skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never liked 'speed' as a programming metric because it's very deceptive. In this case we're talking about students going through some very basic training, and who will do things like blow 3 hours on a trivial-to-me syntax error... but it's "trivial-to-me" only because I, too, spent three hours on trivial syntax errors. I would expect these essentially "constant factors" to be dominating here.

I really don't like speed because there's a quality difference, too. I may not necessarily beat a fresh-out-of-college kid on some task on straight clock-time, but where theirs is bodged together, barely functional, and already extended to the maximum limit, mine will have a strong unit testing suite, be efficient, extensible, scalable, fewer bugs, probably even fewer features in places I know they shouldn't be, less code overall (despite the unit test suite), etc. And there will be tasks I can complete that they can't even get close to; what's the multiplicative difference between "I built a scalable system that serves millions" vs "I couldn't get the system to do anything useful" in the same time period? The productivity differences are really more about quality than raw speed. There are speed differences, certainly, but I think it's dominated by the quality difference.
Keep in mind that many parts of industry itself lag 5-10 years from the leading edge of industry. And the parts of industry many universities track--i.e. the large firms that employ graduates by the dozens--are not the companies on the leading edge. This is probably more the case for your middle tier state universities than for Stanford or something, though.
> If there's both a punk rock band and a rapper with name "Foo" it probably doesn't make sense to mix them.

Damn right. And yet Last.fm does. An example: Felt. "There are three artists with the name Felt"[1]. I'm wondering if using MusicBrainz or another service they could manage to differentiate them.

[1] http://www.last.fm/music/Felt
Apparently the CI chondrites class of meteorites are rare, all having fallen within around 200 years (oldest find in 1806).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CI_chondrite

Even assuming the possibility of bacteria contagion from Earth the question remains how the biological remain appears to contain no nitrogen, an essential building block to life as we know it.
Is engineering not the application of science?
Except for all the times when Real Developers have to use tools which may not be the best due to various constraints but they go ahead and do it anyway because they're Real Developers and not Magpies looking for shiny objects.
I think you're trying to solve the generic problem -- how can I speak and have things magically delivered to me?

That, of course, is a long, long way from here. But I don't think we need to boil the ocean. Fact is, you could make 10 or 20 categories of things folks do on the internet and cover a huge chunk of activity. As one commenter pointed out, lots of folks want pictures of folks from the party last night, not "facebook". There's no reason you couldn't have a handheld device (or program) that you pushed a button and it showed you recent pictures from your friends -- no matter where they posted them online.

If you wanted to get ambitious, you might could come up with 100 use-cases that would cover an enormous amount of online activity: checking my account balances, hearing from friends, sharing pictures or videos, providing feedback on what I thought after consuming some kind of material, etc. I'd be willing to be such a list would be so complete that's it's not important about the remaining items. You'd simply use a browser and an URL for those.

I bet you could create a device with 20 or so buttons that would cover so much common activity on the net as to make the device useful as a stand-alone appliance.

The beauty of this, of course, is that since people's behavior is more or less unchanged (people have been sharing pictures with each other ever since there was photography) the same buttons could be easily learned and would work no matter what the underlying technology or transport mechanism was.
You're assuming most human beings are capable of doing knowledge-based work. I don't think this is true. The reason knowledge based workers make so much is precisely because the skills necessary to perform it are rarer than manual labor. Fully automating manual labor means a large class of people (possibly a majority) will not have any marketable skills from which to make a living.

Furthermore, there are much fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy. At the end of the day, most knowledge work is a one-off thing. Once the program is written, it can be duplicated at no cost. Once the drug is discovered, that knowledge is spread for no cost. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but this is a trend. There is necessarily orders of magnitude fewer knowledge based jobs necessary to run an economy than labor jobs.

When the automation revolution comes we're going to need a new basis for the economy because the current one just doesn't fit in that world.
What is this implemented in?
The write blocking issue could be solved if manufacturers added a read-only jumper to their devices.
What a photograph represents (beyond the literal scene depicted) is subjective. To you, these photographs symbolize the engineering task accomplished; to others, they symbolize the science that underlies the engineering, or the broader thirst for knowledge that motivates scientific discovery.
> Generally, the fastest way to logically delete data is to just forget that it's there. RAM works the same way, as would any other medium that doesn't have any special requirements for writing.

Many media have special requirements for writing. It's true that DRAM and SRAM don't have a separate "erased" state, and neither do fuse PROM, core memory, Williams tubes, acoustic delay lines, or magnetic disk and tape.

But CD-R, Flash, CD-RW, rewritable magneto-optical disks, two-photon storage, and some other memory types have a distinct "erased" state; in some cases, you can't even return to that state. I'm not sure about MRAM, FeRAM, PRAM, and hypothetical memristive memories.
> Zuckenberg (sic) is going to do something so stupid and greedy that he will shadow Rupert Murdoch.... By 2016 you will see headlines: Facebook is dead

To my knowledge, Rupert Murdoch is still obscenely rich and widely considered to be enormously successful.
Those who would be benefited by a charity are unlikely to be impacted by Jobs' computers. What Haitian can afford or would be helped by a MacBook?
I wish I could talk that fast.
When collecting evidence from computers, the policy used to be "power it down, and do dead-drive forensics". Over the last few years, this has shifted to "grab RAM and only then consider powering it down."

Memory contains all sorts of potential evidence, from encryption keys to malware to passwords. Failing to collect this information can significantly hamper or even kill an investigation.

The research into freezing and then extracting RAM contents was interesting, but not terribly practical.
And there is a MongoDB track:
https://www.postgresqlconference.org/2011/east/mongo_talks
http://unity3d.com/ is fairly popular these days.
Upgrading to 2.3.3 Android Gingerbread Nexus One | Technology Rekor
I don't understand. How can a company that doesn't intermediate the web browsing experience screw developers over if they are free to add a new site to the Web at will? You don't need a relationship with Facebook to run a web site.
Impressive! Was really surprised at how little it taxed my system, usually I see my CPU graph shoot straight up. Would love to know how you optimized it as that's the biggest drawback with most HTML5 games I play.
I am very used by now to seeing people who think as ambitious technologists in all other parts of their life fall over and fail to think clearly and ambitiously when it comes to aging. The pall of long-standing societal attitudes towards aging is hard to overcome.

But really - a whole screed on what to do about aging and you don't mention biotechnology once? That is a hot startup market, in which amazing things are taking place, and there are at least three competing visions of how to significantly extend human life currently battling it out in the scientific press and pop-science translation of that.

As your future arrives, there are two things you can do: either (a) accept suffering and death and do only the things you list in your article, or (b) materially help the nascent industry of rejuvenation biotechnology.

We are entering an age in which you can turn money into years of life. If you aren't noticing that, and you don't understand how to do that, then you have not been doing your research.

If you can buy time with money, then the worth of money becomes very different, and you should be giving a lot more of it to the right sorts of science:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/the-rational-use-...

And all technologists should have a better grasp of what aging is, and how it can be ameliorated within the next 20 years with the right research path:

http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes

It isn't as complex as you might think - it only takes a couple of years of reading around to come to a good understanding as to why most of what you read is unscientific nonsense, and why despite that fact there are still functionally useful paths ahead:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific-de...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/magical-thinking-...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/money-making-webs...

----

And finally:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/is-prevention-of-...

"Yes, prevention of aging is within our grasp - in the sense that a package of foreseeable medical technologies could enable repair of the low-level biochemical damage that causes aging, and those technologies might take only twenty years or so to develop. Unfortunately, that timeline is dependent on a large amount of funding and a dedicated research community, neither of which presently exists for many of the essential parts of this research program. While the regenerative medicine and cancer research communities are populous, well funded, and achieving progress, very few researchers are presently working on other goals necessary to halt the aging process - such as repair of mitochondrial DNA.

"So when I say "within our grasp," I mean "if we all get up and do our part to make it happen." It takes a wave of public interest and advocacy to steer the scientific community and large funding institutions - and they presently need steering towards repair-based strategies to deal with aging, otherwise the first working rejuvenation therapies will arrive too late for those in middle age today."
Would you call someone "a whining, privileged bore" to their face?
http://amathematiciansapology.pandamian.com/
Until another service comes along that allows users to record which songs they've listened to, and be as ubiquitous (there's a Last.fm plugin of some sort for practically every music software player, and even for some hardware players), I think Last.fm is safe.

With services such as Spotify competing with it, though, I think Last.fm has lost its chance in the music streaming industry. I have plenty of friends with Spotify accounts but very few with Last.fm accounts (and those that do have them solely as vestiges of the MySpace era).

As the article says, the problem is, as with so many of these small, new companies that get bought by much bigger ones (Flickr and Delicious come to mind as similar cases), they stagnated and have done nothing new.
What is the incentive to the manufacturer to do so? There are some specialty devices, mostly for law enforcement, that are essentially WORM SD cards. Evidence, a photograph most often, is written to it but cannot be modified. These command a serious premium.

Write blockers are pretty common, and not too expensive. The major issue is that writeblockers lag behind drive technology. Not sure how we'll write block the first Thunderbolt hard drives other than through software.
Here is a link to the actual paper:

http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

The Journal of Cosmology website looks a little sketchy to me -- not what I would expect from a serious science publication.

Even if he could conclusively prove that he is seeing a fossil in a meteorite you couldn't discount the idea that these meteorites were blasted off the earth's surface and into space by some ancient, huge asteroid strike and fell back to earth at a later date. That seems more likely to me than bacteria developing on a comet which is what he is suggesting.

That being said I had never heard of this class of meteorite. Here is a description from the paper by a chemistry professor who analyzed one in 1806,

"He realized that these stones were different from all other meteorites since they had the appearance of solidified clay. Thénard reported that “when the stones were placed in water they disintegrated immediately and gave off a strong clay-like odor.” "
Its come to this. That its almost that a company is sorry that it ever made a piece or software like IE6. When people do insane things for a really long time. The next insane move starts to look really sane...
I kinda doesn't like the concept of such cryptic representations of standard language. May be by writing such way you saved a lot of characters, but anytime standard CSS is lot more readable thus maintainable.

Though I also feel, browser specific styles are really painful. And I also miss lack of functions, variable in CSS.
Wouldn't that then be the best tool? Maybe not the best tool from an outside standpoint, but given the circumstances.
Let me know when they automate picking of watermelons, tomatoes, etc. Not highly paid work, but indispensable to get the produce out of the fields.
This guy obviously spent too much time in academia. It's things exactly like this that make CS graduates less and less prepared for real software development carriers.
True. Agreed.
Mozilla-central is CLOSED for Firefox release candidates
Unfortunately, it fits right in with history. NASA no longer has any credibility on the extraterrestrial life front. I've lost count of all their announcements, which have without fail turned out to be anything from arguably-fraudulent (though not quite provably so) up through so dubious it means nothing, like the previous meteorite results.

They have a pretty picture in the news story, certainly, but I will wait for independent confirmation before I even begin to consider the possibility that this may be true, as opposed to a carefully-selected picture culled from gigabytes of data. Not because I have preconceptions either way, but because that's how little I value NASA's announcements on this front.
3 Important Considerations When Selecting a Credit Card Processing Service
A "Thunderbolt hard drive" is a SATA hard drive plugged into a Thunderbolt interface card.
Great way to beat a deterministic machine!
>I'm hesitant to quote any search engine share market #s currently because I frankly just don't believe them, or at least they don't seem to line up with anecdotal evidence at all. Google seems currently way more dominant than they sometimes get credit for.

Huh what is that supposed to mean? That made the article completely useless. Atleast offer something of substance, even it's an anecdote. Does it mean that Google is 100% according to anecdotal evidence?

But the very next line says:
>Yet at the same time alternatives are arising. And more importantly wrt to the analogy, there are alternatives that in my opinion offer a different enough overall search experience to be preferable to some people, much like Web browsers.

Like which ones? Bing? Duckduckgo? Blekko? Coolio? Anything else?
Here's some of what I've found helps make you faster.

- Learn the idioms of the programming language and problem domain(s)

- Keep your hands on the keyboard and OFF the mouse

- Get the best set of tools you can and learn to use them like an extension of your own body. If you have to stop and think how to use your tools then you lose any momentum you have thinking about the actual problem. (Pro tip: start by learning to touch type, then editor hotkeys.)

- Anytime you solve a new problem. Spend time afterward making a more general solution. Then file that solution in a snippets file, utility library, or wherever is the first place you're likely to look for it when you need it
> Is this an apt analogy for the future of the search engine market?

No, I don't think so.

There are tremendous learning effects, economies of scale, and network effects in search that do not exist to the same extent (or at all) in the browser market.

I. The learning effects arise from the number of searchers and advertisers using a particular platform over a given period of time. This enables Google (with the largest market share) to improve its algorithm at a faster rate in response to the behavioral data that it collects. The sheer amount of data that Google collects permits much deeper (and faster) multivariate analysis relative to competitors.

II. The economies of scale exist because Google can spread its huge fixed costs of developing, refining, and operating its search engine over a much greater number of users. For instance, if Google employs 2x the number of engineers as Microsoft in search, but fulfills 4x the number of search requests, its per search engineering costs are 2/4 = 50% of Microsoft's. The same holds for other significant fixed costs, such as data center costs.

III. The network effects arise from a feedback loop between searchers and advertisers. As the number of searchers increase on Google search, it attracts more advertisers because advertisers can reach a broader and more targeted audience. The reverse is true to some extent as well. For instance, as the number of advertisers using Google AdWords increases, it attracts more searchers, assuming that searchers find some value in the sponsored search results.

Note that the learning effects and economies of scale exist in browsers, but not to the same extent as in search. There are no obvious network effects in the browser market, while the network effects in search are quite strong.

Google's dominance in search will persist into the future, until:

1. A competitor develops a protectable technology (e.g., new algorithm) or user experience that delivers significant value to the average searcher and/or advertiser.

2. A substitute for search emerges, which provides a much more effective method for obtaining information that you would otherwise obtain using Google search.

3. Google is unable or unwilling to respond to the competitive threat in #1 or the substitution threat in #2 in a reasonable period of time.

Given Google's quick response to customer feedback (e.g., content farms) and technology change (e.g., real-time search), I don't have a sense that the company is resting on its laurels.

Note there is still room for niche search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, that emphasize particular features of significant importance to a segment of users. For instance, DuckDuckGo does not collect or store a user's IP address, yielding greater privacy.
My dad gave up on our ZX81 ever arriving and bought an Acorn Atom from an electronics guy at work.

I ended up with a Spectrum, then a BBC, then a Dell 486 and various home-builts an Macs since then.
Study your history, in particular the effect of Eli Whitney's cotton gin.

Tomatos are being genetically engineered to have a consistent size and shape, partly to enable better automated harvesting.
لعشاق الروك وعشاق المصارعة جميع عروض ومباريات الصخرة The Rock Home Videos
Micropwns: Risk Microprobabilities for Infosec?
Paul, granted that it's sort of a part of your job to shill for Chrome, and granted that Chrome is a better browser than IE in its current state, but why all the hate for IE8 specifically? Most devs I know who've spent time with the IE lineup would prefer 15 years of IE8 to another 1 year of IE6. End of story, so far as that goes. (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much.)

And the "only" solution is hardly getting them onto a new browser. Moving them to say, Firefox, is only one solution. Another solution would be for MS to produce a standards-compliant browser. IE8 and IE9 are both major steps in this direction. Of course, Chrome itself isn't 100% compliant, and had the advantage of being developed much later in the game, against a well-framed open source stack. And of course, Chrome borrowed all sorts of tricks from IE...

Anyway, there are at least 3 or 4 good solutions for that crowd, only one of which involves Chrome. By the way, I use Chrome and Firefox exclusively. I dislike the piling-on against IE for piling on's sake. To represent IE8 as another IE6 is a little disingenuous, IMO. For what it's worth.
I think this is pretty bad form on both sides.

On Facebook's part, they shouldn't be using a "certification process" to try and exclude competitors from making money from their app ecosystem. From what I can tell, the developers trying to make a living creating apps and even the Facebook platform itself can ill afford this sort of disruption right now. This sort of action will hurt the developers who invested in your platform the most.

On the Google side, they should be thinking about how to structure some sort of revshare agreement to help app developers get back to using Adsense and getting on the list of networks blessed for Connect sites.

Concerning arbitrary and unexplained actions, participating in Adsense alone will get you subject to more than a few of them. Consider what will happen to you as a publisher if you share your eCPM or a screenshot of your Adsense account.

And the same thing with advertisers when they have their creatives pulled for no apparent reason.

In other words, both sides use bully tactics when it suits them, and in this case, a peace treaty would probably be more mutually profitable than a prolonged slugfest.

But it's not like corporate egos haven't fueled destructive behavior before...
Photosynth as a metaphor for an even bigger challenge
If they were in a position of power & privilege, yes. I called a foreign minister much worse things, only a few days ago, and he didn't like it (felt bad afterward though.)
I've been developing a theory for my life called "Decades". Do something for ten years then move on by turning the last decade into a hobby and the new one into a profession. It helps to realize that 5-10 years is the right amount of time for the vaunted 10 to 20,000 hours (50 weeks x 20-40 hours/week x 5-10 years). It helps me set expectations too when deciding what to work on: Is this something I would give five years of my life towards? If I enjoyed it enough would I give ten years or more?

That was the best outcome of graduate school for me. I worked for four years to get in and another four years to complete the degree. By the end of my post-doc (another two years) I had an appreciation of difficult problems with unknown boundaries. I also had an understanding of how my life would turn out if I exclusively followed that path.

I worry today that the focus on rapid iteration leaves aside the challenge of selecting important problems that can truly sustain us long-term. Projects are hard. Sticking with projects is even harder. For me, that has been a whole new lesson in my thirties as I try to develop technologies even as I learned that lesson during my twenties. I hope my forties can start out to be just as confusing as I slowly get a sense of the challenges around me. If not, I'm afraid I'll stagnate and die from the inside out.
And an eSATA hard drive was often a PATA drive with an eSATA interface.

However, clients don't often like you cracking the case to get at the base interface.
Fox neglects to mention that their photo is an actual Titanospirillum bacterium, not the fossil found in the meteorite.
Changelog: http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.0.0/changes/1.0.html

This is a major version, so note the backwards incompatible parts as well:

http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.0.0/changes/1.0.html#backwards-...
Saudi king offers to buy Facebook for $150M to "end revolt".