skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously? Either assume that thinking people who have an interest in business already know what AOL is (instead of implying that there is mysteriously an adult businessperson who has never heard of AOL), or in your definition of "AOL", give a concise summary of its history with a time horizon greater than three years. The sentence that was actually included was jarring in its isolation from reality, and that's not really what you expect from the Economist.
Excuse me while I weep for spammy games that litter my feed with massive amounts of pointless trivia, and pester me at every corner to invite my friends.

If your traffic drops because an avenue of spam has been closed, perhaps you need to take a good long look in the mirror.

Which isn't to say that third party notifications weren't useful for legitimate purposes - they wouldn't have even existed otherwise - but it was a massively abused system and I'm glad the hole's been closed.
Help a Startup Out: A Craigslist for Startups
Last time PyPy got money from google was spring 2009. They can still ask PyPy developers to do stuff :)
Doc Brown was right
There doesn't seem to be any people in this city...is this a side effect of a very, very long exposure or something?
RethinkDB says they're looking for intern(s): http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs/

(I don't work there, but I think they're great people working on interesting stuff, so if you have the right skills I'd certainly recommend applying.)
The price of electrons is not necessarily linked to oil production, since electrons can be produced in ways which don't require much or any oil.

There are other eminently practical energy sources available. The main issue is that these have historically not been price competitive with oil. As oil extraction becomes more difficult the economics of energy will change.
What's most dangerous to me is the idea that without the threat of failure there is no incentive to learn.

You are arguing against a straw man. I gave you several specific reasons why it is good to fail students who have not learned the material they need for their further education, and you have addressed none of them.

To your straw man I'll reply with something that should be both obvious and important. There is no possibility of learning when you are put in a classroom with material that assumes you possess a foundation you don't have. Furthermore if the teacher attempts to address the deficiencies of those who haven't learned the basics, there is no possibility of teaching what was supposed to be taught in that class. Therefore social promotion creates a situation where teachers get a choice of bad options, and no available good ones.

The costs of these poorly set up classrooms are extremely difficult to properly measure. But they are absolutely real. And it is important to note that a significant fraction of those costs fall on the students who were not socially promoted.

Looking at the research you quoted, this critical factor is ignored. Yes, students who are allowed to fail learn less than ones who are socially promoted. There wasn't strong evidence whether they learn less by the same grade. But the most important fact to me, whether or not OTHER students learn less when put in classrooms where teachers have a broader mix of students - wasn't even looked at.

Furthermore the option of summer school wasn't addressed. That gives you the best of both worlds. Students who need it get extra time. And get to stay on course. It worked well for me. I personally had a crappy grade 9 French teacher, was passed when I should of failed, then failed grade 10 French. I retook the course in summer school and passed. It would have been better still if I had failed grade 9 French instead. (And better still if I had a decent teacher there, but such is life.)
" ... because Cucumber is for vegetarians!"

Is this supposed to be some sort of slight, or a put-down?

Is there something lesser about being a vegetarian?

I'm curious, being, you know, a vegetarian and all.
Well I liked your comment but the droid screen isn't as accurate as i'd like on those tiny voting arrows. Sorry about that.
Or have a keyboard that places them "correctly".
If the TSA Were Running New York
Ha, I'm glad I'm not the only one who's mind wanders during those things! I've come to believe that it's more a function of having an extremely active mind that prefers to interact over simply receiving information passively. Same thing happens to me during lectures in class. I try to engage my mind with what's being said, looking up relevant passages and asking myself questions about the validity of what's being said.

Also, there's no incompatibility between believing in a higher power and being able to reason. I'm a Christian in his third year of a Computer Science degree at a major university, and I like to think I have some capacity for reason :p
Hmmm...

I wonder what would happen if someone brought an Intertec Superbrain to work.
With Quicksilver, you can assign hotkeys to the applications themselves. Once I got this set up, I stopped using Alt+Tab.
I want to hear the entire thought process so I can discern how much the candidate really knows. If I was asked this question, I would say obviously the theoretical limit is 80 seconds (provided you use raw data with no compression) and there is no way it could be done any faster. Add to that frame + packet + TCP overhead, delays due to ack/handshaking + latency, packet loss and the download takes longer. Also, speed is influenced by MTU / Jumbo Frames settings, TCP window sizes, and tuning options.

I would have accepted the answer even if the candidates were slightly wrong or off the mark on any of these. Instead I got answers from "ummmmm" and "less than 1 second" to "35 minutes" and "it's impossible to answer this question." Like _delirium said, the basic answer is available on Google so it wasn't a single right/wrong answer that I wanted, of course that would help. I just wanted to hear them think this problem through. I even broke down the problem for them and told them 1 byte = 8 bits. So 10 MB = 10 million bytes and 10 Mbps = 10 million bits per second. sigh

This isn't just a random interview question by any means. I have a solid reason to ask this - we have hosted Exchange from Rackspace and because of how Terminal Server works, we have to use it in non-cached mode. My users use Outlook but it works pretty much like any web-based mail app does - every email is downloaded each time you click on it. It is worse because browsers can at least cache attachments. So a user who gets a 10MB file gets mad at me because it takes 30 seconds to download it. If the new IT person can't understand and explain why that happens, how can they determine the solution to this problem?
Any luck in finding this out? Google all over the place, couldn't find any reference to it.
This post and all the replies are full of misconceptions.

I suspect the average book price is way off.

I have 98 digital books in my kindle library.

My average book price for the 98 books was $3.46.

39 books were free.

The average book price for my non-free books was $5.87.

As far as kindle vs iPad, I have both.

The kindle is MUCH better for actual reading. It's possible when you're 10 years old that you can read novels by moonlight, but as you get older having a well-lit book is a much better experience.

Reading on the kindle, with a bright light over your shoulder is wonderful.

The kindle does have a clunky interface, but I don't have to use it much. I usually peruse books in the amazon store on my computer (or sometimes on my iphone).

I can buy and send it to my kindle in one click.

But mostly, I send books to my kindle using the "send sample" feature. I don't buy books until I'm sure I want to buy them. I send a sample. Then when I go to my kindle, there's a big queue of books that might or might not be interesting. I start reading them, and if I like it I get to the end of the sample and click the buy button they embedded there.

Oh, one more thing -- in the beginning I got a lot of free books for my kindle. My library is now cluttered up with a bunch of books that seemed good at the time, but now I can't get rid of.

In the end, the kindle may have a clunky interface, but it excels at being a book. It's my preferred way to read.

I also have an iPad, and it's just not as good a reading experience for text. You can see the pixels in the characters, and the LCD display isn't as easy to read. I'm sure apple will remedy this going forward as their display gets brighter and higher-resolution. However, I don't know if it can get as good as the kindle with a good reading light. The iPad will never compare to the kindle in sunlight.

However, the iPad excels with color or animated books. For example, the kids books for the iPad are wonderful (look at the free Alice in Wonderland or Toy Story books). For textbooks, I can imagine it can only get better, maybe redefining what a book is. I can imagine physics textbooks with built-in calculations, graphing and demonstrations. The line between app and book is getting pretty fuzzy.
I can't help but wonder how much library/server side legwork would be required to get a functional version of mutt running in a browser.
Of course Mike can sell if he wants to. I can think of a bunch of media outlets who would love to swallow TC's traffic. The deal would just have to include a transition phase. As the article itself noted, Mike's involvement is already maybe half of what it was two years ago.

Think Microsoft and Bill Gates. 10 years ago, it was inconceivable for Bill Gates to ever leave Microsoft. And it happened without major trauma (meaning you can argue that Microsoft is not as good as they used to be, but it didn't tank overnight).
It says that more people are getting into this line of work because they have lost their jobs in the recession, not because they want to grow cheaper food at home that actually costs a lot more than Whole Foods.

People who can spend $1675 a year on having someone else grow their produce for them are probably a lot less likely to have been affected by the recession.
> Why? What do you mean 'why'?
How badly do you need promotion?
"We have to keep our platform pure to protect you, our loyal user!"

If you want to make a case that they are making emotionally overwrought appeals, you should have the decency to provide a direct quote to make your case. Abusing quotations marks by putting them around your own subjective interpretation just tells me that you've got nothing to offer.
Tangential: I wonder how well a game like Nethack would work as a Facebook game. The game could Facebook broadcast if a player ascends, dies after passing a certain (hard to reach) milestone, gets a high score or achieves an account-first...

I guess it probably would only appeal to whatever few people are into social media and are willing to play ASCII games. But it would be nice to see a real game--not to mention an important, venerable one--show up in my newsfeed all the time, instead of Farmville, Mafia Wars, that chef game with those obnoxious over-cute chibis... (Yeah, I know you can block them, I'm just lazy...)
I'll pay $5000 for it
And you have to buy Apple hardware to run it.
So then it's your position that security companies shouldn't offer any new technology to combat botnets for fear of putting out of business all the hardworking botnet developers who have bills to pay?

Those facebook games, and particularly the spammy notifications that some of them use waste many peoples time and cost society real money everytime anyone has to skim over some announcement in their feed or see some random notification.

I join the other people in this thread who have no sympathy for companies seeing their user bases drop because facebook has made it harder for them to spam users.
This is the kind of use I've envisioned having an iPad for, sort of a digital newspaper with the possibility to extend the information base with apps. Looking forward to the iPad landing in SA. Better take a bib to the iStore so I don't mess up the demo unit...
My solution is to use mostly non-overlapping windows and add more (and bigger) monitors. Overlapping windows is a poor design forced on us back when we had 640x480 7" monitors. It's time to let it die.

My tab usage in FF is less switching tabs, and much more opening lots of tabs and going through (and closing) them one by one. When I find my self switching tabs in FF too much I drag one tab into a new window.
An idea just popped into my head- Tab+1, Tab+2... Allow manual ordering, or perhaps order the same way as the task bar, so a visual guide is always visible and the order does not change often.
I only ever know about the first time one of my friends joins one. After that all is silence as I hide the spambots.
I just have a really hard time grokking haskell. I've been using stumpwm and it's awesome, but it integrates less well with gnome.

In the same boat -- 6 years OSX, installed Lucid RC on 13 inch MBP recently -- so far no intention of going back.
Heh, I guess you're right--I saw the Google code blog post and assumed it was ongoing. Mea culpa.

What's the road map for PyPy, as far as the developers are concerned?
No, NP Completeness states that you can go either way.

Specifically: A problem X is NP Complete if:

1: X is in NP.

2: Every problem in P can be reduced to X in polynomial time.

We have established the first condition by intuition-- pathfinding is easy.
Immediately, we know, then, that there exists some way to reduce this to 3-SAT, in a way general for any level.
Reducing 3-SAT to this, however, proves the second criterion (because 3-SAT is NP-complete, so by doing two reductions you can reduce any NP problem to this, in time at worst the cost of doing sum of the two polynomials describing the complexity of the reductions).

So we can also convert 3-SAT-- or any NP-complete problem, in fact, and even more generally, any NP problem-- to this in poly-time.
There's strong evidence that exercise is actually counterproductive when trying to lose weight.
I hate that I can't download google listen on my phone, restricting an app such as this per carrier makes no sense to me :/
Enterprise Cloud Adoption Is Changing the Playing Field
I don't see how this will apply to browser tabs reliably. Are you doing it based on page url or domain?

Page url has the obvious shortfall of being so rarely used for a long amount of time. It might be used for an hour, or perhaps a day, or in some rare cases where you do interact with a single url for a long period of time, but those cases will be few and far between.

Domain seems too generic. If I'm on HN then I may flip to gmail frequently as I work through the day, but that doesn't mean that when I'm in Gmail I want to always tab to HN, perhaps it's to my blog, or work's admin section.

I guess actually my issue is that he uses a single pair example.

If I'm on HN, then gmail would probably be a likely tab target, but on Gmail, the options of targets greatly expands. HN would be at top because of recent use, but the other sites mentioned would also be likely targets.

So then we suffer from the frequent order changing that was cited as a downfall of the MRU method.

Am I wrong here?
Just for the humor value, I'm hoping it is Microsoft Office.

searches

The true answer is even better.
yes, although i was testing their own demo pictures.

for those who downvoted: its pretty dangerous to take something that is traditionally done by humans or in an analog fashion and do it digitally when you are wrong around 50% of the time because people tend to trust technical things that look "safe enough." i understand the tech will get better, but i think its pretty bad to have attributes like "smiling?" and "male/female" even present in the API at all if i can flip a coin blindly and have roughly the same outcome.

of course its complicated, technically impressive regardless. but when a consumer sees "facial recognition technology" from the tech community they aren't about to question it. all im saying is if you are going to offer that kind of analysis, it should be right before people can start using it in their apps via an API and end consumers start depending on the data. if it's not accurate, or not a big enough a deal to care about, it shouldn't be in the API.

here come more down votes...sigh
It also came off as an example of what the author was advocating. Don't be wishy-washy, don't skirt around things, say what you mean and back it up.
Very Personal Computing
Ah come on, all these assumptions make your numbers worthless. I recently bought a nook: reading my first book on it gave me the same feeling I had when I efirst used an MP3 player. You immediately realize this is the future, it's soooo much better and there is no way back.

The only tragic thing is: publishers didn't realize that yet and the number of books you can buy is still so limited.
> - headache and commitment of OS maintenance and advancement on OS that nobody but them uses - virtually no app eco system

You may want to tell Apple about this.
More amusing yet, both of those ignore (of course) transport overhead. In RS-232/dial-up days, that would be 20% worth of start/stop-bits (i.e. a byte of data requires 10 bits transmitted).

For my purposes (not a network admin), I still figure on 10 bps = 1 byte/s. Easier, and usually close enough, what with packet headers and network burps. So, 100MB*10b/10Mbps = 100 s.

P.S. just read OP's expansion on problem. I would recommend reading C.N.Parkinson's take on candidate search (ch. 5 of the Parkinson's Law book, e.g. http://www.02articles.com/read/parkinsons-law-chapter-5 ). If it does not actually help, at least you'll be amused.

P.P.S. searching for the above link, found this also amusing testimonial from a satisfied user: http://direkobold.blogspot.com/2009/04/parkinsons-law-for-hi...
You're right that we may not have precisely two options. However the mere possibility of the competition failing to compete for reasons that are not clearly articulated is the worst possible reason for intervention. If there are other real options that aren't just hypothetical, I would genuinely like to hear them.

Both Google and Adobe seem to be saying that they are happy to compete with Apple, and that their approach is better, and there is no shortage of prognosticators who say that Apple's strategy will fail independently of intervention.
Tax oil, subsidize renewables and nuclear construction (but not operation). That'll do a lot towards building in the incentives that are currently being lost to free-rider and tragedy-of-the-commons.
Evidence Based Scheduling
Agreed. I also have to wonder if the report showing the app store only broke even was because of initial investments which they will not have to repeat in the future.
Also see Adobe's work on a C-to-ActionScript compiler: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

I'd love to see an updated version of that benchmark table with scores for V8, Nitro, and TraceMonkey.
I would have thought the same thing before I had a kid, or at least the thought would have crossed my mind.

Sometime I really need to sit down and write the list of things that nobody told me about raising kids. I started having kids at 30, so the list isn't things like "Hey, they cry a lot" or "you lose a lot of sleep"; I had that figured out. It's the relatively short list of things that still were a surprise. The necessary pharmacology loadout is one of them; we learned the importance of anti-gas the hard way. (That is, if I could go back, we'd reach for that a lot sooner and a lot more often. Like I said, it's essentially harmless if you're wrong and it came up a lot.)
Excellent, thank you. But in paragraph 8, you do mean that "worth considering that if you turn it inside out" instead of "worth considering that if you turn it upside down", correct?
If it's a privacy thing, then why is it a setting? If I turn the sound off, then I can take all the upskirt pictures I want.
On-the-fly derivative of RE seems like it would offer horrible performance. I suppose memoization could help, though.
I don't think you realize how interconnected, and interchangeable all forms of energy are. Not being price competitive with oil means it costs more energy to make then it produces.

If something made more energy than it costs to make it (over 10 to 20 years), then it would be built. Why not build it? It's guaranteed profit.

But, in actuality there isn't anything like that. Every single form of energy is being tapped to the maximum possible. It's the nature of capitalism.

If the price of oil went up, the price of everything goes up. If the price of raw materials goes up, it costs more to build some alternate form of energy, so you get nowhere.
Angry Class-Warfare Email Being Passed Around Wall Street
If people are interested, here's some extra reading matter courtesy of reddit: http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/09/dining-philosoph... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf
Can you provide some links for that?
Miguel De Icaza: CLI on the Web.
Not in the Southern Hemisphere, but your point is well taken that a typical summer slump (noticeable mostly in the Northern Hemisphere) wouldn't be expected to show up as a March drop in number of users.
Though it seems few people here are Windows users, Windows 7 lets you directly switch to/launch apps by using WinKey + [Num], where [Num] corresponds to the app's position in the dock.

Chrome lets you do the same with tabs using Ctrl + Num.
Right because using the Facebook platform to gain tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions in revenue off simplistic games with poor graphics has definitely been a poor business decision.
Now this was an interesting article until I read this line:

"Of course Apple users will probably not notice the subsidy as they will end up spending most of their salary on the machines"

Whatever happened to unbiased writing? While there is a kernel of truth here, what does this have to do with the article?
This has gotten a lot of upvotes in a very short time, so it must be ringing true with a lot of readers. I'd encourage some healthy skepticism.

1) It is really tempting to try to understand ourselves based on the assumed lives of our evolutionary ancestors, but the fact is we know almost nothing about their lives, and conclusions we draw from what we can guess are unlikely to be accurate.

2) There is not one citation in this entire article. This is all opinion, no matter how true it sounds.

3) He offers medical advice based solely on his personal experience. Sleep apnea may not be the same to all people.
Container gardening is far more efficient and cost effective than yard farming. It yields an equal amount of satisfaction, is easier to manage and allows for a better balanced landscape.

Large planters, raised beds and strategically located pots seem to me preferable to hiring someone to come "tend the lower 400 sq. ft."
Goldman’s Rules of Acquisition
It's politically charged to no apparent reason. You might as well say "Hierarchal organizations produce figures with perceived/real authority that cause some people to stop filtering information based on their trust in the individual transmitting (information) and/or the organization as a whole."
You didn't understand what I said.

Renewable and nuclear power today, consume more energy in the making of them, then they produce (over 10 to 20 years).

Subsidizing them won't help - there isn't enough energy available.

If you take the long view, more then 20 years, the picture changes, but few renewables last that long. Only nuclear does.

But since no bank wants to loan money with a payout of longer than 20 years, nuclear doesn't get built. That's why they talk about loan guarantees for nuclear power.

There is no free-rider or tragedy-of-the-commons going on here.
I don't claim it tracks eye movements, only that there is a very strong correlation between mouse and eye movements (research results is shown on home page). However if the site gives that impression then perhaps its something I need to address.

Thanks for the comment.