skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Per mile, truckers drive far more safely than the typical driver...inevitable lapses in safety that occur when you're driving thousands of miles a week...

It's hard to square this part of your post with this part:

...when some trucker nearly drives you off the road because they have to feed their family, you're just getting what you paid for.

According to you, we are paying a low price for goods to be safely transported. What's the problem?

Some here have said "well if the job is hard, then quit it!" Wow. Do you think people don't do this? Do you think that changes the market equilibrium at all? It doesn't.

If that were true, I'd have a very easy time hiring programmers and artists. Or are the laws of economics somehow different for truckers than for programmers?
After reading this post, I decided it was a good time for an inaugural post.

Here it is. How am I doing?

Your skill profile incorporates two of my favorite things: P&P RPGs and employment.
I always thought I was weird for liking XFCE more than Gnome. Sounds like I'm not and it's time to give Xubuntu a full-time shot, especially with Unity being the default in Ubuntu now.
Intriguingly, without anonymity there is no real reason to prevent predators from living next to elementary schools nor interacting publicly with children.

Everyone around them would know their history, and name then therefore watch them to a close degree. As it is now, we simply try to prevent convicted pedophiles from being near unsuspecting children and parents.

---

With a terrorist, the argument is the same. If one knows that party A is a known terrorist, and has thoroughly checked them out then why not allow them to board a plan. 100% security isn't demanded---if it were, then we'd simply lock up every known terrorists before they committed any additional overt acts, then never release them.

---

Of all your cases, the mugging is the only one that makes sense because it refers to a lack of anonymity deterring a potential criminal rather than it being used as advanced warning for the potential victim.
Your article is an interesesting read and despite it's length I stuck with it to the end.

I didn't try the game but I did click thru and have a look at your homepage / landing page and to be honest it's not very inspiring.

It really didn't motivate me to register. There is too much text and to be brutal it's not pretty enough.

You game us being compared to an iPhone app... If you take a look at a typical iPhone apps landing page ( if they have a web presence) they are visually stunning. They are also very simple and you immediately (in 5 seconds) get what the app is all about.

Fir example you need a big button for a user to get started. It's too confusing at the moment.

There are loads of web tutorials on 'landing page optimisation' you should start with this.

Then once that is sorted then you can work on driving some targeted traffic and see what happens.
Definitely something more bright!
I really don't see what connection calculus has with the vast majority of programming. Calculus, and algebraic manipulation in general, has next to no relationship with programming. I really don't see any reason why someone who has difficulty with calculus would have similar difficulties with programming; for all I know, they missed out on some fundamentals because they were sick in school, or they fell out with their maths teacher, or god knows what.

The only time I've ever used calculus in a program in 20+ years of programming is in physics simulation in some toy game apps; and that was just to derive some formulas that plugged in. They could have easily been solved today with some googling (other people probably solved the same problems) or questions on forums.

(FWIW, mathematics has always been my best and favourite subject in school, aptitude tests put me in 99th percentile, etc. IOW, I have no personal grudge against maths. I just see very little connection to programming outside niche areas, and even then they usually barely scrape the surface of the related mathematical area.)

PS: I think your specific bugbears are not related to mathematics either. Bugs: best approached with proper programming style like invariants and defensive programming, along with testing. The quality of software that people actually use can be measured from feedback, bug fix rates, etc. A bigger issue with bugs is usually economics; it's frequently more important to get things into people's hands quickly and cheaply than it is to have higher quality and compromise the other two. Bloat and sluggishness have two cures: measurement and big-O. I'd put both in engineering rather than maths. Understanding big-O, either explicitly or intuitively, is absolutely essential, though it's all blatantly obvious when you spend some time thinking about it.
[Any keystroke] -> New Terminal. [Any window manager worth it's salt]!

I've had ALT-F2 bound to New Terminal window for the past 12 years now, through half-a-dozen window managers. ALT-F1 is new browser, and I've got some preferred CTRL-ALT-arrow keys for moving around virtual desktops. Everything has configurable keys and has for a long time, though sometimes you have to create a one-line shell script to pop up a terminal, find your local menu editor, add that script, then give that menu entry a shortcut.
Unfortunately this doesn't help me decide what a "FtrsIndexScanRel" icon should look like. :( I like these, though I'm a bigger fan of the famfamfam icons.
I felt the same way wrt The Little/Seasoned/Reasoned Schemer and religious experiences.

It's a shame that they're removing SICP in favour of a technical introductory text.

Python is great and all, but SICP isn't about teaching Scheme.
Yes, because with 5.6% of the market share and 56% of the profits Apple is hurting.. lol Get real, Google can only hope to make that amount of money on Android.
Just so you know, I just finished browsing all 82 pages. Thanks guys! :)
Aaron Stanton actually has a product, which is what he was trying to get in front of Google - www.booklamp.org

It's an interesting concept - Pandora for books. I spent some time looking at it as a potential complementary technology for a reader app I worked on a few years ago.

Fairly rudimentary algorithm at that time, but it's conceptually interesting and worth burning a couple of cycles watching the intro video.
Cross-Browser CSS in Seconds with Prefixr
This reminds me of the Isotype project (1924-1934). If it isn't an inspiration it is an nice coincidence.

* Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotype_(picture_language)

* Isotype gallery: http://www.gerdarntz.org/isotype
If you think that is interesting, read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374223130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Or "American Idol".
http://qntm.org/uk

As a United States citizen I won't even try to summarize that. (The author is... err... somewhere in there, so I'll defer to him.)
Better to shove people into well-built structures in Antarctica and use more temperate land for food and energy generation than fill up every inch of what is traditionally considered "habitable" space and promptly starve.
Drag&Drop Picture to Search
Sidebar question: how did you find these? I'm researching a related topic and need to perform bulk searches for patent related litigation data. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Yup! I typed too fast! You are correct. I was thinking the right thing but typing the wrong thing! I'm too used to typine (n)ln(n)!. So, sure, worst case, n times have to do a heap 'sift' which is time proportional to ln(100) as you said.

Short answer: I blew it!

But for the exercise, that is, when there are no ties among the n numbers and all permutations are equally probable, for 100 < m < n, the probability that number m is among the 100 largest so far and, thus, causes a heap 'sift', seems to be 100/m. So, the expected work on number m is proportional to just (m - 100)/m + ln(100) (100/m), first cut, wild guess, don't hold me to it! So, sum this on m and get the expected work (computational time complexity) up to a constant of proportionality. Maybe! That is, so far, first cut, the exercise looks simple! When do the sum, I smell a ln(n) term!
Why are patents transferable beyond the original creator?

This allows the creator to benefit in the case they can't personally exploit their work. If I invent some CPU fabrication process, I won't have the capital to invest to realize it and benefit - but maybe I can sell it to someone who can, which means the invention is actually used, and also I get some benefit.

why wouldn't a patent become public domain once the creator dies

What if the patent is a joint creation, or created while working for a company, i.e. the company owns it?
Years ago I worked for the ResNet team at Purdue University and some of the items in the story were similar. I can relate to the posters pain but I've also been on the other side.

We had an entirely automated system to temporarily block users who exceeded their bandwidth limit. When that happened we brought down the port on the switch. If they moved to a different port we brought it down as well. If they had changed their MAC they would have to associate it with their username (using our home grown NAC) and then we would block them then.

As for support we had standard hours for a helpdesk staffed by students.
I'm not sure what you mean - clicking a runing app on the Win7 taskbar just brings the window to the front, like GP said.
The patent law should change to, if the company goes under or after so many years the patent is no longer valid. Once the patent is no longer valid it can not be re patented ever again. This way companies can't keep using there old patents to hold inovation hostage.
Sun Microsystems did exactly what you are saying, and Google has gone on record, multiple times, saying it would do exactly what you are saying.

It is not without precedent at all.
The intent is to make sure you're reading, not to insult. Asking for a silly rider to be removed is probably sufficient proof too.
great tips. appreciate that, thanks for sharing.
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He lives in Sweden - not the US. So even if he is sentenced to jail it's very likely that most or all of the sentence is suspended on probation.
Web languages as knock knock jokes
Hyper-V is gonna eat VMWare's lunch. 2008 Server is kicking ass and taking names, and is indeed a solid product from what I hear. MS's next iteration of server+virtualization will be the death knell for VMWare unless VMWare drastically reduces prices and comes up with remarkable innovative improvements in the next few years.
AT&T and T-Mobile spend $14 million on lobbying
... when the list of things being analyzed is "Android, Eclipse, the Linux kernel, MeeGo, Firefox, Qt, Symbian, and WebKit."
Nice to know the numbers.
Ask HN: Should recruiters be allowed in "Who's Hiring Thread?"
Recruiters and head hunters have been disguising and sneaking in the who's hiring thread, we should discuss and come to a resolution about it.

I suggest we should have a special thread for recruiters since they pollute the who's hiring community.
You still don't quite get it. It wasn't the car that was being approached head on that got in the collision. That car was in a situation to see the whole thing coming and just put the brakes on.

It was driver who out of the blue realized that there was a car less than 6 inches away, going at least 20 mph faster, who needs to be where they are now or else they'll be in a headfirst collision. That driver's attention is focused on escaping from that threat, leading to a panicked swerve into the next car over.
> Android will undoubtedly survive this attack

Did you have to spoil the ending? Come'n, I was hoping for a little suspense at least!
Mark by Mark Zuckerberg
Good idea! I'll have to give that a try.
You can set keyboard shortcuts on Gnome 3. Though I prefer super-enter for launching gnome terminal (from my earlier ventures with awesome).
Who's going to WordCamp SF?
Who's going to WordCamp San Francisco next weekend? HN meetup, anyone?
MIT did not abandon SICP: it decided that it no longer wanted to teach core CS concepts.

Wait, what? Are you claiming that the MIT undergraduate CS program does not "teach core CS concepts"? Or are you only talking about a single introductory course?
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http://www.quantcast.com/weebly.com
"Traffic data has been hidden by the owner."

Could the founders explain why it's hidden?
I'll give a cookie to the first person to find me a patent that Markdown infringes :p
The grandparent is a good example I think sarcasm should be verboten on any serious discussion forum. It's impossible to argue with because it shields the wielder from having to make an actual clearly stated argument.
I just use safari, is there a better option?
Music Has a Right To the Blank Tapes of Children
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* Grey /ebony GG fabric with black leather trim
* Round toe
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Move your mouse over image or click to enlarge
Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I had never heard of these two men until now.
What’s your mentality?
In fact their track record is so bad that not since Nicola Tesla has anyone gone into bankruptcy with such utter lack of innovation.
I don't think you are misunderstanding so much as conflating two things, the co-ordinate space / construction of the world and construction of objects within that world.

It's correct to say that every 'point' in a voxel based world can be represented by a voxel in that point. It's incorrect to say that every point in a world has voxel data associated with it. Perhaps this is the place where Euclideon and Notch diverge as well.

Using a quantized world representation view (where co-ordinates in the world are quantized to voxel boundaries) then as a voxel moves through the world space it moves from point to point in that space. So a 'cloud' of voxels has an origin and an orientation in worldspace, that allows the translation of a local voxel space (the object) into world voxel space. Since you can't do sub-voxel positioning it behooves you to have an oversampling rate between voxel space and display pixels as well.

A 'feature' here is that it also allows for fine grain collision detection (harder to do in polygon space) but again its pretty expensive computationally. (boundary surface intersection of the local voxel space with the world voxel space).
No, because patents aren't a normal part of business. They're an artificial limitation by the legal system intended to promote innovation but instead are promoting senseless law suits by companies who can't/don't want to deal with normal business.
> Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
The author of this article seems to be trying to confuse things:

Membership in this elite group is likely to come from being involved in some aspect of the financial services or banking industry, real estate development involved with those industries, or government contracting.

What does "involved in some aspect" mean?

...built a small company and was acquired with stock from a multi-national. Stock is often called a "paper" asset...CEO of a medium-cap tech company...another was able to amass $12M after taxes by her early thirties from stock options as a high level programmer in a successful IT company.
You are mistaken.

It is saying that copyright applies to a user interface insofar as elements of it are subject to copyright on their own, but that "a user interface" is not itself expression, not itself subject to copyright. If you copied every last detail of my interface except the icons or other elements subject to copyright, I would have no valid claim that you infringed on my copyright.

(NB:I am not saying this is bad or wrong at all. Only that it is so, and that it's relevant.)

The trouble that stems from this is that what we call a "user interface" is not exclusively or even mostly elements subject to copyright, but consists of methods and behaviors that are often the product of much ingenuity and innovation. This is why various parties have sought patents for aspects of the interfaces they develop--because those things aren't subject to copyright.
VeriSign was founded as the monopoly SSL CA, then they expanded by buying the monopoly .com registry. Now they're divesting any business units that aren't a monopoly (like the NetSol registrar part or the SSL part) because it brings down their profit margins.
I use adblock selectively and whitelist sites that I frequent like reddit.
Part, but if they focus so completely on the subset, then is it really computer science anymore?
> We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio.

And this is why they will _not_ oppose patents.
> why wouldn't a patent become public domain once the creator dies

Because there'd be a financial incentive to kill patent holders?

If you think that's far-fetched, consider that some organisations are quite happy to torture their employees with silicosis if it means they can make faded jeans cheaply (Google it).

(On a related note, abolish patents!)
Microsoft Releases It Tried To Work With Google On Buying Patents
The difference is that even if Google were to try to use those patents offensively against Apple and Microsoft, they probably wouldn't have much of an impact- Google's motivation was defensive, and they pretty much had to try for those patents.

On the other hand, Apple and Microsoft are /already/ having an impact on Android and these patents would only strengthen them- their motivation was offensive and they were the ones who inflated the prices just to hurt Google.
I've seen also some victim blaming in saying "well if the job is hard, ask for a raise or get a union!" Interesting story there. Back in the mid-20th century, trucking was one of the most heavily unionized industries, via the IBT primarily. However, in the 80s and 90s, various Republican and Democratic administrations collaborated with trucking companies to make war on the unions. Originally truckers were employed directly by the companies, but eventually those companies realized they could react to unionization by outsourcing truckers, either into private shell companies that closed down as soon as unionization hit or by hiring truckers as contractors. Various NLRB boards aided and abetted this regulatory change.

You are ignoring the other half of the argument here. In Argentina, were I live, truckers are heavily unionised; this is true to the point were the leader of the union (Hugo Moyano) is probably one of the biggest driving forces of the policies in the country. See, since the railroad was torn to pieces by the liberal policies of the nineties, trucks are the only way to transport goods from most of the country. So the trucking union has the power to literally stop the economy if they so wish. This happens almost every year, and sometimes several times a year. It's impossible to legislate against the union (for example, in order to create more trains) without having an enourmous economic baclash.

Now, I understand that it sucks to be trucker without a union. But there is a huge economical cost involved in monopolizing the control of any form of transport and communication.
Obligatory, if you are new to the internet; the radioactive boyscout:

http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
High school kid works for the NSA his HS senior year? Really?

And you never know, folks - mediocre works for lots of people, especially in technology. It's something to keep your mind open about. There's more money in Big IT, and Big IT is all about mediocrity above all else.

And deciding you're "solidly in the middle of the pack" while in college... you have miles to go before you know where you're at.

No snark, no sarcasm - just statistical inevitability.
There is a difference between being a plaintiff in a patent case and using patents offensively. In the Skyline case, it looks like Skyline sued Google over Google Earth: http://googlecopyright.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-prevails-...
Photo Hack Day, NYC August 20th-21st
Comparing Shared Web Hosting to VPS Hosting
There's a pretty simple solution: Abolish the capital gains tax, and tax all capital gains at the income tax rate. There is no more "capital gain". Only income. Whether your income was earned through labor or rents on capital that you own seems rather irrelevant to me.
It's been a while, but a long time ago I heard the phrase, "The Rolling Stones are not in the music business, they're in the t-shirt selling business." In that way, I think if you examine Google's practices and its strategy with Android, it's that Google is an advertising company. It's where all their money comes from. Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle are traditional software companies in the sense they derive their profits from consumers and businesses purchasing services.

> They may have dressed it up as pious and open – but for their purposes, it's a land grab. Is it anticompetitive? I'm not sure.

Well, then, isn't GNU/Linux in general anti-competitive? Or free-libre software since many developers don't charge for services?

As for Google's trustworthiness with patents versus patent-abuse, anyone know a site with a good summary of Google's patent disputes?
OpenPhoto will be there helping everyone liberate their photos one hack at a time! http://theopenphotoproject.org
Wait, what's the problem that you're solving?
I agree that those examples are not great at conveying the main point he's trying to make, but let's consider for a moment that the top .1% evaluates to a larger number than 5. Maybe he was calling out notable exceptions, or maybe it's just a poorly edited piece of writing.
Considering a used iPad can be bought for about the same as a Chromebook, I can't think of a single reason why you would choose a Chromebook.
Depends on what you are after. If it is only money (aka Apple) they are really doing great. Their tribe has money and loves to pay (you cant even go in the apple store for less than 30 dollars). If you are trying to spread like a virus... Android wins. Not sure where google is getting money off of it, but android will end up with insane market (but you are right much less money there)
Side project because I have a family I need to feed. If I were on my own, I'd probably chance it as full time for as long as I could. I will say I plan make the plunge to full time as soon as I have enough saved from the day job to survive several months to a year.
I'm under the impression that's not true. Looking at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/clementine/images/ I see a smoother surface on the earth side. I also found on the Internet some paired images from different cameras, which of course can be chosen to emphasize either side.
Note that this contention is over one course in the entire CS curriculum. I think there is quite a lot to be gained by continuing to teach SICP somewhere early on, even if the degree programs begin to take on a more earthy, practical approach to compsci. There is no reason "Dive Into Python" can't be taught in something like "Modern Software Engineering 101" and SICP taught in "Fundamental of Software Design" or something to that effect. I think there's place for both, and I fully agree with the author that SICP (or a modern equivalent, if one is ever published) is an important formative text in the mind of the novice programmer. SICP is usually one of the most serious interactions a working "software engineer" will have with functional programming until his beard grays a bit more and he takes a deeper interest in the craft over the day-to-day "engineering". A very valuable experience imo.
As somebody who worked on a social networking website for high schoolers back in the day, I can say with authority that trolling never stops in that age range. We quickly gave up the profanity filter arms race as we saw more and more obscure uses of unicode.