skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool! What is the science backing this? Is it coming out of studies or some theoretical modeling? I've been wondering what the most efficient speed for moving traffic was on a typical highway for a while.
That's not really true. Bands can, and do, use Facebook pages as effectively as they used Myspace pages. You can include audio, tour dates, etc on Facebook pages quite easily. In fact it's my sole means of finding out when/where my favorite bands are touring now.

Facebook pages are even better, because this can apply to anything, not just bands. I also get informed of the latest Abstruse Goose, updates to favorite iPhone apps, etc, all through Facebook. It's just up to the owner of the page to use it effectively.
The Future of Lighting
Should be easy to implement an airgap firewall on a plane or an oilrig.
I'm currently reading Chris Smith's (author of this post) book 'Programming F#' (the iPhone app version). I highly recommend it if you are interested in F#.
Have you submitted that as a patch?
Any idea on what edge cases you might be missing out on that would make your version X times faster? Or, why their version is so slow?
It's ambiguous, so the behaviour is undefined. The author should change the sentence to make it conform to the standards.
China's nine-day traffic jam
Actually my understanding is that with Android you can't remove the crap apps that are pre-installed.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/07/android-j...
Except a major difference is Facebook has proven they are very talented and capable of making really well designed, easy to use and relatively bug free apps. Myspace could not even come close to pulling that off.
It really depends on the business. There are a couple of local businesses here that I follow: a liquor store, a crepe cart, a coffee shop, etc. They all regularly post with specials, events, new dishes/type of coffee/beer, etc. YMMV, but knowing that I can pick up grilled fig, honey and goat cheese crepes on the way to work tomorrow is pretty cool in my book.

Though I imagine most pages are not quite so well utilized. These are all small, local businesses.
Define what constitutes a finished product.
I don't know if it cripples you but it certainly makes the problem domains that you are going to be able to tackle effectively smaller. But a lot of the time you are going to get the most speed improvement by just looking for an appropriate algorithm.
Well, to be fair, the best parsers do handle it correctly. Frequently the binding logic in Perl or Python or whatever will then proceed to get it wrong! And if you've got anything more complicated than a straight C binding and it actually tries to do stuff for you, you can just forget about it working correctly.

When I say I'm still waiting to see the software that does it correctly, I mean like end-user-level software, not the parsers.
Try testing it against a standard format landing page with

- basic explanatory text highlighting the benefits in bullet points

- a picture of a blurred face and the same revealed face (probably rotated pretty girls in a non-"adult" context)

- a big green "chat now free" button and smaller "watch our introductory video" and "create an account" links

my prediction is your bounce rate will drop significantly and number of people chatting will go up.
F5 Week in Review August 16th – 20th, 2010
These guys are mostly product development and marketing guys, and are the experts in the "what people want" side. The startup founders will bring technical backgrounds to the table; they don't need advisors who can tell them how to build things, they need advisors with insight into what to build and how it can be turned into a company. The combination of technical founders with product-guy advisors could be quite formidable.
You can't solve all problems with machine learning and data mining. How would you apply those methods, e.g., to psychological experiments or test planing when every single test costs a considerate amount of money?
Maybe you could retort that you consider typing to be an a disruption to your thinking, something to be minimised both in time, physical discomfort and disruption by touch-typing in Dvorak.
One strategy that I've used before is to write every program as a library, then put a very thin command-line program in front of it. All new functionality goes into the library, then gets exposed.

That gives the best of both worlds. I have my usable program. And later I can easily integrate it into any other library that can benefit.
I'm guessing that none of the people commenting on the original article have ever hired anyone. There's plenty of precedent for this. There are things you aren't allowed to take into consideration when hiring (e.g. sexual orientation, religion, etc) and so as an interviewer, I simply don't ask anything that could result in me knowing. Even social break-the-ice questions like "what did you do at the weekend?" are off limits at interview stage. The reason is to protect myself and the company; if we don't hire a candidate because they lack skills, they can't turn around and sue us on spurious grounds.

So no serious interviewer is looking at FB anyway - it opens up too many potential issues.
I've been using Ryan Tomayko's date/performance library, which is pretty fast, especially if you use it along with his date/memoize module.

http://github.com/rtomayko/date-performance
> One downside of going Kindle only is that you've basically killed any chance of selling books outside the US.

Not to mention that unless you're selling .mobi files through your own store you also kill your chances of selling to anyone who understands DRM.
Use Opera, some things on Facebook break and then you'll prefer email rather than launching another browser. Works for me!
Android Dev Says Admob Pays Very Well
No idea why but visiting this site crashes MobileSafari on my iPad.
What Apple has become to mobile software, Facebook is becoming to business web presence.

For better or worse.
I love the idea, but I want a version of this that is text only (Blurry Omegle). In general I prefer not having the camera involved.

EDIT: Just to clarify I think BOTH versions should exist, and within the same framework so that filtering applies universally (people could choose if they are interested in text/video/both). Especially since I Omegle at work, webcam only is a no-go for me.
I had a wrist health scare in I guess early 2006 now; tendonitis instead of carpal tunnel but the same sort of shooting pains. I changed a lot of things--keyboard I typed on, wearing wrist braces, posture, but among other things I switched to Dvorak. I think it is a important part of why I can type today without pain; whenever I am forced to do QWERTY at length (which is admittedly usually on poor keyboards) the pain starts to return.
Radical Opacity
There's this Dutch dating site Paiq that has the same technique. When chatting with someone, their profile picture gets unblurred after talking a while and hitting their interest words (eg "watching movies"). It lets you focus less on photos and more on personality.
>To understand the details you'll need to know about group theory.

I wrote up an algorithm to swap the minds back, and then proved its correctness, and its running time. It might be more understandable than the group theory proof. It's in a comment thread on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/d3ar3/tonights_futuram...
It didn't crash my iPad, but I can tell you that it uses flash, so you won't be able to see it anyway.

<insert obligatory flash on iPad complaining>
Airplane crashes and things like deepwater horizon are caused by a series of cascading failures and in some way insinuating that it is just malware (or Windows) is goofy. Obviously someone has an agenda.
A chart with one row for each "feature" and one column for each of six "competitors." There's checks and X's everywhere, except of course a glowing, highlighted column representing your company which just happens to be full of checks. C'mon, everyone knows this is bullshit; it's insulting.

Ouch. That one hurts ==> http://foreverlist.com/why#comparison_chart

I always thought it was a decent way to showcase your strengths, not a way to insult anyone. Obviously this comparison chart could include a row called "traffic volume" in which they would all blow away Foreverlist, but why would I showcase that?

Is this kind of comparison chart really that bad? What would you suggest?
From Unix, Sixth Edition:

/*
* If the new process paused because it was
* swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
* to savu(u_ssav). This means that the return
* actually returns from the last routine which did
* the savu.
*
* You are not expected to understand this.
*/
Seriously, how is this remotely workable?

On what legal principle do you ban the use of a single website for employment screening, yet essentially allow everything else.
Funny that you mention this, BlurryPeople was founded by the same people that are running Paiq.
His next line was "But most of us aren't searching Moby Dick, but rather a HTTP header, some user input, or a paragraph of a document."

A HTTP header is several orders of magnitude shorter than Moby Dick.
Would you write a headline saying "X HN member is Y" if I had an interesting project?

They have no affiliation with SA. It's not a small forum project that turned into extraterrestrial space flight.
Motorola's Android 2.2 Rollout: What a Mess
That wouldn't disallow them from screening in the pre-interview stage though, would it? If the company sees something on Facebook that they don't like, it'd be virtually impossible to prove what effect it had on their decision to not interview someone.
When I was briefly a tech journalist, "Tell me about your competition" was a required question for any interview (even for dominant players in a market). I was surprised by how many people seemed to stumble on it, but I guess they were worried about how it would affect the narrative of what I was writing. I always had a lot of respect for really honest, thoughtful answers.
Seven Business Principles That You Have to Follow
Good job of putting the book on the web. I bought the PDF version a long time ago and it was useful in getting me up to speed. Although I use MongoDB for most of my work and not CouchDB, I spend a good deal of play time with CouchDB. Also, CouchDB looks to be hackable at the implementation level: I saw a good article on hacking the Erlang source to customize CouchDB.
Clojure style multimethods in python
Leveraging the wisdom of crowds for fantasy football
Putting the fun in functional programming
If I remember correctly, Ning raised their last round at a ~$400M valuation. As a freemium Facebook competitor with Pmarca involved, you can sort of understand, but no one is going to pay >400M for a B2B social network maker.
I wonder if the Sep 1 deadline is for just JM or the actual JM/TM integration.
It's odd to point to C extensions when talking about the need for a GIL.

The solution seems obvious. Wrap them in a mutex by default and introducing an optional API call to remove the lock.

This way the important libraries will be fixed up gradually by the community and after a bit of time you won't have any C ext's left that will make use of the mutex and therefore the GIL will be gone.

That's the approach that rubinius is set to take.
I'm surprised iTunes on Windows doesn't get brought up more in this regard. Quicktime alone was considered intrusive bloatware even before they required it to use iTunes, then required iTunes to use an iPod/iPhone, and started installing other Apple apps and app updaters semi-randomly.
Fluidinfo receives an additional $170K in Series A second closing
That's true, but if it becomes a habit it would show up eventually, e.g. if the company never hired anyone of "type x".

It's very easy to not-hire someone anyway; you can say "not a cultural fit" which means they wouldn't get on with the team. But it would be suspicious if that correlated well with a readily observable characteristic.
Ha, I've been using CoolBook on my 15" MacBook Pro for a few weeks and it's been awesome. You can undervolt and underclock to keep the temp down. http://www.coolbook.se/CoolBook.html
Now make it so you have to eat the ghost labeled as the candidate you want to vote for, and it records the vote.

I might actually go to the polls.
I didn't find anything nice for linux when I was looking for one a few days ago.

I ended up buying a docking station / stand for my ipod touch, and using the Pomodoro Timer from Navel Labs. I like having it on a seperate tiny screen so that I don't have to go hunting for the application whenever I want to see how much time is left, etc..
It depends on how the carrier includes those applications on the phone. If they include the apps in the actual ROM image, a la Gmail/Browser/etc, then they cannot be uninstalled because they're part of the core ROM. If they include the apps installed in the user's data partition, just like any user-installed application would be, then it's uninstallable by the user.

Neither methods preclude the carrier from using the other method, and in many cases, carriers will use both. eg, Sprint has their unremovable NASCAR app as part of the ROM, yet also includes an uninstallable demo of Need for Speed on the user partition.
Cindy Padnos: Tips for Women Sourcing Venture
Fixing Common Bundler Problems
Situations like that are not why statistics is becoming the new in-demand skill. Expensive trials have existed for a long time. Petabytes of barely-structured data haven't.
It does seem that GNU is bigger on it than the BSDs these days, though. The modern BSD approach is to write libraries, and then have shell utilities just be frontends on those libraries (sometimes with multiple front ends sharing the same library).
Could very well be security theater. Or maybe the researchers missed another layer of seals that protected the screws.
Author: I sell 60 books on the Kindle to every one iBook
Venture Pimp: Barcode Hero is going to make shopping fun
Airliners.net has an interesting discussion about it by industry professionals http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

(and nutheads who like planes...)
I think it’s unlikely (also: prohibited by the German constitution) that Facebook is specifically outlawed. The proposed law probably prohibits searching for private and non-work related information which would include Facebook or a private blog but not a LinkeIn profile.

I don’t have any fundamental objections to that (something like ‘employers should have the right to screen applicants however they want’), I just think it’s stupid and won’t work. It’s unenforceable and useless.

That’s the article TechCrunch links to: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,713240,00... – this is only a small part of a much larger packet of laws aimed at improving employee privacy. The ban on videotaping of employees is at the moment making headlines in Germany and this is actually the first time I heard about this.
Using a feature comparison chart to try to explain your BENEFITS to a customer is entirely different than using it in a presentation to a potential investor to justify your market strategy.

That said, the ForeverList comparison chart is a bit overwhelming and could use some sprucing up, design-wise. You might also be more effective if you just drove your primary benefit home instead of listing so many different features/points of distinction.
I actually enjoy witty and clever commit messages. Just the other day one of my coworkers really enjoyed a commit message where I wrote "upgrayedd" instead of "upgrade".
But any readily observable characteristic would either manifest as something illegal to discriminate on (sexual orientation, weight, sex, appearance, etc.) or as something not illegal to discriminate on in the first place.

Illegal discriminatory hiring practices are very specific, so suspicious or not, it doesn't matter. There's no legal grounds for someone to sue a company because they used Facebook to determine that they don't like "Fight Club" or that they eat a lot of Burger King and were thusly not hired.
Shoply.com
Maybe a retract button instead of delete would be a fair compromise? The comment still appears but the karma is frozen and cannot be downvoted further
I used to write all my prose with dvorak and all my code in qwerty. Now that I write significantly more code than prose, I hardly ever switch over to dvorak. My dvorak speed has regressed a ton so it's not really worth it.

It's sometimes fun, though. I wrote this using dvorak.
LABjs & RequireJS: Loading JavaScript Resources the Fun Way
Thanks, it looks like it might be a nice way to learn an ML dialect, once I have time to dig into it.
5 Free Public Transit Routes in the US
Thanks for pointing that out. Now I am confused…
lots of other things are banned from being used for screening in many jurisdictions - age, gender, race, nationality, religious and political views and affiliations, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, parenthood, veteran status, medical history, benefit-claimant, expired criminal convictions etc.

Funnily enough you'll find most of the above on Facebook. Of course in practice all such laws are largely unenforceable, and rely on recruiters being law-abiding citizens
Or drop me an email. Address is in my profile.
Having worked for an OHA company, I can confirm that the alliance was really a 1-way deal. Google got the hordes of subcontractors needed to get the platform going, and in return the companies got to say they were allied with Google and not much else. OHA companies were never in the loop on major design/development issues with Rubin and his team.

I can't fault some of the member companies for trying to recapture some of the effort now, HTC being the biggest one of them.
Think about what Adobe After effects is doing, though: non-linear video editing. A bit more than a decade ago, you couldn't do that outside of Hollywood. A bit more than two decades ago, and even Hollywood couldn't do it - everyone still used celluloid.

I'm not sure that either video editing or fluid dynamics count as bloatware in my book, because the problems are inherently complex. Word processing, however...
I didn't fully get your point earlier, but it's clearer now. You raise valid points. By the way, two points that may interest you: (1) I personally filter my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-updates" you've mentioned - so it feels a lot more 'human' to me. I get exactly what you mean (mafia wars is a pet peeve)
(2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
This is a fair concern. I have not seen this in practice, though, and it might be a matter of the part of the world where I drive vs where other people drive. But let's cut to the chase with how the system works:

You are not supposed to be driving slower. You are supposed to be driving in average speed with the traffic. You may have had to slow down in the first place to do this. If you are just starting out, a good rule of thumb is to just leave space between you and the vehicle in front of you; keep pace.

The key is to maintain enough space between you and that vehicle that you can

(1) allow people to freely pass through (they are going to do something crazy to do it anyway if they do not have the space)

(2) absorb traffic waves

It is likely you will not be able to do #2 consistently. But you can let off your gas and not hit the break. Hitting the break is an instantaneous warning signal to people behind you, causing something of a reflex for them to also hit the brake. You are trying to avoid the brake-light wave. Letting off easy generally does not cause as much reaction.

What if you end up in a traffic jam anyway? Leave space anyway. It does help.

Aren't more accidents are caused by people getting panicky as they try to cross lanes of traffic that are closed to them? They force their way in or speed up to get around a bunch of people?

It is all about leaving that space so they are comfortable. Everything begins to move faster. And you are more relaxed in your driving because you are not freaking out at what is going on in front of you, allowing you the freedom to react as necessary to all the other kinds of problems traffic can bring.

Intentionally driving slower over a long distance is a misapplication of the principles. As the article points out, it is all about the average speeds. Frankly, very rarely does anyone get "pissed", and all they do is pass around you. And then they end up hitting their brakes and shifting out quickly. Passing != bad thing; we are not trying to win a race here. I have never been honked at.
I implemented just the subset of the Date API I needed for the application, so it didn't do conversions to other calendar formats (Julian/ordinal/commercial etc.).

I don't know why their version is so slow, I can only imagine that the conversion to Astronomical Julian Day (the Ruby Date internal representation) is expensive, inefficient or both.

I used year/month/day ints as internal representation, which was fast for my use cases (parse date string, format date string, compare two dates).
Yeah, while I enjoy the long format and the lively discussion (it keeps the car commute enjoyable), the TWiT podcast is very much an echo chamber. I've since stopped listening to it and instead have broadened my podcast list.
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS)
The article does reference tax cuts for the wealthy as a source of the problem.

"A generation of political decisions — regarding big business and labor, the deregulation of the financial industry and, yes, tax cuts for the wealthy — have brought our society to this sharply divided, socially and economically polarized place we now find ourselves."
Regardless of whether Dvorak is better on physical keyboards, it is definitely worse when it comes to soft keyboards, which are on the rise. I wrote about it here: http://macrael.com/blog/qwerty_rides_again.html but the gist is that since Dvorak puts frequently used characters next to one another, it makes it more difficult to recognize different words' patterns (think swype) which is what makes the autocorrect so good on today's phones.
Here is a question from a layman's (Stat 101) perspective: Why don't we see many Statistics PhDs, armed only with with a computer, access to free public data and some programming skills, CONSISTENTLY make a killing on Wall St?

Is it because Statistics fails once the number of variables & complexities increase to reflect the real life?
I did factor it in when deciding whether or not to take the job. In the end, I calculated I would be saving a bit on federal taxes because I would be using regional rail instead of driving (and thus paying for transportation with pre-tax money). It was enough to offset the local taxes.
You can remove them... if you have root (or in case of newer Motorola phones, can flash custom firmware).

That's why having the ability to replace firmware is important - you do not depend on manufacturer support for newer versions AND they can not force their crap on you.
"Or the biggest question ... how many teachers could have been kept on payroll if they hadn't built it?"

I'm not sure this is the question to be asking. Obviously the laid off teachers will be upset to see lavish spending as they are let go, but I would argue student achievement is the better metric. It's possible that a new building helps students learn at a faster pace than a low student to teacher ratio.
How Ruby's Arrays Are Implemented
Verizon + HTC Incredible + Froyo = Social Media Fail
Building a Scalable Key-Value Database: Project Hydracus
OMGWTFBBQ

THIS is making headlines about Internet innovation? Is the net over?
Understanding Private Browsing
Sure it does.

If X is the cost of running the country, including schooling, roads, public transportation, etc, and the rich pay a higher portion of their income into X, the poor need pay a lower portion of their income into X in order to have the same level of access as if rich and poor paid the same portion of their income.