skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius,”. . . . (Quoted from Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, by Mark Kac. Harper and Row. 1985. p. xxv.)

from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman
I don't see how this could be good strategy.

1) Can BYU seriously hire enough of the football talent out there as to reduce the chances that other teams will succeed?

2) Is BYU so prized a destination among football players that they would be willing to sit on the sidelines at BYU rather than get more time playing, at another team? Consider that they also want to attract the attention of NFL scouts.

Google doesn't have any of these problems -- for many candidates, it is the NFL, and there's no real limit on how many people can "play".
Folks, from what I hear, "Staff Engineer" is a top-level position; it's not your garden-variety engineer on staff. These are people who have risen to a high position in the company as individual contributors, eschewing the management path.
The reason that spreadsheets are popular is the same reason that many students trying to solve a maths problem immediately plug in the knowns, without rearranging terms first. It's fear of the abstract and comfort of the concrete.
Google could fail in this same period, but it is unlikely to go through a revenue and valuation growth spurt similar to the one it has had over the past decade. Google is now settled into its middle-age and it is no more likely to come up with another money-printing machine like search advertising than any other company. Facebook has a fraction of Google's revenue and it is possible that they will figure out how to monetize their assets in a manner similar to Google, but it is also possible that they screw up or are blocked by social/legal barriers and are unable to realize the potential that everyone is imagining them to be capable of.

The possibility of Facebook cratering is far greater than the possibility that Google will crater, but the possibility of Facebook reaching Google-like revenues is much more likely than the possibility that Google will double their revenue over a similar time period.
>But from a practical stance, what's the benefit? What would it achieve?

The reasons I outlined in my post were things like having a single form validation codebase, deployed both server side and client side. More ambitiously you could have the same codebase used for the server-side online portions of something like gmail and also retarget that to use for offline gmail. Basically the big divide between your server-side and client-side codebases would start to disappear.

Seems like Google's native client system is a great step in this direction. Soon enough it may be possible to target say Lua to LLVM bytecode and deploy that to a browser in a bundle of javascript. If the browser supports NaCi you execute the LLVM bytecode with the built-in VM, if not you have a fallback bytecode interpreter in Javascript. That way you get full coverage of browsers with only degradation of performance when NaCi isn't available. I'm not sure however how fast you could make the Javascript fallback. If it is very slow it may not be workable.
>Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies.

Wouldn't it have been cheaper and quicker to send a few hard drives with the data on by post?
This is what I was getting at. You could automate the process of ripping/tagging/uploading.
I understand this completely because I'm one of those who undervalues themselves. However, I'm quickly realizing that your value is not tied to your abilities. Simply, you are worth as much as you think you are. The final value is what you'll hold out for. If that's 10k, you're worth 10k. If it's 4mil, you're worth 4mil.

Ultimately, it comes down to what you think of yourself.
(Enh) .width() and .height() now report the width and height of hidden elements (#7225)

This makes me so happy I could cry.
How we got 8 awesome YC founders to have dinner with us
Agreed, though I think most of Unix's serious warts are actually C's. They're synergistic, though.
Marvell hits back at Intel with new server chip
Free online girl games - girlgamesnow.org
Play new online girl games ,free online flash games,online games at girlgamesnow.org
This is a nice case study that demonstrates an answer to the question of "Why do those evil Wall Street bankers make so much money?" Competition for skilled labor produces tremendous salaries.
Caution curious geeks, don't spend more than 10 minutes near Minecraft if you plan to get any serious work done over the next month ;-) (I hadn't played a game for more than a day or two since GTA4 and after thinking it was stupid at first, MC has sucked me in bad!)
You can (and would) on iPad, because apps can launch in any orientation. On the iPhone, apps always launch in portrait orientation (unless it's a landscape-only app) so your iPhone launch image only needs to support a single orientation.
People are leaving the platform?

Do you mean like someone deactivated their account?

Or do you mean more people leave facebook every month than sign up?

If the latter, can you provide a source?
I love the look of the splash screen... why don't you just go with that? What does dropbox do? their app comes up with a lovely looking splashscreen as well and it sticks for a little while..
And just to be sure, we disregarded the results from the screening anyway, and based our hiring decisions only on the three onsite-interviews.

Am I missing something here?
Looks exponential to me. Particularly from 1999 on, where there's a sharp upturn. The developed countries emissions are flattening because a large proportion of their production is being outsourced to China: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=en_atm_co...

The main issue is that we may not have 100 years - that's just a figure that Lomborg has come up with, and his figures are doubted by a lot of climate scientists. Somewhere around 2degC (over 1999 levels) is about the point where we might start to see positive feedback and serious effects from warming. At our current rate, we'll hit that in about 2040-2050. 5degC is certainly possible by 2100, which means no glaciers/fresh water in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, desertification, food shortages and a couple of metres of sea level rise.
Bug found in nano that allows arbitrary file reading in restricted mode
The only way this story makes sense to me is if the engineer is one of the core contributors to Google Me, or some other strategically important new initiative.

Those teams are small enough that every engineer counts, and a defection could even delay launch.

Facebook would be interested in sabotaging that, but Google would pay even more to defend it.
What can you do with a second Ethernet port?
Not to mention that the first time you get hit in the face will teach you more about fighting than all the Youtube Muay Thai videos in the world
20 of the Best Free Linux Books
Facebook is not selling physical goods at a loss, and the comparison is not apt.

Facebook is making a bet that if it hires a bunch of really talented people while they are available, those people will eventually make more money for Facebook than they cost them.

Don't confuse that bet with an inability to make profit should they so choose.
Already proven false: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/10/bush-obama-endorsem...
How Duff's Device Works
The Evolution Of Leslie The Freebie Guy
I've been using this since the hour it was released, and colour me impressed; the jquery team works _fast_. The amount of improvements in this release are astounding. great work guys!
CAO Introduces the La Traviata Maduro
CAO's La Traviata has been sky rocketing in popularity since it hit stores. The cigar pays homage to the old Havana style and offers consumers the ability to enjoy a high-end, beautifully constructed cigar at an extremely reasonable price.
> and make sure that family isn't sacrificed.

Fortunately, it was just then that Abraham hit his 35 hour work week limit.
You can skip the Default.png file. The experience without it can be terrible, though. Your app will just show a black, blank screen until it finishes booting.

It's a bad enough experience that it's not even worth considering.
If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

(http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Notes and Calendar are the only apps that still use custom launch images. I always found it to be more annoying than useful because you can't tell when the damn app has actually started running, so it's no surprise that they didn't make that feature available to third-party apps.

But if you look at Apple's other software, say, iBooks or Remote.app, the launch image often doesn't match the initial UI presented when the app starts running. I don't think it's much of an issue.

In the case of Instapaper, I might consider doing a very fast animation from light to dark, when necessary, but I wouldn't spend much time on it.
That does happen quite a bit, but I'm sure the $3.5 million engineer was recruited by Facebook, and did not apply for a job at Facebook.
The AppleWay (tm) has another problem:

By displaying the last snapshot of the app as a splash screen, the Apple apps imply that you can immediately interact with the application - but you can't, because it's just a static image.

On slower hardware (e.g., the original iPhone/iPod Touch), this violation of user expectations can last for a measurable time - easily enough for the user to make multiple attempts to interact.

Touch...nothing happens. Touch...nothing happens.

A splash screen is better than a misleading "last view" snapshot.

Go with the night mode splash screen.

kb
Karbonn K406 Price @ Rs 2590; Karbonn K406 Dual SIM Features & Specifications
Karbonn Mobiles has unveiled its latest offering for music lovers, the Karbonn K406. The K406 is a dual SIM music phone, and is equipped with an array of stylish and attractive features. The phone comes at a Market Retail Price of Rs 2590. The phone has a 4 hours continuous talk time and 400 hours standby time, along with USB plug-in. Other attractive features include a VGA camera, Bluetooth, torch light, video player, GPRS/MMS/WAP, mobile tracker, hot keys for audio player and data security. Karbonn K406 Price in India: Rs 2590. Karbonn K406 Features & Specifications:
Since most tech books sell way less than 10,000 copies, I imagine this kind of thing will become more and more common. I believe Mark Pilgrim has frequently credited giving his books away for free online with increasing his physical sales.
So what.. I'm not worth 3.5 million dollars because the money would be "better used" by donating it to whatever cause the author deems respectable? Is that even logical? Where was it written that Google planned to donate 3.5 million dollars and are now not going to because they gave restricted stock to a staff engineer? Oh and how are we supposed to take seriously someone saying that we are probably worth around 100k ~ 500k tops? WTF does that even mean?
no, these people just feel so entitled that they want to be able to party party party AND feel (not actually be) well-educated. anyone who works harder than them and learns more is threatening to this feeling.
Check Out Google's Super Aggressive Warning To Users About Facebook
I'm sure it could. At least a handful of these engineers directly contribute a lot more than $3.5 million in value to the company.
The problem is when handling all those lower layers gets brushed off as "magic", rather than just recognized as a big pile of tedious details.

Learn about servers. Writing a simple webserver really isn't hard, and it will teach you a lot about HTTP performance tuning.
This are my solutions: http://twitpic.com/360tqd or http://twitpic.com/360t2b

Effectively, halfway between the dark and light.
I'm Self's general maintainer, facilitator, janitor etc. It's a great language but once Sun dumped it, it suffered a little from lack of tender loving care. But we're fixing that!
Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet (1996)
It's murder every day in the Old Bailey
We tried it and while it does help to filter out completely clueless people, however cheating is a real problem. This clearly depends on the industry and specifics of the position, but out of three people that hired, two clearly cheated on the remote coding test. This was for a C position in embedded context, and one would think that no one in their sane mind would cheat, and still many people did.

So, yeah, good idea, but use with caution as YMMV.
A Guide to Font Replacement Methods
I spent 6 years at SFU and am now in my 3rd at UBC. The biggest problem I see is that people form micro-societies everywhere. Mostly people seem to stick to their own ethnicity too. I figure it's a cultural thing. No one wants to be somewhere they don't fit in and don't belong. I had a really hard time at SFU with making friends and having a life. UBC is a big enough school that I've had a much easier time but I'm still largely a floater. I'm a métis, i fit everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
That would be ultra-meta.

There is something beautiful about that level of meta. I would be impressed if someone built a active matrix display in it.
Larry Flint Says Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO, Should Be In Jail
You're forgetting a few properties of the new landing page. The image is at its full size, or at least at a much larger size, which is what most people want to see when they arrive at a landing page. In the old version, only a tiny thumbnail was visible. Many pages also don't have the image visible at the top, so this makes it so the image is always visible. So there are a few things that at least argue in favor of the new version.

Scrolling versus paging is a personal preference thing. I don't know the rationale behind that, but I know that some people prefer the smoothness of a scroll over the pages.
We've gone through the same problem. In our case, we wanted our game to resume exactly where the user left off (i.e. no splash screen).

Our solution was to use a pure black Default.png, and design our game to have very low upfront load times. On iPhone 3GS, our game takes 1-2 seconds to fade in from pure black.

This also fixed the problem we had where some users that preferred to flip the game upside down (landscape mode).
The relevant phrase I give is "ars gratia artis" which MGM's logo of "art of the sake of art"
Salute!

Also: For people reading the codebase, any place you recommend starting?
It's Steve Jobs. He once went to a town hall meeting, just to tell them Apple has been in the city for so and so years, and how he's expanding the HQ and how things were going. That's all he wanted to say, nothing to complain about, but just reminding them who Apple is.
(Windows) Move the Firefox or Chrome cache to a RAM disk and speed up surfing
I'd have made that one 0000, personally...
"... personal anecdotes on this page reveal frequently stems the cycle of violence. ..."

I'm really trying to look beyond the symptom and look at the root causes. Read the article I cited to see that this is not just a problem for the targeted individual but whole groups as well.

"... Bullies thrive on the easy victim not defending yourself won't change this ..."

Bullies thrive in environments where bulling is tolerated. Change the culture to make it bully-proof ~ http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201011/r671527_4889232.jpg out than just letting having to expect kids to bear the brunt of inaction. Individual action maybe warranted, it's too much of a problem for individuals. Group action is needed as well.

If you think about HN for a moment advising every user to read & re-read http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html and prepare for an eventual verbal stoush. You defend yourself well using combinations of DH0 to DH6. The attacker moves to a less prepared target. Instead of relying on just individual users the HN community (users & code) fight back to enforce civility. The same ideas can be applied to bullies and targets, organisations and groups of people.
Layers and layers of compatibility layers, reaching back to IBM system/360 mainframes, with function calls commented "this works for now, but Bob should take a look at this whenever he's free, it seems there might be some problems with edge cases".
In FreeBSD, you can create a RAM Disk by doing:

mkdir -p /mnt/ramdisk

/sbin/mdmfs -s 256M md10 /mnt/ramdisk
Er.. just some ideas for you.

- More landing page themes/templates.

- Integration to email marketing software like mailchimp, newsberry, etc.

- Beta sign-up.

- Countdown clock.
One of the most ironic pieces of good advice on this topic is http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to....

Why is it ironic? Because it is written by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao. While nobody will deny how hard he works, he is also on record as being one of the most amazing math prodigies ever.
On the fastest hardware, you could keep Default.png displayed just a split second longer to avoid the "blink too quickly" problem.

Yes, it's bad because it further delays the launch of the app but if the hardware is so fast that the short blink is a concern the slight added delay probably isn't a big deal.
> I really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs

This should help clarify it:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=AAPL+Basic+Tech.+Analysis...
All of this is a lot more diluted when the workers you're talking about already make much more than is required for comfortable subsistence.

It's one thing to talk about self-loathing hurting the cause of workers struggling to meet their basic needs, but at the level of most employed software engineers, I'm not sure how much it matters.

That said, I don't see any difference between engineers and executives in this regard, so if it's okay (by whatever measure) for one to receive multimillion-dollar bonuses, so it is for the other, IMHO.
I don't know, the contract between the background and the text is low already, so making it worse would be kind of hard.

I like using a drop shadow on headings or other important bits of text that have been placed on something that causes the contrast to be low. But I try to make it so it is not obvious it is there, just subtle.
Hugh Hefner Giving Away Golden Tickets
It reminds me of their sudden decision to drop their XServe line, with no explanation or hint of follow-up. We have a guy that has specialized in "enterprise-y" Apple deployments. We have a few XServes here and the default laptop people get is a MacBook. Essentially, years of building domain expertise on this platform have been wiped from his resume, and he's now terrified for his career; he's decided to learn a certain open-source programming language, one which is fairly friendly to Macs and good for scripting (so he can learn while having a practical use, since he's done a lot of bash scripting) as well as enjoying some popularity for web application development. He wants to hedge if Apple doesn't create an analogous replacement.

Jobs is capricious and doesn't tip his hand; the article's lesson of not basing anything on his (or any other person's or company's) whims is a pretty good one.
Logic programming languages [...] have not had
significant impact on the computer industry.

Mercury is a new logic/functional programming language

Mercury is "new" and admittedly interesting since 15 years now. Please somebody update the blurb.
It is very good, I would certainly recommend it.
> I'm not so sure about this. Apple's recent actions seem to point to them wanting to control as much of the shipping code in their OS as possible

If the project is under a license they can use (MIT, BSD, something like that) they do have that control, even if they're not project leads.

> On top of that, ZFS is open-source and there are no license restrictions on filesystem modules in OS X

There is one thing Apple likes even less than not having control over their OS, and it's patent risks. http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html (and Sun not offering any guarantee against patent issues as far as I know) is why they dropped ZFS originally.
Example of perverse incentive: "In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats."

19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
PHP's Smarty releases version 3.0
For the most part of America's history, there actually is a difference between American character and most of the rest of the world. America was made up of those who decided to leave their home countries. Even in extreme cases (Irish Famine) it takes a 'special' type of person to willingly uproot themselves and move to somewhere else where there is no real guarantee of work or success. America (and other high immigration countries) DO fundamentally have a different character. Though it is not inherent, it's emergent. And therefore, if you're not careful, you can lose it.
Why would Oracle, of all people, care about FreeBSD?
Good for them. Because security infrastructure has lagged far behind, on by default v6 encapsulation schemes like 6to4, teredo, and isatap amount to huge attack surfaces. When 99% of the world relies on v4 based network edge packet filtering these protocols essentially amount to automatic firewall evasion. Sure the ports can be blocked or DPI can be used by administrators, or users can turn off these services but the reality is a vast majority are unaware and vulnerable.

While they (generally) aren't an initial attack vector, they are easily and often used by attackers that have knowledge of MAC addresses ahead of time, to hide traffic in plain site after an intrusion, or to hijack traffic in one hop away scenarios. Look at any non-automated intrusions coming out of asia and you'll see 6 encapsulation in use two out of three times at least.

Unless the user has turned on these tools intentionally, or is operating in a legitimate native v6 environment, OS's should never pick 6 first if both endpoints can complete the route with 4.
Yes. “7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad,” is what he said.
Because your IPv4 connection is much more likely to be NATed. This does not matter for HTTP because it plays nice with NATs, but other protocols are much pickier. For these other protocols it would make sense to prefer IPv6.
Granted Smarty certainly isn't anyone's poster-child of internet-awesomeness (looking at you, XHP), and given the uprising in 2008 & 2009 against it the project's taken a few hits, but 3.0 really shows that some of PHP's core is learning lessons and that projects of the past don't always have to go the way of the dinosaur.
The screening process he's describing is just to throw applications away, not to actually accept anyone.