skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I consider it amazing that some people do go cover to cover in my books. In most cases I know that people are going to pick and choose the parts that they like. But they know that if they dig further then they'll get something that has only one subset of jargon describing it instead of all different kinds of notations and terminology -- if I didn't write the books it would be much harder for people to find stuff out. That's what turns me on."

--Knuth, in Coders at Work
Congratulations on the hire. Even though I dislike PHP and avoid primarily-PHP projects (which excludes me from something like 75% of all start-ups, but was fine at Yahoo where many teams used Java/C++/Perl for backend/middleware work), I can only say good things about his contributions at Yahoo which went beyond PHP work e.g., educating engineers on web security.
The whole thing ended up being a prank by team douche. The post was updated so that the rickroll can be avoided. :-[
I'm moderately scared to up/downvote people when reading HN on my phone. At a comfortable level of zoom for reading, the buttons are so small, and with no option to undo my vote, I'd rather not accidentally penalize someone.
I clicked one of the flashy things, and I think I voted something up. I'm not sure though.
My practical definition of stupidity is talking authoritatively about a subject one doesn't understand, and is incapable of explaining. Stupid people are often parroting things they've heard in various places, of which they have only the most superficial of understandings. Not being stupid is often knowing when to shut your mouth.

At a deeper level, it all comes down to being poor at evaluating the relative value of information sources, placing value in the judgment of people for social and political reasons rather than for their actual expertise in the subject matter. This inability to recognize expertise, easily vulnerable to misguiding, is the essence of idiocy.
You bring up a good point megablast, designing for the iPad does bring new challenges of its own. Though I agree with your design criticism, the iPad Human Interface Guideline paper published by Apple is demanded to be followed upon submission of an App to the AppStore. The larger window on the right, the Detail View, is meant to handle a single unit of content at a time, in this case an HN article. This "Side View" perspective may seem awkward considering a large screen, but keep in mind that just because there is more space, not all of it should necessarily be used up :) You don't want to cramp up too much data or display too little. Maintaining a good balance between the two will come with time and experience.
"Don’t pretend to be more technical than you are. Especially in the Bay Area. First of all, it’s incredibly transparent (even to non-technical people), and you will lose all credibility. It also pisses off engineers. "

<venting>
Seriously. Please don't condescendingly explain something technical, incorrectly, to someone who already understands it. AHHHHRGG! </venting>
Certainly you can. you can't send the company to jail, but you can fine them, jail the executives who approved a criminal act, and suchlike.
Interestingly my friend and I hacked on something similar which used OpenGL for visualization. It's amazing what can now be done purely in the browser.
LLVM is a good deal lower-level than the JVM. It lets you build representations of a program in an internal representation that's higher-level than assembly but doesn't limit you as much as the JVM; for example, it doesn't come with a built-in garbage collector and allows tail-call optimization. LLVM makes a great compiler back-end, does a bunch of optimizations, and can be used at runtime to do on-the-fly compilation.

Once VMKit is more stable, it'll be able to run Java code and .NET code on the same LLVM-based VM, which is nice.

LLVM supports a bunch of different processors and platforms as backends. If you're writing a compiler, this is a godsend.
Just to clarify slightly, I'm a tech guy doing a finance job (while I get round to looking for something else). My day to day work is processing millions of dollars worth of Corporate Actions for pension and investment funds worldwide. If my job description involved implementing solutions to business problems I'd be happy, but just now I do what I can while also having the same workload as other people in the same role.
What's funny is the ads on boingboing don't really look out of place.
You stopped just short of the explanation I was hoping for. :)
I am gonna define the singularity to have occurred when we know once and for all which one is more healthy: a cheeseburger or a bag of potato chips.
Except there was no exit interview possible here, because as soon as he gave notice, Calacanis told him to pack his stuff up and get out. I don't feel comfortable calling someone a "coward" in a situation like this.
Yes, but they are low-quality TN panels. I decided to buy a refurbished T60p with an IPS display.
Related: What's A Non-Programmer To Do? by Spencer Fry

http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do
If you really want someone to work for you for 3 years, sign them to a 3 year contract.

Of course that would require some sacrifice on the part of the employer. They wouldn't have the lopsided advantage of being able to fire the employee at will, yet expect to shame them into staying for years.

There's been a lot of discussion of "entitlement" surrounding this incident, but the only entitlement I'm seeing seems to be coming from the employer side.
A solid framework for understanding and addressing disagreements, but there isn't enough emphasis on the time constraints imposed by reality. I often find that you must be willing to let a disagreement stand, even though, with enough time, it could be worked out.

Advice on two derivatives of this problem would be even more helpful:

1) How can you tell when you have sufficiently refined your communication with the other party?

2) How to reasonably judge the point at which the costs of continuing the discussion out-weight the benefits.

This is usually situation specific, but please share if you have any rules that can be applied.
There's a corollary to the 90/10 rule: if solving a whole problem seems infeasible, try solving 80% of it instead.
You're putting a couple carts before your horse there.

First, you presume there's a trade secret. There's no indication that is correct; all I see is a new soon-to-be-sold product that Apple intentionally let off of its campus and into the wild.

Second, you presume Gawker criminally misappropriated or otherwise misused the trade secret. Gawker bought a lost phone. Did they have a duty under California law to seek out its owner? Possibly -- but that's an entirely different question from if they criminally violated trade secrets laws. There's no indication that Gawker had any duty at all to protect Apple's secrets; it's not like Gawker is an employee at Apple. You can't just say that, because a person committed a lesser crime, they necessarily committed all greater conceivable crimes. Same goes for the person who found and sold the phone.

Third, you presume the government had probable cause to believe that each of the items seized from Chen had information relating to a crime. Two problems with that: (a) as noted above, it's unclear a crime even was committed and (b) the warrant was patently overbroad, and its doubtful the government had more in mind than a fishing expedition. That's a plain violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Fourth, where's the fire? There's no on-going crime here. There's no criminal enterprise. There's an isolated, public incident. So why the high priority? Why the extremely aggressive measures of seizing all of a journalists' computers?

Compare and contrast that situation to one of the cases listed on the DOJ website you linked to:

"In support of his plea, Mitchell acknowledged that on September 5, 2007, he emailed much of the contents of a DuPont proprietary spreadsheet document entitled “Denier Economics” to an official with Kolon. “Denier” is a term used to describe the weight per unit length (linear density) of a continuous filament or yarn. The Denier Economics spreadsheet contained highly sensitive business trade secret information related to DuPont’s production capacity for Kevlar® yarn in a variety of denier types. Included in the information for each denier type were specific figures relating to annual production, unit capacity, spin speeds, and several factors relating to line efficiency (such as percentage yield and percentage up time). The Denier Economics spreadsheet was closely held and distributed to a small number of DuPont personnel on a need-to-know basis only."

Now that's a trade secret, and it's a clear misappropriation of it by someone with a duty to keep it secret.

And what did the DOJ do there? Did they start seizing the property of third parties covered by shield laws?

No. They slowly started building a case.

The exact opposite of what REACT did here.

Shoot first, ask later, for high profile crimes is not just the wrong approach, it's unconstitutional and inappropriate. And it demands an explanation.
I used to be arrogant like that (still to some extend) and I absolutely understand where you are coming from. Seeing other people screwing up on things that seems extremely obvious and no-brainer can be annoying and can be confused as being stupid.
The Problem With Opera: It Tries To Scream When It Just Needs to Sing
Genius redditor created a multiplayer 2d game, where everybody edits the world
The computer motif (complete with Bill Gates as the Devil) is particularly apropos for my school's website.

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...
Google '96: http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...
Any accountants turned startup/geek type people here? I'm one.
We might just as productively argue about politics or religion, but I'll sum my response up by saying that roughly 60% of the apps we assess (assessing app security being my day job, and what the company I cofounded does) have no C in them, and those apps are not "more secure" than the apps with C code.

Should "you" write C code? No. You don't have to. You will screw it up in amusing and horrible ways. But don't suggest Microsoft should rewrite Office in Haskell. All that would happen if they did is that we'd learn how to exploit insecure Haskell idioms real fast.
Hear, hear on the mobile safari limitations! I kinda understood on the iPhone, but on the iPad... it gets on my last nerve, especially when it "overwrites"--a webpage I opened in a new tab to read later, only to hit my limit and forget to close one of my 9 allowed pages then click on something in my mail and BAM! It overwrites. But, wait, there's more! It doesn't remember that page and you can't hit the back button to return to it. Lovely.
Like I said, it's like the Bible. Most people don't cover-to-cover the Bible. But the Bible also isn't the "encyclopedia of Catholicism". People have favorite passages. There are books in it people do read end to end. There are places, like Psalms, where you open to an arbitrary page and read either direction.

TAOCP is like that.
I'd like to correct the title: Make any webpage look like it was made in Frontpage. Yeah.
Trying to overcome communication barriers and understand where other people are coming from is not “[pandering] like an asshole.”
Terry Childs sounds mentally ill. Was that raised in the trial?
Amazon Payments is a step in the right direction, but even it is more complex. Here's the App Store flow:

1. Click "Buy"
2. Enter your password
3. Click "Buy"

Here's the Amazon Payments flow:

1. Click "Pay'
2. Enter your username
3. Enter your password
4. Click "Sign In"
5. Choose a payment method
6. Click "Pay"

Bear in mind that the burden of typing is much greater on a mobile (and especially touchscreen) device, so just having to enter both a username and password instead of just a username is far more annoying.

There's also the fact that people are very unaccustomed to paying for access to Web sites (as opposed to buying things off of Web sites). Can you think of any paid site that's widely used by consumers? I can't. So you actually need to make it more painless than the App Store, because even if you have something extraordinarily compelling, you've already almost scared your customers off just by mentioning money.
That is massively, dangerously wrong. Dunning, Kruger and an array of later researchers have shown that while the inept do strongly overestimate their own abilities, the highly able strongly underestimate them. The very able assume that if a task was easy for them it must be easy for everyone, while the completely inept assume that a task seems difficult because it is objectively difficult, and that they must be very able to have made the progress that they did. The lower you estimate your own ability to be, the more likely it is that you are in fact highly able. CF Downing demonstrated that people with high intelligence tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are similarly intelligent to themselves and underestimate their own. If you think that the people around you are more intelligent than you, you're statistically likely to be the most intelligent person you know.

Personally, I think this is a highly pertinent cognitive bias, so pervasive as to affect nearly every aspect of modern life. I think that our most able thinkers keep quiet for fear of being wrong, whilst the stupidest and least informed in our society shout from the rooftops in blissful ignorance. I think that between the natural effect of "the more you know, the more you realise you don't know" and the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society, we are becoming dominated by the loud and inept.

In my work as a gambler, I rejoice in this bias, as it is what pays my bills - bad gamblers can't even conceive the idea that there might be skill involved. Unfortunately, I think it is fucking up society - while professional scientists are careful to speak precisely, avoid hyperbole and only make statements that are backed by strong evidence, their opponents feel free to rant and rave, to extrapolate one anecdote into compelling evidence, even to deny the possibility of objectivity.
Considering the police took several hours to go through everything, fingerprints could be obtained on site, could they not?
HN: Why does it show that I'm logged in as someone else?
My username is ozres1 yet every now and then it says I'm logged in as someone else
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/281/20974680.jpg
From the article: "Doing these kinds of analyses is notoriously imprecise, in some cases amounting to little more than guesswork."

That is does not paint a very good picture, and when looking into the actual report and what industries are considered: "...rise of the digital economy, as fair use permits a range of activities that are critical to many high technology businesses, including search portals and web hosting."

I would bet that any user-generated content website is considered, and who knows what else.
LLVM's intermediate representation is more low-level than JVM bytecode and provides no safety guarantees, allowing it to be used for any language including C. LLVM does not provide a language runtime, garbage collector, or JIT compiler. In fact, its principal use right now is as the backend of ahead-of-time compilers like GCC and Clang.

What LLVM does provide is a bunch of optimizers that operate on LLVM IR, and a bunch of code generators that take LLVM IR and spit out machine code for different CPUs. Traditionally these things have been inseparable parts of a larger monolithic codebase (e.g. GCC). Compiler writers can now reuse LLVM's optimizers and code generators instead of writing their own, and instead focus on the frontend parts where all the interesting language features live.
Westerners like to view any marriage practice other than their own as sexist (polygamy, arranged marriages) without realizing that traditional Western marriage is sexist as well. Modern Western marriages are less sexist, but it's not especially or necessarily true that self-arranged monogamous marriages are less sexist than the alternative.
Since when does calling out Microsoft equal being PR for Apple? Reporters should be attacking bad policies, no matter what the company. And wether the arguments are rational or personal, they make some good points. Some of the articles seem as if the guy is wearing a tin foil hat but then again, it is well documented what Microsoft has done against Linux/Open Source movement.
MathTran: create, store and translate mathematical content
7) Don't call people engineers when the appropriate term is "developer" or "programmer"
Oh, holy crap that's good. You may see me steal that.
From the final chapter:

"Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting... You are much better off using code as
your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can
code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing
things to advance those disciplines."

Don't know about the programming profession, but the secret weapon bit is true to a degree that might shock many of the readers here. I would even go so far as to say that NOT knowing how to program causes ridiculous waste of resources in other disciplines.

Working as an epidemiologist during the H1N1 pandemic, I saw literally dozens of man hours drained on repetitive statistical reporting and database tasks that the average reader here could probably automate in under an hour. There were lots of extremely smart people running around with a ton of important things to do, but since no one (myself included) really knew how to program, what were we to do? I think I was the only one to even have the inkling that we could probably be replaced by a few Excel macros.

I don't know this guy's back-story (or why he seems to inspire such antipathy), but this passage got me very excited! I'd already bought into the idea that learning at least the basics of programming would be a good way to improve my general analytic thinking ability (a noble goal, IMHO), but I was being held back by the thought that it was a bit of a frivolous endeavor. This has really inspired me to get started!

Secret weapon indeed! Wooo!

[EDIT: I see several others have commented on this bit. Sorry to be repetitive!]
No, it's just there's more abusive dicks online who need to be told off. :-)
Try reading this, by Cosma Shalizi: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html
Good article. I wish more of those smug arrogant idiots who think everyone else is an idiot would read this :P
I know Zed was just reacting to dive into python, but if I seriously wanted to help people learning to program I wouldn't write a pdf, I'd make a fun interactive website.

The first think Zed asks his readers to do is find the terminal and get a python command prompt up un going. arrg..

The first thing a new programmer should do is something cool and interesting, or useful. Immediate gratification.

10 PRINT "Jay Rocks"
20 GOTO 10
Have you tried using urlib and urllib2? I think that alone prevents anyone from getting to the site. :-)

Seriously though, I'm going for simple and if there's a problem then I'll lock it down more completely.
A big problem with Xilinx/Altera FPGAs is how closed and expensive developing for them can be.

I still shiver when I think about the times I spent with WebPack.
Personally I think engineer is a better term than "programmer".
Actually, LLVM does provide a JIT compiler. It supports both AOT and JIT compilation.
Mzl.la Mozill's tinyurl
good point and duly noted (though i find your style of offering feedback somewhat abrasive).
Ravenpack: financial news flow
Ahem.. from the article:

> However, it will be straightforward to use this on your desktop too, if you want, and we’d encourage people to try with that configuration.

So yeah, it sounds like they're happy to have people experiment with this in the regular desktop edition, but they're not ready to commit to it in that edition yet.
Our friends with the iron ring (if Canadian) are very sensitive and misusing the term engineer will elicit tears.
Monty's response is well-thought-out and well-supported. I was hoping to see the other side of the argument when this came out before, thanks.
Interestingly there's a scandal running in Denmark right now where a big vendor has received around $10 million to create a system much like the one you're describing. The system was a year late, and now it doesn't work and constantly crashes due to overload. Embarrassing.
Here's Yahoo News on the situation: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100427/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1816

Money quote: "In a statement, the Santa Clara County DA confirmed our report yesterday that Apple sits on the steering committee of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) Task Force, a coalition of 17 federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies created in 1997 to combat high-tech crimes (the Santa Clara County DA's office is the task force's lead agency)."

And: "Apple Inc. has provided "advice, recommendations, strategic input, and direction"..."

That can mean a lot of things, but "high level advisor" is certainly among the most obvious interpretations here.
Isn't this something you discover by yourself in the early teenage years, in terms of lesson learned, and don't do it again (trial-error)? At least it was for me.

PS: Thanks for the quotes. However I failed to explain this lesson to my little sister.
I'll have a page on the site they go to for the first exercise, so it's always updated with the latest best starter thing to do.

However, the #1 problem all the people I've tested this on have is getting basic gear going. The simple act of just "write, run, fix" is even daunting. The goal of this section is to give them a very simple set of things to do so they can get to just enough working gear to do write, run, fix.

That "immediate gratification" just doesn't exist anymore. It existed for BASIC because Microsoft included it for free for years, so no install needed. These days there just isn't something like that out there.

The only exception to this would be a Javascript book. But, javascript is such a giant nasty mess it would be hard to teach things like this. Without good error messages, syntax errors, etc. it'd be pointless to teach it.
Some of Warren Buffett's wisdom might be relevant here:

I want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper, to be read by their spouses, children, and friends, with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.
Yep, that's the idea. Writing a book for programmers isn't really that useful. There's plenty of those and adding one more programmer to the tech scene would be like spitting into the Pacific.

But, if I can improve every other discipline by making it easier for them to learn to code, and then get them to use code to improve things, then that's a much better goal.
Well of course you'd be a bad programmer after just 84 monad tutorials. You need at least like 300, maybe 385 just to finally get it.

Sheesh, don't you know anything?
"stupid refers to lack of ability while ignorant refers to lack of knowledge" -- Therasus

You can educate ignorance, you can't rewire stupidity.
Mixergy interview with Chris Dixon
I dropped over 70 pounds mostly by eliminating carbs (bread especially) and substituting lots (and lots) of vegetables. If anything, I increase my fat intake.
Who builds the tallest tower with a marshmallow, tape, and dry spaghetti?
For those who don't realize, Microsoft made this as a joke for one of its events.
I'm probably nit-picking here, but TouchOSC doesn't generate sound by itself.

You're probably missing the point. Interface is the whole point of the iPad. Interface + processing ability is a lot of what the ongoing computer revolution has been and will be about.
Try section 7 of these notes:

http://see.stanford.edu/materials/aimlcs229/cs229-notes3.pdf