skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So what your saying is you could do it if your fucked with it enough, but it would be most likely impossible to play a quick trick on a friend by switching out his power source - the charing cube.

That's one way of saying it. But you are seriously underestimating the specific value of 'fucked with it enough', without the required knowledge you're looking at a project that will cost you a few months to more than a year. This is not that easy. Electronics, modulation technology, isolation, SMD hacking with regular tools, it's all possible, but it's not that easy.

> Let me ask another question, Now what about electricity through Googles proposed one gig high speed test networks, hooked up to smart houses, providing your internet and cable needs. How long 10-25 years? Would additional technology need to be created?

100mbit is available in some countries right now (Korea for instance) http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2006/11/8195.ars , 1G is definitely possible with todays tech but nobody would really know what to do with it. I'm a pretty heavy user on a 20Mbit broadband connection the only thing that I find limiting every now and then is that I 'only' have 5 Mbit up.

So additional tech would not need to be made at all, the bigger question is what you would do with it.

> I am trying to write an MBA paper guessing googles long term strategy, 25 years out. I know they applied to be in the energy market but I'm not sure how they could fully use this ability other than transfer power from their data centers to consumers.

Trying to guess googles long term strategy, 25 years out is like trying to predict the information age from the moment of the invention of the Hollerith card. There really is so much happening in such a short timespan that you have no chance at all to do that.

Google started in '98, you're trying to make a stab at what they'll be doing over twice as long from today as they've been in business, I doubt google themselves looks that far ahead, so how could you try to guess what they themselves probably do not know ?

Google mostly applied to be in the energy market so they can power their datacenters and use the grid for transportation and to facilitate their solar experiments, I'm not at all aware of Google wanting to be a domestic provider of energy, do you have any pointers ?
If you've ever worked with light weight http framework in Python or Ruby, it works exactly the same way.

http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-web-development-r...
http://github.com/cgrand/moustache

There isn't a mature web framework for Clojure yet (for obvious reasons), so there isn't a popular "way". At the moment you have a lot of good libraries and you can put your app together in whatever way seems most sound to you.
Just like PayPal's site(s). 3 ways to tell me the steps in the processes, each with different names, but barely a decoder ring for the API.
Well, it'll defeat a conventional keylogger, but not one that logs mouse events with accompanying screenshots; or a keylogger that runs a MITM attack.
I think the point Google is making is that ruba.com will be shut down and the team Mike assembled will be integrated into iGoogle and other teams. They will not be working on ruba.com any more.

Mike had assembled a world-class team, including former Googlers and Google wanted those people back working for them. It's the Google boomerang. :-)
If you like gedit you should give geany a try.
New social media savvy IT Contract Portal opens it's doors
Password Hashing Salt- Should It Be Random?
Even in a smaller corporation I'd be very careful. I try to put myself in the place of the boss there and to have some sysadmin walk up to me and say hey Jacques, I'm leaving today, here is the guy that I trained while you weren't looking, he already has all the passwords and would very much like my job, I can promise you I'd be less than thrilled about it.

There are two things wrong with it, it presumes that it is his right to make these decisions and presents his boss with an impossible situation, either accept and you might have continuity, or don't accept and have an immediate problem.

Master salesmanship to get away with it but not everybody is quite as timid as his boss was there.

I can't find a better term than blackmail, but that isn't quite it because he doesn't expect any payout, maybe someone else has a better term for this, but something really isn't right here.

That decision was simply not his to make.
I've heard things like 仕事と生活のバランス. But it's true that the concept sounds rather alien. Most of my co-workers at the lab eat, socialize, sleep (I see people sleeping at their desk regularly), etc. at the workplace, and they go out as a group often. It's their "life". It's tough, but I'd say it's quite different from the western image of someone actually working very long hours.

Your experience at a company may be different, of course. I haven't had the chance to experience it, and I'm not sure I really want to ;)
Yeah, probably. But Ruba is not acquired YET and my personal experience (very limited, I must admit), tells me not to jump to conclusions. :-)
Firefox w/o NoScript.
Designing iPhone Icons
The only problem I had was the usual - leave it for 6 weeks without printing and it gums up a bit.

I've also had some feed problems where it dumps ink into the printer.

The guys I share an office with got one and didn't read the instructions properly and we stood their (me laughing) as the ink unloaded into the thing.

But when it's all working you get 6+ months of reliable printing.

And for the price of an inkjet, a spare one is cheap, though I'm lucky - my local retailer is 5 mins away by foot and when my dried up I just went and got another one - the dried up one is under my desk waiting for me to clean it!
Still, you have to trust the book's author did not cherry-pick studies in order to make his case for selling the book. This may go against his economic interests.

That's a hard pill to swallow.
Great advice about multiple devices and resolutions, but...

I will never, for the love of absurdity, never use 20 decimals for what should be a simple value.

Can't we just round it up?
Series Seed Documents, Step 2 (as opposed to version 1.1)
Many of Derek's posts are a vehicle used to illustrate a point. I thought that was generally well accepted.
Costco does photos for about 9 cents each at a higher quality than I can print at home, and I don't have to do it. And you can get up to 30x20" things for $3. I'm replacing my inkjet with a laser the next time my ink cartridge is out.

Not to mention I prefer the quality of laser for B&W and that's all I do anymore.
I don't know anything about labour laws in India, better go read up on that stuff, but on the face of it I'd say it is a non-enforceable scare tactic.

It's like voodoo, it works if you believe in it.
Same here with an HP4000+ from eBay. Full duplex, network, two full ream bins, $150. I expected it to die pretty quick but two years later (and 1000s of pages) the spare toner is still on the shelf.
Nice work and all the very best.
I had a question for you...How did you start distributing your application for "beta" testing?
Thanks!
Derivatives Really Aren't Very Scary
IIRC, the setTimeout trick only works if window.onload executes before your timeout fires.
Human Psychology: The Science
I did not have the intention of backhanding you or your friend. If my post had the appearance of doing so, I apologize.

I just wanted to point out the (for me at least) non obvious fact that the mind behind the theory of Clojure's persistent datastructures is working on Scala's collection library and that Scala's hash maps are already backed by hash tries - http://www.scala-lang.org/archives/downloads/distrib/files/n...
This is an excellent piece in the first place. But the following quote (from towards the end of the article):

Remote administration products like Absolute Manage carry large risks because they intentionally create a mechanism for a remote third party to take control of the machine. This can be powerful in the right hands but devastating if exploited by attackers. There will always be a risk of abuse by authorized parties, as alleged in the students' lawsuit against Lower Merion School District, but correctly designed technology should at least prevent unauthorized third-party attacks by making sure only authorized parties can issue commands. This requires getting authentication right--exactly what Absolute Manage failed to do.

is superb.
I'd love to see the cap changed to allow smaller investments by currently non-accredited investment. If we replaced the hard asset/income cut-off with an amount indexed by either income or assets, it would make crowdfunding of small businesses a viable option.

Since regulators don't want to see "Middle class family's life savings wiped out in investment fraud," allowing people to invest up to 3-5% of annual income or 2% of total assets in a given business would create additional sources of funding, prevent any one startup failure from being personally damaging, and give individuals the chance to invest locally in growing businesses.

This wouldn't have made sense twenty years ago, but the administrative requirements can be a lot more easily amortized by a central crowdfunding platform these days.
No, certainly not. It just looks weird, that's what prompted him to ask.

There are lots of people in the category you describe though.
HP's article was pretty good. I doubt they're lying about spending $1b a year on R&D for it. They're a publicly traded company so that should be verifiable.

Calling them greedy is just silly. Again, they're a company. It's their job to maximize revenues. That's what they exist for.

They wouldn't be able to charge as much as they do for ink if people weren't willing to pay for it. People wouldn't be willing to pay for it if there were equal quality ink available at half the price. Which means that either HP is correct and the enormous investment required is what keeps competition from driving the price down, or they're doing a hell of a branding job by making people think that generic ink will ruin your printer. Either way HP is just doing what it's supposed to.
Google Wave now available to all Google Apps customers
Reporter breaks "unbreakable" phone
Actually, it's more the opposite - if you just want to print a few at a time to send to relatives, it's a lot cheaper to print your own, as the delivery charges dwarf the price of the prints themselves.
Good for them! But it doesn't say what will happen with their service.
Data Center Building Boom in Silicon Valley
I have no great love for facebook, but let's face it...

"Joe the plumber" doesn't like having to log in :(
Can you name any websites which have deployed SNI?
Nero Intrecciato Karung Stretch Knot Clutch by Bottega Veneta
It's also worth pointing out that when all the institutions that had Lehman Brother CDS exposure got together to settle it, after canceling out the huge notational figure dropped to only $5.2 billion in real money changing hands.

ADDED: here's one item I found discussing the details of all this: http://www.glgroup.com/News/Lehman-CDS-Settlement-%E2%80%93-...
OK, with prices like that there really is no point. I'm used to around €1 per 15x10cm photo in small quantities, much more for larger prints + €3-5 for delivery.
MBA Pay: Top B-Schools, Top Dollar
Does Buffett deserve his outsider rep?
Why you cannot have a simple map initialization in Java
There are more CPAN authors than ever before. There are more CPAN uploads than ever before. I used to give out a couple commit bits a week to projects I'm involved in; now we've got half a dozen people with access to do that giving out at least one a week (and this in spite of the fact that we're getting at least that many new contributors through github as well).

Overall Perl use may have declined, but good, effective, maintainable Perl use by people who're involved in the community is on the rise - and that's the group that I'm a part of, the people who write Perl as a robust, team-oriented, scalable production language rather than the PERL scripters of old (and my thoughts go out to the PHP and ruby communities who seem to have acquired a similar breed of idiot this time round the hype mill).
Scribd: HTML5 revamp led to users spending twice as long on the site
Humorously I loaded that into a tab and didn't go to it for awhile. I got there and thought "I don't use Gmail, why the hell would I open that?"

If it weren't for Roboform this might work if it were some service I actually used.
How to nail the five-minute pitch: Handy things entrepreneurs must include
Just to point out LINQ to XML http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387098.aspx.

It takes a lot of pain out of XML processing. Don't have to remember the specifics of XPath/XQuery but you still have to deal with the pain of multiple namespace resolution inherit in XML.
When you're unable to determine the difference between "the majority of [an] article" and "the first three questions out of eighteen" then you should take a step back and decide if you're reading from the assumption that Perl is no longer relevant rather than with an open mind.
the best deal I've come across in the UK is O2's simplicity, which I've just signed up to (FUCK 24 month contracts). No phone, just a 1 month rolling contract at 15 / month with 300 mins and unlimited texts. Or if you sign up for 12 month contract, same minutes/texts but at 10 / month.

I bought a basic nokia for 30 quid. done.
this is one of his worst arguments. I find it almost exactly the opposite. I've been programming for almost 20 years and I am considering myself an expert. and many people around seem to agree ;).
most of the beginning was spent w/o any kind of unit testing. But I find it that I do more and more testing with time, and I'm sure as hell I'm not becoming a weaker programmer that suddenly needs the training wheels ;)
Regarding your second point. I'd be interested to see figures for how many web requests globally are fulfilled by a shared cache. My gut feeling is that it is a very small proportion of the total.
I have to say, that's my list of the week, if not the year! awesome.
I don't really mind either way; the fact you went to the trouble to write the article indicated that the first stage of our marketing work - reminding the world the Perl community was still there and still cared - was complete.

Now it's time to move on; the endless debates about whether a provably growing language is "dying" aren't productive for anybody.

I'd love to see a follow up article from you decrying the features of Perl you hate the most though and describing how you think they could have been done better (or are done better in other languages) - serious technical debate is so much more interesting than "not dead!" "are dead! "not dead" "are dead!", don't you think?
Unless you live close to a Walgreens / Walmart / Target. Then you can upload the photos and just pick them up directly from the store when you're ready.
This is such a great idea. The boy born on a Tuesday problem is so simple once it's explained and yet completely unexpected before you hear the answer.
I don't think anyone else will understand why you would want to use it either.

More competition, more innovation, better products for us to use in the future?

You probably don't need to pay attention to this project. Did you pay attention to Google when it first launched, or Apple when it made the Newton? If you're not that interested in the database technologies, you can just not pay attention, and hope that it becomes unavoidable if it is truly remarkable in the future.
Amen to that. Insecurity destroys whole worlds full of ideas every day.

"The Myth of the Genius Programmer" is one of my favorite presentations: http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusPro...

From a "corporate" perspective, I think insecurity often stems from the mandate to produce output and not waste time, and no one wants to produce half-baked or poorly-thought-out output, so they throw their ideas in the trash.

EDIT: Also, the importance of asking stupid questions. Stupid questions are the most important ones to ask, because everyone else was probably too afraid to ask them, resulting in gaps in thinking that you could drive a fleet of trucks through. For this reason, sometimes the most important person on a design team is the person who has the faintest idea of what's going on and asks questions about existing processes that everyone takes for granted - they ask seemingly nonsensical questions that challenge the thinking of everyone stuck in tunnel vision.
A list that can be used for interoperability tests would be great, even across languages. For example, Perl has DateTime::Format::Natural that provides this functionality. There's a list of supported inputs at http://search.cpan.org/dist/DateTime-Format-Natural/lib/Date... .

I guess such a list of test-cases could simply be a JSON file containing the input strings plus an output specification. The options for output would only be explicit datetimes, datetimes relative to the now, or timespans.
> neither Perl5 nor Perl6 seem to offer much for developers

Saying that Perl 6 offers nothing is just ridiculous. If a fast and solid implementation appeared today it would blow the competition out of the water.
Count me in; I was on a plane during the last one. Just make it before Obon, please. :)
So basically what he's saying is that super naive unit tests which barely even test the happy path are hardly better then nothing.

I fully agree, but I am getting tired of all of this slam down style, flame-bait headlined, writing.
I wished people would use the word 'acquires' to describe those situations where a succesful start-up is bought by a larger company, not as a fig-leaf for dismembering a not-so-hot start-up or worse.
I'm working on my second startup with my fiance (soon to be wife)! The first is a salon on New York City called Bloom Beauty Lounge which we launched in February: http://www.yelp.com/biz/bloom-beauty-lounge-manhattan

She does the day to day, I handle the marketing, and finances.

Our second startup is actually related to the salon as well, but involves a slightly larger team. Will post about it here for sure when we launch something :)
Google’s U.S. economic impact
I attended a talk last year at the Edinburgh Science Festival given by one of the Pixar guys - it was absolutely fascinating.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the whole thing were the "outtakes" that get produced when their models don't quite work as expected. So even Pixar's mistakes are pretty entertaining.
Why We Still Need OSI
Incredible. Link to final example: http://www.alistapart.com/d/responsive-web-design/ex/ex-site...

Ethan is the fluid grid master and this example shows how powerful it is in conjunction with CSS3 media queries.
It would be nice if they had incorporated the data of startups as well as corporate pay.
I wonder if Arc is the tortoise to Clojure's hare.
Study How to Write the Action Research Papers
Writing action research papers require students to be thorough with including their thoughts on paper. They will be able to offer an opinion based research paper where solutions to the problem and ideas on overcoming them will be presented in an orderly manner.
Nice. I have been appreciating Clojure a lot more recently because my largest customer uses it (so I am using it). There is a lot to like: practical language, good decisions on how Java integration is done, nice setup for supporting contrib library, easy to use stable 1.1 or 1.2 depending on project (since with leinigen I put clojure.jar and clojure-contrib.jar in each project's lib directory), nice Emacs support with swank-clojure, etc.

I dont hire other programmers but if I did I would appreciate have so much Clojure specific talent in one organization. I hope that Clojure/core prospers - they deserve it.
A Dao of Web Design (2000)
because not everyone invests in Google...for every Google there are thousands of companies that crash and burn. Just look at YC, a savvy investor by any metric, with hundreds of startups under their belt...and they had what 20 exits?

It's easy to sell a startup investment to non-savvy investors..."invest X into our company and 5 years from now you'll be a millionaire!"

A millionaire can afford to lose 50-100K on a bad investment, someone making $40-50K a year cannot afford to lose even 15K.
The hash array mapped trie was committed to trunk 3 months ago and was first released in 2.8.0.RC1 (which no one uses due to various bugs) and is now available in 2.8.0.RC2 (which very few people are using due to binary incompatibility).

In contrast, Clojure's PersistentHashMap dates back to 2007 and was in both the 1.0 and 1.1.0 releases.
Failing Irrationally
Something about a commercial website with its sense of self-interest versus welcoming-user-focus causes me a gut bad reaction.

Postgres is an good example of doing this right IMHO: http://www.postgres.com
the commercial aspects are underplayed and yet they have a good business. With Postgres I feel I can contribute even if I am not part of the "core." I think Clojure and the businesses around it benefit from keeping the same open, welcoming feeling.

I have been very interested in Clojure and haven't seen it put a foot wrong so far. This is an unexpected "off" note.

EDIT: Languages and tools do prosper and my point here is to highlight how they do so by building a community and what Clojure's "core" risk through making this distinction.

EDIT: I know about http://clojure.org - my point is that http://postgres.com (note the .com) downplays the us-vs-them-ness that comes with a commercial tombstone site. Also the announced redirect indicates to me the change in tone is intentional - I hope they readjust. They can keep the community-sense and still have a good business.
An acquisition seems to be the logical outcome because if the team is going to be working at Google then that raises the question of what's going to happen to the ruba.com site. It doesn't seem plausible that the project would just be abandoned because I think it's reasonable for the owners to expect some compensation for the work they've done.
Birds select conventional over organic wheat when given free choice
Indeed. The whole essay boils down to "bad unit tests are useless, therefore unit testing isn't worth bothering with".
A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.

The classic example of a company intelligently growing up with a generation is McDonald's and baby boomers.

First, cheap food at drive-ins where teenagers can hang out, check out cars, and find dates. Then happy meals for their kids, who can stay in their car seats in the drive-thru. Now, healthier choices and high end coffee.
I see from your profile that you work for Infy.
I have heard this "we have incurred training costs on you, so you have to work for us for one year" argument before.

AFAIK, this was put in place to deter people who fit your profile to a T (newly minted grad, wanting to go abroad to study).

It will be interesting to see the parts of the employment document which talks about this "expectation" to repay their training.

IANAL, but training a new employee is part of the cost borne by the employer. So, they are not doing any favours to you by giving you that.

These "agreements" are mostly verbal threats ("we will not give you release docs", "we will not provide you with a experience certificate" and of course "you have to pay US" etc.,).

If you want any/all of this for your resume, you have no other way than to tough it out for another few months. Hey, we all know what probationers do in the first year in Infy :D

Or, if you really want to study, forget that you ever worked for Infy and don't bother to mention it on your resume. Of course, this is not palatable for anybody who wants a "clean" resume in India. And, if you have joined Infy, you might be one of them.

Good luck.
Grading the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Improvised Cleanup Tech
Coding insults