skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks great. I bought a lot of books on the Kindle for iPhone so I'm happy to see that they platform is alive and growing.

But I'd also like to see Amazon create apps for other devices. I can't change phones easily because too few of them have a Kindle app.
Google's take on the situation: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=stackoverflow.com,+exper...
A larger risk pool tends to drive premiums down, not up.

Of course, this presumes that private insurers determine premiums in a rational manner, which may not be the case (and if it is not the case, then you're going to pay more no matter what).
Rolltop, a "future designer laptop" concept
We need something like jQuery for CSS. One, sane, extendible API/DSL that works the same on all browsers, with all the quirks taken care of behind the scenes.
Is it so that CS-books face an increase in value when the author have a passed away? Kinda like with art, where the author/artist never sees the pleasure of economical benefits during his/hers lifespan. But when death occurs -- that will be the ultimate marketing effort as we can take the time and sum up a person intellectual contributions....hmm..does this wanna make you work harder or what?
The article convinced me there are problems with the act but why must it be stopped? Should I go round with a sledgehammer destroying works of art that are incomplete too?
A closer look at the Skipfish (Google's Security Scanner)
I applaud Nielsen for trying to bring more data to the usability world, but man, the guy just doesn't bring any insight. All he does again and again over the decades is analyze a bunch of data which proves that well-established UI conventions work better on average than less common UI conventions.

However any designer or UI person worth their salt innately knows 95% of everything he has ever said, and applies it intuitively while balancing a dozen other issues which Nielsen pretends don't exist (branding, innovation, gameplay, etc). Nielsen's biggest achievement has been branding himself as a top-tier usability expert when in fact probably every high school in America has at least one aspiring designer with a better understanding of how people actually use computers.
We're working on that. Axel Simon is cabalizing gtk2hs. Once that happens, it could go in to the HP.

And then we'd get cool tools like ThreadScope as well: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/threadscope/ (which needs gtk2hs)

Hot topic and stay tuned.
I have a wide array of taste, but when working, I primarily listen to metal. The key here is something with a fast and steady beat, which really gets me into the groove.

It's hard to automatically classify this kind of music, so I have a half-dozen or so hand-made playlists, each around an hour long.

The music is for when I know what needs to be done and just have to sit down and do it. When I'm thinking about a problem, silence is what I need.
Are affiliate links dirty?
"Perhaps Japan needs to find a path of entrepreneurship that actually appeals to Japanese in their 20s and 30s, rather than desperately try to copy the valley?"

This piece of advise is good for almost anyone. The valley has a great business model that works there, but it may not work in your neck of the woods.
Social Recruiting: Localbacon Relaunches As Jibe, Raises $875K Seed Round
I'm sure the house leadership had the plan worked out pretty quickly, it just takes time to work out the details with the Senate leadership, then communicate it to the >250 democrats in the House and line up the required number of votes.

Was the plan hard to figure out for the media and other commentators? Probably, because they don't have access to the House rules people, nor do they think about procedural maneuvers all day.

In retrospect, passing two bills was a very elegant solution. By passing the Senate version straight up, they guarantee that at least some version of victory is achieved without having to deal with the 59 seat issue. Then sending an amendment package back to the Senate with only carefully chosen amendments that allow the reconciliation maneuver gives it a decent shot despite the loss of the supermajority. Had they tried to pass one bill that combined the original and the amendments, the filibuster could have killed it.
In this specific area, the gov is treaty-obligated to provide health care to Native Americans. They have failed miserably - http://www.reznetnews.org/article/indian-health-cares-broken... - the sad part is that those stories in the article are the typical and not even the worst.
"Attitude is 90%."

you wouldn't accept "attitude being 90%" of a doctor's competence. A lawyer with 90 % attitude and 10 % competence will lose your case for you. Why should programmers get away with "attitude"?

There is no excuse for not being able to answer basic data structure questions if you call yourself a programmer. The fact that some Google interviewers layer on arrogance and excess doesn't obviate the basic idea.

"They should also realize that most of these guys who are walking CS textbooks are completely dysfunctional socially. mean that they can't work together with the other engineers on their team, they're focused on proving that their solution is right, and generally just lead to lots of in-fighting and drama. They think that their intelligence or above-average competence is a license to ignore decorum and be cruelly rude and blunt to those around them."

Stereotype much? I don't have any kind of CS degree, but I have met and worked with many people with MS and PhD degrees in CS, who knew theri datastructures and algorithms cold, and the ratio of good folk to dumbasses is if anything greater than among than the population of "developers" who wrote a welcome web page in PHP and think algorithms are unimportant.

(see? I just used your rhetorical trick in the opposite direction. Making weak arguments based on anecdotes is easy)

These guys are working on an algorithms/data structure heavy project. "90% attitude" is a guaranteed fail.
Another ivory tower joins those built by Spolsky and Yegge. A nice theory on hiring that is completely impractical, bordering on the surreal.

1) You wouldn't recognize a Dennis-Ritchie- or Claude-Shannon-to-be if they would spit you in the face, because at the point in their lives where they would consider to work for you (if there ever was such a point), their achievements would not stand out nearly as much. Robin Milner died saturday and I just learned he didn't even have a Ph.D. Pretending you'd be even remotely capable of recognizing

2) What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB? You are describing a group of maybe a thousand people worldwide. Many have academic ambitions; others are interested in completely different subjects. There are more than a thousand companies looking for these people. If you'd manage to hire one, you'd be lucky.

3) Even if you were able to recognize the ability for such achievements and get them to apply, it is doubtful they would able to achieve those peaks in your corporate environment. Claude Shannon didn't have to satisfy any customers. He could spend years developing a theory, whose practical value was only clear after it was sufficiently developed.

4) A corollary of 2): the people you've hired so far are not the kind of people you describe.

It would be nice if, just for once, someone would try to describe the people they actually hire, instead of pretending they only hire potential Field medalists, Nobel laureates and other people of such fame that all of their actual developers know them.

[..] I am often unable to solve complex problems during
the interview because of the nervous pressure. But I don’t
want to hire people as good as me, I want to hire people
much better than me.

5) People that botch their interview because they are nervous can't be better than you? Perhaps nervousness/self-doubt go hand-in-hand with the ability to be better than you and you're throwing out the babies with the bathwater. Especially considering that someone passionate about working with you would be prone to nervousness.

6) And finally, about that Spolsky quote: I'm convinced he put it there to make sure no one else would hire the ones he would like to hire. If you don't have any doubts about a candidate, then you haven't pried enough to expose their weaknesses. That, or they are too glib. You should have doubts about every single one of your interviewees.

PS: this article, as well as the ones by Spolsky and Yegge referenced in the article, contain sound advice. However, all three of them go overboard at some point, which inspired the above. This comment might be considered as tearing apart a specific point, while ignoring the larger whole. This is not my intention: the article is worth reading.
JSON is a carefully-chosen subset of what "eval" will actually include, the three major differences being that it specifies the delimiters rigidly (JSON that uses apostrophe-delimited strings is not JSON), it rigidly specifies Unicode (defaulting to UTF-8), and it doesn't permit anything that looks like Javascript code. So, comparing it to "wiring over some Lisp and evaling" it is not accurate, JSON was created for the explicit purpose of not doing that. Previous approaches typically did.
That may be true, but just as the smallest scientific theory is usually the best one, the smallest government intervention is usually the best. This entails that a local program is usually going to be better than a state program, which is usually going to be better than a Federal program at addressing needs.
Out of curiosity, what is your definition of computer science?
Is the parent liable for as long as the child is alive (e.g., what happens when the child is well into adulthood)?
Reinventing the Magazine for the iPad
Awesome combination of animation, cinema, informative copy, and a slick app.
The article makes the "long tail" case that the number of fart apps within a phone's application catalog signals to potential buyers of the phone that they will likely find the fart app that is just right for them.
You don't have to clean up. If they are no longer being obeyed they will just be ignored. You would only remove them if you are redesigning, in which case you remove them as you go. Just make sure if you are currently adding in vendor prefix stuff you add a general case for everyone else now. Future and backwards compatible.
The rules for reconciliation say that the changes must only be financial in nature, ie, if you decided to subsidize all boat builders it would make sense for reconciliation to change the amount of the subsidy. But not add some new program for elephant trainers. That would be out of bounds.

The reason reconciliation was set up was so that the financial numbers could be tweaked with minimum fuss on bills whose policies were already voted for by the Senate.
Labrepl: Follow along with the Clojure Studio from Hickey and Halloway
Interesting. Good to know.

I tried and gave up a few times to build the last version of the Haskell platform but this one seems to have built & installed cleanly on the first try. Looks like a good start.
I am not sure if this helps you, but lab-repl by Relevance just came on GitHub. It's the training course Stuart Halloway and Rich Hickey are doing with the Pragmatic Studio. I haven't dug in the source code myself, but it seems pretty interesting ...

http://github.com/relevance/labrepl
It's interesting how many articles have quotes like these

but it also sends Amazon’s own grayscale-only hardware to the back of the line

that lack any consideration for the positives of Amazon's decision to have an E-ink screen. For many people who bought the Kindle, the insanely good contrast, even in areas with direct sunlight, is a must have.

Also, I'd like to see an iPad last for a month without charging.
Looks good. Makes me wish even more that Amazon had been able to keep the $9.99 pricing on ebooks. At that price, I'd probably buy many ebooks. But for 50% more, the public library will still be my #1 choice.
I think it could be worse than the status quo (which is saying a lot, since the status quo is pretty bad).

A lot of people lost confidence in "conditional immigration" categories (ie., we'll let you immigrate provided you become an engineer, an entrepreneur, pick grapes in napa during the harvest season and leave afterwards) after watching how these programs actually work (the H1B, in particular).

I had my own experience with this (as most programmers have). The company I worked for, a "startup", wasn't making much progress and had burned through a lot of cash. Investors and managers got frustrated. They moved the office a long distance and banned telecommuting completely. The took away private offices and put us into a cubicle farm. And, of course, they diluted everyone's stock.

So, what did I do? I quit. But I'm a US citizen, so I didn't face deportation when I did this. But the H1B workers, all Indians who have to wait longer than normal for green cards because of the longer queue, didn't quit. Of course they didn't, they'd been there for 4+ years, are they going to give up now, when they're so close to a green card?

So management pretty much got away with it. Well, they didn't, the company tanked 4 months later, but they sure succeeded in bullying the workers who lack freedom. And the thing is, while I did get to quit, if more and more workers are governed by this arrangement, then this sort of treatment will become the norm, and free citizens will not want to work in that field anymore (which I think is already clearly happening - I personally believe that Americans avoid engineering not because they're too dumb or lazy, but because pay and benefits in engineering are lagging behind other options for highly educated people who are free to pick a different career (1)

Personally, I'm certain that this visa will lead to widespread bullying of tech founders by investors who control their dream of becoming free citizens of the united states. That will be much worse than what we have now.

I can't get behind any type of conditional immigration. I've seen it in action, and I'm convinced these programs are utterly corrupt and end up making the environment so bad that free people will end up choosing other careers (exacerbating the shortages that the programs claim to remedy).

(1) Based on a RAND study

A summary is available here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engi....
The full RAND study is at:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241/
Creating—or discovering, if you prefer—Markdown and JSON were not great feats of technical accomplishment. They are, however, considerable achievements in data format design. In their respective domains, they provide best-of-breed formats with simple rules [1] that anyone can master in a few minutes.

One of the key insights shared by both formats is the very thing that make people wary about touting them as serious creative accomplishments: they build, very explicitly, on existing user conventions. Markdown was based on the emphases and accents used in email; JSON was based on JavaScript's object notation. They appear obvious because we already know the rules.

[1] Simple for humans, anyway; Markdown isn't straightforward to parse, because of all the edge cases.
It doesn't work without issues at all. It's going to calculate the width of the string wrong, so the pointer movement is all broken: enter some utf-8 characters, move a "character" backwards - boom, your pointer is in a funny place. Once you move past the excess "space" (which is there because the code assumes 1 character=1 byte), you're going to tap multiple times to see the cursor go past a single character. Delete a character (byte) and watch it turn into something else.

There's no unicode support at all.

I also miss a lot of features most would take for granted in a line editor. Deleting and jumping between entire words, simple (or not-so-simple) history search are just a couple common and useful features.

Right, this is not compatible with readline, so people can't use it as a fallback. Now who's going to depend on a 400sloc library only to get a prompt and forward/backward & line-wise history movement with hardcoded non-personalizable bindings? Surely one can do that in seventy lines? ;)

You've got a lot of code to write; the line editing capabilities of the common libraries aren't as minimal as some may think. Of course you can just ignore all of it and say that other people don't need these features because you never used them.

Having said all that, I don't have anything against the idea of seeing another BSD-licensed line editing library prosper. If you want to do it, go for it! If the basic features get there, I'll embrace the project. In the meanwhile, I'll sit back and promote libedit.
I think this is an important point. As much as it's nice to think that SO is destroying EE. There's no evidence that compete.com's numbers are anything but fiction.
How CRE made SEOmoz $1 million
> these are exactly the types of people you don't want to hire

Depends on your budget and appetite for risk. If you have the budget and want to reduce your risk, IMHO there's no better indicator of future performance than past performance.
FBN Wins FOIA Suit Against the Fed
Exposed: green consumers' dirty little secrets
Any idea why Palm doesn't take its (arguably) strongest asset, the webOS, and license it out to other phone makers? Apple wouldn't mess with Palm/the phone makers because Palm still holds a considerable chunk of patents, and that'd get some cash flowing into Palm again.
Google will happily show garbage rather than showing nothing. (Welcome to the entire business model of some companies.)

Experts Exchange plays right on the edge of what their policies allow, but previously they have backed off in response to feedback, and nixing them would cost Google millions of searches in a key influencer demographic getting nothing.
It must be stopped because it doesn't increase the number of green cards issued, it just reallocates them. As such, it will damage the existing system, rather than just creating a new damaged system.

To build on your analogy, it's like burning half of an incomplete work of art, to get wall space for another one.
legislation and quick iteration don't go together.
Showcase of Indie Art and Photo Blogs for Your Visual Delight
Today we’ showcasing a new kind of websites here on Inspired Mag – non-mainstream photography & art blogs. Extremely cool websites made totally out of passion and almost without any kind of advertising banners or any other form of monetization.
Psychology Hacks of Dave & Busters
Congrats - that is really cool, thanks for posting this.

How long ago did you launch?
Is The Job Market Finally Turning?
Investors are only 10% correct at predicting startup success so I'm not sure they are the ones to be relying on for an accurate assessment.
"Today's decision orders the Fed to disclose documents identifying which institutions borrowed money and the details surrounding each loan" - a couple of groups have gone after this information and this seems to be the first one that got some results. It bugs me that in a lot of these information suits the current Administration kept the same policies as the previous Administration.
This article reminded me of a bit in an article that was on HN a couple weeks ago:

Starbucks evolved from a small chain of cafes to a huge one by consistently introducing new products, constantly pushing the envelope. Right? So what the hell? [Chokokuro Cafe] just immediately changed their name to reflect the name of the first product that brought them moderate success.

A Japanese friend who works in marketing told me this is the "Japanese resolve." A company sees its fate and resigns itself to it. I think it sounds more like someone just giving up and settling for what they have.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173679
Script to install oracle on Debian based machines 
A simple logic to install Oracle, even though MySql rocks, few situations demand to use Oracle, for all those who need Orcale might have a look [ might be naive, but makes things easier ]
I wonder what this site (http://www.best-family-photography-tips.com/) do in Experts-Exchange top referral sites.
I posted this because of our discussion on this post yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207136

It seems that "self-control fatigue," as they tested it, is indistinguishable from the "moral self-licensing" discussed here.
Ask HN: Why no Kindle app for Android?
I've read about the thoery that Amazon is preparing for the possibility that they will lose the eBook hardware war to Apple, and are therefore, trying to sell the Kindle as a platform. This is the motivation behind the Kindle for iPhone (and iPad) apps.

So where is the Android app? Is one even in the works? I feel that Amazon could churn one out in a few weeks if they really wanted to. If one isn't in the works, then why?
That is assuming you are comparing the speed against C. I rewrote one into short, sweet style and found it was much faster than python and ruby. The only frustration was being unable to get the code shorter than the ruby version.

Note that the benchmarks are still for 6.10.4, they might get a bit faster when run with 6.12.

I am curious, are you speaking from some particular experience of problems with the speed?
I posted a couple of links in a comment below.

A summary is available here: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engi.... The full RAND study is at: http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241/

This is in reference to a RAND study that provides very substantial evidence that engineering and science careers now lag badly behind other options available to highly educated people in the US.

I think there's a very sophisticated argument to be made that a visa program designed to remedy a "shortage" of engineers doesn't make much sense. I'm alright with disagreement, of course, but it's very frustrating to hear people dismiss this as a "dey took our jawbs" xenophobia. Does it make sense to create a special visa program in a field that is already, according to objective research, lagging behind other fields? Keep in mind, we're not talking about general immigration here, we're talking about very specific legislation targeting a narrow part of the economy.
Died from sorrow, not from old age.
You can't just bolt code from one platform onto another. Google shouldn't buy them; they offer nothing that Google needs. However, if there are any struggling phone manufacturers, buying Palm for WebOS to distinguish themselves from the competition might be a good idea.
For anyone that uses an ML (e.g. OCaml), Haskell or Scala, Milner was responsible for the Hindley-Milner type system and inference algorithm that sits at the foundation of these languages.

It ignited a wave of research into type theory that continues to this day, yet in many ways, Hindley-Milner is still the most significant contribution to the field.

I remember reading his original paper on polymorphic typing for my qualifiers and being struck by the elegance and approachability of his writing.

Well worth a read.
there was a video taken during at least the welcome/panel session and the Mahout session. Which is fortunate because the most informational public exchanges occurred during those sessions (IMHO) and you'll also see how poorly organized the event was.

Videos aren't up yet, but I expect they will appear at http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1341
YC Founders at Work Series: Dropbox interview today at 1:00pm PDT
My guess would be on their measurement methodology. The about page reads: "We have a diverse sample of 2,000,000+ U.S. Internet users that have given us permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys." That translates as sketchy toolbar/shareware installs and checkboxes that are checked by default.
How my YouTube video got over 1 million views
It's not slavery, because slavery is not a choice. H1B holders choose to accept the terms and can choose to go home. Slaves can't.