skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've now added that to my "Great Articles" project. Forty articles/items now and gradually increasing.

Here's a question: If you were to put tags on that article, what tags would you use?
No, for two reasons. 1, What you're quoting is a theoretical maximum, actual rates are substantially lower. 2, The latency is brutal. Most of the net (especially as viewed from mobile devices) is very small files delivered frequently, which makes latency a much bigger factor in overall experience than speed. Ping times on even the strongest 3G connections are much higher than even an average wired broadband connection.

Also you only pay less for your wireless internet because the average consumer uses WAY less of it than wired. Per megabyte we're spending far more on those wireless data plans, and as soon as the rate of use grows I think we'll see them start becoming metered.
Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved: Methane Bubbles
This may be true for some bosses, but it's not a good general rule. You often don't hear about it, getting an outside offer and a raise happens all the time, and within a month it's pretty much forgotten.

If you present it by saying "I really love it here and want to stay, but the compensation being offered here is really good," then your boss should be fine. If your boss can't handle a business negotiation, then you should be looking to get out anyway.

Bottom line: it's a market, and you have to negotiate. Once the papers are signed, things usually go back to normal.
6 books, 2400 pages. That's less than a nickel a page, or ~$80 per volume. There, now you're justified, I just gave you an 85% discount per book :)
Is it an important differentiation to make?

It seems to me that the two are interchangeable, because often startups are add-ons/features of existing infrastructure; and this could equally be a project.
I think you'll also want to include before/after images in the galleries showing what can be done with each layer.
Lifehacker Pack: Best iPhone Apps
The Art of Delegation
The important piece to remember is that this costs companies $300 per posting on sites like Github ($350 for JoS, $400 on 37Signals), but $0 to post on their own site. So companies like Twitter (http://twitter.com/jobs) are still going to post on their site first, and are only going to post their hard-to-fill jobs on these boards.

So yay for GitHub and 37Signals for offering more alternatives to Dice and Craigslist, but remember that the best jobs still come directly from the employer's website.

(Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who loves their new recruting video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU6epAkC9wg)
Is it me or doesn't this make any sense?

But what really sets Metro Bank apart is its state-of-the-art IT system.

Then at the end:

With such grand designs, isn’t Vernon Hill, one of the bank’s founders, tempted to build an IT system of his own? “I hate programmers,” replies this dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. “They only cause trouble.”

Didn't they already build a state of the art IT system?
The "talented" do get paid very highly. A chunk of the revenue goes to the website owners, but you'd still earn a decent amount of money.

There are some other services requiring webcams which i've encountered in the past, like someone who teaches you a foreign language or something similar and charges you $X a minute.
nope. They were logging network traffic on every unprotected wifi signal.. Sure they would only have fragments -- but it was a screwup on googles behalf.
I think marketing's only part of the Economist's success.

It's certainly true that editorially and, uh, advertisorially a lot of what the Economist does is not done to primarily inform its readers, but rather to play to their aspirations. Just look at the advertisement section that comes after the initial material and before the meatier articles. Or listen to their city guide podcasts. They're interesting, to be sure, but they're also very directed toward people with a certain kind of ambition.

It's easy to spot problems in their reporting and analysis in areas I know something about, and now I think I can see them sometimes in areas I know less about. (Hard to tell what that says about me -- older, uglier, a bit more experienced -- and what it says about them -- maybe their writing isn't as good. Probably mostly the former.) Still, calling the other newsweeklies "lowest common denominator" makes them look far better, more articulate, more insightful, more not-retarded than they are, and at least you can't say that about the Economist.

And lot of places would be well served by a magazine of similar quality and tone but focussed on their specific region.
Glad to hear you liked it! Were you there for any particular reason or just for the experience?

Pro tip: don't go to the Winter Assembly, it's no where near as good as Summer ;)
Ah, this is when I get a little bummed i moved to Bismarck. Disappoint.

Have fun.
Why you should go to jail for videotaping police officers
You know, I took a mechanical drawing class and I loved it. Wasn't required for my CS curriculum, but just playing with the tools and making these precise drawings was a joy. They eventually switched that class to AutoCAD only. Pity.
:) Now I read your original comment -- I agree.. I can't stand Gym based cardio.
Secure Ajax from Non-Secure Pages
Bonus:
http://www.economist.com/comment/604403#comment-604403

One of the best explanations between community banks and the "big" banks.

I worked for a company that is now part of Fiserv.
Tech Companies, Google Sold You Out
Personally I don't find these new features as exciting as the first ones. It is very much possible that I miss some use cases so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I think all interface elements could done in plain HTML, a "YouTube for virtual machines" with create, embed, and simple controls would be both useful and understandable. I find the chat and drag/drop a bit of a duplicated effort and it is anyway orthogonal to the main functionality.

With all that, best of luck with your next iterations and looking forward to trying it out.
Sorry, but I disagree. A lot. For example, the author claims that "the slur brooks no possibility that the speaker has failed to appreciate some valuable, fulfilling element of the subject's hobby."

Here the Author claims that the Speaker failed to appreciate some element in what the Enthusiast produced. It could just as easily be interpreted as the Enthusiast's failure to produce something the Speaker could appreciate.

In condemnation of the phrase he hates, the Author ascribes malicious intentions to the Speaker who uses it. That's a misrepresentation. "Too much time on his hands" usually implies that the Enthusiast produced something for which the Speaker sees no use, which prompts the Speaker to imply that it would be better to apply the Enthusiast's energies and passions on something the Speaker finds useful. Along with passing judgment on Enthusiast's work (something that upsets the Author), the Speaker also recognized the Enthusiast's passion.

Of course, some of this stuff will surely be relegated to the scrapheap of history.

Let's face it, most of the "fringey" stuff is relegated to the scrapheap of history. For every misunderstood genius, you have many more harmless nuts who invent and patent "Method and apparatus for automatically exercising a curious animal"[1]. What changed is our ability to perceive them globally, or, to be more precise, their ability to broadcast to a wider public.

Having more freedom to direct your thoughts and opinions to a wider audience than before, does not mean you're somehow entitled to have those thoughts and opinions respected.

[1] http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6701872.html
Ah, well, where I shop that's not always an option. Besides, I like leaving a tip when I get served.
http://act.boldprogressives.org/cms/sign/google_evil/, as an alternative to a boycott of Gmail.
How come Zed uses temporal nouns ("today") but there's nary a timestamp on his blog posts!?
Too Small to Fail (repeated as a reminder - I just found it for the first time)
Ask HN: A freemium seeder website? 
I have this thought about creating a freemium seeder website.

Developers have the problem of how to seed their applications with resorting to under hand tactics.

Early adopters have the problem of finding new and interesting stuff, quick and easy.

The early adopters can select any categories that they want to hear about a new app from.

While someone who wants their app seeded for free would only select one category.

While some who pays a small flat fee [$4.99, just calling a figure] can select an arbitrary amount of categories.

The fee is mainly to cover the cost of the servers, grow the userbase of the adopters and to ensure that the person is serious.[It would be a side project, currently working on www.timeline-x.com]

Also, we would encourage the users to enter freebies they would be giving their users if they signup.

At the end of the day each early adopter gets a list of sites waiting to be seeded based on the categories they selected.

Would any one be interested in using/paying something like this?
Ubercab CEO Ryan Graves Talks Startups
Droid 2 Arrives on Verizon This Week
Is this spam or am I missing something?
Chromium sends data to Google upon startup
Damn. It's never as exciting as you hope it will be.
Replies by paragraph:

1: These are pretty important features. Suppose you want to share a VM with your collegue and ask him for help. So you invite him to StackVM and share a VM with him.

2: It's all plain HTML already. Not sure what you mean.

3: Thank you!
Several years ago I vacationed in Bali (my employer was paying -- woohoo!). At the time, the exchange rate was 10,000:1. So I'd walk into a bank with $100US, and walk out as a "millionaire" in Indonesian Rupiah.

When you buy something in a store there, they pretty much ignore the two least significant digits. They make up the rounding error for you by giving you a handful of mints.
It's about damn time we started having this conversation.
The way distribution of press releases works is worth a whole separate article, but here are some brief answers to your questions:

> Where would I find the hottest press releases?

Depending on how well-known your weblog is, companies will actually find YOU and email you their press release. Especially if you ask for it on your site.

Alternatively, you can browse through different press release site and subscribe to the categories you're interested in.

> Are all press releases of the world just being dumped into a big stream (maybe using telex machines), where millions of interns sift through them to find the interesting ones?

Some companies use 'wire services' which send out their press release to large database of journalist email addresses. And yes, those journalists have to sift through them. But I think this is changing and building up relationships with journalists is actually more fruitful in the long run.

> Or how does my press release get noticed?

Find the influencers in your industry and provide them with a relevant story they want to share. Also, don't just focus on bloggers, but on your customers as well. Nowadays, they are just as likely to share your announcement as anyone else. As long as your announce is relevant for them.
I entered the professional workforce a little late but had always been considered good with computers. Starting low($45k) I quickly came to conclusion that people where making way more money($85k) than me and I was just as good if not better at the task at hand than they where. With my managers support I asked my employer for parity with my co-workers. I received a good bump to start(65k) and over the course of a few years I was into a six figure salary. There was some drama that helped along the way, people quiting, epic weekends of coding, and normal BS of not working at a "google/fog creek" type of place but it worked out for me.
Color me the pessimist, but my response to the "8th startup" would be "why'd you quit on the other 7 and decide to do it again?"

For me, a startup is something you throw everything into: time, (your own) money, and aggressively focus on. It's filed, you have customer focus, and you're not doing it as a hobby. Sorry, I'm over the "startup" (project) that's building something fascinating...but has no focus on generating revenue. It's a hobby. Not a startup.
This sounds like a me too by the korean police. I mean, what's the point, most of that data won't be held on korean servers, much less google's korean office.

I'd like to know if google employees even use their desktop as thick or thin clients.
Where do I find the plans for this, and the software? I'd love to try to build one.

His webpage says the "MakerScanner" is an open source project but it doesn't provide any plans or code. Grr that really grinds my gears when something is called open source but it isn't.

I can't even find any contact info online to ask him.
Flexibility and power
Yup. That's pretty much it. I remember jumping on a Ruby project and having to install 50 (not exaggerating at all) gem dependencies. A handful of them didn't build because of my version of (Ruby|GCC|Rails|OS X|MySQL) and of course nobody else knew how to fix it.

I still love Ruby, but now I use it almost exclusively for sysadmin/build type stuff with Rake.
A bootstrap of 1000 miles begins with a single step
F5 timestamp in Notepad.
So you need to trespass through people's gardens to walk down the street? Or do people just walk in the street?
Insight, "Yahoo: goodb(Y)e"
Las acciones de Aeropuertos reflejan la atractiva recuperación en 2010
Why not not just boycott verizon. It's not like the others have agree to this yet. If I was a small telco (hey t-mobile) I'd be doing my best to position myself as the open internet experience TM.
"it's a market" and "you have to negotiate" can't be stressed enough.

hell, the simple fact that you can negotiate should be stressed more.
Room for Debate: Who Gets Priority on the Web?
Well it's quite a complex problem really. It's pretty much obvious that some people run faster, some others swim faster, some see better, etc. On average, some people of a given origin perform slightly better on a particular task ( west african at running) in a way not related to the environment (they don't train differently).

Obviously this difference is extremely slim (though enough to make a difference when looking only at the very end of the bell curve, for instance 100-meters world-class runners). It exists nonetheless.

I don't see that there aren't similar differences between individuals in intellectual abilities, emotional, etc. I, for instance, never ever worked at school. Not once, up until 15 or so. Up until late in high school, I was usually the smart guy, the best in class, doing absolutely nothing out of the classroom. My friends who were working as little as I did (sitting next to me in the back of the class, laughing at my jokes, etc) where very bad performers, with notes half mine or less.

Unfortunately, my utter laziness and lack of discipline got me after some time. I'm almost unable to work at anything that doesn't genuinely interest me. That's why I'll probably be unable to ever get a college degree, because you need to at least attend the most annoying courses, and I just couldn't.

At some point, for the hardest problems (or to be top-world-class) you'll need to be both gifted and hard working. At the same time. See Edison, Einstein, Newton, etc.
Fairly large stretches of the Washington, DC, suburbs have no or few sidewalks once you are off main streets. I have read the explanation that the developers wanted to give the original buyers, 55 or 60 years ago, the feeling that they were out in the country. (Given that some of these streets had little bungalows wedged tightly together, the buyers must have been oddly susceptible.) A number of neighborhoods within the city lack sidewalks, too, and in them one can start a listserve war and bring out yard signs by proposing to lay sidewalks. There can be good reasons--big old oaks in the way--and ridiculous ones--fear of attracting riff-raff.

It should be said that when some of these neighborhoods were laid out, most families had at most one car, and that car commonly smaller than some of the sports utes and minivans one sees today, leaving more space on the pavement for pedestrians.
Nice catches... I was agreeing with you until I thought about it a little, now I'm agreeing with you again.
It's great if the other party gives a number first, but this binary, on-of-us-has-to-be-a-looser game can be a pain in the ass. Have a fall-back strategy, like giving a high number first, or even better, simply be very pragmatic, i.e. know what you're worth (or want), say that number first and don't ever budge. When pressed, point out that you understand it's bad negotiating strategy to give a number first, but you're not playing games here, you being very straight up.
Apple To Acquire Chinese Game Developer?
Sigh. People keep missing he most important aspects of the so-called 10,000 hour rule.

It's not 10,000 hours of practice. It's 10,000 hours of a certain type of practice. The practice must be directed, with feedback from coaches. The original paper this came from also mentioned that the experts practiced differently: They often spend a lot of time doing drills and focusing on individual skills. It's a very focused, methodological approach.
Probably on Zed's end too. He doesn't drink.
Wow, that's an insanely brilliant thump against Ruby and the community.

As a born Rubyist (That is I started programming with Ruby) hopefully this article will get enough traction to make people start looking into having Ruby be as easy as it should be to start with.
Don't give a salary figure in the first place ;-)
As a native speaker, I stumbled over it also. I've never seen it before. It may be idiosyncratic to Doctorow, but it's not in common usage.
The linked article goes into detail.
The banks website seems to be at https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/ .. but Chrome says the SSL certificate is signed by an unknown authority, who claims to be VeriSign.
Are you seriously going to argue that a robot couldn't make a big mac and frys, even using 1980s technology?)

Yes. It's quite hard to operate a robot safely and reliably in an environment that was designed for humans. Especially when said humans may be around at the same time, displacing stuff, walking around, complaining when the robot pours something boiling hot over them by accident, etc.

Once that is completely solved, though, you're looking at plain old math and market forces. If a robot gets the job done and is cheaper - guess who gets the job.

I guess I don't see how obsoleting the housekeeper or the barista is any more disruptive than obsoleting the assembly line worker.

I think you forget that the assembly line worker has not really been obsoleted. They have merely been reduced during industrialism and are now being outsourced to india. But many people are still employed at an assembly line. Quite likely the pants or shirt you are wearing were sewed in Bangladesh, on a slave labor assembly line.

Imho the industrial revolution will pale in contrast to the robot revolution. Think about what happens when these assembly jobs really go away. When robots are advanced enough to perform generic, finicky or complex tasks cheaper than humans.

I don't think baristas and housekeepers account for much there.

But how about transportation, manufacturing, construction, military, nursing (already happening in japan), agriculture, cleaning (who likes cleaning?), pick & pack...
Lies, damn lies, and visualizations
Ok, it is not obvious from the video but it seemed that the chat functionality is built into your system and it seems like some JavaScript-based GUI similar to Meebo. It might be easier to let people copy/paste and send a link to each other via whatever chat they are already using. Implementing a chat system seems like a distraction here. Again, I can only speculate about the actual system, so maybe there's no point for me to suggest features until I can actually try out a first version.
On a slight tangent, if you work at a large corp that has very organised payroll/HR procedures, such as reviewing pay only at fixed times (eg. once every 12 months, as my current employer does), how hard is it usually to argue for a payrise ahead of schedule?

If the next pay review is 6 months away, is it feasible to argue for a payrise now, or would managers have very limited power to fight against the HR process?
This post strikes me as not really about Ruby but about software development in general and specifically developing web apps. There isn't much insight here, of course it is hard and the language and framework don't matter much.
I bike.

Something about the scale of the American suburb makes walking totally infuriating for me. I need the wind in my hair and the landscape sliding by to really relax - inching by the same cookie-cutter houses every day kills me.

I enjoy walking in the city or the park, but I can't just impromptu do that.
It still puzzles me that people feel like their legal privacy was violated by the info gathering. The wifi was broadcasting, they were in public, they recorded some data. If this is illegal, I don't think it should be. Its analagous to taking pictures of people in public. Its in public. They're just standing there with an antenna.

Granted, it seems a bit creepy, and I don't fault people for feeling violated. But legal action seems silly. (I know that laws may be different in these various countries - I'm saying that this _shouldn't_ be illegal if it is)
It's one thing to record the signatures of open wireless networks in a given location. But, from what I hear, Google was also recording the payloads of the packets it intercepted. I can understand people being upset by this, especially if carried out on a large scale.
If a form is going to submit data over a secure channel, the page containing the form should be retrieved over a secure channel also. Otherwise what’s to stop somebody intercepting and modifying the pages HTML so that the form submits the data in plain text elsewhere?
Privacy laws are applicable to companies storing data, not on individuals that incidentally use someone's open network.

Also, they weren't just scanning for availability and signal strength, they were snooping the traffic and saving it.
I built a Lisp over a weekend some 20 years ago - 1989 I think - following the instructions and methods in Henderson's book.

Google for LispKit and you'll find out probably as much as I knew back then. I read the book during the week, then implemented it all in about 24 hours over Saturday and Sunday. Run first time.

Never did anything with it, though ...
Some time ago I've blogged about it,

"Top 10 Tips (+1) to Get a Pay Raise"

http://codemonkeyism.com/top-10-tips-1-pay-raise/
Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast
Best bit:
Crawford County State’s Attorney Tom Wiseman is currently bringing five felony charges against Michael Allison...who recorded police officers and other public officials he thought were harassing him...He faces up to 75 years in prison for the recordings... Given the deference law enforcement officials get from courts and prosecutors, how can a citizen who feels he’s being harassed or treated unfairly by law enforcement protect himself?

"The only person doing any harassing here is Mr. Allison, who was harassing our public officials with his tape recorder," Wiseman says. "They may have problems with some bad police officers in some of your urban areas. But we don’t have those problems around here. All of our cops around here are good cops. This is a small town. Everyone knows everyone. If we had a bad police officer here, we’d know about it, I’d know about it, and he’d be out. There’s just no reason for anyone to feel they need to record police officers in Crawford County."

And that's exactly why it is neccessary to tape them