skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see a much larger donation coming the way of Khan Academy. Gates is in a philanthropic spree and if his recent remark is any indication, he has big hopes from education delivered through web.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/

In all, it’s a well-deserved feat for Khan Academy.
He convinced me at 29. That's about 4 years ago.
It works for many restaurants. Vie in Western Springs also has a pickling demo I'm thinking about going to; they also coordinate a co-branded CSA basket with classes. Restaurant demos are a very widespread practice.
Something is going to topple Facebook, but I very much doubt it will be Diaspora.
You had me until "I called the two companies we hired to improve our ranking." Google did not cost you $4 million, the fact that you were spamming Google did. As it very well should.
Grab Benefits From Pocket Folders
They are undoubtedly amongst the best promotional tools today. That is why thousands of business employers as well as industrialists are nowadays inclining towards A4 folder printing at a very rapid pace.
I think the competition vs. collaboration is a little off, but the general point about recognizing the rules of the game is spot on and very important. When you understand the rules you can choose to play, choose not to play, and may in some situations be able to change the rules to suit you better. (When you don't understand the rules and just have a vague sense of being treated unfairly, all you can do is whine, blame, and be miserable)
You guys all sell yourselves short. Anyone on Hacker News with any technical skill who is running a business that pays for its own decent office space has tons of things to workshop, and as long as you're based on a major metro area, people will sign up. We've done it multiple times. Stop blowing this off.
Heh, nope, I never knew that was on (drat) :) It was at a local pub in Lincolnshire.

Around here we have shed loads of micro-breweries.
Thanks for writing this -- it's awesome to see JIT principles boiled down to the point where you can easily understand the whole system. Please let us know if you publish the tutorial; I'd love to see more detail on the JIT. In particular, it would be the perfect template to demonstrate feedback-directed optimization opportunities and to measure the overhead of tracing; it would be incredibly interesting to see what has to be done to make the JIT outperform the AOT compiler.
Transcoding best practices
10 ways to kill pair programming
Revolving House
I'm in IT and six out of the dozen or so managers I've reported to in my eleven years here have been women. (We're definitely a serious outlier—there was at least one time when my entire five- or six-level management chain was female except for the CEO.)

I haven't seen much direct evidence for the competition-vs.-collaboration model in our organization, but there's one generalization I can make: for whatever reason, on average the women have been far more competent than the men. I've encountered several men up the hierarchy from me who were indifferent, ineffectual or incompetent, but none of the women have been, and the sharpest woman I've worked for could run rings around the sharpest man. I suspect this happens because women have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously in IT. The main difference here seems to be that they can eventually get real career traction.
I think you are wrong about what sexism is, or what any -ism is. I can make all sorts of observations without falling into an -ism:
There aren't many women in tech. I am not sexist.
A majority of convicts are minorities. I am not racist.
Older people are more likely to be ignorant of new technology. I am not ageist.

Ism's are not about making the observation in the first place, they are about being reluctant to drop your assumptions when you meet an exception.
The Rise of Social Network Ad Spending
Reloaded it and it started quickly.
Where are you now Eugene Alemzhin? (invented Shariki, the first match 3 game)
It's very convenient to be able to pass a partially built query, including a limit, into a function which adds more conditions. Why would you not want to be able to do that?
What A Double-Dip Recession Would Mean For Venture Capital
I'd suggest taking the trends from TREGNY (but not the actual values, as they are skewed high). Then taking scrapes from craigslist, leaving off the outliers, and then fitting those values to the trend curves and adjusting based on the input you get from your form. There's a bunch of data out there already, might as well use it in conjunction with what ever you're doing right now.
The ideal seed stage team
Practice doesn't make perfect. It only get you 80% there and the remaining 20% is from a combination of sweat-equity and talent.

At some point, the efforts of B-grade practice sessions result in a saturated level of performance.

If there's something we should teach our kids, it's that doing "OK" is not good enough - you should focus on doing YOUR BEST.

The spirit of competition and "winning" is that you are giving 100% of your effort to the goal at hand - be it winning a race or leaning a new hacking skill.
What do decisions and devices like this one do for the Andriod brand? not a lot of good I would immediately think. This is probably google's biggest problem.
Sure, there's Guinness. But that's not really all that's widely available; New Belgium stuff tends to be massively available, and Dogfish Head is not that far behind.
I didn't have any issues running it in Chrome. Loading rather quickly and stayed responsive the entire time even though I have quite a bit running on my dev box right now (Eclipse, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Skype, etc).

Anyway, I thought it was cool. The effect was somewhat lost on me, howerver, as the community I spent most of my childhood years in is what many people think of when you ask them to imagine a stereotypical redneck trailer park: dirt roads, "mobile" homes that should be condemed, broken down cars on cinder blocks, couches in the front yard, etc. I was still impressed though.
Yup, it was Mado. The demo was definitely worth it. You get to go home with a few cuts of pork as well.
My point is also that there's (almost) no point in the encryption at all. If Diaspora is going to be P2P, then any compromised node can hijack the data. The only point of encryption would be to protect information enroute. Once information gets to a node, you either need trust, white box encryption, or hardware based DRM.
Yes, we could benchmark that. Most likely our framework would be orders of magnitude slower. There's a couple of reasons for this:

- Data transfer is slow. Streaming the data in is not possible on all browsers.

- There is a very high sunk cost for each single computation, that is multiple times bigger than the time it takes for the average map/reduce function to run. This constant overhead per step is hard to minimize.

- A single map or reduce computation is further chunked down into multiple iterations of the same function. This is to avoid the "slow script" warning that browser show for long-running tasks. This technique is necessary and further adds overhead to the computation.

As a result our framework might not be well suited for many traditional MapReduce scenarios like word count. More suited tasks are ones that have a lot of overhead even if I ran them on my own cluster. This could be any tasks that involves pulling in data from a third party that is not local to the computation. For example counting word frequencies in all wikipedia pages will be vastly faster on our cluster than it could ever be on a single machine, even if we have only few workers.

We still need to figure many things out. The opportunities here are the availability of idle processing power and the possibility to sandbox computations in browsers. We need to find out exactly what the best way is to exploit those opportunities.
I love watching the videos on that site, but I find a month later it's like I never saw the video. I'll revert back to not knowing how the immune system works for example. Any memory/learning tips for that?
Look forward to the tutorial!
Sidenote - Khan Academy is hiring: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/eng/1920729182.html
Get Company Intelligence from Workstreamer
I agree with your assessment of Bayern but have not been exposed to Blackfoot. I am partial to Kettlehouse, myself. Both Bayern and Kettlehouse are within walking distance of me, which is very nice.
I don't think that's it. I think people will go out and drink regardless of whether or not there is any advertising. But when it comes to say the name of the beer you want, that's when advertising comes into play. Deciding which nearly-identical product to order is hard. So you can reduce the problem to deciding what ad you liked better, and then your problems are solved.

Also, "alcohol is a toxic industrial solvent." So is water.
I've used it in the past. I didn't find it to be especially useful myself. Mostly what I wanted was the smart completion for PHP. I've played with if for C++ and it was pretty nice, but given that I never write C++ not useful for me personally. I've been told all it would take is writing some sort of simple parser for the completion to work, and it's been bought up on the CEDET mailing list several times but never gone anywhere. (Admittedly, I could probably write one myself if I wasn't so lazy so I'm as much to blame for it not going anywhere as anyone else.) I can't really speak to the UML stuff as I've never used it, but it looks pretty neat if you're into that kinna thing.
Clicking Facebook "Like" Buttons Gives Owner Permission To Spam You (w/ demo)
Look at it this way...in the US, lets say a good job in an office pays $50,000 per year, and a doctor in the US makes $100,000. Now imagine there is a wealthy nation in Europe with a few entrepreneurs who have more money than time, and they need people familiar with American business practices and fluent in American English to complete some basic tasks.

Of course they could find these workers locally, but let's say that because of a strong economy and high cost of living, the average salary is $250,000 per year in that country. The entrepreneurs go online and find a few Americans who would otherwise have been working the aforementioned "good jobs" that pay $50,000, except that the economy is so bad that those jobs are unavailable. The entrepreneurs hire the Americans at a rate of $100,000 to perform the job remotely.

The Americans get a better salary they would have otherwise gotten, and they get to work from home. The Europeans get a much cheaper worker ($100k vs $250k). Everybody's happy. I don't see what labor laws would be violated, and I don't see who would be hurt by such a scenario.
That's fine. Care to explain your thoughts? Just curious.
Gold Market is not “Fixed”, it’s Rigged
You lose what you don't use. This is normal.
I mentioned this the other day in a comment, but I figured it gets a lot more visceral punch if you actually see it happen, so I wrote up the consequences in an article and wired together a working tech demo. I haven't seen anybody exploit this misfeature "in the wild" yet, but then again I'm not exactly plugged into the social networking scene.

It astounds me that somebody thought making the Like button be silent opt-in to "permission" marketing was a good idea.

Added bonus points (not covered in article): this creates a security hole in every Liker's account, because it slaves the security of their News Feed to the security of every site they have ever liked. Pretend you like something published by Scrappy Startup A. Six months pass. Scrappy Startup goes out of business and their URL gets grabbed, or Scrappy startup gets their server owned, or Scrappy Startup merely permits defacement of the contents of their HEAD. This lets the attacker immediately assert publishing privileges for all connections created by Likes (6+ months ago), and then spam the connected Facebook News feeds with live URLs carrying an endorsement from Scrappy Startup.

Now pretend Scrappy Startup is, or purported to be, Obama. (Thumbnail sketch: you and 10,000 other people favorite a picture of Obama hugging two puppies titled "Obama Gives Constituents a Lift", six months later the Facebook login crowd sees "Obama Gives Constituents a Lift: Click here and put in your bank account details to receive your instant stimulus package".)
Software Freedom Law Center to Open Indian Office
Get a quarter or a half pig from Slagel Farms through them. It's cheaper than supermarket pig, no-shit blind-test 10x better, and the Mado staff is unbelievably cool about the whole thing (Rob Levitt helped carry my pig out to my car during the dinner rush).

Can't say enough good things about that place.
Sure, elegance is attainable in any language and I definitely agree that large rewrites (especially involving a language change) are at best perilous, however it seemed to me that the OP's point was largely about common attitudes.

Having seen a few large projects detonate under similar circumstances as described in the movie I believe he has a point. In all instances the timeline went something like this:

- several year old codebase (now bloated with so many change requests the original design is completely buried)

- new project manager enters stage right with a gleam in his and and a plan to "modernize" the codebase

- Ruby selected as the language of choice for the rewrite

- 8 months to a year of code churn later project is abandoned

Now given language hopping large scale rewrites are typically a bad idea, especially if you're converting an existing shop with a different language of choice and established workflows, one has to ask what would lead any otherwise rational individual to decide engaging in a project of this scope is viable.

In all of the instances of this kind of project flameout I've observed a PM (or higher) was so enamored of some "sexy"* new technology that all other concerns where cast aside and predictably carnage ensued.

* For values of sexy that include: Ruby, NoSQL and just about any other arguably (im)mature tech that's getting a lot of column inches in the tech blog arena.
For web applications? Watir. Unit tests are great and all, but not that useful compared to high-level functional tests that tests the stuff users are actually interested in doing. With limited time and limited resources, write Watir tests first.

Test #1: Sign up. Did it work? Were all parameters set correctly?
Test #2: Log in. Did it work? Are you logged in as the correct user?
Test #3: Something that touches your most important business logic. Can the logged in user add an item to her shopping cart? Post in her blog?

Just a hundred tests like that gets you a long way, and doesn't take that long to write.
If you're watching it passively like it was a sitcom on television or something you're not going to have very good recall.

If you want to remember more try taking notes, quizzing yourself, reading up on related areas, applying what you learned to your daily life, etc.
Cracking commercial quantum cryptography
I have a male cousin who's parents absolutely refused to supply gender specific items. Going so far as to purposely ban toy weapons and other "kinetic and violent" items from the toy chest. By four he was turning anything and everything into a sword or a gun -- legos were assembled into firearms, airplanes were turned upside down and held by the tail as a mock gun, sticks and cardboard tubes were swords and clubs...finally after trying to put the lion back in the cage, at 7 or 8 they finally relented and let him join the rest of the world.

The whole exercise seemed like an utterly pointless endeavor to everybody else...boys will generally find kinetic ways of expressing themselves, girls will generally find non-kinetic but more social ways -- prompting or no prompting.

Most surprising is watching my female cousins and nieces grow up, several of whom were quite physically active (doing more kinetic type play activities, climbing, wrestling, etc.) until 5 or 6 when they all very quickly toned that part of their activity patterns and started upping their social patterns. I think this had to do with their development of more complex speech patterns.
I find economics, more than almost any other topic of discussion amongst techies, elicits an incredibly strong Dunning-Krueger effect. Mention economics, particularly something like Austrian economics which doesn't have complex mathematical models, and all of the sudden everybody is an expert.

I don't pretend to understand the vagaries, and I tend to read Paul Krugman columns, but the vehemence in which people who are completely unqualified in the field will attack expert opinions is stunning to me.
I prefer an analog of Zawinski's Law here:

"Every company attempts to expand until it can make loans."
To be specific: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve
We just made some improvements (and will continue to) on Quizlet Search. Shoot me an email at phil@ (site domain) with any more feedback.
Gruber shouldn't make legal or political commentary. He's already on the line with a lot of stuff he talks about, good thing he keeps it to 2-3 sentences.
Maybe it's more like Greenspun's tenth rule: Any sufficiently large organisation contains an ad-hoc, informally specified, [bug-ridden] implementation of a bank.
I would like to see the same outcome as the author of this post, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. The television content business (cable TV networks) and the television distribution business (cable system operators) have a very mutually benefical relationship with regard to bundled services. It's like the crux of the whole model. Steve Burke (COO of Comcast) was refreshingly plain spoken about this at AllThingsD back in June. Google & Apple will have to end-run the service providers TV offerings using the web (probably delivered on the same pipe) to compete.
Foreign Policy: The Mobile Banking Revolution
> Throw some real lagers in there ... nobody could mistake a Boston Lager for a Budweiser

Budweiser is a real lager. It's a pretty faithful czech style pilsner.
Copyrighting Fashion: Who Gains?
" because most companies are not in the business of teaching or evangelism, nor should be/can be in that business"

Actually most companies _should_ be in the evangelism and teaching business. The marketing is invaluable. And I bet more companies then you know do this. For example Google just had an event at the GooglePlex for small business owners on how to better user adwords (or something like that - I heard second hand from a friend thats a local small business owner).

Even if you can't make a profit at it many businesses actively support user groups and evangelism groups. For example I share a building with Engine Yard and Sauce Labs. Both actively support the relevant user groups with space and time.
Anatomy, physiology and pharmacy are susceptible to investigation via the scientific method. The economy is not.

Furthermore, the layman had best not mess with his own treatment in many cases: "Give me antibiotics, they worked last time I was sick!"
yes i agree with your comment - men are now coasting - that is - they move on inertia - riding the male system designed 2000 years ago - but women have the momentum and therefore they will conquer the workplace within 50 years

i have been researching this topic lately and as i wrote here http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/about/ women have kept alive from generation to generation the memory of a society where females were rulers of men

this information comes from the book -when god was a woman- http://www.amazon.com/When-God-Woman-Merlin-Stone/dp/0156961... especially this quote

in the original female society

–all authority was vested in the woman who discharged every kind of public duty – the men looked after domestic affairs and did as they were told by their wives – men were not allowed to undertake war service or to exercise any functions of government or to fulfill any public office – such as might have given them more spirit to set themselves up against the women – the children were handed over immediately after birth to the men who reared them–

http://books.google.com/books?id=plkmFjler8cC&printsec=f...
I understand handset makers not providing timely upgrades (who wants to spend engineering/support $s on software upgrades for a sale you already made to a customer [really, a customer of your customer] who probably won't hold any loyalty to your brand either way), but why are so many new devices coming out with really old versions of Android? I've never really seen anything like that before... PC makers are ready to go with Windows Next the day it's out.
Which of those two styles is being presented as superior?
Cheap plug: Come on down to Colorado and check out the Great American Beer Festival.

Here's the list of breweries:

http://www.greatamericanbeerfestival.com/breweries-exhibitor...

It's a really great event for anyone who loves Beer:)
Depends on how you define lager. According to the Bavarian Purity Law it's not even a real beer since it uses rice, much less a lager.
Blackfoot is in Helena. My office used to be right across the street from the brewery. They don't bottle at all and I don't think they ship kegs very far. In Missoula, I know you can get some at McKenzie River or at Missoula Ale House. Actually, there website has a list of places. http://www.blackfootriverbrewing.com/beerfinder.html

Blackfoot also does a lot of one-off batches that only last a week or two. They like to experiment.
I think it's the rice that makes it so cost effective.
Ahhh. It's like a breath of fresh air.
Now I officially have a reason to visit Montana! Where would you recommend a beer lover go?
F5 Week in Review, August 23rd – 27th, 2010
I'm not surprised. When I first found out Dell was re-entering the "small devices" sector I decided I was going to stay far away from anything they produced. I was burned on the Axim X50v and I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.

It was for close to the same reason as mentioned in the article as well (outdated system software). I bought it on the promise of an upgrade from WinMo 5 to WinMo 6 and while they delivered on the promise of WinMo 6 it was many months behind the expected release date and was so buggy and slow that it was unusable. Though that may have been the fault of WinMo more than the device itself. They never did release an update to fix any of it, either.
What characters are allowed unencoded in query strings?
With in-depth SAS mining, you are likely to recover the cost of a $2K workshop out of the gates with a day of consulting. I'm pretty sure 37 sessions offer "soft", feel good knowledge.
I like this. As one of the folks working on Djangy.com, I'd like to apologize for their required use of App Engine.

It's coming, guys :-)
You'd be annoyed too if people continued to misconstrue what you were saying in order to attack a strawman.
Thanks, I read book for version 2, and I will skim for version 3.
> Depends on how you define lager

Bottom fermenting. Many grains are used in lager. Some even have maize in them.
I think this may be a smart move. It works from a charitable perspective, but it's also strategic for Google to keep an eye on the other side of the digital divide as more and more low-income households become wired.
Are You Ambitious Enough?
Would be good to retitle it. This is a really excellent article and I suspect there are a lot of people who will skim past any link with Clojure in the title.
I use Ruby and I love the language. I think every developer gets flack for using whatever tool they're using. Honestly, why do other people care what language you use? If you're comfortable with PHP, use PHP. If you love Ruby, use Ruby. But if you're not using it, why should anyone care what someone uses? I might make it known that I don't like PHP or Java. But I won't say that I think PHP programmers suck.

To draw some parallels, the detractors remind me of the opponents of gay marriage. Sure, they might not approve of it. But it's certainly not their business to judge what language anyone should use. The trolls out there aren't good for the programming ecosystem. Use whatever tool that makes you happy.