skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"If you asked me 3 years ago what language you should learn I would’ve said Ruby. If you asked me 6 years ago, it was PHP."

You should have concluded that you're not the best person to give advice on what programming language a person should learn. Anyway, the right answer is C++, and the rest will follow.
So...we agree. My point is that where some of the other people mentioned had their masters degrees in CS, Jobs seems to have been more of a business-inclined hobbyist who really liked and could competently work with computers. I concur that his biggest strength as far as computer science went was that he happened to pal around and co-found a company with someone who was the most badass hobbyist in town.
Meh. This is basically what it's like to be the SO of a student, or an academic, or a freelance blogger or writer or programmer, basically anyone who has an unstructured work environment. Both my SO and I will go to relatively nice restaurants with our laptops and work and ignore each other.
It's interesting to revisit Pac-Man so many years later. As a kid, it was always just a game with unpredictable behavior, incomprehensible in its abstractness. Dissecting it now and providing concrete detail to every movement feels like one of those "destroying my childhood" moments.
I'm not usually the type that debates this topic in forums and probably don't know what I'm talking about. However, my understanding is that the worry comes from not seeing artificial radio signals from other parts of the galaxy.
I agree with you. My audience is primarily web developers, so that's who I write to.
What about their radio signals? That travels at c. Although I don't know our maximum range on getting clear radio signals from a given point.
Your Code Sucks and I Hate You: The Social Dynamics of Code Reviews
Actually, all that's really necessary is to take a snapshot of the background and overlay whatever is different from the background. 3D data would help in the case of a color match between the actor and the background, but isn't strictly necessary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
So the example they give here is onsmash.com. What's interesting is the domain still resolves to an IP in what looks like a CaroNet colo in North Carolina.

How are they taking over these domains I wonder? Or are they forcing the sites to host the take down notice on their own hardware?
That's fair, they didn't prove an "arsenic backbone," but here's a couple of key lines...

"...the purified DNA extracted from +As/-P cells contained As. Our NanoSIMS analyses, combined with the evidence for intracellular arsenic by ICP-MS and our radiolabeled AsO4-
experiments demonstrated that intracellular AsO4 was incorporated into key biomolecules, specifically DNA."

and

"...the level of PO4 impurities in the medium was insufficient to elicit growth in the control (-As/-P)"
I'm intrigued. So many email signatures for example plead that you don't print them out unless necessary.

Are there really people in the world who print out every email and document they receive?
I vehemently disagree with the message of the post. It's unnecessary to suggest that anybody must learn anything, let alone JavaScript in the browser. Plenty of technologies exist that abstract away the need to know JavaScript and allow a developer to focus solely on their application rather than the underlying technologies that allow their application to run on a target platform (note, I'm a co-founder of one such technology, http://www.noloh.com).

Similarly, I wouldn't demand that anyone learn assembly or C. While it can be useful in certain situations to have that knowledge it's most definitely not necessary. It's perfectly acceptable to learn and use a higher level language, whether it's NOLOH or one of many other tools and languages that generate the necessary JavaScript or other underlying code. This has the benefits of freeing the developer up to concentrate on their application, while allowing the producers of such tools to worry about the numerous implementation details regarding the many different target platforms. This also has the benefit of allowing for easier porting to non JavaScript platforms.

Clearly if you're somewhat religious about having to know and being able to reproduce all the underlying architecture that runs your application then you must learn JavaScript, but for many others, using a language they know, or learning a higher level language can fully allow them to focus on their applications is ideal.

There also exists a middle ground, for example in the case of NOLOH, if the developer knows some of the basics of JavaScript they can create, or wrap existing 3rd party JavaScript widgets or modules, but extensive knowledge of JavaScript is not necessary, and the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of developers are not of that type, but rather looks to use an existing module created by someone of that type.

Thus, I would argue that if you're a developer of a particular type, either one that's religious, or one that plans to create certain types of client modules or wrap/integrate client modules with little to no API, then you must learn JavaScript, but for the vast majority I believe it's becoming increasingly less necessary.
So I'm curious if these cells can survive if reintroduced back in to the wild?

"Next, what they did was culture the bacteria in the lab, and artificially jacked up the arsenic concentration, replacing all the phosphate (PO43-) with arsenate (AsO43-). The cells weren't happy, growing at a much slower rate on arsenate than phosphate, but they still lived and they still grew. These are tough critters."

That seems to indicate that they wouldn't be able to compete with their cousins outside of a controlled environment.
The Top 500 List - Internet Retailer
Can maybe someone comment on the current reliability of GAE? What people write on this topic, for example in the comments on http://www.carlosble.com/?p=719&rewrite, sounds pretty scary. Apparently the status page at http://code.google.com/status/appengine doesn't reflect people's experiences.

Is it possible to work around the reported reliability issues? After all, what good is scalability without reliability?
I forwarded this to my girlfriend. Thanks for providing an SO's perspective so that I can make the point that it's part of the game, and not just me.
Posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960718
MIT Entrance exam (1869)
It's not the implementation that surprises me - once I know it's the right thing to do, I can easily figure out a method how. What's surprising is the insight that it is the right thing to do.
I've opened up a ticket for our blog to look into this.

Do you think you could elaborate more on what the exact problem is and what we can do to fix it?

Please forgive my ignorance here.
Then consider my snarkiness rescinded. Part of the problem with aggregate news sites is that they often remove context.
ssh on my phone has been a life saver quite a few times now, too.
Google appears to disagree with you, as their recent modifications to address this issue have shown.
So even if there weren't arsenate based to begin with, now we do have artificial arsenate life forms?
That was so much more interesting than I anticipated! Never was a big Pac-Man fan, and I guess I always assumed that the ghosts were just aiming directly for Pac-Man! To learn that they each have their personalities and targeting mode is awesome and makes the game much more interesting!
Everyone knows the best language is Modula-2...
Cutting spending is never irrelevant. The entire reason we are in the this situation is because the government spent money that they did not have. Hence the deficit.

If you think that cutting spending is irrelevant then how do you think raising taxes will help? Until the government stops spending and printing money, how can we ever trust them to do the right thing with more money from more taxes?
Also worth your time if you're looking for inspiration: http://www.cssmania.com/
This group of descendant cells, having been selected by natural selection for the laboratory environment with high arsenic concentrations, might indeed fare poorly if put into Mono Lake with its different environment. Perhaps their descendants would be so few as to be undetectable.
Google does an above average, and often good job, at actual usability challenges. But they are pretty universally bad at making things that people would consider beautiful.

Chrome gets usability issues right. Things like their tab closing behavior, the almost total lack of dialogues, one click bookmarking, etc. are all really great. But Chrome is not a beautiful app. Its toolbar icons are fairly childish, its tabs just a bit off.

I'd say that trend holds through most of their products.
If you're interested in this you might also check out King of Kong is also an interesting documentary on Donkey Kong and the world record holders. Also, it's one of the better documentaries I've seen.
I agree that JavaScript is a very good thing to learn, but it seems odd that the article doesn't even mention server-side JS. Yes, jQuery is wonderful, but a large share of the things that are getting people excited in the JS community lately revolve around Node, Socket.io, and other attempts to break JavaScript out of its DOM playground.

Criticism aside, it's good to see articles like this. There are more subtleties to JS than a lot of people realize. Instead of getting frustrated and blaming the language when it doesn't behave like [insert favorite language here], one should take the time to study its fundamentals.
It seems like we are waking up to a bad dream that the US government is increasing the Skynet in the Terminator movies..

They track you, bug you, infiltrate , and than order drones to bomb the heck out of you..

The sad thing is its not the Government's fault. We as voters let this happen in not opposing the interests of the Military-Industrial-Financial complex with real votes on the issues..
Facebook Seeks Friends in Washington Amid Privacy Concerns
I totally agree; I would love a way to "read" blogs while driving:

Go to a TC article on iPhone, click bookmarklet, sit back and listen.
In my opinion the driving model of Forza is not nearly at the level of GT5. Methinks this is highly subjective though.
You are not forced to give your inheritance to your children. You are forced to give it to the government. That's why your rephrasing does not work.
was great until the Mario theme came on...then I clicked away.

Call me pedantic but the Mario theme has become ridiculously cliché.
heh if this takes off, I can imagine almost every aggregator site having a HN clone of some sort.
And that's just the beginning.
Isn't that kind of high school level algebra?

I thought we were all supposed to have been dumbed down compared to our illustrious forefathers?
WikiLeaks now storing files in 'James Bond' bunker
this post would be a lot better if they actually had screenshots of videos of the menu system so we know what all the frustration is about.
My husband has been patient through years of on-call duty and pages at all hours of day, night and weekends. He's been patient through all night maintenance duties and when I'm away for conferences or customer visits few times a year.

I've been patient when his company adapted this agile practice that means a release until 4am every Wednesday.

One thing I'm wondering about is the "get involved" advice:
I'm a pretty mean developer, but I work in languages and environments that are very different from what my husband is working on. Whenever I try to discuss his work problems, I end up asking lots of wrong questions and generally annoying him. There is very little I can do to actually help him work on problems. Thats with me having 15 years of coding experience.

There is simply no way a girlfriend who is just learning to code can help her startup SO work on his projects.
"I badly need it for me startup" and "I hate www to death". Do you really need it that badly or do you really just want it?

I don't disagree, I would like to have it. Also SSL for my domain without having to use appspot.com. But I'd put SSL as a much higher priority.
> That seems to indicate that they wouldn't be able to compete with
> their cousins outside of a controlled environment.

Not clear. They only grew more slowly when in a less friendly environment than they're used to. It's conceivable that the new environment selected for bacteria who can process AsO4 more quickly than the control strain, but it's not clear how well suited these new bacteria are to the original concentrations of AsO4 and PO4. Perhaps they'd do better, perhaps worse.
Obvious rebuttal: Google vs. everybody else.
Why We Built the JSMentors.com JavaScript Mailing List
me too. This usually does a great job of pulling out the full text, but on occasion I have to click through to the actual site.
It is definitely a part of the game -- that's why it is so important to find someone that can understand. I've found the people that understand the most are people who are also ambitious and have the drive to succeed in whatever they do.
While we're on the subject, why is JavaScript the only language available for the browser? I can run tons of languages from the command line since they all follow the shebang (#!) convention. Why can't I run Python or Ruby with the <script> tag?

It seems like any language that had appropriate DOM bindings should be able to run so long as the user's browser has the appropriate interpreter. (Kind of like a plugin, but for embedded interpreted languages.) For example:

<script language="Python" version="2.5+" downloadfrom="http://www.python.org/dompython ">

Is this just too much to ask?!
"How are scientists so convinced that mutation and natural selection is all that is required"

They believe no such thing. Selection isn't required for allopatric speciation. Two isolated populations will naturally start to diverge just due to drift (random genetic changes over time). Given enough time they will inevitably become sexually incompatible.

"As far as I know, no new species have ever been produced, despite natural or unnatural selection."

Then let me direct you to: http://tinyurl.com/ridley2004speciation

"We begin with two distinct, but related species. The pollen of one is painted on the stigma of the other. If a hybrid offspring is generated, it is usually sterile ... However ... the chemical colchicine can often restore hybrid fertility. It does so by causing the hybrid to double its number of chromosomes ... Hybrids so produced may be interfertile with other hybrids like themselves, but not with the parental species. They are then a new reproductive species."

"Most garden varieties of irises, tulips, and dahlias, for example, are artificially created species. But their numbers are dwarfed by the huge numbers of artificial hybrid species of orchids, which it has been estimated are being formed at the rate of about 300 per month."

"Polyploid hybridization is also important in natural plant evolution."

Now, that type of speciation is a special case. It is not how animals speciate. But you are quite wrong in your quoted statement above.

"how come we take it for granted that humans, homo erectus, neanderthals etc. were all divergent species that had a common ancestor something like 50,000 years ago? Am I way off?"

Yes, you are, by an order of magnitude. Homo neanderthalensis is supposed to have diverged 500,000 - 800,000 years ago. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.316.5827.967a ("The new findings also push back the date that Neandertals split from the human branch of the primate tree by 200,000 years—to 800,000 years ago")

"maybe the white->dark->white butterflies was a bad one"

Don't believe everything you read in AnswersInGenesis. This is still a good example. Or at least, so I believe on the basis of http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/block_kitcher.php - "These are interesting alternatives to the familiar story, and the causal hypotheses they introduce can be tested in obvious ways: by examining the rates of larvae survival or by investigating nocturnal motions of moths. And this is what biologists have done."

But I don't have time to dig into the primary literature.

"scientists have been interbreeding literally thousands of generations of fruit flies and despite all selection pressures, artificial or not, were never able to produce a single new species"

Do you have examples where this has been the actual goal? I know Dodd (1989, http://eebweb.arizona.edu/courses/ecol525/readings/dodd_1989... ) tried this, but I don't think the experiment ran that long.

You will appreciate that it is much more effort for me to correct your poorly-informed naysaying than it is for you to naysay.
Holy. Shit.

I hope I never work with someone that needs this article.
These guys are building real businesses with revenue growing super fast. The beauty here is they saw a great business, Groupon, duplicated and raised bunch of money to grab market share.
That traffic appears to be additive to wired traffic, making it a double whammy in some people's opinions.
Microsoft and Google both started bulking up their Washington offices as they came under government scrutiny, so no surprise to see Facebook doing the same. Last summer they hired Marne Levine, who the article describes as "a former top aide to Larry Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council".
Well... you can use Python & Ruby in the browser if you're not opposed to having your users install Silverlight.

(I don't think I'd do this myself, even though I like Python quite a lot.)
End-to-end web programming in JavaScript using NodeJS is breathtaking to see in action.
tumblr seems to be going up and down, I don't know if that's normal or if I just had bad timing posting this. If it is actually normal I might have to reconsider using it.

I also had some issues with the sheer number of incoming requests overwhelming my server that I've got the images hosted on, but I think I've got that resolved now.
To be honest, that was implied. I only used client side as the beginning point because it's the one with the least amount of fuss to setup and the quickest reward. It was trying to be encouraging and encourage core JavaScript education.

You should know that the server side technologies are a big piece of the inspiration for writing this. I'm sorry I didn't convey that correctly.
New Academy Teaches?How to Earn on the Internet?
I didn't (and wouldn't) say Android is badly designed. It's OK, and I'd even say certain parts are beautiful, but it's quite uneven and some parts do actually border on ugly. It is certainly good enough for me, but for most people I think the bar has been raised to stratospheric levels by Apple and people now have really high expectations of the visual experience they should get from phone OSes.
It's not the voters fault; it's a systemic fault. Once you accept that violence can be used to force people to take certain actions; and that its proper place is not only as last resort for self defense you accept a system that will continually gain more power and use force more and more. People need to realize that the use of force, and living at the expense of another is not sustainable and will eventually collapse.
If you want absolute proof without any possibility of doubt go to church. If you want a series of ever more robust hypotheses supported by growing evidence which "suggest" possibilities, then you want science.

This is the first result. It's not foolproof but it's very, very suggestive.
Yes, I did just as you suggested. Strange. Still no go.
If you read the questions you'd see they are a combination of both memorization and understanding. You can't have understanding without memorization.
I feel the last part is just untrue. If s/he can't help in a coding capacity there are plenty of opportunities to help otherwise. It's akin to having a role in a family.
שריפת ענק ביערות הכרמל - וואלה חדשות
"For credit cards, agents can get real-time information on a person’s purchases by writing their own subpoena, followed up by a order from a judge that the surveillance not be disclosed."

The information was in a Power Point presentation Chris Soghoian FOIA'ed. Good reporting once again by Ryan Singel.
I wonder if it's really a genuine idea or simply the unintended consequence of an algorithm.
It's an entertaining movie, but I don't like to see it referred to as a "documentary". They did a lot of manipulative editing and such to make things seem a lot more dramatic than they actually are.

Twin Galaxies released a number of statements about misleading/inaccurate things in the movie: http://forums.twingalaxies.com/viewforum.php?f=86

I've heard that the documentary "Chasing Ghosts" is very good, but haven't had a chance to watch it yet.
Touring the Computer History Museum's amazing new exhibit with Woz.
When I saw this I could have sworn I had read it before, but in fact what I was remembering were earlier posts by the same guy (also comparing Google, Bing, and Yahoo maps); if you liked this post you might like them too:

http://www.41latitude.com/post/557224600/map-comparison
http://www.41latitude.com/post/1130407638/map-comparison-2
When have I heard this before? Yes, in 1999 when home broadband networks were getting rolled out.

And retail ISPs have spending money earmarked for network upgrades on other things.

From the technical point of view, as long as Netflix's machines are close to the ISP's switches (which is what the Level 3/Comcast spat is about), there will be no problem.
Well, since the entrance exam would likely be geared toward people graduating high school, wouldn't the entrance questions have to be at that level of educational experience?
Good communication is crucial to pretty much everything in life.

Additionally, grammar is not merely a matter of formulating sentences properly. Learning grammar structures your thought and allows you to make precise distinctions, important for sophisticated thinking.
Depends on how far back you go. For a Roman, mental multiplication was exceedingly difficult. Clearly this implies that there was a period of upward trend. If we believe that we're dumber than some of our forefathers, then there must have been a peak at some point in the past (or perhaps even multiple peaks, but we don't have enough evidence to suspect more than one, so let's assume it's an approximately parabolic trajectory).

Obviously, it was the men and women of the 1950s, who built computers and airplanes from nothing with little more than their wit, a grease pencil, and some twine, who were of the utmost in mental capacity and grit.

Since we're only 60 years from 1950, whereas 1869 is 81, we must be smarter than them. In fact, we're about as smart as people were in 1890. Ten years ago, we were as smart as people in 1900, but sadly such intelligence is ten years gone.

A corollary: in another 21 years, people will look back at this exam and just barely understand it. A few years after that, all hope is lost.
What can i say... you make my dream look bad :) good job, cant wait to see where you take it
OK, well I believe you. I'm just not an AV expert, so I don't want to pretend to know anything in that realm. All I know is that my Windows box always has worms, and I'm not an idiot when it comes to protection...that's a big issue.