skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The writer of this letter now has a research group named after himself (http://www.carreira.ethz.ch/) so lets go with uncurable egomania combined with dangerous levels of political skill and charisma, all co-presenting with a callous disregard for one's fellows, justified by the argument that "people want to work for me." Frankly, we're lucky he's only a scientist and didn't study economics, politics or law instead of chemistry.

--- edit ---

If naming groups after yourself is normal, then it's not a bad apple, it's a bad barrel! It sounds like academia could only be more feudal if you had to call your professor "my liege."
Underline Text on the iPhone
I have fond memories of "Japan, Inc." -- a manga introduction to 1980's economics. It was one of the few manga stocked by our local library in the time before English-language manga really became popular.

http://www.amazon.com/Japan-Inc-Introduction-Japanese-Econom...
This was good -- although I have to say, we femgeeks don't generally sport beards, I don't think. The rest still applies though.
Confused about the syntax? Gosh, how could that happen?
Academic math/CS is not remotely this bad, at least in my experience. I've never heard of anyone being told to work more hours. I've heard of people being told to get more done, but that's a different issue.

In general, a bad supervisor will neglect you rather than force you to do ridiculous amounts of work, and will fail to put in the requisite effort to get you a job.
The mainstream is composed of a million niches.
Thinks of correct property rights as being a sort of rule of laws. Now the rule of laws might be a legal fiction, but it does have utilitarian benefits.

People can predict and know what's going to happen to them if they transgress and plan their life around that. Moreover, it give them incentive to invest and increase our overall wealth in the long term.

However, some people likes to make the rules of law a quasi ethical principle. That what some people called, "justice".
Ever heard of compersion?
It's because we all secretly want to be Gandalf.
I was using Google Chrome (on Ubuntu Lucid).
Not to mention the complete lack of Firefox or Chrome.
Javascript (with Prototype and later jQuery) taught me how to do functional programming. Or at least made me love it. I actually began to prefer programming JavaScript for the power/freedom. Glad to see I can do about the same thing now in C# with the var keyword and closures, first class functions, etc.
A better link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/199528/Multitasking_With_iOS_...
Will you also burn your paper books in case Amazon ceases to exist (or changes its business model)?

How free it is to be free to use only devices that Amazon supports? How yours are your books?
The 'Dick' he writes about didn't know functional programming concepts in early 2000s. If HN existed at that time, you probably could have said that about the HN readers. OOP was the big deal then and the majority of non-MS programmers didn't grasp functional style either.

I sure didn't in 2001. The author is an idiot.
(not attempting to pick a fight, just feel I need to point out...)

I'd generally argue that the reason you have troubles with the iPod is because you've learned to think like an engineer... ie, unlearning how to think like an uninformed user in the process. You're not exactly their target audience (nor am I).

Out of pure curiosity, which iPod style is this referring to? Scrollable-wheel, click-wheel, touch, shuffle? I personally find the click-wheel versions to be a bit annoying because they don't register scrolling accurately enough.
I guess what I really mean then is: did this guy get his ass chewed by a higher-up (who was smart enough not to put it in so many words) because it's how the institution operates?

It's a little over the top. Trollish even.
I call bullshit on the idea that intuitive software can't be powerful.
Where are you right now, and what is your full name?
Ah, but the company rebounded and is still doing pretty well, Neal Patterson is still CEO -- and most likely, the parking lot is half full on Saturdays.

Guys like this win @ life. By doing this kind of shit.
"but comparing a bootleg movie to a fake life-saving device just makes you look ignorant."

Not really. Pirated software can be "low quality". They could contain viruses, which also could look bad for the company that made the software.
Have you ever use Visual Studio or written a production app in C#?

VS provides the ability to do all of those things. You can both extend the IDE and create DSLs. And .NET runs on a VM, so it's write-once, run-everywhere (unless you're trying to port to Mono/Linux, but that's not what .NET is designed for). It also has the absolute best debugging toolkit of any IDE, ever.

Make files are for the people deep down in the guts of systems, writing bare-metal code. This isn't 1990, we don't to force ourselves to use these antiquated tools for all sides of development.

The idea that you need to "understand your build system" is particularly ridiculous. I understand that my code compiles, has no warnings from VS, passes all my test cases, and works fine in beta testing. Why do I need to write a make file to do what VS is smart enough to do automatically?
Great idea, you should probably ask Hannes (the RingoJS lead developer though)
Eclipse 3.6 Helios is here
Pwned!
Naming Your Company
If they can continue the path they took with the N700+ series, this is maybe the most interesting piece of news in the smartphone area since I can't remember when (maybe the Palm stuff).

Android/iPhone are nicely iterating and improving, but this news shows a change of strategy which can reinvigorate the competition with another strong "open" player.

On the long run I would bet on Nokia against Android, because they can do the iPhone on the mass market (they are a mass market by themselves) without the fragmentation problem of Android. If well done and if Apple keeps the big brother like control on the apps etc. the iPhone would slowly go back to a super profitable niche market and keep doing an insane amount of money, but in a niche market.
GRAPH PAPER.

Just like I drew sprites on when I was a kid!
Almost everyone besides Microsoft and Nokia are onboard with Android now. Apple is too late to stop that train.

No doubt the first patent volley was a bit of FUD, primarily to add a sense of risk to Android among second-tier telcos. They failed at that as well.

The elephant in the room is Motorola. No one ever goes after Motorola because they have a portfolio a mile deep. Which is humorous, because ultimately Motorola presents far more of a risk to the iPhone than HTC.
Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many

That's a good thing, to be honest. One person fewer who needs to worry about stupid semantic differences between tabs and spaces is one person happier.
That's a hugely misleading title.

You have to agree to the terms, however you can then immediately opt out of the specific change and continue using the Appstore as normal without sharing location based information.

I'm not sure how this is any worse than G-mail scanning e-mails of Google or Bing using your web searches.
They want to protect the public from unsafe false copies? I can suggest this for software: educate the public on the use of simple cryptographic tools. The public needs to know how to check for themselves that their torrented copy is an authentic copy.

If they want to protect obsolete business models from technology, I would suggest the following: reduce the privacy and freedom of the entire public by spending lots of public money on big brother programs.

The article gave me the uneasy feeling that they are trying to use the first problem to justify the second solution.
It depends entirely on the professor and the department. My adviser once said that he expected forty hours a week, but if we really wanted to be successful we should put in sixty.

I know plenty of other people with ridiculous horror stories though. Things like professors demanding to know why a postdoc was taking so much time in the bathroom, or confiscating a graduate student's plane ticket back to China until an assignment was completed.

Academics desperately need a ratemyprofessor.com for advisers and lab environments.
That seems to be a rather sweeping claim to make on the basis of one asshole.
Is it? Couldn't I just use someone else's to get it all setup/registered? As far as I know there are no restrictions on the number of devices you can sync to a single computer.
> This is expressed in the famous quote by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Ironically, this was a quip at the expense of Robert Hooke, who was particularly short in stature.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Fame
I'm not so sure this is right. They want a high quality file and hopefully one that is trojan-free etc. Thus, there are several 'name brand' ripping groups.
> Unless you 've been living in a cage for the last year, you know that server side (better: 'general purpose') JavaScript is all the rage.

Apparently I've been living in a "cage". I think he meant cave, but nonetheless I haven't heard that server side JavaScript is all the rage.
Also from Engadget, here's a look at the MeeGo tablet UI:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/22/meego-for-tablets-gets-a-...

It's looking pretty slick for an alpha. But then again, they're building on a solid base with all the lessons learned from Maemo/N900 combined with the cutting-edge UI framework development happening in Qt.
Hi-tech moguls and The New York Times may buy it, but you shouldn't
Fortunately for guys like this there's an oversupply of smart kids without the worldly knowledge to avoid careers in science.
OK, they... brought it back?

* shrug * not interested enough to investigate deeply.
How We Got To 40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days
Surely I cannot be the only programmer around who enjoys dressing well and taking a certain amount of pride and interest in my appearance. Hacker news and The Sartorialist are the two first bookmarks on my bookmark bar and I find the both equally inspirational.
I have about 100 Lode Runner levels drawn on graph paper. One of my first games was a version of Lode Runner that allowed you to create custom levels and it was incredible.
Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi on how Bing, Yahoo plan to catch Google
Lots of research groups are named after the PI, this is nothing unusual. For example:

http://dft.uci.edu/

http://www.princeton.edu/~cargroup/
Announcing Miniredis
Personally, I'd never buy an eBook, ePub, or whatever. I either invest in a dead tree, get a unDRMed PDF, the web copy, or just check it out from the library.

There are far too many options available today for me to buy into a format that can do less than what I was able to do 5 years ago.
My wife is currently a grad student at a top 10 chemistry university studying under a fairly well-known and respected female PhD (relevant because "respected female chemistry PhD" is rare enough to really be "what's wrong with chemistry now"...not the subject of this article...). This PhD does an excellent job in motivating her students by pushing them for timely results, but I don't think anyone in the lab feels like they are expected to work evenings and weekends (indeed, some of them have brand new kids and a healthy work/life balance).

Of course, most weekends the lab has least a couple people in it, but I don't think it reflects the attitude presented in this memo. To be clearer, the motivation to come in on weekends and stay late are not coming from a harshly-worded memo, but from their desire to push their career forward.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I thought I'd throw that perspective in.
thanks for the clarification. I was unaware.
Gene Zelazny responds to Tufte on the famous Minard graphic [pdf]
It's probably on the basis of that one asshole, and the experiences of other people he knows.

I personally know several people who have been taken advantage of by their professors, so I'm inclined to believe him.

Also, "taken advantage of" is exactly the right term in my friends' cases. Both are classic Aspergers cases (actual Aspergers, not just an excuse for bad behavior), and their professors seem to be taking advantage of the trouble they have mounting an effective resistance.
Wow, I have to pipe up here. The commenters so far are completely missing the point of this article. The author is making two observations, both of which are quite correct in my experience. First, the mainstream MS developer universe -- the overwhelming majority of it -- is parochial. People learn new things when MS release some new technology and not before. (I'm talking about the smart ones here. The mediocre ones don't bother learning.) Back when I was an MS programmer, the place to learn new things was MSDN Magazine. There is very little interest in looking outside the village gates; in fact it tags you as a little weird. This phenomenon is so well-established that I'm surprised anyone would deny it. I've commented about it on HN many times myself.

The second and main point is that since this large programmer population receives its knowledge almost exclusively from MS, it's a really good thing that MS have started teaching functional programming. It's probably the best chance FP has ever had to break into the mainstream. Even if it takes over just a corner of the MS world, that corner is probably larger than the rest of FP put together. This is a really good thing, and it massively kicks the ass of the crap that MS used to feed their "Elvises" and probably still do.

I'll add a third point. We know why this is happening. It's because a little less than 15 years ago, MS changed their direction, acquired some top-notch people (starting with Hejlsberg), and started moving in a direction more informed by CS and PL theory. This process is slow, but good. One can finally see it yield real fruit in the form of F# and the recent enhancements to C#. People like Meijer are having a very real influence. Come to think of it, that's probably why people like Meijer went to MS to begin with.
Custom Stickers and Pocket Folders Can Be Used Together in Marketing
custom sticker, vinyl sticker, presentation folder, pocket folder, presentation folder printing
I recall that some studies showed that long term productivity is maximized at around 40 hours a week (at least on average) [citation needed, please]. When we go from 40 hours to 60, productivity rises temporarily, then falls. The fifth crunch time week is even less productive than a standard 40 hour week. After 2 months, the benefits of the first week are cancelled out. Finally, when we go back to 40 hours a week, productivity plummets, then rises to it's standard level.

But the most interesting thing is that long term perceived productivity is higher at 60 hours a week than at 40. Because of that, it is very difficult to realize that overtime is a mistake (emergencies aside).

I would also understand that not all people are alike. Some may be most productive at 35 hours a week. Some may be most productive at 50. But 60 hours sound like much. Maybe you could try to work even less for a month and see the results? (And of course try to measure your productivity reliably. Going from 60 hours to 50 or 40 may be beneficial, but less so than going from 90 hours to 60.)
Mark Zuckerberg promises a billion users
Strategy in the Eurovision Song Contest
Also not relevant to the topic but to this comment is the idea of scaling redis pubsub out horizontally with node.js based clients. This is my NodeRed project.
You have to have access a computer to first turn on an iPad, but my grandmother has gone just fine so far using an iPad with no accompanying computer.

If you don't sync photos/music and use the iPad for watching Netflix, email, and web surfing, there's absolutely no reason to connect the iPad to a computer except for every few months when Apple pushes out an OS update.
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is a customer oriented company, they are aware of what the enterprise is asking for.

Somebody knowing 20 languages does not necessarily make a good employee. What the enterprise wants is exactly what VS has been giving them for the past years.

Sure, as the enterprise is escaping IBM-isation of the workforce you can see a bit of a shift in perspective (evidenced by changes in VS), but nothing so drastic as to actually decrease "productivity".

The point here is that the article has the wrong name, the title should be "How enterprise lives with the programming world".
Vaporstream: Self-destructing email-like messages. cc: bankers, scoundrels
Using Chrome and google reader, after listening to an mp3 in a feed, many times the UI locks up and the page has to be reloaded to make it usable again.
If that's the case why is it that the kindle will sync all my books to my k1, k2, iPhone 3G/3GS and iPad with zero fuss and no repurchases required?
Freakonomics: How the Unemployed Spent Their Time in 2009
I read a discussion on Usenet many years ago about weight training. A post described how they measured the stomach muscles' pressure on the intestines.

Someone asked "How do they get anyone to do heavy squats with a pressure sensor up their ass?!"

The answer was just two words -- "grad students".

(A favorite anecdote.)
It depends on how Apple provides those ads. If they handle the ad selection on their end, and don't provide any information back to the advertiser, it's functionally anonymous.

Saying "here's this guy's address, provide an ad for him" is very different from "send me ads for this area, and I'll show them to people who are near there".
Reminds me of this awesome flash game: http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/
It reminds me of E.J. Corey's group at Harvard, as described in "Lethal Chemistry at Harvard," available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-...

The article begins with the suicide of one of Corey's graduate students.
I agree - people should take risks at any age! I just don't think there is any reason to wait, and it can get harder with time
Let's say your anaerobic threshold is 190bpm, and you are working out at 155bpm. That means you can never go over your AT by definition, since you are always changing your pace to keep your HR fixed at 155. Essentially the longer you work out the slower you go, so that your heart rate never increases.
Your point is quite valid; I've seen people do magic with video editing software and CAD packages that I'm sure wouldn't be possible with a more fisher-price interface. But basic actions should be intuitive for someone who is familiar with computers. Higher end video manipulation products are the worst offenders I've seen, with custom GUI toolkits and weird idioms. No native GUI widget like menus or toolbars in sight; it turns basic functionality like opening a file, or closing the program, into an exercise in frustration. Even vim and emacs have happy GUI wrappers these days that make those operations accessible.
under GVR:

"...he has an afro that would make Snoop Dog smile."

LMAO
Kinect gesture-controls for Xbox 360 priced at 150 dollars
lol...great post!
on the news feed :
So by default will I be seeing the most popular stories ( which is more compelling case ) or friends submitted stories. I believe that reddit does this for a reason.

on the editing: i would do some a/b testing on this , and just put an edit button for users next to the title or description and just see how many times people actually click it.
Amazon and Apple my have a different contracts with the publishers?
Very funny. This is one of the many fantastic features of DRM.
Owning a computer is a requirement to use both devices.

It's a rather silly requirement on first boot.

I wonder if the requirement is there only because they want to make the user aware of the iTunes sync feature. At this point in the iDevice life cycle, the PC is an accessory to the device, and not the other way around. It's just a nice-to-have.
I hate this kind of ethic; our competitors have it almost exclusively (from my observation).

We are a much smaller company all round with a very relaxed work schedule (like today, our busiest day, we finished early to watch the football) and yet we consistently outperform, outmanoeuvre and beat those competitors into the dust.

It's all about work ethic and the ability of a "team" to Get Things Done.

I think the leanest and most productive type of companies/groups/teams today tend to:

- work flexible hours

- work relatively few hours

- and most importantly works hard to reduce the hours you need to be productive (this does wonders IMO)
They don't play golden goal because in practice, golden goal leads to more defensive play. The current overtime procedure of extra time + penalties is the best of many mediocre options, and I suspect future innovations will lead to better procedures.

When you look at the reality of match congestion in top level clubs, you have situations where you may have to play 3-4 matches a week at times, when 1-2 matches a week is the most a player can reasonably recover from. As a result of that, clubs already have to prioritize which competitions they care about--a club simultaneously competes for a league, more than one domestic cup, and maybe even an international cup or two, so "less important" competitions like the English League Cup and even, in recent years, the English FA Cup aren't taken seriously by some top clubs. You start adding extra time to a significant proportion of a club's league matches and you exacerbate that problem and lower the quality of play.
Building the Hydra - Array Virtualization is not File Virtualization
Before the term "intuitive" was bent a little by common usage in the tech fields, it had a basis in "unconscious competence." Unconscious competencies based on in-built the physical modeling tools of our nervous system are very powerful. Leveraging these in-built capabilities to build our UIs is also very powerful.

Awareness of all of these different sorts of "intuitiveness" probably distinguishes the excellent UI designers from the average ones.

EDIT: Not only are the unconscious competencies very powerful, they also tend to be highly optimized.
You're right to some extent, but there is definitely a tension between the two things. This is true with all tools. If a tool enables doing something very complicated, it is almost always hard for beginners to use.

Think of musical instruments. A kazoo is beginner-friendly, but you can only make fairly simple sounds with it. On the other hand, a piano keyboard is barely usable at all to a beginner, but is incredibly powerful in the hands of an expert.
I have used the Visual Studio family from 1997-ish to 2001 (VB, ASP/VBScript and C) and then, again in 2002 (C for WinCE) and 2004/2005 (this last time, with C# for IIS), so, I would say, I have used it quite enough. I have also used NetBeans since the time it was called Forté and Eclipse for Java/J2EE/J2ME. I find they are all at the same level in terms of debugging, with some advantage to the Sun complete toolset when running under OpenSolaris and when you want to optimize your C code for multiprocessors.

As for this not being 1990 (or 1980, BTW), I agree. One should not use antiquated tools to do a job, but I find your willingness not to understand what you are doing quite amusing. If I cared, I would find it distressing, but, since I don't, I will leave it as it is.
I dropped 10 pounds by cutting all alcohol intake. No other changes, in general. And stabilized at that weight for more than a year.

I guess the ice cream in my twice weekly coffee goes next...