skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technical errors in articles like this stand out so glaringly when they are about something you know. It reminds me to never rely on journalism for technical details about something I don't know well.

"To make Chemcor, Corning ran the sheets through a "tempering" process that set up internal stresses in the material. The same principle is behind the toughness of Pyrex glass, but Chemcor was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment."

NOoo - the strength of Pyrex DOES NOT come from being tempered, it is a chemical difference. Pyrex glass is a brand of borosilicate, and it's the high silica content and boron that make it both more mechanically durable and resistant to thermal shock. I don't even think you CAN heat temper borosilicate.

This has been a message from Chem lab dork, carry on, carry on...
When every Verizon store, kiosk, and multitude of resellers are able to finally show the iPhone next to an Android phone, Apple will take a big slice of Android's pie. Verizon has 90M subscribers and the cell phone buying cycle is only 1.5 years - Apple will sell millions to Verizon customers.
1) I refuse to believe banks and insurance companies have I/O that can't be satiated by commodity hardware. InfiniBand QDR can transfer 40Gbit/sec with 1µsec latency. That's easily 200,000 synchronous round-trip messages per second PER link. If you can deal with higher latency, those can be aggregated and you can easily exchange tens of millions per second. Let's take this one step further: ECNs and automated trading systems. Their latency and I/O requirements make banks look like amateurs, yet they almost entirely run on off-the-shelf hardware and systems. Billions are at stake in these systems.

2) When was the last time Google or Amazon or NASDAQ or Arca was actually out of service because of hardware failure or maintenance?
One thing that may address your first two points is that Google demoed at I/O a web presence for the Android Market that would work in conjunction with the push service on the phone. Buy an app on the web and it's pushed to the phone.

I imagine that if done right this would allow them to match Apple in terms of providing more real estate for promotional content from app developers, and reduce the barrier to buying since you can preview an app, hit "buy," and immediately have it on the phone.

I also think the lack of a good web presence for Android Market is holding back device adoption. I know of several people who are dissatisfied with their iPhones but are hesitant to jump to Android without being able to see if there are third-party apps out there that are analogous to what they've already got on their iPhones.

I agree that one of the major problems with the Android Market at present is certainly this culture of "I won't pay for an app -- and if I have to pay, I'll copy it to my SD card and delete it within the 24 hour return window." A developer has little incentive to make a really, really good paid app if a good proportion of their users would pirate it. There's a tipping point where you can instead make more money by making a mediocre ad-supported app.
Agreed. I really didn't need to take those philosophy classes to become a software engineer.
I haven't used it myself, but I hear DoubleTwist is a great Android app for music, and the desktop app seems pretty good.

Also keep in mind that a lot of people loath iTunes (I think it's great on OSX, but I probably wouldn't want to use it in Windows).
Getting a PhD in Computer Science is premature optimization.
An excellent idea, maximizing use of the available road space.
Alcatel-Lucent recruiting devs to help foster kids
DuckDuckGo is a perfect name.

When I first saw an article about it here, I clicked on it because I was surprised that there's a product with such a silly stupid name.

A few months later I wanted to try the service (because of HTTPS) and I didn't need to look the name up.

It's an unforgettable name that immediately draws your eyes to it. A purple cow.
I think people are assuming that if you ported your COBOL app to a cluster you'd use some kind of middleware that provides the same "inherent" reliability that the mainframe environment provides. The cost of such middleware is an open question.
Android = OS
iPhone = Gadget
PBS's Frontline did a report in May 2010 called College, Inc., detailing some of the ups and downs of for-profit colleges and universities:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/?utm...

It's about 45-50 minutes long. Worth the watch. If you're having trouble viewing it in Safari, try Firefox.
I would love to see some startup disrupt the banking industry.
I don't disagree that every technical community has its own terms. But it's very difficult to broaden that community by restricting yourself narrowly to those terms. To me, "an arrow that works like a monad" reads like a recursive definition: if you don't understand how one works, you can't understand the other.

The net effect is that your community is going to be composed of people who made a conscious effort to break through the communication barrier. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; you end up with a small, focused group of very smart people. But it doesn't buy you many converts in the industry.
Daringfireball was quoting WIRED's Fred Vogelstein:

"The true comparison is between Android and iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system. Android’s activation numbers are not device dependent. Apple’s shouldn’t be either. If we are going to truly compare the two mobile OSs we need to include sales of iPads and iPod Touches. Add them into the mix and the data shows that Android is catching up but still isn’t close."

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/30/vogelstein
I think you should just go out and do it instead of reading about it. Don't get into that rut.
It's ironic that what developers hate about iPhone is precisely what makes it ideal for developers who want to make money. This being the walled garden, the inability to easily install free third party programs, and also the fact that there is a financial barrier to entry (a Mac, plus a dev fee) means that other developers are reluctant to make their apps free in the first place - meaning you don't have to compete with people giving their apps away!

It's a brilliant, (albeit arguably evil), strategy by Apple to create a viscous circle where developers bind themselves to iPhone, which means the good apps wind up there and thus users buy the product and pay for superior apps, which makes it more lucrative to develop for, and so on. And they sell some extra Macs and make money on dev fees, and take a cut out of every app store sale. It's really a simply ingenious grand strategy which has worked unbelievably well for them, however unethical or limiting some people might think it is.
Why not just build the light rail over the highway, like they do in Bangkok?
I think the JUnit code is well written.
http://github.com/KentBeck/junit
I think there are new banks starting up and some probably see themselves as high tech operations. But in that sector that means J2EE and not Ruby on Rails.
I really doubt a "team of geniuses" collaborated to "plant the seeds for all these interpretations and ideas in our heads." For one, that isn't how movies are generally made and seems like a pretty boring way to approach making a movie like inception. For another, there's no "team of geniuses" credited — just Christopher Nolan.
I would pay a good price for a decent iPod touch style android tablet. 7" seems to be the pattern which is too big really.
Uhm. Wikileaks is based in Sweden? I don't think so.
This only works if you exclude the entirety of commodity and stock exchange business, which runs almost completely on off-the-shelf hardware. I'd say this is a pretty big part of western civilization. Of course, the I/O requirements of these systems massively eclipse that of "puny" banks, logistics/distribution, manufacturing, and insurance companies.
I didn't say 3MB/sec was enough... just that it was fair. there's a difference, you know.

I suspect the differences you saw after moving had to do with how active the other users of the disk were. this may have been chance, or it may have been Linode's policy of pro actively doing things about heavy disk users.
Hacking the Smart Grid
We could look at some data. Consider Payscale.com's salary data: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp

Math yields a starting median pay of $46,400 and a mid-career median of $88,300 -- higher than most other degrees.
The Microsoft .LNK patch is finally live
That's what he said. The parents would pay you a flat rate (today's tuition) and you would pay their kid's tuition 10-15 years from now. Assuming the bubble burst before then, you would make the difference in price between today's tuition and the tuition of the future.
Ironically, if more people took the time to learn the language and the browsers they wouldn't need to load a few hundred kb of [insert library] just to validate a form. Those "10,000s of lines of client code" would be reduced significantly.
Thanks for the link! This is actually really freaking cool.
Perfect timing. I need to pick a name today. Getting tired of Newco.
> SAS or HP mean nothing (by themselves) to the buyer.

That's a matter of perspective. A big company identified only by initials definitely suggests things to me, they're just not very good things.

Of course, that doesn't matter if they're aiming for megacorporateenterprisemultinationals, since I don't run one of those.

On the other hand, it does matter when I come to buy hardware and software for a small business, or as an individual consumer. Then I want things like good customer service and the flexibility to buy exactly the configuration I want. Unfortunately, these initials-names only suggest to me overpriced, production-line, bloat-ridden products, with unhelpful or inaccessible customer support unless I buy an expensive contract I'll probably never use.

I would far rather buy from vendors who appear to have some level of personal involvement in their companies and who make me feel like a valued individual customer and not just another revenue stream on some bean counter's dashboard at head office. That doesn't mean you have to look amateurish, but I find interesting names like Smart Bear much more attention-grabbing than something that sounds like an infection I don't want to catch!
Why "In-Person" Isn't All-Powerful
It's odd that the tuition rates are the same. I went to a very expensive University and for many majors it made plenty of sense. The school probably could have charged twice as much for computer science because of how many people I knew graduating straight out of undergrad with six figure jobs, but if you're an English major I can't imagine it being worth it.
http://progit.org/book/
In the best case we would have the choice to sync over the cloud or via a computer. Given the hard choice of cloud vs PC, I'll take PC syncing everytime - I don't like having to go through a 3rd party for privacy and reliability reasons, not to mention that my business travels often take me to places where the cloud isn't ubiquitous yet (for example I'll be working for 5 days on a project in northern NH were there is no cell coverage).

YMMV of course but the cloud model doesn't work for me right now and while I may be in the minority, I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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I agree, with the caveat that it shouldn't be done on a curve. College should be much harder than it is, but it should be theoretically possible for everyone in a class (of super-geniuses) to graduate.
There's a difference between motivating people to do their job better, and convincing people to do the job in the first place.

You would need to pay me a lot of money to convince me to work with COBOL full-time. Once you've convinced me to do the job, paying me more won't make me any better at it.
Not really, building another deck on a road (assuming that's the right solution for a given topology) is well understood technology wise. Adding a completely new, untried infrastructure for a vehicle class that nobody has any experience with will add unique challenges that may be difficult or even impossible to overcome. In practice, for instance, how would you deal with it if one of these monsters broke down? What will you do when a car has an accident with another car underneath one of them in such a way that you can't move it without further risk to the occupants?

How will the drivers deal with a vehicle that is in their perpetual dead angle ? How will the driver of the 'urban train' see the vehicles he's moving over and make sure that none of them get crushed at intersections in case traffic somehow got blocked?

China has some history of 'grand announcements' which are then not followed up on, and a few that they did follow up on that failed fairly spectacularly. We'll see if this one works out, I'm sceptical but who knows, maybe it will work.

The three gorges dam is also still holding up in spite of lots of nay saying so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
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Upvoted, seconded, and added to my CV. I was just thinking, in reading that article, that one of the biggest obstacles to selling the HART stack to management types are the names. Can you really, with a straight face, imagine standing before a room full of grey-haired VPs and saying "yes, we want to implement this with Hadoop using Hive, Flume, Hue, Pig, Oozie, Avro, and Zookeeper." And then explain that "Hadoop" is named after a teddy bear.
What, were you expecting Tech Crunch to check facts beyond a trip to Wikipedia? Actually seems like they can't even handle that a lot of the time. So, I guess WL is based in Iceland now or something, but I guarantee very few people actually care.
You can write a finite-but-longer-than-the-universe loop using any non-constant problem with large enough inputs. There are classes harder than NP, so NP-completeness is not particularly relevant.
This has nothing to do with the use of monads, but how they are explained. When your explain monads to people who don't no what monads are speach starts with "It is an arrow..." You are explaining monads to yourself, not to someone who doesn't understand monads (and consequently doesn't have a clue what arrows are.)

So far as I can tell monads are abstraction of state(though calling them abstractions of function application is more correct, calling it state is more intuitive to me, and how they are represented in the type system.) From there they get used for different things: Maybe == Nullable Types, List == lists, Either == Unions, St == Mutable State, IO == hide IO. Then a function that is pure and doesn't know about what your monad does gets invoked by the monad where the hidden state changes the flow of computation. Maybe performs a null check, List calls map, Either picks the type in the union then calls the function on that, St allows you to use and update the hidden state, IO performs IO then shares the result with you.

Now there is an explanation of a monad that doesn't assume you already know what a monad is. It may not be good since it basically says monads are sticky higher order functions masquerading as a data type, but there you have it.
It was not bricked. It was Facetime/MMS that disappeared.
Is "this kind of code" worth it? It certainly is aesthetically pleasing and somewhat terse compared to a parenthesis jungle. But that does outweigh the fact non-experts don't know exactly what the statement is doing?
That looks good.

But it seems they charge every time you send an email.

So does that mean that I can register and include their form on my landing page and they will store as many users that register for my service?

There is no upper limit or no point at which I will get charged (e.g. 500 subscribers) ?
Personally I think that any new banks should use NoSql to store their data and use haskell for their core code.
Yep, that's an important point: you should probably have chosen a different example. The one you used will either make people say "it's a lot better to write it in two lines" or "oh, cool, I can write one liners like that".

Your post is explaining and demonstrating the use of "and" and "or", whose purpose is to allow idioms which rely on short-circuiting logic to control side effects, but that particular example didn't involve side effects after the operator (which is the whole point).

Perhaps it would be a good idea to replace that example with one that shows what would happen if you used "and" in an "if". It would serve the same purpose as the one you have currently -- show the unintended effects of using the wrong flavor of operator -- without confusing people or unintentionally teaching bad practices.
'IPhone' implies 'iOS', but half of all iOS devices are not iPhones. The iPhone is a smartphone model. It should be compared to other smartphone models, not other mobile OSes. But ofcourse, if iOS sales were compared to Android sales, there'd be no contest. I'm sure Android will overtake iOS at some point though; Android handsets are getting cheaper and cheaper, while Apple cares more about profit margin than unit sales.
i've worked on code written during a phd that eventually graduated to a product.
my role was making it production ready.

code written during research is a complete mess, and necessarily so: you don't know what you're going to end up with. you try this, you try that, you hack it, you tweak it six different ways.
often things only work in a few very specific situations; generalising to more useful situations can be difficult.

a phd won't motivate you. the right environment will educate you on the latest techniques though and teach you to be critical of them and improve them.

you'll also learn how to write code quickly---i find deadlines in academia more intense than my industrial experience (perhaps because the outcomes are far less predictable).

i wouldn't do a phd part-time:

1. it's intense.

2. you want it to be over as soon as possible.
Daniel Ellsberg on WikiLeaks (Economist Interview)
This argument is increasingly common, but it misses the actual truth. Sure the difference in salary shrinking will increase the amount of time it takes to pay off the degree, but that is not the whole story.

1) Unemployment rates are inversly propertional to education level. The worst hit by the recession were those without college degrees. Who is going to bet that trend reverses in the near future? If anything the college grads are just going to suck up high school grad jobs they are overqualified for.

2) Type of job/ceiling. A lot of times you can get the same job with or without a college degree (see: Sales Representative), but the college degree usually means a better compensation structure and pathways up in the organization, even if the salary is not a huge difference for the first 10 years eventually the HS degree will reach a ceiling. I've even seen this in accounting between those that are CPAs and those that just have accounting degrees, or at upper level executives who have MBAs vs those that don't.

3) The cost numbers in these articles are invariably screwed up. $200,000 for a college degree? If you are actually price sensative go to a county college for 2 years and then a state school for 2 years. Total cost would be <$60,000 for the whole thing. In most states you would even have your choice of multiple schools.

My theory was that you should go cheap on the undergrad, if the name of the school matters so much, just go there for graduate school. I'd hire a guy with a grad degree and a state school over a really top shelf undergrad

(hence, state school for me and I just got hired at my job along with a bunch of guys who paid 4x or more for private engineering schools)
>5, There is a culture of "free" and "opensource" in the entire Android ecosystem and most apps are released for free or are ad-supported. Google seem to love this since if you use their ad system, they get a cut and therefore they don't seem to have an incentive to push paid apps to have wider availability.

This isn't entirely consumer-driven, IMO. I have no problem supporting developers, and I've bought the "donation" version of a number of apps to support developers, but the fact is that often as not when I look for an app to do something, the free app is the best choice available.

There are times I find myself wishing there were more quality apps I need out there that the developer would take money for, just to help end this notion that Android users don't want to pay for software.
Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce
Thanks for your insights on this.
Yep, got those installed. I wish the project drawer would have the same color settings that the main window. Also, folding is very nice on Textmate.
Of course a patent still wouldn't have helped in this case if it has been around for 50 years.
HTML5 Features, Tips, and Techniques you Must Know
Not sure the infrastructure is likely to be that much more inexpensive - the requirements for smooth gradients and strong foundations are going to be more than your average rail line, and they'll need to pay incredible care and attention paid to intersections.

That's even before they've taken into account the costs of building and testing enormous custom-designed vehicles rather than using tried and tested technology.

Alternatively, they could have sacrificed slightly more road space for a conventional light rail system, or even a bus lane and all the flexibility that comes with regular buses....
What’s the purpose of an education?

I ask this because it’s central to the topic. Is it to get a job or is it just to learn? If it’s the former, then we can have an ROI conversation, but if it’s the later then ROI doesn’t really apply.

FWIW, I worked in higher education for over 10 years, and I can assure you that universities don’t think it’s their mission to train students for the workplace.
How to Recruit a Frontend Hero
I think the reason it's making people reconsider their saving money to fulfilling experience ratios is not that they believe their lives to be shorter because of the photographs. Rather, it's very easy to take your own life for granted, especially if you're you experiences are repetitive (e.g. if you spend 40+ hours a week sitting in the same chair). This and other life-affirming art are minuscule forces when compared to the power society and psychic momentum can have on a person's direction. Reminding yourself not just that you may die at any time, but that you WILL die sometime, and realizing that sometimes you're not pursuing the goal of getting the most out of life but instead trying to live the most days is the more pure rationality.
Why Craigslist is such a mess
I come across the same situation often. In networks that support it, I just do the equivalent of "follow" (or "add friend" or "subscribe" or whatever it is called).

In networks that don't, I simply create a bookmark in 'Interesting People' folder using the comments/submission urls for that person -
eg. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=grease
or http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=grease