skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This may make the automatic-online-matchup really tricky, though.

Another option I was thinking about for this purpose is parsing the python to make sure they don't get up to anything fishy, but I have no idea how hard a Python parser would be. My guess is very.

Or we put them into separate proceses, as swolchok suggested.
love it, great job! keep it up!
I was a little surprised by construction management
What's good about it?

What's good about it?

What's good about it?

(I had to ask multiple times because we all know that the first couple of answers would be, "Nothing".)

Every job, no matter how boring, is loaded with "stuff" that you can use to contribute to your long term progress.

It may be access to a user who's an expert in their field and would love to share their expertise.

It may be a project that needs to be done, but no one else has time. And you can learn a lot of unexpected stuff from doing it.

It may be lots of interesting data on their hard drive that you can learn a lot from just by transversing and/or organizing.

Hell, it might even be proximity to a quiet coffee shop where no one would miss you.

It could be anything.

So if you're stuck, then it's your job to turn lemons into lemonade. (Practice turning lemons into lemonade is an invaluable skill on it's own; just ask any entrepreneur.)

Now close your browser and make a list of 10 things you can try to get some value out of this job while you're there. Then open your browser back up and let us know what they are.
Why? Sense seems to work just fine for me. Every app I've downloaded (I've tried ~100 or so) works great. Sense integrates well, and seems to work perfectly with any integration points it has with 3rd party apps. It really seems to be a thin layer that really dresses up (in my opinion) the overall experience.
I believe your problem is that you cannot switch, not that the job is boring. I would try to solve that problem.
You ask: So, in summary: it might be relatively easy, plus, why not.

I answer: Because for the same amount of effort you can make an order of magnitude more money.
A look at the history of insurance in general and medical insurance recently in Massachusetts will disabuse you of the notion that the government can not force insurance companies out of business.
The article is mistaken; the 8 MB is shared between the 50 cores. There's some speculation that it might be a Non-Uniform Cache Access architecture, where local parts of the shared cache are faster to read/write than other parts. If so, that would certainly be an impressive step. A better article is here:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/06/01/intel_knights_co...
More information:

http://mashable.com/2010/04/30/lala-shutdown/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/29/apple-to-shut-down-lala-on-...
Jack Dorsey: The 3 Keys to Twitter's Success
Uh, according to that model there's still no actual payment. Most "Real Book" authors make money from royalties, those Daily Show appearances are PR in order to actually sell copies. Non-fiction authors can supplement their income with things like workshops and presentations . . . but fiction authors are pretty much screwed in that little scenario.
Rejections also sent for Work at a Startup.
There is linenoise (http://github.com/antirez/linenoise) but not Redis (http://github.com/antirez/redis). Looks very strange :)
Apple obviously wasn't interested in Lala's users, and I don't expect they were interested in code, so was it a talent acquisition or did Apple just do this to remove a competitor to future online music services?

Edit: spelling
I have heard that Apple can actually turn off particular users' apps on their devices, but this isn't necessarily the case. I bought NetShare (a tethering app) and it was later pulled from the store, but it never disappeared from my phone. (Now I never actually got it working, but that's beside the point.)

So I would say this is only bad for the user in the sense that they might not be able to have all the cool apps they want because (a) they may be pulled before they can purchase them or (b) they may never be developed because it's too risky to make them with Apple's fickle review policies.
Yes, I almost ended up accepting the other job offer. However, the management there (as I found out later) was worse than where I am currently.
I am with edw519 - make yourself extremely useful, to the point where you are a "superhero" build stuff that is going to make other people in the company's lives easier!
martythemaniak said Android UI development is similar to doing HTML + CSS, he didn't say it's the same. The Android UI layouts are significantly less broken than CSS, even before you include the clusterfuck that is varying browsers support for CSS.

If you've ever tried doing a UI Layout for Android, you'll find it's actually pretty damn easy to support multiple resolutions. If you're actually interested, here's the canonical resource on supporting different screen in Android: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support...

BTW dealing with multiple resolutions is a problem that's rapidly heading to the Apple ecosystem. The iPad is 1024 × 768, the current iPhone is 320×480, the next iphone is rumored to be some multiple of the current iPhone resolution, etc.
The trend of huge, irrelevant images in blog posts needs to go away. This post is particularly bad.
Flash Player not available for your device

Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Adobe® Flash® Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
I'll give my opinion as a designer. I want to be able to have control on what my user will be. That's why Pantones exists in print. That's why designers love spending hours to polish their iPhone apps, because they want them pixel-perfect. That's why I curse every time a client of mine tells me he can't see the site well in IE6. Will I start developing for Android as well? Of course, I'd be stupid not to, but I hate the fact I know the UX won't as near as the one iPhone users of the same app will have.
Find the overlaps between your side project and your day job. I've done that and it's really helped--each hour spent on the overlaps makes me look good at work (since I'm engaged) and also helps me move closer to accomplishing goals with my side-project.
I've gone through most of "Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart" - interesting stuff. Had no idea about the earlier books, thanks.
So is he the only person in the world who thought that in the hypothetical case that Mozilla Firefox returned to single digit market share, it would be because IE9 ate its lunch?

I had assumed Chrome on desktop and various Webkit on mobile was the assumed competition, I honestly never even considered IE.
Agreed, frame of mind is important! If you are bored, then keep producing more value with that extra time; people will talk about you if you are creating things that are high quality, refined, and useful.
Plovr: open-source alternative to the Closure Compiler Service that runs locally
Flickr Search Fail
What? Mozilla is explicitly not implementing SQL on the client. Instead they're implementing some kind of indexed object database.
What's keeping someone else from making a Lala clone if Apple isn't interested in keeping the service around?
Perhaps, but this is very much a "broken-window theory" type of innovation. If this undoubtedly smart developer hadn't needed to work on this to get around Apple's policy, who knows what more progressive achievement he could have accomplished?
Could someone explain why Speed Tracer shows some "Script Evaluation" even for plain vanilla HTML pages with no <script> tags? I see two scripts: the first one has the URL field blank, while the second one reads "chrome-extension://ognampngfcbddbfemdapefohjiobgbdl/data_loader.js".

Thanks!
"their pizza simply wasn’t as good as that of established pizzerias"

Really, the same could be said about their burgers. In just about any city you care to mention, you'll find small independent places serving far superior burgers to what McDonalds offers, and that doesn't seem to have harmed them in the slightest. I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons they got rid of the pizzas, but I have a hard time believing it was because they weren't good, since I distinctly recall them being at least much better than their burgers.
Accounting frequently makes these lists, but if we're talking about Big 4 auditing/tax, I'd say it's highly misleading. Being expected to work significant overtime with no compensation results in a much lower effective salary.
What is the 1.5 vs 1.6 problem? I thought in the Android SDK you can select your target. What's forcing you to use 1.6 during development?
1. You rather missed my point. I brought up web development from a developer's perspective, not a user's perspective.

2. Take the typical case right now - accommodating the Nexus One and a typical large-screen HVGA device - the difference would be about 0.5-0.8cm in extra vertical space. Coming up with a design to work on both screens isn't going to ruin your application, neither is it so exceptionally hard as to not be worth it. As you've demonstrated, its a very popular piece of Android FUD right now.
Time Management Tool The Stress Diary
These surveys always forget to mention how many jobs openings are out there.

I've recently done some research in my state (RS/Brazil) and found that new jobs for economists payed double what systems analysts got (in the last 6 months). But there were 721 jobs in IT and 6 for economists.
Would it work to store all the state in a python C module?
Well the language is explicitly programmer related, e.g. "If you're like a lot of programmers you may have considered one day joining a startup" and "the event is free, but since more programmers may want to attend than we have room for..."

The event had a clear focus on being for programmers, which is fine by me. I'm just saying another event, geared towards non-programmers, with a different focus, might be useful.
So Apple is being unfair, but there's no alternative?

Sounds like a good investment, according to Scott Adams http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383843
I was surprised to see geology there, though it makes sense when you think about it: lots of demand from oil and mining companies.
Flooding opens up sinkholes in Guatemala City
Based on your previous postings, your based in London?

If so, I'd suggest going to one of the several events aimed at startups in London (e.g. the Techcrunch Europe events). There are always lots of companies looking to hire people when I go and everyone seems to struggle to find good people.
That would be far more remarkable than putting 50 cores on the die. It would be cause for riotous celebration.
Not unique, but certainly extremely common. Go check the comments on the page and see for yourself; plenty of comments there saying it looks "widgety" so Apple was right to ban it (even though there has never been anything on the agreement about "widgety" applications). I'd bet this guy would be one of them writing in defense of Apple, had it not been his application the affected one. As long as those people have an excuse, no matter how inane it is, they're gonna stick to it; and I'm seeing more from the Apple camp than any other fanboy camp I've seen before.

I hope this causes more people to look at their own attitude towards Apple and the kind of future it's buying them.
Recently, since SC2 beta hit, I've been mulling about the idea of a "programmable RTS" -- an RTS that allows you to preprogram unit AI in some fashion, and then plays in such a way that your programming really factors into the game. For example, maybe you have many little units, so that it's difficult to micro them separately, or maybe the battles operate very quickly, or your units have an unusually large amount of active abilities.

After all, most of your APM in a game like Starcraft is going toward things that you could replace with a very small shell script. Although I can't argue with success, it's always felt silly to me that a big part of the game is just building enough intuition and reflex so that you can actually spare your mind to think about the interesting parts. If you can simplify the reflexive pieces at "game-time" while keeping them interesting in a different way, that might leave you with a game that's even deeper strategically.

However, it would be a difficult exercise to make an RTS that was dynamic enough that some folks with a lot of spare time didn't just write "ultimate" AI for all the units that is close-enough-to-perfect, and distribute that to all lazy players. Perhaps one might establish limitations on the resources or length of scripts you can write, so that it's difficult to write a script that is simultaneously effective for strategy A and different strategy B, and you need to specialize your code based on your style of play.
Looking for Open Source Projects
I'm trying to get experience with coding larger projects with a small team. Anybody know any good open source projects using PHP and Git/bzr/mercs?

I have experience with:

~(X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript + jQuery

~PHP

~MySQL

~C++
How Do You Engage Employees?
The Skull of Doom
I was accepted, but I forgot the username I used to apply :\. Should I email info@yc to get it, so that I can RSVP? [I don't think I had my email in my profile either, but I'm guessing it was in the application.]
Precisely. The sad truth is that despite all of the perceived (and real) inaccuracies in wikipedia, there does not exist a more accurate single source of information on such a wide variety of topics. Wikipedia may see the occasional hoax, and may see its fair share of biases et al but other sources have the same problems. How many encyclopedia's parroted Washington Irving's hoax that the western world believed the Earth was flat prior to Columbus's voyages, for example?

In the event that a wikipedia user remains unsophisticated and does not acquire a degree of critical thinking the worst case scenario is that they are subject only to more or less the same degree of inaccuracies as any other encyclopedia. This is why wikipedia is a superior encyclopedia, because in the best cause it engenders critical thinking and in the worst case it's equivalent to just about any other source, so on average wikipedia users come out ahead.
I have to think that it is a pretty big PITA (and cost) to get the proper licenses to sell a library as large as the one Lala had online.

That said, I would love it if someone did step up. I have looked at a few similar services, but haven't found any that make for an adequate replacement.
"Another option I was thinking about for this purpose is parsing the python to make sure they don't get up to anything fishy."

If that was safe, it would have been bundled up into a module. This is a Frequently Asked Question for Python, and the answer is, you can't.

I thought of process separation, but it won't work. The best performance would be one persistent process that runs the cell computations, but it's too easy for Python code to find places to hide data persistently for communication above and beyond what you expect.

For example, would you have thought to block the following?

Python 2.4.3 (...)
Type "help", ...
>>> def f():
... f.i = f.i + 1
... print f.i
...
>>> f.i = 1
>>> f()
2
>>> f()
3

The people who know the most about Python, including the implementors, have said this impossible. Again, unless someone familiar with the community pops up and says something has changed in the several years since I was hanging out on comp.lang.python. But I doubt it.

And mind you, that's one example, and not a very sophisticated one. If you're answer was "no", or indeed anything other than "duh, of course, I've known about that for years", then you don't stand a chance at the sophisticated stuff.

You can't fork at cell-run-time, because while a process couldn't write anything back out to the parent, it could still grovel over the parent's data space which could still be used to advantage, and depending on the rest of your code may still make an out-of-band channel available.

You could fork a process per cell before anything "incriminating" has been instantiated in the parent process, but that's got a lot of problems even on one machine (including the 32K process limit), let alone a hosted service, and you'd still end up with the possibility of a "cell history" being recorded that could be potentially exploited.

Python does not give you the necessary primitives to accomplish this task. I see three options: Live with it (a viable option except online), spawn one process per team and officially bless that level of communication (though it radically changes the nature of the game), or change languages.

To be honest, Python is going to cause you other problems on your online server too, such as the extreme difficulty you're going to face in isolating Python functions to a certain amount of CPU time. (Same problem, as long as the Python code cooperates it might be possible (and it might not really) but if it starts hostilely modifying the parent code you lose.) Other languages have support for that too.

Unfortunately, you're really bashing on Python's weaknesses here.
Why does increasing the supply of available homes (and thereby lowering prices) hurt the rest of us?
Apple's 10 coolest job openings
Searching for Jesus in the Gospels
moment of silence
So, pretty much all of them.
I was actually in this exact situation about ~8 months ago. One of the best inspirational videos that got me through that time was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4 . Caution: Gary is a little loud and obnoxious but he makes good points.

Even if you have a 8-5 day job, work the 8pm-2am night shift and stop complaining. Take @edw519's advice and make a list of 10 things you can do to create value and start doing them. Even if you have to be somewhere for 8+ hours that sucks use that time to your advantage.

There is no excuse for not making it happen, use that free time you do have to make meaning and create value.
First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process
> it makes it difficult for people to jump out of their salary bracket if they basically got the shaft with their previous employment.

Nobody is forcing you to tell the truth - after all, they have no way of finding out anyway.
I only queried for projects being shared in 2010. Looks like a Hacker News post actually drove a bunch of tweets for linenoise:
http://www.backtype.com/page/github.com%2Fantirez%2Flinenois...
The US has similar research:

http://www.aaai.org/Pressroom/Releases/release-02-0910.php
In a book I read by Russell Barkley, one of the doyens of ADHD research, he said that if screening questionnaires were boiled down to just one question, the best question to ask would be "Are you easily distracted?" That question goes a long way toward identifying children or adults who have issues with attention control. He says multiple question screening questionnaires are still more reliable, but that one question about ease of distraction has enough sensitivity and specificity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

to be useful for brief screening.

What I find interesting, as a Baby Boomer, is how much the paradigm has changed. When I was a kid, only children who were "hyperactive" were considered to have a problem. People who had trouble concentrating were not considered to have a psychological [after edit: or medical] issue, and of course in those days it was thought that few or no adults had any such issue [after edit: as "hyperactivity" or "attention deficit."] There does seem to have be evidence that many people grow out of either the hyperactive or inattentive type of ADD/ADHD, and that impulse control and attention focus are learnable, but apparently they are more learnable for some people than for others under matched training conditions. The medical interventions do appear to be helpful in their own right.
Regardless of the merits of Lala's service, I highly doubt that the biggest music retailer in the U.S. had a reason to be afraid of any competition from them. Certainly not reason enough to be forced to buy them. Apple are infamously frugal when it comes to M&A, so this must be either "buying technology" or "buying talent". I guess we'll see which once the iTunes "cloud" service is launched.
This looks awesome...with the exception of "A", every single word in the title titillates me. Definitely plan to play.

As an aside, to those of you who are interested in this sort of game AI, you might want to look at the growing (AI sub)field of General Game Playing. The idea is to write a basic game AI that can take in arbitrary rules, "think" about them a little, and then play the game against one or more opponents. The author of the played favored to win this year's championship, Turbo Turtle, has open-sourced his infrastructure on Google Code (ggp-base), which makes it orders of magnitude easier to participate. More info: http://games.stanford.edu, http://cs227b.stanford.edu.
1) which is why I pointed out the relative lack of fluid layouts on the web. Developers not doing what's best for users, because it's a pain. Granted, I spent more time in user-land.

2) so if you've got a background image which you want a button to appear over, you either need bottom buffer space on one, and is weighted off the bottom, or it gets cut off on the other. Or you need two images and two layouts. Same issue, and this is for highly styled apps, not for basic stuff (which is legitimately easy).

As to the resolution independence, you still need to make a ton of resolution-specific images if you want the sharpest possible image, which - again - matters for perceived value. And you're royally screwed if you do pixel-art instead of something easily resized.
Why can't we just have SQL92 on the client side along with some nice API that accepts keyed JSON objects and performs the standard CRUD operations with them.

I get that people want simple Key-Value and Object storage APIs because they provide nice abstractions for a particular set of use-cases, but that doesn't warrant throwing out relational databases & SQL.

The correct fix for this is to require full SQL92 compliance in the HTML spec, patch up SQLite to plug its areas of noncompliance, and then let framework designers address data access APIs (that all persist to relational data) at the JavaScript leve.
That's because it is a GPU. It's Larrabee. Intel couldn't get enough graphics performance out of it to compete with GeForce and Radeon in the graphics card market. However, they can still compete in the GPGPU market, where the specialized graphics hardware that GeForce and Radeon have is less of an advantage, and Larrabee's x86 compatibility is actually useful. Intel is afraid that GPGPU is going to encroach on their CPU turf, and this is their answer.
A new Twitter directory webapp, what do you think about it?
I think the problem with sense ui is not so much the apps but the time HTC needs to upgrade to the latest Android release on their phones.
Thanks for the link, hadn't seen anything for Android yet. But it does nothing to alleviate the problem. Re-post of my other comment:

You still need to make a ton of resolution-specific images if you want the sharpest possible image, which - again - matters for perceived value. And you're royally screwed if you do pixel-art instead of something easily resized.

The issue here isn't for all applications, it's for highly styled applications, which are kicking ass lately and are important for perceived value of a device. Resolution independence and fluid-ish layouts do indeed make basic UI extremely easy. But basic UI evidently can't compete equally with a more stylized UI, as the iPhone shows pretty clearly.