skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am in this situation constantly. Bosses very often don't realize when they're making unreasonable demands, and it is sometimes your job to give them a reality check. But you don't just tell them no. Here's my script:

"OK, I'm totally on board with what you want to do, but I wanted to give you a heads-up about some problems I foresee. You want me to do Really Hard Thing and have it to you by Friday, but as embarrassed as I am to admit it, I don't think I'm quite good enough at Really Hard Thing to have it in a condition I'd want to present to you by Friday. I mean, I'll give it my best, but I felt like it would be irresponsible not to tell you so you could make a decision with all the relevant information. If I can make a suggestion, I think it might be better if we do More Reasonable Thing. It seems like the ultimate goal is to do X, Y and Z, and More Reasonable Thing will still do all of that. Alternatively, is there any wiggle room in the schedule so I can make sure you get it in the condition you're expecting?"
>Standard condom size should be good for virtually all people.

that a very overstretched (pun intended) statement.

>They are extremely stretchable in width, e.g. you shouldn't have a problem putting one on

with pretty much any condom able to hold a bucket of water, it is theoretically possible for any human male to put it on. On practice, when condoms are noticeably smaller that your size, it wouldn't roll over using one hand and it requires so much frustrating both hands finger acrobatics that it just becomes a separate activity on its own which understandably may affect the mood in some cases. Among the "standard size" i personally met wide variations in elasticity and size to the extent that some [rare] of them i couldn't practically put on (and i'm biologically pretty average). Correct condom size does matter.
Despite whether of not I'd use this service I must say your site explains it very clearly, directly, and in terms anyone can understand so I'd say job well done.
VMware and Verizon team up for mobile virtualization
Stars that shouldn't be there form by stealing material, not smashing
Star Trek Enterprise Baby Spoon [video]
It is definitely noteworthy that the N9 and the N8, both examples of excellent hardware running competitive software, have basically been sandbagged by Nokia.

Contrast this with RIM, who just released a slew of stop-gap phones until QNX (BBX) is ready... but they still are promoting the hell out of those phones and are getting decent sales, keeping the company viable. And those aren't even world-beating phones.

Meantime, the N8 with its pentaband radio and Zeiss camera, and the N9 showing off the best of Meego, get no promotion at all... really does make you wonder. Microsoft-hatred might indeed be a disease, but Nokia threw out Symbian and Meego for an OS that is (for all its positive reviews) unproven.

Symbian Belle and Meego are definitely competitive options and offer a lot. Any tech site (engadget etc.) reviewing the N9 basically wound up mourning the premature death of Meego and wondering what might have been. In the case of the N8, the common assessment was it was stellar hardware with an OS that was almost there... well I think Belle pushed it over that line to being something competitive.

This is the same madness that Apotheker brought to HP, trashing established businesses just because they weren't sexy enough and then immediately trying to import the business model of the last company he worked at. I don't think Elop is a mole but he definitely has yet to do anything except destroy value at Nokia.
Completely unrelated, but how does that Museo Sans render so nicely on Win/Chrome? Usually font rendering on Chrome is horrible. Now, checking Typekit, it seems some fonts have nice anti-alias, while some not. Where's the difference?
A major in history and only one extra semester for a cs major? Do you already have calc 1,2,3 diffy q's, & linear alg? The math sequence is what stops most people I know from starting on it so late.

I agree with part of brudgers and part of jburwell. You have more marketability with a cs major and can land any job at a higher pay rate, but after that it will be your work experience and what languages you know that count.

Also a masters degree in cs at Vanderbilt for example (near me) only takes 2 semesters if you have all the pre-reqs. (even though you are given up to 4 to finish it)

Picking up some extra classes now but still getting that job would open the most doors for you.
Tennis: Swiss Indoors, Basel Preview
Isn't it already solved, at least in gmail with the priority inbox thing. And perhaps it is a problem meant to be solved at the receiver's end and not sender's end.

BTW, as a sender, I would love to have a way to incentivize someone to read my email even if he is busy. I can totally see that being monitized.

And you you already haven't, check this discussion on avc
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/the-impact-of-priority-inbox.... The comments thread is especially educational on how people use this. avc.com is a good resource for user research if you are into product development, provided Fred writes about it :)
Better is Better
Poll HN: How many free Dropbox users would upgrade given lower tiers?
If you're currently on a free Dropbox account, would you pay to upgrade:
10GB for $2.99/mo
20GB for $4.99/mo
30GB for $6.99/mo
40GB for $8.99/mo
I'm using the date range search option a lot when I am getting outdated search results. Even constructed a quick search for it, so I can type something like: "gdr 30 things" which will then search for stuff from the past 30 days.

Blog post about it: http://www.pushingbits.net/posts/google-date-range-address-b...
The entire story could have just been the last screenshot and its caption.

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Certainly, but the practical privacy implications are probably similar. In case of a stolen phone, the thief has access to all the files in both of these cases. Sure it would be cool if Dropbox wouldn't have any access to our files, but I don't see how it would happen without eroding the usability. It could be an opt-in feature of course.
I think (IANAL) is that in libel publishing is the offence - so if you publish a copy of the libel you have committed the same offence - so "is a hyperlink publishing a copy?" is the question.

In a torrent the offence is something like "making available a copyright file for download" so the argument is that a torrent (which doesn't itself contain any of the copyright file) and a link to the torrent are equally "making available".
Clickable: http://www.walkbase.com
Are you suggesting that the academic institutions offering degrees in 'design' disciplines (e.g. architecture, art, graphic design, etc.) are worthless? These institutions are certainly peddling design as knowledge (not that it is just knowledge, but at least that knowledge is a significant component).
I find this is one of the things I struggle with the most. I definitely "refactor" code by moving it to a subroutine sometimes purely for readability's sake. I also try not to stress out about how reusable something might be until I actually NEED to reuse it. Otherwise it often seems like "premature optimization" trying to generalize a routine that I'm not even sure will ever get used anywhere else.
Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ? We already know that things like whether the child can wait 20 minutes on a marshmallow at age 4 is a better indicator of scholastic success than IQ.

I fear people use IQ as an excuse for a (lack of) their success rather than face up to it and improve (or just accept and move on).
I occasionally use the Bing search and spelling APIs (I wrote a Ruby example: http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/06/ruby-client-for-search-an...) but I would hesitate to build a business dependent on a 3rd party set of APIs.

A long time ago, I relied on Google's public search API and when it was cancelled I started using Bing, but nothing that I depend on.
Overflowing inboxes are the problem. Perhaps we should have provided more context about what we're trying to fix : )

These guys do a good job: http://emailcharter.org

We're trying to provide a framework around that first rule of respecting the recipient's time.
You may want to consider asking this on Stackoverlfow.com
When I lived in Cambodia, even when I was in areas where malaria was not common I still used a mosquito net every night, because being bitten by several thousand mosquitoes is not conducive to sound sleep.

And I got malaria anyway.
Cool tech, but the design is... I don't know... dorky? At the very least it attracts attention, which is something that in great many cases not needed when making photos.
Agreed. If you have nothing in your inbox, it looks like you have nothing going on, are not successful and are unimportant.

If your inbox is overloaded, then you are unproductive, overwhelmed, unhelpful, flustered.

If you are in between, it says almost nothing about you and therefore would be pointless.

I think this was probably a fun little project, but I see absolutely no sense in it- at least not the way the author intended anyway.
Yet another disrespectful and intrusive attempt at commercializing an icon's passing.

edit: Thanks to the moderator who removed this.
Why would you be uncomfortable in that case? How do the potential drawbacks of such an oracle existing outweigh the potential positives?
The other problem with this is that you never have the opportunity to improve the business, either. Often, management wants the rank and file to improve processes ("because they know them best") but it's hard to find the time for that when you're already working full time (and more) on your deliverables.
I understand the reason for its shape is because of the giant lens it has, but I do admit it's a bit awkward to carry because it feels like you're carrying a giant lens. Anyway, I'd love to play with it in person and have a realistic feel for it.

Does anyone know if you can refocus on the camera screen itself? Is it touch screen?
"Nature is paywalled" is a sentence I fear I will see again, with a different meaning, at some time in the future.
How to Communicate With Users When Your App or Site Crashes
Looking at the homepage, it says that the most popular pages were converted into static form, and now they're trying to sell the domain.
Fo' real. Anybody who thinks this only reads tech news and doesn't deal with mobile phone consumers in the real world.

Android is the _cheap_ option. You can get Android burners now on budget telcos like Cricket and MetroPCS. Geeks like it too, but that's not the massive perception of the OS. It's becoming just the default phone.
http://99designs.com/

http://prizes.org/

etc. Crowdsource it out. I've seen some amazing designs on prizes for less than 300 bucks.
Teaching Etsy to Speak a Second Language
In my experience, the drive to make things reusable from the start ends up delaying projects to a point where they might just not get done.

I also refactor for the sake of readability (and urge my co-workers to do the same). Of course, this might mean I'm a bad programmer and I shouldn't ever get 6 levels deep in logic in the first place...
> Friendika ... is also widely used

That's interesting. Last time I looked I got put off by the confusing pod options but I will try to pay it more attention.
Cool - I wish you all the very best. Let me just emphasize, though, that you really need to mean it, and it takes serious work and proper commitment to create change.

But it's worth it.

Good luck.
This is the streisand effect at it's best. Most who are fans of the show likely forgot about this episode, while those who aren't are now aware of some potential downside. What was tesla is thinking in this one, besides annoying a popular car show and it's fans?
It was Javad's, but before Javad, the company.
Poll needs a "no" option.
I'd pay just to have it always say: my inbox is unbearable.
Magnet links, you mean?
In big organization certificates simplifies and standardize hiring process

I agree 100%.

But let’s not forget that simplification and standardization are orthogonal to Results as measured by performance. The trouble is, simplification and standardization are how HR departments are measured, whereas employee performance is how line managers are measured. Thus, the companies most likely to emphasize these metrics will be the ones with HR departments.

It’s not so much that big companies benefit, it’s that HR departments benefit and big companies are the ones with HR departments.
A growing number of people "want" Android today but your average customer had no idea what Android was when Android beat the pants off WebOS in 2009/2010. WebOS was a great OS stapled onto the biggest laughingstock of marketing and shoddy production quality in memory.

WP7 was late and less polished but also suffered from carriers-dont-push-it-itis.
MeeGo Harmattan isn't as polished as iOS - it's got a lot of first-generation performance issues, definitely requires some babysitting to keep it running well, but it's miles ahead of Android.

It feels like the Harmattan team at Nokia really understood good UI and good design, and wanted to build a product around those ideals.

The N9 is also a really slick piece of hardware. Someone designed and loved this thing, and wanted it to be amazing. It doesn't have any weird bulges or outcroppings like all the Android handsets; the appearance of it is minimalist; even the camera module on the back looks like it fits the style. I always found the Android cameras to be just another annoying outcrop, never fitting with a cohesive design.

The N9, and Harmattan, have that cohesive design. It's a royal shame that it's the best phone no one will ever use...
It still disadvantages those people who want to use that service while there is nothing to perform the job. Take google recently killing code search http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/fall-sweep.html. One of the commenter's had been building their own code search platform before google did. Google entering the market meant that this was no longer viable though http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112444. A new code search platform will no doubt pop up, but it will take a while to get something that works well.

This is the problem with the giant company stepping into new areas, it often leaves destruction in its wake.
Lytro cameras are ready for preorder.
Careful though, that's apples to oranges. Clearly you're right: waking up a small core for a tiny task is going to require less power than doing the same on a big core. But the choice here is between a A15-only design (you need the big core always) and an A15+A7 design. The one with an A7 is a larger chip. That silicon area has built-in costs in both money and power consumption and has to be accounted for.
There are two huge problems with this service: trust and privacy.

Trust: a one page website is asking for access to my Gmail account. As far as I can tell, this means it gets access to everything 24/7. EVERYTHING. Holy crap. Because of the way that web security has evolved, my email inbox (not Gmail, but that's beside the point) is now the master key to my life. No way in hell am I handing a service like this the master key to my life.

Privacy: I'm assuming this is inserted into the email as an HTTP reference ("signature updates throughout the day"). If that's the case, then most correspondents won't see the image because modern email clients block 'beacon' image requests by default. If that's not the case and the image is embedded as a MIME object, then the tool is kinda useless, because who knows when a correspondent will read my reply?

If anything, the real solution is already described in the website header: "It's kinda like the AWAY setting on instant messenger, but for email". Most IM software, including Gmail, already has "online presence" notification. Perhaps that's where the real solution lies.
Rick joined SGI in 1998, by that time Nvidia and Voodoo had put all but the final nails in the coffin of SGI.
I think it's in the TrueType hinting:

http://blog.typekit.com/2011/03/16/skolar-web-hinted-for-bet...
How long have you worked as a professional software developer? Have you ever worked at a large company? There are plenty of people with a decade of experience who enjoy writing code who are just bad at it. Some of these people work on software that is much more important than Facebook.
One solution I heard has a basic idea that's quick to explain, although the details are messy. It might be interesting to get some intution:

Flip the coin N times and count the number of heads, K. You got one of the C = {N \choose K} = N!/((N-K)!K!) ways of getting K heads, all of which have the same probability, no matter what the bias of the coin is. If you consider an ordering of the C choices, then you have an integer from 0 to C-1 drawn uniformly at random. You could represent that integer using binary and extract about log_2(C) random bits.

For large N, the number of bits extracted is nearly the optimal NH bits, where H is the binary entropy of the coin. To count how far through a list of combinations I am for large N, I might construct a lattice and, I'm guessing, start reproducing works referenced by the paper that the parent linked to. Whereas the paper itself seems to have, from my quick skim, the definitive answer. Nice.

As tucked away in another comment, related is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor
I agree, most of these are hilarious!

But seriously, until programmers are paid $100/hour or given royalties, deal with the result of bad programmers...

... or do it yourself!
Free Diablo3 in exchange for your time. xbox360/ps3/pc
Camara de seguridad Falsa, totalmente real
I also found that if you have iOS5 on an iPhone 4, the new camera button allows you to access apps and what-not without unlocking the phone - though it thinks its locked.

Double click the home button to get the camera icon, go to camera and press home button and you can access all apps.

But if you try to go to the photo gallery, the phone tells you its locked and wont go there.
I'm pretty sure I saw the "everything is a nail" type listed, which might well cover the folks that think Technology A is the be-all and end-all.
I agree that it is too optimistic (see my other comment) but I was dissapointed that I can't swype in iPad.
I believe that is due to the work they explain in this blog post: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/07/26/new-from-typekit-improved...
The engineers who worked on it, of course.
To me, everything in that article can be addressed with a little experience.

My one indicator that someone is going to be a bad programmer actually has little to do with technical skill sets, but rather personality. As my sanity check, I make sure to examine the open-mindedness (willingness to research and use unfamiliar tools) of programmers. More often than not, you find programmers who are very comfortable in given languages, environments, tools etc, but once you take away their comfort blanket, they keep reaching back for it.

An extreme example would be a scenario such that a programmer who knows C very well decides to do a decent amount of parsing in C instead of researching better languages for the job such as python or perl.
Benchmarks show Galaxy Nexus mashing iPhone 4S
Not really, no. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding facebook's tracking system, but I don't think your browser history is being captured here. You are viewing pages that have a facebook widget on them, and if you have a facebook cookie that says "pingswept", this tells facebook that pingswept visited a page with a specific widget on it (and thus, which page). Facebook is not taking anything from you that you are not sending them - the issue is that a website that is not facebook is passing your information on to facebook. Aren't they the ones that deceived you, not facebook?
Incorrect. That only works if the device doesn't require a passcode to get past the homescreen.
I don't believe ads are the only culprit. Daily, and increasingly, we give away our decision making to a myriad of sources. Blogs. Fox News. @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher). Apple product keynotes.

Hopefully we can also use the same technology to liberate ourselves from the magnetic attraction of ads and the media and do something positive. I'd look to recent events (Arab Spring, #OWS) as a possible glimmer of hope there.
> Those whose compensation is unfair usually run for another employer

This doesn't happen efficiently, however. Moving upwards is risky and the consequences of a downward-adjustment (getting layed off) often include bankruptcy and financial ruin.
Setting aside the possibility that the delayed-marshmallow-gratification thing has been exaggerated by people wanting to downplay IQ, and taking it at face value: the fact that IQ is not the single most important predictor of scholastic and/or life success does not make it unimportant. It warrants discussion, especially if it can be improved.

For example, eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly across whole populations. Isn't that something to be excited about?
So true. With both sides of the remote-face-delivery-portal implemented in HTML5, will the Flash (finally) end open up the internet for real creativity and minimal-capital moving content distribution?
cool but doesn't look very ergonomic. grasping rectangular blocks isn't very comfortable
Lego Robot Beats Human World Record For Solving the Rubik’s Cube
The core issue here is you want to make this about me. It isn't. You don't know the first thing about what I do and don't know.

Well, you seem to think that basing a font on another is a ripoff, and that's the bit on which the parent poster is basing his assertion.

Many of us feel it is not a ripoff. Helvetica, however popular, was not the first of its kind, and most average people wouldn't be able to tell it from Akzidenz-Grotesk, created some 60 years earlier.

Almost every major foundry has a Helvetica clone. If this is a big deal, it was a big deal before the relatively minor addition of Roboto.
Newsflash: people still buy software
Single reason I got a Playbook over a Galaxy Tab. Lag disturbs me greatly, I have an Android phone and I can't bring myself to use it because of that. Regularly I check in stores to see if they finally made it acceptable and so far they haven't.

It really makes me wonder.

This reminds me of Amiga vs Windows. Many years after Amiga's demise, the bloody mouse cursor still lagged in Windows very noticeably. I guess not many people had done much work in Amiga's workbench so it wasn't a big deal for almost nobody. But it wasn't until Pentium III times that it stopped disturbing me on a daily basis.
In this case, what's really needed is high-level labor (organization, and maybe programming), and not low-level labor (typing in the damn references by hand). I guess it's easier to get volunteers to do the latter, and the "high-level" volunteers are mostly editors and wiki-policy wonks, not thinking about appropriate data structures and implementation.

It is striking how little Wikipedia has advanced technically since it started, compared with its enormous growth of content.
I abandoned RubyMine to go back to vim myself. Do it and do it today.
I'm a student in the third year of my CS degree and I constantly worry about not being a good programmer. There's things on that list I need to work on.
The design of the site is very, very good. Within a couple of seconds I knew EXACTLY what this does. Not usually the case with a lot of startups out there. That text under the logo is very good.

Having said that, unfortunately I'll join others in saying I won't use this. I'm one of hte "searchers" - my inbox is always full, but I search for right emails, instead of filing into folders and deleting.