skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sort of. This is from memory, but here's how I remember that experiment working:

In that experiment, they showed that, for some value of n, rod cells consistently activated in response n photons, and did not activate in response to (n-1) photons. Thus, they argue, rods are sensitive to single photons.

In some sense, they're right, in a straw that breaks the camel's back sort of way. However, the common mis-interpretation of these results is that n=1; that is, in utter darkness a rod cell would fire in response to a single photon. But this is not what the experiment showed.

(Note that just because a rod cell activates doesn't mean that the organism would perceive light. In order for a signal to reach the optic nerve, a retinal ganglion cell needs to activate. Ganglion cells only activate in response to the activation of a significant number of photoreceptors. Only in some part of the fovea, where there are no rods, is there a 1:1 mapping of photoreceptor to ganglion cell. In most parts of the retina the ratio is closer to 1 ganglion cell per 100 photoreceptors. Furthermore, even if a ganglion cell activates and a signal reaches the optic nerve, that still doesn't mean that the organism will perceive light. It's likely that further levels of processing may filter out transient activations.)
To make that $200,000 you also have to pour an ungodly amount of time, effort and money into the education system, etc. Once you factor in all the relevant differences the gap is a lot smaller than it appears at first. There are many programmers who earn that kind of salary and don't fit your description of being in finance or climbing the managerial ladder for years on end.
> "It’s a lot like an English essay. You start with a prompt, and then you talk about the prompt for a few pages and at the end of it all you wrqite your conclusion and you realize that the entire essay has nothing to do with the prompt."

> I have never had this happen.

Me neither, but it's because when I was writing school "essays" I had the conclusion in my head from the very beginning and I navigated it to a predetermined goal. It works for school tasks, but it's really missing the point of an essay (as pg nicely wrote about in http://paulgraham.com/essay.html).
As a nice perk, all of the core client binaries [0] (and pg_upgrade [1]) are already present without having Mac OS X Server installed.

That includes: clusterdb, createdb, createlang, createuser, dropdb, droplang, dropuser, ecpg, pg_config, pg_dump, pg_dumpall, pg_restore, pg_upgrade, psql, reindexdb, and vacuumdb.

Unfortunately, it doesn't include any of the server binaries: initdb, pg_controldata, pg_ctl, pg_resetxlog, postgres, or postmaster.

For the curious, I've pasted the output of pg_config at http://www.pastie.org/2275197

[0]: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/reference-client.h...

[1]: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/pgupgrade.html
See http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2011/html5-notes-for-analysts-a...
I've been looking for a good reason to use twilio for years now. Will the latest developer contest with this new API http://www.twilio.com/contests/2011/07/new-developer-contest... be enough to get me to look harder? I think it may.
No Beatles.

No Bob Dylan.

No Pink Floyd.

I'm certainly enjoying Spotify, but it has some big gaps that need to be closed.
Ask HN: Starting PM job in finance/insurance. Tips from devs/QAs/managers/etc?
Really, this is my first official PM job. Advice needed.
This is my first time buying one of these bundles. I started to play games again this week, so I figured "what the hell?" I paid the pre-selected $1 above-average payment for this bundle.

If I have a great time with these games, I will probably double my payment next time. If I don't, I probably won't buy the next bundle at all. Either way, I can get my feet wet again with games with a low barrier-to-entry price.

Also, let's not forget that the cost of production of digital goods is essentially $0, and you could view this as an alternate channel for game developers to make some extra sales while getting people pumped about their future games.
Went on a B1 visa "to raise investment for StackVM", which took 15 minutes to get.
Why did I (a boy) get into computers? I was a nerd and I had one friend and no social skills. I played no sports and did nothing but play with action figures and watch TV - until I found the computer. I never gave it up until I grew up, and now it's a job and sometimes a hobby (when i'm home long enough to play with it). Would you say it's more likely or less likely that an equal percentage of girls to boys would have similar experiences? Or would you say that girls might just have an easier time socializing and might be less prompted to lose themselves on the computer?

Why do we even care about which sex works more in that field? If we had the answer to this question, and somebody decided to increase the population of women in the field... Is it going to produce better code or something? What's the point other than just playing with social structures for fun, or exercising some strange need to reach some kind of artificial equilibrium anywhere we see what we perceive as an imbalance?

tl;dr there's not as many friendless geek women and who cares who's coding anyway
There are many programmers who earn that kind of salary and don't fit your description of being in finance or climbing the managerial ladder for years on end.

Who are they and where do they work? I am looking for a job.
I think innes had tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Setting Up a Ruby Development Machine From Scratch With OS X Lion
these are awesome, i just do a $25 and let them decide how to balance it all out. question though, any chance for an iOS humble indie bundle!?
It sure does!
"or specialist you have to start your own business, too? Also known as a practise?"

The number of practicing dermatologiests strictly limited to an amount determined by a council of dermatologists via the AMA. Programmers have nothing remotely similar.
Not being particularly scientifically-minded, I really like the third one, David Miller's:

"Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her..."

A perfect analogy given the intended recipient, I thought.
Metrics, Metrics Everywhere [video]
Not sure what your message is exactly, can you clarify?
You're suggesting that Apple would turn off the means to run apps developers depend on to work? The same developers who create apps for this 'locked-down' App Store?

It may come to pass that a version of Mac OS X will ship with an option to only allow apps from the App Store. It would be a great thing to enable on less-technical-people's computers. However, making it compulsory would chase away the very users their platform depends on for success.
They asked for mine, but they didn't seem to care much about it. If they had, they wouldn't have hired me. My grades were not good at all.
Disclaimer: I don't have a FaceBook account. I never had a myspace account either so I don't know much about social websites. I do make an occasional "tweet", but not often.

I got a g+ invite and tried using the service for 3 weeks. I deleted the account yesterday. In short, I found it overwhelming and confusing. Simple things like deleting photos or only sharing stuff with some circles was difficult to follow. Setting privacy was especially confusing. The options were worded in such a way that I had to re-read them several times to understand whether I was enabling or disabling something.

I felt I was going in circles (no pun intended). For example, try to find the "sign out" menu item. I did and felt, that it did not belong in the spot where Google put it. It seemed some things like "sign out" were purposefully made difficult to find and others were worded in such a way as to make the meaning intentionally confusing. I felt these things were done on purpose and that bothered me.

Finally, I hear others say that Twitter is now in trouble because of g+. I disagree. Twitter is immediately intuitive to me and does not try to do too much while making it difficult for users to figure out where to push what button and the privacy issues there are simple and easy to understand.

Just my 2cents about g+.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm always happy when I see people who care about the value they provide, and not only about the money they get. For those people I'm happily overgenerous with my money and time.
I used to poor, like seriously, food was an issue, poor.

Both of my parents and other close relatives started many businesses. They all failed. They are all intelligent people but they all suck, and I mean SUCK at running/growing a business.

I'm a pessimist. I have zero risk appetite, and I mean 0, zip, zilch, no thank you. And as an experienced software engineer, I make a quite a bit of money.....

....but darn it, Patrick's going to push me into staying up late, starting one side business after another, until one of them catches on, and I can quit my day job.

And I've never even met the guy!

Thanks Patrick!
It's not a simple change, because sites actually rely on not being able to _decrease_ the line-height. I tried allowing sites to change the line-height and had to back that out because of sites breaking. You can read the whole sordid story at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349259

Note that the change to allow changing line-height specifically on <button> did stick, and will ship in the next Firefox release in 3 weeks or so.
Youtube's HTML5 player is still very alpha and poorly designed (still no fullscreen?). It has hardly changed in over a year since it was released.

I question Google/Youtube's commitment to moving to HTML5.
It says the HTML5 standard is not slated to be complete until 2020. That seems ridiculous. Why so long?
You could almost argue that the definition of a "good programmer" is one that does know many languages, even if just to bring over paradigms from one to the other or keep his brain sharp.

I also think that programmer to architect could go either way. Some programmers are very well versed in their domain and current application and make excellent architects while the application remains the same. Once enough changes are made, they are no longer an expert in the code base, and don't know the best ways to extend and improve on it. Others are good at envisioning the current solution and know, from doing it with the programmer hat, how to best architect a change, no matter how it evolves.
Yes, but the two best solutions don't. The other solutions are mostly for educational purposes, I guess. One of #9 or #10 is the one that should be in some utility library.
CloudFlare re-invent the internet
Eric Schmidt: Blackberry User
Find product companies where top-percentile individual contributors can make a huge difference to the company's bottom line and are renumerated accordingly.
Did you read the article?

The vision is "users, not the device phone vendor, should be able to control what apps they can install and run".

Note that's what being built is not an OS. What's being built is a set of APIs to allow web apps to do more of the things that only native apps can do right now, so that you're not stuck using native apps that the device vendor has a stranglehold on.
What is your skill set? developer? designer?
I agree!
I have a somali friend.
The general somali myth is that they all, the tribes, came from one Somali man and his wife. I think the Somalis generally realize they're not from arabs. And abhor even the suggestion! haha.

But he said that you are correct, if you go in the north of Somalia, where currently, Somaliland is. You will find that many Isaacs ( clan name) think they are descendants of the arab tribe of Mohammed. My friend tells me these people are just confused. And I think we can agree that DNA analyses seem to suggest he's correct.hehe.
DNA and linguistic research seems to suggest the Earlier Egyptian,Somali, Amhara and Eritrean populations to be close relatives. With the Somalis having the least influence of surrounding nations ( Arabs, west-africans etc.)
Funny how the ones that don't think they're purely Africans, are the ones that in fact, are!
karma-whoring: http://www.economist.com/node/18775343
Are there any specific points in there that you feel are detrimental to productive team work?
Exactly, looking at the load curves over time is useful to gauging how well you are doing overall and for spotting potential trouble issues but when it comes to actually dealing with these issues or predicting an eminent collapse i tend to look at mysql threads and performance, the slow query log, concurrent users, etc. for determining what needs to be dealt with and what will hit us on the head in the near future.
But you have to know about what programming and computer science is about before WANTING to apply to a CS college. Or you can just rely on the media or your parents to tell you that CS pays good money - but that's just disastrous.

I think that CS does not appeal to females simply because females are more social than males; spending endless hours in front of a computer is not really that attractive.
The thing with greed is it never collapses on itself, it gathers and gathers like some sort of black hole until a single entity has all the money. See greed is something that drives someone to gain one of the few things that can allow them to continue their paths unchecked. My point being that I doubt hoping they just undo themselves is going to do anything, the defendants winning against odds and setting new patent precedents, and the people of these united states however, can do something. We need a way to justify what's really a patent infringement. I haven't the least bit idea on where to start, but I think that's the area to start in.
This is the seriously awesome talk Coda Hale gave at GitHub's CodeConf in April, reprised at Pivotal Labs in June. The live video isn't the best quality, but the quality of the talk more than makes up for it. And the slides and audio are just fine, so no worries about watchability.
Was hoping for specific examples, but thanks anyway.
Where do Flash games come into this? I'm not very familiar with the development of a flash game but some guy in this article claims "Flash will disappear" or something. I assume this means whatever source the games have will just be compiled into some other sort of file compatible with HTML5? Or am I missing something completely?]
His answer was interesting. A 'no' would not have been interesting.

Thanks for playing.
If you don't have schedtool available on your distro, you can use 'chrt --batch 0' instead.
What sci-fi are they might be referring to? I don't remember seeing transparent batteries on Star Trek...
The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs
Call Someone Who Cares
Too bad I don't think users see bing as the value add that MSFT does.

Look at it this way, iPhone doesn't have massive search integration that is world beating like Android does and users don't seem to mind.

Search is a useful function, but it is not the function you buy a device for.

Phones are primarily communication devices, so making a killer communication device seems like a good idea. Sometimes you want to track down content - via search in a browser, ok fine bing is useful there.

I just don't think anyone buying a phone even thinks about search integration unless they are a nerd. Search is a feature on a phone, not a de facto reason to buy.
90000 web pages infected by mass iFrame attack
Because by definition it requires three browser wendors with _complete_ implementation of the standart.
Looking at it this way we have no version of HTML complete.
Congrats Peteris!
Prieks, ka kādam izdodas! Veiksmes! :)
The point here is not to build an OS. The point is to improve web APIs so that web apps can compete with native ones, and do it in an open fashion so that all web browsers can implement the new APIs. ChromeOS has done some of this, but neither far enough nor openly enough (what ChromeOS extensions are working on becoming cross-browser standards?).
I doubt the compiler is responsible for assessing the test. I also doubt that gender-bias on the part of the assessor is the reason for the disparity though (assuming the disparity in this small sample is representative anyway).
I am not sure if it's even possible to accurately measure 1st and 2nd moment changes in load to a fine extent that you can quickly (edit) detect bursts and distinguish them from noise. Also, the analogy about the link seems isn't quite right; you shouldn't be pushing the link to its maximum capacity.

This is because traffic is rarely "smooth." Even if you say the link is operating at 90% utilisation, you usually refer to the average. Pushing a system to high load can lead to instabilities and unpredictable performance.
Most Asia-based manufacturers can have lower cost than any North America-based manufacturers. Just ask Broadcom whether they're feeling the heat from Taiwan-based manufacturers.

Race to the bottom doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing if you can produce the cheapest alternatives. But it is bad if you can't do that.
Don't forget you can increase your payment for this bundle if you really enjoy them.

Also, I wouldn't write off the next bundle if this one doesn't suit your fancy. In my opinion the games in this bundle are more casual than games in previous bundles (I wouldn't consider Aquaria, Revenge of the Titans, Penumbra, et al. to be all that casual anyway).

Not that you need to worry about the next bundle at this point X3
A very good point, I'd agree with this.
Is it really AAPL that is giving massive boost? How about GOOG?

Ohh..c'mon! Feels like I'm reading AAPL fanboi blog.
Um...

"If the student hasn't learned, then you have not taught."

I think the idea of the blog post is that the team lead will teach these 3 things to all the other developers... As a team lead, I think this list seems like a very effective tool to ensure that communication is not just one-way from lead -> developer, but is also developer -> lead.

No competent team leader is going to be caught by surprise by the schedule slipping on the whole project because of widespread problems, but it's easy to become derailed by a little "detail" which a developer didn't think was worth mentioning, but is actually a critical component which holds everything up.

The team lead can't ask about each and every tiny thing -- so I think this list is a great summary of the communication responsibilities that must fall to the rest of the team.

this is presented in such a way that if all team members followed it properly and consistently, they are basically self governing and don't require a leader at all.

Again, totally disagree. It would be wonderful if a team were self-governing, but it's rarely the reality. And if it is self-governing, you would need far more rules than just these!

However, I may be conflating the roles of coordinator and team lead a bit... in my role, I do both...
Tiny sample size aside, a given woman is nearly four times as likely as a given man to receive an internship offer from Fog Creek provided both have reached the phone interview stage. From there, women are twice as likely to decline Fog Creek's offer, presumably due to having more & better internship options.

Survival rate by stage:

Submitted resume gets reviewed:
1.05 : 1 in favor of women.

Reviewed resume gets a code review:
1.02 : 1 in favor of women.

Reviewed code gets a phone interview:
1 : 1.96 in favor of men.

Completed phone interview leads to an in-person interview:
1.31 : 1 in favor of women.

Completed interview leads to an offer:
2.92 : 1 in favor of women.

Candidate declines offer:
2 : 1 in favor of women.
Sure, but then you start hitting lag issues, right? Plus we cannot route the data through the US due to data laws.

Hopefully you'll come to Europe in a year or two, because your product really does look fantastic :)
This book helps explain it a lot:
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Men-Earn-More-Startling/dp/0814472...

The pay difference is a matter of a multitude of life choices made slightly differently between men and women.
The security model is one of the hard parts that needs working out, yes. This is just an announcement that there is a plan to work one out in case people want to participate instead of just having stuff dumped on them from on high when it's done the way Google and Apple do it.
Is it because we as a culture have decided that "men are focussed on building things" and "women are focussed on social interaction"?

I think that that is the root of the problem, that collective decision, that outsourcing of our moral responsibility to our bodies.
Yeah, I noticed that but technically the charts only go 30 days back, so it's theoretically possible they hit #1 at some point. Although doubtful since it was a paid app then.
apple doesn't allow for 3rd party sales, best you could hope for is a jailbroken humble bundle.
He is implying that new content (including games) will be created in HTML5 using Canvas and JS instead of in Flash. While google has made a tool that can convert some content from Flash to HTML5 automatically (Swiffy), it only supports very old Flash content.
Apple doesn't say. They tweaked the ranking algorithm recently though, to include usage in addition to downloads.
Most people have a different primary definition of the word "hacker" than the author, in other words.

Most people know exactly what the word "hacker" means within their respective social circles.

It seems almost bizarrely religious to me for someone to say something to the effect of, "the way most people use a word is not the same as my own way or its origin, therefore most people ought to change."
Nope, there are many. Pathology, for one.
临沂企业名录
> I can't comment on the original article. Are comments closed, or am I dumb?

It was posted in 2009, so the comments are probably closed :-)
Behold Gaddafi's ‘Libyan Rocket’
An epitome of Gaddafi’s eccentricity is the car he designed for himself, which Libya claims is the safest car.
PyCodeConf Tickets On Sale
I've watched my neighbor's dogs many times and they've watched mine a few times. I don't think I would use a service like this. I knew and trusted my neighbors quite a while beforehand. Meeting people over a web site, then entrusting my dogs lives to their care isn't something I would want to do.

I'd be more willing to take care of other people's dogs, but don't know why I'd volunteer to take on the work. Even in exchange for money I probably wouldn't do it.

That said, I do think there is a market for this. Plenty of people are not nearly as cautious (paranoid) about their dogs as I am. There are also probably a good number of people that would do it for small sums of money ($20-$30/day). The dog kennel industry seems way too expensive to me. It shouldn't be so expensive to take care of a dog.

Cracking this kind of market is hard though. It's mostly a marketing/brand job and if that's not a strong suit of yours I'd stay clear away.

Actually I'd much rather you start a dog kennel that is cheap as possible while maintaining safety and quality. A simple safe place to drop off my dogs while I go on vacation. I don't see why that service can't be offered for $30/day or something.

I don't think anyone has managed to build a chain of well respected and affordable dog kennels in the US.
Ask HN: Any one using usenet? Please list some active geeky newsgroups ...
I assume queries are done over R=1 consistency then? Is W=N the only way to keep writes consistent with these indexes at all times?
Hive is a really slick DW tool built on top of Hadoop. It has a SQL-like language and supports typical DW techniques like table partitioning, key clustering, etc.
A good place to start: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
I've been looking at FreeCRM, and for the price, well, it looks pretty good.