skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might get featured in tech blogs if you could tell an interesting story about battery bars. I don't know what an interesting story about battery bars would sound like, but fundamentally, interesting stories get coverage.

Battery bars sound sort of dull to me, but then bingo cards sound sort of dull to most people, and you can tell an interesting story about them. Stories like this push a lot of buttons for mommy bloggers: "I was so busy last week but my son's birthday was coming up and he loves [without loss of generality: dinosaurs]. I came up with the brilliant idea to play [dinosaur] bingo but I was too busy to make them by hand, so I made with the Googling, and I found a great website where I could make the cards in no time flat. My son had such a big smile on his face."

Note the absence of anything about technology or me. Those are pretty boring subjects for moms. (By comparison, if I were trying to get coverage from a tech blog -- perhaps because I have an unfulfilled masochistic streak -- I might lead with the techy bits.)

Does the battery bar thing make people the hero at the office? Make their kids love them more? Let people preen to their friends? Inspire someone? These are how you go about telling a story.
I don't recall claiming torts were the cause of all medical inflation. I claimed torts were the cause of Daniel Markham being shuffled from sleep study to sleep study and of him not being allowed to hack his own medical device.

Also, your argument is specious since it completely ignores the cost of unnecessary medicine performed in order to ward off lawsuits. For example, a lawsuit fearing doctor might order unnecessary tests and procedures with little medical benefit but, but which the doctor can point to in court and say "look, I did the best I could".
Submit your resume via git? What is there not to like here?

It will weed out a lot of the nohopers, without making the decent people feel like they are jumping through unreasonable hoops. I like it.
The IBM/Firefox tie-up started a long time ago with them contributing some accessibility features. http://www-03.ibm.com/able/resources/firefox.html

Glad they made it official, though, but Firefox had been an IBMer favorite for a while: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/05/4902.ars
I like the layout, look, color and feel. Too bad listcentral.com and .net are tied up by someone else. It deserves a better URL than a "dot me".

Maybe you could find something else like listy.com or listbuddy.com. Something with a .com that you can build its brand on. It looks like .net and .org are just idling in someone's portfolio waiting for a buyer. I think a .com will add a lot of value to the company that a .me will not.

From just out of the starting blocks it looks good. I'm looking forward to seeing where you guys iterate to.
3 languages
That's fantastic! Thanks for the link. I've been wondering if there was something like that for a while.

I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).
Scientists Close in on Genetic Signature of Longevity
You need to include the number of instances of harm in this sort of calculation. Is someone who steals $1000 from one person a worse criminal than someone who steals $1 from a million? Many people purchased defective goods, but only one corporation had its secrets stolen.
Then what would have been the purpose of offering North Korea as an option anyway?
And is in fact one of the major issues in the Euro debt crisis, since the centralization of the currency has taken this option away from debt-riddled governments like Greece.
Why does it need its own ORM and form helpers? Just install SQLAlchemy and WebHelpers, import and use them.
Although it's a bit of a reach to say that they "market" matrix/matrix2... It isn't terribly nice to use, they don't actively promote it, and they don't allocate it very much processing power.

That being said, I have always gotten the impression that they maintain it as a sort of testbed -- a huge number of Flyertalkers use matrix for very esoteric queries, and I'd imagine the feedback that ITA gets from those users is invaluable.
hahah.. nice one rmorrison
Android SurfaceFlinger tricks for fun and profit
Not so. Most of QPX and RES is Lisp.
I meant the original article. Chatroulette hasn't been dead-pooled. The title was inaccurate and sensationalist.
Irish ISP begins blocking imgur.com in name of Child Protection
Brought to my attention via reddit, but wanted to post here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/ckutv/fuck_you_02/
The worst thing about liability is not the first-order costs, but the second-order costs. I'd make up an example, but all you need to do is read the posted article. Even if we say for the sake of argument that every last penny of what he spent was because of lawsuits, just to simplify things, the lawsuit cost to him is still utterly dwarfed by the opportunity cost to him of jumping through all those hoops and having his life shredded by sleep apnea for several unnecessary weeks vs. the way it could have gone: "You know, it does sound like you have sleep apnea. Diagnosing it definitively is hard, but let's send you home with a test CPAP for a week and see how it goes. I'll get you one from the back and you can start tonight."

Your tort statistics won't include anything about making this guy suffer, or the fact that going with serious sleep apnea for an unnecessary month may well be taking months off his life, or the extra income lost and just general worsening of quality of life, yet they are by far the larger factor here.

People on HN are prone to treat every medical issue as if the doctor is choosing between two medicines where one will save you, one will kill you, no medicine will kill you, and only the amazing skill and training of the doctor can resolve the incredible conundrum of which to choose. But really, there's no need to treat every medical issue that way, only the ones that actually are that critical. Abstractly, there's very little reason that my scenario above shouldn't be the way it actually happens. CPAP machines won't kill you if it isn't sleep apnea. (A quick Google search on "cpap fatality" has a lot of links about dying because you didn't wear the mask, albeit hypotheticals.) You probably can't get into a sleep study this very night anyhow, so trying that out isn't that great a loss. Silly scenarios ending in death can be constructed but the probability of them is negligible, and that's a stupid base to build policy on... but here we are. Meanwhile, in the real world, he really is suffering.
I dunno, these patient narratives have a way of driving me up the wall.

It seems like just about everybody who can't cope has "Obstructive Sleep Apnea" these days... Enough that I'm starting to wonder if it's not just fashionable, but contagious.
> You're also confusing medium and message here.

We're discussing Ebert's claim that video games, the medium, can't be used to produce art, the message. I apologize for leaving out "medium" in the sentence that would have made that clear.

> There are also mediums which lack the fidelity to effectively convey porn, but which can still convey art. (Scratching in a 1x1 foot patch of sandy dirt with a stick, for example. It's easy to convey nudity or profanity on such a crude drawing surface, but none of that would turn me on.)

That might be because you're used to getting your porn in higher-fidelity. However, the first porn that most kids draw is basically scratches. Also, we're pretty sure that some "scratch fidelity" cave drawings are porn. (An alternative is that kids are/ancient folk were more abstraction-tolerant. This shouldn't be too surprising - a lot of porn works between the ears.)
I didn't expect to see the birth of a new meme on HN.
IPhone 4 3G Data Performance
The amazing story of illegal arms dealer Viktor Bout (2003)
I know that getting a stack of resumes to vet is a big pain. But surely there is a better way to find good candidates then seeing how many hoops they can jump through.

Basically, isn't the ideal employee one that would be entertaining multiple offers? Doesn't this challenge filter those candidates out?
How does Quantcast directly measure?
ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases.

Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a outline and link to the talk see: http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html).

RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time, which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC.

The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer. In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.)

This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.
Interesting...I wonder if he picked up that compete link from the previous Hacker News post discussing this.
Perhaps the best way to find good teachers is to find people who do it for social reasons, to have an impact, or for the appreciation of their peers, rather than the money. Even if it's on a part-time basis.

I'm not sure part-time would work for elementary school, but past that? I think it would work.
He could tell you but then Google would have to buy them out. :)
Using the internet it's possible to verify a doctor's job(assuming access to medical charts and lab results).

I think the thing that separates licensed professions from unlicensed ones , is usually issues of safety,i.e. when the price of an error is just too expensive.

So truck drivers(which is a pretty easy to verify job - are goods delivered ? ) are licensed, and have a conduct code("sleep every X hours" , speed limits ) , and computer maintenance technicians aren't, even thought it's more complex to verify their job(are updates installed ? is the computer secure ? ).
That was kind of the joke...
That's what I'm thinking. Tap Tap Revenge is the only thing they've been able to pull of successfully, but it wasn't even their idea — they bought it from an iPhone developer from the pre-SDK jailbreak days when the game was called Tap Tap Revolution. All of their original ideas have not been nearly as successful. I can't see any reason other than talent and TTR for the acquisition.
"That'd be a bit sad."

Understatement of the year!
I think Posterous took 5 steps forward and 1 step backward with their campaign. Their diction was a small blemish, not a mortal wound.
Such integration is cool, but I think the box needs work. It is ugly and hard to read, imo. :(
The ad up top is just awkward. It blends in a bit... but not well enough, so it sticks out like a sore, out of place, thumb!
smanek is way too busy with postabon to chime in, but I can tell you that half of #lisp on Freenode is idling from *.itasoftware.com
Mixpanel (YC S09) now tracking 1 billion actions per month
Joystick Labs launches accelerator program for indie gaming startups
I don't think his premise is true. He says we were all taught photosynthesis in elementary and high schools and now all we know is a phrase that has no meaning for us. In fact, no one teaches the whole story of anything in biology before college, and not everyone takes college bio. Those of us that did knew the answer. It's a question of how far into biology you've studied...
Tobias Schneider - Flash is Dead, Long Live Flash (Gordon.js)
I've been telling everyone I know that uses Posterous of this lame move. A couple I know have moved away from Posterous, most think it's a pretty poor move, a few couldn't care less.

Certainly though I won't be recommending Posterous to anyone. Referring to them as Preposterous is a great idea!
"Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." - was said by the person who emailed Jobs. Not by Jobs.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/01/exclusive-conversa...
The latter 3 are not too interesting IMO, because porn and masturbation have been around for centuries, and whatever effects they've had have become part of society.

The first one might be an interesting one to consider. Of course this is assuming children get hold of the pornography at an earlier age than they should and continuously have easy access to it. And in my opinion, the only thing that occurs is that children will get desensitized to the typical types of sex early on, and when they reach the age where they will be participating, they will need or want more interesting, atypical, types of sex to fully enjoy themselves.
You claimed torts were the cause -- I'm claiming they're the excuse, and the $2k bill is the cause. $2k in guaranteed cash is a stronger incentive than the very remote chance of a lawsuit over sleep apnea. Even if the latter does exist in some small number and can be blamed.
Not only will they leave it, this is the most important part for Google. I expect that they will spin it into a 'Google Travel' product and take over the travel market pronto
Presentation from JSConf US 2010 that provides a technology introduction to Gordon, an open Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript and HTML5.
As I understand it, C++ to maintain the QPX in-memory database and SBCL to do the routing magic (which is even more non-trivial than you might think, e.g. a "best" result set is not 20 routes that are all within a dollar and that hit the same airports, etc. etc.).

RES uses Clozure CL (formerly OpenMCL, an evolution of Macintosh Common Lisp) for the stateless middleware with Oracle RAC for the backend and Java with the usual libraries for the web front end.
Another cute way that's more obviously correct without translations is to consider a square with sides of length a+b. You get an interior square of area c^2 and 4 right triangles with legs of size a and b.
I'd like to see him shipped off to the ISS.
Unlikely that they will go away from lisp. They are heavy users of SBCL (performance) and CCL (fast compile) and have some interesting fraction of a million lines of lisp code and might just be one of the larger employers of lisp programmers.

See http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-failure-of-lisp-a-reply-to-br...
This. He really articulates clearly the difference between two ways of thinking. Thinking by really understanding then translating the thoughts into words and thinking by manipulating words.
A tip I picked up from one of pg's essays for finding out what technology a company uses: look at their job listings; they don't lie.

In the "Operations" part of the company it appears you're right, "most work is in Python": http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718167

In "Engineering", Lisp tops the "particularly valuable" list at the bottom of "Knowledge and Skills" for http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=730130

Farther down the same page they ask you to solve puzzles. "Puzzles submitted in C++, Lisp, Python, Java or Perl will be reviewed most promptly, because those are the languages we use every day"
Loans are inflation. By definition.

The youtube video isn't working for me, right now, but that's clearly not correct. In a loan from A to B, the money B now has the use of is money that A does not have the use of. If there is interest on the loan, B can't make up the money for the interest from nowhere (unless B is a government controlling the supply for the money in question), so while the interest represents the additional wealth generated by the loan, it's not inflationary in and of itself. If no one is creating more money, the interest has to come out of a fixed pool of money in the economy, and now that there's more wealth (assuming the loan was successful), each unit of money is worth a little bit more, which is deflationary.

This might or might not be a problem, depending on who you ask. I think it probably is, but the only way to solve it permanently (rather than in a stopgap manner like creating money at a rate you hope matches the actual growth of the economy) is to make actual wealth the basis of the money. This is, uh, very difficult, to understate the problem.
re 1: Bret Taylor addressed db queries in the video on Tornado (the video is on Facebook, but I cannot find the link). If you run more than one instance of Tornado per core and you have a decent load balancer in front of the instances, then short blocking calls to the db work just fine. If your db calls are taking a long time, then it might be better to speed up the queries with caching or query optimization before worrying about async.

I like this approach because I prefer writing app logic in a straight line instead of in callbacks. The code is easier to understand and debug.
On that note I did come across Udemy[1] the other day - which is something similar and looks like it will let you offer paid-for courses in the future (paid courses seem on a limited trial atm).

1. http://www.udemy.com/
Not only do I buy a DX which is US-only (wireless-wise), not knowing they'll make the Web available in the UK (my Global kindle 2 could only access Wikipedia until the 2.5 update recently) but 2 months later they drop the price by $120 and make the case black! I'll never buy another Amazon product as an early adopter, but rather, wait until it's really cheap. I now have to read about 100 books to pay this thing off.

What annoys me is paying £50 in customs charges which I can't get back. Caveat emptor!
Apple, AT&T Sued Over iPhone 4 Antenna Problems
Tornado is great because it's so damn simple. Just a couple of nice little libraries that work well together. It doesn't try to be sneaky about anything, so a glance at the code on Github is usually enough to determine what's going on behind the scenes, and whether or not it's going to be a problem.

I've built a few small sites with it, and it's great for experimenting with custom architectures. It doesn't really assume anything about your data or architecture, so you're free to build things on top of it. If you want extra features, they need to come from somewhere else. If you want an integrated solution to knock out a CRUD website in a weekend, you should look at something like Django (which is also fantastic).
I asked this question to my brother who is in high school and he got it right without me steering: CO2, water and a little bit from the ground. Education works :)
I sort of agree. Actually, I like companies that give applicants challenges. But usually they are fun and interesting challenges, not "refactor this crappy code". Refactoring bad code is a useful skill, but my guess is that they're going to end up filtering out a lot of qualified people just because their challenge sounds boring.
Unless you're hiring workers at low wages (data entry type stuff), I wouldn't bother filtering the net. It'll create more problems (and cost money) than it solves.

If your employees are fairly reasonable, you should explain the policy to them. Tell them nothing is blocked, but here are the acceptable uses. Then set easily measurable standards that they have to perform up to.

Put this way -- if they're getting the work done, why do you care?
This is exactly the sort of thing I wish more companies did: not relying on external credentials, or judging the developer in one marathon interview, but instead, just giving the developer some work representative of what they'd be up to every day at your company, and seeing if they can accomplish it.
How We Recruit - On Formal Credentials vs Experience-based Education
I'm a current ITAer working on QPX -- by lines of code, QPX is probably actually split pretty evenly between C++ and Lisp. But accounting for verbosity of C++, the logic is heavily on the Lisp side. I think anyone on my team would consider himself to be a Lisp developer before anything else.
I think both are good to have. The challenge will get you the applicants whose resume and CV might not reveal how talented they are. The traditional route is great for people who are already well established who want to drop off a resume through a friend and don't have much time for a long interview test process. I suppose the tests might not be that hard if you really are experienced, but they are a huge barrier when you are low on time and energy.
Tumblr and Posterous insert Quantcast Javascript into their pages, and it includes their unique Quantcast ID in it. The same way Google Analytics works.

From Posterous:

<!-- Start Quantcast tag -->
<script type="text/javascript">
qoptions={ qacct:"p-16ewveTurfCCM" };
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js"></script>
<noscript>
<a href="http://www.quantcast.com/p-16ewveTurfCCM" target="_blank">
<img src="http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-16ewveTurfCCM.gif" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast"/></a>
</noscript>

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Street food carts rely on Twitter and Facebook
I think that it is alienating some users; but I suspect the loudest noise is from people attached to the so called [by Posterous] "dying" platforms (makes sense?). Whereas Posterous is aiming for the disgruntled Tumblr (et al) users who may see it as a dying platform (and who knows if that is working). It is a powerful market to pitch into.

At the end of the day it comes down to metrics; does this wording reach more people and is it worth (to them) the bad karma from the rest of us?

Time will tell (or, probably, not).
Bad ones too, that's how the first draft of our employment contract had a non-compete clause prohibiting staff from working in the child-care industry.

(We do hardware/embedded software)
This is great, except for the minor issue of not wanting to announce to the world that you're applying there.
I use my DX to read PDFs and papers in bed, on public transport, etc, so while it's good for actually buying books, don't forget about its PDF viewer.
Anybody that goes to an "Unconference" gets what they deserve.
Hear, hear. A voice of reason. This blog entry is the perfect example of where knowing a little information is dangerous.
If the job involves a lot of refactoring, or, if looking at legacy systems is how the job will derive its requirements, then it is a good test.

I tend to object to "fun and interesting challenges" more - all they tell me is that somebody had a lot of spare time, and don't rule out the possibility that somebody needs "fun and interesting" stuff in order to produce work.
It's a god damn miracle. Calculus is pretty fucking important and it's also easy if you're not a moron. So I'll teach you some of that shit.

Oh dear god.
The USA has signed all 4 geneva conventions and all 3 amendment protocols, but not ratified 2 of the latter. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Geneva_C...

And the conventions quite definitely do apply to some degree when a signatory fights an opponent that is not a nation (and which therefore, by definition, cannot be a signatory). The details are a bit difficult, especially when a conflict is both internations and involves non-nation parties, but it's definitely not correct to say "our opponents are not signatories, so all rules are off".
1) The pulmonary specialist who ordered the sleep study does not get $2k, the sleep study guy does. Why would the pulmonary specialist care about enriching the sleep study guys?

2) Humans respond disproportionately to low probability, high cost events. Witness the reaction to "XXX causes cancer", the DC sniper, 9/11, or similar rare events.

So yeah, I'd say fear of lawsuits is a better explanation than the desire to make somebody else $2000 richer.