skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look at the last photo in the stream:

"P021711PS-0659

President Barack Obama talks with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg before a dinner with Technology Business Leaders in Woodside, California, Feb. 17, 2011. Also pictured, left to right, are Carol Bartz, Yahoo! President and CEO; Art Levinson, Genentech Chairman and former CEO; Steve Westly, Founder and Managing Partner, The Westly Group; and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman and CEO of Google."
This chart doesn't show the 5 year sabbatical that Microsoft decided to take between August 2001 and October 2006.

Major versions of IE tend to be (are always?) synced to OS releases. What effect did the Longhorn Reset have on the sabbatical Microsoft "decided to" take?

Does anyone know? I can't imagine I'm the only one to ask this in the intervening 4.5 years, but my Google searches aren't finding anything.
Have you thought about contacting MB (http://www.moderndcbusiness.com/) the new "Modern DC Business Mag"? Just started publishing and its bent towards VC and entrepreneurs. It's kind of fluffy but they might be interested to give some exposure.
Ask HN: My younger brother wants to get into web engineering. Where to Start?
My younger brother is getting really interested in web engineering/becoming a 'hacker'. He's a sophomore in highschool and exceptionally bright and driven. All he knows right now is a little bit of python. He has no tangible goal in mind, he just wants to eventually be able to build apps, etc.

My question is, where should I start him off? My initial suggestion was for him to learn HTML/CSS in and out ("Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Eric T Freeman").

What do you guys think? My background is more in finance/investment banking so I'm pretty ignorant on how to start him off and not the greatest of mentors in this situation.

Also, if any of you are willing to be an 'email mentor' to him, let me know.. Id be glad to reciprocate the mentorship in my area of expertise.

Thanks!
Is Google’s Facebook competitor almost ready? (new social networking platform)
I like the site and think its helpful.

I have to say it isn't for my case though. I'm using Paypal's website payments pro for my current app, and that comes with a monthly fee not factored here.

Also when I looked at using a real merchant account, these fees vary greatly and no one I was looking at was as cheap as 1.8. All the merchants I looked at were more expensive than Paypal percentage wise. I also feel like this doesn't account for some batch fees I saw.

Not to mention that many times with merchant accounts you are paying a merchant fee and a gateway fee.
Different fields vary a lot also, so it's probably not that useful to try to talk about "academia" as a whole. Not only do we have dueling anecdotes, but they aren't even anecdotes on the same subject. =] Imo, the pros and cons of being a physics versus a philosophy versus a CS academic just aren't that similar.

I can believe that the 'hard' sciences are roughly like he says, at least at many places. It's common for there to be a sort of "lab" mentality, with a lot of grad-student cogs in a famous-professor-lab machine, and credit tends to go to the head of the lab (especially if the paper has 50 authors or something, as is common in some areas). Partly that's because it takes a lot of money to set up a physics/chem/bio lab, and there is a lot of grunt-work to be done.

That's less common in CS, I think. Not inexistent, but you can find a research group that isn't like that. It's even less common in the humanities, but then you have a whole different set of problems (less money, fewer jobs).
Not only that, but your team has somewhere to go for help other than you.

So many of the "do it yourself" comments are so clearly written from the one-man shop perspective. No thought of working in a team environment.

Drop 5 Rails programmers into a team and they're going to be a lot more productive than 5 guys arguing about how to do their own framework.

When you're trying to bring something to market or deliver something to a client, bitching about how routing should work when there's a ton of functional and tested ones to choose from is a big fat waste of time. Choose one and get to work.
What I find surprising about this type of news is why the brain would need so much complexity.

It seems to me that a network with 10^11 neurons and 10^14 synapses should have sufficient computational power to carry out the information processing tasks that humans perform using only simple function neurons.

This belief is based on the following observations :
- I have personal experience with ANN's with only thousands of nodes that are able to rival humans at handwriting recognition.
- Current computers are far from being powerful enough to simulate a 10^14 synapse ANN yet they seem to be rapidly approaching human level performance on many cognitive tasks (ie. Watson).

If individual neurons are as complex as recent research results suggest I wonder what all that computational power is being used for. Or is the human brain just hopelessly inefficient as an information processing machine ? Maybe it's such a recent development that evolution just hasn't had time to get things right.
It's the oddest thing. I thought the gawker redesign was specifically targeted at the iPad. When I opened it up on the iPad, I got the WAP-like text interface.
Objects and closures are two different perspectives on the same thing. That is, if you're in a language with closures but no objects, you can implement objects using closures. If you're in a language with objects but no closures, you can implement closures with objects.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)
HIV is fairly large and complicated for a virus.
Great little tool I've used in the past to make recommendations to clients. Looks like it's been reskinned (lighter)?
Has Social Media Made the 9 to 5 Work Day Obsolete?
I'd drop the initial splash page and just let users get right to the landing page.

Some nit-picky things:
1. Height of your submit button doesn't match your search input
2. Button styles don't match, not a huge fan of either
3. Links along the bottom are confusing. Why does Users, Bands and Advertisers work but not Contact Us?

Overall I like it. The Watch -> Answer -> Download section is really nice.
And John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) in front of the flowers on the LHS
My impression was always that Macromedia acquired FutureSplash (shortened to Flash) when it became clear it could kill Shockwave, which was much slower (14Kbps connections then). Flash also had a rapid release cycle, which did not have any negative impact in its adoption and success, releases were backwards compatible. Chrome's adoption is certainly more significant now, also not affected by many releases. For Android, I'll wait and see.
Pointless crap is subjective. Zend_SOAP, I imagine, would for many be considered "pointless crap", but having it available means I don't have to go looking for a SOAP library when I need it to interface with a gateway.

People always confuse features with bloat. Disk space is cheap, and these frameworks aren't hurting things by having additional features.

Now, complexity I can get behind, but stop relating complexity to weight or bloat. CI is less complex than ZF because it does substantially less. It requires developers to do more to accomplish the same tasks ZF developers can do a lot faster. However, it takes a lot more work to get to that point.

Personally, I'm glad we have these choices. We can choose the right tool for the job. =)
Your post ? Genius.
That's exactly what I think. Most of the people who hate frameworks are those who don't appreciate or just love to reinvent the wheel everyday.
"Java" is an overloaded term.

"Java the Language" is not dying. I would be happy if it did, but it's going to enjoy COBOLesque longevity, and for mostly the same reasons.

"Java the Virtual Machine" is not dying, and I don't care one way or the other -- why do I care if Jython targets JVM vs. CPython that targets its own VM or IronPython that targets .net? If it gets the job done well enough, I'll use it. It isn't really mutating either.

"Java the Eco system" is not dying - there's too much invested. It will be years before it dies, if it ever does. It's also not mutating.

Seems to me like no part of Java is dying, and only a small part of Java is mutating.
After working with several PHP frameworks i now work with one that I rolled that doesn't include a lot of the automagic functionality that I find so frustrating in the major frameworks.

I have a simple MVC setup (simple is the key word, the router function is less than 80 lines) a DB abstraction class and a default class that models extend.

Regarding being able to bring people in, it's only helpful to use a framework if the person you're bringing in is already familiar with that framework, otherwise it's a detriment in most cases.
I'm thinking of making a paid version of this, with multiple IPs in each region. I registered rootredir.com. Are any of you interested in this? How much would it be worth to you per month?
"To Microsoft and Intel!"
> This is actually a BAD thing

I am not aware newer browsers break backwards compatibility. Newer browsers usually work better at the things they were already good at. If you want to target a larger audience, pull your analytics and draw your line at the set you want to serve. Usually any reasonable line will cover mostly everybody.

This is the kind of excuse Microsoft uses - when you can't improve your software, you call it "stable" and "mature".
Author finds pirated version of his book in a Google Code Project, files bug.
What is "housing advice"?
Here's a link to that article on The Economist that states there are too many people doing too much of _everything_ and life is hard in general. Oh wait, that doesn't exist yet perhaps because that's reality. It sounds like he has spent so much time doing everything but what he _should_ be doing which is looking for something he actually _enjoys_ doing. Not that the article wasn't insightful or lucid or anything but this article struck me in he clearly enjoys complaining about his work life than doing it so there's a problem. I don't love my job but I enjoy doing it most of the time and I have great hobbies, a great partner in life and am happier and fitter than I have ever been. Perhaps he should try doing different things and see how that works out as when you are doing something you don't have any expectations. Why would you say "I love science, I just don't love doing it?". I love Formula One cars but don't know anything about driving them but I love riding motorcycles, and riding bikes. He needs to find the action verb that defines his work life and not impose any expectations from a noun he associates with "love."
"These companies generally have absolutely no understanding of the markets they're entering. It's what I call the Cargo Cult School of Product Management; "
Yea, I mentioned the myth that a MBA can manage everything before.
Global Mobile Applications Store Ranking in 2010 and 2009
A miracle by Pope
I've never once been pestered by Chrome. Updates are automatic and invisible.
Self taught mathematicians used to be very common (100 years ago).
There are about a 100 better sources of political discussion than Hacker News. I've only been here a couple years (lurking for the first 1.5) but I feel like the noise is really drowning out the signal for me.

So I have to disagree with you here, Jon. I care about politics, I really do, just not much while I'm here.
I suspected there was a wrinkle I was missing. So what might be the root of gaius's claim about their public image? Do they run a lot of adverts implying something different?

I'm not too concerned about their size relative to the whole "homeless budget", but how much of their income is spent on direct benefit to the people they are chartered to help. I'm also concerned about their "implied accomplishments" versus their actual accomplishments,ie image vs reality.

From what I can tell, about 60% of their income goes to the salaries of front-line people (legal and housing advice). 28% went to operational expenses (fundraising and "shelter shops"). The rest is advertising and paperwork.
Thanks Rob. I will keep this in mind and will ask for your help as soon as possible.
This is the reason I love rackspace :)
I think some of the people working on all those rovers keep up with automotive technology. Also, when it comes to the specific systems involved they know more about sensors, robotics, and real time systems than just about any organization on the planet.

PS: NASA engineers were contracted to conduct research into whether electronic systems or electromagnetic interference played a role in incidents of unintended acceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHTSA-NASA_Study_of_Unintended_...
Thanks for the link. I'm a self-taught coder of about 13 years now (C, Java, Ruby) and I always feel like there's a few basics I'm missing so I'll probably tackle this after Lisp. Besides, Python has always seemed like a very nice syntax (love when indenting means something but the colon bugs me).
Why is this getting downvoted? Just curious.
Opera's popularity is highly geographically dependent, unlike any other browser, I think.
It is very popular in Russia and Ukraine for example (almost on par with Firefox).
See http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2009/03/16/a-look-at-deskto... and http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/04/14/
Yeah there are definitely a few kinks in there - Contact Us isn't suppose to by a link -- they're just suppose to contact us depending whether they're users/bands/advertisers since we are gonna split those emails later today. I'll def fix the link.
The initial splash was put in there to make sure that people know that this is a landing page and that the main site is under development -- do you think it's necessary? We were worried people would get the wrong idea.
Punisher instead of Batman.
He already did:

easy rollbacks to previous versions if a deploy went awry, separate static media serving (because it's faster), load balancing and the like

Other things that come to mind are database migrations, running tests before deployment, pushing code to multiple servers etc.

It is probably a good idea to automate all these tasks.

Yes, with an application server you might have to reload the code, but it doesn't really matter, because thats just one step of your automated deployment.

And if you use an opcode cache you probably have to restart the server with PHP anyway.
What does Watson mean?
You make some really good points. Having been homeless myself, I have experienced the different types of homeless people. There are those who are simply in a difficult situation and are intent to drive themselves back to, or become part of the middle class.

There are those, which I wish were given a more logical and critical eye, who will never attain employment. There are also those (many) homeless who are mentally ill. These people are often categorized as the unfortunate, but more often than not are simply disenfranchised with the society we've created. For the homeless who are mentally ill, disabled or otherwise unable to hold employment it is critical that we take a different approach. A long term, critical-thinking approach. Present the numbers to the population. The math is remarkably simple if you take the time to understand the people and their relationships with commonplace society.

The right-leaning tend to worry about conversations like this, fearing it will stir up laziness and cause mass exodus of labor force. While there may likely be a percentage of that, the overall outcome would certainly be less homelessness, less crime, less strain on the public system and in the end a better economy for all.
Behold, MR.Prime!

https://github.com/rkneufeld/mr_prime

It's a little ruby Miller-Rabin primality tester I wrote with my friend in Crypto class that can handle ~500 digit primes in less than a few seconds. I think my friend also wrote a C extension for it - super fast.

Edit: spelling.
There are two basic reasons I would select an 'advanced' language for development.

1 - can express 'weird' things that other languages would not be able necessarily express without strange gyrations.

2 - if you can develop in it, you're probably on the upper half of the developer bell curve. That brings systemic improvements in general.
What he's actually talking about is a matter of preference. He almost completely misses the point of using a framework to not reinvent the wheel when you like the way the wheel's invented in this framework.

Some like plain HTML, some perfer HAML, some generate DOM tree, some like to have "components" and "controls" - and they're all equally right in their views. The same holds for SQL vs ORM.

Some frameworks hold TMTOWTDI views, when you could do things in a way you perfer. Other frameworks insist that there's one and only one proper way of doing things (in given framework).

Just use whatever suits your tastes well.
<snark>You'd prefer C?</snark>

Seriously, though, how would you improve the solution? What would decrease the likelihood of serving the wrong asset or no asset at all? I'm sure there are other interesting solutions to this problem, but are they as complete and in some measurable way better?

Disclaimer: I work with Jared and enjoy the benefit of the solution as described.
San Francisco used to spend generously on direct payments to homeless individuals, until Proposition N was passed in 2002, redirecting the money to services for the homeless. This measure was championed by Supervisor Gavin Newsom who, as we know, was elected as Mayor the next year.

The arguments summarized here on Wikipedia are a good introduction to some of the issues in play here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_Not_Cash
It's called having balls.

Having balls for brains, maybe. Instead of working on making the US border experience more efficient and human-oriented, they just make it harder for a selected group of people. An easy way out, I say.
"It also probably works against you in most parts of the tech industry, where there's a surprising amount of blind opposition to anyone with a doctorate."

I didn't encounter any doctorate-opposition per se. I think it's more opportunity cost issue.

Tech industry is quite meritocratic. Problem for many people with PhDs is that this is the only thing they can show after many years spent hidden in academia, working on esoteric things.

If you keep up your real world skills during graduate school, I believe nobody is going to hold your degree against you.

At least that was my experience (and experience of my classmates from graduate school).

We did a lot of nitty-gritty software engineering during graduate school (ideas from our papers had to be implemented and integrated into bigger projects, that's how funding pipeline worked).

Also it helps not to act smug about your degree - industry is full of very smart people who didn't even go to university.
I wish I could say the choice of OCaml among all available functional languages was objective, rational and well-deserved... the fundamental reason is that my knowledge of OCaml is orders of magnitude greater than my knowledge of Haskell, F# or Erlang (three languages I would have considered using as well). I do find OCaml more adapted to the way I think, but the way I think probably ended up the way it is because I have been using OCaml a lot.

I can do a fairly adequate analysis of OCaml-versus-PHP or OCaml-versus-C# because I'm familiar with both sides of the equation, but I wouldn't be able to do an honest comparison of OCaml and Haskell.
Clever Recruiting Techniques: A Flyer at a San Francisco Cafe
I've got the SSH port on my webserver set to a random >1024 port, and I get at least 2-3 denyhosts emails per day.
Tax breaks
My biggest gripe with this is that when the truth finally comes out, it gets no attention. The perceptions that changed rapidly from "toyota = safety" to "toyota = death" will be slow to switch back. It will take years, although Toyota has done a good job marketing themselves since the incident.
It's in there now, although it only shows major version numbers (generally not unfair, although a major version of Chrome doesn't necessarily mean the same as a major version of, for example, Firefox).

Edit: Actually, I just noticed that Opera 9.1 and 9.5 are there, along with Firefox 3.5, so scratch that!
Seems like all security tools are double edged swords. Lots of folks react against security-by-obscurity, because it can get overconfident fools hurt badly. Someone please name any security tool that doesn't do this.

That said, first have your basic security squared away. Only then, layer that with just enough obscurity to avoid attention. By analogy, acquire your armored vehicle first, then drive it to your camouflaged hiding place. It doesn't matter if you avoid all but 1 of 10,000 shots, if shrapnel from that one shot kills you anyways.
How does a system that hands out free apartments deal with moral hazard? I'd also like a no-questions-asked $700/month apartment for free to work on my startup, and I can imagine many other people would as well.
This is generally well regarded security advice. Its what #ubuntu-server tends to recommend to people if they come in saying their SSH port is being attacked. Simply changing the port greatly reduces the number of attacks, and combined with IP blocking (automatic with fail2ban or similar) you are completely protected from these simplistic automated attacks.
To Winamp! It really whips the llama's ass!
I imagine it is because, of all the contributing factors to iOS being popular and a "hit" when it came out, this reason seems like one that is so minor that suggesting it as the cause is dangerously misleading.
Is Steve Jobs Dead?
The Simple Picture That Can Make You A Millionaire
A M A Z I N G.
I was really impressed :).
I've watched a few of these, that professor is awesome. He teaches in a very positive way that's clearly understandable.
He's the best one I've found on itunes U
While I agree, you might be able to argue that the hits on an obscured port (24 in this example) come from more experienced hackers who would be more able to compromise your box. And potentially having a non conventional SSH port might be attractive. I.e. Whatever's behind this hidden door must be more valuable than what's behind this obvious door.

Overall though I think it would increase security... just might attract some trouble too.
"My taxes" != city taxes, but you probably already knew that and are trying to pivot the argument to be about me instead of about my point. That is usually a sign you can't argue my point.

I'm saying, $87 a year out of my taxes is a tiny amount when you consider what you pay for other things. How much do you spend a year on defense? Since the effective tax rate is around 30% (roughly) and the defense budget is around 20% of the federal budget (roughly), I pay around 52x more for defense than for helping homeless people in a given year. Is defense 52x more important than social services? And I say this being a defense contractor who entire livelyhood depends on taxes and the military industrial complex.
If I remember correctly you studied math, didn't you? Competition for a job in math is way lower than it is for biological sciences. The reason is that the current model of a successful biology lab is that of a PI leading a number of students and postdocs anywhere from 5 to 20. There is NO WAY that all of them are going to find a job in academia. Germany alone produces in one year the same number of PhDs as there are professors in the country. Ratios are not very different in UK and US. Most of the competition happens in the biological sciences: you can run math or CS research by yourself. Difficult to do the same in biology.

I've written about it here: http://gilest.ro/2010/what-has-changed-in-science-and-what-m...
Either because someone is not getting sarcasm, or because it is not sarcasm after all…
Bootstrap your startup: become a hacker tutor
Aren't all the guests American? Tim Berners-Lee is British.
The graphic showing what actually happened vs. what he planned.