skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would love to hear that there are CS/EE programs using version control to catch cheating. It seems to me that if you forced students to "show their work" by having them commit to their project repo in small increments, it would obviate (some of) the hoops some depts seem to go through to prevent cheating.

At my school, we were given programming problems a week in advance, told to solve them and memorize the solutions, and then had to show up at a computer lab for an "exam" where we basically typed the programs in and made sure they compiled, etc. I believe this process was put in place after rampant cheating was happening in more traditional "turn in your source code" types of projects. However, this was a pretty horrid experience, and for some students who treated them like regular exams (ie didn't actually memorize working solutions beforehand) these exams were crushing to their grades.

I can imagine some sort of automated checker for this, examining repos for unusual activity (one giant commit right at due date) after a project was submitted. Of course, I've also heard that in some academic CS depts, any version control at all is a huge deal (we were taught how to use the integrated CVS tools in Eclipse in one afternoon by some TAs, and that was the extent of my exposure to vc in the classroom, and this was in 2006-7), so maybe I'm dreaming too much.
I'm also interested in becoming a 'first time mac buyer'. As such, I have some questions:

- Do these offer a significant enough improvement over the last generation to justify not buying a refurbed older model?
- What's the real conceptual difference between the three models? I know it's not just screen size - how do they differ in intended use case?
- I want a laptop I can lug around everywhere and curl up on the sofa with as well as sit at a desk. Is the 17" too big for that?
Consumer laptops where the OS sees 8 processors. Now is a really good time to pick up Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, Scala and see what the fuss is all about.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258395
2 CS degrees (BS and MS) :)

The sad thing is that for a job, you could definitely be self-taught...I feel like in retrospect (and if it wasn't for HR requirements), people only need a CS degree if they plan on doing research or theory-based programming.
Because they want you poor fools to buy up their remaining stock.
You did the 2720QM instead of the 2620M he specified, and added a few extras (windows ultimate, 750gb hdd, etc). What he claimed is almost true, except he missed that the $1050 model's display is not 1920x1080, you have to pay an extra $150 for that.
Getting close. We are talking tablets there, I'd argue typical tasks on them involve only single app.
Great opportunity. A couple of suggestions, if you haven't done it before: (1) do up a mini-agenda -- yes, even though it's only for 8-10 minutes (2) don't do all the talking yourself (3) try to get his feedback on at least one key point so that you can incorporate it into your next communication to show that you listen and understand.
The first ones ran hotter/used more power than the case was designed for.
Haha. HotelCalifornia.js
Equinix, Carpathia Team Up to Offer Secure Clouds
New ways to experience better collaboration with Google Apps
Yeah, why not? Among top tier laptop and cellphone manufacturers, the only name that appears on both lists is Apple (well, I guess Samsung makes laptops too...). Adding a SIM/RUIM slot and a 3G chip makes so much sense. I know a lot of laptop manufacturers in Europe have offered this as an option. Why not Apple?
How To Unlock Motorola XOOM To Flash Custom Recovery
Klein partner Mary Meeker's ideas for solving U.S.'s fiscal mess
It's very doable - but will our politicians actually do it?
Thanks for the encouragement and acknowledgement of the need. If you’ve got any lingering thoughts / ideas on the topic, it would be great to hear them. Feel free to send me an email Michael.Aiello@lifeensured.com or give me a ring 347-227-0189

We hope we can shift the focus a bit away from the “this is for something when you die” to – “hey, it’s good practice is to really claim ownership of your digital assets and have this stuff sorted”
Seems to me like they skipped it for Lightpeak, which is also surprising/good.
Would you happen to be located in San Jose?
The power of sparrow isn't the UI, it's the deep integration with gmail. More specifically, the labels are the killer feature.
Since there's only one port, you'll most likely need a splitter to use both the data and video simultaneously, unless you want your existing monitor to be at the end of the daisy chain. (DP was brought to market for terminal devices, not pass-through like Firewire, any Thunderbolt devices will most certainly have two ports.)

I assume most monitors will transition from DP to a Thunderbolt pass-through quickly, but in a daisy-chain situation, the monitor would be disconnected the least, meaning it would need to either be the first in line, or split off, allowing the other peripherals to be removed without re-connecting the monitor.
Yep. My MBP, which was hte latest verison as of last week, gets about 3-4 hours on battery. Way less than they advertised. In the past they've been pretty reasonable. Not so much any more.
Opera takes speed-dial to the next level with new "Barracuda" Snapshot
Faulting Apple for having different priorities about which features to implement first? I used to use a a Linux (Fedora) laptop but I got tired of opening the lid, only to find out that it didn't suspend properly. I bought a Mac so I could run Unix and have the basic stuff "just work."

I'm still hopeful that someday the Linux community will finally produce a polished desktop solution on par with Apple.
Ya, thanks. I need to get my designer friend to help with that :)
Full-screen apps, increased emphasis on gestures, an app store... looks like they're trying to add an iOS feel to the user experience (at least within apps that use the new features).
Doesn't always work. Spotify on iPhone became irreversibly borked for me once, requiring me to delete the entire app and reinstall it
I don't really care about Terminal.app anymore, iTerm does full screen and 256 colors well, and iTerm2 is under development and has even more fancy features.
The Expansion of Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights
I ran into a bug trying to use with RVM -- be forewarned. The new Passenger module-installer for Apache presumes you're using gemsets, and doesn't know about default gemsets. Patch forthcoming.
- Do these offer a significant enough improvement over the last generation to justify not buying a refurbed older model?

Depends on what you do: if you do anything that's heavily CPU-bound, the answer is "yes." If you don't, the answer is "no."

If you want to see all three, go to an Apple store. If it were me, I'd probably want a 13" with an aftermarket SSD and an external monitor at home.
http://www.NameChk.com works well too.
Address Academic Term Paper to Scholars in the Field
There is a vast difference between what is written in high school academic writing and college academic writing. In order to do a good job with their academic term papers, students need to firstly know the difference between these two levels of writing.
Alpha 4 of the next version of DB2 quietly slips out into the wild
And has the feature of when running connected to a monitor (lid closed) to becoming a warm cat bed/magnet :)
He may be a customer, but it is hardly what runs his blog, as it is an analytics tool.
I made the comment at HNDC last night that "Are crowds wise? That's arguable. But it definitely moves in herds."

The value of a well executed stock "betting" game is that, since what is being wagered is of little or no value compared to an actual market position, the herd may reveal it's intentions in the game before a similar movement is noticeable in the actual market.

For this to to be true, though, two necessary, but by no means sufficient, pre-conditions need to be satisfied: a sufficiently large and well-informed herd; playing a game that maintains the proper balance of care-free (not too much at risk) -vs- care-full (enough is at risk) gameplay.
Thanks. Clients set up the (email) notifications themselves. When we receive verification that you have passed, we send out these emails on the client’s behalf. To perform verification that the client has passed, we call the folks who are listed as verifiers.
Yeah. It segments away people who want more than 113 dpi in a sub-5 lb laptop with a hard drive larger than 256 GB quite effectively.
The company originated in 2005 and has raised several smaller rounds of capital in the past. They're not a startup anymore; they're a full-fledged business.
Supposedly DisplayPort is theoretically capable of at least one extra display, but Apple's tech specs page still says "an" external display, so I don't think they've implemented that yet.

Still, I'm thinking there might be Thunderbolt-compatible external video cards. Since the wire protocol is PCI Express, it seems possible, and performance should be better than external USB video cards.
That's where I think Apple doesn't have as much of a problem as many devs want them to have: they give a lot of leeway already to devs to create tons of apps that people want. C.f. the various App Stores. And when (eventually? I don't know of it happening yet) some "killer app" appears on another platform that isn't possible on Apple's platforms, they can just narrowly relax the rules to allow it.

This is why I'm happy to see both models exist and thrive. Android would look like an old Blackberry if not for Apple. And likewise Apple can pick up any advantage that Android has (other than a few, such as meeting the needs of markets outside Apple's target).
Is there any technical reason they'd stick with USB2?

Politically, I think they want to skip it and push "Thunderbolt" as the better standard, since USB3 adoption is still pretty low. Just look at their comparison chart:

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html
When I first read the title I thought it was an app for the reincarnated.
IIRC, it was because Intel made USB chipsets really cheap vs IEEE1394a (aka FireWire) chipsets.
If you're serious enough about your gaming hardware that you're currently building gaming PCs every couple of years, you're still going to be replacing your CPU and your graphics card every couple of years, whether graphics are inside the case or not.

Besides, Thunderbolt = 10 G_b_ps, PCIe x 16 = 8 G_B_ps. No idea on latency/transfers per second, though. (http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express)
Anyone know if you can boot from a Thunderbolt Connected drive?
No, just get an older model off ebay.
I'm not sure. I would associate PerfectNameFinder.com somehow with "shady dating site" and that's no good.
Thanks. Entrustet has made some good headway in the space. We hope the LifeEnsured feature set, positioning and execution help us become the most trusted company in the space.
Having what it takes to be an entrepreneur
Totally depends on what you use your computer for. I use my optical drive about once every 12 months and all of my important files fit easily into 128GB. With the proliferation of media services in the cloud, that number continues to drop...I now listen to Pandora 10x as much as my iTunes collection.
My 2 year old X200 has 1.3 hours battery time, decreasing rapidly. The display plastic is broken, the camera is broken and the mouse tracking nob is broken. It's the worst piece of laptop hardware I've ever had (compared to older IBM Thinkpads, DELLs and iBooks, Macbooks and MacbooksPro).
What a load of B.S.

First off the total amount that Hedge fund managers make as compared to the total return to the investors in an index ETF is comparing apples to oranges. You really should compare the % returns if you are going to make this comparison at all.

As mentioned in the original NY Times article one hedge fund manager's "flagship fund gained more than 130 percent last year". That sure beats a 28% return of the market index.

Secondly, hedge funds such as SAC Capital, etc. themselves are constantly investing in indexes. They buy and sell index ETFs and their derivatives all the time. I'm sure if you asked them, "hey should we shut down the indexes?" the answer would be, "No."

Here's the NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/business/01hedge.html
(1)That support, in the form of AppleCare costs money, something like $350 at time of purchase. (2)OSX will run on most PCs, it's not specific to hardware anymore. The additional price paid to Apple is ostensibly for attention to detail in hardware and software design.
Thunderbolt aims to replace nearly every kind of single-use connectors (HDMI, DisplayPort, eSATA, USB, Ethernet). Unifying the connector for displays, peripherals, network and power is a great idea, so I can't complain if they're going up against USB 3.0.
$500 -> $99. Depending on if you paid before or after the price change. Besides, $99 somethings gotta give. And all indications (atleast, recent indications) were pointing to Apple discontinuing the Server OS. Even though every version of OSX was basically server without the management tools, its good they brought the management to the desktop version.
Is this peer-2-peer like FireWire was or it is a client-server model like USB? I see people talking about this being copper or fibre. If this is fibre, then it can't supply power to the device like USB? I don't see that catching on for most portable devices (e.g. hard drives). It's extremely convenient to just have one cable for a device that needs connectivity and power when it comes to portable devices.
As long as they're paying 37s, 37s is happy, and they're evidently happy enough with the service to keep paying.
Dating, Madoff, and Supply & Demand
> especially with USB3 being in the same ballpark in terms of speed.

For some uses it's not just a matter of speed - USB2 and FW are similar in terms of speed but USB2 is pretty much unusable for multi-channel audio recording purposes.
Has anyone tried this in a high-volume production environment? Sounds very interesting.
So you are one of the reasons there is still a 13 inch Pro. In a couple of years, with a new Air with bigger SSD and more of your data in the cloud, it might make more sense to you.
Nice of him to do it, but usually talking with an associate is a waste of time.
Nondeterministic Floating-Point Conversions in Java
Steve Ballmer's argument against Iphone
= not a business phone

Nokia makes business phones
Display Port has allowed daisy chaining monitors since 1.2 at least, if not earlier back.
Here's what I got out of the article:

* They are inserting special x86 instructions around object access JIT output instructions to "trap" uses of references to objects that had cleanup/relocation in progress. The trap works around the work in progress to "heal" the references in rare instances, usually allowing branch prediction on the x86 to simply fall through.

* It almost sounds like part of the relocation work by the GC used a mechanism not unlike "transactional memory" to either "commit" a block of moves of active objects, or roll them back in case of a conflict caused by the running application accessing/updating/creating something at an inopportune moment.

* One of the diagrams suggests that there are N GC threads corresponding to N application threads. If there is in fact a one-to-one correspondence, rather than just "there are many of both kinds of thread", I wonder if they have thread specific sub-heaps, and employ some kind of processor affinity binding together the application thread and its corresponding GC "shadow" on the same processor? Maybe that's automatic anyway, based on memory region in use? Anyway, localizing these tasks together might avoid processor cache misses. I may have read much more into one of the diagrams than was really meant, though. Even if they don't have thread specific heaps, I think I like the idea of having heaps tied to individual threads, only migrating objects/references to a global heap when they have in fact been shared between threads, or are anchored to some sort of static context.

Anybody care to provide an alternate interpretation of some of this?
I built a small game engine in Scala. Coming from C#, I felt right at home, many of the advanced features of C# transferred over. All in all, I had a pleasant experience.

The issues:

- The tools aren't ready for primetime.

Scala is a very complex language. I can only imagine the man hours needed to develop a IDE that _really_ understands Scala.

- Scala's Complexity

Most of the time, I could handle this alright. But sometimes the sheer number of possibilities was daunting. It seems like the features and libraries need to be culled. Possibly it's just the result of trying to blend OOP with Functional programming.

What surprised me the most is - most of the time it worked. I think I would still pick Scala over Java. Especially with better tooling support.
The next operating system: building an OS for hundreds, thousands of cores
Yes, it could've. But I think that would be an example of the increasing snarkiness that pg has noticed, and is saddened by.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057275

You may think it's witty, but I think it's just a touch nasty, and I would prefer to give a clear explanation.
It’s copper, for the time being at least. Intel’s document says it can transmit up to 10W of power.
Moving Social News Forward: The Anticipated PoundWire Beta Launches
JP Morgan Raises $1.2 Billion For Digital Growth Fund
The $200 Microhouse
I don't care who won, I like my FireWire CF card reader.
My US$.02:

- Unless you need the higher processor speed or the Thunderbolt port, previous gen refurbished should be quite a deal.

- The 15" high res (1920x1080) is the sweet spot for portability and desktop use. I have a 17" now, and it's really just too big. When I bought mine though (late 2007), the 15" didn't have a high res display. If I were buying one now, it would be the 15" 1080p or the 13" Air (ultraportable).
Unfortunately not. Half my problem might be that I'm located in the anemic Midwest. St Louis to be exact. Are virtually connected co-founders very prevalent?
For me it's the completeness of the integration - labels, starring, spam. There's not much you can do it the web client you can't do in Sparrow.
Google has said in the past that they defuse links and ignore any pagerank they would pass if they determine their are paid or for the sole purpose of passing pagerank. So, yes, there is a difference between penalties and devaluing links.

edit: here's some of that discussion http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
You can lease your card: http://cuttingedgegamer.com/
Oh wow, I was pretty sure I read somewhere that Apple was only allowing OpenCL. Good find
Haven't tried it but as this is coming from WooThemes who make Tumblr-style themes for Wordpress, it's a smart move providing a tool like this.
Great input, thanks!
Wish I had seen this earlier! You folks should plan this stuff with the Refresh:Miami guys.
Right now we're not doing anything special. We just send the emails from the server as we need to. A lot of the emails are set up as nightly jobs which we queue up in a DB before we send.
Well possibly, if it's in displayport mode using all four lanes in one direction, it can push that much bandwidth. How much bandwidth does a 27" apple display use?
Free MobileMe? Apple removes MobileMe from online store, discontinues retail box
It all depends. If you have no access otherwise to VCs, this is at least a start. Also not all associates are a waste of time, I know quite a few that have brought a deal or even two to the firm they work at in one year.
Mostly time at this point, but I also wasn't sure if there would be interest. I should have some more free time this spring... maybe I'll work to get an MVP out then? I'll let y'all know.
You could make money off of drunk people with that. Add automated fake DVD box or site creation.
By the way, if you couldn't get an appointment. Let us know here who you would enjoy talking to:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=d...
This doesn't take into account startups who have SLA's because they have a B2B product. We have both B2C and B2B customers and as a result we can't be down for our business customers or we have to credit them. Honestly, 99.9% uptime is not hard to manage. Pick the right colo facility with a history of good uptime. Have more than 1 machine, and have them on redundant power supplies (on separate PDU's). Voila, unless you screw up deploys, you have 99.9% uptime. This doesn't take a huge amount of money.
Same here, when I discovered that OS X was solid enough that I rarely rebooted combined with suspend that always works the requirement to re-launch on boot like KDE went down for me. It is still a cool feature.
It may not be 'real' version control, but remember that huge percentage of people have no idea that such a thing even exists. If you've ever explained version control to a non-developer the second they actually grok what it is, they instantly see the value.

This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of version control.
Anyone else catch this tidbit from Apple's site?

File Sharing for iPad: Lion Server delivers wireless file sharing for iPad. Enabling WebDAV in Lion Server gives iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share documents on the server from applications such as Keynote, Numbers, and Pages.

This sounds like the OTA iOS file sync we've been waiting for.
I honestly wish this were not the case. Nearly everything on iTunes seems more expensive than the Blu-ray version on day / week 1 release. To make it worse, the Blu-ray version will often come with the iTunes digital copy on a separate disk or with a code on the inside.

I love movies, but I don't buy many DVD disks nor did I ever, at 480x720 it just seemed not worth it. Blu-ray though I find that I'm more willing to purchase with the greatly improved quality.
Business systems: inventory, sales orders, purchasing, forecasting, accounting, etc.

One is one of the largest master distributors of industrial supplies in the world.

Another is a web-based and catalog distributor of consumer goods (mostly apparel.)

Each has acquired 5 competitors in the past 10 years, converting all of them from whatever they were running to their 20+ year old software written in 40+ year old technology. Both were super agile long before any of us ever used the term.

(All client side web software is written in javascript. Some things do change.)
My experience differs. Funding is a "relationship sell", and associates can be very helpful -- or not, as the case may be. For their areas of specialty, they're often more knowledgeable than partners. And it's their job to help find unexpected new deals. Oh sure, I've dealt with some bozo associates in the past, but they're the exceptions.
I second [2]
You can always have one optical fiber for data, and a metal conductor for power, wrapped up in the same cable / connector.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one having that problem - site is nigh-unreadable with both firefox and chrome.

Also, there seems to be a continue reading link on the page that doesn't actually do anything.
How TED Learned That 'Giving It Away' Increased Both Popularity and Revenue
Well said. Though a cynical contractor could counter that having less productive tools means you get to bill more hours for a given task. Sort of a flip side of the old job creation parable:

"Why are those men digging that ditch with shovels? Wouldn't it be more efficient to use a backhoe?"

"Yes, but this way we create more jobs."

"OK, but if that's the case, why not give them spoons instead?"
I'm actually reading your book right now (took a break to check HN). It's very good, quite impressive really. I've been around a while and I'm learning quite a bit from it. Nice work!

[EDIT: oops, as RiderOfGiraffes points out, I have mistaken his identity]