skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other hand, the guy's lawyer does admit he was the one that found the phone, it's not likely Wired found the wrong person.

I don't think Wired is making any assumptions about the legal status of what he did.

Does that make it any less freaky that trawling Facebook is what led to this scoop? Well, admittedly no.
When I see a graph that start's at some random point on the Y axis I assume the person is extremely biased and instantly ignore what they are saying. If I don't see error bars on data points I assume they have zero idea how accurate there information is.

Unfortunately I suspect that this approach is less common among the under educated because trying to create misleading charts is vary common.
I spoke to someone at Wolfram about using the API about 6 months ago and they said they would try and get me access to their "Pioneer Grant" which is the free version of the API. No word since then. The pricing for the regular API is prohibitively expensive. How did you intend to use it?
It would have been awesome if you had put the effort to state your position instead of slapping two links to Wikipedia and leaving us to infer what you're trying to say.

If you are implying that Apple removed the page because they are ashamed of it, I'd say bubkes. I don't think Apple's position has changed in any way. In fact in last week's Steve-rant, Jobs reiterated basically the same thing.
If you're going to do a comparison of programming fonts at small sizes, at least bother to get optimal font rendering for small fonts. Your worst looking fonts are the nicest with proper rendering.

Also "alternative"? Every programmer I know has heard of these...
So typical of TC to spread this sort of unfounded gossip without even one quote or citation. Did they even contact Arrington to confirm before jumping to publish this rumor? If so, one has to wonder why they haven't included anything more than speculation into this post. Can we just finally ban TC here?
Cloud Sherpas Raises $1 Million To Help Migrate Companies To Google Apps
Very convenient that Washington State has no income tax.
I've been using the Bitstream Vera fonts for over a year now. The main draws were:

- zero distinguished from O, lower case L from 1

- clean, unpixelated characters

- supports bolding, so I can use that in my editor's styles

- is part of a family with a serif and sans serif font, so I can use the same fonts as my defaults everywhere (and I now notice that HN uses Courier for its textarea, ick)
How to install debian in the Ben NanoNote (the ultraportable Linux clamshell)
Window indicators for Ubuntu ("windicators")
Inconsolata is nice, but the angled quotes annoy me. Fortunately, someone fixed that: http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...
Indeed I am.

Couldn't ask for anyone more supportive and understanding through all of this. Especially with having to deal with 2,500 miles between us right now.
Well done, sir, well done.
Speaking of this, what's a reasonable number of requests per second an application should be able to handle before it's safe to post it on HN (or Reddit?). I've got an application almost ready that I'd like to post for comments, but I'm a bit concerned that the machine it is on might buckle under the load.
I'm not sure... From my past experiences if you post an item that hangs on the front page for around 15 hours you will get around 3000 visits.

That order of magnitude is my experience. Google for "the hackernews effect". I know Justin Vincent from the techzing podcast (great podcast) has posted numbers from when his web app Pluggio (formerly tweetminer) was on Hacker News, so you could search for that.
United Airlines merges with Continental Airlines
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8cckg/arthur_wh...

It doesn't appear to be all good news over there.

Nevertheless, I have added this to my ever-expanding "things to further investigate" list.
I've had the same experience of around 3000-4000 visits for 14-20 hours. The problem may be that it is concentrated in a pike or maybe 700 in ~30 minutes I think.
You always chart money starting from zero.

In the case of billionaires you are looking at an estimate of there net worth so while you can chart Carlos Slim Helu & family at 53.5B and William Gates III at 53.0B if you start the chart at 50 billion your error bars would take up 50% of the chart's vertical space.

And that's the major reason why trying to create a chart that exaggerates differences is such a bad idea. If your error bars are 5% and the gap is 1% then pretending there is a significant gap is stupid.
Indeed. And I write funny so pen on the right is actually more helpful than pen on the left. I can only write if the paper is orthogonal to my body i.e. parallel to the keyboard. I make my left-arm parallel to the keyboard, which puts my fingers on the right-side of the keyboard, making it easy to pick up the pen placed on the right side.
Avoiding possible confusion as to what this statement refers to is plenty reason for removal. In itself, that they took it down shouldn't imply Apple repudiates the statement, is ashamed of it, or wants to cover it up.
Trust me: if you ever have to choose between no variation in crappy weather, and no variation in wonderful weather, you should choose wonderful. Disneyland is better than Mordor.
This one is a must have for the beginner.

http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/032150...
"Every programmer I know has heard of these..." - Absolutely.

The frequency of these "lightweight" articles has increased of late (e.g. Linode,Slicehost gets newest release of Ubuntu, JavaScript starter link, etc.).

May be this is an indication of the changing demographics here on HN. It is called Hacker News and calling Consolas, BitStream Vera as alternative is just "newbism".
I don't know about the word test scores but the rest of the demographic info doesn't look right.
For instance, the second chart. The data suggests that statistically, the odds of a girl drinking are higher than an african-american drinking.

By the way, very very misleading graphs. I was totally shocked by going through them. I had to read the comments here to realize what was being shown.
Finally a sensible explanation for why the window title bar widgets were moved to the left in Ubuntu 10.04.
Have an online store? What you need to do by July 1.
The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation
I am reminded of why I used to love that company. What happened to it?
Not sure that I totally agree with the rationale here, what's the consensus here at HN?
Microsoft fires back at critics of its HTML5 strategy
The differences between 70 and 60 is not that small (~15%).

There are many ways you can use chart's to try and mislead people, but when you need to do that it's a sign that you are trying to suggest something that's not true.

PS: The first words out of a competent thesis advisory when looking at those charts would be "where are the error bars?"
Very interesting piece. At least half of the startups in the 2010 batch had wives or girlfriends, and the toll that it takes on them was not really documented. I'd love to hear more stories like this.
I use consolas on windows and linux and it is by far the nicest programming font I've ever used, surprised it didn't get more of a look-in, though obviously sub-pixel rendering is required for it to not look awful. Pity they didn't compare it with sp-r turned on. Oh well!
HTML5 experience on iPad Vs Nexus One
iPad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4

Nexus One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUw7RyBrZA

Flash on Nexus One: http://vimeo.com/9596010
If you use mixpanel, you can turn off particular items on your graph, which makes the scale usable again.
I really hate sites that make it impossible to follow a link if you are using Windows. Yes, I know Windows can suck. Same with IE. I know all of this, but sometimes in the real world you can't help but have to use one and when you are, it shouldn't prevent you from reading things on the web.
I will offer a name, see if you can find it: SGIScreen.
Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1
Another author in this MPEG license discussion debacle who is clearly unread and confused over what open means, and what free means.

H.264 IS open, just as all the other MPEG "technologies" are. The complete documentation for each and one of MPEG's data formats is available to anyone, free of charge, to use and to implement in whatever way they want - it's just that the end result; the H.264 video product itself, isn't free to deal with from January 1st 2016. What MPEG decides from that date and on can so far only be guessed, and for some damned reason, everyone in the "other camp" keeps making the worst possible guesses, while always having kept their mouths shut about MPEG-1 Layer-3, and MPEG-4 ASP. I call it FUD, and hypocrisy.
To some degree, I'm critiquing Ray Kurzweil who generalizes about progress. So, for better or worse, I take a lesson from that which is to be empiricist: look closely at each field to see whether it's vaulting forward or not.

It's not happening in space (although hypersonics seem to be getting more real). It's not happening in AI or speech recognition/understanding. It's not happening in medicine.

So the net empirical situation looks like the opposite of what Kurzweil says. Only IT and Moore's Law are going totally nuts. One can conjecture about why, but I think that's conjecture and there aren't deep fundamental principles about scientific and technological progress, at least that we've found so far.
Major Network Expansion for SoftLayer
Yes. It lists 12l of alcohol for Germany where the average person drinks more than a hundred liters of beer.
...and still picks stocks for a living http://www.lebed.biz/
Yeah, I certainly don't want to knock HBS by any means for technology. The school is big enough that a sizeable proportion are still involved in the tech industry. So there are significant networking benefits if you want to go into tech.

But if you are doing a straight comparison between HBS and GSB, the nod goes to GSB.
Totally anecdotal, but I thought I'd pass this on.

Whenever I use Goog 411 or Dragon, my results improve if I speak like a standard radio announcer. You know, that kind of jokey, fake lilting voice that they use on car commercials? I hate doing it because I sound like such an ass, but whenever I've done so, Google understands what I'm saying. YMMV.
Top Olympics Logo– Mark of the Olympian Spirit
The special multisport event Olympics features the events covering the summer and winter sports in which thousands of athletes compete for the glory and represent the pride of their nation. Both summer and winter Olympic Games are held alternately after 2 years time.
This has nothing to do with fsync().

If you lseek() back to the beginning after each write(), this behavior should never occur.

Growing a file is complicated, and may require extra unexpected disk accesses while the directory entry is modified or the free blocks are reassigned. These are what are blocking the write(), and write() will do them eventually, on a busy enough system, whether you call fsync() or not.
> If I don't know the exact answer in advance, I need to feel my way by trying something, back tracking then trying a variation etc...

That sort of "coding by accident" is exactly what interviews like that are designed to exclude. No doubt some very few people can successfully code that (wrong) way but the vast majority who do so are simply incompetent.
Java's not even good for that. But the Pet Store has been used in previous comparisons, e.g. when C#/.NET first arrived. But take any application that has to communicate with other systems and/or users, and terse algorithms and vector commands appear less significant.

I'm not saying that once you're doing an application in this field it doesn't matter what language you use. Quite to the contrary, but quite likely we're looking at different language features here. Modularization, macros and other means to structure your code. I'd honestly like to see how the modern APL derivatives handle that.
> Avoiding possible confusion

I believe the word you are looking for is 'inconsistency'.
Your core muscles are fatiguing. Practice,practice. No chair can help with that - it can let you rest in a s-shape, but that's not the point - you want to be using muscles while sitting.
I had the same problem with Mac OS for this site, but was able to get to the destination at last... Tricky, but for me (I own a Nano) it is worth the hassle)
Embodied interactive systems are good - but harder to teach to novices
> Many projects don't need to worry about some low levels aspect of the design (if at all): memory management, for instance, can mostly be left to compilers and linkers.

And in properly written C++, it is.
The first five sections of Chalmers's paper explain the problem very well:

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

(Chalmers is the philosopher who coined the distinction between "hard" and "easy" problems of consciousness.)
He mentions some of these candidates get hired and wash out. That seems like a pretty good correlation.
Since Apple doesn't have anything resembling a monopoly in any market it operates in, and since all DoJ can do is file a suit that is predicated on them having one, this is unlikely to go anywhere.
I have a question - I am a linux user and am willing to pay a few dollars to get a patent-encumbered, high quality decoder - if it allows me to watch high def entertainment with low enough internet bandwidth expenditure.

Is it that a vast majority of Linux users are unwilling to _pay_ : for content and software ?

If it is as I suspect, then it could easily sound a death knell for media consumption on Linux. I wonder how much sooner would we have had Linux hardware-assisted H.264 playback (ffmpeg, vlc), if there money to be made off them.

H.264 is evil for content producers - for content consumers, if (and _only_ if) the quality of H.264 >>>>>>>>>> Theora, then I can see why we would have to pay for it.
The end result of a full screen interface with minimal chrome for devices with small screens is great.

It's interesting how we've gone a full circle right back to full screen single tasking apps. Perhaps this is the iPhone's influence?

Maybe we'll finally get the purple button in the next Mac OS X? http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2000/02/mac-os-x-dp3.ar...
If philosophers can't solve any problems at least we can clarify them pretty well.
As a fellow South African, I support the idea simply because ZA needs more sites like this.
What you mean by contact Arrington? He is the author of that post...so no TC banning yet. ;)
Minigore for iPhone Video Review
Out of all the iPhones I have ever seen, none of them seemed to have Minigore, although it’s (in my opinion), one of the best titles for this mobile device. It’s completely underrated.
Psychology of Business = Games?
I was curious where the data came from, since the article didn't really explain it. Here's the details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Social_Survey
Women in tech don't need patronizing, just encouragement
ANd boy do programmers that have real skills Resent these processes. Because all the do (for us) is get in the way. Its hard for companies to please all of the people.
Like any company, Facebook sells a product to its customers. The product is user data, and the customers are those willing to pay for access to that data. As a result, Facebook is under constant economic pressure to maximize its ability to sell that data to its customers.

Zuckerberg has a huge incentive to promote the idea that privacy is passe or somehow doesn't matter, because the more he can convince his users to accept having their data made public, the more value he can deliver to his customers.
What does C++'s language cruft have to do with CS?

Generic programming, among other things.

The C languages are actually missing a lot of the important concepts, like lambdas,

Lambdas are functions without names. They're not important concepts, they're really just syntactical sugar.

and discourage other important things like recursion.

Just because the language doesn't require TCO doesn't mean it discourages recursion; it just discourages teaching recursion with trivial examples like factorial. Quicksort, for instance, would be an excellent place in a C or C++-based course for teaching recursion.
Distinguish between architects,designers and coders. Different skills needed at each level of solution design.
I guess there are only two scenarios. They either dump you or fully support you.
here's something that looks like a solution:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran0...
I'm not one of these people who thinks rain is crappy weather. Rain can be awesome. For me, variation is the main thing.
Heh. Or sigh. And actually it was from Scheme to Python and Java. The software engineering course changed from CLU to Java a long time ago and that was fine, but the new course (6.005) that's a bridge between the intro "make neat things using Python" courses to it, that in theory tries to teach the bulk of what's in SICP, uses Java. For that purpose Java is not even wrong.

MIT's EECS department panicked when enrollment crashed after the dot.com bubble burst (for the previous quarter century or so they had 2/5ths of the undergraduates (!!!)) and it was decided from on high to change the very nature of its CS foundation and to purge Scheme from the base curriculum.

You can find Sussman's comments on this here and there; here's one paraphrase: http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2009/03/24/Why...

Although I can't at the moment find the sharpest direct quote of him, very roughly, it's a change from understanding what's really going on to patching together libraries.

Now, this is in the cause of building really interesting things, or that is my trying to put a positive gloss on it all and my impression of what it's actually accomplishing.
If you're a pure CS type this is an unmitigated disaster ("So the reason, basically, is that software today is a train wreck, and you might as well embrace helplessness and random tinkering from the start? Horrifying." Andy Hefner, http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr...) and you should go to one of the other top schools like Berkeley, where they still teach SICP. If you want to go out into the world and make cool stuff, it's probably still pretty good to great.
Over 65 Year Old Magazine "Homes and Gardens" hacked Story On Hitler
One problem that PCI compliance has had in the past is that an enterprise was only "compliant" for a very brief period, right after the security scan. So it's easy for TJ Maxx to get nailed for "non-compliance" if and when they have a card number leak.

The PCI specification seems to have been written to protect the payment card industry, not the merchants.
The guru of the bottom of the pyramid
Introducing MinMVC
Things that C programmers need to know about C++:

- malloc() is broken. You need to cast the result.

- Casting is broken. Even though C-style casting is available, you can't use it to reliably cast a void * as an object even when you know the type.

- Pointers are broken. C++ introduces "references", a kind of non-nullable pointer which doesn't look like a pointer, makes a syntactic mess of what & means, and is used inconsistently wherever one could simply always use a pointer.

- Exporting functions is broken. C++ functions can't be reliably exported as public APIs, unless you are absolutely sure your OS and compiler will never be updated. You must use #ifdefs to wrap the functions in 'extern "C"' declarations to have a stable plain-C API.
It might make more sense for window controls to also be status applets, since not all windows can be minimized, maximized, or closed. For instance, if a particular window is no longer needed and only showing some completed action, the close button could turn green. If there's an error, it could turn red. If a process could take a long time, a progress bar could appear and the minimize button could turn green. If a web browser could show a web page better with fullscreen, the maximize button could turn blue. This would follow the applet colour coding scheme.

One could even add some custom window commands (such as resize to content) to their applications.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والاسماعيلى بث مباشر
Depends on your view of what a market is. Apple's app store is pretty dominant in the market for "mobile apps".
That was quote from the article btw.
Having a monopoly is not a requirement, all it takes is anti-competitive behaviour and the restriction of free trade.
To summarize, don't assume that other people are like you, because they probably aren't. I think this is a good lesson for many hackers.
Success, most probably.

At that time, Apple was struggling to be relevant and needed a level playing field. Now it's the undisputed leader in what seems to be two very important segments for future growth.

Now, all it doesn't need is a level playing field.
Indeed. The issue here is "How easily can you afford a dud hire?" Too many people out there with great resumes can't program their way out of a paper bag.

The whiteboard test may be unfair to those who melt under interview pressure, but if the greatest danger is false positives for the "can they code?" test---if it's a startup where the price of one bad hire is very possibly if not likely the failure of the entire venture---it's the best test we've got.

Note that the test doesn't have to be "tricky" or anything like that, e.g. a simple "reverse a doubly linked list" will weed out a surprising number of candidates. My three basic tests, back when C/C++ were the only choices to use, were that one (tests groking pointers), do a recursive factorial (any language will do for that), and "find the errors in this block of code".

Mistakes in doing any of the above are perfectly fine, what you're looking for first and foremost is "do they have a clue?"

Or use another higher level test from one of the best managers I ever had: if you have any doubt about the candidate, don't hire them. And if you doubt they can really code....
While your post has the superficial form that a retort might have, that word doesn't mean what you think it means...

Melodrama: (noun) a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. Language, behavior, or events that resemble drama of this kind.
I don't think tying claims need to prove an actual monopoly, just the somewhat lower standard that the seller has sufficient market power in the tying product's market for the tying arrangement to restrain trade in the tied product's market. It's been applied in the past to car manufacturers who tried to corner their own cars' replacement-parts market, even though the manufacturers didn't actually have a monopoly in the car market.

It's hard to prove, though, because it tends to require showing that the company did the tying solely or mainly for the purpose of restraining trade, as opposed to for some legitimate purpose. The car manufacturers lost because the courts didn't buy their argument that their attempts to limit the replacement-parts market were for quality-assurance reasons. Apple would have to argue that section 3.3.1 isn't intended mainly or solely to stop cross-platform compatibility, but has some legitimate, non-trade-restraining purpose, like improving the reliability or quality of iPhone apps. Probably even just "it makes it easier for us to review apps if they're all in the same languages" would be a good enough explanation. A bad result would be a leaked smoking-gun email saying "hey we should institute this policy to stop people from porting our apps to Android".

Monopoly leveraging is a separate (but related) concept, as far as I understand it, and a bit easier to prove, because there's a much stronger presumption that if it's happening, it's bad, regardless of the reasons.

(Edit: edited/expanded a bit for clarity)
Good Bubble, Bad Bubble
Does anybody know how much google paid? TheNextWeb says its $40 Milion but that number is unconfirmed.