skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For you or anyone else that dislikes the memorization parts of Chess, you may find Arimaa (http://arimaa.com/) interesting. Personally I also like it better than chess because of the somewhat more simple/elegant rules while still leaving a game that seems to have a large strategic depth.

Of course it also has a great hacker aspect of being very difficult for computers, but I think that's really only a rather marginal side issue. The game really is a fun game to actually play.
> I don't have an Android mobile but I do have a first generation iPhone. The day iPhone OS 4 was announced and I learned most of the features wouldn't be available for my iPhone it was like it lost all its utility and I immediately thought of it as obsolete.

Coming from someone who've own a Windows Mobile device, I'd say three years of software support and two major OS update, with the third coming in an upcoming months, is enough to satisfy me even if I don't get all the features.

Several years ago, I bought an O2-branded [HTC Magician](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Magician) and throughout its life, has exactly one update that not only not fixing most bugs but also introduce more stability issue to it.

From that moment on, I refuse to buy anything without some kind of guarantee that I'd receive at least a year of software support. When my old WM device broke, the choice at the time were iPhone 3GS and Motorola Droid. Uncertain with software updates, I decided to go with a 3GS.

That said, the choice would be much harder today even though I'd still choose an iPhone, because I'm not sure at this point if Google is willing to provide any update for the Nexus One three years from now, even without most of the new features.
"If you've had summer jobs in college, you may think you know what jobs are like, but you probably don't. Summer jobs at technology companies are not real jobs. If you get a summer job as a waiter, that's a real job."

I just quit my summer internship at a technology corporation. I was hired to supposedly work on code but was instead black box testing hardware. It was the most mind numbing and terrible job I have ever had. I have had real jobs before in high school from washing dishes to being a bell hop. I used to think the 9-5 was the holy grail but it really was hell for me. I would much rather work part time doing anything else and pursue things on the side that do that. The point is though is that I don't think the way to realize work sucks for some people is through having a job as waiter. At least for me my first real 9-5 experienced scared me half to a nervous breakdown. The place was devoid of excitement.
When WHOIS info is correct it can be a big help. I've done the same for phishing scams hosted in the US. The person on the receiving end is usually somewhat confused at first, but eventually gets it.
Yep, we're real excited. There's been some issues with getting a 1.0 release out, and the devoted dev time should be awesome.
Can't they just load up more ads with the additional search results at the bottom?
> The language features I find patronising are the ones that make it hard to do things a certain way, regardless of how carefully considered my reasons are.

Any in particular that you have in mind? Historically, many people have had very carefully considered reasons for using features like goto, type puns, etc. but many languages exclude them as problematic. Is it patronizing to exclude such features even from the toolbox of programmers who carefully consider their use?
Still, I'd prefer swallowing a pill to an operation.
Some lisp and scheme implementations have used it as well, partly spurred by this 1994 paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=182453

(I don't know offhand if any widely used ones currently do, though.)
Perhaps we should require the source code to be included in software patents.

People would just obfuscate their source code in that case.
But you can still ask to record it right? And if for some reason the cop OKs it, then it should be all good?
I have heard of (not actually experienced as I do not have an Android phone) programs on the Android Market stating "You must have Android 2.0+ to run" or "Does not work on XXXXXX device with 1.5, but we're working on support!" While most users don't care, developers do. Because Apple offers the upgrades free through iTunes ("New update! Click here!"), the number of upgraded iPhones 2Gs with 3.0 (opposed to the 1.0) nears 100%. Thus most developers can just build against the latest OS, get to use the new APIs, and be okay.

However, I do admit the loss of the 2G upgrade changes things a bit, and I would like to see how Apple handles it. The easiest answer is that the App Store allows one to select devices that are incompatible with certain builds, however I would love to see a universal binary situation supporting the old OSs much like PPC/x86 or iPhone/iPad apps.
In Illinois, I think you're OK if the cop consents (this is kind of an academic point, since they won't consent). But there are other states where, if I understand the statute correctly, consent isn't relevant.
I think Aussies just want to make sure you can take care of yourself. When I was renewing my visa, I made it clear to the officer that if necessary, I could fly to NZ that night and reapply from there.

My suggestion is, until you have your TR/PR visa, be lightweight and be mobile. Always have your bank statements and few grands in cash to show you're not a burden and you're not moonlighting illegally in the country.

However, there is always the possibility of someone having a bad day to mess up your plans.
I see that the author of this article is not particularly reassured, and neither am I.

What I learned here is that Google employees are grandmasters at parsing. ("The fact that the phone you bought three months ago won't work with the software we launched today does not meet the technical definition of 'platform fragmentation'". Imagine my relief.)

I've also learned that, not surprisingly, Google engineers have no experience selling hardware. They seem to think they're still programming for the web, where you can push out ten new apps every week and people are happy about it. When a customer buys hardware they want some assurance that its makers will support it throughout its operational lifetime, and will not simply throw the unit over the wall, dust off their hands, and move on to the "more innovative" new product of the week.

My hypothesis is that Google will continue to find that the cellphone market has a natural rate of product obsolescence that is difficult to fight. The good news is that the entire installed base turns over every two to three years. (To a programmer who has to support ancient garbage like IE, this sounds too good to be true - three years is actually really fast.) The bad news is that, in the USA at least, you can't really make everyone buy a new phone more often than once every 12 to 18 months, because the subsidies don't come along more often than that. To "innovate" the hardware any faster just produces a mismatch between yourself and the customers. One party or the other is going to be uncomfortable, disoriented, and potentially resentful.
You can get some version of analytics directly from Google via Webmaster Tools. It's a bit more aggregated and anonymized, though.
The other reason it is done in EDT is that you get to have a jury trial, basically you can get layman off the street and argue it in front of them rather than have to follow the letter of the law.

This makes it who can argue the best. Whereas in Delaware where most suits are filed for big companies the judge with a lot of knowledge and business law experience handles the case and thus the letter of the law is followed which means you get an extremely fair trial.
The opposite for US customs. Whenever I come back from a weekend trip abroad (hey, international flights are cheap), I always get searched because I have suspiciously little luggage. It would be funny if it wasn't the government going through my backpack for no reason. (Sadly, nobody has ever wanted my crypto key for the laptop. That's what I plan for, but I forget that they are actually more concerned with alcohol people didn't pay duty on than my .emacs file. If only they wrote that in the law book, I might not even mind customs...)

Anyway, note to drug smugglers: might as well smuggle a whole suitcase full of cocaine. Less suspicious.
Is DDG completely independent or does it pull in results from other search engines, like a meta search engine? Does it do its own spidering?
clap that analogy was absolutely fantastic.

What I have found personally that keeps me going is knowing that other people appreciate the work I have done, so I release early and often in an attempt to get other people riled up as well and to also get them working on the project if at all possible. So number 2 is definitely a good point.
She was employed by the state of Victoria as well as enrolled part time at unimelb. The immigration official made it clear he didn't like Americans. What I found interesting was that although Australia touts its algorithmic "points based" immigration system, the end decision is arbitrarily made by a human, just like any other country's immigration system.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/24ward.html?_r=1 -"patent holders win 78 percent of the time, compared with an average of 59 percent nationwide"

I wonder if the stats still hold in 2010, but in 2006 it sure seems not to be a myth.
What is chrome-to-phone?
It's not perfect yet, but I'd really like to get there: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.htm...

Here's what's coming:

--Stack Overflow, man pages & programming documentation in 0-click.

--More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more suggestions: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

--More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
Wow, your new phone has a whole 512mb of non-SD flash instead of the G1's paltry 256mb!
Maybe a disclaimer in the title that it only works in Safari on Macs, so linux users don't waste their time clicking?
To extend your analogy though, obscure algorithms could be like the techniques that allow master craftsmen to build beautiful, solid furniture using only careful joins and maybe light wood glue. On the other hand, what most people want is something quickly and cheaply assembled from standard parts from IKEA.
Most likely a server that was hacked, most people appreciate getting a call at that point to let them know that they are hosting something that is not entirely kosher.
It's pretty hard to contain the effects of nuclear tests, especially when nukes are exploded in space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosion
I generally prefer people who consider their words, and hold some back.
Because the 3G infrastructure is overloaded as it is without multi-gig downloads?
HTML5 Watch - Neven Mrgan chronicles interesting HTML5 implementations
Activesync can do almost all that now. Exchange, calendar, contacts, policies, security (not profiles or telephony).

And iPhone has very good activesync support.
I only learned about this fairly recently:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/

And I feel pretty stupid for not having realized earlier that something like that almost has to exist.
By the way, company cultures vary widely. Some 9-5 jobs are a lot of fun, others are soul-sucking.
Sorry to hear you ran into that. It sounds like a terrible environment to try to learn chess in.

But you can get quite good without spending much time at all studying openings. I hate studying openings, and I'm definitely better than most of the people who cram openings. Learn how to play chess well -- what you wanted to do anyway -- and learn just enough of the opening to get to a playable middlegame position (playing less-aggressive openings makes this much easier, and allows you to figure it out based on general principles), and skill, not memorization, will make the difference.

(Just in case you, or anyone else reading, were thinking of taking it up again.)

P.S. I wouldn't want to play the Caro-Kann either. ;-)
That's a good way of putting it.

Toolmaking is one of the nicest forms of programming that I know of anyway.
The cops can do a lot worse than a $100 fine. That is the sort of thing that "don't talk to the cops" applies to, not minor traffic offenses.
You can't even buy a used iPhone running OS2, unless the original owner never plugged it in to iTunes or was really consistent about clicking "no".
Behind every website there is hopefully something new and exciting that is fun and interesting to build. The front-end part and all the glue layers not so much.

(pet peeve: browser incompatibilities :( ).
The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

That was the part I loved the most about learning Chinese, in school we were required to learn a certain amount of radicals, and once we learned those we learned what they looked like squished next to other characters at that point I knew there was a metal involved if I saw the character for metal, even if I didn't understand the rest of it. Gold being one exception :P
It would be nice if it stated browser compatibility in the posts. Half of the hacks don't work in Firefox 3.6.3 on Debian.
Isn't that how clojure works?
Heh; it hit me that way, too. It seems obvious in retrospect. I found that this page has a nice mini-introduction:

http://www.imada.sdu.dk/~kslarsen/RelBal/

If requests that use a red-black tree tend to come in bursts, then you can probably get speedups by deferring rebalancing for idle periods, even single-threaded. That's pretty darn cool. I would like to see some programming language runtime that watched rb-tree access patterns and decided if this would be a good idea at runtime.
I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms instead of just at the beginning.

I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space].

It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.
Sorry, that was confusing indeed. It's late/early here.

Persuasive, not binding is correct. But in practice the authority of the court is such that most lesser courts will honor it. I was also wrong on the "highest appeals court" count - if the issue is of constitutional interest, there is the Federal Constitutional Court.
Like everything else, when and how much to talk to the police is a judgement call.

I am quite possibly the world's least legal driver; I've spent more of my adult license with a suspended license than a legitimate one. Not only that, but I drive around with expired plates. In one case, very, very expired plates. From a different state. And I drive a pretty consistent 10MPH over the limit.

And yet I very rarely get tickets. Because I am (I think) good at not antagonizing cops. For instance, here is a trick that works very reliably for me: when driving on the highway, if I see a cruiser pull out onto the road from a trap or the median, I pull over preemptively --- before the lights come on. They say, "why'd you pull over", I say "I figure you pulled out like that because I did something wrong", and they say "drive slower next time".

Similarly: dome light on, car engine off, hands on the wheel, window (mostly) down. "Got any weapons in the car"? That's a question I'm happy to answer.

I think the thing people don't realize is that most people are total assholes to police officers. Just being civil puts you in the top 10th percentile of their clientele. I'd rather be civil (and, for my neighborhood cops, helpful) than self-righteous.

Another thing, after reading the ACLU guides, watching the videos, and reading the books: you have rights, but you have no authority over the police. You usually have a constitutional right to be free from search without probable cause. But that does not mean you can prevent an unreasonable search; it merely means you're likely to win a case that hinges on evidence obtained from that search.

If you're an iota less than civil to a cop who's having a bad day, he'll arrest you. That's pretty much the ballgame. Your day is ruined. Find a friendly, polite, short way to avoid discussing incriminating topics with the police. Say, "sorry, I don't consent to searches" and, if pressed, "I'm really sorry, this is just a thing with me, but I'm not going to consent to a search; is there anything else I can do to help?". But do not say "My life might hang in the balance if I allow you to search me". You're just going to get arrested, and then immediately searched anyways.

Finally: none of these things apply near the border. You have essentially no rights near the border.
Also, converting the entire site to https will get the referer back. At least with Firefox: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferr...
I loved working through my Baby Rudin so much that, once I had my 'ah hah' moment, I created an open source project named in his honor.

RIP Professor Rudin.
>> and Facebook can't truly leverage any of its "friend-based" data without ugly privacy skirmishes.

Oh if only that were the roadblock that it ought to be.
I like DDG, but the last time I used it I had to fall back to Google to find an answer to my question. I was trying to find the date at which the central bank of Canada was going to make its next rate announcement. I knew it was June, used the most obvious keywords, but didn't find a good answer with DDG. With Google it was in the top 10.

Not a huge problem. It works most times when I use it. But it's not quite Google yet.
See this part of the Froyo presentation from Google I/O: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBQFXRW5ZiE#t=02m40s
That post is from August 2009, the forced firmware upgrade was in December 2009. If you go to page 51:

"It is not currently rootable"
>I have heard of (not actually experienced as I do not have an Android phone) programs on the Android Market stating

When you open the market on a device it is pre-filtered to apps that work on your handset with your features, in your region, etc. Users don't have to read through and sigh at disclaimers.

Apps can even pre-filter by your screen size, whether you have a GPS, and so on.

The situation with Android is very similar to the Windows landscape: Lots of apps work perfectly fine back to Windows XP or before. Yet occasionally an app demands something particular on the newer variants so it becomes, for instance, Windows Vista+. Same idea with Android. That's just life of a quickly evolving ecosystem, and they've managed it well.

And remarkably many of the improvements have been ecosystem enhancements that benefit even apps target obsolete versions. The truth is that even today the platform API was so robust back on 1.6 (that was really the pivot point) that brand new apps still primarily target it.
I like to use Windows for my dev environment, but I code for Linux systems. When I used 32-bit Windows, I used pubuntu to run an ubuntu server inside Windows without using a VM. It was nice and fast and worked well aside from a few networking quirks that I eventually worked out. pubuntu isn't compatible with 64bit Windows yet, and I was really itching to use all of my RAM so now I run CentOS on an old laptop of mine with 256MB of ram and a busted display (not good for anything but a testing server anyway), which I have stuffed in the server closet.

I have my workspace folder on my dev machine shared, and on the laptop I am using cifs to mount it as a local folder (/workspace on my laptop is actually c:\workspace on my windows machine), so as I make changes to files, they are instantly reflected on the laptop. This makes for extremely convenient testing.
Xcode allows developers to build for multiple architectures (armv6 and armv7), and you can pick what features are required from the device for installation (for example, requiring a camera or microphone).

At the OS-version level, you can build applications to take advantage of the latest OS, but also be compatible with earlier versions (that’s how the universal applications for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch work—their base SDK is 3.2, while their target is set to 3.1.3 or below). Additionally, it’s fairly easy to detect whether or not a certain API is available at runtime.
Top five are Northern District of Texas, Middle District of Florida, District of Nevada, District of Delaware, and District of Oregon.

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/05/patent-litigation-fo...
I think the more apt question is: "should we have banned the use of nuclear tech when it was first being harnessed". Also no, at least for me, since I think it's one of the few viable alternative energy sources, but we wouldn't have needed a doomsday clock if we hadn't.
Aquamacs. Interchangeable MacBook/MacBook Pro. Usually, no external monitor. I'm at pains to get things working on my laptop, even though we deploy on Debian; I almost never code "remote".

For the times when I have to edit remotely or in a terminal: pico. Shut up.

I've played with Coda and TextMate, but a couple times a year I have to write serious amounts of Win32, and I need to form a relationship with my text editor.
PHP? Avoid it.

Look into Python and Django or Pylons.

In my opinion Python has a better culture and community. You will also be exposed to functional topics like list comprehensions and generators that you are unlikely to come across in PHP.
The thing that really sucks about having a regular job is the expectation that you're supposed to be there at certain times.

That was, hands down, the worst thing about my day job. Regardless of the amount of work you have to do or your personal feelings, you will be in the office from early to late because employees at companies like ours are in the office from early to late.

I don't know that "You'll be in the office from early to late because you'll love it so much you don't want to leave" is that wonderful of an improvement on this, incidentally.

My favorite part about being self-employed is that I can say something nobody can say at a big company: "The firm will not benefit from my further presence today. Well then, I'm done. See you tomorrow."
The problem is that those organisms will grow very quickly and are prone to mutations. You'd end up with a huge population of rapidly evolving critters, something you can never predict.
Oh, the irony runs much deeper than that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...

My theory is that the Old Grey Lady is going senile. Their public editor wrote a piece in 2004 rejecting the idea of the paper of record. Oddly, he went on to become a decent historian. At the same time the paper was pressuring Archive.org to remove nytimes.com from the Archive.

Yes, you heard that right: the New York Times has an explicit policy of removing itself from history in order to close down access to what it publishes. The final giggle is that Archive.org is run by Brewster Khale, the guy who got them onto the web in the first place.

I've been watching them for years and, frankly, I think they have no idea what they are doing.
I have friend who still uses a first generation iPhone and is miserable. It does run the apps but the hardware is too slow for the experience to be any good.

Apple owns their stack top-to-bottom. They dictate how their devices are built, how carriers will work with them, and every aspect of the experience from start to finish. Comparing the G1 to the first iPhone on the basis of software compatibility ignores that Google and Apple operate in very different environments.
Because most users don't know enough to make an informed decision, and SSL is the conservative choice?