skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if alcohol drinkers are happier people, and happier people live longer...

does that mean people who have a lot of good sex live longer too? I bet they do!
I worked on the left-nav and a bunch of the tools within it. It's nice to hear that somebody enjoys it.

It's interesting, though, how diverse opinions are on various features. I'm far more used to hearing "I hate you for putting a left nav on search. I want my screen real estate back!" And I get jealous of the guy who did the homepage fade and PacMan/Buckyball/colored-balls/Google-as-you-type doodles, because there've been generally positive user responses to those. Google Instant in general had an overwhelmingly positive user response.
If an IT department did this to me without warning, I'd quit that day, CC'ing my manager and the IT guy's manager telling them exactly why they'll now have to spend months finding and training my replacement.
Well, if people are using un-approved personal devices on the corporate network, it seems there is some fault on both sides. Assuming there is policy addressing this issue.
This would be seriously awesome! I love the cocoa frameworks, but I can't stand objective c. being able to use ruby would be a dream come true.
Never ever deliver a crappy product. If you're in the weeds you're going to know it. Raise the issue early and ask for help. If you can't complete the project that sucks for your client, but its recoverable. If you continue to flail for weeks and finally deliver half ass crap without a warning then you have failed miserably.
Yeah, I agree. I will probably cache search results if load time is too slow. Also, I have a 0.5 second delay (after keyup) to execute the search function.
Me personally, no, but it raises an interesting point. I could see a market in "scoring" reviews using models based on data sets similar to the one examined here.
Awesome work, Stephen!
> It's mental that for £20 I can pop into any off-licence, corner shop or supermarket in the land and buy enough alcohol to literally kill myself

If you're concerned about that, boy have you got a lot of other things to start being concerned about. You can kill yourself with pennies worth of water, or £2 of petrol and a match, or jump off a building, or...

My point of course being that while it might be a little unsettling to look at the alcohol aisle and think "enough of that could kill me", there's a million easier, cheaper and faster ways to attain the same thing.
Sure, but you send out an Email warning people first. There's no reason to wipe people's devices unless they are willfully defying policy, and even then, you've got a list of the people doing it - just go to their office and talk to them in person (involve their manager if needed).

Wiping a personal device to "send a message" is passive-aggressive and totally destructive to morale.
Yeah, in this case you need to ban the devices, not wipe them...
Don't connect personal devices to corporate exchange?
Unfortunately there were times where the media (and sometime even HN) made a big deal of prodigies and/or drop-outs. You'll hear more of these questions for a while.
Thanks, Daniel! :)
There's a big slice of the feminist segment outside the intelligentsia for whom feminism is pointing to a stat that says that X% of all Fortune 500 C-level execs or some such are men, and being outraged.
So what's the route to take when I realize i'm in over my head? Apologize, refund the money and move on? Hire someone to help me finish it?
Also, I've been thinking to make a more mobile-optimized version of the site right now.
Seems like Tinker.it are just trying to drum up interest in the Arduino and to get more people talking about it.

I can't really fault them as some people may be exposed to the open source electronics prototyping platform from the chatter, that may have not otherwise noticed.
This is why I don't use editors with IntelliSense-like capabilities, or if they have it I disable it.
I tend to agree. It's one of the more frustrating marketing tactics.
I got a feel that the next iteration of arduino is coming. Frankly, I am excited.
If you don't go to college, you better damn well educate yourself better than anyone in college will.

That means reading big textbooks, working on hard projects, getting to know more about things outside your field of study.

This is what I've done instead of college, but I feel like I've probably studied a lot more computer science than a lot of my friends who did go to college. It's not an easier path, just a different (and possibly cheaper) one.
I'd look to summarize the projects individually or put them into groups and describe why they are important / show what you can do, then provide a link to the project or portfolio of projects. Sell it first, provide supporting details for a potential employer's further inspection. Regarding what to add and what not to, think about what story you want to tell. If you want to get into a specific year, include projects that pertain to it, even if they are small. If it's a certain technology, then those are the winners.

After you have your resume put together, I'd like to mention my startup, CollegeJobConnect. I apologize if this comes off as a shameless plug, but I think it is very relevant. On-campus recruiting and career service departments limit the true array of companies you could and should be connecting. We are trying to change that. We're an online platform that is dedicated exclusively to helping undergraduates (juniors / seniors) connect with cool companies for internships and full time hires throughout the entire academic year. We're working with a few hundred undergrads right now and over 15 companies. If you think it would be worthwhile, we'd love to get you onboard (takes 2 mins to get up and running). Having your resume summarize what you've done and what you can do is step #1, next is getting it in front of the right opportunities that you'd like to pursue.
Society greatly underestimates the surprising pyschotropic efficacy of common foods and nutrients.
Hey guys just added a bunch more services from other developers. Thanks to all.
There could be important data still on the device itself, I imagine the argument would be.

Seems to me how it should work is that the device's user defines a PIN number for his device. Should the device be lost, the user could provide the IT guys with that PIN number, which would be required for the "remote nuke" feature to be used.
This was an interesting comment, but I think it would be better to disclose the fact that your Amazon link contains a referral tag. Now I am not sure whether you posted some a big excerpt of the book because you genuinely thought it was interesting, or if you wanted to make more money.
What's your bachelor's projet? I've got a few friends doing undergrad work in Osaka, and one doing her graduate degree there.
Definitely man! That feature will be quite useful.
Testing, the Chinese Way
I had a great response when I coded my resume in HTML. I posted it to the web, jazzed it up using some colour and jQuery. Employers love seeing creativity.
It's been speculated that Sidis's intelligence was due in part to having thin-walled blood vessels in the brain, making it easy for nutrients like oxygen to diffuse into brain cells. This theory explains his and his fathers' premature deaths due to stroke.

It also suggests that ordinary people today might increase their intelligence by trying to eliminate arterial plaque.
The key is to put things down where you'll think to look for them when you want to pick them up again. The same principle works when deciding how to structure code.
Boiler Room is one of my favs. Even though Glengarry Glen Ross was relatively boring, I like this line:

"It takes brass balls to sell real estate."

Then he turns around and he is holding brass balls. A-B-C is the best pitch ever in a movie, after greed is good of course.

If you want a great example of how to deal with rejection, come to Haight Ashbury and watch the homeless people ask for change. Sometimes if they have a good enough pitch, I'll give them a dollar. There was one guy giving "bad advice" and he told me to give him my credit card and to have unprotected sex with an intravenous drug user.

I gave him a dollar.
I'm currently building a web-based IRC client with bouncer-like functionality - ie, stays online when you close the browser, remembers backlog etc.

Built github.com/RJ/playdar-core in erlang, after initially writing it in C++/boost
What a fig is.
Is this the same as the arduino with built in Ethernet or something different?[0] Or the tinker kit perhaps?[1]

[0] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbanzi/4754644235/in/faves-pixe...
[1] http://www.tinkerkit.com/
As I guessed, the words used by those writing 1-star reviews suggest bitterness and idiocy on the part of the reviewer. Most nice people grade on a curve.

The words used in 5-star reviews aren't bad, though, except for the word "perfect". It's often misused when describing software.
The problem is that right now there aren't granular enough controls of remote devices to allow people to adequately differentiate between approved ones and illicit ones. The fault lies on both the side of the client device software and the server side software.

The same goes for Gmail (Google Apps Premium Edition only) and Android (or anything else using Google Sync). You can enable/disable IMAP & POP for the domain and if you enable it you open the floodgates. You can selectively enable/disable users via API but they can toggle it back on their own. If you setup Google Sync instead of IMAP/POP you can remotely wipe devices but you can't do anything except wipe everything and there is no inbuilt method to notify the user first.

Exchange, as described in the blog post, is equally bad. I'm confident things will improve in 2011 but it's unpleasant right now. The best thing companies can do is to set a clear policy on what's allowed and what isn't based on their data security needs, and never violate the users' trust.
Their "approval" is insufficient. If they want me to carry a device with data which they have the power to destroy, it's not really mine, so they are going to have to buy one for me. Remote wipe is the kind of thing you could be prosecuted for … if you weren't doing it to a private citizen.
In terms of scalability, YouTube Instant will encounter lots more problems than iTunes Instant. It's full-length video vs. 100x100 artwork image.
Had a little play with that site, its nice that it has a JSON service but whenever it made a query it hanged like hell. So like jackowayed said, they'd have to get faster results. One thing you cant fault with using Google search, its fast.
This is one of the reasons I use a third-party app (NitroDesk TouchDown) for reading Exchange mail on my Android phone. If someone hits "remote wipe" it'll only delete your Exchange data, the rest of your phone remains untouched.

http://groups.google.com/group/nitrodesk/browse_thread/threa...

The app doesn't have permission to wipe the entire phone even if it wanted to.
These rules are useful heuristics, but a good graph has a purpose, and its parameters are chosen accordingly. So, while Tufte may favor a wide sunspot graph to emphasize the weak downward slope, my advisor (a solar scientist) would have slammed me for that. We already know that there's a weak downward slope. What we care about is the absolute magnitude of the peaks. Tufte's graph is useless here.
I saw a demo of Seaside a few years ago where they were using continuations to write code like

while( updateBillingInfo() != 'done' ){
displayUpdateBillingInfo();
}
renderCheckoutScreen();
....

The point was that a method call that might present output to a user or read in a value could be an entire http render/response cycle. The 'updateBillingInfo()' method above could include arbitrary web interaction with the user. What was allowing all this was the fact that the framework was using continuations. So that when the user was finished updating the billing info the stack of the above code could be revived and resumed.

I thought it was so cool to be able to structure complex web interaction with that kind of procedural code. The closest thing I've seen at work is srping webflow but that is nowhere near as cool.

For years we have been able to inject a password prompt to a user when they request a secured resource. After the user logs in they can go to the secured page. What about something like a multipage color chooser? so that at any point in a web interaction the user can go into the color chooser sequence of screens and have the end result returned to wherever they were when it kicked off? And being able to stack these re-usable flows arbitrarily deep?

What I have seen in production is some kind of hack like a 'returnTo' http parameter that lets the other flow know where to send the user when they finish that part of the interaction. In some cases you see people attempt 2 levels by passing the parent and grandparent as a string or something like that.
The thing is that there is no way I would dive into smalltalk to get features like this. For better or worse I am tied to Java on the server side.
I'll be fixing that soon. Should be in within 24 hours.
This is neat. Heck of a job. I probably couldn't do it anywhere near that fast.

But...

When I watched the video I got a sinking feeling regarding the comment thread on HN. Sure enough, I come back here, and see people praising the simplicity of the design.

Ha ha. Surely you jest.

This is engineering compromise, but heavy on the compromise. The Jeep they used for this video didn't have a radiator, only used two lug nuts per wheel, and didn't have any brakes. (Note how it coasted to a stop.) A Jeep in actual, drivable condition would take a least an hour to field strip to the same degree, and one that had any significant mileage would take even longer still, what with rusty bolts and seized connectors.

And even a Jeep in running condition compromised a lot to reduce the number of parts. You can have a car that's as simple as a Jeep if you're willing to give up:

Air conditioning.
Airbags.
Any kind of modern emissions controls.
Modern engine diagnostics.
Electronic stability control and ABS brakes.
Cheap maintenance.
Decent fuel efficiency. (Jeeps are pretty heavy, thanks
to the simple design, have lousy aerodynamics, and an
carburetor-fueled engine that isn't afraid to waste gas)
A roof.
Any kind of sound insulation.
Doors.

Jack Barath wrote a column[1] on the death of the basic car, and it boiled down to "people won't buy a car without these features"; along with some bonus wibbling about government regulations (see "emissions controls" in that list above) that would make such a car illegal to sell.

I thought his column sucked[2], but the point is that a basic car is not impossible, or a relic of ancient technology that is now lost to us, but because outside of a few specialized applications, such as military vehicles, "basic car" is actually a codeword for "a car that sucks", and I would confidently lay money that the dozens of people expressing admiration for the Jeep's elegant design would hate to be forced to drive one.

1: http://www.speedsportlife.com/2009/01/21/avoidable-contact-2...

2: http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2009/02/27/blind_nostalgia_and...
So the referenced study prompts a basic but hopefully interesting question about statistics and epidemiology which I hope someone could answer. When they controlled for former problem drinking status and medical status (among other factors), there was a major change in abstainers from 200% increased mortality over moderate drinkers to 51%. So it seems like current abstainers included a significantly death-prone cohort who were former problem drinkers and/or in poor health.

Okay, so that makes me wonder what the difference is between controlling for major factors and simply excluding the cohort with factors having that very significant impact on mortality. My question is, at what point should one correct for major factors and at what point is it appropriate to completely segregate the data? What if the size of the group with major factors excluded would be statistically insignificant (i.e. heavy drinkers who have never been problem drinkers)?
That's amazing, I didn't know that was even possible. 1.6cm is huge!
"Every time you come from Russia to America, you feel as if the world has stopped rotating. The feedback wail of corruption, scandal, intrigue, and murder is cranked up so high over there that America sounds like elevator music by comparison. Days go by very slowly in America, and you can waste a lot of time hoping for something to happen."

-- http://exiledonline.com/the-last-puppet-show-an-eyewitness-a...
Not knowing something, and not needing to know it, is progress. Not knowing something despite needing to know it is not progress.

People will always need to know things. (Otherwise we could have instant "progress" by lobotomizing the users and leaving them drooling helplessly on their keyboards.) It's bad to decrease your users' savvy faster than you decrease their need for it.
Thanks for the quote. There is a bit of correlation-causation concern here. For example, it is possible that whatever causes the decreased Vitamin D also causes schizophrenia. It need not be some chemical, either; it could be tied to behavioral or even genetic problems. For example (no truth to this that I know of but for sake of discussion): "Parents with a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia have tendencies that make them are less likely to provide proper nutrition or typical sun exposure to their children. Thus, those with a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia also have lower vitamin D, though that is entirely outside the causal chain." That (made-up) hypothesis would fit just as well as the "Vitamin D is in the causal chain" hypothesis, no?

Given the uncertainty--and the suggestive epidemiological associations--this seems like an excellent subject for a clinical trial. I seem to recall that one is actually occurring (though perhaps for a different disease), but I can't find the link.
Ask HN: Am I the only one who's not in love with Google Instant?
Let me make it clear that I do like the idea of Google Instant. And, YouTube Instant. And, HN Instant. Edit: Now iTunes Instant too.

But can someone give me an official reason why it's better? I think it's safe to say that I prefer the old Google better than this...being instant and Ajaxy is nice but for now it's tacky.

I really did just prefer the Search Suggestions more than anything.

What am I missing?
So to connect to an Exchange server in iOS, Android or WebOS you have to give the server root on your phone? What sort of crazy security policy is that?
I tried this out on a test page, couldnt see a difference, whats it supposed to fix?
We've started adding these selectively to internal tools to supplement more complex tools aimed at depicting progress or trend visualization. It's helped a ton, and goes a long way toward turning indecipherable IT goon geek speak into something normal users find helpful (along the same lines as somethings like Google's App Status Dashboard (http://www.google.com/appsstatus), the Stashboard (http://www.stashboard.org/), or the Salesforce.com status board (http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/) do for red/yellow/green statuses at a glance.
And i dont use twitter. :P
Yes, there is enough time. I currently do 35 hours as a dev and 15-20 as a student, and I think I could do 5 more hours of development. My social life would probably suffer a lot, though, as I'd have to work or study more on weekends.

And I have no idea whether I should say I'm a developer or a student whenever I have to choose. I tend to go with student because finishing college is my priority, but it's still an annoying question.
Thankfully there are now some door safety devices on the market, for example:

http://www.fingersafe.com
If you are in the US, it's likely illegal for your boss to try to regulate microwave ovens based on causing wifi interference - that's solely the job of the FCC.

The regulations that allow the use of 2.4Ghz ISM band require you to accept that interference....
Let me guess. Your source for that would be a diet book written by some guy who spends half the book complaining that his theories are being dismissed by mainstream science?
Would Tim Berners-Lee or DJB fit as a good example of #4?
The most interesting part of the Freakonomics chapter is that modern day prostitues suffer from the worst kind of competitor - one that gives away the product for free. The chapter points out that, 100 years ago, something like 20% of men lost their virginity to a prostitute, whereas now it is something like 2%, because most men are likely to find a woman who is willing to have sex with them without any sort of long term commitment.
Somewhere Cory Doctorow just did a double-take. I wonder if being that prescient is much of a burden?
> worry about managing client expectations so they're never negatively surprised by what you deliver.

In short (to be blunt): Don't promise what you can't deliver.
It's also quite likely completely illegal - warning or not.

It's a personal device - the company has no rights to it.
Sounds exactly like me, except I haven't gone back yet. I went to a poorly chosen university, hated it, and left after a year with failing grades. Now I'm happily employed with a small company but I'm positive that I'll go back (to a better school) when I'm ready. I'm lucky to have landed a job the week before I graduated high school without even looking, which I went back to after dropping out.
Apologize, refund the money and move on? Hire someone to help me finish it?

A third alternative is to reduce the scope to something you can finish. 37signals advocates compromising on scope but never on deadline, and I agree.

Any of those options would be fine. What's important is that you keep the client in the loop so that they can find another developer if they need to, before the project is 2 months late with no end in sight.

As a corollary, be upfront about your skillset, and don't take jobs you know you can't finish. As with anything, lying will bite you in the ass.
I designed a game called Rejection Therapy back in 2009 to encourage myself to get out of my comfort zone more. It was amazingly effective and enlightening (for as long as I did it).

If anyone wants to try it, it's here: http://rejectiontherapy.com

It's not finished, it's very stripped down, but it works.
For Youtube Instant, the actual search terms are hitting suggestqueries.google.com for the autocompletion, which is what is powering google.com.

The actual video coming through is likely from a CDN, which are already built upon an infrastructure for scaling. Probably not as big of a deal as you think. Bandwidth wise it's unlikely that somebody watches the entire video as much as they rapidly hit different videos.
No, not really. If using an un-approved device on the company exchange compromises corporate security, you need to either lecture me, take "disciplinary action", or both. Nuking my iPhone from orbit is neither.
> which in your opinion is ridiculous and distracting.

FTFY
Robotics breakthrough: Scientists make artificial skin
Actually, this has existed since exchange integration was first added to PocketPC (a long time ago). It allows companies to control the security of their data.

Joining your personal phone to exchange is much like joining your personal computer to the corporate domain. You don't do it unless you want corporate IT to administer it and corporate policy allows it.

Edit: I sympathize with people who lost data, and do agree that the phone should warn you before completing the join. That said, as a business owner, I only allow exchange (and not POP or IMAP) for exactly this reason. I need to be able to wipe the company data if a phone is lost, or someone is fired (and not cooperative), etc. The real world isn't always nice.

Also, the full device wipe is by design, and the feature is called "Remote Device Wipe." The details can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124591.aspx

Note that the storage card is also wiped (where attachments and other sensitive data may be saved).