skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you that the composer-style arm flailing is not great (even if intuitive to non-techies), but I do consider smaller, closer-proximity gestures a perfectly viable direction of research.

> I'm not sure how learning a set of rather specific gestures is less complicated to a novice user than hitting the right arrow key or the spacebar a bunch of times (or clicking on a button labeled "next photo").

They are just not as good with traditional computer input methods, negating the advantage that you or I would gain there.

The point about 3D is very good, and something that can be workable even with 2D displays (in a "3D" environment, like your average FPS). Rotating, pulling things from "behind" something else etc. For certain categories of use, it is probably better than voice commands - another natural UI for humans - in the same way some of us still prefer the CLI over a GUI.

The current technology obviously is not quite there, but it is already possible to implement a virtual keyboard by observing finger movements. Combine that with gestures performed above the virtual surface, and you might have something.
A lot of big companies do give feedback on request though especially for developer roles where you can give specific factual feedback (candidate was weak in multi-threading, etc.)

It's one of the big advantages of technical interviews. You don't have to rely purely on subjective human judgement.
here ya go: https://twitter.com/#!/roder/status/12954711699230720
The interest on that expense would completely wipe out the benefit of frequent flier miles or cash-back and would stick you with a drastically higher total payment (credit card rate =~ 19%, student loan rate =~ 5%). If you have enough cash to pay off college tuition within the payment period, I stand corrected. Most people don't.
Doubtful. Credit card companies charge a percentage of the transaction cost to the seller. Usually sellers just mark up their goods accordingly, so the buyer is the loser. The buyer's only recourse is to use a rewards program to get some of that markup back. The credit card company lost little if anything, and probably profited on the transaction.

The mint was eating the entire credit card transaction cost, so that $300 came from the mint, and probably more as well. Not to mention the shipping charges, and the cost to re-process all of those coins when they came right back to the mint. The line item profit to the mint is still positive since it cost way less than $15,000 to make those coins and they can re-sell them. But in reality, it just means that either the mint prints more dollars to make up for the loss (taxpayer loses in inflation) or more taxes are raised to pay for the loss (taxpayer loses more directly).

The bank where he deposited the coins also was forced to eat processing cost and shipping charges to return the coins to the mint. If lots of people started doing this, the bank would end up having to raise rates, charge for the service, or put significant limitations that would hurt legitimate usages (ex: laundromats).

All in all, this is a naughty hack. The hacker came out ahead, the credit card company came out ahead. The bank lost a little, the US government and taxpayer lost big. The economy as a whole loses as well - a lot of busywork was created, but no net value.
I know it's in violation of FB terms, but what's really there to stop people from making fake accounts?

It might work, but as others have pointed out, it probably was what it was because it provided instant gratification anonymously.

I'm sure someone can build quick little app that would take two facebook/google/twitter accounts and connect them to one of the many video chat services, but, on nothing more than a hunch, I doubt it'll be as successful.
I believe that is basically it. They won't be participating in writing specifications, but I don't think that anyone will be stopping Apache (or anyone else) from implementing any of the JSRs.

If a hypothetical Java Servlet API v4.0 would be released they could still make Tomcat be compliant with it.

On the other hand Tomcat is very widely used in the not-quite-huge-enterprise companies and it is obviously helpful for a spec if all implementers can agree on some common ground before it is written. ECMA probably wouldn't see a point in doing ES5 if Microsoft and Mozilla would not talk to them.
Ask HN: How Many of You Are Active on Quora?
An alternate viewpoint is that mathematicians discover truths and laws about the mathematical realm, just as physicists, chemists and others discover them about the physical realm.

Mathematicians do in fact do "experiments" before proving a theorem - it's just that those experiments are often thought experiments, in terms of asking "what does (or would) this mathematical object look like, or how would it behave?", and those experiments are not mentioned in the final formal write-up.
Which is odd, given that open source software has been looking to protect itself from patents (rather than by means of patents).
Ask HN: Who's up for a Triangle (NC) Hackers & Founders Meetup next week?
Thinking about scheduling a RTP Hackers & Founders Meetup for next Friday, the 17th. I know the holiday season makes scheduling touchy this time of year, but it would be nice to get in one last gathering just before the end of the year... call it a chance to reflect on our successes and failures in 2010 and make plans for 2011.

If anybody is in, let me know. If there's enough interest, I'll try to arrange a venue where we can get a room to ourselves. If it looks like there may only be a couple of us, maybe we can just pick any pub that's convenient and head there.
I'm of the old school I guess, and I think "Engineer" has a special meaning that generally does not apply to what most software developers/programmers do.

To me, the term "programmer" connotes a person who is performing more or less rote translation of specifications or a detailed design into software code.

"Developer" connotes a more holistic involvement in the entire process of constructing software applications.

YMMV.
http://sn111w.snt111.mail.live.com/default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
The large contract with NASA is for future launch services, NASA has only paid SpaceX $250M or so to date.

Bang for buck is good, $1/4B vs $25B for Constellation.
People say the music business is suffering, but it's not
Firefox 3.6.12
Hysterical, cheap shot though it is :) Thanks for sharing.
The Apache Software Foundation concludes that that JCP is not an open
specification process - that Java specifications are proprietary technology
that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the
spec lead chooses

So much for Java being an open standard.
It was only a matter of time until they arrested someone. Putting the controversy surrounding Wikileaks aside, this arrest seems like a good thing. Setting a precedence of not punishing people for DDOS attacks would be definitely be bad. Especially when the DDOS attacks are so simple to do, "download this program, enter http://visa.com into the first box and press Go".
Well, yes, but you could probably have earned/saved even more money money by not going to restaurants at all.

If I'm going to a restaurant, it's a luxury, not a chore, and if I'm doing chores, I'll just go do chores.
For reference:

http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/

Also, finding a venue that could confirm space for up to 30 people on the 17th proved easier than expected, so I went ahead and reserved space, and scheduled the meetup. Please see:

http://www.meetup.com/RTP-Hackers-Founders/calendar/15690999...

to RSVP.

Hope to see all of you (well... within reason) there!
Terrible demo for a very handy product. If the folks at Boomerang are reading this, consider having it redone by a professional.
Physics also identifies the dynamics, which are a special type of constraint. Engineers also consider economics, which usually limits you to far less than physics allows.
I think this guy is making this story up. It used to be true, back in early 2009. The mint changed their policies long ago. He wrote this post in summer 2010.

I call BS.
A friend of mine who's a planetologist points out that the IAU's definition is really not a good one from a planetologist's point of view. It's centered around how the planet moves (which is what an astronomer can see) instead of around how it's composed (for which we need to send a probe).

It's not even that good from the astronomy point of view. A planet has to have cleared its orbit of other bodies—so what about Jupiter's Trojan asteroids? Are they just handwaved out of the way, or is Jupiter no longer a planet?
I bought a $250 pack (minimum purchase) of these coins from the Mint, incented slightly by the $5 in profit I'd make from the credit card transaction, but mostly because I thought it would be fun.

I however have intentionally tried to "put them into circulation", using them to pay for small items at the farmers market, drive-through windows, tips, etc. I've had to explain them a few times, but most people think it's interesting and it makes for a few seconds of friendly conversation. I think I've burned through around half so far.
Ya, the fewest lines of code submitted is often the best result (counterintuitively).
He shouldn't forget that a lot of the "scientists" that are using his "engineering" money are really "applied scientists", which are on the very blurry boundary with basic engineering.
I'm not sure about the reason why Anonymous took on Gene Simmons but I can't imagine how he denied people their freedoms.
Cleantech Firms Make Up Just 4% of North America's Fastest Growing
Android Phones Choking Network Capacity
As commentors have mentioned, you can't simply roll-your-own-Java without being at risk of a legal battle.

Zooming out. What are the biggest technologies being affected by this, and what are the alternatives available to the creators and developers of those technologies?

Would we end up in a situation where someone like Google would have to revamp their entire Android runtime?
Not sure why you were downvoted, you made good points.
Here's the link to buying coins. There is a $1000 limit for every 10 day period.

http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Category...
I'll bet people would pay $250+ for that.
What do you mean by `index section'?

I find an index to search for keywords at the end of the book quite useful, but that's probably not what you meant, or is it?
I don't see why that should be a problem. There is also a clear correlation between scientists and religion (or lack of belief).
seems like they are ignoring an opportunity for a pivot - their promotion created demand for their web design services, but they want to be an app maker so they don't pay attention to customers for anything other than apps.
Mitigating Slow HTTP DoS Attacks
Indeed. Weinberg's Second Law states "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization".

I am glad engineer is not "synonymous" with "programmer".
That was the key event for me.

If one finds oneself in this situation is there any general advice for trying to get to talk to someone else if you contacted by a jerk from what might otherwise be a good prospect?
Yes there is.... Liberation Mono is the best font for working at a shell.

xterm -fa 'Liberation Mono'

To try it out young grasshopper.
The trade-off isn't worth it. There's 2 of us full-time and we'd much rather pay the EngineYard and EC2 premiums if that means not having to spend any time dealing with hardware or even sys-admin activities. The extra time lets us focus on the business and have more stress-free lives.
Unfortunately, the accidental liability problem needs to be taken seriously -- mostly because of risk/reward. I try to write as nice and appreciative letter as possible.

1. I don't reject candidates -- I choose a different candidate.

2. The more they went through the process, the longer (and better) the letter. Rejected application, short thank you for applying. If you came for two interviews, but then we went with someone else -- I write a longer letter with references to the meetings.

3. Good candidates that we didn't hire (because another was better) are invited into my personal network. I recommend them to others, I invite them to dev events, etc. I give non-specific-to-our-interview job hunting advice. We'll have openings at some point.

4. I do the same for candidates that are just not a fit (they do X, we need Y). I might never hire them, but I have a personal goal to know every good developer within commute distance of my company (we live in a low population area).
After setting up my first merchant account for online credit card processing this year, I have to disagree whole heartedly. Rewards program cost the seller of goods. The fancier the card (platinum, cash or frequent flyer programs) the more it costs the seller as a percentage of the transaction. This is why many places refuse to take AmEx. They have high monthly account fees, and their per transaction percentage is considerably higher than a plain old visa.
With our upper-arms nearly straight down most of the time, yes. Our biceps are quite durable, and have to lift less than 1/2 our arm weight; our shoulder muscles have to lift the whole frickin' thing, and from a worse leverage standpoint if your arms are "out".

Maybe that's the solution to gestural interfaces - quit with the in-front-of-my-face stuff, and go towards more sustainable movements, like we already have with keyboards and mice; everything at elbow height.
Not really. A 30 minute video file might be slightly smaller than three 10 minute video files but the difference would be negligible.

What's happened is that YouTube has developed a way to identify infringing content, and profit from it.

They can find an "illegal" clip of a TV show or movie, contact the copyright owner, and with their permission leave it on the site but serve up advertising alongside, splitting the revenue with the legitimate owner. Everybody wins. Allowing longer videos will let them do the same thing with full episodes or feature movies.
Seems like, having it free was not enough. Also if you read the article, you'll realize that it is a test machine for devs.
Twitter: 2010, The Year in Review
Just the other day I was actually thinking about this and about how the titles often don't imply job function. I jotted something down that I was hoping to elaborate on, but haven't done so yet. So as not to seem like a shameless plug, the URL in my profile anyone's interested. Not much to see, but perhaps someone has thoughts.
I am using Boomerang pretty often.

For instance, right now I have an e-mail scheduled for tomorrow. I wrote it to a colleague that was on vacation while I was writing the message (a follow-up on a bug). In some way, I'm helping him manage his Inbox effectively: this e-mail didn't need to be read while on vacation, so why should he care.

My other typical use case is when I write an e-mail at 7pm, but I prefer it to reach the recipient the following morning at 8.45am. First, because it's working hours, so the chance that it gets lost is lower, and second, to pretend I wake up sooner than I do :)

I don't use the "postpone me receiving this e-mail" feature. For that I prefer calendar. But I do see its value.
I completely agree. In 2008, some students actually made this already:
http://www.physorg.com/news125773212.html

I wrote about it back then (in Dutch, http://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/471) and at that time, there were some laws preventing this from really catching on. I guess those have been changed in the mean time?
Yep, we use Google's new OAuth API. It lets you grant access for our servers to send mail on your behalf without us having to learn your Gmail password.
Google has a list of the cities that appied for and (may?) receive the FIOS offering. Its in the original story link.
If 1 in 1000 candidates would sue you, causing $100k in costs for a drawn-out legal battle, then your practice has a very expensive expected value, but in a way you won't notice until shit hits the proverbial fan.
I'm no email expert, but doesn't that raise like spam flags--a gmail originated message not coming from gmail servers?
To answer your questions, yes it has an SD slot on the right-hand side. I've been looking around but can't determine the exact size of the SSD. No idea on the specifics but I am aware that the CPU is an Intel Atom chip.
i think you miss the point. minimal change = more than minimal results.
Reassuring to know a list of chosen cities hasn't been leaked.
80s, 90s and 00s. The increasing demand for and status of programmers resulted in titular inflation. In the late 80s - early 90s the popularity of personal computing brought many people who would previously look down on programmers into the ranks, and in order to sound more appealing they started calling themselves "developers" (Microsoft played an important role in this transformation - they correctly identified programmers as one of their most important group of customers and probably figured calling them a fancy name would help customer loyalty). Google may be identified as responsible, indirectly, to the second transformation. Unlike other companies Google did, in fact, hire many engineers (people who were trained as engineers, that is) and created a climate in which doing anything useful on the web begets the title.
It's left out, but if anything I'd say without is more accurate, given this part:

>... beginning with a subset of users.

Nowhere does it claim to only remove limits from "some" videos, merely "for some people right now", and it also doesn't imply it won't reach everyone. Though I haven't seen anything from YouTube, so it could be that that is the case.
This kind of rhetoric disturbs me. The burden doesn't lie with the scientific community, but rather the republican party. Science is not a movement, it's a set of practices that emphasize observation and empirical analysis to interpret the world around us.

Science is there for anybody who wants to open their mind to it to enjoy. I'm sure some republicans have and assuming those numbers are correct, 1 of 3 things happened: 1) they've changed their affiliation over time (becoming either democrat or unaffiliated), 2) they didn't find what they were looking for in science and stopped practicing, 3) they're in the current minority.
I'm not sure Ryan Dahl should be considered an armchair expert with respect to Node.js.
It's possible that "young" is a euphemism for a lifestyle that's either party-centric or bohemian. However, since I've worked with shops that actually are bohemian, age really doesn't matter. 45-year old hippies, dads that occasionally winter in France. Pulse's about page really does look very young; maybe a warning to those looking for more traditional workplace ideology.

Like you said, it probably means sweatshop.
If you think this one is bad, you should have seen the OLD demo video!

We just added a paid subscription tier (pay-what-you-think-is-fair pricing) with the new launch, and a better demo is one of the things we'd love to spend money on.
Not exactly sure, I wouldn't want to chance it since California actually has some additions to the federal laws.

http://www.dfeh.ca.gov/DFEH/default/
You may be disheartened to know that the article was comparatively light on climber jargon.
Hmmm. That's almost a low enough price for me to take it, even as I don't need the enterprise features. I do need the extra space, however.
I always think that you get strcpy by first writing

*target = source*

Step two is realizing that things don't work that way in C. Step three is sprinkling in semantic sugar to make it work.

strcat, then, is for symmetry with strcpy.
Really? HN thinks this is a good article? Wtf happened to this place?

"I traveled around the world for cheap because I have points. How did I get points? I collected points with cards. LOL POINTS"

Thanks for wasting my time.
Of course there is a flip side, if you interview 100 programmers in a small high tech town and piss off 99 of them by not even sending a 'no thanks' letter.

And each of them tell all their friends that you are an a-hole, then when every potential hire in Cambridge/ NYC/ Stanford etc has heard that XYZ software are a-holes you are going to have one hell of a job hiring.
I would claim that there are two factors that lead to the fact that most scientists are Democrats: the overall lean of universities, and the source of funding.

First, scientists tend to work in academia. It's well documented that universities are strongly slanted to the left. It seems reasonable to expect that when the left-leaning universities are looking to hire, they will tend to (possibly not intentionally) favor others like themselves.

Second, the government is the largest funder of scientific research. However, to the extent that the GOP favors a smaller government (and though they say this, they don't actually do so, but that's a different discussion), this would make one expect that those against such governmental funding would be morally bound to find other means of employment.

asking how the guy who prohibited stem-cell research

This isn't what happened. It's incredibly frustrating to me that people continually read a ban on federal funding to be a ban on research itself. But it does reinforce my point that the governmental force behind science is now perceived as the sole force behind science.

reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality

In the science of economics the opposite is true. For example, Democratic support of minimum wages and other price controls, and especially their opposition to free trade, fly against the wind of economic science.
Ageism in tech is rampant. If you replace age with race, it will become immediately obvious why this is discriminatory:

> You're working around highly energetic, incredibly passionate, white people - almost everyone in our team has European roots.

Doesn't sound so good, does it?

That said, it's probably an oversight and they didn't mean it in a malicious way.
This is great. I usually don't want to read a whole subthread because of location higher in the page.
The credit card companies pass on these perks to the merchants. Transaction fees for card purchases are actually higher for cards with rewards.
Ask HN: Blog - roll your own or use existing
As a web developer I've generally built my own super simple blog engines for client sites - actually you couldn't really call them fully fledged blogs but they suffice.

As the need for features and content formatting increases, I wonder whether the custom built route is the right path to take. Whether I should continue re-inventing the wheel or simply use something 'out-of-the-box'

One benefit with rolling it myself is that the UI for managing the blog is stripped down and easy to use.

From what I can see though, many of the well designed company sites that have blogs use wordpress or similar.

Any thoughts?
Not so much. My first thought, after all, was "Hooray, now I can watch Top Gear and Doctor Who episodes which aren't split into six different sections!" I don't really want to watch 60-minute videos of someone's cat.

(Incidentally, before anyone gets on my arse about copyright violation which I usually disapprove of, I feel justified in pirating Top Gear and Doctor Who since they're shown for free on the (Australian) ABC or SBS. I pay Australian taxes despite not being resident there, so I damn well should be able to watch what I've already paid for.)
Startup Career Advice (from Union Square's Albert Wenger)
I agree front end is where the majority of the latency occurs. Luckily there are automated solutions out there to tweak performance but my favorite is http://blaze.io because they do all the performance adjustments in real-time and you get the power of a leading CDN.
fwiw, and this is certainly not my forte, i'd rather be an asshole than a defendant in a lawsuit like that
Cambridge Endangered Language Database