skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to think that concrete examples of ruby's successful production deployments and higher developer productivity mean more to companies than some blog ramblings.
I was commenting on the portion I quoted.
Oh, certainly not defending it. The knew how many people were coming well ahead of time. I live in Portland, there's only one little Apple store for all of downtown and the eastside - it was a nightmare.
The entire video is NSFW if you work in a .NET shop. But then again, those are likely to have YouTube blocked! :-)
"I rent but paid cash for a recent BMW last year"
One tip I can offer is not to do things like that. A house or condo is generally an investment that increases in value, so you should buy that for yourself instead of buying it for your landlord. And paying a lot for a car that will be
virtually worthless in 10 years won't help you achieve your goal.
>I guess obviously if a company does a buyback but the stock goes down for unrelated reasons then you're really not gaining anything.

Unless they held the stock above the falling trend. I felt this was a potential flaw in the analysis - the stock price kept falling but that was not necessarily related and could have crashed completely if it weren't for the buyback, we can't tell; it's not science.
"James Clerk Maxwell might be spinning in his grave. But is he rotating around his long axis, or flipping endwise?!!!"
And also the convenience of having the user/session info in HTTP headers where all sorts of other code/frameworks expect it -- instead of only where Flash in-page objects can see it.
See also: "Evidence-based Software Engineering": http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.113...

and the work of Greg Wilson: http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367
Funny how people downvoted you for coming up with the obvious answer...
A brief history of TV in America as shown in old RCA commercials.
RISC OS runs on fastest hardware ever (for RISC OS)
Invest in adderall and see where that takes you. Joking.

In all seriousness, drop the desire to turn 100k into 1 mil in x amount of time. That will lead you into wreckless, speculative behavior. Trading is tempting for you because it offers instant feedback. With one or two successful trades, people tend to extrapolate their returns into future returns, believing that it's possible to repeat these trades over and over again. Odds are stacked against them. Don't fall victim to this thought pattern.

Smart investors invest where their odds are highest of winning. From what you've written, it sounds like that investment would be in yourself. What led you to this "blockbuster" year? Can you grow and expand upon the factors that led to such a successful year? I'm sure there's some opportunity. Do it.
Starbucks as a Platform & Foothold for Location-Based Networks
I'm sure Jesus thanks you for reminding him of this product but probably wonders what your point was, you prayer seems to have wandered off somewhere ... ;0)>
"And sometimes an antenna that's not great, but good enough, is good enough."

Clearly his carrier isn't AT&T.
Hehe. His "search" for the cure.
Crowdsourcing, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Arrogance of BP
I could be easily to do with how liquid all that money is too.
Ok, that sounds more like an incremental improvement than a complete rewriting of the rules. I wonder what percentage of their total effort goes into that as opposed to building the product.
Why does the author removing them for the Market justify removing them from handsets?

Just because the developer decides that they don't want to sell (or give away) the app anymore doesn't mean that they should have the power to make that decision retroactive.

I could perhaps see doing it as a sort of nuclear-option security thing; if someone had released an app that made phones overheat or their batteries explode or routed all your phonecalls through Russian Mafia servers. But I'm fairly suspicious that just having this capability will lead to it being used for cases of 'sellers regret'. Or that it might get used if a carrier put enough legal pressure on Google to get rid of something they didn't like. (Hypothetically: something that allowed tethering without paying an additional fee, on carriers that charge extra for it. Or something that allowed VoIP, on carriers that don't allow it. Etc.) The simple fact that the capability exists means that they can be ordered to use it, and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that, given how easily abused the court system is.

Still, it's better than the iPhone, if only because at least with Android you have the option of installing applications without going through the Market, which are apparently untouchable. It might make me more suspicious about getting anything through the Market that seemed like it might be controversial, though.
The coding window assumed I have an american keyboard, which made it sort of hard to program.
I disagree; Megaupload, Rapidshare, Mediafire, etc are basically black holes in the Internet. Files go in, but what comes back out is not usable.

First, most of them have wait timers. After opening their page, the user must wait 60-120 seconds before downloading.

Second, they're plastered with ads. And not Google text ads, but awful '90s-style popups / popunders / flashing seizure GIFs. Ad blockers are useless, because the sites are written to prevent the download link from working when ads aren't visible.

Third, most (all?) of them don't handle Unicode correctly. Upload a file in anything except US ASCII, and you'll be lucky if even the file extension comes across intact. For example, Преве́д.zip could come out "Ð�Ñ�ÐµÐ²ÐµÌ�Ð´.zip" or "РџСЂРµРІРµМЃ" or nearly anything else.

Lastly, sites like Rapidshare are known for imposing download limits, such as "2 files per hour" or "max 50 Kb/s". This is hugely annoying when trying to download a half-dozen 30MB files.
GNU Smalltalk supports both file based and image based development. Exporting source files is no means to an end — image based development is not widespread because it forces people out of emacs and vim.
Additionally I think you'd be hard pressed to find a modern compiler (for some loose definition of modern) which would not optimize that loop away.
New Papua tribe discovered
Given the probability that you will not actually make a million, I think that this is a false goal that will only lead to frustration. My plan is to utilize my savings, after having got out of the 10 year rat race, to do something I enjoy (that also has a fair chance of being big). If it turns out that I make a million, well and good, if not then atleast I've been enjoying the money instead of leaving that to after retirement. The rat race is always there if I feel the need to go back.

Addendum: I also believe pretty much anything you do for the next ten years has a fair chance of being big. The only problem I see is that you're constrained by having a family and so might not have 10 years to fritter away like that.
Reasons to Splurge (The Psychology of Indulgence)
there is so much information to process

This can't be overstated. The shear amount of data available for processing is huge. Google-scale. I'm not very familiar with GWAS studies (I'm more familiar with high-throughput sequencing), but these are O(N^m) scale problems (where m>=2).
For that matter, Google knows probably as much as any entity can ever hope to know about people's browsing behaviors. They track what sites people click from their search results, they'll know if you go back immediately to search, or try a different search, if you're not happy with the results. They have Google Analytics installed on millions of domains and know intimately the behavior of users on those sites. I really fail to see how the simplicity of a binary "like" button on opt-in pages with easily-spammable RDF tags can compete with this.
>Linode is VPS, EC2 is cloud computing.

No diff in utilization. You can still use the API elastically spin up new instances, if at a different scale.

>...$features..

I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying on third parties for utilities like that.

> If all you need is VPS, then Linode is really the best option available.

K, but has anybody been making their machines faster?
Insufficient vitamin D tied to severe asthma attacks
P.S. The Scribd version looks horrible. Lots of arrows and similar are missing so some slides won't make any sense.
If you want to be totally, brutally, honest about it, companies should pay me a full salary for a half work week.

Why?

Well, take John Harrington's example (photographer).

You book a one-hour shoot, for say $200, to make it an easy number to play with.

Your job is to show up, set up the lights and backdrops, do the necessary makeup, get the executive portrait for the financial report (or whatever), and get out of his way.

Now, the exec suddenly says, "I only have 30 minutes, so you have to get it done in that amount of time."

Do you take a pay cut? No. You charge double, because to do the same work in half the time, you have to be better.

If I can get my work done in 20 hours/week, and another engineer takes 40 hours/week to accomplish the same task, I should be getting the higher hourly rate, not the same hourly rate.
I do like the idea of compiler driven tests over Q&A, but you still fall in the same trap of only getting answers for a very contrived case. There are more dynamics to a good developer than just a few hypothetical situations.

For example someone could be great at Hibernate but not really have some a lot of work with pure JPA. Just because they are not familiar with the JPA does not mean that they have not mastered ORM concepts and would be able to do JPA development as good as the rest of us in a week or so.

Which brings me to my next point. I would throw time completely out. With the situation I just framed a senior level developer is going to do what all of us do. Fire up the browser look at the JPA api and implement it. This is what makes a good developer. Someone who can gather code together and create a solution.

On almost any given project there are going to be new API's that developers will have to familiarize themselves with. The ones that can are far more valuable developers, because they disseminate that information back to the rest of the team.

Your test does not account for that and by making it time based you are disadvantaging the very ones that posses that valuable skill. If the answer is right, it's right.

As well you should consider offering the service to recruiter and hiring line managers, not as a competitive test, but rather as a filtering tool. Competitions are regarded in academia, but in the corporate world people just want to know if you can do the job.
When Example of Essay Writing Is a Helpful implement
An example of essay writing is helpful in many ways. If you are inexperienced in any type of writing an example will assist you in gaining new knowledge. If a good example is located you will be able to write your paper using this example as a guide.
Well, you don't need to be a genius to be creative. Also, who is to say that some entrepreneurs aren't geniuses? Just because they apply their intelligence to business instead of writing novels or proving theorems, doesn't mean they can't be smart.
So, who ended up winning this bet re: Wordpress 3.0?
Whole heartedly agree.

Are we hired for our skill, or to warm seats?

In corporate america, I'd say to warm seats.
Does this indicate the meaning of life is a 1337 amount of pie?
Excellent production values for a joke.
23andMe Publishes in PLoS Genetics
Heh if it wasn't for google Java would be completely dead.
Is OS X going to be iOS Desktop?
Here in small town midwest you can get decent rental properties for around 50k-60k.
What facebook is trying to build is not a search engine. Rather, I believe they're building more of a recommendation engine. As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up.

The meta data for each site/artist, etc you like will also give them (in theory) enough data to recommend not just on what your friends like.

Whoever unlocks the magic in the data and offers a compelling, personalized experience will rule the next decade.
In fact, there were a few (smaller) problems with the EVO 4G:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/14/htc-evo-4g-and-droid-incr...
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/13/htc-evo-suffering-from-gl...

None of the coverage was anywhere close to the iPhone's coverage.
You are joking right?
Antivirus product testing is changing, whether vendors like it or not
Or we could not use the JVM, because it's antiquated and never worked. I mean... that seems to be where everyone went five years ago.
Posted earlier today, see here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1460896
If Sergey Brin thinks the current medical research establishment stifles certain kinds of research avenues, fine. But let's not cast this as him "proposing to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science". He's not the next Francis Bacon, and this isn't some deep insight into the nature of science.
Venture Pimp: Fitalytic wants you to start exercising
I guess the problem comes from the fact that you can't convince any programmer(engineer?) with rational arguments so the evangelists and team leaders need to resort to fairy tales.

It's an art in itself which can be mastered without any technical knowledge. When this art comes to discussion it's easily taken down.

I'm still reading all the related posts here but the humility and measurement could be my new passion. :D
Here are two examples I've done. The first is matrix multiplication on the GPU. The second is a cellular automaton like simulation (the falling sand game popular a few years ago). Each incremental game state is calculated in a shader program and then used as input for the next increment.

Below I've linked github urls and two blog posts that were done about them. Unfortunately right now webGL is kind of a moving target and I doubt these examples still work out of the box. However, if you are interested in GPGPU on webGL I would encourage you to get involved as I think there are some tweaks to the standard that would make GPGPU life easier.

Matrix Mutliply
http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828
http://github.com/bunions1/matrixMultiplyGpu

Falling Sand
http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1471
http://github.com/bunions1/fallingsand-webgl
All of the real cruft on the internet wants to be in every search engine it can. The real gems are entirely oblivious to where their traffic comes from / could come from.
"It means they are completely rewriting the rules for selling enterprise software"

Or we're hearing about it because this approach just happens to work for them; others trying it out may not fare so well and quietly go away.
> It's pretty hard to block these sites because you have to know the domain name/information on each one.

No, you do not. There are services out there that assist in this.

http://www.cybersitter.com/
http://www.netnanny.com/
http://www.cyberpatrol.com/
http://www.asacp.org/

Couple this with parental controls in Windows and Mac (I'm sure it has it), and you don't have to know each domain.

> Assuming large-scale voluntary compliance, and I think the chances are good that all the "big" producers will move over, it's much easier to just filter the xxx domain and be done with it.

There already is voluntary compliance amongst the the big producers, as well as the smaller ones. There is no incentive to attract children.

These sites have already a vested interest in their current domains. Do you realize the cost involved with moving domains at the scale you are discussing? For what? To do what's already possible and being done?

I'd be more worried about sites that you wouldn't think to place in .xxx and yet are in many ways worse (looking at you, reddit!)
The DIY Triple-Rotor Helicopter
It's not a generic VM. Sure it's got a lot of basic instructions for adding (signed) numbers together but a lot of important instructions are very high-level and very specific to Java. It was never designed to run anything else. So non-Java languages ported to the JVM do involve kludges. The comparison to x86 isn't far off.
"Shan Zhai" rising: pro teardown of a cloned/knockoff GPS
Well, it's easy to re-write the rules when you have a cash cow called the US government buying loads of your applications. You just don't need to chase after customers anymore. Right?
Then AOL ran out of capacity and I was back to my 700 bucks after paying about 200 in commission to Bear.

How did you pay 200 dollars in commissions on a 700 dollar trade? How did you find work at an investment bank without being sufficiently savvy to realize that buying options on a credit card and then paying a gigantic commission is an absolute, guaranteed way to lose money over time? I'm genuinely confused here.

At any rate, the only people profiting on derivatives are the market makers. And even they blow up eventually. (Example: Bear Stearns).
It would be nice to see a search engine with some social intelligence, because Google is too easy to game, and has been giving poor results of late.
Which will provide no additional benefit, but will cause additional problems.
I'm on the Google Apps Script team. Ask me questions.

Funny thing is I published a Game of Life script a while ago, but it seems to have disappeared...
I think Facebook is vastly overestimating the number of people who are actually going to go out and "like" stuff.
It's not too late for Myspace - it's just too late for Myspace to be Facebook or Google.

They still have strong brand equity that they can use to generate an extremely profitable website, but what they require is a fortitude and humility to make a hard pivot, fire tons of people, and shrink dramatically.

They can't operate at scale any longer, but they do have the opportunity to leverage what still amounts to one of the top 10 brand names on the internet and use it to create something that makes a select few rich - and more importantly, actually creates value for others.
> No diff in utilization. You can still use the API elastically spin up new instances, if at a different scale.
They both have APIs, but EC2 has hourly billing versus monthly for Linode (they issue service credits pro-rated daily if you don't use a VPS for the entire month, refunds are manual and require a processing fee). EC2 also offers more options in terms of CPU and memory (3+ different CPUs and 1.7-32GB versus 0.5-4GB and single L5520 CPU architecture). They are both elastic, but from a billing perspective, Linode's elasticity isn't too practical.

> I guess, if that sort of thing matters to you. I don't really like relying on third parties for utilities like that.
It may matter for your project, if you need automatic-elasticity, more durable off-instance storage, better security, more compute power, more memory. Linode can't provide these features.

> K, but has anybody been making their machines faster?
Sure, EC2 has upgraded their m1 hardware the past couple of years, GoGrid is upgrading to Westmere later this year, Storm on Demand has upgraded some of their hardware, Flexiscale has upgraded, and others.
Researchers develop living, breathing human lung-on-a-chip
Its funny in an ironic way.

Hopefully he'll be fine though. The criminal "justice" system doesn't take kindly to pranksters like this.
At school we had business case on the facebook platform yesterday. It said googles main worry was facebook data being used to make a search engine. And it makes sense - data about me and my network is a huge heuristic in ranking pages. Also, the lecturer said sites increasingly saw more referrals coming from facebook and twitter than google. That was news to me.
Given the sensitive nature of some of the data they work with and the fact that 70% of their business comes through the [US] government, I wonder if their engineers all have at least some level of security clearance. Or would palantir just as easily sell the same product to the US government as it would to another government?
Do you actually, when running your own server cluster, upgrade every 18 months to keep up with Moore's law? I know I certainly don't. It was only just recently we phased out x86 boxes.

Will cloud computing compete over computing power? That depends, does anyone turn to cloud computing for serious computing performance?
I might be wrong though as I had never considered the possibility that Apple might have been developing OS X for Intel processors right from the beginning as a “Plan B” sort of strategy. Being able to do keep that quiet for five years was truly amazing

Ermm, it was never a secret that NeXTStep was cross-platform.
I concur, maybe invest in learning R first and build a couple prototypes that monitor a market trend and report some sort of result then just start iterating and building applications for investments that interest you.
Could Low Educational Attainment Be Slowing the Recovery?
The right way to do this is to try out a lot of different areas and see which ones are actually interesting; once she notices which of those are satisfying, those skills could be further developed.

For example: let's figure out if your wife would enjoy being a teacher. To be a teacher one needs some significant education, so the commitment is significant. The right thing then is to try out being a tutor - there's no need for a certificate there, you can just put up an ad somewhere or go through your social network. If enjoyable after 3 months -> consider teaching and getting the required degrees. If not, consider something else.

You said income is not the primary motivator. If there's some savings in the bank, that savings should be partially used up to find an answer to this question. The best way to start is to completely quit whatever she is doing right now - a lot of the time the fact that one has complete intellectual freedom of the day really gives some perspective on life.

Also, of course, she can pick up minor projects on elance and other freelancing sites, and see which of those projects satisfy more than others. Whichever ones satisfy most, those are the areas where the skills should be developed most.
Official word from Innocentive: http://blog.innocentive.com/2010/06/23/innocentive-oil-spill...
Mystery surrounds 'horse-boy' on Google Street View
I know the vuvuzela soundtrack on YouTube is silly, and this is silly too... but you know what? I like that one of the biggest companies of our time is OK with being silly sometimes.

Remember when Apple used to have fun, too?
> I can only imagine the reaction if a major Apple competitor had the same problem. Apple gets a pass on everything.

It's interesting because the same problem has been reported on both the Nexus One and the Evo 4G, yet nobody gives a damn.

Oh look, your statement is completely the wrong way around.

Same stuff with Google's remote application killing, had Apple done it it'd be all over the web and would be the first link on HN. Google did it, the HN link has already fallen off the front page.
Could you imagine buying a brand new Mercedes CL550, finding out that if you grip the steering wheel with your left hand it will shut the car down, and then having Mercedes insist that there is no problem and that you should buy a steering wheel cover?

This is so far beyond unacceptable for apple. I cannot believe (well yes, actually, I can) that they're not doing a recall on this or, at the very least, providing users with a free case.

The other tragedy of this whole thing (or maybe it's just brilliance on behalf of apple) is that the stories about the antenna issue are all overpowering the issue that 3G users are having with iOS4. V4 renders the phone slow and buggy. Opening SMS messages will sometimes crash the SMS program. Things are slow, opening the ipod function can take upwards of 10 seconds sometimes.

Really really really really bad form apple. The last 6 months have been terrible for them.