skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I rather meant to say that I think the ability of language users/developers to write powerful tools is a very important quality.
I assume you don't want to tell us which Large Corporation you work for, but I think your experience is not the typical BigCo employee experience.
I don't see the real value of an article like this. It is just an opinion, but no (scientific) evidence supporting his opinion. Of course the guy has a great backgroup and his experiences at Facebook are definately important but to truely state that a certain programming language is better than an other there has to be evidence. I do know that it isn't easy to conduct this kind of research but without it we can't reach a conclusion.
The argument being advanced for diversity is around building a diverse campus environment and helping out disadvantaged individuals. You do not hear about it helping out races. For one thing, even if that's a goal it would be impolitic to outright admit the point of affirmative action is to help out races; advocates of affirmative action have a hard enough time dodging accusations that the whole process is fundamentally racist as it is (and it's getting harder every year).
Lots of tech events in NYC use Meetup (http://meetup.com) -- it's free to join, search, use/attend, but you pay to organize your own.
All of these developer challenges popping up remind me of something we've long loathed in the advertising industry: spec work aka contests. It's worth noting that compliancy is a billion-dollar problem, and if you help them solve it you get $2,500 and a ticket to Health 2.0.

From a high level perspective, "health 2.0" is very interesting to me, and the research I've done in recent months has led me to believe that it's not a place for your run of the mill startup. You need some serious gunpowder to survive. However, it does seem ripe for a few disruptions.
I kept wondering throughout the entire escapade: "I wonder if Apple is going to rush the iPhone out to the public now that it has been leaked?" It certainly seems like more testing was required.
Totally great point. What the user doesn't like would be hugely informative to marketers. They have a metric boatload of data (http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/bubhl/csv_dump_of...) to use, and to take advantage of. I know the reddit community, and I worry about pissing off the independent nature of said community, but I think that Prescott makes some great points about what that data could be used for.
I really like your site. I was on it for quite awhile the other week and it felt like a nice change from other boards.
How to Target a Facebook Ad to a Specific Individual
I agree about the reddit users -- they are a fun bunch when it comes to privacy! (and I mean that in a very loving way.)

But, Reddit has released data previously (http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/bubhl/csv_dump_of...) and it seems the users were pretty fond of it. So why not some more, even more anonymized data?
Isn't this true to some extent for every region that's not Silicon Valley?
I just picked up "Best of American Splendor" and "From Off the Streets of Cleveland" 2 weeks ago, having learned that I was Pekar's neighbor in Cleveland Heights. I moved here from the East Coast only a year ago, and was excited to read a local author and see illustrations of places I was just getting to know. He'll be missed, but thankfully there's a huge catalog of his work to read through.
This has got to be one of the laziest "articles" I've ever seen. The final two paragraphs look like a 9th grader trying to slap together a couple of concluding statements for a last minute essay.
It wouldn't be worthless. It would be worth what the students learn. That plus policies tossing out those who don't get good enough grades (like real colleges have) and you've got no problem offering infinite online attendance.
"If every college let everyone in, it would be worthless."

I think that HN, while not a college, might be a counterexample for this idea.

Here everyone can join and communicate, and yet we can maintain a high level of communication. The ones who don't fit are quickly flagged or simply won't come back again.

I think selectivity is good, however it doesn't need to be enforced in the admission step, it will happen in the middle of the process. People who would not be able to follow the course requirements would quickly drop out.

I'm not arguing that this idea would work (I don't really know), but based on the HN experience I think it should be considered.
Exactly what value is being added over this posting? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1507999
Man claims to own 84% stake in Facebook - judge grants TRO in his favor
I wonder why it matters so much that the C# tools weren't open source? Given the BizSpark program gives you them for close to free (and express versions are free) what does it matter that he doesn't have the source code?

The article didn't really go into the depth that I was hoping for, wanted to hear things about not just the performance but how hard it is to hire/learn the certain language, hosting costs, best agile tools etc.
While I have no first-hand knowledge (and I doubt you do either, please clarify if I'm wrong), I'd be willing to bet that overall Apple could care less about tethering apps.

I believe that tethering is native to the OS, I remember doing some simple hack on my first 3G iPhone that enabled it for a while until a software update wiped it out. Other carriers (non-US) support it (a quick link I found re: Rogers: http://scilib.typepad.com/techreviews/2009/06/rogers-iphone-... )

So, your tethering restriction argument seems kind of straw-man to me. Additionally, it's not surprising that there are some bottom-feeder (fart) apps. Of course, the "fart-machine" apps are hardly the majority of the eco-system, but even so I could pretty much guarantee you that the fart apps would work 100% of the time on iOS, and probably 50% of the time at best on Android. As the app gets more complex, the probability of it working properly on all supported iOS devices, and NOT working properly on some subset of Android OS and hardware increases.
The article calls snapfish a "photo storage service," but it has always been much more geared towards photo printing, with sharing really only available between members. I wonder how video will integrate into that business model? Printing stills from your home movies?
DuckDuckGo is not open source, it may use some Open Source code but so does Google and tons of other web apps.
Jesus, I don't know what you're on about in this thread. When people think to themselves that they are better than average drivers, they mean "I am better than the majority of people, for example most of my coworkers, at driving." No one had to swallow any quasi-mystical nonsense about Gaussian distributions to understand this. It's human nature. They are implicitly comparing themselves to other people and believing they are better.
Here's a better article about language choice that asks, "Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language?" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html)
> Know your audience, Use jargon only where necessary, Use simple sentences, Be consistent.

Forgive me for being cynical, but hasn't every copywriting/business writing book recommended the same thing?
all equity isn't created equally -- .5% of google is worth vastly more than 20% of a brand new startup.
They have had issues in the car area also. It helps to know about the prejudices and capabilities of review organizations when judging their opinion. Ideally you will gravitate to someone who has the same or close to the same priorities that you do.
As someone born, raised and educated in China, I say this would never happen unless China can treat IP protection more seriously. Piracy has already destroyed the possibility of a strong music and movie industry. Non-existence of protection against superficial copycat behaviors is hurting not only foreign companies but also those few Chinese willing to innovate.

Another problem is that things rely too much on good will and efforts of the government. However, government funds are put into projects mostly to make government reports look good on paper and to allow government officials to get promoted to higher level positions. Some universities put Wi-Fi in some areas of the campus so that they can report they have campus Wi-Fi. Things look good and bright on paper. And that's because it is meant to be like that.
This article brings up none of the roadblocks that will prevent this.

1. So the ruling party is headed by engineers? So I assume the taxi cabs are driven by the blind, all the jockeys are tall, and the businesses are run by physicists. Not matching skilled workers with their work is a disadvantage.

2. The Chinese government (or any government) can't sit down and order up long term technological advancement. What government program did Gates or Jobs take part in?

3. All the top talent will emigrate. The real innovators would prefer not to be constrained by the local party official's rules.

4. Complacency is a huge issue for us, but thankfully we make a good destination for all those people from #3. The more the immigration door remains open the less we have to worry about this.

5. Low cost exporting is a house of cards. There is always a country that will do it cheaper/more exploitatively. Hard to have a long term strategy here. And you can't copy your way to first place. The copy can never be better than the original.
Pittsburgh also gives birth to people, but can't keep them.
Aside from Bing and Yahoo I suppose.
Blogging.

I have lots of posts that rank well for obscure technical terms in programming languages and computer science.

I have a comfortable job (I'm a prof in CS), so I don't really need the extra money, but to my surprise, I get about $300/month now.

That's up from $10/month a year ago.

If it keeps growing like that, I won't be able to "ignore" it for much longer.

At the moment, I'm doing it all with Google AdSense and book referrals to Amazon.

I'm sure if I spent more time on it, I could do a better job of monetizing it.

But, I'm not even sure what I'd do next.
Cascading is nice, don't get me wrong, but you still know you're writing MR. And you're still far more involved in the details of getting data to and from than I would like.
The big sort
Practical examples for increasing conversion rates
It's better if you actually own the small company, though...
You start by replacing it with nginx... lol...

Now serious, I still think that most people with small websites on dedicated servers are best of using nginx.
I did just that, having used Apache for years with great satisfaction, at some point my website was killed by swapping death due to bots visiting and using excess memory.
After that I started using lighttpd which was much better but memory leaks and stagnant development in that project brought me to nginx.
I was sold when I deployed my website with it, it's so fast, small and stable that I never looked back.

Sorry for this negative advert for Apache, but honesty forces me to call it bloatware by now, maybe this will happen to nginx too in a couple of years. Who knows.
One of Apple's strengths I think is that they have the resources of a large company and yet do a decent job at moving & pivoting like a small company. They're at a point lately where they seem to release some major new cool thing each year that makes consumers drool and their competitors tremble or at least scramble to catchup.

The flipside is that if they feel too much pressure to keep moving fast they might move too fast and then the quality drops and they stumble (as possibly evidenced by the recent iPhone 4 signal issue.)
I agree that Reddit's community might balk at some of the ideas referenced in the article. In fact, I made mention of the Facebook privacy fiasco to highlight the issue. Also, I mentioned the opportunity to go to retailers instead of ad networks. I was thinking of it as a benefit. Imagine going to a retailer's Web site with products that you are interested in showcased on the homepage with discounts instead of random stuff that you are interested in. More like Get Glue (http://getglue.com/)

I actually signed up for a Reddit self service account in doing research for the article. While the Reddit system may do a lot to target the ads on its own, I found it incredibly rigid and lacking a lot of features that other services offer. The lack of features and the proprietary nature of the system preclude the ad service from reaching scale.
To my mind it's the entire stack that makes it a problem.

For example if you don't feel comfortable using Mono, you also have to deal with Windows for your OS, better experience with SQL server, etc. Even if you use Bizspark to make the up front cost trivial to non-existent, you still have to use those specific technologies.

How many of the types of people who are tech people founding startups prefer their servers on Windows? I sure don't, even though my day to day desktop life is there. It just doesn't feel right. But maybe that's just because my prefered languages for personal use/etc are at least arguably better on *nix environments (Python works well in Windows, but Clojure's not nearly as good, at least once you factor in a lot of the popular tools like Lein).
My use of the term 'unfair' was in reference to the way the term was used in the article. I thought this would be perfectly clear to everyone, since everyone would have read the article.
Ok, I've written a system very similar to what Herb describes, and on one hand, its definitely a good abstraction and prevents a lot of the silly mistakes I've made.

What it doesn't really give you, is any superior way to handle transactions between your two actors. You'll still have the same race condition/deadlock issues you would with plain ol' locks/threads.

So on one hand, its a step forward, but on the other hand, it doesn't solve the problem that really needs solving.
Yeah, dude - get direct advertisers and you can probably bump that up to $3k/mo.
Those are all valid questions that show you haven't researched the least bit into what ooc does and how it works, otherwise you'd have some clue as to how it does solve these problems.

(And please, no "But I don't have the time, you have to chew everything for me"-answer. I'm in overload of this kind of answer too.)
Wait, is that the spammer Calacanis?

Did he found hackaday or buy it?
1. I do not know how we calculate what has a "much wider benefit for the entire society".

2. But I know that if we base our decisions on the (elusive) benefit to the society versus justice, we are taking a step towards a totalitarian system. This is not where we want to go, and (I think) not what the proponents of the Affirmative Action intended.

3. I am sure there must be ways to help the underprivileged individuals, and maybe underprivileged strata, of our society without having to resort to such actions.
Reading between the lines, one take: "we didn't block them, but we told them we were going to."
Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton
If you'd be interested in taking us out, we'd definitely be interested. Boats are very hard to come by in the area.
What a joke:

"On Friday, for example, Fring withdrew support for video calls over Skype on iOS 4 without warning, again damaging our brand and disappointing our customers, who have high expectations of the Skype experience."

Right, which is why Skype on Android is abizmally bland, has no support for any sort of video chat, is only available on Verizon, and doesn't work on Wifi. Oh, and your iPhone client has a great video experience right?

You blocked fring because it doesn't support the Skype experience, which you're defining as including video support. Hypocrite much? XMPP and Facetime need to get with it.
"They could let everyone in, they don't have to pass everyone. Let the cream rise to the top and let everyone else drop out. As long as the courses were rigorous enough then the degree would maintain it's credibility."

Most colleges just don't have room for everyone. If they opened up the flood-gates of admission, many people, whom would otherwise be able to get into college, would be left out in the cold because they allowed everyone in (even people that do not qualify and or will eventually drop out).
Presuming you mean this as a genuine question, "no". There is no network that tracks sales of used books, and manages to send royalty payments to the appropriate party. Mark experiences no direct financial benefit when you purchase a used copy from a bookstore. The best possible interpretation would be that he sells more copies new because the existence of a secondary market allows people to buy new copies with greater abandon.

It does sound like an interesting marketing approach though: open a used book store that does make this promise, and without obligation sends $1 per used book to the listed author. Since it's a 'gift', there would be no need to determine legal ownership, assigned rights, etc. I'm not sure that it would confer enough advantage to cover the lost $1 of profit, but I think it would attract a lot of attention and business if you could keep the prices competitive otherwise.
How about we just cut out the crap and make admission based on scores only. This will of course mean that your chance of getting in will become really, really low, unless you were jewish or asian.

All these people who cry out for affirmative action to be removed, I will see them write two pages about why it should not be there, but they will never advocate the really fair solution, because it will make them extremlely unlikely to ever get into the schools.

What you are saying is pretty silly, by the way. An elite school like that is admitting perhaps 50 black people. Are you saying of all the applications from black people they received, they did not find 50 that met the cut-off mark? That's a bit unlikely, is it not?

The score of the blacks may have been below the average of the other admitees, but they were not BAD. It's an elite school, they will not put dunces in there, and there are certainly enough black applicants with the appropriate scores.

If you want a score based system, then say so and accept that whites will be a tiny minority in those schools. But don't try to have this hybrid thing that keeps the whites in and the blacks out.

Either scores and nothing else, or let the schools decide. Choose one, and lobby for that, and not AGAINST affirmative action.
Those other things weren't crappy last week. Funny how fast expectations change.
This is one of the taboo subjects on the Internet where it's possible to say something that is factually true and yet you can be downvoted into oblivion if it is "not PC", so watch out folks.
Your post suggests a lack of critical thinking on your part.

1. I sell my book to a used book store.

2. You buy the book I sold to the book store.

3. Somehow the author also takes a cut in that sale?
The first resource (http://ipadpeek.com/) is a little deceptive since it just puts a pretty iPad frame around the browser and supports non-iPad compatible technologies such as flash and hover.

Maybe OK for demos, but I wouldn't touch it for "design".
While I wholeheartedly applaud all attempts at getting ANY government at all to spend more on science, technology and education, I am baffled at the constant American paranoia of its 'leadership' in science and math.

A couple of points:

1. It is OK for America to not "rule tech".

China has the most number of humans in the world. Statistically speaking, it shouldn't be surprising that they will eventually 'rule tech'.

American leadership in technology is an anomaly - it's representative of the historical advantages that the US has had and the deprivations of rest of the world. IOW, US is more like a one-eyed king in a country of the blind. As others pull themselves up, it's natural that this anomaly will be corrected somewhat.

2. America is not really lagging anyway.

The world's top universities are American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive...), most of the Nobel laureates have been American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_coun...), most of the high-tech companies are American (I don't even care to list), and a lot of people who are technically savvy eventually become American anyway. From outside at least, the US looks like a giant chain reaction of innovation that has spun out of control!

I guess "America is doing great!" won't make as sensational a headline as this one.
Would you bet $100M on your pet language?
"What's with all the laptops?"

I've gone all laptop for a few reasons.

Ergonomics: For 6'4" me, quite a ways off most ergonomics charts (in theory not, in practice yes), the best position I've found at home is in a reclining chair with the computer on my lap. It isn't recommended anywhere that I can see, but with the position I hold my computer in, all the actual ergonomic factors that you are supposed to seek out are in play: I'm usually partially reclined so it's more like I'm in a chaise longue, which I've seen mentioned as one ergonomic optimum in a few places (and I agree). My wrists are very straight and unpressured. I don't use the trackpad a lot anyhow and it's in easy reach. I can go all day like this no problem. (Yes, I am aware that I shouldn't even so and in practice don't. My point is that I can.) Very few desktop setups have been able to match this.

Also, Dvorak on my laptop keyboards has proved sufficient for me. YMMV.

Display Space: My laptop is at 1600x900 (yes, exactly). I'm in Linux running compviz, and with a single keystroke I can switch virtual desktops arbitrarily quickly. (With compviz now it can be literally a single frame on the display if you like; I find I prefer a bit more animation so my poor primitive lizard brain, already struggling with this whole "computer screen" thing, doesn't get completely disoriented.) I still like my dual-monitor display at work but I can't say it's critical.

In Windows, I would scream. Even Windows 7 is still too multi-desktop hostile for this to work.

Computational power: Usually my compilation is actually offloaded to fast VMs anyhow, so that's less of a problem. You shouldn't buy the cheapest laptop you can get, but anything above about $600 should scream for most dev tasks, even modestly-disk-intensive loads, because everything comes with such obscene amounts of RAM nowadays that a lot of stuff is hitting cache anyhow. With a full desktop Linux and two VMs generously allocated with RAM, I'm just barely using all 4GBs, including disk cache. (Without it, I'm at 1.8GB free RAM. Obscene, I tell you.) Anything else and laptops are fine. Admittedly, you may have to run Linux.

And this laptop is now coming up on a year old now, and there's been advancements even then. Just about the only thing I do now that shows any sort of delay is starting up Firefox, and, well, I'm still waiting to see the system that doesn't take visible time to do that :)

The last desktop advantage for dev is IO and I expect SSDs to end that disparity. (Leaving behind only 3D graphics, but unless you're developing a 3D game that shouldn't matter for dev.)
Either way, makes me want to avoid it...too bad too.