skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Outside the US, helium is seriously expensive.

OT, but: That would be because it's rare and hard to extract and running out. It's only cheap in the US because in 1996 some genius passed a law requiring it to be sold cheaply to use up the US's helium reserves.

The likely result is that the world will be basically completely out of helium by about 2050. Too bad for anyone not-very-rich who needs an MRI scan at that point.

See, e.g., http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/08/25/nobel-p... for more.
But you can't send and receive files with it. The N900 has consumer IR and not IRDA, indeed.
A nice description of the OECD PISA: http://www.oecd.org/about/0,3347,en_2649_35845621_1_1_1_1_1,...

This is a pretty decent summary:

"PISA is a three-yearly survey of 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD member countries and 35 partner countries . It assesses the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills essential in everyday life. They are tested in the domains of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy and complete a background questionnaire. For each cycle one domain is focused on more than the others. The first data collection took place in 2000, the second in 2003 and the third in 2006. The fourth cycle is in progress for 2009."

Like any statistical analysis, this study isn't perfect, but, it certainly is an eye opener. If China is able to replicate their success in Shanghai in other regions of China, the United States is going to start to fall behind in 5-10 years in terms of academic leadership of the world.

Time will tell - Shanghai might be an outlier. The United States may also get its act together when it comes to education in general.
Not if you don't know what the Fail Whale is.
Eating Opentable's lunch
Gingerbread successor, Honeycomb is coming with Tablet friendly features.
It's just the way some people are wired, and sometimes peoples' wiring changes. They may decide they're not comfortable with the idea of someone else being able to do something they can't. They may have always wanted to climb the highest mountain in the world. They may just want to add it to their summit collection. Sometimes it's just a job. Sometimes it's a trophy, or the crowning achievement of a lifetime.

I used to have arguments with one of my old roommates about space exploration. He would argue that if we found a planet several thousand light years away that could support human life, we'd never get there because nobody would volunteer to go. I could never get through to him that there are people who will take any risk to get to do something like that, even if it meant only being memorialized in the memories of their distant descendants or being frozen for a few thousand years and never again seeing everything they'd ever known.

However, human history supports the idea that there will always be those few who are willing to do things for reasons which evade the rest of the human race. That's just the way we're wired.
C is another Blub, so you aren't contradicting my point, but I would say that the reason C isn't a good replacement for Java is that C has no support for garbage collection. C and Java both have a large amount of valuable, working code that programmers can utilize from other languages, but a language written on top of C has to accept that whenever a C library is used, someone must deal with C memory management, either the programmer who writes the bindings or every programmer who calls the bindings. They may have to deallocate memory and they may have to reason about the lifetime of memory deallocated by library code. Scala programmers can call Java code with no such worries. If they wrap a Java API in a Scala API, it is only for style and convenience. A Scala programmer would not use a C library lightly, certainly not without bindings that ensured memory safety, and writing such bindings would require a lot of care.

The difference in practice is obvious: there is no Scala "FFI" to Java, at least not one that is visible to programmers. You just instantiate Java objects and call their methods. Ruby programmers do not blithely write calls directly to C functions in their Ruby code. They look for bindings, write the bindings themselves if necessary (making sure the bindings handle all the C memory management safely,) and then call the bindings from their Ruby code.

Where increased performance is worth such an investment of time and care (and a little bit of unavoidable risk) it makes sense to build a language on top of C. Java caters to a different set of needs, where convenience and safety trump performance.

P.S. The Java community went through a phase back in the day when many libraries were wrappers around C libraries, for performance reasons or simply because there was no Java implementation available, and it was a big problem because it invalidated some of the guarantees that attracted people to Java in the first place. Almost all (very, very close to all) of the cross-platform discrepancies encountered in server-side Java code were because the same C library behaved differently on different platforms.
I'm a big fan of inexpensive hobbies that allow me to keep both feet at sea level.
It would only be fair. I'd like to see someone try to pull the same kind of thing with NY Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel etc. as they were doing to wikileaks. It's much easier to go after Assage and his organization.
I'm pretty sure Media 1.0 also did and does this.
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I interviewed for jobs in California last week, and I got job offers from three startups (two in San Francisco, one in the Valley), one of which was pre-series-A. Each of these reassured me that they knew a good immigration lawyer and offered to pay for them (in one case as part of a lump sump relocation bonus.) I ultimately decided to go work for Facebook instead, but I can confirm that there are certainly startups making job offers in the full understanding that they're going to have to arrange H1Bs.
What no Perl or Python?

Below are the figures I get (at this point in time) for the top two sets of figures provided in the post:

indeed.com:

36,337 Perl (#3)
18,470 Python (#5)

linkedin.com:

126,992 Perl (#4)
68,630 Python (#5)
OK but this is not an algorithm - I was a bit excited, thinking he had a 1-2-3 formula to come up with a topic that always works in any context.
And corrupts SVN checkouts, and who knows what else:

svn: Checksum mismatch for 'servers/dev/jboss/jvspoc_dw_loader/lib/jboss-serialization.jar'; expected: 'f26ddb52dc01622d93625264f104b142', actual: '838620288f1f8089176d015930a152dc'

No thanks.
The scientific method is fine. Note that this is about certain psychiatric pharmaceuticals being found not to have the efficacy that was earlier claimed, in studies done by pharmaceutical companies who doctored results and played statistics games and selectively hid results that didn't support profitability.

It's fascinating to see the level of hubris in the corporate pharmaceutical industry, that after cornered and confronted with the fact that for decades their self-serving fabricated so called research is fraudulent, they would now have a conference to announce that the scientific method has failed.
If you ignore the APIs, AWS still has a substantial number of merits which make it a formidable player. It is a huge leap to say that because the market has smiled on AWS, we all love everything about it and wouldn't prefer more of it be REST-ful.
I'm betting we'll switch to hypoxic hydrogen ("Hydrox") for deep (>40m) diving then, or use atmospheric dive suits and ROVs only.

Hydrogen is a pain to deal with on the surface and in transport, but if you're putting it into something like 95/5 hydrogen/oxygen bottom gas, is not going to explode. At >30m, that's quite breathable. Some kind of hydrogen-based trimix is probably acceptable at that point. Continue to use nitrox and 100% oxygen for the shallow stops.
Switch to Linux.
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"But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain."

Good! That's what science is all about. Making theories that can later be "disproved" or "confirmed". It's when you cannot disprove something that it is no longer science.
Couldn't agree more. Though the Carphone Warehouse website is still screaming "buy me, buy me" in a shrill voice.
Of course the fact that they have been sued does not mean they did anything illegal (or even anything wrong). It just means that a couple of people in California scraped the money together to instruct a lawyer.
Promises to bring new and interesting things
WikiLeaks: British Police Arrest Assange
Yeah, that was my point. Just because it's got a 1Ghz CPU, doesn't mean it's the same processor.
The replication they are talking about in these particular pharma studies are of the nature that a pharma corp orders up twelve identical 8 person studies. Three studies come back showing their new pill helped a tiny bit, six show no the pill did nothing, and three show the patients got worse. They then cherry pick the three that showed it helped, and possibly toss in one of the ones that showed the pill did nothing just to cover up what they are doing. They then publish a paper showing that 3 out of 4 studies validated that the pills work. The other 8 studies are set on fire and never mentioned. And there is your multiple studies.

This is not some crazed conspiracy theory either, this (doing multiple very small sample size studies rather than one slightly larger study and discarding and never mentioning some of the studies with the least favorable results) is actually how it is now known to be done, and this methodology is the reason why some journals have started to say that all of the studies have to be registered in advance if they want to publish their results so that the companies can't selectively discard results like they have been doing.
Did you read the article? It is not primarily about the pharmaceutical industry, or about doctoring results, although it touches on both of those topics. The argument is far more subtle, and more far-reaching.
Smart people can move between languages easily. It's concepts, understanding of problems and patterns that are important.

I will continue to choose languages that I enjoy and will continue to recruit people who also enjoy the challenge of learning new things.

Sure, a new hire may not have any Scala/Ruby/Erlang experience, but if they understand about source control (you'd be surprised!), testing, enterprise patterns and how to solve a God-damned problem, that's all that is important.
Infochimps and others have proved there is a market for large niche datasets, but I think the idea of hosting said data and charging per query could work - but is really just a twist on what the incumbents are already doing.

P.S what happened to YC-backed datamarketplace.com? Their site seems abandoned.
It (the witch hunt) has begun...
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I agree, but I also want to point out that in most cases people are only going to be passing already-dead corpses, not living people who need to be helped or saved.

Having just read information on the 1996 Everest blizzard, it seems that guides and other climbers generally try to help those that are dying or struggling, but the options are few, and the oblique, ignorant "If they're still breathing there's still hope!" just creates more deaths in the long run. You can only do so much, and if someone is too far gone, there is no point in risking the death of the would-be rescuers in a futile attempt.
I don't understand what the discussion is, the standard says the main function should have a return type of int, that should be the end of it, if some random beginner argues "but it works for me", there's not really much you can do, people will continue to write incorrect programs if they want to.
Wikileaks:Advisory Board - Wikileaks
The question is then if that particular 'organization' has a large enough number (let's say 50? or 100?) highly skilled exploit developers.

I have no problem to believe that a country of that size, regardless of its technical sophistication overall, can produce without much effort an institute like that.

Don't forget that 'professional exploit developer' was a concept largely unknown until well into the 2000's. That never stopped a whole slew of exploits to appear since the mid 1990's, many of the early ones from the bedrooms of at best amateur security aficionados.
Actually, it does. The likelihood that ESP actually works is significantly less than the likelihood of "the decline effect", which is explained by a number of perfectly rational factors (touched upon in the article.)

If you want to claim that "ESP is bullshit" (as you and I both do, I imagine), you somehow need to account for those (rare) studies which oddly enough seem to support an ESP effect at a statistically significant level. "The decline effect" goes a ways toward providing this explanation.
"otherwise we would be many times happier, more productive and more intelligent than a generation ago."

Aren't we? I'd argue we're at the very least more productive.
Learning Ruby and Rails, where would you start?
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There's quite a bit more to the scientific method than that-- the notions of controlled observation and reproducible results surely matter, as does the principle of parsimonious explanation.
That looks like a sure fire way to make sure you only hire mediocre programmers.
I suppose the comparison is between me and last year's myself, when priority inbox was not turn on. At least I hope so, otherwise it's obviously as you said.

I do have priority inbox on but for me it makes no difference whatsoever because I work with an "inbox zero policy" anyway.
I don't know of any non-paywall way to view the article; I'm a (satisfied) New Yorker subscriber, so I've already paid.

It's a great article, by the way.

The answer to your latter (implied) question is "no"-- the article does not explicitly mention any of those three things.
Google doesn't usually consider such things when making their interfaces better. At least according to them. Google was asked when they rolled out Google Instant what impact it has on their ad revenues, and they said something like "it won't bankrupt us, but other than that we don't worry about it when improving thing for users".

By the way, you want an interesting example? Think of the "I'm feeling lucky" button - a search option on their frontpage which completely bypasses any ads. How much lost revenue has Google experienced because of that one small button? Yet they still keep it.
WikiLeaks founder Assange arrested in London
Those ITA guys who based much of their infrastructure on an "esoteric" language clearly didn't know what they were doing.
Here's a PDF of the full article: http://crayz.org/science.pdf
Ask HN: How to follow up prototype of open source equivalent of Adobe AIR?
Earlier this year I prototyped a very rough equivalent of Adobe AIR, please see http://code.google.com/p/deskml/ I haven't had a lot of time to push it forward so the first thing I have to do is make that time. Assuming I do so though I'm still seeking advice as to next steps. I'm just going to dump some concerns/questions out there.

Starting with concerns, it's coded in TCL. This presents several problems. First TCL is disparaged. Unfairly in my opinion, and not unlike how Javascript used to be disparaged. The fact that I was able to slightly modify a couple of open source projects in Tcl (a web server and a web browser) and then glue them together with fewer than twenty lines of code for my prototype, speaks to its ability.

Notice I say its ability, definitely not mine: I've barely programmed in Tcl, and that is part of my problem: I don't have the necessary acumen. And the disparagement means there's a dearth of Tcl talent. I've actually gotten a couple of top Tcl developers (Jeff Hobbs, David Welton) to briefly entertain the idea and respond two or three times to emails from me, but those efforts have died on the vine.

Still though I am convinced of the viability of this project and indeed I have even prototyped what I consider to be a potential killer application with it: ebooks that support embedded Javascript. Here is a URL with a link to downloads for that prototype.

http://www.chess.com/download/view/stauntons-footsteps

I feel liked I've pushed this as far as I myself personally can and I guess I'm looking for advice or even assistance or a co-founder. My interest is really in the front end aspects of it. Also I have a number of first and second degree contacts with parties who have started up successful businesses around browser technology or epub-publishing. My interest/skill is probably going to be around the front-end/middle-tier aspects of the project, I probably need more of a hardcore backend engineer with C chops (tkhtml3 the foundation of the hv3 browser that the project modifies, is written in C) who has Tcl experience or an interest.

Anyway thanks for any and all advice or hopefully interest in picking this up and running with it. I'm trusting nobody will just fork this and run with it, plus don't forget, I've got some serious industry contacts already. I think what this needs is some impetus and some polish and it will be ready to market more seriously. Thanks for entertaining this rambling.
He has it backwards. Choose the developers because they are good, then let them choose the programming languages.
From the video, it seems the entire screen has the same touch simulation, it doesn't say anything about being able to address "touch pixels" (tixels? taxels? tacxels?).

So, I guess it's able to switch the simulation very quickly, to implement the various demos they show where the tactile feedback is different for different parts of the screen.

That seems to imply that this won't be compatible with The Other Touchscreen development, i.e. multitouch.

Does anyone know?
I thought there was something odd about the article, then I found the explanation:

"I'm Just A Recruiter With An Opinion"

Sorry, in my experience the opinions of recruiters on anything like choice of programming languages is probably worse than useless.
I'm surprised C/C++ isn't in the list I get the following result:

148,296 jobs (#1)
Julian Assange arrested in London | The Guardian
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"Smart people can move between languages easily. It's concepts, understanding of problems and patterns that are important."

Important to what?

When starting a company, I think it's perfectly reasonable to worry about how easy it is to find people who know how to use your tools already. Sure, you can always train new people, but it takes time. In a new company, time is usually against you.

Not to mention, you want a good ecosystem for your tools, so you can leverage other people's work.
I was going to mention this too. The blog is "Captain Recruiter". Seems recruiters and HR might be better off sticking to discussion about insurance paperwork.

Really bad advice in the article here. There might be a few cases where the prevalence of a language/availability of help (assuming the language is non-proprietary and has more than a handful of users) might matter significantly (almost always to cater to the demands of individuals misinformed in a manner similar to the author of this article), but for a software project that you intend on maintaining, you should definitely pick a language on its technical and communal merits, and not the skills listed on LinkedIn.
I think it's just market research for them. That doesn't mean that it's not a privacy issue.

On the other hand, I agree that there are worse things to worry about.
Assange arrested in London (BBC)
Presumably because Evernote will have tested this (and has proven traction) and when you're Evernote for x ("your personal data") it makes sense to use terminology/messaging your target market is familiar with? (or, coincidence)
So why not talk about what he's wrong about, instead of writing ad hominem attacks on him?
The moral dilemma quickly becomes a question against your own survival instinct, in places like the Everest.
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Arrested In London
Could maybe someone give a concise definition of what makes an API RESTful and explain why the AWS Query API is not RESTful and how a RESTful API would be better?
Interesting news, but totally irrelevant to the WikiLeaks operation.

They have absolutely thought this through, with all the necessary "insurance" they have been spreading around.

Regardless of the fate of one man - Assange - classified information will continue to leak.

The wheels are in motion.
Yes, that's deprecated. And it was horrible before.
Correct, at the moment the whole area offers the same feedback. This means that multi-user applications do not work.
The problem with that approach is you'll end up with a program written in a dozen different languages and no single person can understand it.

I once worked at place that had a, relatively small, code base that contained more or less equal parts tcl, C, Lisp, Visual Basic, C++, Perl and probably something I'm forgetting due to the fact that the programmers got to choose their languages without any sort of supervision. It was no fun at all for anyone to work with.
I wish that was true, but it simply isn't. It's always possible to sink lower and it's the case way too often.
No ways man, entrepreneurs don't look for opportunities to be mouth fed. They create them. It's more fun to create outside silicon valley and then take there and grow further. (IMO)
Riverbed is competing with HP to acquire Radware for about $1B
Is this correct: in Sweden it is considered "rape" (by the male) if there is no condom involved?
still, 100 > 1
I, too, signed up for MoneyBookers with a unique email id under my dad's name. (The only place on internet I am using that combination of Name and email).And after 3 months of inactive account I was flooded with emails from random spammers. Emails sent to that unique id addressed to my dad.Don't have the emails now, but will try and look for a screenshot I saved sometime back.
No. It is considered "rape" because the woman reportedly asked Assange to stop when the condom broke, and he didn't.
Juniper acquires Altor Networks for $95M (cloud security startup)
Some anecdotal evidence that its not just YC startups. My company, NewsCred, raised a seed round of approx 1M this summer. We raised it from "top tier" super angel funds. We are not YC, and were not even based in the US. We also were not serial entrepreneurs, although I'd like to think that we're "above average founders!"

Long story short: we did not give up any board control but did not worry too much about price. We got a fair valuation, but nothing crazy.
yes its crazy, he is charged with starting to have sex with a condom and apparently she claims when they finished there was no condom. thats it folks.
err, she was also reported to have thrown a party for him after the event...