skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and many of those devices come setup with very reliable RAID without any special configuration by the user. Running 5 1TB disks with no redundancy on standard Ubuntu ext4 is like pleading for data loss.

With the Evercube, I pay double for 2.5" storage and have no redundancy? 5TB of storage but only 512MB for the OS? At those prices the OS storage should be at least 1GB so that users have more options. Standard Ubuntu Minimal requires a lot of manual configuration (no room for GUI in 512MB), especially if you want network sharing and RAID. Then, because it's Ubuntu I can guarantee that there will be major changes in the configuration process at the next version upgrade.

Compare this with ZFS on BSD/Solaris which exports NFS shares with a single command. Upgrade process is predictable and requires little intervention.

Or compare with my setup: Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure. And just the Evercube shell without drives costs much more than my setup!

Whoever buys the Evercube will be looking for a pretty solution instead of a technically solid one. Ubuntu 9.04 is outdated and no longer supported. To spend this money and go this far on design on hardware, and then fall so flat on software is really disappointing.
How To Lose Weight Quick? Some Secrets
Fair enough. Not a great article, but I would love to highjack the discussion toward the question of why we have "weed out" courses in the sciences? The incentive system for science programs seems to be "increase our reputation by maximizing the percentage of graduates accepted at top PhD programs." So, the intent is to keep the number of science graduates to an absolute minimum, at least until it is time to write an op-ed piece decrying the lack of math and science literacy in the population.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to reconcile getting the small percentage of top students ready for careers in research and academia without the necessity of culling non-gifted students that find it interesting?
While I highly doubt his conspiracy theory, my experience has been similar. Exams measure mindless problem solving by memorized pattern matching instead of understanding. Instead of a coherent understanding you need to memorize how to solve a few problems, as the exam will ask minor variations of homework or book problems. Even with a lot of intelligence and understanding you realistically won't be able to come up with the answers to them without having seen the solution to a very similar problem before.
In a lot of countries there are government web sites and services that forces citizens to use Windows and specific versions of IE. Some of them used Activex, vbscript etc, The worst example I remember is an important web service for drugstores in Turkey that required Microsoft Java VM!

Apparently this is not the case for Russia.
Writing a static site generator using org-mode.
Gidsy, a marketplace for authentic experiences, has launched
You could do alright (and very customizable) with the django admin and introspection. "Somebody" should probably write up a guide on doing that.
I think the tale's point isn't that the way physics is taught is deliberately made to make people fail, but that the failures it leads to are features, not bugs. I think he might have a point in that. The whole premise of the essay is that

> Naturally intelligent people are quite worthless if they’re undisciplined.

Someone who thinks so wouldn't have a very high opinion of his intelligence.
Similarly the idea that history is merely memorisation, as if we had access to perfect information about the past which we can completely understand despite our entirely different context.
I don't know if it's deliberate or not, but it seems to me that this is how a decent chunk of curricula have evolved. Although we do not know the actual background of the author, I can share my own anecdotes.

Here's my background: I've got a B.Sc in Electrical Engineering, with a post-degree specialization in Computer Science (essentially, the compsci courses for a 4-year B.Sc, without all of the Arts electives). Yes, this means I passed Physics.

Through high school, I did quite well based entirely on intelligence. I put very little effort into anything, kept an honour roll average the whole time, and partied hard at every opportunity. To be honest, I'm surprised I don't have brain damage, based on some of the stuff I did.

I get to Engineering school and things start to change. Now, I'm nowhere near the top of my class. As I was used to in high school, I'd plan an hour to finish an assignment. I'd get nowhere. Just like the OP's story, I felt like I was running into brick walls all the time. Physics (statics, in particular), was a total disaster... At Christmas, I got my marks back and ended up with a 51% in Statics. Brutal. "How can this be? I'm smart! I'm the guy helping other people with their homework! This doesn't make sense."

That's when I started to realize that hard work was the element I was missing. I turned down the partying a fair bit, and started to actually put time and effort into things. The following semester, 71% in Dynamics. Not a stellar mark, but a significant improvement.

The biggest problem I had through my University career was that I had no problem putting time and effort into things that I was interested in, but courses that I wasn't overly fond of ended up in the mid-60% range. My transcript is a strange mixture of 90%+ marks and ~65% marks. Designing a simple CPU on an FGPA? Awesome! Let's do this! Sink hours and hours into it and end up with a 97% in the class, with a functional CPU coming out the other side. Calculating the torque in an electric motor? Fuck that. 60%.

I don't think I ever really managed to get over the hump of "I can do well in any of these courses, if I put time and hard work into them".
Health and Fitness Tips For the Modern Entrepreneur
Make a Chicken Coop
tl;dr:

If survey classes actually connected the dots, it would promote intelligent students without challenging them to persevere, and ultimately favor the development of bright but undisciplined generalists.

---

While I relate to some of the cynicism of the essay, I think this is an emergent sociological phenomenon rather than something that the designers of curricula necessarily intend to do. Sure, there's a need to weed out students who can't hack it later due to a lack of intelligence or persistence, but the idea that course designers set out to build people into student-drones who blindly memorize information because "that's what society needs" is hogwash. This is a result of a need to serve a broad range of students with a limited supply of teaching talent.

I'm confident most college departments would love to get highly intelligent students intensely interested in their field of study. Showing them how to connect all the dots could open a window towards a genuine love for the field at hand, turning a jaded generalist into a dedicated scholar. While persistence may still be an issue with some of these students, showing them how amazing and connected a field can be could encourage them to specialize in this fascinating study. Few things inspire as much persistence as deep fascination. The crappy survey classes probably do more harm than good in turning away potentially excellent students from the material.
> we could have sued them out of existence years ago

really? but you didn't, from the goodness of your heart, right?
The importance of user testing copy and content
Sex ...someone mention sex??
Make Money Online Fast in Just 15 minutes
This is how engineering education was explained to me:

1st year: Well-defined problems, well-defined answers

2nd year: Less-defined problems (labs)

3rd year: Harder problems where part of it is defining what the problem is, more labs

4th year: A vague problem like design a plant to process X and produce Y

I believe the purpose of engineering education is to teach you effective problem solving. Yes, you learn a variety of common methods but really, engineering is about creative problem solving with constraints

If you cannot make it past physics or chemistry, you do not make it to the true problem solving curriculum.
I don't see it in the app store, unfortunately.

Edit: for me, the only way to get it is to download in iTunes and then sync
San Francisco Wine Tours
I bet they pay more than 99 cents too!
well moon moving out of its trajectory means alot more than tides (which in itself is pretty darn serious) IMO. The nights would be absolutely dark, also earth's rotation speed (AFAIK) is also affected by moon's gravity and bulges in both earth and moon's softer crust. Plus maybe we can adapt to such changes but our culture will change and it will be alot more difficult to live through that, imagine explaining to your kids/grandchildren what moon is (or rather was) and how it looked when it was closer/farther.

PS if moon gets a major hit, its highly unlikely earth stays 'physically' unaffected. The aftermath of the collision would leave numerous chunks of huge rocks in earth's near space and it would be almost certain that some of then then hit earth. And the effect of decent sized rock hitting the planet is better known to our long lost friends, the dinosaurs :)
The Web Framework Evolution
Could America turn out worse than Japan?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. OpenGL ES + C (iPhone, Android, WP7?) is a likely earlier step than OpenGL ES + JavaScript (WebGL).

Do you disagree?
In the Netherlands we have the site http://buienradar.nl/

It is very popular and it beats looking out of the window by a large margin. When it is raining you can see very accurately how long it's going to take for it to stop so you can decide if it's worth waiting. When it's not raining but it looks like it could be going to rain you can similarly make good predictions.

Note that they're not doing actual prediction, they're just showing radar images of the clouds of the last hour.
So your theory is that he's making this all up? No.
13.72km/s - 49392km/h

Source: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php
(scroll to the bottom for Earth approaching objects)
A lot of people seem very smug about ridiculing liberal arts majors for their life decisions. Please realize that most of us working in software are also lucky enough to be paid well and love what we do, we followed our hearts AND our heads. Imagine a world where there were no software jobs and you needed a PhD in french poetry to get a real job?
Would be interesting if during the flyby our analysis revealed that it was made up of a Gold core or something :). Suddenly NASA might get a bunch of funding to prepare for the next flyby
Eh, I'm going the other direction. I've picked up IE9. It has a few small negatives, but it is pretty fast and light.

The irony is I occassionally have to install Firefox because some website isn't compatible with IE9.
Imagine an "iPad Pro" that had similar battery life and even an integrated keyboard. In addition to supporting the SSH workflow, it can run traditional GUI applications if you really need them.

You don't have to wait: it's called the MacBook Air.
It's natural for many people here to think whatever they are doing must be what everyone else is doing, but the average Internet user does not have a MacBook Pro running Chrome. And the ones that spend the most money on the Internet certainly can't be pigeonholed that way.

Recently I worked with a high-fashion site in New York that you'd think must get most of their web hits from iPads and modern browsers, but no. More than half their traffic and sales came from IE6/7/8 users browsing the site from a corporate PC during their lunch hour.
Gas Fracking may cause earthquakes
Am I the only one who read the article hoping for a "If it DID hit the earth, X would happen..."?
For anyone really interested in liberal arts, you would probably be better off doing it on your own, even if college was a lot cheaper than it is. Use your money more for things that will repay the investment.

There are some really good resources out there for self-study. An easy one to start with is Ron Gross's The Independent Scholar's Handbook, http://www.amazon.com/Independent-Scholars-Handbook-Ronald-G....

But the much older (early seventies) book This Way Out is even more useful. My Amazon review:

This book is in 3 parts, the last 2 Experimental Colleges and Foreign Study are too dated to be useful.

Part one is the best book for college-level self-study I have used. I first read it in the early 1980s and have reread it several times since, it is only 135 pages but packed with useful advice. The biggest weakness for the current user is that it has nothing on computers or the internet, but some of its advice such as "Write lots of short papers. Long papers kill students and tutors alike. Write lots of short papers. It will teach you too write and that, as we will demonstrate later, is essential" could almost have been written for the Web (most books on creating web pages emphasize short, to the point writing). They also mention the absolute essential for self-education - you must love to read, if you don't, then stay in college where they will force you to read.

http://www.amazon.com/This-way-out-alternatives-traditional/...
WeasyPrint renders HTML+CSS to PDF
Having grown up in the UK, owning my own company was never something that even occurred to me- I wasn't until I moved to NYC that I saw just how great it can be. I'm sure that there are some cultural reasons for that, but I think one of the most important factors is simply being surrounded by people doing their own startup thing and picking up on their enthusiasm.

Given that my visa restrictions here in the US forbid me from easily working for my own company, I'm always thinking of returning to London. So, this sort of event is great to see- the creation of Tech City and an obvious growth in startup culture means that London could be a great place to do business.
Incredibly, this app is slower than using their mobile website. Nicely done!
Apparently not available in Germany.

The AppStore search function only finds third party apps and the AppStore link from the blog post opens the AppStore and shows the unhelpful error message "Your request could not be completed".
I used it about 2 years before realizing it had regular expressions, which have made some of my queries so much easier.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/functions-matching...
Just curious, is it a pgadmin3 on OSX that is the problem for you or pgadmin3 in general?

On Windows, I find that I quite like pgadmin3 as compared to MySQL workbench but it's likely just a matter of taste.
> programming, ultimately, is thinking.

I very rarely feel slowed down by my environment. It's possible for it to happen, but most of my time is spent thinking about a problem, not typing.
I get it: I used to use 3 monitors.

I just have found that if you want to read something, I prefer it to be on the center monitor anyways, so what's the point in having multiple monitors?

Plus, I prefer to work on my laptop screen, because it's more flexible - I can put my feet up, move around, change positions easier.

Just my own personal preference
I doubt that physicists care who would pass the physics class but for those who have understood physics.
Top Ten Reasons to Switch to Subversion
Angry Birds downloads pass half-billion mark
An asteroid that could move the moon would have to be moving insanely fast, or be close to the size of the moon (due to conservation of momentum).
Yes. YC funded every major player in the email CRM-addon space (Xonbi, Etacts and Rapportive).

I believe they've also funded two flight search apps.
Give me a break. You're just making things up. By all means wear your tinfoil hat and keep your pitchfork sharp, but try to keep at least one toe on the ground.
Agreed. Our (mostly non-tech industry) audience shows a similar browser breakdown.
second that... my working folders are dropbox... and commit to cloud git repository as needed.
Square launches iphone app for consumers, payment auth by GPS
How about if he is using Git? It is normal to work out of your local repository and only sync with the master occassionally, no? At least on projects that can tolerate such methods.
> Because Safari gets to JIT-compile JavaScript and UIWebView embedded into apps can't

I'm not sure this is still the case in iOS5.
I found that statement interesting too, specifically because our math courses had us re-derive a PILE of stuff, and I felt much more enlightened after having done that.

Summation, for instance, was derived early on. Same with integration (Fundamental Theorem of Calculus).

One of my most memorable re-derivations was in my 4th calculus class (Sequences, Series, and Differential Equations, if I recall). We ended up taking the Taylor series approximation of sin(x), cos(x), and e^x. As the patterns started to emerge, the professor encouraged us to look at them carefully and start considering what happened when you substituted ix into the approximation for e^x.

This ends up, of course, turning into Euler's formula, e^ix = cos(x) + isin(x). Seeing it with the Taylor series approximations, though, snapped all the pieces together. Up until then, it all seemed like magic (sure, you can talk about vectors and imaginary numbers, but you're just accepting it as true). That derivation fundamentally changed how I look at this stuff.
Finally, dojotoolkit 1.7.0 is released
CRM Pioneers Offer Choice of Deployment Options – Review of MaximizerCRM
I've overheard lots of discussion from iOS developers lately on this becoming a new trend. As certain apps increase in complexity the old Facebook home screen style becomes much less scalable, and this new method seems to be the answer.

My guess is we'll see at least another half dozen popular apps take on this style as well.
Most people here are too hung up on the details. I don't read an essay like this and take away from it, "Boy, the author had shitty teachers!", rather I think, "Yeah, he's right, raw intelligence without perseverance won't allow you to advance far in graduate school."
Google Launches Native Gmail App For iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
It's an edge case, but still true... Not something you'd do more than once a year probably ;)
Why not? Google doesn't support IE7 for Google Apps. They claim that they will only support the two most recent versions of any browser. Should we expect that they will drop IE8 support once IE10 ships? For personal use, people need to be nudged to use a modern browser. The average person probably just uses the browser that ships with their machine and doesn't even know to upgrade.
Show HN: BrowseOn - continuous web browsing, from desktop to mobile (MVP)
From an earlier press release on this asteroid, from a 2010 pass:

[The radar imaging] reveals 2005 YU55 as a spherical object about 400 meters (1,300 feet) in size.

Not only can the radar provide data on an asteroid's dimensions, but also on its exact location in space. Using Arecibo's high-precision radar astrometry capability, scientists were able to reduce orbit uncertainties for YU55 by 50 percent.

"At one time we had classified 2005 YU55 as a potential threat," said Steve Chesley, a scientist at JPL's Near-Earth Object Program Office. "Prior to the Arecibo radar passes on April 19 thru 21 [2010], we had eliminated almost all upcoming Earth flybys as possibilities of impact. But there were a few that had a low remaining probability of impact. After incorporating the data from Arecibo, we were able to rule impacts out entirely for the next 100 years."

*

So, they do know this one will be well-behaved for 100 years.
I agree wholeheartedly.

You develop iOS apps with Xcode. To support Windows, they need to then develop a whole Windows IDE, support it, etc. There isn't a significant reason to, there is no business sense in it.

Microsoft doesn't have an IDE for Mac to write Windows Phone 7 apps, and I don't see anyone crying about it.
I rarely split views, so that makes no difference to me - all my splitting tends to occur in Emacs.

And I never type anything to connect to my screen sessions. How primitive ;)

I have shortcuts for the main machines I use that opens a terminal window, ssh's to it using my key, and attaches to my running screen or starts a fresh one if none is running (rarely - most of my screen sessions are 1+ years old)

My sessions on less important machines run in screen windows.
This is the first iteration of my first-ever released project, done over the last week. It allows you to sync your mobile browser to your desktop browser. I hope to expand the product and overall make it easier for people to switch working from their desktop to their mobile phone, and vice-versa.

Technology: Node.js server running on Heroku, connected to a Redis database.

I would appreciate any suggestions, criticism, or improvements!

There are a couple other great apps that do something similar:

http://trns.fr - uses text messages instead of email / mobile bookmarks
http://AirLinkApp.com - one-time bookmarklet generation
Yes, but have you had any commercial vendor say "Ok, I'll put 3 engineers on it"? Unless there are 100 other customers with the same problem you have, your bug report will be put on the list that they'll eventually get to in a month or 6.

For commercial products, your only option is to threaten to pull your business. Since it would probably cost thousands or tens of thousands to fix your problem, unless you are a big customer or the problem affects a lot of other customers, your problem will not be a priority.

For open source, you have the following options:

- ask the author to fix it. This works surprisingly well, if you're polite.
- post a question to the projects mailing list, and you will usually receive a response
- fix it yourself
- pay somebody to fix it
- pay the original author to fix it

Notice that there is ALWAYS a potential solution. Sometimes it's expensive, but for commercial software, too often you are SOL.