skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think people are getting smarter; they're just getting better at IQ tests. These are not the same thing. As a society we are simply becoming more familiar with the sorts of puzzles researchers use to gauge intelligence.
In typical Slashdot style, the headline there is a tad overblown, but the gist of it is that flooding someone's inbox is a violation of the computer fraud & abuse act.

Can we go after the spammers next?
Watch,Friends,with,Benefits,online,free, 
watch,Friends,with,Benefits,online,free,
the staging not one but two sequences choreographed, a flash mob phenomenon YouTube has already felt his way since his first
by the Intelligence Service and leads to a cottage, where he is confronted by the Cabinet Secretary (Langton) and Lord (Fox).
I understand the standpoint of people thinking it's crazy. But javascript does the same thing, does it not?

I thought this is what the triple equals is for?
If it's any consolation, he got me last week.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846306
I'm convinced that this post is satire and the author has trolled us all.

In fact, i reject any other explaination. Sticks fingers in ears. Lalalalala, it's satire, nobody is this incompetent. Lalalalala, can't hear you.
Try to do all those steps again, and look at them from the point of view of someone who does not work in tech...
New York and Newark are nothing like Detroit right now. Both are going through a great revival. There are a lot of reasons why, but it really has nothing to do with machine politics, ivy league educated people, or anything else you mentioned.

In my opinion, most of the credit goes to better policing, everything else follows the drop in crime.
You can cache stuff offline with HTML 5. My tablet is wifi-only (didn't want to spend 100$ on an overpriced data plan) and this works fine with it.

Google Books also has an 'available offline' option, BTW. I can't quite decide which I prefer.
From your description, it sounds like Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" to me.
I don't think you really mean "object orientation" so much as "a byzantine object hierarchy" (stereotypically associated with Java, of course). To me, Ruby's object-oriented string functions are a lot easier to keep track of than PHP's:

x.length vs strlen($x)

x.gsub('foo', 'bar') vs str_replace('foo', 'bar', $x)

x.strip vs trim($x)

x.upcase vs strtoupper($x)

All four of the PHP functions use a different form: strX, str_X, X, and strtoX. Some of this could be solved with consistent function names, like always using str_X, but then that makes me wonder why one wouldn't just want to have all string functions available as object-oriented methods on strings. Python takes a different tactic, and has a non-object-oriented len() method, but this isn't just used to get the length of a string, it will also get you the length of a list, tuple, or dictionary.
The juice that we're all looking for:

> On that basis, Groupon incurred a $420 million operating loss for 2010 and a $117.1 million loss in the first quarter.

So they had a slightly worse amortized 1st quarter this year than last.
>traditionally doctors had a particular social position and professional mythology around them.
...
>Sort of the same thing expected of priests, professors, sheriffs, etc

yep. such posturing allows to keep price ("economic incentive") higher
This comment is almost better than the blog post itself:

> But just like C, PHP is lousy for the medium to large. Any software project with a duration in months or greater that is entirely in PHP is going to be painful.

Yeah, C is terrible for medium to large projects like, say, Linux.
Xkcd: Password Strength
I'm skeptical that the topics listed in the sample are actually relevant to a first-time programmer. While eventually I would want people to know that numbers are stored in binary in the computer, for most purposes, a first timer doesn't need to know that. Similarly, signed vs unsigned numbers aren't hugely critical, and some languages (e.g. Python) don't even have unsigned.

It seems to me the core, universal concepts that beginners have trouble with are more often ideas like iteration, control flow, and functions and recursion.
It has always admitted it's unprofitable - they dropped their BS accounting metric trying to show that with some magic they were making a profit.

To be honest their filing reeked so bad and them trying to slip in that crap and not account for marketing expenses - I wouldn't trust their executive team at all.
Yes. Emphatically yes. You think just because it isn't on Reddit it won't be talked about elsewhere?

Reddit is a conversation platform. IMAO, the contents of those conversations should be irrelevant to everyone but those partaking in them.
This is just a simple LZ compression scheme with a per-book, static dictionary. It's trivial to decompress, although that exercise is left to the reader.
Ask HN: Android Market App Sales Experiment
I published my first app to the market about a month ago meeting only the minimal image and text resources required.

Now I'll be adding the optional media resources and testing out basic marketing techniques(disclaimer: I know nothing about marketing) to tracking sales improvements. I'll then post back the results if people are interested after each test.

I was wondering if anyone had any techniques or theories they would want me to try out?

Some of the ideas I'll be covering early on: * Creating the optional image assets that the market place supports on my own(no design background). * Creating a simple promotional video myself. * Telling friends, posting on my personal social accounts. * Working on driving traffic through SEO to the web based version of the app(hourweather.com). * Getting the logo or other assets created professionally(probably through 99designs to try that out). * Paid advertising(Google ad words $100 voucher). * Maybe try some more shady SEO, social stuff?

there are some more details http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/2011/08/Android-Market-App-Marketing
Gizomodo won't be charged in iPhone 4 case
Yes, in fact all of my new projects are in PHP unless I'm absolutely forced to use something else (and I say this as someone with years of Java experience and some Ruby experience).
Yikes...THAT wasn't the right to say
HP TouchPad gets permanent $100 price cut: $399 for 16GB, effective now
A paragraph isn't an essay. Even though essay writing isn't a crucial skill for programmers, clear and effective English writing often is, especially when you need to explain technical issues to non-technical people. Besides, good writing ability is often a pretty good indicator of general, well-rounded intelligence.
Quiet Please - H4xing in Progress
> Up to half the people alive in 1930, to use Kovács' insensitive phraseology, were mentally retarded? Really? That might help explain the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

What a ridiculous conclusion.
Am curious to see having the dictionary in a trie allows you to build an implementation that is O(n). Will add it to the blog post if it works.
<quote>The climate has changed throughout history, but not, obviously, to the extent of rendering us extinct.</quote>

It's come pretty close, and that's typical. Most species that have ever existed on this planet went extinct ages ago, often during periods of drastic climate change (as far as we can tell from the archeological record.)

Our own fairly recent past is the same. The latest research on the 'flood' that gave rise to flood myths in every civilization in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, suggests that the Mediterranean Sea was a fertile populated valley during the last ice age. But when the ice age ended due to natural climate change, the rising Atlantic broke through the natural dam at Gibraltar and flooded the valley, and into the Black and Red seas, up the Nile, etc. That's a massive natural disaster that must have wiped out a pretty big chunk of humanity. It was probably repeated on a smaller scale around the world too, as seaside villages were flooded out by the rising oceans and likely increase in the number of storms as the world warmed up.
How Much Time Do You Spend Actually Doing SEO
That's a peculiar sense of "safe". The value of gold fluctuates substantially over time, even over fairly short periods of time. Sometimes (like the last decade) it goes up; other times (like most of the 1980s and some of the 1990s) it goes down. It's easy to lose half of what you invested; if you time it right, you can lose seven-eighths.

The peculiar sense in which gold is "safe" is that it tends to go down just as much as it goes up; that is, it isn't subject to secular inflation or deflation.
In production, or just your dev environment?
Regarding a scaling question in the chat going on here: http://envo.lv/http://news.ycombinator.com

Check out http://www.mindlessbehavior.com for an example of a large # of concurrents.
The basic idea is that given a financial time series of N periods with three states (up, neutral, or down) there are 3^N possible "strategies" to test, which is an NP problem.

This doesn't seem right. It's completely atheoretical and ignores the market or asset structure. The question is not how many strategies there are, but how hard is it to compute the optimal price. Basic economic theory often can be used to derive the optimal price as a simple function of information (data).

There may an argument that markets are inefficient that follows an NP=P style argument, but I suspect it would require a specific market structure, such as a set of agents that can only communicate via a sparse network.
I can't really tell if this is real. I don't imagine it is but then again, you never know
For me, chat toolbars that can be placed on third-party sites make me think of Meebo as well. I don't think Facebook has a third-party embeddable toolbar (yet).
So, how does the airtouch cope with the cables to your workstation? Or is it intended to be used with laptops?
As I see in the comments here, and in general public sentiment, there is an extreme bifurcation. People who believe and people who don't.

I grew up in the suburbs and will be moving downtown in a month. A lot of people, my parents, my girlfriend and some of my friends think I am crazy. When you see pictures like this, it is hard not to blame them. But once you get past the empty buildings and wasteland, there is something magical about the city.

Not a single person who lives in Detroit does so lightly. Everyone loves this city and firmly believes in its future. It provides opportunities unlike anywhere else. For example, there are 6 bars within 500 feet of my front door. I can see Comerica Park from my bedroom. The prospect of a Tigers playoff run makes me extremely excited. No where else can I get this experience for the amount of rent I am paying.

It certainly has its problems, largely created by 30 years of inept city government and the collapse of the auto industry. But we have smart people running the city and the state and a large, well-funded, group of people who have a contagious belief in its future.

If anyone from HN is ever in town and wants to grab a beer downtown, I'd be glad to show them around.
fake, but good try.. must've taken hours.
Joel Spolsky's argument for going all out and treating their devs well is that interesting work and good pay might get them the top 1% devs, but adding a nice workplace gives them access to the top 0.1%. It is, of course, an optimization that can only really be applied once you've got "interesting work" and "competitive pay" locked down.
i guess but what incentive do celebs even have to join something like this? Why would they stray from overflowing bucket of clicks that is facebook and twitter streams, are they not making enough revenue. The idea doesn't seem that it would be too appealing to consumers. From the short article this doesn't seem beneficial to anyone besides adly. Why would you want to cut out the social interaction, are twitter and Facebook negatively affecting their ad revenue? From the article, it didn't mention how either the celeb or the consumer will benefit from this. I guess I will have to catch up on TWIST to figure this out.
the db_query() function in drupal also does that abstracting.
I've used both a Kindle and Nook and found the formatting of books in stores to be poor for the majority of books (but not all). I get out-of-copyright classics (or public domain books) now from places like Feedbooks and Manybooks which do a much better job of quality control on the formatting. Feedbooks.com is my favorite but they only have a few thousand books.
Thanks, I clicked the documentation link at the top of the page and gave up when it didn't go anywhere useful.
I don't think Microsoft is even still developing WebForms (last release is April 2010). Too many aspx sites are written in the old version of WebForms which turned the html output into a horrible and ugly mess. MVC3 is pretty much just as good as RoR or any other mvc framework about outputting clean html.
MarketWatch puts it succinctly: 'the bigger Groupon gets, the more it loses'. Although it's not the firm's fault, the timing of this filing amendment couldn't be worse - investors are likely to psychologically associate it with the market instability. Not that I'm qualified to dispense investment advice or anything, but my bet is that this offering will either be under-subscribed or the firm will end up under-capitalized and the founders will get ejected within a year of being listed.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bigger-groupon-gets-the...
I love it when people tell me spending more money and time and effort on something that is less flexible, reliable or performant is somehow saving money, time and effort. I think you do not understand what you are talking about and you're giving me marketing spin, in fact that must be the case. You're simply wrong. I've explained it, you're not listening.

Of course the kicker is that this is in a thread about how a bug in Amazon means that the EBS volumes that were allegedly being backed up, actually weren't.
I'm sorry - I involuntarily downvoted you when I meant to upvote. For what it's worth, I agree - the conclusion is ridiculous.
Haha, I am not one of those.

I think humanity needs to be selfish in this case, and you know, it needs to be some kind of long term selfishness.

IMO there is no rationale behind the "humans are evil" thing. Just a very poor self-esteem.
I recently interviewed for a developer position that did not include a formal interview. Instead I spent the day working with the company on a small task. Come the end of the day I was asked to describe the design/implementation of the solution a do a short code walkthrough.

As hiring processes go it was easily the most enjoyable and beneficial (from my perspective) that I have experienced. Not only did it provide me with an opportunity to prove my ability but it also gave me an insight into the company, their working environment, my potential colleagues and the work they do.

Obviously a day is a large time commitment but if the hiring company can obtain enough assurance from a CV/personal recommendation that a developer is capable then it's an extremely beneficial process for both parties.
I leave my tower on the floor next to the desk and all of the cables are long enough to reach even when it's at standing height. There is a tray below the back edge of the desk that you can rest smaller objects on, like a USB hub. I believe they also make a bracket that attaches to the underside of the desk that can hold your tower, if you need.
No they always check the signature before applying the patch.
Do yourself a favor. Never ever use wordpress as an example of a quality PHP application. Please look at the source code, the open source wordpress is a monstrous hack that has no clear architecture, has a terrible system of hooks that plugin authors regularly abuse and doesn't scale unless you write your own hack of plugin to override the db handler so you can do things like r/w splitting or sharding.
I was thinking much the same thing. If I ever find myself in the position of wanting to teach programming to a "mere mortal", I suspect I'd look to Chris Pine's Learn to Program, which I've always heard good things about.

http://pragprog.com/book/ltp2/learn-to-program
I don't think they ever will. I think they see it as taking away from a simple, "It just works" user experience. The reasons that I see it taking away from the experience they want are:

1. It would require users to think about how much room they have on the device. Yes, you theoretically have to do this anyway, but with approx. half of users never, ever connecting to iTunes, that is something they would have to begin worrying about. Apple doesn't want people to have to think.

2. It wouldn't be fast, especially for big files. Soon, people would be complaining that their multi gigabyte movie rip is taking too long over the air. I've done this with a jailbroken phone over wifi-it's a pain. People would try it over 3G, or worse, EDGE.

And two non user experience reasons:

3. It's scope creep. A phone or tablet isn't meant to replace a computer, despite what everyone says. There isn't a solib business case for them to spend the time to develop this or add in additional storage for all the garbage people would acquire.

4. It's another possible attack vector.
This is still the main reason why I use PHP: the development cycle is just so fast, and if you are experienced enough to write good code without anyone holding your hand, you can do great work in PHP in a much shorter period of time when compared to most other platforms (at least the ones I've tried).

When people criticise the PHP language I think they really miss the point: it is the PHP platform that is really powerful because of:

1. The shared nothing architecture (it really helps you scale).

2. The rapid development cycle.

3. The portability (Apache, IIS, nginx, persistent in-memory interpreters via PHP-FPM...).

4. The huge amount of native C extensions providing amazing functionality.

Sure the language has warts, but who cares when the platform is this powerful?
man, i'm not arguing about the importance of the essay writing skills (this is my weak one, and i know how important it is). My point is about when in the process you make candidates hopping through the hoops and the height and the number of the hoops. I don't have enough time to jump through all the hoops of all the employers that early in the process. It is like in marketing process - awareness, consideration, preference, action, loyalty - insisting and expecting action (buy) immediately at or instead of awareness.

Anyway, the process of filling a job vacancy is about mutual fit. Somebody, who'd like the process would obviously be a better fit to that company culture than me, so the filter does work.
Auto Transport Des Moines, Iowa
It seemed clear to me that Joel was intentionally choosing the most expensive instance of each item (chair, monitor, desk, etc.) that a developer could reasonably want, not to suggest that every developer needs his specified setup, but rather so that he could put an absolute upper bound on what it could possibly cost you to keep a programmer happy. It was a mathematical exercise, not a recommendation.
BankSimple getting closer to launch
For the record, "PHP: The Good Parts" is downright fucking awful. Apologies to the author if he reads this, but I'll buy him a beer and restate my opinion.
"I turned on comment thread pagination to decrease the load. I'll turn it off tonight."
Mostly interested in foreign leagues.
People who abuse that phrase probably don't improve as quickly as people who use it sparingly.
As long as we confuse how we'd like things to be with how they are, we're doomed to waste a lot of money that could be put to better use. Doctors are human, humans are most reliably motivated by self interest, the key to good care at good prices is to align economic incentives. Certainly, doctors care, and the social prestige means you can underpay doctors (which selects for those less motivated by money than by the desire to help people), but that does not remove the economic aspect.
See also: http://www.ai-class.com/
PHP's one great strength is that it can be effectively used in a very wide range of applications. But doing that well requires using the language in ways suited to that purpose.

The problem with people "defending" PHP is that they often only use PHP for a very specific purpose, and describe PHP from that perspective.

Hacking quick and dirty procedural scripts, writing something like WordPress plugins or developing "enterprise" applications with frameworks like Symfony or Zend are entirely different ways of using PHP, usually done by entirely different kind of developers.

The unmaintainable crap PHP is infamous for occurs when less than mediocre developers only familiar with one approach apply those limited skills to a project that requires a completely different approach.

What the author describes is not "how PHP is supposed to work". It's just one of many ways PHP can work. (And certainly not my way of using it.)
ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches
Some of the other responses link to good resources, but I want to point out that "separating the code from the markup" is the wrong question -- instead what you want to do is separate business/application logic from display logic. It's okay to have an "if" statement or a "for" loop in your markup (in fact, it's necessary for dynamically outputting content), just make sure those things are specific to the display of the data, and not the creation or retrieval or "processing" of the data. For example, gat all of your data from the database first, put it all into a simple array or simple variables, then just loop through arrays and echo variables in the markup. MVC frameworks will have you put the data retrieval and prep steps in another file altogether, but even if you don't do this, at least shove all of that stuff up at the top of the php file and then at the bottom do all of the markup/display stuff.

UPDATE: Here's a stackoverflow link with a zillion more examples and resources about this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/62617
This is far preferable to the situations caused by the removal of freedom of speech. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," as the saying goes. I may be forced to defend some people who make my blood boil, but that's one of the prices you have to pay to avoid being censored.

Admittedly, I wouldn't be especially sad if people with no formal training in a scientific field were required to place a disclaimer stating that after all statements about that scientific field, but that wouldn't stop them from saying stuff, it would just make it clear that they aren't experts.
I used to think I would want to be an angel investor at some point, but being an LP at YC (and maybe at a later stage VC, and get shares in great long term companies directly or via BRK.A, would really meet my goals.
Well, the title of the book is "How to Count", which makes it understandable why it focuses on these things, but other than that I agree, as a first lesson, this will scare people away more than it will make them curious to continue. Floating point arithmetic, endianness and byte representation of data types is pretty hard actually.
And PHP has super-aggressive garbage collection and C has none. And C compiles to machine code and PHP compiles to optcode. And...wait a second, why are we comparing this two unrelated technologies again?
Apprenda gets $10M in venture funding
Agreed, Emphatically. Free speech means in particular protecting the speech that some/most/all people don't like.

[edit, having watched it now. I can't believe anyone would want to censor this. This is exactly the type of thing we absolutely can not censor as a society. We can't ignore/hide away violence. That people suffer this kind of abuse needs to be pushed into everyone's face, everyday until we put an end to it. It's not someone else's problem its OUR problem.]
When choice of programming environment does matter