skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is not taking a class that requires you to write 20 pages or read 40 pages within the last semester an issue?

I find that, as people in technical majors progress through the years, they take less and less humanities and more and more major specific classes.

It might be worrying if math majors didn't take a class that requires problem sets in the last semester. Or english majors didn't take classes that required writing. But to suggest that students aren't learning because they aren't taking courses relevant to their major is a biased assertion.
I'm currently using Backbone.js + JQuery in my startup and my decision came down to the following conclusions:

Use Sproutcore or Cappucino if you are trying to emulate a native desktop app and where long load times are acceptable (i.e. the user sacrifices time to load everything to not have to wait much if at all after the initial loading). Also use these two environments when your users are Apple Users.

Use Backbone.js + JQuery in a small startup environment with a lean team where the front-end devs are multitalented (i.e. they can easily move between html/css and javascript)

Use a MVVM framework with bigger teams () and with teams where your front-end guys may be good with html/css and graphic design but have limited or non-existent stills when it comes to programming intermediate to advanced javascript and handling mildly to very complex programming concepts.

MVVM has value and I believe it was invented to solve a common communication/coordination problem in corporate-style environments and especially with "silo"-ed teams and matrix management. However, the way I see it will slow down a good front-end developer. MVC is much more powerful and flexible in the hands of a good dev. MVVM just adds another layer of abstraction so the pure HTML/CSS and graphic design guys don't have to get their hands dirty with real programming.

If you are going the Sproutcore/Cappucino route, you really are commiting yourself to a platform and certain ways of doing things from a user interaction perspective. You will gain a lot in not having to build some basic, common interfaces, but you will lose when you need to invent and create your own custom interfaces.

Summary:

Backbone.js + JQuery = Flexible, powerful, lean - Good for experienced devs

Knockout.js = Less powerful, simple = Overcomes coordination and cooperation issues in teams where "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing"

Cappucino/Sproutcore = Complex apps built fast, inflexibility in interface design patterns. Good for "native-style" apps.

Anyways, those are my opinions. I encourage you to challenge me on anything you don't agree with as my experience with Sproutcore/Cappucino is limited to just research and I only built one small app with Knockout.js.
"American soft power is vanishing"
Could you share how you implemented unit testing your backbone controllers' javascript code?
Mark Pilgrim Ask Me Anything on Reddit
The encoder is being improved, and the decoder is being optimised for speed on various platforms but the spec defines what the decoder does and it was effectively frozen as soon as Google converted a bunch of Youtube videos and got hardware manufacturers on board. Any change to the format would break existing content (most of Youtube) and shipping hardware.
IOS Dev Tip: TextWrangler reads binary Plists
Quick review: first thing I noticed is that not all graphics are "Retina"-ready and it shows; their use of the UITabBar is pretty bad IMHO (tapping an icon never switches to a tab but flips or slide to a different UIView; some navigation is inconsistent (e.g. you go to recently viewed, see an item, the back button brings you back to a different view); you have a bunch of "Unfiled Notes" that you apparently can't file: it's syncing the info somewhere so I imagine that the desktop app allows you to rearrange these notes, but not being able to do it inside the app means that the app in itself is not usable; someone asked: I can't find a way to do OCR on pictures taken.

All in all, meh. At first sight, it reminded me of Evernote, but I think it's missing what makes the desktop version of OneNote interesting: the ability to take notes however you want by just clicking somewhere. The size of the iPhone doesn't really allow for that so I can understand. But if you're not using the desktop version, it looks like this is no special note-taking app.
This is a known issue in the current version of voxio. If you get this message it's most likely that your number is not supported by our system at the moment. This 'misleading' message has been fixed and it will be online very soon. We are working hard to support all possible phone numbers out there.
Thank you for the feedback.
I generally like Gruber and think he tends to weigh his thoughts and arguments very well - but I still can't forgive him for buying MPEG LA's PR release[1] hook and sink[2]. Since when has it been a good idea to take a press release at face value[3]?

He hasn't recanted this complete acquiescence, so I am under the impression that he sincerely believes them - and only on the grounds of that single release.

Maybe he was biased, too cute for his own good, had a brain fart, or is too stubborn to accede. I really don't know, but this is one case where I can't really blame Gruber haters for framing his writing and philosophy in a certain way.

[1]: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100825006629/en

[2]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/26/h264

[3]: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/08/27/free-as-in-smokescree...

(Fixed a typo: "thought" to "thoughts". Don't read anything into it!)
The fact that the standard is frozen is not incompatible with them improving their implementation.
Deviantart searches for web application developer
For a sufficiently large project, just starting autotest can be a drag. For projects with large suite, I think the only way which does not have diminishing returns is parallelizing the test suite.
Ah, typo in parent comment. I meant "via email". If you read this comment, I'd greatly appreciate an email at loganfrederick@gmail.com so you don't have to post your email publicly. Thanks again!
I think "passion" is a better single-word summary of this essay. Having a fervid passion for your start-up is what enables you to make what most consider a difficult decision (quitting school, quitting your job, taking out a home equity loan, maxing out your credit card, etc.) simple. This is evidenced by the author's "pull the trigger" analogy. I guarantee that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did not spend sleepless nights deciding whether to drop out of Harvard--they just did it.
Sorry, I was agreeing with you about Flash and then going off on a tangent without making it clear I was meaning a different "plugin" argument. I was referring to coverage such as:

So Much For Standards, Google Says WebM Plugins Coming Soon For Safari And IE9

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/14/webm-plugins/
Want to be a successful startup? Create and add lots of value to your clients
Thanks. Getting closer. Some random pages I've read seem to indicate that express and npm don't always work well together from an installation standpoint. Your experience show otherwise?
Not to be pedantic, but the United States isn't bigger than Canada (its just more populous).
No way is the conclusion that they should stay in the kitchen. The conclusion is that maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields.

I think that the reason people fail to understand why there are so few women in software development is because they frame the issue the way you just did. They think about how to convince a young woman that engineering is better than home economics.

Instead, try this as an exercise: imagine you're a career counselor at a university, and a very bright young woman has just entered your office asking for advice. She's a top student who can handle math, science, and arts/humanities, and she's got the chops to score in the high percentiles on whatever standardized test is required for a grad program.

Imagine a conversation where you try to talk her out of becoming a cardiologist and sell her on a grad program in computer science. Make sure you consider employment prospects, earnings potential, social prestige, job stability at age 48, and so forth.

This conversation will demonstrate why it's not engineering vs staying in the kitchen. Young women are starting to out-achieve young men in the US, and I'd be surprised if this isn't the case in the UK.

People (who are aware that the achievement gap is now starting to favor women) often think of the scarcity of women in engineering as a dark spot in an otherwise bright picture, but one that should still be remedied. I think they're missing the possibility that the evident aversion women have to engineering or CS is actually a positive thing for women - that women have realized that they can achieve more real power and influence in other fields. By "better off" I'm not talking about some condescending "oh, you'll be happier at home with the kids" kind of thing. I mean wealthy, high income, highly influential, positions of power in business and government kind of "better off".

Now for a slightly lame backtrack - I actually do think that science and engineering are amazing fields, and the scarcity of women is a complicated thing - especially at the undergraduate level (after all, the most common academic background at the bachelor's level for fortune 500 CEOs is engineering in the US). However, I do think that the perspective I described above needs to be a big part of the analysis. People seem to view the low participation of women in certain technical fields as a negative for women without adequately understanding the other things women are doing and the possibility that they may be making better choices than men.
Ask HN: Best Use for Spare Domain Names
So I've accumulated quite the portfolio of worthless domain names. They're all top level domains so I suppose they aren't worthless - but I can't sell them for anything.

I'm trying to determine the best use for these names. Right now I have many of them pointing to my active website(s).

If I got a few generic keyword related articles together, built a few pages and give myself back links from some of these domains, would that be a bad thing? Would adsense get rid of me?

PS I know there was a similar ask HN thread posted about what you're doing with your unused domain names, but I'm having a hard time using google or searchyc to locate it.
Cry us a river, gaius. If things like this article count as "real, actual discrimination", then pretty much every women-in-tech complaint includes tales of "real, actual discrimination".
> So it would be more accurate to say that H.264 is incompatible with the FSF's idea of software freedom.

It depends on how you define "compatible", but H.264 is only sort of compatible with MIT-style licensing as well. It's compatible in the sense that, if you start with MIT-licensed software, you can slap on the required H.264 license and not violate any laws (MIT-licensed software can be relicensed under more restrictive terms). But it's incompatible in the sense that you can't actually choose to ship your software under the MIT license and the MIT license alone. In that sense, H.264's license is viral: any software that supports H.264 in any form must incorporate the the H.264 license.
Oliver Wang is totally right on this.

But i'm slightly more ambivalent than he is on the subject. What Chua wrote did hit a resonant note in American cultural stereotypes, and that's bad, BUT, i don't think it invalidates Chua's points particularly either.

Chua's approach is a particular style of child rearing, but her own piece was so filled with nebulous caveats, that i found it hard to believe that anything she particularly said was rooted in being Chinese.

The real problem in the end, i guess, is just that she was an Asian woman saying these things. Not that she's got some of the overbearing qualities shared by strict mothers everywhere.
Diving deep into email spam statistics
Updated Section and Other Matters
Do CEOs Matter?
IPad Sales Outpace Every Prediction
Once you adjust for poor blacks and Mexican illegal immigrants, the US is fine. The poor health care, nutrition choices, and young people being shot skews the statistics.

If you are a "white" person the stats are as good or better.

This post is not racist; other countries have relatively homogeneous populations, the US does not.
Wow.

In the US, coffee-makers are low-payed jobs with no benefits -- as opposed to omputing and IT, which are good jobs. So your first analogy doesn't apply.

And on the second point, the field of gender HCI has shown that there tend to be differences in how men and women use computer programs. Yes, these are contextual and more likely to be due to societal norms, social pressures, and encouragement with technology than any innate gender difference. Still, they're real. And when software is constructed by almost-all-male teams, those preferred usages get embedded in it.
Who is attending the Gamification Summit?
We're flying down to SF this afternoon. It will be a great event! It also seems to be completely sold out. If you're attending, come find us and say hi. Our company IActionable is one of the sponsors.

http://gsummit.com - more info
when everyone else jumped straight from Baseline to High

Interesting. Which mobile device(s) did that, and what decoder chip(s) did they use?
They're not irrevcably licensed. If you find that WebM does actually violate your patents you can't sue otherwise you lose your license to all of the other patents.

Realistically Google should not revoke your licenses unless you lose the lawsuit (not when filed), because if they have legitimately infringed your patent then it seems like blackmail to keep them from acting on it by such a method.
The video is not playing here. Was it removed?

Nevermind, noticed that it is going to Blip.tv, here it is on Blip.tv if the linked site doesn't work:

http://blip.tv/file/3627639/
Although it seems not to be a direct play as the footnote states that Amazon.com is not a sponsor of this promotion.
Integrating Virus Total Into Your Browser
That is interesting, to hear what he says to investors. Salesmanship, but interesting.

Off topic, but last spring on my way back from Silicon Valley I happened to sit next to the guy who ran a parts plant in China making components for Apple. I have very narrow interests (programming, hiking, writing/reading, and cooking) so it was neat to get talk to someone who is in a very different kind of business than I am in, and was in a much higher pressure job.
now that's a stretch.
I can't help but to be unsurprised. Instances of Apple not exceeding predictions are few and far between.
I don't know if it's gotten more sophisticated recently, but the last time I played with autotest it had a very naive concept of "relevant tests". Certainly not the sort of runtime analysis the parent describes.

(Also, on our moderately large codebase it noticeably impaired the performance of my whole machine because of the way it constantly scanned the entire directory tree. I know there was some talk of adding edge triggering via kqueue or fsevents, but no one had done it at that time.)
Great summary of the responses. Discussions like this have a way of revealing guys' sexist (A, B) or self-serving (C) attitudes.
Don't forget Seadragon. I believe that was Microsoft's first iPhone app.
With H.264 bundled with a piece of software, that is not possible.

The decision to only support bundled codecs and refuse to let the user use anything else was made by Mozilla, Google, and Opera. It is not a spec requirement or technical necessity. The idea that a browser would be forced to bundle h.264 is quite evidently mistaken, as the browsers that do support it don't bundle it.
I really like this list, but it's also rather painful to read because I can imagine concrete examples of these archetypes from my own history.
The-M-Project: A HTML5 enabled JavaScript framework to target mobile devices
Wikinomics talks about Innocentive, saying at the time there were "ninety thousand scientists from 175 countries" registered there, and that "firms will build their R&D organizations around a core of question askers and outsource most of the problem solving" Actually, I think they mention Innocentive over two dozen times in the book and how it was supposed to revolutionize the world. Meh. There is the book on Amazon if you haven't seen it: http://amzn.com/1591843677?itag=nowarlab-20&linkCode=as2
10 Questions About Your Family You Can't Answer
You could list them here and see if anyone else could use them.
This title is going to be misleading to a lot of people familiar with Learn Python the Hard Way, and other variations using the same methodology.
Go Google and the FSF. Closed standard like Gif must die or be opened.
Why? You'd just have 2 boxes - "Email from your FB friends", "Email from other people".
Google Launches Fourth Annual'Doodle 4 Google' Contest
Is it just me, or does it look a lot like Diaspora?
You should always be working hard on user experience. Not just at the beginning.

- Ryan Carson (@ryancarson)

http://startupquote.com/post/2828008385
What Romanization system is that? It looks like Cai to me.
443,137 purchased so far. That number surprised me a bit.
> maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields.

really?

if you had a teenage son or younger brother, would you be encouraging them to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer? or would you be encouraging them to learn about computers, software, networking, mobile phones, social networks, the cloud, the web, and all the other cool things we love that are changing the world?
Rackspace CEO On The Future Of Cloud, WikiLeaks
That's a great quote! It ties nicely with others of the same theme. One of my other favorites is:

"There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose." -- Elbert Hubbard
What's Mozilla's market share on mobile devices?
there has to be some "mac4life"er out there willing to sacrifice his liver for "the greater good", and save the master-of-all-things
I've seen the trade domains threads here on HN. The domains I have are all niche related so I really don't think there'd be any interest.
Side note: If you purchase this and can get 3 friends to purchase using your referral link you get your gift card for free.
Not valid, npm installs express with no issues.
No, clearly it's not Free as in FSF, but 'free as in beer' is the only thing that separates it from H.264, it's definitely the most accurate description I've seen yet.
Try us. I have a collection of names as well..
The opportunity cost for Facebook and Twitter is much lower than blogging, especially when most blogs were meant to target friends, relatives and co-workers. Really, if blogging was meant to be taken as social networking, there's no point in setting up something outside of what all of your friends are doing unless it's a special case. And, right or wrong in terms of openness, that's what's happening.

As per "special cases:" most blogs left tend to be dedicated and area-specific, meaning that a blogroll is somewhat pointless. Look at Smitten Kitchen: it's a highly targeted website about a specific area, not a general purpose "Hey guys" website. No blogroll, no need for one. If you're doing small-kitchen cooking, great. If not, you probably know about Serious Eats.

The few weblogs left are analogous to 'zines, when everybody else was mailing letters and talking on the phone. "Revolution girl-style now" indeed.
Do you know when and if that so called "Non-Profit" Garage48 would be coming up? I'd be happy to participate. However, I don't know anyone who is going to these events. Would this be limiting anything?
Sure... until your database is your bottleneck.
Future - The Road for a Java Programmer
The Good News About Android's Version Distribution
I didn't take any action on your site (quite busy at the moment) but I have a few suggestions on your design.

- Try not to use sans serif (Helvetica) and serif (Georgia) fonts at the same time. Choose one and stick to it. If you are going for large font sizes serif look nice. Otherwise use sans serif. Keep in mind though that sans serif fonts are easier to read on a screen.

- On a similar note, bold and underline on long paragraphs/blocks of text is hard to read. Also #000 on #fff (or vise versa) is tiring for the eyes. Have you experimented with shades of black/gray (#333, #666, #999, #ccc)?

- Try to make better use of your space. The login box takes way too much space.

- Last but not least, I personally find the blue header at the top very "strong". I would use a different shade of blue (google uses nices shades of blue, perhaps you can steal a couple)
I compared it to how the $20 off $40 at the Gap did for Groupon which supposedly $10 Million in one day or something really high!
Broke! The page is serving as "content-type: text/plain" for some reason.
Now that makes sense. I was reading it completely differently. Which is also why I probably couldn't find anything wrong with what you were saying.

Sorry for the confusion.

=)
I would encourage my child to pursue his or her own passions My goal is to expose my kids to a broad range of fields, and strive to ensure that they are well educated enough to understand and make wise decisions about their own lives.

But if we're concerned about how women aren't going into graduate engineering or CS programs, that means we think something's wrong with their choice, right? It might not be their fault. It could be discrimination, an unfriendly environment, a lack of friendly encouragement (or a lack of pressure, which also works, though often at the expense of the person's happiness).

So think of it this way - if my daughter was interested in following grandpa's steps and going into medicine rather than dad's steps and going into computing, I certainly wouldn't discourage her.

BTW, I've posted about an article from the RAND foundation about the "shortage" of science and engineering PhDs in the US (it's easy to find on their site). RAND found that this is, essentially, a rational reaction to poor prospects and pay relative to the professions. I understand we're not robots, passion matters. But when researchers are RAND are reaching this conclusion, it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.
You're quite right, but I think its ridiculous to ask Google to give you a free license to their patents even as you are suing them for infringing yours.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f545e/i_am_a_fourtime_...
I don't know, but mobile only represents about 3% of web traffic.

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/01/2010_mobile_...