skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've recently moved to protocol buffers and am quite happy with the results. Before that, we had a few tomcat apps with ad-hoc urls that return xml responses. Since we already have a good http request/response channel, I was able to create a java bridge for the message objects, as well as a simple python library that can communicate with all our servers.

While there was a little overhead in getting it integrated into the build system, it works great, and gives a much better interface, and much better control for messaging individual servers.

The project itself is also very well put together. Hell, even the autoconf generated makefile has targets like "uninstall", which seems to be a rarity when building packages from source.
An article worth reading for a lot of astute observations. Andy doesn't shy away from making painful points. One of his more striking quotes:

"But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?"

(Actually, my guess is the over-dependency of faith of individual meritocracy will cause us to miss the deeper structural problems that Grove is pointing to.)

EDIT: (Anedoctal single point of data with limited context), My friend worked in a Battery startup company in the Silicon Valley. After the initial design phase, the VCs and management decided not scale up into manufacturing, they rather lay most people off and sell the design.
Tomorrow's World - Home Computer Terminal (1967)
No, Aaronontheweb makes a good point. Of course he's not arguing in favor of environmental disasters or slavery-in-all-but-name. Pay attention to his main point: attack high labor prices here, rather than low prices elsewhere. Andy Grove can be protectionist if he wants, but just because he's not ashamed of it doesn't make it any better of an idea.
Does iOS 4 multitasking really use more battery life?
I got the impression that unless you were using something like Pandora that's actually churning CPU and IO in the background, the new "multitasking" isn't really leaving multiple apps open. It is simply freezing their state in memory so they would load quickly where you left them. Google is conflicted on the issue. Does anyone know for sure whether all those apps in the taskbar are alive and causing battery usage? Should I be vigilant about closing them (the interface is cumbersome) if I care about conserving power?
Nope, usually takes me 3 tries.
Enjoy _your_ third world economy, free from pesky pollutant-causing industry and manufacturing.

The poster has correctly identified the value proposition that causes companies to locate their manufacturing facilities elsewhere, and points out (also correctly) that making our tax codes as unfriendly to business as our labor laws will only encourage _those_ bits of the business to relocate as well.

You cannot have all of:

* high wages for manufacturing workers
* cheap products for consumers
* high taxes on business
* large profits that make it attractive to operate a company.

You would probably respond by saying that you'd prefer higher priced products and low-profit corporations, to which I'd reply that:

* cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living.
* higher profit potential = more business growth.
Try http://www.kayak.com/explore/
"What can I get for $2,000?" is an excellent question. As a consultant, I wish I'd get this question more often from cost-conscious customers rather than "how much is this going to cost me?", because the former is quite easy to quantify and quickly sets a budget and an expectation. The latter is very exploratory and immediately puts the consultant on the defensive.
Aaronontheweb, why wait for government action? Come work at my apartment TOMORROW 16 hours/day for $0.20/hr. I'll try to find a way for you to inhale some heavy metals and asbestos while you work. Imagine the fun of trying to predict whether you will be functionally retarded or die of painful cancer first. Either way, you will die painfully, because I do NOT provide health insurance.

Seriously: How did we get from "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to "drive down everyone's quality life to match the world's most miserable and backward countries?"

Aside from technology that hadn't been invented yet, people in the West lived did very well in the late 20th century. Most people who bothered to show up for work had a balanced diet, adequate medical care, and usually a car. And they somehow managed to do it without rampant workplace death, child labor, or rendering the ecosystem uninhabitable for decades[1]. They even had fundamental civil rights like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.

[1] Aside from notable exceptions like Love Canal, etc. But I see that as largely the result of ignorance; we now have a better understanding of the impacts of our behavior on the place we LIVE.
Examples of large-scale functional language projects
I found it telling that this "wealth creator" used entrepreneurs as his example of wealth creators,
rather than bankers and traders (he's from a trading/PE/VC firm).
Uh, I wouldn't know about Leopard; but Ubuntu can apparently go to "11". (http://i.imgur.com/8E7Wx.jpg)
At the heart of it all, you want me to prove that Capitalism isn't the best economic model because you fancy this extremely primitive means of sharing resources. That's fine.

My god. Are you aware that you are the one with a near-religious anti-capitalist opinion? Just read the statement above. You're already convinced of the inviability of capitalism and so no argument will convince you otherwise.

You're an idiot. Not because we disagree about whether capitalism is a viable economic system or not, but because you continue to argue with me over it and by your own admission you are ignorant and continue to remain ignorant about these matters. Your opinions about economics are purely emotional and based on hearsay.

I have never said whether or not I think pure capitalism is the ideal economic system. My point all along has been that for you to say it is "beneath us as a society" is an empty statement because you haven't studied this at all.

"We need something better." How can you say that when you don't even understand a single economic school of thought?

I'm done too. This is really frustrating. I don't care if you agree or disagree with me about the viability of pure capitalism, but I can't even have an intelligent discussion with you.
Since Steve Jobs is known for replying to emails, people can potentially try to manipulate Apple's image like that guy did. It could hurt the reputation of the company; I wonder why Jobs does that (and his emails usually don't have much content anyway).
* - how old they are*

Why does their age matter? Their ability to deliver is what should matter. The first time I charged $100/hour as a consultant I was 18, I'm fairly confident that I never had a customer turn down my services due to the number of times I'd traveled around the sun.
Thank you very much for the answer.

Where I live (somewhere in Canada, one of the big Cities), sometime I would ask myself if I could make a decent living with Rails skill because the demands aren't too many (mostly they're looking for typical LAMP + jQuery/CSS/HTML or Drupal or Wordpress).

There are a few "shaky" startups looking for Rails developers but I'm guessing the pay is not that great and the company usually won't last long (2 years max).
Feynman's explanation of where a tree gets its mass starts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE#t=2m12s
We have agreements with the artists and labels.
Stem Cells From Human Blood Can Be Reprogrammed
wow, this nose dived off the front page.... I wonder why?

oh ya, don't try and criticize a Y-Combo startup on hacker news. Sorry, Andrew.
This might be helpful

http://blog.iteleportmobile.com/quality-over-quantity-how-we...
Thanks!! "hard to navigate in the open dialog" can you give me some more specifics? You can email me if you'd like: dj < a t > isound.com
Yeah, the search result layout kind of sucks right now...
PS3 Profitable, Price Cut Unlikely
The answer to that type of question is always zero (or unanswerable with the given information). It's cute, but ineffective.
I think attacking your competition reflects poorly on you. I'd recommend coming up with something better on your About page than "Myspace sucks; it really sucks."
"High labor prices" = "High wages." THIS MEANS YOU!

Unless you are worth >$10M, are retired, or live off a trust fund, admit that you're labor not capital: just like highly paid executives, surgeons, and name-brand attorneys are more "labor:" they generate more earned income than asset income.

Go ahead: pull out your 2009 tax return: is the "income from wages, tips, and salaries" greater than the "interest income" and appreciation on your house (ha ha!)? Then you care about WAGES. Stop pretending like you're a Rockefeller: you're not. And your doctor / lawyer / professors / boss aren't either.

(If you persist in an unjustified obsession with your assets, HIGHER WAGES are what will drive housing prices up in the long run...compare incomes and housing prices in Palo Alto and Lubbock, TX, and HIGHER WAGES and GROWING MANUFACTURING will help your stock portfolio: do you really want to see GE and Boeing follow GM into bankruptcy?)
It is interesting, but I think it is a dead end. The concept is possible because GSM doesn't require mutual authentication. Consequently, devices can "relatively" easily attach to a tower, if a bunch of circumstances are true.

Umts requires mutual authentication, so any devices that will connect must be preconfigured to do so. This means that attaching to your own tower becomes a lot less simple: each device must be configured to work with your own cloud.

I think it is a dead end because gsm will be phased out eventually. This is only "easy" today because many phones are dual stacked gsm/umts.

OpenBTS really started some interesting work in this space, but I think openBSC is the more advanced (and less approachable) soloution. OpenBSC recently reported some small ability to support a little bit of GPRS. Without GPRS support, there is no ability to do data on your phoney tower. Unfortunately, the hardware on openBSC is less accessible.
Meh. I'm not impressed with either this article or the preceding one.

I've been programming almost exclusively in F# over the last year - but they've been smallish projects. The weird thing about F# is that the code keeps collapsing from huge constructs down to really small pieces.

A couple of nits from both of this guy's articles. F# supports multiple inheritance through interfaces, which ain't C++ but it's good enough for government work. F#'s pattern-matching is freaking way far above the simple case he showed there: active patterns, assignment on test, structural-matching, etc. You can do some super cool stuff with F#'s pattern-matching. Hopefully he knew this and it was just an oversight.

Also he seems to indicate that MS is going to use F# as an entrance into large-scale scientific-type computing. This may be true, but it is badly misleading. By teaching developers to work with immutable data and functional composition, it opens up the entire PC stack to all sorts of improvements over your average VB code. I expect to see some really neat stuff come out along these lines.
Eventually they will be redeemable for Whuffies.
It's a nice idea, but there seems to be a fatal flaw:

The first three entries that I tried all came back with terrible tracks.

In comparison, The Sixty One seems to have found a nice approach in limiting the tracks that you first encounter so that you're likely to have a good first impression and explore further. The stuff on their front-page tends to be really good stuff even if it often misses my genre sweet-spot.

You might consider something along those lines with curated tracks being the first encounter to make sure you get things off on the right foot.
Your statement reminds me in a way of Diogenes of Sinope[1]:

The most scandalous of these activities involves his masturbation in the marketplace, to which he responded he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope
Bing has been doing something like this for a little while now (through their acquisition of farecast.) Check it out: http://www.bing.com/travel/flight/flexibleTravel?dm=07%2F02%...
* cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living.
IIRC, consumer products are about 18% of a typical household budget. Housing, healthcare, and education are the majority.

For the millions now with ZERO income, even Chinese-made Wal*Mart crap is unaffordable. Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.

I will gladly trade somewhat higher consumer prices for confidence that I will be employable in safe conditions at a middle-class wage for the duration of my normal working life.

And I'm very pro-manufacturing: but the environmental externalities must be mitigated and properly priced: my health is very valuable to me, even if there's no clear market price for it.
Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution
I could see all 4 pages. Try clearing NYT cookies.

It seems the opposite conclusion may be just a difference in reporting.

Most of the 2006 article deals just with "normally" long lived people (80-90 years vs. their shorter living relatives).

About 100+ year olds they wrote:

"A woman whose sister lived to be 100 has a 4 percent chance of living that long, Dr. Christensen says. That is better than the 1 percent chance for women in general, but still not very great because the absolute numbers, 1 out of 100 or 4 out of 100, are still so small. For men, the odds are much lower. A man whose sister lived to be 100 has just a 0.4 percent chance of living that long. In comparison, men in general have a 0.1 percent chance of reaching 100."

So even then, they found 4x higher relative chance for extreme longevity for people with extremely long lived siblings.
Remember, "it just works." The specifics, or the comparisons between the two, are not to be considered, I think. Consider the way that Apple would - particularly in epochs past - long, long lag behind comparably spec'd PCs for upgrades to the innards (for no particular reason). I don't mean to denigrate the buyers of iphones and ipads, I just don't think this kind of performance nuance is really cared about; the functionality is what's considered and so, latency or whatever else aside, things are comparable enough.
Google Kills Scroogle.
I spent 25 years in a big company tolerating crappy software. Jason is absolutely 100% dead-on correct.

The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. ... [T]he software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.

Enterprise software is bought on marketing bullet points, as long as the budget can bear it (cost and quality for enterprise software are totally uncorrelated). The buyers have no ability to judge the implementation of those bullet points, so a crappy implementation sells just as well as a good implementation.

The other observation I would offer is that the level of effort required to initiate and carry through the purchase of a new software package is so high in a large company that nobody can afford to make a mistake (time/effort-wise, mentally, and career-wise). Thus, only "safe" choices are made. Ironically, what appears to be the safe choice very often is a mistake - crappy buggy implementations of huge bullet lists of mis-features.

Sorry for venting. :-D I'm much happier in my new small company where we are willing to make several small, recoverable mistakes (base hits, bunts, sacrifice flies which advance the runner) to score a run rather than swinging for the fence and being out on a fly ball every time.
Exactly. This is the strong case for tariffs. We need to effectively tax the flow of goods coming into the country for countries who insist on promoting a lower standard. If it costs money to protect workers rights and the environment, then any country doing less should see it's good taxed to make up the difference.
I stopped reading at "Whatever you just said, it's wrong" as it was evident from there that it was the usual HN hyperbole article. Not to say HN is dominated by such articles, but their number has been steadily growing and one is already too much.
If you want to touch the lives of as many people as possible, you can't go wrong working for Microsoft. They might be evil, but if I can help out some percentage of their users, that's quite a bit of good done for the world. I won't say that's my biggest reason for working there, but it helps.
Five Choices When Customers Don't Pay
It is actually pretty amusing to find lawyers claiming that this phrase was intended as a compliment! A very nice piece on its origins.

Dickens, who had his own scars from dealing with the law, said this about their environs:

"These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession, where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law." (Pickwick Papers)

The unbroken line of criticism over the centuries probably is its own best evidence that there is something seriously broken with our profession - the guild system that renders the services over-priced, the maddening court procedures that just as often work to deny justice as to promote it, the shake-down artists who merely fly the flag of the law while engaging in basic extortion, and on and on.

There is much good in the law, and in many of those who practice it, and it all the sadder therefore that many would pervert that which might otherwise be so well-used.
Even if it was flash you could still script it.
Mr. Grove correctly identifies the problem but avoids the obvious solution, perhaps because it's too painful to articulate. The phenomenally elevated standard of living that we have enjoyed in the U.S. since the end of WWII just isn't sustainable. The Chinese aren't devouring the tech market because they manage their economy. They're doing so because the Chinese worker will work for far, far less than any American worker. Americans currently still monopolize the high paying design & research job market but there's no reason to expect that Asia will indefinitely play second fiddle here.

To put it bluntly - the last decade was the beginning of a painful crash of the American economy back to earth. When we finally do reestablish equilibrium Americans will be back at work at assembly lines. A massive re-investment in hard science education, which seems extremely unlikely, might cushion the blow but there's only so much room for jobs in intellectual capital.
This reminds me of an interesting article by Jeff:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/11/has-captcha-been-br...

In it he mentions the site below which is a some Chinese hacker's page that breaks down a number of common CAPTCHAs and puts a price on them:
http://www.lafdc.com/captcha/
Nice piece covering the origins there of the phrase. Lawyer jokes have fallen flat, to me, when they aren't clever... I guess because I know too many lawyers who work for good / not for profit / etc.
He had me up until:

Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars -- fight to win.)

Everybody loses a trade war. And the ensuing impoverishment and desperation can trigger a shooting war.
Is Apple All The Tech Press is Talking About?
I am wary, that a one page rule would have unintended side effects. Like not reducing the complexity, but making the wording extremely terse instead.
Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.

That was only possible because that time period was a window in which our technological superiority made it possible to provide the average working man with that standard of living. That period is coming quickly to a close.
Many of these I'm sure where spurred on by CarlH's C++ Course http://www.highercomputingforeveryone.com/ (used to be on reddit) which is a great resource for learning C++. The interactive forum style of reddit makes teaching and mentoring easy.

This is a great idea.
Those screen specs would be in the area of 330ppi.
Unemployed consumers don't consume.
Please, you'd expect cancer incidence to go up if for no other reason than that we're dieing less from other causes.
Right. He makes many good points, but many of his assumptions are flawed. He uses a few examples and anecdotes to paint a picture of the wealthy exclusively as bootstrapping individuals that innovate for consumers and create massive value. While this is certainly can be case, the reality is that the majority are quite different. Look at the wealthiest individuals and most profitable businesses, they are often not creators of value, but manipulators of markets and mediators of commodities. Energy Companies, Corporate Aggregators, and Financial Services. If we are too blind to see that these companies funnel huge amounts of money away from more efficient uses, perpetuate monopolies, and destroy true free market innovation, then we will pay the price.

While his criticisms of Marxism were on the spot, they simply summarize how Marxist ideas of capturing the "means of production" by force are outdated in knowledge economies. Marx was right in the end though: look at the economic success of countries that have converted to knowledge economies, as the workers own their means of production, and often are in the position of being able to demand excellent working conditions and payment in exchange for their labor.
That type of thing would probably wind up being way too limited. It has
to be generated and checked by a computer so it's going to tend
towards a pattern and not be arbitrary enough. And as you make it more
convoluted you're probably going to piss off the users more than slow
down spammers.
> So it would seem that you are trying to define a medium as "art", which is wrong.

No, I'm not. I'm discussing Ebert's claim about the sutability of different mediums for producing art.
I wanted to point out the significant difference between "hidden" and "ignored". There was nothing hidden about these IE features. People just chose to ignore them. And of course they were nonstandard, just like most other new technology.
Home Anti-virus Comparison
What sort of versioning capability does this give? That's the main reason to bother using something like this.
Nice idea. No captcha would be better. How come Facebook doesn't need a captcha on their create account page? http://img.skitch.com/20100702-g2gt6pxcpyug324yhyay4gsj13.jp...
From my readings many years ago we were pretty sure the Soviets had discovered the EMP effect that Starfish Prime revealed to us. Imagine the possible consequences if we'd remained innocent of the phenomena.

I also wonder how much of what we "know" is based on simulations based off the inadequate data we captured in this one test.
It actually doesn't. Unless you search directly from one airport to another airport on a specific day, it just pulls in cached results from old searches to get the best fares chart and the nearby airports data.
tl;dr steaks and strippers.