skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a reason for this, and it's cowardly and despicable, but it's not nearly so straightforward as the US press being lapdogs for US war criminals.

Newspapers have a journalistic duty to be impartial, or at least a marketing duty to appear impartial. (News outlets that seem partial lose prestige, and hence compete in a different niche--contrast the New York Times and the New York Post.) Who must they appear impartial to? Their audience, of course--and the primary audience for American newspapers is Americans. Now, when the American executive branch and one out of two political parties seriously claims that waterboarding is not torture, you suddenly seem partial to Americans if you openly contradict that claim, because the question of whether waterboarding is torture has moved from accepted wisdom to controversy. Clouding all of this, of course, is that the controversy itself is nothing more than a semantic argument. Another contributing factor is ignorance--waterboarding went from an obscure torture technique which comparatively few people knew about to an active political issue, which means a lot of people who knew absolutely nothing about waterboarding until the administration said "we're for it and we're doing it" made up their minds at that instant, based on their opinion of the administration.

Weaker forms of this are seen when, for instance, news outlets give equal time to cranks when reporting on science, because there's "controversy" over whether evolution is real or whether the earth is really 4 billion years old. It's easy to find more examples if you look out for them.
To put it into a specific timeframe, 18 months ago was approximately 6 months after the iPhone 3G's launch (and 6 months before the 3GS). In fact, that puts it right around Christmas 2008.

Wow. They could have launched that Christmas. That's around when the first Blackberry Storm came out too. It feels like forever and a day ago.

They could have been on their second generation by now. Instead, they bungled it.

I wonder how much the project cost them.
Lessons from 10 years of being a VC
This happened to me. I promptly informed them that they hadn't hired me as a contractor, hand't been paying me the rates I demand as a contractor, and bid them farewell.
Well, in that case, EGCS won, and was renamed GCC…
Is it? I can't get it to work, it complains about the backtick in column 27.
Woot now available on Amazon.com for $149M.
If Knuth announces that he proved P=NP a lot of people will believe him.
Exactly, just look at PHP. Design by committee gone horribly, horribly wrong.
I think it's only a matter of time before ChromeOS and Android become the same thing, or at least very close siblings.
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>Would you entertain the possibility that their wages are lower because the cost of living in their countries are also lower?

In the connected world we live in now, people can see what they could be making. If they can be mobile then many are going to (and do) take advantage of it. They gain enough experience, move to a country with a higher salary and then invest the money back home. Why would you spend your life working for a "comfortable but frugal lower middle class lifestyle" when you could be rich without having to put out much more effort?
That's plausible, though there are a lot of factors and some subjectivities. Most retail goods cost more, but you also get some miscellaneous stuff free or heavily subsidized. For example, in Denmark, it's easier to get around without a car, you don't have to pay for health insurance, the state provides some degree of free child care, etc., all of which adds up to a decent amount of savings, especially for poorer people (for whom those things tend to account for a larger proportion of their budget). I think Scandinavia definitely wins on the lower-class end: a 25th-percentile-income family in Denmark, is probably much better off than a 25th-percentile-income family in the US. I'm not sure what the comparison would come out as at the 50th percentile. It might depend on where exactly in Scandinavia and the U.S. you are, and answers to some lifestyle-preference questions (for example, do you actively prefer having a car, or do you actively prefer being able to get away without having a car?). At the top end, the U.S. diverges increasingly above.
I want to think of something positive about MSFT but I can't find anything. Can anyone remember the last time MSFT innovated something (not followed an existing market/paradigm) and led the market by sheer quality of the innovation (not because of monopoly)?

The only product that I can think of is Xbox360.
Most certainly to .pyc. Native code is the realm of a JIT runtime.
Each one of these is a niche where you can compete with Elance with your own web app.
Ugh. Visual Studio is a superior development environment to anything you can get on Unix (with the only exception being Smalltalk environments and Slime to an extent), and case sensitive file systems are a mistake that came about from laziness. A file system should be case preserving but case insensitive. Full Stop. Do you know how much money has been lost in the business world because some idiot on a unix box thought differentiating different files with case alone was really cool?
I believe they are not focused on single-request performance as much as being able to scale to thousands of simultaneous requests.
As a meta point the guidelines here request we use italics for emphasis rather than caps (you can do italics by putting a * either side of a section).

(I just noticed you were a new commentor so I hope that comes across ok :))
It's interesting that eggheads and tinkerers are not perceived as leaders or leadership material by those recent grads, professional bureaucrats, and trustees. Why is that?

In this day and age where we consider everything a learnable skill, from ice hockey (Gladwell) to math (Asian culture) to seduction (Neil Strauss et al), why are eggheads and tinkerers seemingly considered unteachable in the ways of leadership (real leadership, as espoused in the article)?
I HaveThisPattern. :) It is good to see that more people than me search for such... lets call them control flow patterns, because they reduce how much you have to think about mundane things during programming in a language which does not provide such primitives. You can just think "ok, iterate this array", and while your fingers note down this pattern, you can already figure what to put in there.

Of course, one needs to consider the loop constructs the language has. I would be annoyed if someone wrote the first loop in java, instead of using a for-each loop.

I just have some patterns differntly. For example, by now, I use a method to implement the guarded linear search, as it requires less branches and allows to hide the handling of the not-found-case:

for (i = 0; i < students.size(); i++)
if (student[i].hasGoodGrade()) return student[i];
return noStudentFound;

For the polling loop, I'd just extract a conditional.
do { readValue(); } while(!valueValid());

But yes, I recognize that these are minor stylistic quibbles :)
well, it applies to everywhere I guess, you just gamble it. I myself still in quest to find 'good' one (but I'm not a job hopper :))
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Nicolai Tesla is almost the engineering equivalent of the Simpsons:

Tesla did it! Tesla did it!
I think the Kin proves beyond any doubt that Microsoft can fail on its own without any external help.
I'm not sure that HN generally looks too kindly on individual tweeds being submitted as news items.
Most cars get better gas milage than a UPS truck though. I know there's a ton of factors to consider here (what if the UPS truck is already making a delivery to my neighbor?) but it just seems really wasteful and indulgent to me. It's one of those things where I know if I signed up for it I would use it for the most frivolous and lazy purposes because it's just too easy and the consequences are completely hidden from me unless I make a real effort to think about it.
While those devices could have been appealing to teenagers - at least in combination with a cheap data plan - i really don't understand why microsoft wanted to go into that niche market with a stripped down OS that shares some interface similarities with its big brother windoes mobile 7. Add those experimental devices and the average, non-geeky customer, which this is clearly aimed at, is totally confused. We, of course, know that this isn't WM 7, but the average Joe who read 4 lines of text about WM 7 in some magazine could easily assume that this is microsofts next big thing, which of course it isn't.
It just feels so unnecessary, dead before it launched.
Interesting concept, never thought about it like that. Any related articles/links?
I think this is the difference between failing silently like everyone does from time to time and going-down-in-flames failing.

The Kin's short history is a long series of WTF moments from the market without any echo from Microsoft.
Same thing happened to Reddit years ago. As if a battalion 4chan script kiddies had nothing better to do than sick a downvoting botnet on Reddit to decrease its signal:noise ratio. I hope they haven't targetted HN now too. :/
Amazon is really aggressively pushing their Kindle platform. We've got the Android app just released, the price reduction of Kindle 2 to undercut the 3g Nook, the new improved and sleeker looking DX, and new Kindle 2's are $155 on Woot today.

That's all in about a weeks time.
I actually spent last night reading through your book. I've been programming for a while now, but I'm by no means a hardcore programmer (ruby and javascript make me feel too comfortable). But I did pick up a few tricks from you, especially the rules for if-else-if. Good stuff. If there's one thing I'd like to read more is coding tips like that. Anything else up your sleeves Zed?
It's Nikola actually.
Thanks famfam
You realize that's not really possible right? Apps rely on the permissions they ask you for their core functionality. If it can't post to your wall, for example, to help spread the app, it's not really worth it for you to use up the server's resources.
Seems odd they would release a Kindle DX less than two months before a major new version?
Google Codejam: http://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html
Thats the best i could come up with ddemchuk. Any other domain suggestions are welcome.
That's just cruel of you.

I spent entirely too long parsing that in my head just to see if you could be right...
The same problem happens in grant writing, my family's field, to the point that I wrote a longish blog post on the subject: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-why-... . My guess is that it happens in many others too, and people who are smart eventually realize they'll have to pay for quality or accept lower quality.

Sometimes bargains can probably be found, but they're probably rare and difficult and don't last very long.

Getting really good grant writers (like us) is going to cost at least $100 an hour, and probably more like $125 – 200. The same is, as far as I can tell, true of web consultants. Good lawyers? $300/hour. Escorts? Probably also $300 in most of the country.

If you don't realize how much things and services costs, you'll end up with sub-par quality, or you'll pay, and/or you'll complain. A lot of people do the latter. I wouldn't expect it to stop.
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I'm curious about why this was downvoted.

Is "upvote for x" too reddit-y?
No, the cutoff date is the date and time by which you can't add anymore things to the tote-bag (ie. in this case 10 a.m. 2 days before your delivery day).
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> know what a great product is,

Microsoft has long lost this ability. Too much Kool-Aid, IMHO.

They really believe they are a cool company.
You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs.

That's probably half-true: you're right that there's more to hiring programmers (and many other kinds of professionals) than paying lots of money, but there's also probably a minimum barrier to entry. I doubt you're going to find high-quality programmers to work for $30K per year, even if you buy them an Embody (http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Embody-Chairs), give them a window, offer to let them rewrite everything in Scheme, and do whatever else Joel Spolsky has mentioned.

I'm not sure what the minimum really good programmers will go for in most of the country, but I'd be surprised if the answer is less than about $50K, and even that's probably way too low. Until you hit the minimum threshold, the rest of your comment doesn't take effect.
Like http://www.erikyyy.de/compilercache but for any python program. Very cool.
Maybe the interviewing process is different where you are, but around here the salary is normally not mentioned in the posting - you'd normally get asked about your salary expectations once you've been through the interview.
It's definitely complicated. I was thinking of a few different scenarios and in some cases it's not clear that local distribution is always a better route. For example if your local store gets a shipment of 100 items and only sells 10 what happens to the other 90? Do they get shipped back? Thrown away? Who knows... If the UPS truck happens to be down the street and needs to go 1 mile out of its way to make a delivery to me that's better than my own 10 mile trip. Even with your example of less physical stores we'd have to consider that means less jobs, less revenue for the town in the form of property taxes when the business closes, less sales tax for the state -- apparently Amazon only charges sales tax in 5 states.
A dumbphone? Not even 18 months ago. They would have to launch this in 2005 for it to have a chance.
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Looks like it's operated by these guys (who are described as an "amazon affiliate" in the FAQ):

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Why is this sophomoric garbage on HN? Seriously, we're supposed to believe that the New York Times is a craven tool of the neocon puppeteers, rather than liberals who got mugged by 2752 object lessons in the difference between random homicide and harsh interrogation?
See the Overton Window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_Window
That's only half the story. Other important bits:

* Improved iPhone 4 baseband hardware performs significantly better than iPhone 3GS in areas with very low dBm. The 3GS dropped or failed to place calls at -113dBm, whereas iPhone 4 works fine. Quote: “There's no doubt in my mind this iPhone gets the best cellular reception yet, even though measured signal is lower than the 3GS.”

* Signal quality should be measured in terms of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), which “is essentially a measure of how much of the signal is compromised by noise or interference” instead of dBm, which is merely a measure of power. This distinction is important because, since “the iPhone 4 works almost perfectly fine at -113 dBm, it has much better sensitivity.”

* “The drop in signal from holding the phone with your left hand arguably remains a problem. Changing the bars visualization may indeed help mask it, and to be fair the phone works fine all the way down to -113 dBm, but it will persist - software updates can change physics as much as they can change hardware design. At the end of the day, Apple should add an insulative coating to the stainless steel band, or subsidize bumper cases. It's that simple.”
MSFT has pretty much always been a second mover. When you're as large as Microsoft you need to confirm the markets you enter are $2BN+ and a good way to do that is wait for someone to prove the market first.

Also Bing is a very innovative search product.
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Downvotes don't kill stories, moderators kill stories.
(author here). This is good feedback. I definitely struggled with finding a good way to describe what each of the features does. I'm considering writing a sequence of followups, each focusing on a particular feature, trying to describe how (say) Java code could be refactored to take advantage of the feature.

I'd very much appreciate suggestions for things to address in such a series! Any time I write something like this, I always learn a lot in the ensuing discussions. Mostly I learn technical things, but it's good to learn more about the writing process as well.
I'm looking into getting a toto-based blog going, and yes, it is easy to get started with. However, I'm finding a bit of a lack of info on middle-level stuff: are there CSS themes out there that work with it? How do I handle things like permalinks, tags, a table of contents, trackbacks, etc.?

Probably there's some "easy to find" file that I ought to be reading. Great. Where is it?
My guess is that's a reference to this article http://trn.n0t.net/post/374883143/i-wish-that-i-could-use-a-... and HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108482 from a few months ago.
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How much do Somali pirates earn?
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Today Finland officially becomes first nation to make broadband a legal right
It doesn't seem that complicated. A UPS truck drives less than 100 miles per day[1], and gets 9 miles to the gallon[2]. At most, that's 11 gallons of gas to deliver packages to 150 people[3].

If those 150 people were to drive to the store instead, they'd get an average of 23 miles to the gallon[4]. The average round trip to the grocery store is 5.5 miles[5]. That's 35 gallons of gas for all of those people to go to the store.

By that calculation, driving to the store uses more than three times as much gas as centralized delivery.

[1] http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2009/04/30/fedex-aims-30-percen...
[2] http://www.hybridcars.com/news/fedex-and-ups-add-electric-dr...
[3] http://gas2.org/2008/12/11/ups-drivers-using-bikes-to-delive...
[4] http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_stat...
[5] http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/foodnutritionassistance/fun...
According to FT, you're right:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/06/30/274571/from-roubi...

What I love the most about this whole "spy affair" is how utterly incompetent and clueless these Russian spies appear to be. I have a hunch that they were more interested in living the good life in the U.S. than serving Mother Russia's interests.
I should note that as of this evening Microsoft was still running Kin ads on Hulu.
Spotify recently ran an online programming competition to find suitable candidates.
I feel that good/great programmers ask too little. Because there's order of magnitude of variance in skill sets and productivity, there should be much more variance in salaries.

In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors.

How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.
I'm tempted to buy a Kindle, especially with the Woot deal on the Kindle 2. I tried a Kindle at work the other day, and I couldn't help but notice the 'flashing' of the screen when I move to a new page. I'm talking about this thing it does where the screen gets erased and redrawn, a process that seemed to take 1-2 seconds. I thought that was quite.. awkward. Kindle users: does that bother you when reading? Or is it something you don't notice at all during normal operation? (Or even non-existent on current models, maybe).