skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'We Got Acquired by Amazon’: Woot’s Deal Video
I bought a Saeco from Premier Appliance for around ~$430. They don't have the machine I bought, but the Giro is a great little coffee robot, too: http://www.premierappliance.com/storefrontprofiles/deluxeSFs...

The Saeco machine I bought has a built-in grinder, so its relatively clean. Makes very consistent espresso, good to very good with the right beans. The machine is quick to heat up, has two heating elements, and foams milk well. The build quality is better than the Gaggia machine I replaced.

I can't recommend a Moka pot, unless you're very precise, patient, and have an equally precise stove. Aeropressed, french pressed, and cold pressed are great ways to get good coffee, but they're not espresso.
I wonder what % of users actually use RSS, might just be that it is a very low percentage of Firefox users so the button is not used very often.
Indeed, the selling point is access to the internet. More for targeted use than for extended browsing. While such browsing can be done on phones, eventually one gets a sort of "what would be better done on the bigger screen" intuition. Which is when syncing content back and forth between machines starts to shine (and comes to feel indispensable), as it lets you start internet tasks in either place without needing to consider which screen would be better long term; you just switch when the need arises.
The "lower cost of living" argument, is misleading. Yes it is cheaper to live in many other places, but competitive forces make smart developers gravitate towards high paying jobs.. if you are paying $7/hr for a developer and you consider the overhead of management layers,communication costs, cultural diferences, productivity etc etc.. you end up getting about $7/hr type of product.
If your project can live with $7 components fine.. if you need better, you usually throw it away and get a new one...
( Exactly as I did last time I bought a cheap set of tools at home depo.. yea they where cheap, but lasted a week and gave me a whole lot of trouble and aggravation)
I've read many articles critical of offshoring to India over the past few years, and they all seem to have the same pattern. The authors all seem to want to describe what's wrong with offshoring, but what they end up describing are great examples of the kind of thinking in American companies which leads to failure. The pattern is almost identical:

- It all starts with, out of nowhere, 'pressure' to 'outsource/offshore' a specific project against the will of the developers/managers in the US.

- These same devs/managers are entrusted with the project and told to 'get it done in India'. They have no idea where to hire great developers, or what these developers want after they're hired, but they set up a project anyway.

- They either go to an outsourcing company or set up a small office in India to get a 'bunch of developers'. There is no discussion in the article of a management structure in India and it is assumed the experienced devs in the US need to do the management and review of the work.

- It's amazing how often the result cited is that 'it would take us less time to rewrite what these guys did than to ask for rework'.

- The company, having learnt its lesson, presumably never ventures into these waters again.

Meanwhile, companies which know anything about a global workforce have a center in India set up not by a group of devs who don't want to do it, but at the topmost level of the company. They hire or send someone really bright who understands India and the talent market here and spends real effort and investment into hiring great people and building a real techie culture.

They protect their India teams from the I'll-spend-more-time-reviewing-it-than-writing-it-myself crowd, and give them real ownership and responsibility, often starting small but prepared to give more ownership as the teams grow in capability. They don't set them up for failure by givening them US managers who want them to fail.

I work at a large setup like this (and there are many others), where teams aren't 'sending code to be reviewed' by devs in the US, they're defining the specs and technical direction, shipping products to customers directly, often much better than the US teams they took the product over from. Not always, but very often. All the technical management for the product is in India and they're given real responsibility and authority to set directions for the technology.

Yes, as the article says, there are great developers everywhere, but they need to be found, they need to be attracted and appreciated and they need to be given real ownership. Then you find out if offshoring works or not.
You may want to consider returning the Kindle DX if your use case is PDF reading, particularly if you have any complex graphics, and absolutely if random flipping through the document occurs.

I own a K1 and K2 - and nothing beats them, not even paper, for bright sunlight reading. I had a DX for about a week, but found that the page flipping performance in textbook class PDFs, particularly when I was looking for a random page was poor, and, the Achilles's heel - complex graphics took several seconds to render.

The iPad is a better tool for that use case, and, with dropbox + goodreader, it takes me all of 5 seconds to bounce my PDF onto my iPad for future reading (With the bonus that my iPhone now has access to the same PDFs, and, I have full access to color documents.)

I do 100% of my summer reading outside on my Kindle, though - wouldn't even attempt it on an iPad, even with the matte screen that I've added.
Outsourcing can work.

The problem biggest is most people who outsource do it to save money. So naturally they end up selecting programmers who offer a cheap price (which has nothing to do with they skills).

The second biggest issue is the type of people who outsource have no technical skills, hence they cannot interview developers.
The "real-world" performance is only better if you don't hold it in your left hand.

I can't hear very well out of my right ear, so I've always used my left hand to hold phones to my left ear. I never had any trouble with my 3GS, but my iPhone 4 is almost instantly transformed into an iPod Touch 4 when I hold it normally (i.e. the "wrong" way).

Personally, I like the rest of the phone's new features enough to adapt my grip during non-voice usage (which is most of what I use it for anyway). However, people aren't exaggerating the attenuation issue at all.
The article seems neutral till the last lines:

The developing gender gap in the gifted programs of New York City does not signal that girls are smarter than boys. Rather, it exemplifies how well-intentioned government officials and educators can disregard boys’ needs and abilities and unwittingly adopt policies detrimental to boys’ well-being. It is a small part of the long story of how American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation’s schools.
Perhaps so, but the comparison between the Kindle and iPad is easily the least interesting part of the article. He didn't discover a significant difference, and that's exactly what we all expected.
Yea.. and you probably don't charge $7/hr.
Maybe the name of the article should read "Cheap outsourcing doesn't work"
Here's some code:

{-# LANGUAGE
TypeFamilies,
MultiParamTypeClasses,
FlexibleInstances #-}

data True = T
data False = F

class LogicOr a b where
type Or a b
typeOr :: a -> b -> Or a b
instance LogicOr True b where
type Or True b = True
typeOr T b = T
instance LogicOr a True where
type Or a True = True
typeOr b T = T
instance LogicOr False False where
type Or False False = False
typeOr F F = F

class Decide tf a b where
type If tf a b
nonFunctionalIf :: tf -> a -> b -> If tf a b
instance Decide True a b where
type If True a b = a
nonFunctionalIf T a b = a
instance Decide False a b where
type If False a b = b
nonFunctionalIf F a b = b

whatIsMyType tf1 tf2 a b = nonFunctionalIf (typeOr tf1 tf2) a b

If we load this into ghci, we have the following example:

*Main> :t whatIsMyType F F 2 "foo"
whatIsMyType F F 2 "foo" :: (Num t) => If (Or False False) t [Char]
*Main> :t whatIsMyType F F 2 "foo" :: String
whatIsMyType F F 2 "foo" :: String :: String

In the first :t, ghci lazily (though correctly) gives us the type of whatIsMyType. In the second example, where we provide an explicit type annotation, ghci is able to (correctly) conclude that our annotation was correct by evaluating the various type functions it had given us before.
I would argue that the major selling point for selling any phone (smart or feature) is to use the "phone" part. Everything else comes second.
I suspect most people don't use RSS at all.
I value my karma here... That said, I was tempted to post the same thing.
Exactly: it's depressing, but working software really can be created by throwing dozens or hundreds of junior-level developers at it.

I'm just not interested in working on any problem domain where that's the best approach.
Today's concerns for security are not concerns for keeping our information private. Rather, they are concerns that we will maintain control over our private information, to be able to share it at our own discretion. Facebook removes much of this control from the user.
But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

Because disruptive innovations on the web are always driven by large numbers of people, and never by mere handfuls of engineers, right?
Yes, a private dropbox/pirate bay among your trusted network of friends is 100% win. Easy to use and virtually invincible to RIAA claims. Heck, include a VLC browser plugin to make it all seemless.
Video: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals
I can honestly say I didn't see this coming.
Studies are good but as a reader it feels like a subjective thing. At the end of the day, I read best on the device that I feel happiest and most successful in reading on. So far, that's the iPad. eInk may or may not have advantages but the usability of eInk devices like the Kindle has felt weak to me. I'll take an inferior screen on a system that feels right over any other. (I guess this explains why I'm a Rubyist too ;-))
"A good developer in any country does not have to fear outsourcing or other cost-saving trends."

So the attention-grabbing headline is a statement on 'outsourcing' in general, which I believe means just delegating services to a third-party supplier and not necessarily to save costs, and the very last line of the post qualifies it to a 'cost-saving' sort of delegation, so as not to detract from the intensity of the arguments and yet leave it just about politically correct.

Nifty.
More support for pg's point that your biggest enemy is the back button!
Why is a -50dBm S/N ratio considered a "perfect signal"?

Edit: dBm as a unit for SNR doesn't make sense, which is why I was confused. The Y axis is overall signal strength, not S/N ratio.
no evidence to show that facebook users see it that way, or care.

Also FWIW, I think the name "diaspora" is terrible I cannot see it working at all.
It surprises me that anyone could say Windows' third-world font rendering is "optimized for on-screen clarity." Even the current Ubuntu level of font rendering looks streets ahead of ClearType.
I think it is because it is harder to fit text on a vertical bar. It has to be rather wide to fit a couple of words horizontally, and even then the text will often get cut off. The text could be rotated to read vertically, but that is hard to read.
I wonder what the difference between "Vertical Scrollbar" and "Scroll Vertical Bar" is (on the OS-specific filter views).
I've got both - I need something that can make espresso.
IPhone 4 Antenna problem is UX: What the user doesn't know makes them happy.
It looks like Chrome was on the right track by ditching the "Search" field off to the right.
> I recently switched from PHP to Python + Pylons and am noticing significant differences in workflow.

Can you elaborate ?
awesome, Maro! one of the biggest impacts of research (in an applied field like CS systems) is that it provides good ideas for people in industry to pick off, adapt, and refine for their own applications. great work
Forgive my ignorance - if the demo operates in the 900Mhz ISM band, how would any GPS phone be able to connect to it?
Thank you - the proximity sensor issue is a much bigger deal for me as well!

I took my iPhone into a genius appointment yesterday. They took it into the back area and upon returning informed me that they installed a "patch," I couldn't restore from my previous back-up, and that it was a known problem.

Apparently this is a software issue that only affects those upgrading their iPhones (the iPhone 4 doesn't like something in the back-up), not brand-new users.
I'm not here to support the pirate bay or their party, but you do realise that ad homs from Orlowski thrown at one supporter of an organisation isn't a good basis for a strong argument?
Chrome doesn't even have an RSS icon at all!
I'm not an iPhone user but I imagine most people would just suck it up and get a case. All the other options tend to suck more.
While I can appreciate your sentiment, it does indicate a complete lack of understanding in the depth and scope of determinism.

Determinism proposes there is a predetermined unbroken chain of prior occurrences back to the origin of the universe.

This in 'complete totality' includes every primary impulse, every secondary reaction (e.g. willpower) to that impulse and every course correction that may follow.

tl:dr; causality includes what you think is free-will.
Is this guy going to go Kaczynski on us?
"The greater variance of males on intelligence tests is one of the best-established findings in psychometric literature"

And this is supported by a graph from 1932? I'm not saying it isn't true, but surely there is more recent data to support one of the "best-established findings" of that field.
BASH Cures Cancer
According to the graph in the middle of the article (unless I'm reading it wrong) it would seem that there are more male geniuses.

The graph then, would seem to indicate that the sort of tests that determine a child's eligibility for entrance into the gifted programs in New York either a) do not track with IQ tests or b) filter out children with IQs lower than say 95 (therefore making more girls eligible than boys).
> I've done functional programming work in the past (ML) but the fact is, it's just much harder to just get things done in functional languages.

This is 2010, we're not living in a FP vs. OO world anymore. Clojure (and I've heard Scala) preserves the greats parts about OO programming. I'm sure this is the just the beginning.
Whiteyboard - stick-on whiteboards
Mrs Briant channels Steve Jobs
Last night Mrs Briant caught me playing with her new iPhone 4 and wondered aloud what on earth I was doing.

"I'm trying to make the signal drop. Apparently if you hold it right here, it loses it signal", I said.

"Well don't hold it there then!" she said, as if I was five.
Somewhat related: I was a little irked when I read the StackOverflow thread on iPhone Error Logging Best Practices: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1667994/best-practices-fo...

Short of fatal crashes which corrupt their user's data, do most iPhone developers simply not care about reporting on exceptions?
wait, what? genius bar can fix it with a patch? did they install the patch for you and did that fix the issue for you? do you now have an iphone that has proximity sensor fixed? when they returned the phone, were all your apps/settings intact or was it fresh? what does your about screen say for version numbers?
iPad turns pages much faster than the Kindle — I've found that flipping through pages is snappier than even the printed book (i.e., via either repeated taps or swipes). Also, Kindle is plagued (though it better than the B&N Nook I played with) with refresh delays whereas on iPad text is nearly always instantly rendered).

And advancing/rewinding to random points in a text — no comparison as Kindle not suited for that task; but on an iPad, it as easy (or superior) to a printed book.
Margin of Error +/- 2%
No need for it to waste space - just drag it up next to the File/Edit/Etc menu. I use the toolbar in place of the bookmarks menu itself, since I get to organize it exactly how I want it, and with quicker access/better categorization.
What's the general opinion on F#?

From my limited knowledge it seems to be taking the good concepts from more obscure or academic functional languages and making them easier to implement with the help of the existing .NET infrastructure.
How to install: EASY ON POCKET SIM ONLY DEALS FOR THE MASSES..
sql_apply("select id,somefield from sometable","applicator_function");

PHP is a programming language, it was not designed for 'simple web/database apps' any more than any other language, you can use the building blocks provided to create access at the level you require. But you can customize it so that it does become usable for 'simple web/database apps'.

The above is a short sample of how I'd do the thing you describe and I don't have to remember to fetch the next row from the table and I don't have to check that I'm at the end of the result set, grouping is as easy as SQL will make it and all cleanup is automatic.
I had the same initial reaction to the graph, but she seems to be using the graph to show that reality may be at odds with the enrollment numbers. Data from 1932 does seem quite out of place in an article addressing "recent trends".

She goes on to suggest that the gifted programs are more targeted to girls - things like verbal-oriented tests and needing to "sit still" for periods of time.
If you take the Mean. Hence the ideas of median and mode, both of which in this case would cough up 0 accidents as the "average." Importantly the majority of things talking about "percentile" are using a median for "average"
Didn't see the original. But even if I had, I imagine I'd be much happier to see a duplicate of this than yet another "original" news story about the iPhone's antenna.
There also needs to be a time-to-burnt-retinas speed
> To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula

Clever. As I was reading this my mind started reeling "What if they intentionally showed more bars to make AT&T's crappy network look better than it really is?"

I bet they anticipated the rumors this might start.
Probably not, since what they're looking for is the usefulness of the individual pieces of the UI itself.
I love the 'recent results' options in search engines for that reason.
I wonder the same thing about the search box. I personally drag all the navigation buttons and address/awesome bar up into my menu bar and eliminate the other default toolbars. (File|Edit|...|back|forward|reload|stop|awesomebar|adblockplus)
Useful to examine this comment:

http://blog.meebo.com/?p=2589#comment-1142969

which points to this (older) "devblog" entry having some actual detail:

http://blog.meebo.com/?p=2320

Here's the front page for the "devblog" category.

http://blog.meebo.com/?cat=13

Unfortunately, while p=2320 says it's part 1 of 3, I don't see parts 2 nor 3 under that category; they appear to not exist (yet).

EDIT: Here's the mentioned presentation, as an unembedded YouTube URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7SUFLFu3HI
I think Apple is very strongly research-driven with respect to materials science and industrial design: the basic design of the iPhone / multitouch interface, the unibody design of recent MacBook Pros, the stainless steel antenna in the iPhone 4, and so forth.
Why on earth would you say that ?
Xach has a new toy under-wraps that's gonna revolutionize the state of Lisp deployment. Really awesome stuff. Stay tuned ;-)

http://quicklisp.org/
I can't seem to get the Bespin Bookmarklet to work with the text box in hacker news comments' text box. I tried the same thing over at reddit and same situation. I can type text in the box but the submit button doesn't respond nor do the drop down menus. Attempted with latest versions of chrome and firefox. Disabled NoScript as well.
The little bar diagram that phones display is an oversimplification and generally wrong. It's a bit like downsampling your monitor to 5 pixels and complaining that they don't accurately represent the original. Most bar displays compute some form of signal or signal to noise ratio, but even that is a joke compared to the complexity of modern digital multiplexing, shared control channels, inter-tower hopping, and that doesn't even consider what happens to your voice packets after they are on the ground at a tower. Your phone doesn't even have the proper instruments to deduce the likely hood that you will have a clean connection.

If people want to complain about actual dropped calls, thats one thing. To nitpick the weather prediction that is your reception "bars" is absurd.
Ideas worth spreading: Measuring what makes life worthwhile
Physics may not be entirely deterministic. At the quantum level physics starts being about probability. (In fact, quantum physics is all about probability, something my grades wish I had understood while taking the course...) Maybe particles have free will: do I tunnel now or not? Not now, maybe later. Maybe the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a reflection of the free will: you can determine either a particle's position or velocity as much as you want, but you give the particle an equal amount of free will to choose the other one.
If you're a fruit-eater the noise would be incredibly high. Think of watermelon, oranges, grapefruits, heck even tomatoes are all frequently eaten by people and contain large amounts of water.

Someone who eats 'healthily' is going to be much harder to geolocate than someone who eats 'carnivore' style.

I suppose you would look for the strongest source and use that. However I can't help but feel that they're measuring differences in identical isotopes and not relying on unique isotopes (IE of a different mineral) to do the locating. More potassium might mean the North American east coast and more calcium could mean the west is how their method reads to me. This means that they're calculating from the sum of the isotopes.
Zing. I remember reading/watching studies of classroom settings a few years ago where teachers were unconsciously giving boys a better learning experience. It was eye opening. I thought there was a fairly established result in gender bias studies of education -- boys get more opportunities, more teacher interaction, and the system encourages them more. Maybe this is more fair?
Integrating a whole bunch of small, well-designed tools is just as expensive and time consuming. And the final results are often worse.
Yeah. It would be interesting to know if intelligence distributions remain constant from generation to generation.
You can freelance locally. A thousand business cards and a laptop, and you're in business. Getting customers is the hard part, so don't be shy and ask around.
Has anyone factored in demographics? Anyone question whether the people who buy an iPad are more likely to leisurely browse the web more so than a person who buys an Android device? Personally, I bought an android phone to hack on it, not to browse the web.

There is always a bigger picture, and usage statistics can be skewed any which way depending on how you look at it. Regardless, "the statistics" presented does not surprise me one bit.
Using a good PHP MVC framework such as CodeIgniter or KohanaPHP can go a long way towards making your PHP code cleaner and more maintainable. PHP clearly does not match the expressiveness and elegance of Ruby or Python nor does it match the power of Lisp, but as the author points out, it does "get the job done". Using a good framework will help you avoid reinventing the "well written" PHP code wheel.
Just as easy for Windows. Use clojurebox. Double click the .exe file.

http://clojure.bighugh.com/