skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Android's never been "true" open source. I don't think they've ever done major development in the open; definitely not since 2.0 (IIRC, the Droid was on the market before even the SDK and emulator for Eclair, and not even sure if Eclair got a source release before 2.1)
Except this is sort of a cop out isn't it? In the sense that for any type of artist there are good artists and bad artists but while the good artists may be highly differentiated bad artists share a common set of deficiencies.

The article is almost in the 'you might be a <foo> if <bar>' style (most common instantiation I am familar with is 'you might be a redneck if <insert denigrating attribute of redneck>' And in the spirit of that humor I liked it.

That being said, if you ask me as a hiring manager what I consider 'good' programming, its 'readable/understandable', it does what it is supposed to do, and it has tests.
Humans love to classify and compare. Most of us compete to demonstrate we are better and the intelligence is not different. Having a way to measure this human parameter precisely is a normal consequence.

Plus, from a more useful perspective, we need to have some way of measure a parameter if we want to study it. If we were trying to compare the results of two different strategies to improve the intelligence, we would need a precise method to measure the intelligence of every individual.
As usual in Globalpost, attributing to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity. CEOs make dumb decisions every day without being anyone's mole.
Ironically, it only works with a Mac. Something I don't have.
Whooops... One of the symptoms is:

"(Functional) Manually caching the results of a deterministic function on platforms that do it automatically (such as SQL and Haskell)"

Isn't that what memcached is doing?
In all fairness, we're not talking about v.01 of random projects, we're talking about early versions of the Linux kernel, the GNU toolkit, the compiler that makes every Linux installation work. In short, we're talking about the core components of free operating systems.

Yes, they were built for free, by people spending time in their off hours, and were not sponsored by any corporations. That much of the development is sponsored now should not diminish the efforts of those who bootstrapped the open source world with grass-roots, if any support.

Furthermore though, while the majority of operating-system and application type of things might be sponsored, that typically isn't the case in web applications, which is a better comparison.

Most of the components used to build diaspora (Ruby, Rails, Apache [maybe], etc.), were built without the budget that the Diaspora team has commanded. Drupal, which is a similar-level web application, though far more mature, was bootstrapped I believe.

Hell, there have been entire businesses that led to multi-million dollar exits with less than $200k.
Can someone offer some serious comments on whether these are worth buying? They look really cool and I would buy one but I am concerned about how they operate and how big the pictures are?

I presume it takes hundreds of smaller pictures and merges it into one picture, allowing you to zoom anywhere after the event but that makes me wonder on the end quality of the picture?

I have been following these cameras since they were demonstrated on their site earlier this year and got a bit excited then.
We get the sort of unsure, passive aggressive criticism, full of ifs and maybes. The sort that actually makes you feel worse because the boss appears to be personally disappointed.

Get chewed out proper and at least you know it's just because jobs have to be done.
This is why you never rely on another company for your data. Corporations have so little ethics these days they cannot be trusted.
Here's how Eric defined MVP:

<< First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. ...

Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-... >>

By that definition, it feels like a video could definitely qualify as an MVP? It allowed them to validate important learnings about customers with the least effort... not so different from an AdWords MVP smoke test:

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/how-to-go-from-i...

In any case, it sounds like Drew programmed enough to create a prototype but not enough for it to have the polish required for a user to be able see that it "work[ed] seamlessly" or "worked just like magic." So in that sense, the video did allow him to exert less effort and still test his customer hypothesis.
Pretty amazing; I had no idea these cameras were so close to being cheaply produced.

I hope they make lightfield data available for tinkering -- this could be an awesome research toy.
Mr. Muhfuhkuh, (great name btw) I just want to touch on your point about the "neurosurgeon with the most gifted hands". The medical industry is rife with such professionals making large amounts of money; I propose this is part of problem.
Of course surgeons have enormous amounts of knowledge and training, but in the end their customers are sick humans being operated on one at a time. How does this scale? and How is the ROI of the work determined?
What if the customers were mostly coal miners making 40k per year? What I'm getting at is society places to high of a value on human life and this throws certain industries out of whack which society pays for in the end (or we "import" them from places that have a lower value on human life).
* 7. A device that automatically disables any cell phone in any car within 50 car lengths of me and heading in my direction.*

Pretty sure this would have the opposite of your desired effect. Nothing will distract people more and have them fumbling around with their phone than if a call drops, GPS loses signal, streaming radio stops, etc.

Obviously, people shouldn't be doing these things in cars, but I think it's always interesting to think about unintended consequences. Also, I'm pretty sure your (7) was in jest, anyway, but just playing along here...
Facebook Updates Messenger
I find the lack of "inflow" to be, as you put, very sad. I understand the need to develop in private and release at their discretion, but there are more than a few features in ICS that were implemented by the CM team already, as well as other things that have been "major" issues in the AOSP build tree that had been sorted out by the CM team and submitted as patches that were ignored. Seems a shame, really. That having been said, I'm sure I will install CM9 when it becomes available for whatever device I wind up with.
the tech is great & the product is very cool, no arguments.

as a a photographer myself, i'm wondering why people actually buy this though? how many photos do people take that they wish they could refocus later?
At least we can give away our decision making to a myriad of sources, instead of picking between three television channels and the town crier.
Groupon Valuation Sinking to $12 Billion
I don't think it's about getting print resolution or perfect focus.

The idea seems to be to add a playful kind of interactivity to photos. With their Facebook app, you can click around a photo and "discover" different views. "Look, there's Mark in the background. What is he doing? I didn't even see that before..."

I don't know if it will be a success, but I really like this concept. It's sort of like Instagram but with amazing science behind it.
They said they would do this months ago, why is it news?
Google 'making progress' on G+ psuedonyms
Cappuccino Training Course: iDeveloper TV
I'm glad that as a purely functional programmer I don't have to worry about order of program execution so much.
That particular symptom is built under the assumption that your language supports map/filter/reduce or some equivalent functionality. These are generally preferred when available because there are fewer places to make mistakes.
I hadn't looked at Khan Academy in a year or so, but it looks like they've vastly expanded their offerings since then. In particular, they've added a couple of hundred lessons of Art History stuff, which I'm quite keen to look through.

The mathematics and physics stuff would have been great for me... if it had existed fifteen years ago.
Good read.

"Knowing that there are 50M people supporting DropBox or 11M+ people supporting Evernote"

Lots of people use more than one service for similar functionality: dropbox, google docs, and evernote.

Not sure why, but I can verify they do.
I'm tempted to get one of these simply to play around with the potential for 3d reconstruction based on the data in the images.
7. A device that automatically disables any cell phone in any car within 50 car
lengths of me and heading in my direction.

I think this device would have the opposite effect that you hope for. I wonder how many days you would last with it?

Multiply the number of talker_drivers you meet with the probability that one of them can't handle the extra distraction of driving and banging on his cell phone, trying to reconnect his call that you jammed. Imagine on a busy commute, this happening every two or three seconds.

Actually, this could be a murder mystery plot, on par with cutting the brake lines. Hide a jammer in somebody's car, and wait for the inevitable result.
There are a grand total of 6 fields on that screen. One of those fields is prominantly labelled as "Siri". It's not like it's being hidden in small print.
Newer dishwashers have a "Clean" indicator light that stays on after the cycle finishes, and you can toggle on and off.
It'd likely cause a more dangerous condition as the jammed drivers would be fussing with their phones trying to figure out what happened to their signal.
They could easily have added a grip system, and based on the linked hands-on, which states that shake-induced blur is an issue, they should have.

I think the design is novel to prevent mental comparison with a "real" camera, which presumably performs much better in terms of image quality (especially in low light).

Avoiding "real camera" thinking also highlights the device's unique aspects and lets them sell this first version as a less-serious novelty at a relatively low price.

I really hope this isn't their end-game play and that they'll introduce something more "prosumer" in an intelligent, useful form factor next (and something that doesn't require integration with a bogus social network).
When I was a student, I definitely let my son watch too much television (now he has ADHD - not sure if they're related - but from studies it sounds like they're connected). It was a babysitting tool and I couldn't afford daycare in the evening as well when I had to study. Now, we have a nanny and our kids hardly watch tv at all. Our baby seems to be drawn to the iPad and iPhones and we're keeping these away from her. We're smarter and definitely not student 'poor' anymore and this has definitely affected how much tv our other kids watch.
iSSH+vim for iphone has a usable interface. I've actually done emergency work through it. But if you have a bluetooth keyboard it becomes even more usable. I figure it's about as usable as you'll get with the iphone's tiny screen and keyboard.
1. I use a cordless phone at home with stations in every room. The base unit has bluetooth which when paired with cellphone(s) is able to receive calls. I drop the cell phone off at my charging station when I get home and never pick it up again until I'm ready to leave the house.

4. Isn't this the Peek(getpeek.com) device?

6. Doesn't Windows have to work first before a working clone can even be fathomed? I kid.
#7 would be pretty dangerous.

So, the guy suddenly loses his call. He then looks at his phone, trying to figure out what happened. In that time he accidentally swirves into another lane.
Yeah, it's a bit of a letdown in some ways, but... still. Liberally licensed project with tons of source code still isn't doing too bad.

To put a more constructive twist on things, I wonder how Google could achieve their goals and also make Android more 'real' Open Source?
For more technical details, check out the CEO's PhD dissertation:

https://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf
Nonsense.

Of course bad sleep will affect your IQ, and it doesn't make it less reliable. Why? You brain is less reliable when you had bad sleep, and IQ is a measurement of its peak performance. If you're not at peak performance any given day, your results will show.
My guess is not intentional. I would bet they called it the "A"4 because they are "A"pple.
The Unity 3D export is fantastic.

Here's hoping that webGL gains full traction.
My favorite part is how it defaults to using lines from everyone except Donny.
Because it is something we can measure, and science can only deal with things we can measure.
I don't have an overloaded inbox, but for those who do, it seems to me that they're mostly overloaded with stuff that was sent to a group rather than to them as an individual.

If the sender is even thinking about the question "Does this particular individual have time to read this email?" then the chances are that this email is already far more important than average.
Some people have been trying to one-up each other on cynicism by predicting that Google is lying.
I suspect that people who don't "get" pointers (#4 in the article) actually have a much harder time with the pointer declaration and manipulation syntax in C than actually understanding how pointers work and what they let you do.

For instance, in C the * character is used both to declare a pointer and to dereference one and they can be stacked to dereference nested structures. Then & references a variable memory location but is also used in method signatures to change the semantics of calling a function into pass-by-reference. To complicate & further, & is often seen alongside const declarations, which are a whole other thing that people have to keep in their heads.

On top of all of this, * and & have their own operator precedences and associativities that you have to memorize, which is a whole discussion about binary versus unary operators and precedence tables. And I didn't even mention [].

I really don't think that people fail to comprehend pointers because their mental models need updating nearly as often as they just haven't fully internalized all the hoops that C makes you jump through to mess with pointers.
This is a problem for schools using usually custom-built tools to manage the district's resources and administration. For the more flexible charter schools that are more open to the idea of adopting something like Khan Academy into the curriculum, they are small enough (usually one school) to switch over, and are often already using Google Apps as their default method of email and collaboration.

I know that at my sisters' charter school (2 schools, K-8 and 9-12), the entire school is on the Google Apps Education platform and getting started with Khan Academy was really simple for them, as they already had name@school.com email accounts they were used to using.
I'll be in the Valley from Oct 25th to Nov 8th, scoping out the startup scene to possibly move out there for good. I'll happily take you up on your offer.

(Though for making such a generous offer, I should be the one buying you the beer. I admire what you're doing here greatly - it's always a smart idea to use your down time to build up a little karma. :) )
Google+ for Google Apps users - it's a matter of days
If it hurts, then solve it - startup idea: In Japan there is a company called tenso.com that will ship to anywhere so you can buy products for the Japanese market and have them shipped to your local tenso Japanese address. They box it up and forward to you where ever you are - for a nice fee. Not sure if this exists here in the US, but maybe you should create it if there is a market.
I had one of them (well a master with a 6512 coprocessor). People still to this day do not believe I had a dual processor BBC Master.
Not sure about that. Here's how it plays out: 1) driver coming towards you gets disconnected from her call; 2) she looks at phone to diagnose problem, starts to redial; 3) drifts across center line just before reaching you...
but how do you quantify intelligence in order to determine that there is a relationship between it and an IQ test score? If you can say that a real IQ test is a decent measure of intelligence, how to do you know this?

Let's say I have a Teakettle test which assigns a score to the temperature of the water in a teakettle based on only qualitative properties of a teakettle (is it whistling, is it rumbling, does touching it cause pain?). This test is probably good at assessing the extreme cases (water is 212 F, water is around 70F) but I'd guess it's a poor predictor of temperature. Now if you gave me a thermometer I could see how correct my test was.

The problem is we don't have a thermometer for intelligence (that I know of) and more important I don't know if there is any consensus that 'intelligence' can even be assigned a quantitative value the same way the vibration of molecules can.

Now maybe the IQ test, like the Teakettle test, is a good summation of qualitative properties. Now you can compare this quantitative value to others to show a useful correlation. The Teakettle test may be a really great way to predict time to tea-time. An IQ score can only be useful if it shows a strong correlation to other, quantitative things (SAT score, salary, life expectancy, number of hairs in eyebrows)

To say that a real IQ test is a decent measure of intelligence seems to be at best a tautology.
Interestingly, his enumerated set in the "Bad Programmer" list is almost exactly what I was grilling for when I asked people to implement stupid algorithms on a whiteboard and then step through them, debug them, etc.

I somewhat disagree with:

> 6. Cannot fathom the Church-Turing Thesis

Truly understanding the Church-Turing thesis probably requires more computability theory than the two-week overview even top CS students and otherwise great programmers get in their ABET-required Discrete Math course. It would be great for more people to have an understanding of what a computable function is and isn't, because it would make it easier to explain why we don't have more fancy-pants type systems around,\footnote{Inference is undecidable for most interesting ones.} but it certainly isn't a requirement for great or even good programmers.
In the extreme case of mostly low-activity, switching to a smaller, slower, low-power core is going to save you power. If discrete, the low-power core can be made with completely different parameters and process technology and consume virtually 0 power compared to the "big-dog" in low-power-mode, and you can properly cut power to the leaky "big-dog".

However, if you find yourself switching back and forth frequently, you are probably wasting time, power and materials.

What is "frequently"? I cannot say.
Ask HN: Branding Companies for Web Apps
We are developing a Web App and we are in need of a company which can help to develop our brand.
Any recommendations?

Thanks!
#2: Is Groupon Now doing this?
Introducing the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP
Because they still haven't done it.
If you're going to listen to a Friedman talk about economics, make it Milton. Quoting Thomas Friedman is an exercise in pop sociology and buzzword-dropping.

Invention is not a necessary or sufficient condition for prosperity. You can arrive there via many paths (thriftiness or wise investment, service provision, etc.).
Modernizr & the Sass parent reference
I'll take the other side of that bet!

What kind of odds would you give me that a group of people in the 10th percentile will have a higher average income than a group of people from the 90th percentile? If all IQ measures is your ability to take an IQ test, I think you'd be pretty confident that the bottom 10% will perform about as well as the top 10%. So, would you up up for 1:1 odds on that?

If you're willing to bet consistently with your beliefs, please get in touch; my email address is in my profile.
"Good" is also arguably subjective and relative to the subject's perceptions of "bad"(and vice-versa).

So of course that "good" tradeoff to one programmer might be a "bad" one to another.
An iPad and a bluetooth keyboard is around as heavy or heavier than a 11" macbook air.
7. A device that automatically disables any cell phone in any car within 50 car lengths of me and heading in my direction.

Thanks, you just disabled my GPS, so now I'm looking at my phone trying to figure out what's wrong, instead of looking at the road. That's an idiotic idea if I ever heard one.
I've found the same thing. Solid colors of a screen capture can easily compress to under 200 MB for 60 minutes of video, but live action (even with only small movements) can double or triple that in size.
Alice (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+a...), plus other important pages: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+d...

I realize there's a tremendous amount of spam, vanity pages, vandalism, and useless content the editors have to deal with, but it's still disturbing to read about the occasional outbreaks of deletionism that affect Wikipedia, while corporate and political whitewashing goes apparently unchecked (I don't have a specific reference in mind).
Focus on the entire picture, no. Zoom in on (and then inevitably have to focus), yes. So I guess it depends on the density of capture for me, at least.
Back when Google was bidding on Groupon, a friend of mine is a finance exec at Google and he said even at $6B, Google thought Groupon was overpriced.
On the one hand this is a great article with great research.

On the other hand it shows extreme naïvety.

As bad as this may seem, almost every company I have ever worked for - and I have worked for at least a dozen of the world's biggest most profitable companies - none of them care about security in practice. Publicly it's a different story, but back in the security department this happens:

1) security is always an afterthought on every project even if someone put it in the plan

2) the security department covers the entire organisation, that is: all processes, functions, applications, buildings, staff, hardware and software

3) the people that work in the security department cannot possibly have the kind of in-depth knowledge of every one of these and practically never have deep knowledge of any single one, to make the right decisions

4) the power of "No" is used in the place of finding out what is really needed from the real experts who don't work in security - ie they don't listen to anyone who doesn't work in their function

The result is that most companies are vulnerable at almost every turn, but take the view that they only need to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted. And it makes perfect economic sense, as long as the horse has not bolted.

If it has bolted then the decision makers go into damage limitation. That's how companies work so it does not surprise me at all that skilled knowledgeable people can expose these issues with ease.

It's inevitable that what we saw at Sony will happen again and again. Perhaps this was the root cause of Blackberry's recent woes too. We may never know.

Like he says... we live in interesting times.
Cryptographic puzzle at http://minotauragency.com/
I received an unsolicited email pointing me to http://minotauragency.com/, where there's a sloppy GoDaddy-hosted website containing a cryptographic puzzle. I'm not too apt to spend time solving it but I thought it might interest the community. (In case anyone thinks to scan for subdomains, I already did so and haven't come up with anything useful. I'm not sure I care enough to write a scraper.) Enjoy!
Why fighting small battles is losing us the infosec war
Making of the Hipmunk Android App