skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with his assertion that 'great since day one' is unequivocally better than the other - if I can get something earlier, but it's a little rougher around the edges, that's often better - particularly since having something out in the wild where people use it early means you can get good feedback to help you improve the product and avoid horrible untested issues slipping through (a certain antennae issue springs to mind).

Other than that though, his use of 'copy and paste' as an example is something that really depends on perspective. He argues that 'copy and paste' is a single isolated feature, and that Apple waited until they could make it great since day one. However, if you looked at 'copy and paste' as merely an element of a larger system, then launching that system without one of it's key features makes it not so 'great since day one'.
The Entrepreneur’s Declaration of Independence
I agree that college should not be the end of learning. However, I wouldn't want to be taught by a professor that says "that employers don’t generally care about the content of job applicants’ classes; they’re more interested in whether an applicant graduated, was able to meet deadlines, and work within a bureaucracy."

If they truly believe that, it will reflect in their courses. Instead of trying to teach their subject to the best of their ability, they'll might instead give many deadline oriented assignments that do not help learning of any kind. Instead of being accessible for students to ask questions, they might make it a more difficult process to get in touch with them, rationalizing that "they don't really care about the subject, all they care about is getting a good grade, and graduating so they can get a job in some bureaucratic workplace."

Professors with that attitude can turn students off to a subject that they would have otherwise enjoyed, and make it more difficult to learn.
I don't think you should throw out "increasingly unlikely" without some evidence. I do worry about our education system. But the idea that it's harder to attain a middle class standard of living then it was in the past is very dubious. And, it's a claim that's used to support a lot of bad policies.
You may have misunderstood the sprout's comment.
You are correct - my bad memory!
sjs I don't know if you're into indie music, but my side project http://mixest.com/ should work in safari on the ipad (we're working on an ipad app as well to make it easier to use).
google reader, Stack overflow, facebook, github, ebay
Thanks and I understand your discomfort in sharing the pay. I am thinking of applying for some Android positions which made me question the monetary compensations. Thanks again.
Yeah, when he listed the physical keyboard as a "why is this here" example, I knew the guy had nothing to say that was of any value to me.

I certainly have no problem with people liking the Apple Way (typing this on a 13" MBP, charging my iPad in the other room), but I find it endlessly annoying when someone feels incredulous that someone else might want something outside the strictly-defined Apple bounds.
Totally agree with you. In Spain we usually say 'castellano' (as stated by the wikipedia), and almost everyone say 'castellano' in areas where there is more than one official language.

In America is different, as there are no more 'Spanish languages' spoken there (apart from Portuguese being an 'Hispanic language') it's more fair to say 'Español'
again: I guess.

The difference between 'Spanish' and 'Hispanic' will fill books and books. I remember studying when Queen of Castille and Navarre, and the King of Aragon married and thus, creating what's mostly known today as Spain, calling it something like 'Ispania / Espanya' and get an angry letter from King of Portugal saying something like:

"You can't call your kingdom that way, because 'Hispania' refers to the whole peninsula and Portugal is not part of the kingdom, so change it asap, thanx bye"

History is sure fun
FedEx also has an interesting story:

"In 1962, Smith entered Yale University. While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age. Folklore suggests that he received a C for this paper, although in a later interview he claims that he told a reporter, "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C", while other tales suggest that his professor told him that, in order for him to get a C, the idea had to be feasible. The paper became the idea of FedEx (for years, the sample package displayed in the company's print advertisements featured a return address at Yale)."

Smith used his time in the military to get insights in how to refine his idea:

"As a Marine, Smith had the opportunity to observe the military's logistics system first hand. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, flying with pilots on over 200 combat missions. He was honorably discharged in 1969 with the rank of Captain, having received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. While in the military, Smith carefully observed the procurement and delivery procedures, fine-tuning his dream for an overnight delivery service."

link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith

I thought it was pretty interesting. Found it because I've been spending a lot of time seeking companies that have the following attributes: (1) extremely high barriers-to-entry, (2) good growth potential for the next 15+ years with little obsolescence risk, (3) a high quality management team, and (4) a good balance sheet. FedEx was one of the companies which met all the above categories.
It's not completely fair to contrast with FedEx, which had one of the largest startup costs of the time because they were different types of delivery services but:

> Smith supplemented a $4 million inheritance from his father with $91 million in venture capital to get his idea off the ground.

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/FedEx-Corpo...
What about attribute-based XSS? How do you sign "onmouseover"?

What about dynamically-generated scripts that include user input? People do this all the time in the real world. Even if you sign it, you're still screwed if you get quoting wrong.

The crypto is also superfluous; you'd get the same protection by having the server set a long random nonce in a header, and then require every <script> element to bear the same nonce. No crypto required.
You can always tell a Victorian, you just can't tell him much.

As a Queesnlander, I find South Australians easiest to pick, slightly more refined vowel sounds, although my fellow cane toads do stand out when I'm at work in Sydney or Melbourne.
We don't know what technologies will win out. When money is thrown at one for political reasons, its quite possible that other more viable technologies don't get developed. And if an alternative like solar or wind is truly viable, it will succeed.

What we need to do is make sure that all of the costs of oil are paid for by its users. We shouldn't be spending hundreds of billions ensuring a cheap supply with foreign policy. All we're doing is hiding the true cost of its instability.

And if things like oil are creating other indirect problems, its use should be taxed to pay for those costs. That will allow alternatives that don't have the same problems to compete.

But to pick a solution the way the government does and throw money at it is a wasteful strategy.

They're doing the same thing with electric cars. Both the federal and California governments will give thousands in deductions for this particular solution. This hides the true costs. And we ignore that the additional electricity probably comes from burning fossil fuels anyway.

Most of the technologies that created the wealth we enjoy came from private risk taking, not politically fashionable government money spraying.

Divining the future is very difficult and best done with distributed intelligence with a great diversity of perspectives all competing with each other, not with any one particular brain installed in Washington.
I think it's essential. Not knowing the internals both means that you're more likely to screw up and type the wrong git command, and makes it less likely that you can get yourself out of trouble on your own. It's hard to actually lose data with git, but you need a good understanding to fix things.
I think that if you're using a well-developed framework, you can safely ignore #9. However, his advice is SPOT-FREAKING-ON for any home-grown stuff.

The last time I ran across a "core" directory, there was all kinds of application-specific code in there, all rolled up in switches and stuff - if you wanted to develop something using the "core", you had to go through about fifty files and add your own cases for your site. It was awful.
I think it's a little harsh to say that I "completely missed the point" of this article. I get it -- Apple products are very polished and carefully designed and the Android lacks that polish but is feature rich. Is that an accurate description, or did I completely miss something else?

Marco is a developer with some very successful products, and I really respect his work. I feel that makes him influential in the hacker community and this post did make it rather high on HN. However, respecting Apple's products has gone too far when I can barely tell it from a PR piece. I don't know what it is, but it's not news.

I really don't want to begin discussing regular Joe's desktop experience -- summarizing people into 2 camps trivializes the actual wants and needs of a computer user. What I can tell you is that on a site devoted to hacker news, this post seems like 'dog bites man' with an easy shot at a strawman.

I don't mean this to be a biting criticism. As a developer, I just wish that I had started using linux earlier because I would have learned a lot more and it would be more second nature. Out there, someone 10 years younger than me is being turned off from using linux on the desktop because of posts like this, and that's a shame.
"if you want students to study then you should eliminate grades. grades simply encourage them to game the system. of course, gaming the system is a very valuable real world skill."

Grades many times give you the push you need to succeed. Without them, many people wouldn't bother studying. A similar thing that happened recently in many public schools is the elimination of winners and losers in sports games (every game is a tie). Is this really going to prepare anybody for the real world?

The only people "gaming the system" aren't interested in learning and probably shouldn't be in college in the first place.
So you have a nonregional English accent, then?
Why did you use state?
Mac OS breaks compatibility too, so there is nothing that could be better than on Linux side.

Actually, if you really care, you can still run a.out and glibc5 ELF userland binaries on Linux. On the other side, any m68k or ppc for classic apps are no-go on OSX, as well as some ppc-for-osx. Also for third party drivers, you need version for specific OSX point release, they are not generally very compatible.

There are also entire classes of hardware that are unusable on OSX, period. (I remember wasting particularly lot of time on trying to get IrDA run on OSX with a little bit more than just IRCOMM. On Linux, it worked out of the box.)
Ouch: Ancient Torture Devices
Here is a torture devices from the past when men (or even women) who went against those who held power were treated more lowly than even the least of animals.
Hi, I am Amy Walker, I am 25, and I was born in Somalia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k

(make sure to not miss a second)
There are a few clues. Queenslanders will say 'castle' with a short 'a', rhyming with hassle. South Australians will always elongate the 'a' - 'caarstle'. Then there's the dialect differences - Victorians will go to the 'milk bar' to get some milk. Queenslanders will pack a 'port' to go travelling.

It's true, though, it wasn't until I lived overseas that I could start to pick up the differences. And as for the city/country difference, I would say it is more a function of education level than geography.

That said, I think there will be no more divergence in Australian accents because of high population mobility and nationalised TV broadcasting.
Yes (though it's not the accent most Americans expect).

It's worth pointing out that whilst I often get ribbed for having no accent...

it was a light hearted comment :)
A good book which also covers this (and is quite entertaining) is Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/038071543...
Hey everyone, I'm the author of the post. I'm a longtime HN lurker, so I was very excited to see it shared here. I've really enjoyed reading the discussion.

A quick disclaimer: I have zero background in linguistics. The only materials I used for research were Wikipedia and Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C). Moreover, this is nothing more than a short post on my personal blog. So, don't expect an academic paper on the subject. ;)

Anyway, thanks for reading!
anyone who is currently using Windows XP should upgrade

Can we stop this silly meme of calling a switch between two unrelated products an "upgrade"? WinXP => Linux is an "upgrade" that has 0% software compatibility, and requires a massive amount of retraining and reconfiguration. Which is to say, it isn't an "upgrade" at all.
Indeed, but facts are easy to learn once you understand the concepts. I can memorize that a quicksort is O(n log n) and a binary search is O(log n) all day long. However, if I understand big O notation, I can figure them out on my own and (in theory) never have to memorize what the complexity of an algorithm is again.

Besides that, I shouldn't have to pay $300 a credit hour (for a cheap public school nonetheless) to memorize things. I can do that on my own.
Henrietta Lacks’s ‘Immortal’ Cells
The significant role of luck shouldn't be ignored in a piece like this. Especially in light of our diminishing attention to an expanding volume of voices, getting noticed can be tough even when you're doing all the "right" things.
$100 back then would be a fair amount of money today. Nice story though, the big thing to notice is that opportunity and timing + determination made it work, age, capital and so on were secondary.
It depends. Some Flemish dialects are nearly unintelligible for a speaker of standard Nothern Dutch, but standard Flemish and standard Nothern Dutch are fairly similar. Which isn't surprising because standard Nothern Dutch was heavily influenced by the Flemish of well to do Belgians that fled to the North during the sixteenth century.
I'm going to take a guess that you actually meant:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178836/5_ways_iPhone...
Things like Coffeescript and Objective-J make me nervous. Javascript is flawed certainly but building a completely new language on top of it feels too radical. An abstraction like that seems bound to be leaky and it doesn't seem like you'll ever completely escape working with other native JS pieces so why not stick to a single, common syntax with good tool support, tutorials, docs, libraries etc? Javascript's not that bad a language once you establish some conventions.
Much better explanation here:
http://ctuning.org/wiki/index.php/CTools:MilepostGCC

The basic idea is to use machine learning to pick the best set of gcc compiler options for a program. A better optimizer for a compiler is useful but it's hardly a revolution.

Edit: to clarify, this isn't just choosing command-line flags, but using machine learning in the compiler's internals.
> It seems like most recent performance gains come from runtime/dynamic optimizations, not static/compile time optimizations.

Are you sure? Have you heard of stream fusion for Haskell?
And their best player at the world cup, David Villa's name is correctly pronounced Dabid Biya
Happy Fourth Of July From Google With Rube Goldberg Doodle
well as there are probably not many venetians present you might as well translate 'xe un mona' for us
> Without them, many people wouldn't bother studying.

With them, many people don't bother studying.
"Here was a book in a pastel-green cover about a loony dude in the 1970′s cycling across the midwest to the west coast..."

Motorcycling, surely?
I don't disagree. But the programmers have "regexes" which refers unambiguously to their type of "regular expression"; there's no good equivalent for a CS theorist. (A regular language is not a regular expression, just like the set of prime numbers is not a test for primality.)
Did they remove the global interpreter lock?

And if not, how can the language be used for high concurrency (ala Facebooks tornado).
I think that's a great argument, but only for some cases, in some disciplines. No amount of conceptual knowledge will tell you what the irregular 3rd person singular present active subjunctive of 'esse' is in Latin (it's 'sit'). No amount of conceptual knowledge will tell you what year the 1st Punic War began (264 bce) or where Vergil was born (modern Mantova - a town called Andes in his time). Some things, you have to memorize.

For that matter, so nobody thinks I'm picking intentionally useless and out of the way factoids, you need to memorize whether your programming language says 'elsif' or 'elif' or 'elseif' too. Would you trust a programmer who had to look that up all the time?
to me it seems input is anything coming from the user to the database.
I was thinking just like, <> -> &lt; &gt;
but maybe this is naive or sometimes you require proper html input
There's people working through the class on my learning website, Curious Reef:

http://curiousreef.com/class/structure-and-interpretation-of...

There's already a lot of work available that others have posted which is handy if you get stuck or want to see other ways of solving the problem.
Oh ho ho,

If Ken Rogoff knew the economy was in trouble, he did a good job of hiding that this 2007 interview:
http://www.onpointradio.org/2007/11/wheres-the-economy-heade... (!!)

I don't know where the 2003 starting date came from. Perhaps they started a different book then and re-purposed it for the present events. Or perhaps he was hiding stuff in the 2007 interview (though I'd doubt it).
$100 back then would be a fair amount of money today.

It would be about $2400 today (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+1907+dollars).
The Great Vowel Shift happened after Chaucer, but was mostly complete by Shakespeare's time. One important change in vowels that didn't happen yet by Shakespeare's time was the unrounding of short u, that is, the modern sound in words like cut, but, knuckle, lust, blood, etc. All those words sounded like "put" during Shakespeare's time, and of course move/love was a real rhyme.
Revolutions in software development are pretty rare. Developing for the web probably qualifies. Mainstream acceptance of garbage collection as well, probably. This seems overblown.

How is this different from tools like Acovea? http://www.coyotegulch.com/products/acovea/

More of a search problem than a learning problem if that's what's really going on.
Livly

http://livly.org

"Livly is a non-profit company that aims to create true, sustainable cures for the major diseases plaguing humankind. To work toward defeating these problems, we have developed two arms: an in-house research facility and a creative, incubator space to cultivate promising startups.

Our mission is to create such therapies directly through in-house biotechnology research on strategically important topics. Currently, we are focused on one area of research: Certain humans appear to possess natural cancer immunity. We attempt to harness this immunity to cure cancer in those not so fortunate."

I am pretty sure they have switched to for-profit.
For what is worth, African Portuguese sounds more like European Portuguese to us Brazilians.

Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent

In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.

In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:

http://www.learningportuguese.co.uk/audio/compare-accents.ht...
Biocurious, a hackerspace/techshop for biotech in San Francisco ($300/mo for membership)

http://biocurious.org/

kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1040581998/biocurious-a-...

"BioCurious? Experiment with friends.

What ideas would you come up with if you hung out with a molecular biologist, a mechanical engineer, a computer programmer and an artist - and happened to be sitting next to a lab?

You might find yourself saying, "Hm... I never would have thought of that."

Biological and genetic knowledge is growing fast. The way forward in an increasingly cross-disciplinary area is through collaboration. Recognizing this need, we brainstormed BioCurious, a collaborative labspace where, together, we learn, socialize, research and make the tools that will change the change the face of biotech. BioCurious puts biotech in the hands of Makers, creators with the passion requisite for innovation.
-
Curious about Biology? Find out more at the new biology collaborative lab space where citizen science moves out of the classroom and into the community. Following the successful example of hackerspaces such as Noisebridge, Langton Labs, Hacker Dojo, and co-working spaces such as the Hub, we're pleased to offer the first Bay Area space dedicated to Non-Institutional Biology. Got an idea for a startup? Join the DIY, "garage biology" movement and found a new breed of biotech. Meet cofounders and friends, and make things you'd never dreamed possible."
And of course, even lambda is unnecessary. Using two combinators, customarily called s and k suffices:

k x y = x
s x y z = x z (y z)

This system is called the SKI-calculus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus). The I in SKI stands for the identity, and can be expressed in terms of s and k.

As an example, here is the y-combinator:

y = s s k (s (k (s s (s (s s k)))) k)
A few schools, like Evergreen in Washington State, have done precisely this.

The other problem is that grades still solve some practical problems, which I discuss here: http://jseliger.com/2010/02/17/the-validity-of-grades . Not having grades will probably encourage system gaming too, just in a different (and probably worse) way than one has now.
Yeah, I totally agree. You can tell some areas, most definitely! I grew up in Sydney and can tell Melburnians, partly because they can have a bit more of a nasal accent than us from Sydney. I bumped into some people from the Sunshine Coast today in Luxembourg and they had quite a Queensland accent (a la Pauline Hanson) but I couldn't really tell you what about it made it particularly Queenslandery. (The different names for things definitely makes it more obvious, but since we're talking about accents I didn't mention those :)

I do agree also on the city/country difference being education, you can definitely hear the "country" accent in the outer suburbs of Sydney, for example. Still, it's the best way I could really describe the two, since that's more traditionally where they're from :)
Ginkgo Bioworks

http://ginkgobioworks.com/

"Ginkgo BioWorks is engineering biological solutions to address the fundamental challenges that we face today. We're starting by focusing on energy and chemicals, but engineered biological systems will impact nearly every major industry. Our bioengineers make use of an in-house pipeline of synthetic biology technologies to design and build biological systems."
Haters, jayters and the art of resilience
thanks for the replies.