skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is hard to say. It seems like some of the frameworks, for example jQuery, are making it easier for people to start using javascript, but could also be limiting the extent that they are actually learning javascript.
Microsoft could have built Facebook. But they didn't.
Interesting post. Although I think a bit backwards. Circuits are just a manifestation of computers, much like women 70 years ago who acted as computers.

The foundation is really these two questions "what functions are computabel" and "how efficiently".

From those questions come other questions like what model are you using... this changes the answers to both questions.

You then go into how do you build physical manifestations of these models and how do they affect various aspects of computation.

Languages are just about how you express computation to the model(s).

And SW engineering grows out of how one builds non trivial functions and how requirements often change over time.

Distributed systems are just a world where different computers (anything that computes) has access to different data or functions.

So rather than go up from HW I'd spend more time in theory... move to lamda calc and turing machines... and then languages... then architecture. And then SW engineering, etc...

This probably won't make you any better of a dev from day 1 after graduating, but will make you a better computer scientist.

And if you want to be a better dev, just grab a Safari Books subscription and start (or join) a project.
Isotope - An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts
One subtle message I got out of this: Web applications are a good choice. Stick with it.
I gave up on Clojure running on App Engine a year ago because I could not get the loading request time below 3 seconds. It is not as bad what you describe, but it was a problem. The loading requests happened frequently enough that users noticed the lags.
From the creator of jQuery Masonry.
Certainly there are a couple of ridiculous ideas in there, but some of them are shockingly prescient:

"Don't disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products...staff it with Apple salespeople..."

"Get a great image campaign. Let's get some branding (or rebranding) going on."

"Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack. The original Macs stood out because of their innovative look. Repeat that. Get the folks at Porsche to design a box. Or Giorgio Giugiaro. Or Philippe Starck."

"Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development...Even if Jobs fails, he'll do it with guns a-blazin', and we'll be spared this slow water torture that Amelio has subjected us to."

"Dump (or outsource) the Newton, eMate, digital cameras, and scanners... Sell off the laser printer business."

And seriously:

"Build a PDA for less than $250 that actually does something: a) cellular email b) 56-channel TV c) Internet phone."

Wired's 1997 article predicted Apple stores, the Jony Ive era of Apple industrial design, a decade's worth of iconic advertising, and the iPhone. I think we can forgive a suggestion or two about building Apple-branded UIs for washing machines.
Note the negative sign in front of $7bn.
Asia/Seoul is the same as Tokyo. We should change this to make it more clear. Thanks. Mark
Brain-hand response is not the same thing as a perceived delay.

Once latency becomes greater than 50ms, it becomes human noticeable -- aka "not instant."

Given that UI response isn't used to trigger human reflexes, you are just misunderstanding the intent.
> but nothing about solar system commercial development, that we have started seeing in our lifetimes

Is this really happening right now?
Cool, will check it out!
I find I rarely need to target any browser other than IE with specific styles, so I usually end up doing something like this, which doesn't rely on JS.

<!--[if lt IE 7]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie6"><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie7"><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie8"><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie9"><![endif]-->
<!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--><html lang="en" class="no-js"><!--<![endif]-->

Edit: And then remove the 'no-js' class with js
5 Things You Should Never Say in PR
They aren't destroying it just for the hell of it; BBC Online has been cut across the board because they were so wasteful in the past.
This might be a good read for such things: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html
Precis: a technology for a sub-visible, targeted watermark is presented,, where a targeted watermark is one that only becomes visible when the right parameter is passed to the reveal algorithm. The reveal algorithm is a parametric compression algorithm; with the right parameter the watermark becomes visible.
Async: Elegant asynchronous Javascript in node.js and the browser
The 200ms braind-hand response time you are refering to is the time it takes to see a change on the screen, brain reacting and sending a signal to the hand and then to actually press the button. What the firefox roadmap is talking about is from the time the button was pressed until something changes on the screen. These are two different things and they actually add up. Then there's also the final delay between the changes happening on the screen and the brain recognizing this.

So the user experience delay is the sum of three different sub-delays. Firefox wants to improve it by reducing the middle part.
Why? Major versions are just a number. How many major versions of Chrome were there last year? I haven't looked it up but I bet it was more than 4.
I think that's probably usually the case, but I'm not sure it always must be even in the long run, since short-term unrest can have significant long-term consequences. For example, if a society that purely values technological progress ends up with periods of significant disturbances/violence/unrest from masses of disgruntled people, enough damage might be done that it becomes eclipsed by a more stable society that grows more slowly, but with fewer disturbances. Admittedly, that requires a fairly high level of unrest, but it's not inconceivable that a few tens of million poor unemployed people in China could lead to quite some trouble.
You are right. The reason I worded it as I did is that my friends that are in the trades are mostly millwrights, welders, and other manufacturing related trades.
Analyzing Tender's Growth, By The (Redacted) Numbers
From the road map it looks like their main focus will be on product polish. They will be adding some features to the system. These features seem to cluster around "Web Platform" features (ie. HTML5, CSS3, Social stuff, etc...) and continued improvements to their add on system.

The polish focuses on improving interaction times for all user interactions. Their goal as previously mentioned is to get it down to 50ms from user action to visible response. They also say the have 50 common usage paths (identified from testing) that need to be improved.

This looks like a reasonable though ambitions plan for Mozilla and if they stick to it they will remain competitive and relevant.
Perhaps. Or perhaps the agent had already told him obliquely and the author didn't want to hear it.

We know from the story that the agent had previously done his job -- selling the author's books for increasing amounts of money despite declining sales. And we know from the story that after he meets with Hollis and is told the proposal reads like a crib from Wikipedia, he goes home and writes another proposal for her. And what happens? She likes the ideas but not the writing. And when the WSJ steps in, again it's for the ideas -- they want a co-author for the writing part.

Perhaps the agent should have been more direct, "Jim, the word on the street is that you're a one-hit wonder; that your ideas are great, but your writing sucks. What do you say I check around and see if I can hook you up with a co-author for the next proposal?"

Put this in HN terms, if people like your ideas but aren't willing to fund your startup, do you think it's someone else's job to find out why?

Frankly, what I found most alienating about the story was the me-me-me focus. (I mean really, going unsolicited into stores and signing books with random messages?) Too bad there was so little focus on providing value for his readers. Once I hear an author refer to a book of his as "garbage", I'm inclined to agree with him and dump him from my recommended list.
Using genetic algorithms to maximize Lending Club performance
I remember when I was young, getting about 10 386 computers

Huh? you had 10 computers? why? how?
Is there somewhere I can submit comments/feedback other than here?
Firefox is far from becoming "more and more irrelevant". Just because you've switched to an alternate browser doesn't mean the rest of the world has. Chrome may be incrementally gaining some share, but it's mostly at the expense of IE. Firefox has almost 25% of the market, while Chrome is 5%.
Down vote with qualification. I spent time writing my thoughts, you spent your time downvoting with a click?
This question doesn't make sense. "Big Companies" have thousands of developers. Thousands. You're 1 guy, maybe a small team of 5. "Big Companies" could easily implement ANYTHING. But guess what? There are thousands of YOU out there. More than at any big company, and they can't do EVERYTHING. So just do it and stop worrying about it.
There's no leverage in consulting. Granted. Doing it anyway - as long as I'm working for the man, I want to be the man.
A better alternative was already invented years ago: http://totallyabsurd.com/bethebike.htm
I wouldn't sweat it, I strongly suspect that little elegant guidelines like this are slowly falling into disuse.

English is a "living language," which means that it sometimes grabs a beer, goes out back, has a smoke, and vomits in the gutter.
Show HN: Wall of Trolls - Naming and shaming trolls
Recently, it feels like there has been a sharp rise in the amount of trolling of new startups/products -- comments dismissing them as stupid or pointless or "just a feature," etc. So over the weekend, I whipped up walloftrolls.com, to name and shame trolls a bit. You can submit troll comments from HN and also vote on other comments posted there. If there's a lot of demand, I can add other sites too. Leave me comments below or by email (linked from the site).
I remember all the way back to the 8080, the 8085 and the Z80--- all quite fondly in fact. Wrote a great deal of assembler code even with the problem of Z80 differences </nostalgia>
Clicky: http://walloftrolls.com
Graceful Degradation For Non-Standard Web Fonts
Do you think that a lot of the gains over the last 50/100/300/1000 years came about because societies didn't stand in the way of progress in the name of full employment, exactly as that full employment was practiced the day before? I do.

It happens that I'm on a pretty favorable part of the curve (in terms of ability and inclination to "work with computers"), so take my thoughts with as much salt as you
think is appropriate, but I'm glad past societies didn't turn their noses up at farming, beer and bread making, writing, indoor plumbing, domesticating animals, stonework, bronze, iron, steel, water wheels, coal/oil/nat gas, electricity, the steam and internal combustion engines, telephony, interchangeable parts and the moving assembly line, automobiles, modern medicine, transistors, integrated circuits, etc.

I'm sure that all of those innovations caused some significant amount of displacement amongst the established practioners of the "old way" of doing things. Had societies past decided that that displacement was too costly, the life of today's 99th percentile priveleged person would almost certainly be significantly worse than the life of today's actual 1st percentile (un) priveleged person.
poorer access to nutrition

Based on studies [1], the above is simply not true. Wal-Mart has for example given more people access to healthy foods at lower prices than at any other time in history. Fresh vegetables and fruits can compete on price with less healthy alternatives at WM. Now, this doesn't mean people will chose them over a bag of chips (they study claims there is statistical significant evidence that people do though), but it has removed price as a fairly large barrier.

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-16/do...
Looks nice, real similar to mIRC but for some reason I feel I will find myself still preferring irssi. A new shiny look on an old dusty protocol doesn't give me any nostalgia.
>Cyrix, an Intel competitor at the time, boldly parodied the "Intel Inside" campaign with their own "Cyrix Instead" campaign.

That sounds like an awful campaign - every bit of copy with "Cyrix instead" bringing to mind their competitor and subtly suggesting that Cyrix are the lesser company .. bleurgh.
There's one other bit of prescience in Wired's cover story that I've never seen anyone mention anywhere (including this retrospective). It's hiding in plain sight on the cover: http://www.magazine.org/ASSETS/FB3E53577D7F42CAB9D5053CE3580...

Can you spot it?
I'm pretty excited about Account Manager, the identity management feature, that's scheduled for Firefox 5. It has the potential to make the web both more secure and simpler to use. Usually those goals are opposing.

Of course, the biggest obstacle will be getting people to add support for the feature to their site.
Credit where credit is due:

http://paulirish.com/2008/conditional-stylesheets-vs-css-hac...
I believe that the right perspective is to take the "view it as a gc" and leave the file system to do it's job!

I don't have the references on hand, but among possible memory management schemes, "stop and copy" garbage collection is asymptotically fastest, though it does potentially result in "pauses" in the mutator/executing program. Any other scheme has to worry about keeping track of unused data and all the bad news that comes with multiple things going on at the same time.
On the ground, tales of ill-prepared undergrads
How does it compare to other similar programs, e.g. http://www.daisydiskapp.com?
I love and use this idea, but the OP missed the Shift key. At least Firefox and Chromium use Shift+click to open the link in a new window and I'm pretty sure IE does that as well but I can't test that now.

This is what I use:

$('.some-snazzy-selector').click(function(ev){
if( ev.which == 2 || ev.metaKey || ev.ctrlKey || ev.shiftKey ) return true;
e.preventDefault();

/* Awesome AJAX code goes here */
});

I posted this comment on the blog, but it may reach someone else here, too.
Something about that page makes me feel like the domain should contain geocities. I venture to say it has to do with the winkled paper effect along with the blue carper background. Aside from the look/feel I like the idea.
Sounds like the main story is that they're redefining what a major version number means a la Chrome.

Chrome's numbers are not in the same scale as FF and IE too, of course. Users can't tell the difference between Chrome 6 and 7 like one can distinguish FF 2 and 3, or IE 6 and 7. I wonder, though, if Google was just trying to catch IE in version number with Chrome and once it's at 10, they'll stop increasing it so rapidly.
I think we both have the same vision of how the mid-distant future looks.
The links to attractions on the whenshouldivisit site should be made blue (and/or underlined), otherwise many people will not find them... :)
Yep, thank you. Post updated.
"Register business.com" is an easy one.

But really, looking back is rather painful--too much heartache, too many missed opportunities.

It would be far better to look at today with tomorrow's hindsight.
Some technical info.

I'm using a technique called Squarified Treemaps outlined here: http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf
The algorithm is tuned for speed right now but I really want to get it parallelised in a future update. I spent a lot of time getting the visualization as readable as possible.

Submitting to the app store is still a worrying process. You've got everything ready to go and you're excited to be done developing and then you sit for 15 days wondering if you'll be rejected or not. But overall I'm really happy not to have to build my own payment system.
I think you have it backward. It's not about how long after you think of clicking do the action happen, it's how long after you did click can your brain start to see the result on screen.
With that 100 ms you mention, and let's add another 100ms by the software, you get 200 ms between the time your brain wants to click and the time it start receiving a visual
response (assuming that part is immediate, which it is not). It is actually a big selling point of google chrome, while a lot of it isn't really that much faster, it do seems instant and firefox does not (at least for some people, including me).
I don't think it's useful to waste time with trolls on this site. Instead of trying to find / pursue trolls, I prefer writing constructive comments. Focus on the positive side instead of fighting against the negative side, your efforts will be more valuable.
Google Chrome version number is meaningless as told by Google itself: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-chromes-vers...

This doesn't however mean that other browsers too have meaningless version numbers.
Darpa working on major cyber security break through
Delicious seem to have gone back to the original behavior: Middle Click opens a new tab.

But, generally speaking, developers don't really take this into account.
I would lobby for improved ballots in West Palm Beach.
This is nothing but propaganda to repair the U.S' image after it was caught with its pants down for supporting Mubarak and opposing the democratic movement.

The whole article is phrased with the assumption that the U.S. government is unquestionably on the side of democracy and free speech: it's benevolence implicit and accepted.

But that's hardly true, specially in light of recent events: when it comes to dictatorships and internet freedom, the U.S. is the first to hand them pliers and wire cutters.
Why you don't have any Gingerbread
Why Entrepreneurs & VCs Should Focus on Basecamp, Not the Summit
The Beautiful World
Eh, can't win 'em all. I wasn't even within 40 miles of a mac in 2000, the Steppenwolf thing is news to me.
Brutal New York - 1965/95
I know, but you can't Greasemonkey everything, eh?

I do that too, for what I visit regularly and presents said problem... but it can sometimes hit unexpectedly.
I submitted this a few days ago, in off-peak HN hours, so it didn't get any traction, but I wanted people to be aware of it, so I'm trying again.
There is a bug where only 2.x compatible modules are indexed. This will be fixed soon.
Chrome auto-updates and generally always looks the same. I can't imagine why anyone -- users or developers -- would care what version number it's up to.
I appreciate the feedback. There are definitely many people more qualified than me to actually design a curriculum. My argument is more about the approach than the actual content.

Certainly agree about not making you a better dev from day 1. I do think in the long run it will actually make you a better programmer though, particularly for more difficult and complex projects.
I just looked at the website on a windows system, also large screen, under Opera 11.01 just downloaded. It looks ok, the screenshot on page 1 (we are going to replace) is very fuzzy, but the text of the website looked ok. We will delve more, thanks for the feedback, I'm sure we can figure out what is going on.
Mark
From my first hand experience in FPS gaming in non-amateur settings the vast majority of average users will not be able to notice a (say) 50 ms difference in UI responsiveness. I covered that when talking about network latency in my previous post.

Of course this is just my experience, scientific findings may very well dispute my ignorance.
Microsoft Visual C# Default Keybindings [pdf]
Clustrix as a Document Store: Blending SQL and JSON Documents 
Many responses to my previous post claimed that my comparisons to MongoDB were unfair because MongoDB is a "document store" and Clustrix is a SQL RDBMS. Somehow that distinction made almost any comparison invalid. In response, I spent my weekend coding up a prototype document store interface for Clustrix to demonstrate that a different data model is not in itself an architectural differentiator.
You're right, it caching won't help directly. But if every hit takes a tiny fraction of a second because it's (at least mostly) cached, it will take a lot more to overwhelm Apache. Caching Wordpress is not trivial, but it's not necessarily all that difficult -- it depends on the particular blog and how dynamic it has to be. I've had success setting up caching for my own stuff as well as a high-traffic online magazine.

Your larger point, BTW, that Apache can be overwhelmed, and that it makes a lot of sense to do some math and tune the configuration -- makes a lot of sense. I'd not really thought about that in depth before, but it seems obvious now. :-)
Thanks, this is awesome.

FYI: I can't get it to work in my IE9 beta while setting the browser mode to IE7 or IE8, but it works fine in my VM running XP with IE6.
I would love to support this, but we don't right now due to performance reasons.

Dirty laundry: Each paragraph is laid out and measured only once (at a specific column width), then the metrics are all cached. Layout is then performed by dumping paragraphs into each column and just clipping whatever overflows.

The advantage is that this process is very fast, even on a mobile device. Try resizing a window and notice how quick the re-layout is.

The downside is that certain layouts are not possible right now, such as the example you've shown.

As browsers get faster, we'd like to start doing our own line layout, which would let us do far more here (with a performance penalty, unfortunately).
Yeah, this is what I wrote about last week.

Until now, every version of Firefox had significant changes -- visual changes, changes to the way you interact with the browser.

It now sounds like Firefox will follow Chrome. It will keep the same UI, and simply add new features.

Which is fair enough, I guess, if the browser is to become the next platform (for Web apps). It's time for the browser to 'fade' into the background, to give Web apps focus; to empower the apps, rather than interfere with their operation -- much like any other OS!
Http://ifile.it/nl5pst0/Offer%20Letter.GIF
No, they have a unique hybrid program in the College of Engineering that combines engineering and business. Stupidly, they call it general engineering (I have no idea why), but they tout it within the University as the engineering program for entrepreneurs. Unfortunately I never met any other entrepreneurial minded students in the program, which is kind of odd. In retrospect, I wish I went with computer science, but you would assume that any program within UIUC College of Engineering would be world class.