skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of this aricle reads as if the author is a little naiive as to how container ports work, and just assumes that the cargo industry hasn't thought about these problems. There's plenty of room for innovation in cargo, but don't pretend that the people involved have never thought of the problem of losing containers at sea.

For example, I'm a little surprised by their recommendation that RFID chips be added to containers to prevent mis-loading, as if the current practice is to just randomly grab containers from stacks waiting by the shore.

There is already very sophisticated software (MACS3, or more specifically SEALASH that calculates the force added by an extra container on top of the stack) that does this stuff. There are also programs that read the numbers on containers as they go on and off the vessels, so that they are loaded onto the right trucks at the destination at the right time. If heavy containers end up on top, it's because they need to be removed first or were delivered last---that's a problem that can be solved, but it's a more complex problem than just adding an RFID tag to everything.
TurtleBot: Mobile 3D Mapping and ROS
Um.... http://aws.amazon.com/
Not true. I posted it because it built upon what Steve said.

"...and experiences like that taught us the power of ideas..."

That's what inspired my original comment. I respect Steve and Woz like founding fathers of the Computer Age. No offense taken pohl, semantics throw all of us off.

I am the change I want to see in the world. I don't bring other people down on HN or try to question why they posted something. I have no right.
I'm just wondering why Toyota thinks they've got the final word on design/theming.
Geologic Time: Graphical Representation of Geologic Time
My god, I needed this exact thing rather badly right now. The Emotive Beta Linux SDK is looking hard to work with and does not give access to this kind of data. Thank you for making it!
I self-taught myself trig and calculus in high school. I wasn't told about AP classes until it was too late to sign up and then I was told it was a waste of time to take the test without the class. I signed up for the AP test anyway, spent a semester self teaching and got a perfect 5 on the test. It took some dedication but really it wasn't that hard to learn. Later I found out that none of the students in the class got a 5, mostly 3s and 4s.
The problems of entrance exams are obvious, but you are not being fair - when you say, why did I had to mug organic formulae? Isn't that kinda, how everywhere? If all I want is to do - MS in CS from some top US university, why
do I have to mug that word list for GRE?

> was very miserable because I had no real interest in any of the subjects

You had no interest in Physics & Mathematics? You can hardly blame people who set JEE questions, you don't expect them to ask to write C programs for the entrance exams, do you? Given, myriad subjects that are being taught at +2 level, only physics, chemistry & mathematics are universally taught across India. And the way I see it, It makes sense to ask questions from those subjects.

>When I went back to India to do an internship (and enjoy the vacation) a couple of years back, I was appalled by how little enthusiasm most people have about the work they'd end up doing.

Again, even in US, "most" people have very little enthusiasm towards work they are doing. But I believe, your story is little anecdotal too. Every one of my friend whom I know socially in Bangalore today, are programming their ass off. They work on weekends, on side projects, start up ideas or open source stuff. I understand, my experience is anecdotal too. But again, if you are willing to look beyond IT services, there are people who genuinely love programming, I guess thats how the case everywhere, pretty much.
I suspect seeing customer service as a problem is the root of it. there's no algorithm for it, just people.
This isn't upvoted enough.

While the general sentiment of the article is true enough (I suffered an academic path not too different from magic_haze - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412098 - above), the specific example of the call-centre in question cannot be used as a valid premise.

They want "new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email.", and also in all likelihood want to pay a pittance for this. Sample the following quote:

Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.

s/competent/cheap there, and you have the reality. I doubt if fresh college grads from Nicaragua or Philippines are on average more 'employable' or 'competent' than those from India. In fact, if a fresh college grad is able to competently answer questions by phone and/or email with a modicum of communication skills, they're arguably better off not getting employed in such a job.
Awesome work. Did you show this to Yelp as well to get their API limit increased?
First off, your original complaint was on the inclusion of the word "algorithm", and not the fact that they referenced supercomputers solving the problem. As such, I didn't address it since you didn't address it.

>Formally, TSP is a decision problem: whether there exists a path shorter than a given length L. That's not "easy/trivial".

Also, it is easy/trivial to solve the traveling salesman problem (Try all permutations using brute force search). It's just not easy/trivial to solve it quickly/efficiently.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Does make one awe struck that so much human output/wealth can end up at the bottom of the sea, and still be considered just the cost of doing business.
Yes, this exists. Hang on while I find the link...

Edit: Found it: http://designsvn.com/
no, thats a good idea lemme look into it
10-5: Law of Skills and Success
"The truth is that for some it does and for some it doesn't." A pleasantly reasonable thing to say.
Rip, Watch and Organize Everything: The Ultimate Media Guide
I wish you linked to Joel Spolsky's article rather than blogspam. Article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
Unfortunately that isn't an efficient solution when you have hundreds of applications to process. Perhaps this is why degrees are often required for entry-level software positions as someone with a degree is seen to be better employees (compared to the high school drop outs).
I don't think that was the same issue as here in the Netherlands we could use the full-sized 128 bit keys. So I'm not sure why it was specific to France, but it was.
Chronon Systems - Beta report card
You can change degrees fairly easily but, depending on the requirements for your new degree, you may have to fulfill a number of additional requirements. For example, if you are going to a large public university and are in their engineering program studying for an electrical engineering degree, you can switch over to computer science with very little difficulty. However, if you are in the liberal arts college studying philosophy and want to switch to computer science in the engineering college, you will often have certain minimum requirements to be accepted into the college (much like if you had applied from outside).

Overall, though, US universities and colleges are very flexible compared to other countries. Probably why they are so popular with foreign students. :)
Hah. Sounds like my current job working in government IT. What would take weeks or even days in the private sector, can take years in the government.
AWS kicks ass, but it doesn't (yet) offer scanning-tunneling electron microscopes or particle accelerators to the best of my knowledge, which might be what grandparent was referring to?
This is extremely cool but I have one question about the website design; what's with using Flash for the headings (I only noticed because I have click-to-flash turned on)?
If I understand what you're saying, I think your analysis is alarmist.

The fact is that there is an evacuation area around the Fukushima plant established out of an abundance of caution. The highest readings that have been taken within that region --- not including the plant itself, which is a different story --- are still below a level that would pose a plausible threat to human health; they're in the single-digit mSv/hr range.

It's also important to understand that the evacuation area is designed to address multiple vectors for radiological health threats. Not all radionuclides disperse the same way, and the ones with the strongest impact on the environment settle out of the atmosphere as sediment. Presumably, you don't want kids stuffing their mouths with I-131 that settled in their sandbox. To avoid scenarios like this, you evacuate.

But most laypeople (of which I am definitely one) start with a conception that is much more primitive than reality. They imagine gamma radiation zinging through the air and making people's hair stand up and giving the carp in the lake third eyes. Not so. The most radiologically active stuff dispersed over a distance around the plant is probably no longer airborne; it settles out of the air quickly (and, not for nothing, but also has a short half-life).

It is also a problem that these bodies have been in some (tragic) cases sitting out in the air --- not because of radiation, but because of the scale of the disaster across Japan --- and thus the same rationale that motivates the evacuation (to avoid pointless exposure to Cs-137 and I-131 sediment) also suggests maybe it's not a good idea to distribute the personal effects of contaminated disaster victims. But that doesn't mean the corpses are glowing. It may, for instance, mean that the jackets of 1 out of every 400 people have to be bagged differently.

It is simply not the case that the region within 30km of the Daiichi plant is a nuclear hellscape.
One question: does India have equivalents to U.S. private colleges and universities? It seems like one of the U.S.'s major strengths comes from the fact that you don't _have_ to choose public schools, which means that a) you have many more schools to choose from and b) the competition, especially for top students, forces public schools to be somewhat better.

A more minor Q, if you feel like answering it: which school are you at in the U.S.?
How much does a satellite cost to build? Even with a lower success rate, with a cheaper launch cost, it might end up being a better bargain launching twice as many satellites and losing half of them.

Of course, that wouldn't be acceptable for human cargo.
There would need to be a reputation component like airbnb; otherwise, you would run the risk of shady people picking you up knowing that you have >= $x dollars on you and steal it.
Tech journalism 101: "leaks" are not leaks, just limited announcements.
Poll: For session data: Redis, Memcached, or other?
I'm curious what other engineers are using for user session state storage/tracking within their web apps. I'm not asking about general cache storage, this is specifically about what you use for user session data (if you do that at all).

I'm also interested in hearing what techniques others use for fail-over and to increase availability.

EDIT: added choice 'An RDBMS'
memcached (from Danga Interactive)
Membase
In-process memory
Isn't this kind of a dumb question? To break it down in simpler terms:

Would someone who's gotten a formal education know more about certain topics in a specific domain than someone who hasn't?

Of course, but as several other observant posters've already noted - there are many things you learn in the field that you don't learn in school. The real question, however, is does it matter?

People in a variety of fields practice at different levels, and programmings becoming more of a "prosumer" activity anyway; note the number of "easy to use" frameworks that've come out in the past few years. Plus, any ecosystem has it's ingénues - or a "magician's magician", like in that movie The Prestige. Haha. Some are inegenues, some are practictioners, others highly theoretical, some are shamanistic. There are a number of archetypes that exist within said ecosystem. It really depends on the person and what they make of programmatic ability more than anything else.
I can relate to you but I did take up CompSci in 11th and 12th grades and was pushed by my parents to stick to what I wanted (lucky). They had probably noticed that I was spending too much time on the computer trying to create something or just tinker with it.

Joined Info Science engg later. But I've been disappointed since. I had to scrape through chem, physics and civil subjects (compulsory common subjects at my university for all first years). Rote learning is encouraged instead of practical work. Hiring is based on grades and not the ability to create/solve.

In most families joining startups is frowned upon for a funny reason. I had convinced my mom about startups and why they were the coolest places to work at. But a friend of her's turned up at our house, and asked me as to how I expect my mom to answer when a prospective bride's parents ask her about my place of work (it seems that I should be working at a popular place). I had to tell her in simpler words - I don't want to be the replace-able guy working in a cubicle knocking at the keyboard all day. and told her startups don't have cubicles and have a t-shirt culture. End of chapter ;)

People seem to care a lot about `social status` which is measured by money. The remedy would be to start to care about how the money is made rather than the money itself (it's difficult to totally eliminate it since people see social status as a measure of your value).
Android was never open. The OS has always been.
Mobile gaming: the problem with Android is consistency
Grave: Version tracking for CouchDB views using Node.js and Cradle
Talkatone still exists to this day allowing for Google Talk functionality up to, and including, Google Voice calls over 3G.
The scrum teams don't own the means of production. Individual contributors are human capital. The means of production are owned by the people in control of the finances and business model. If the company were to shift direction and your product discontinued, it's possible the scrum team would be disbanded and the resources that were being used to support them would be reallocated by the "owners" to a new team that aligned with their decision to shift strategy.
The site was inspired by iwannaworkatinstagram.com. I want to build a recruiting tool that makes it easier for people to get hired by companies that they're really passionate about working for. Check the blog at http://www.hustlebee.posterous.com for more on my journey and where I'd like to go with this.
The context here is devices that are small and light enough to be reasonably handheld - i.e. tablets and phones.

It's not yet clear to me if touchscreen will ever make sense for larger-screen devices, certainly you do not want to interact using touch with a vertical surface for any length of time.

However, using an iPad for "long-term, serious work" is just fine. So I don't think you should equate large screens with serious work.
An API for accessing dynamic instances would be so useful for me. I'm developing a library with layered model storage (local cache,memcache, datastore) and cached query functionality on App Engine and using the power of local cache forces me to do some heavy cache invalidation.

If only there was a way to loop through all instances and refresh/invalidate values.

Here's the project if you're interested: https://github.com/ocanbascil/Performance-AppEngine
I'm curious: How are you presenting the upgrade option to users?

(The most recent version of my app which includes in-app purchases has been submitted for review, but hasn't gone live yet. Otherwise I would report on my experience.)
Survey: Verizon iPhones Drop Fewer Calls than AT&T
Here's an approach.

Suppose that Google picked 4-10 different startup-sized groups and anointed them as "customer support organizations". The companies could provide customer support for Google applications to the public (and could charge the public as much or as little as they wished for the service).

For it to work, Google would have to be willing to be more open with these support companies (hence the anointing of a few). The companies could provide care and hand-holding for customers, but eventually some percentage would need to result in actual bug reports and actual technical troubleshooting that could only be done by Google. Today, no one can offer this service because there's no way to open a support ticket with Google -- they're too closed. If they would open up slightly, even for just a hand-picked few, then this might be a way for Google to offer excellent customer service without doing it themselves. The customer support organizations would compete with each other on customer service and would also compete with each other on how easy-to-work-with they are for Google engineers: perhaps Google should even charge them varying amounts depending on how well they do this ($10 for a well-researched bug report; $150 for a poorly researched one).
I think it is exactly the same in most/all of Europe. And let me say that I think that's a good thing, but I'll get to why.

Let me give Portugal as an example, as it is where I live...

By the start of the 10th grade we had two major choices for the next three years, either go to a "professional school" or to a "regular school". Neither blocks access to the university, but the regular school's curriculum is mostly tailored towards it, as the professional schools are more tailored to just finish 12th grade and go work somewhere.

By the end of the 12th grade you must choose what course you want to take at the university. I chose Computer Science/Computer Engineering (a 5-year course).

The first three years of a course like this is a pretty inflexible curriculum (maths, physics, programming, miscelaneous computer science stuff, electronics, some history). The next two years are more flexible, you can choose your courses, but within the computing subject.

Nothing stops you from learning stuff from whatever subjects you like on the side. But the (mostly) fixed path means that someone who graduates from a CS/CE course (or any other) really knows something about CS/CE (and not only the subjects he/she deemed interesting enough to enroll in).

This means you don't end up with computing people that never used a functional programming language (or don't even know what the hell that is), or don't know how regular expressions actually work in a formal setting. They may choose to forget about it, or never actually need it, but they will be better professionals because of it. $DEITY knows that I took a lot of uninteresting courses in college, but sometimes that knowledge comes in useful in weird ways.

Flexibility is just fine if you have the discipline, but it is a killer if you really don't know what the hell you want.
Elon Musk seems to be someone who really knows how to do cool things with the spoils of a successful software company. Are there any other good examples of people like this that have taken one big win and parlayed it into investing in seriously futuristic technology?
SEO – Freelancer Or Companies | Article Buster
Are you going to do it as an Erasmus student?
I posted this story earlier, but I decided to make it into a blog post since I reached #7, and I also included some analytics on the bulk e-mail that I sent out.
Yeah, farmers are really good about adopting this technology because they have to--the competition is fierce in farming and the industry is constantly challenged to do more with less.

Contrast that to the tire shop who fixes the farmers' tires, or the local florist and they will likely not have a computer in their store.

We're not going after farmers (yet) since they don't need websites or lead generation; however, the other businesses in their communities do.
At what point do you realize what you're building is what your protagonist heros always fought against?

And does that realization make you stop?
I see these articles constantly, and wonder which interns don't know that they should be paid. Unpaid internships are next to nonexistent in my major at my school.
As an outsider (i studied physics), I always thought computer science was NOT about programming. I find it fascinating that you CS people can work on the foundations of computation, like P=NP (see, only know the basics). Programming to me seemed a very pragmatic thing: you learn as you go. Need to build a parser? read parsing theory. Need to do text mining? learn it. In that sense, i don't think there are "CS-educated programmers". While everyone can benefit from taking an introductory course, in the end everyone becomes self-taught
An RDBMS
Consumer Reports ranks Apple's iPad 2 best tablet on the market
Previously (with comments): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319875
I don't know much about the US. In India, some universities have have campuses and some don't. There are colleges affiliated to them. Then, there are govt-run colleges and private colleges. In between those two, there are aided colleges, which are run by a private trust, but funded by the govt (the trust gets to make profit while the govt pays a specific grant every year which takes care of the institute's expenditure and faculty salaries).

There are also deemed universities. These are just privately run colleges that have been given authority to have their own curriculum, provided, they fulfill the infrastructure requirements and other stuff.

Faculty, except in a few reputed institutes, are horrible. Horrible as in worst massacre of the terms involved in the subject. We had a lecturer for web programming classes who said "AJAX is a programming language". Fine! Teaching in India isn't taken up based upon interest or merit. It's the job people see as a fallback. They end up there when they don't get into their beloved Infosys, Wipro, TCS and other body shopping companies (due to their low grades coz these companies hire by grades). Some of these faculty turn out to be ego machines who don't learn and never like to see their students knowing more. And the cycle goes on...

The some colleges have pathetic infrastructure and are still given approval for affiliation (cash under the table baby!).

BONUS - A funny incident: We were asked to submit an abstract for (compulsory) 30 minutes talks. The format given to us by our in-charge lecturer was a cover page with title and student name, a separate abstract page and put these in a stick file. It seems one paper with title, student name and abstract won't do.
The Migration Observatory
India does have many private colleges and universities, but their quality varies a lot. CS courses in most of them are dictated by the needs of the outsourcing biggies like Infosys and TCS, which doesn't gel with traditional CS hacking. However, with the rise in the startup culture, these private universities are changing for good.

PS: I am a student at one of these private universities.
I teach college in the US. I have never been offered a bribe. In fact, I've never heard of anyone even attempting to offer a bribe.

However, I did wimp out once when a student begged me to increase their grade from a D to a C because they needed a minimum GPA to play football. My thought at the time was, "This guy is a prick, but he has absolutely no future in the life of the mind, and college football is probably his only chance at success in life." It was something of a split-second decision, and I still regret it. Upon further reflection I realized it was completely unfair to the other students in the class, and swore never to do it again under any circumstances.
These are great guidelines. If you don't at least understand them, your style probably sucks. And I say that objectively.

Good writing skills are so important today when you consider that much of the writing people typically do is in an email or a powerpoint, not a romantic novel.