skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But it's pretty easy to conflate them without any objections from the uninformed American public.

Do you think that Biden actually understands the difference? If he does, do you think that he cares?
It's even easier to walk someone through with a command line. I've done it, reciting the magic incantations for the Windows recovery command line to a relative who didn't even know the difference between Windows and Office.

It was painful, but I relish the idea of walking someone through a GUI to do it even less.
I guess it depends on the technical usage. I still go back to my college era calculus and physics books. Expensive at the time but worth it's weight in gold.

For emerging technologies (hot, new languages) I prefer StackOverflow, Google, and wikis. I'd only give ePubs a shot if the price was substantially cheaper than the dead tree version.

I'd still buy an iPad, but only for light reading and the 100k apps.
Y Combinator in FT EDSL
I had trouble finding any useful information on the landing page. EclipseSource did a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new features, which at least gives me some idea:

http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2010/06/23/top-10-eclipse-hel...
Eclipse is near the apex of the problem indicated in the article. I recently had the displeasure of using it, and had a torrid time trying to configure the colors to my preferred grey on black color scheme. Not only are the options for setting colors spread over different areas of the configuration UI, but there were too many "fine detail" choices regarding semantic markup, without there being a clear and obvious way to change the general thrust (i.e. inverting the text contrast scheme). I had to change dozens of settings, as I recall, to end up somewhere close to what I wanted.

I had to give up on virtual space in the editor, though.
The World's 18 Strangest Military Bases
Another vote for "it depends on who you work for". I just got that a speech that's basically equivalent to that letter from my (CS) adviser. I think it was supposed to be motivational, but the only thing it's motivated me to do is send out resumes and commit to quitting grad school.

Edited, to add that I was already working 80 hours a week before the speech. I'm not even sure how I could possibly work more if I stayed.
Can the CodePlex Foundation Free itself from Microsoft?
Contracts with publishers.
Amazon's Kindle has similar limits[1].

[1]: http://consumerist.com/2009/06/amazon-tries-to-clarify-downl...
I don't think your analogy holds. In fact, the piano has an incredibly intuitive interface. Push buttons farther to the right, and they get higher in pitch. Push buttons farther to the left, and they get lower in pitch. I would argue that the playing of music itself is unintuitive, which is why a beginner would not know what to do with a piano.

I do agree that making the ui for complex tools easy to use is very difficult, but I wouldn't label complexity and ease of use a trade off. There are an infinite number of ways to display a user interface, and I believe there's always a way to make something easier to use.
Unions by design are democratic institutions, and thus protect the average worker. Good programmers will be hurt by a union more than they will be helped, so the union shops will be stuck with lousy programmers and lose in the market.
I stopped using the store because of this issue. Now, if there is some hidden option that will block this "feature" that's different, but I have yet to find it.
Someone told me a few years back that when Moore's Law dropped the price of sequencing to the point that a garage startup could afford it, everything would change.

Article says it's $5,000 per species (in bulk). Not that far off.
I really hope you change your mind eventually. Dead-tree books are probably on the decline, and if nobody is willing to pay for electronic books because of the prevailing attitude (electronic things are free!) that's going to mess things up.

Don't get me wrong, dead-tree books have their place. In addition to ebooks, I own something like 200lbs of reference books. I'm not blind to the pros of paper. (though you can bet I'll be excited when a real textbook replacement comes along, and I don't have to lug 200lbs around)
Oh, I know. One of my friends noted the same thing recently--people use semicolons all the time in spoken language. But in written language it looks pretentious somehow.
Before our node.js solution we actually ran Java along with a highly optimized JBoss Netty comet implementation and it had a hard time scaling since it used _a lot_ of memory. Generally, our Java solution used around 10 times more memory than our node.js solution. Like I note in that post:

"We have rewritten to node.js from Java+JBoss Netty, because the old solution had scalability problems. We have also been able to build a very sophisticated messaging system given JavaScript expressiveness and the simplicity of node.js. Generally, we have found node.js and V8 very impressive - and it uses about 10 times less memory than Java+Netty did."

Jetty Comet uses a lot more memory than a vanilla JBoss Netty implementation - at least based on my benchmarks.
I always wondered what a semicolon sounded like.
This is almost a perfect example of "sick system" (or how to keep people in abusive work/personal relationships):

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think.
Rule 2: Keep them tired.
Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved.
Rule 4: Reward intermittently.

http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html
When it comes to apps, Apple is the publisher. They make all the rules and can do as they like.

For music and books Apple has to negotiate contracts with publishers who likely demand certain conditions in return for their content being made available on the various iTunes stores.

Considering Apple's consumer-friendly position on the repeated downloading of apps, it seems reasonable to guess that forcing consumers to pay to redownload books, music and videos is a requirement imposed on them by the content publishers.
What you need is to hire a contractor/consultant with experience in that specific area of scalable content/knowledge delivery and conversion.

I am that consultant and contractor - my last contract position was with a company that has a platform for delivering live and on-demand video to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous viewers, worked on all platforms, and would convert virtually any audio/video file into the necessary formats for streaming and downloading automatically.

Over three years there, their installed client base increased by an order of magnitude, the transcoding service is now being marketed as a separate product, and I'm looking for more work to fill up my time.

So my advice is to hire a consultant, and my other advice is to hire me :)
In a time of supposed enlightenment? At least now we have free markets instead of feudalism and puppet monarchies run by Great Pirates.

Last year, my neighbor was a PhD working in a lab at an institution in the same equivalence class, and he told me that he made it clear that he expected people to work nights and weekends. The attitude in the email linked above is strict but the point is that the guy probably had been slacking and if he wanted to do something else then he should do something else instead of slowing down the pace of important research and taking up a spot that could be easily filled by somebody else.
We'd never be so gauche as to send a memo about it. There are much more efficient methods of getting employees to work every night and weekend, and if you do it right, it won't even occur to them that that isn't normal.

I forget whether I'm talking about salaryman "we" or tech industry "we"...
http://oo.apple.com
No, we're google's products. The advertisers are their customers.
How does knowing makefiles help you understand your build system if you're using VS? You do realize that it doesn't use Makefiles (at least, not by default).

With that said, I know people who the old VC project system inside and out. And I know tons of people who know MSBuild as well as the most build engineers I know in the Unix world know make.

Makefiles are an artifact of a particular build system. It is not foundational to all build systems. Understanding Makefiles is useful for the world in which you use make, but I fail to see why it would be useful in a world where they don't use make.
Settings -> turn off "location services". This will prevent any app from requesting this info. Of course, you're not going to be able to use Maps or other apps that require GPS. And of course, websites you visit can still use the same GeoIP tracking that they use for non-mobiles.
No, because it's free.
Speaking as the parent of a newborn, I would have to say that statement isn't quite true.
Here's the deal - I don't like being generalized as some sort of mind-slave to Microsoft's brain trust just because I prefer Visual Studio and C# over Eclipse and Java.

My choice of development platforms and tools doesn't mean that I'm inherently less curious about what else is available to me, and the author's generalization and yours would seem to indicate otherwise. What you're reading in the HN comments are the objections to this generalization.

If I had written this article and wrote it about how PHP developers don't know anything about unit testing, agile, JIT compilation, pre-caching, and whatever, a different audience of HN readers would be tearing it up in the comments right now.
Does anyone know why Eclipse is dog-slow on OS X? crappy JVM implementation or something else.
Do the news media spend too much time on news?
hmm...

If I have to do something new with the list, I don't have to completely rewrite my program (like #1 does)

You said #1 only took 15 minutes. Hardly seems like a big cost. If you never have to rewrite, #1's the right answer. Or if the rewrite includes functionality never even anticipated in your "correct solution". If it's that small, starting over with a clean slate may be faster than fitting in new functionality.
well its not like GLaDOS is going to build itself.
Daniel Vorhaus: Consumer genetics needs more transparency, not regulation
It's definitely been ropey. My own hunch was that it was not browser related, but to do with their rollout of Caffeine - either maintenance on other products has been taking a back seat, or lower priority searches (from users' pages rather than google.com) are not being handled as quickly, but sit parked in the stack above other things - sort of like the situation a while back where sometimes you'd visit a site and pages would stall due to an endless wait from Google analytics).

There's more to this thought, but it's still basically a hunch and I don't want to waste 15 minutes on it. I just hope they designate July Quality Control Month.
Open Source Business Tactics in One Slide
Same and same, plus with Chromium daily snapshots.
This must be publisher specific. I purchased a book on my first iPad and when I bought a second (with 3g), I re-downloaded it without having to pay for it.
Jason Calacanis: A message to the Mahalo community
There is a 10 minute talk of the changes in the JDT:

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a300965365/p57522647/?launc...

Nothing earth shattering for what I do, but interesting.
Wow. How on earth do these people not sack up, tell their boss to diaf, and walk out the door? Because honestly, if you allow people to use you like a punk, stop whining when they do. At will employment works both ways.

From the article:

EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.

But can they?

The EA Mambo, paired with other giants such as Vivendi, Sony, and Microsoft, is rapidly either crushing or absorbing the vast majority of the business in game development. A few standalone studios that made their fortunes in previous eras -- Blizzard, Bioware, and Id come to mind -- manage to still survive, but 2004 saw the collapse of dozens of small game studios, no longer able to acquire contracts in the face of rapid and massive consolidation of game publishing companies. This is an epidemic hardly unfamiliar to anyone working in the industry. Though, of course, it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry, perhaps venturing into the booming commercial software development arena. (Read my tired attempt at sarcasm.)
My company, Greenview Data, provides a hosted email encryption solution that would cover your lawyer friend perfectly. It allows you to encrypt emails with attachments up to 50mb that the client then accesses through a secure web portal which they create a username/password for, so there's no need for your friend to manage any keys or certificates. Clients can also reply to emails through the portal, keeping all communication encrypted. There are even special scanning algorithms specifically for legal professionals (and health, finance, government, etc.) that will automatically encrypt emails with sensitive data even if your friend forgets to do it herself. It's all designed to make encrypted email as simple as regular email so nobody has to worry about it. Check it out at www.greenviewdata.com/encryption.
Bad idea. Reward people for "putting in hours" and suddenly they'll figure out ways to be present in the office without doing actual work.

Some employers avoid falling into this trap by refusing to make a record of how long employees work, only their results.
On Linux 32bits and 64bits it is faster than Galileo. (Seems faster and uses less memory)
Extreme Programming - One Team
I usually start at the bottom of his list, check for the domain and trademark first.

If not, all that other effort is wasted when you get all ready, set, and happy with your name only to find out a barber in Toledo is already using it.

-- edit: removed useless remark --

Lastly, do heed the advice somewhat. I've been using a business name for 9 years that I hate, is hard to pronounce, spell, and doesn't reflect what I do. Arrg. I was young and thought it was cool. oops
You would get even more noticeable size increase by doing push downs with a cable or skull crushers.
The general geolocation feature has been out for a while, but it's been limited to neighbourhoods like "SoMA, San Francisco", rather than a specific place, like "Twitter HQ, San Francisco."
You make it sound like grooming can't be hacked...
Python did the same for me. Closures was not a new feature as of C# 3.0. It is a part of C# 2.0. The problem is that the syntax is so verbose and horrible in 2.0 that the readability of the code can be quite messy and almost not worth the effort.

C# 3.0 greatly simplified things with the introduction of the lambda function syntax hence why a lot more people have suddenly "discovered" closures in .NET.

When first learning C# 2.0 I had a lot of difficulty understanding how to use delegates with closures mainly because I couldn't get past the syntax. Learning and using Python shortly after helped me tremendously in understanding how closures worked and when to use them because (not surprisingly) the Python syntax is so much cleaner and intuitive. I was able to then transfer and apply this knowledge to C# by cutting through the noise and using closures effortlessly (as needed). When lambdas arrived in 3.0, it was a no brainer.

This experience showed me how being exposed to and learning other programming languages that follow different paradigms can have a positive impact on how you write code in your primary language.
Google's visitor stats on browser size
SocialSci is hiring two science minded RoR devs to help bring academic research online.

We save researchers time and money by bringing their scientific surveys (drag/drop, pdf upload, and visual response) online. We have developed a full suite of scientific tools and linked them to an anonymous, honest, and payable group of participants.

The team is currently 4 strong (2 dev, 1 biz/scientist, 1 academic sales), but we want to bump it up to 6.

Recently seed funded (we can pay you actual money / equity), graduated Tech Stars Boston, and now work out of Dog Patch Labs (Cambridge).

If interested, shoot me an email at leon@socialsci.com

Thanks.
N8 to be the last N-series to run Symbian platform
"the piano has an incredibly intuitive interface"

I prefer not to use the word "intuitive" exactly because it has no definition and leads to such miscommunications. You're saying the layout of a piano keyboard is arranged by a system that is easy for beginners to understand. I'm saying it's not easy for beginners to use. These are two very different things and the piano is an interesting example of how one does not necessarily imply the other.

"the playing of music itself is unintuitive"

Most of the children I have met are able to use their voices and percussive instruments to play music. I don't think producing some form of live music is inherently difficult.
Product Success ... Just a Worksheet Away
I've heard about that, and I'm not convinced. Here's the quote in context:

> What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

So if it's (also) meant as a quip, it's a friendly one. And in either case, the saying goes back to the middle ages and was always meant metaphorically.
Sometimes the world just is as simple as it seems. Type 1 is right, type 2 isn't.

After 15 years of writing code I can only vouch for two metrics of code quality: clarity and length. For a long time I too thought that clarity means using "thisIsAStudentBirthDate" variable names - but it turns out there are very very few instances where the shortest code isn't also the most obvious at first glance.

I think the turning point was when I decided rewrites aren't a bad thing. I started seeing the code as alive - unchanged code isn't good, is dead. The myth of perfect code is just an illusion. Writing for the next version sounds very sensible - until you get enough years under your belt to realize that either there won't be a next version or it won't be anything like you expect.
Bootleg movie != Pirated software
Chrome bookmark sync malfunctioned and I lost 400 bookmarks because it only backed up a 100 of my 500 bookmarks. It just dumped 400 bookmarks but luckily I had backed them up a few weeks back so I ended up only losing 100 bookmarks.

Also Chrome sometimes loops the sound from a flash video after I close a tab.

I emailed the Chrome team about these issues but no response.
...$4,000 he raised on a website that connects artists and inventors with private investors.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1992078142/building-the-...

The guy also has a blog:

http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/

And a GitHub repo with Ruby code for generating .stl fabrication files, for those who want to follow along at home:

http://github.com/famulus/decawell
You are right, and you highlight an important development here: In moving into the world of targeted advertising, Apple's going to have to let go just a bit and engage in some transparency.

I want to know what's being collected on me, where it's going, and what it's going to be used for. Heck, if anyone has the capability to make this kind of disclosure uncommonly clear and intuitive, it's Apple.
doubleTwist is looking for experienced android engineers in NYC or SF. email resume/cv to chris at doubletwist dot com
David, you forgot to include Symbian signing for Nokia and Samsung handsets. This usually runs around $20 per signing.

That said, because of some of the things we do with wifi scanning on the buddycloud client, we have to sign four different versions: one for each varient of S60 with different ways of handling wifi. So figure on each code fix costing $80.

We've also found the approval process SLOW. We tried to use Symbian.org's Horizon free signing system but they always loose the order and it ends up taking them about a month to get the 4 binaries signed. We've gone through this a couple of times and it's never improved.

Then it takes Ovi at least two weeks to get the binary into the market and through their content approval process.

It's all total effing built-by-a-committee bullshit.

My money is on Android's zero bullshit approach winning out over Nokia's sloth and Steve's ego.
19% of software on Apple's App Store is paid, with $1.49 average price
What you're saying is that a light switch has high discoverability.
Notes and frequencies of the organs of the human body
How to Write History Term Papers like a Historian
Records of past events should be presented in an impartial manner when writing history term papers. This requires the writer to think like a historian. With knowledge gained through attention given to the professor during class and with a good understanding of how to write a term paper you will be able to submit a well documented term paper.
The complete guide to the iPhone's new OS
How did you get the person to understand the concept of "what the command printed out"? I don't know how many times I had to say "Yeah, but look above the dollar sign, was there any text printed out between the current dollar sign and the last one?" The person I was talking to always would complain "IT DID NOTHING I'M BACK TO THE SAME THING."

I eventually got through it by getting them on IM and giving them text to copy-paste, and sometimes they'd send me screenshots.
BTW: I'm not in the slightest bit interested in complaining about or arguing for patents - it's the opposite of intellectually interesting to me: it's boring and emotional.

Thanks for the link. My reading: Claim one is that dragging an icon to a drop location unlocks the device. It's like dragging to the recycle bin, except that: 1. the drop location is a "region", not an icon (a bit more general); 2. the action isn't to move a file, but to unlock the device (ie. trigger this specific global event)

This doesn't seem sensational to me, but it does sound like a good idea: simulating a slider for unlocking. "Pocket unlocking" would be less likely to happen, and it would look cool. Although drag-n-drop is well known, it's never been used to trigger a global event (TMK).

The subsequent claims refine this: the icon must be dragged along a displayed route; or within channels; or the direction of dragging is given by arrows or text (presumably randomized). These aren't purely "gestures" because they involve interaction with elements on the screen. The last one - text directions - is probably the one most likely to be upheld by the court.

(for completeness, the other claims are just alternate language for the same thing - to circumvent seemingly irrelevant syntactic distinctions between eg. "system" and "method")

Just because someone claims something doesn't mean it's true. Like any other claim - in a thesis, in an advertisement, by a politician - it may be true or false. You need to check out the evidence and the criteria used to evaluate it.

What is interesting will be to hear the court's opinion. That's what counts, as far as "patent law" is concerned, not what the inventor claims. [nb: I've used "claims" with two distinct meanings here: the claims are claimed]
I think it is a lot more common in chem and bio for the sort of reasons you say. You have to work on the schedule of the experiment, which isn't always conveniently aligned with an 8-5, M-F schedule. I did theoretical physics at Caltech and there was no expectation of this sort from the profs. Lots of my friends in chem & bio (and to a lesser degree experimental physics) worked kinda crazy schedules. Even in those departments, though, some profs were known to be slave drivers and some were more relaxed.