this very well, Open source designers need to figure out a better way to make the metaphors used coherent, it remains to be seen if its possible in this environment. Style is not trivial
I've heard that contributing to their open source stuff regularly is a good way to get a recommendation.

Edit: From their Chromium guys. They might have been dangling a carrot, in retrospect.
The amount of work we put into applications has absolutely nothing to do with what we can charge for them. Don't mention it around customers because it doesn't motivate them and don't mention it around developers because it causes them to consistently underprice.

Honorable Call of Warslaying Online had five hundred man years invested into it and costs $60. Bingo Card Creator has, hmm, maybe 0.5 man years and costs $30. Charge based on value, not based on cost, or you risk auto-commoditizing your offering and locking yourself into a business which does not outscale the day job but has no stability or benefits.
I loved Gorillas. But Windows ships with .NET, including a C# and VB.Net compiler. I'd rather have hacked on that than BASIC, nostalgia value notwithstanding.
People have had to fold their own textiles for as long as they have had shame. The more abundant technology is, and indeed any resource, the more we can free up the greatest of all resources--the human mind. Great comments noonespecial.

btw: "mahmud," the robot can do whatever it's programmed to do, not just fold clothing ;)
"Pretty much everyone who has an iPad also has access to a machine they can do development on."

For now.

To be honest - it feels ridiculous that the iPhone seems to need a computer so much. And I would imagine the iPad (or perhaps the iPadHD/iPadCamera/iPadNextGeneration) will feel slightly the same way.
Performance comparison: iPad's A4 vs. Nexus One's Snapdragon
For these customers, an indie PC game is $0, an AAA PC game is $0, a song is $0, a movie is $0, and you want TEN FREAKING DOLLARS for your iPad app.
Wikileaks has really misled the public
This is honestly one of the most poorly-written 'articles' I've ever read: "The process of simplification of consumer goods in response to demand is what has delivered the enormous productivity gains that generate much of the wealth of modern life."

What does that even mean? How about this: "Think about light switches, for example. Homebuilders, these days, put all the wiring inside the walls where you can't see it, and power is generated miles away from sources. Most people couldn't generate a current if their life depended on it; they just know that if you flick the switch the light turns on and if it doesn't you change the bulb or check the circuit breaker (the equivalent of hitting restart) before calling in the experts."

I know that dumbing ideas down to the point of meaninglessness is sorta the status quo of mainstream journalism, but at least have a little respect for your readers...
Whereas the true geeks look at you like you're crazy for still using crufty old QWERTY. =)
A co-worker bought it and his ipad wifi connection issues was all he could talk about today.
While I generally enjoy a Cory Doctorow opinion I can't help but to think he is off on this one. The iPad is analogous to a newspaper, both used for consuming content and both gated from seeing how they work on the inside. The Apple IIgs' of today are Arduino's, FPGAs, and the like. Mostly or fully open source and customizable.
Yah, but why in the world would you ship Windows7 on it? What about chrome OS?
5 hour batter. Said enough.
How about anything that contributes to the continued survival of the human race?
Actually, it might give students a real incentive to tinker: "hey, you might make thousands of dollars on the App Store". Parents? Spend $100 for a curious kid's birthday to get a dev kit, it would be a great investment. Especially if it takes away from time they'd spend doing passive things like watching TV.
Faster Firefox landing page increases download conversion by 15%
I'd actually be O.K. with the restrictions in the App store if there was any non-jailbreak method of loading apps outside the app store. That would allow you to install things like Google Voice, Opera, or whatever if you the user want to, while still providing a squeaky clean simplified view to the average user.

For example, on an Android phone, by default you can only install apps from the Android Market. However, by checking one checkbox in the phone's preferences, you can install non-market apps. Those might be apps you upload using the Android developer tools (if you're a dev), or you can download and install apps from a website, or you can use a third party market (like SlideMe).
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Researchers Trace Data Theft to China
Here's my take. When I was a kid, yes I had the Apple II, I had HeathKit radio kits, etc. And yes we now have iPhone, iPad, etc. But folks those all have SDK's. And Linux exists now. Arduino. Mindstorms. Roomba. All kinds of electronic and computer kits for experimentation. Make magazine. Mainstream bookstores now actually have lots of geeky computer magazines and books on the shelves. And the Internet: tons of free software and documentation, all at your fingertips -- all of this quite unlike the 70's/early-80's.

So no, I don't think somehow the iPad is part of some new Dark Age. If anything, we live in a Golden Age for hackers. More so now than back then, taking into account what I cited above.
User content on Facebook may not be copyrightable. If I make a list of my personal interests, I haven't necessarily produced a creative work by the standards of US law.

Check out this site (just found it via search): http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/
Are "apps" so bad? In a perfect world, everything would work great on all standards-compliant browsers. But here I am, using Google Docs on Opera and it's destroying my homework.
It's surprising it would take people with their background so long to figure that out.
There's a lot of "testing the waters" going on now with iPad app pricing. It'll take several months before pricing models settle. We saw this when iPhone os 2.0 came out. Lots of $5 and $10 games. As more competing apps became available, and the number of iPhone users increased, prices came down. This took months to play out, and it'll probably be similar with the iPad.

Right now I don't see many people buying a $4.99 issue of Time for their iPad when you can subscribe to the paper edition and get 56 issues delivered to your door for $20. Yes there is a convenience component to the digital version, but a 1,400% markup in price isn't going to fly in the long run. Lots of experimental pricing like this will be going on for a little while. Early adopters will jump and spend money on content like this to show off and learn about their new device. But that'll dry up after a bit.

It's always easier to lower prices than to raise them. So it makes sense stuff will start off high. By late summer or maybe even by fall we'll have a better clue regarding iPad pricing models. More people will own them by then, and there will be more content available, competing for business, driving down prices.
IPhone 4 is coming this Thursday
> The problem isn't distribution - it's a couple of different things.

I certainly agree that we can't solve this problem by just trying to redistributing existing wealth (i.e. aid). It was never a viable long term solution, and not even as much of a short term one as I would have guessed.

But I stick by the point that we've made amazing strides in productivity, but overall we've not distributed this well. What I really mean by this is, IMO, it would be a better result overall if the world were less productive, but the minimum living standard were higher.

I agree that it's productivity we need to spread, not wealth. The former will bring the latter. But, I think it's fair to say that some parts of the world could afford to spend more of their effort towards facilitating this. Even if that means a drop in overall output, for a while at least.

> Things we produce start out as luxuries and eventually become commodities.

Sure, but the incremental benefits of these items to people tends to get smaller. These could be sacrificed at least until everyone reaches a flatter part of this curve.

This like medicines, sanitation, are not exactly in the same class as, say, an iPod.

> Yes, actually, producing as much as we can is a pretty good plan for improving the world.

In practice a decent plan, and perhaps even the only practical one given human nature and our political systems. But still not a goal in itself.
"The Toronto spy hunters not only learned what kinds of material had been stolen, but were able to see some of the documents, including classified assessments about security in several Indian states, and confidential embassy documents about India’s relationships in West Africa, Russia and the Middle East. The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages."

It's interesting that this particular data stealing operation was directed mostly at India. Strategically important information is to be found all over the world.
Which part do you disagree with? He certainly didn't protect me. In fact I'd say he deliberately sacrificed me to protect himself and Kevin from the VCs.
> 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.

I read the article as more of "this is the problem with interpreting 'do incremental development' as 'be a genetic algorithm.'" If you told a computer to come up with things that make the UX slightly better, it would come up with boogers before it came up with the miniviewer, because boogers are a local minimum, whereas the miniviewer requires "climbing the hill" of development-without-promise-of-reward. To put it another way, a half-implemented miniviewer would be much worse than boogers—so in order to come up with the miniviewer, you can't rely on "evolutionary" customer feedback, but rather have to use some "revolutionary" R&D as well.
Congrats for your newfound love and condolences for your grandfather. Tread carefully - intellectualizing love is existentially rocky territory.

I have worked in algorithmic trading, hedge funds, and investment banking. I have degrees in CS and Mathematics.

There are a rare few people who have walked these footsteps - see Jim Simon of Renaissance or Doyne Farmer of Prediction Company. And of course there are more you never hear of because they don't have enough money or interest to garner media attention. This community is not an open community because unlike the open source world, it is not beneficial to share knowledge. Governments have to force them to.

One question I wonder if you've considered: do you feel comfortable working within boundaries that governments have the power to change? It's an aspect of the job I find interesting, but I feel many members here would find frustrating.

Mathematics is far more important than C.S. at crafting algorithmic trading strategies, but developers are in far more demand. Quant shops only really need one genius, and maybe a few in training in case the first gets hit by a bus.

In terms of what mathematics: you're going to need stochastic calculus, but don't worry about that yet. Unless you are blessed you're going to need a PhD in math or physics. The importance isn't the thesis, but the topical knowledge along the way regarding which relationships break down under what conditions. Most entry-level quants go for the PhD and pick up stochastic calc while job searching. Machine learning is no panacea: regression (a form of machine learning) is the oldest trick in the book.

So I'd suggest forgetting about finance altogether until you absolutely have to. If you're absolutely serious: ride the academic train for as long as you can. It's not easy riches, but neither is quant finance. Easy riches is swapping MBO's to your buddies on comission.
Now yes - as I much prefer Ruby, C++ and a wee bit of Haskell these days. But to learn? Absolutely not. The beauty of BASIC was that everything was simple enough that a 10 year old kid could comprehend it: type in instructions, and run them. No compilers, no CLR, no API calls. All of those things make the barrier to entry too high.

I started out writing things like:

10 PRINT "Jason"
20 GOTO 10

The reason why that's so important is that it can be comprehended, and it provides a base to which more knowledge can be added in very small pieces. Once the hypothetical 10-year-old has grasped the above - and there are a few fundamental concepts to grasp in there, they can start adding to that. Say:

10 FOR I = 1 TO 10
20 PRINT "Jason"
30 NEXT

And from there, it's just a matter of learning more and more until you're dealing with abstract syntax trees, NP-hard problems, functional languages, multi-threaded programming and whatever else we get to deal with.

But if that first step is too high, many people will never be able to climb it.
I'm just under 50 at the moment. Off the top of my head, I think five of those 50 are idle.
Every afternoon, I 'waste' 15 minutes of company time, leaving my desk as a highly paid software developer to do the dishes in the sink. No one told me to do it, we have a cleaning crew that comes at night, but I do it because it frees my mind -- the greatest of all resources.

Not all chores are "chores". Sometimes we just enjoy doing boring stuff.
I hadn't seen or heard about this video prior to this article.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001802-38.html seems to have it embedded and a description.
To some degree, it's voodoo. When you deal with machines of a particular OS every day, you get a feel for what the numbers mean.

you can't determine why as (no processes are using high CPU)

Roughly, the load avg is the length of the run queue (how many processes are waiting to be run or are being run, vs. how many processor cores are available) with some IO activity thrown in for good measure. It could be a lot of IO wait or a lot of small processes that are driving up the load avg -- not necessarily just one process trying to hog CPU time.

There are a lot of good suggestions here -- many sysadms are too reliant on load avg (myself somewhat included).
I dont't get this? The iPad SDK has been out for months.
Davos: Of Women, Sleep Deprivation and Financial Meltdown
> The fact that there's any literacy, lifespan over 30 years, immunization from disease, infrastructure, and knowledge is marvelous in and of itself. The rate that those things are growing lately is astounding. Humanity is doing a pretty amazing job lately.

And yet there's still so much more to do.
Imagine A World Without Banks
Sickens me.
Interesting how the Internet has made "dealing with anti-Semites" a common problem.
Nexus One not Droid.
Well, if you weren't going to buy it before you certainly aren't after this. Which I suspect will put an end to the Joojoo. When you're an unproven, mail order company you only get one bite at the apple and this was theirs (no pun intended)
STS131 Launch
I've used NFS for a simple Wordpress blog (php + mysql) for about 2 years. They've been pretty reliable and cheap.

I'm glad they now support Rails apps.
I feel for them on the subject of Flash performance. They're discovering what has been biting Apple for years: Adobe's timeline for making their software work properly on your platform is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Adobe's fiscal interest.
ASK HN: From lit major to Computer Science Masters?
Is this possible?
I'm currently working on learning how to program from the very beginning and completed no coursework related to computers. Is it close to impossible for me to be accepted into a (half-decent) computer science program? What would I need to do to accomplish this?
Its been on HN for more than 12 hours: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241879
Chrome isn't due to be official until Dec. While this is rumored to be a summer release. That said HP has plans for Android slates so I'd assume ChromeOS is also a possibility (http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/07/video-of-hps-android-power...)
Oh. I actually wasn't saying that the guy "blinked." I was trying to evoke the image of a relatively powerless person staring at an army who had just given an order; the guy would of course have no response available except OK. Wasn't deriding the guy at all.
Even being an anti-apple person, I'm not sure I would give the advantage to HP for the 1.6Ghz Atom over the 1Ghz A4 without some real benchmarks. Also, how lightweight (or not) the OS is will probably determine more than their relative speeds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...
Honestly since you have to deal with crappy roads at some point in your journey, you are better off investing in a cheaper sport bike initially. If you are not looking for mission critical speed, you'd be surprised how long a cheap wal-mart sports bike can go; besides, those are far easier to replace and cost 10% of your budget.

That said, if you are looking into a serious racing bike, by all means check biker friendly forums or even look into a central park bikers group on meetup.com.
Like an autonomous Miegakure?
Wow, I'm quite surprised and honored to come home and see that my post got so many votes.

Having read through most comments below, I want to make a few points:

1. I am not implying a moral obligation to do some jobs over others. Nor am I suggesting a framework to judge the value of some jobs over others. If I had known this was going to be read by so many people, I would have spent more time making sure my message was communicated more clearly. I'm sorry for giving some people the wrong idea.

2. My point is actually very simple and I expect the vast majority of Hacker News readers already get it: for people considering what jobs to do, especially young college students, be wary of focusing on the value of fun and money. Fun and money can be very distracting when you are young and haven't experienced so much freedom before. However, the decisions you make when you are young can have consequences for the trajectory of your whole life. Always think about what will give you long-term and enduring happiness and satisfaction. Often, I think long-term happiness is connected with a cause greater than your own immediate satisfaction. Hence the consideration of value creation.

It's obvious advice, but I hoped my story would make it more digestible for college students.
There is so much wrong with this article, I don't know where to start.
A lot of hackers love their Macs.
Scaling Clojure Web Apps with Google AppEngine
He also wrote software that scraped and archived AIM status messages. Apparently he has a long history of scraping content in various forms.
You could start from the beginning...
Yes, but as seen by lots of recent HN postings have shown, actually using a/b tests seems to be a rarity.