skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other side of the coin, I see it as a cynical marketing move specifically designed to appeal to nostalgia create the very impression you had, that they "maintain a sense of fun and a corporate attitude that allows fun hacks to make it to the world." Google is often successful at appealing to geek humor and ideals in order to gain fans, even as they do things that violate those ideals.
A co-worker, Asian-born, says that she knows an awful lot of ABC (American-born Chinese) kids majoring in business. This I think is not uncommon for groups either getting to the states or making their way into the professional classes. One generation does the hard stuff to get a job that pays well; the next generation notices that a) the business school is easier, and b) the MBAs get to lay off the BSEEs and send their jobs offshore.
Large car rental companies are not exactly cutting edge on IT. They tend to have a lot of small locations that's not exactly easy to start upgrading because of the cost of sending people out to do it all.

My local branches look like they had their last refurb in the late 90s for example.

One example does not a sample make.
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Well, I AM talking about the real world (note my post scriptum). Also, when you talk about small consultancies and Fortune 500 companies: I have worked for a small consultancy and, later, as a freelancer for German top companies (Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Post, Munich Re - to name a few) and they all have paid, both that consultancy and me, within a month of which the consultancy/I have sent the invoice. USA is, judging from your comment, different... I see that now.

Aside from being (in my opinion) a bad business practice, it's also lying to the shareholders. You see, that $80 Billion figure would be smaller if they'd pay the manufacturers in a reasonable timeframe.
This seems like a relatively simple business proposition to a client. "X% of users on the internet today use IE6. I will be happy to provide pixel perfect support for Y dollars." Adjust Y up and down based on your ability and desire to continue to support web applications that use IE6.
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Great work on the site BTW.
I also think it's interesting that with Jobs and Woz's offices being across the building from each other, that forces them to walk past everyone else to talk to each other in person. That has to make it easier for founders and executives to keep track of how things are going in the trenches. That could also make employees feel that management doesn't consider themselves "above" them.
Somehow I had managed to completely miss the term "polyfill" until just now.

Handy!
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These kinds of articles were novel 10 years ago when Apple was coming back and was doing so while beating Dell at supply chain optimization and that was, justifiably, a huge story. Ironically, I read them in BusinessWeek back then, too.

Now, the ODM/OEMs have become brands and the folks who once were the main participants in Apple's supply chain are now directly competing with Apple. Breathless articles aside, are we really sure that Apple's supply chain is much shorter/faster than those of Lenovo, Dell, HTC, Sony or, holy hell, Samsung?

I also have a hard time seeing how $25M worth of lasers is a supply chain innovation; most other manufacturers would probably prefer to make the laptop for $6 (amortization) less. I have a ThinkPad T520 [with Linux] because it's rugged, comfortable (no wrist razor), has a TrackPoint (I know, I know, but I love it) and about $1200-$1500 less than a comparable Macbook Pro. Clearly, the majority of hackers disagree with me, so I'm convinced that 90% of Apple's incredibleness is their marketing (not ads, but understanding how to design and build excellent products which are very well targeted at their audiences).
Photos of Apple's remodeled Fifth Avenue Store
Generally, models can be left up to the developer to create based on business logic. Take for example, Zend Framework. It provides an active record like pattern in its Zend_Db_Table but expects the individual application to create the models that use (not inherit) Zend_Db_Table.
Regardless of how it works, or how awesome the underlying tech is, this application is so incredibly ugly that I'm not even going to try it. My friends will laugh at me if I ask them to start using this.
#include <LockhartsLament.pdf>

In the end, I don't think absolutely everybody will be able to do the heavy math degrees, but the horrifying state of math education does bear a significant share of the responsibility as well. We have sucked all the life out of mathematics in the name of pedagogy and it's a bit much to expect that to pass by without effect. We can't accommodate all the student's desires for easier degrees, but the students complaining about looking at years of abstract theory without grounding are fundamentally correct, too.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
On errors: Yes, this is the main point I agree with. Fortunately most languages have frameworks with do this now. The main thing I would wish for would be a more configurable 'warning' or 'notice' level wich would indicate e.g. type coercion or addition of strings or other nonsense when debugging.

On typography: seems like a lot of trouble for no substantial gain.

On Input Methods: People know `x - y` is left to right. `x = y` is easy enough. These points take a couple minutes to memorize each.

I am intrigued by nested quotes, however. In some languages such as Chinese they use arrow quotes -《》 - which would be easily nested and visually distinguishable.
To be honest, I say fuck them. I'd rather lose the work than have to support IE6 as it's a time and therefore money sink.

You have to be pragmatic with respect to such things.

Even most European corporate clients I've worked with have dumped IE6, most going straight to IE9.
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As an MBA I can tell you, that the degree is not as highly valued as it once was. A STEM degree is much valuable even is rolls that were once filled by business types (some finance rolls, operations, etc.)

A MBA is a relatively easy Masters, but I think it's relevance is rapidly fading.
What I actually meant was that your comment: "Frankly, if Steve Jobs is not one of your heroes, you're not a hacker in my book." is as ridiculous and preposterous as the opposite version I posted. Please don't try to categorize hackers or HN users like that.
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It's a quip, certainly, but I've been saying for some years now that China is/was the prototype.

I think it's a useful shorthand way of maintaining perspective and presenting it in a digestible sound-bite to others.
"A simple bytecode layer that other languages can target"

What about the Parrot VM: http://parrot.org/
I don't think it's simply that math is hard. Many of these courses are taught in ways that make it hard for students to see how the tools they're using are going to be useful.

Students would be better-motivated to take the challenge if they were applying it to problems that seem relevant to them. In CS, for instance, which is more fun: slogging through an algorithms book front to back, or researching the best way to solve a problem you face in one of your own code projects?

To answer your question about relevance: I made it through my undergraduate physics major not because lectures and homeworks were fun, but because I got involved in research early on. I found it much more fun to learn in the context of a project I felt a sense of ownership of.
But Groupon is now a public company and what they've done isn't exactly normal (though LinkedIn did something similar...and of course yesterday the follow-on was announced):

Groupon floated a record-low percentage of its total outstanding shares among U.S. Internet companies, helping to stoke demand. Only 4.7 percent of the stock was made available to the public, based on the offering terms. That’s less than in any U.S. Internet company IPO of more $200 million since at least 2000, Bloomberg data show.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-03/groupon-said-to-rai...
For example, to move up ARM only needs to add more cores or more processors, while to move down, Intel would be force to cripple existing products.

So apparently the author has no idea what they are talking about.

If AMD can't match Intel "moving up" then what exactly indicated ARM will magically be able to do it?

Even if everything else was equal, Intel has a huge advantage in fabs, which is very important with high end parts. Only IBM come close to them.
So what do all these startups do that can not raise a series A? A subset sell as a team buy, a few go out of business, but an increasing number are going out for a bridge round. Basically, instead of raising $5 million, I am seeing post-seed startups raise anywhere from $500K to $1.5 millon, at a valuation somewhere between a series A and a seed valuation, with the hope that the additional capital will give them time to gain more traction or scale their business.

A good option for bootstrapped companies that have exhausted their friends and family but aren't ready for gasoline on the fire.
I wish I could just get away with it like that.
Looks like Lot18 solved a problem amazon claims it cannot.

1) Amazon has never claimed this. Amazon wants to be taxed the same as other e-commerce competitors.

2) It is far easier to calculate sales taxes in the 500 or so jurisdictions if you only sell one type of product.
... They tend to have a lot of small locations ...

These aren't the rental outlets but their main business offices in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal & Bulgaria!

NB. The Bulgarian results shows 71% using IE6 in their main office(s).

One example does not a sample make

At no point did I say it was relevant outside my sample :)
I disagree. Yes, this should be refactored and placed in a model; but that would be something like Clients::getReadMetrics() that would contain the same SQL. I don't see that heading towards a full ORM or even remotely like SQL generation.
Engineering is hard, if you are not that smart and cannot optimize problem solving. If you can't see the shortcuts (e.g. zero force members in Statics problems), it takes longer. I struggled.

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,
> " Frankly, typical JVM startup times alone is enough of a pain"

The default JVM options are biased toward long running processes. That's kinda what most software running on a JVM is going to be though - start it running, leave it for weeks.

If you want a JVM that is tailored for short lived processes, then quick startup time is just a few options away after you RTFM. Or use a language/runtime more tailored to short lived scripting.

FWIW I've never seen a JVM take more than a second to startup though, which is more than adequate for server software.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you confusing Java the language with the actual JVM? On your last paragraph, you pretty much described what the JVM is in my perspective.
I remember reading one of Douglas Hofstadter's books - Metamagical Themas - and liking the bold Helvetica font he used for all the Lisp code. But I doubt he coded with it...
I think the cleaning business is probably hoping for referrals.
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> I'd advocate for pascal et al over C-like languages simply because of case insensitive identifiers.

Then what happens when a German programmer has an identifier called weiß? Will accessing it as WEISS work? When dealing solely with US-ASCII, case-insensitivity might be useful, but Unicode and the use of non-English non-Latin writing systems opens a whole new can of worms.
I get the feeling that the Ripples feature isn't designed for the average consumer. It's aimed at the marketing crowd. They can easily find out who the big "share hubs" are, and leverage that to potentially help promote their product or stay in contact with their community.
Dude, I don't understand you. You did what?

I don't think you gain anything by splitting it in 2 files. It could happen if the browser downloads the 2 files in parallel, but it can make your page load actually worse because you do not have a guarantee of parallelism (there's a limit to how many resources you can download in parallel from the same domain and adding multiple domains is not without cost because of the extra DNS lookup, which is also a big problem on mobile phones) and you're also introducing eval().

If anything, a better hack would be to load it such that it does not block the page being loaded.

See a sample how it's done in this project: https://github.com/alexandru/crossdomain-requests-js/wiki/Us...
And that is true, but referral making is largely akin to a pyramid scheme. I also think that if the referrer is talking about their 19 pound groupon, the refer-ee would likely balk at the price as well.
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No, as far as I understand the situation, the password that got leaked was for the whole cables archive and not for the insurance file.

The insurance file was not released because Wikileaks is saying they are being blackmailed by a big bank (don't remember which one, BoA?).

Edit: I think I confused this stuff. It's not about releasing the insurance file, it's about releasing information on the banks that they can't do because of the claimed blackmailing.
The insurance file will only be released as a last resort.
I think the article is realistic in terms of IE6 support costs if you're not just building a simple website.

Trying to build a responsive, dynamic webapp, that is identical in IE6 to a modern browser can easily add a lot of time. Just as an example, producing all the graphics for rounded corners, rather than being able to do them in CSS.
PG turned off the visible vote count for everything but an individuals posts and comments a few months ago, so you can only see the vote count on stuff you've posted. Is that what you are talking about?
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It's interesting that despite all the investment that Google is making in Plus and their desire for a foothold in this market, they flat out refuse IE6: http://i.imgur.com/ONRK4.png
I completely agree with this. I went to one of the top 10 private high schools in Illinois and I was stuck with a math teacher, for two years, who's job it was to make sure no one got less than a C average. Understanding the material was not a primary concern, making sure no one had an abysmal average was. We had a 99% college matriculation rate to preserve after all.

If this is the attitude in an elite school, I can only imagine what it is like in the public school system.
It all depends on the kind of site you are building and the technologies involved. On some sites it may be ok to deliver a "less beautiful" web but with all the contents, in others it won't. Oftentimes nowadays you'll face a complete rewrite.

In some recent projects I even worked hard to convince the client that it wasn't worth supporting IE8. It's not only that it loads faster with modern techniques (as CSS3 allows awesome effects that would need images/javascript with CSS2), but some functionality built around HTML5 would need a COMPLETE rewrite in Flash.

Of course that means that if they insist on supporting older browsers not only that would mean a 30%-100% increase in price but new features the want afterwards will be more expensive as well (because you're supporting two different projects).
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I've not read Metamagical Themas, but your words remind me that one of my favorite programming books, The Little Schemer, does in fact use a variable-width font for the code.
Maybe this is just me, but it would be nice to have an indicator (perhaps changing the color of the text box) to show who's leading the conversation/asking the questions.
I know not all of the roundtables will be in this format, but having it be an option when starting the roundtable may not be bad.
The less support you have the harder it is. I have a graduate degree in engineering, and it was hard, but a lot of that came from having to face difficult challenges on my own. Classes are short, and the hours spent at home studying are long. Getting time with the professor is difficult, and his hours are limited.

We need to give students more support, don't let them stress out and drop out, we need to be there for them. Sitting at home for hours staring at a badly written text book is not productive and burns kids out.

Now how we do this... more teachers? higher costs? Can maybe technology be the key to lowering costs while increasing support? I'm interested in working on this problem.
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Previously submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3192237

What I find curious is that the de-duper apparently doesn't check for case differences in the URL encoded characters.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/03/%E2%80%9Cbut-the-...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/03/%e2%80%9cbut-the-...
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It's easy, the American universities are good because they attract plenty of foreign students coming from places where the universities may not be as good but where high schools are arguably much better.
But looking at it, it does seem that it is point-and-clicky. It doesn't so much look like a 2D game programming framework or am I wrong?
It is not just car rental companies. Most of the UK's major banks use IE6 still.

This is because most of their intranet apps will only work in IE6, and they have the size to demand that their supplies support IE6 too. Corporate IT policy won't allow browsers apart from IE.

If only Microsoft allowed side-by-side installs of IE6 and a IE8 it might be a bit more bearable (given that IE9 is not available on XP)
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Parrot is basically just a VM for Perl. The opcodes are tied heavily to Perl 6 semantics (type coercion for everyone, the string "0" is false, etc etc).
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By selecting ~500 engineering students out of a pool of 3+ million.
I follow and sometimes contribute to a couple of forums: http://www.unix.com and http://serverfault.com/.
Microformats are the one case that does seem obvious/sensible to me.

It would seem to me that decentralized, ad-hoc microformat micro-standards would make more sense than a slow, bureaucratic process. The web will adopt good ideas, useful semantics, etc., so I don't really see the benefit of a 5+ year process of introducing a few new tags.
There are no comment on the blog, so I'm just going to put this here and hope the author sees it (as they appear to have submitted the post):

You don't want to write SQL in your controllers. It's a recipe for future pain and suffering.

- If a second action needs the same data, it's likely that you'll end up duplicating your query. Especially if you work with other people, and they don't know about the queries that exist in all of the different actions.

- If you change the structure of the data in the DB, you need to find every affected query, in every action. It's extremely fragile, and prone to breaking.

If you have a model, with a nice public API, that interacts with the DB, you know that you've isolated the change to just that one place. All of the controllers that call $model->some_data(); will continue to work no matter how your change your data source so long as you obey the API.

There are million different ways you can approach that, but I strongly recommend that you find one that works for you, and stick with it.
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I'm subscribed to a bunch of these, and it's just a case of me being too lazy to unsubscribe. In fact, I even end up opening a bunch of them by mistake when trying to open a different email.
Patents are about ideas and inventions which must be "novel", "useful" and "non-obvious". A smart mix of things that already exist would not be patentable unless it is "inventive", "novel", useful" and "non-obvious". If it is all of these, it should be patentable whether it is software or hardware. (Note however that laws of physics, mathematical formulas, etc. are not patentable.)

What's broken is not the concept of a patent, what's broken is its implementation. Patent applications that do not satisfy the set criterion often get accepted. "Non-obvious" often is equated to "currently non-existing" even though it may be very obvious. (In fact, one of the ways to show non-obviousness of an idea is to show non-existence of it in spite of the problem being existing for long.) As you stated, it is difficult to have a "smartness" value for a software (and I think even hardware) patent.

Another reason why the real-life implementation is broken is that people and companies want it to work both ways based on whether it is helping them or working against them. But nothing specific to software here, the same happens for hardware too.

What needs fixing is the implementation, not the idea itself of the patents, be it software or hardware.

Edit: Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
I would argue the opposite problem: those who are interested in math at the college level are forced to sit through two years of applications-based mathematics before ever touching the theory behind it. Nearly all of higher-level undergrad mathematics is hidden behind courses designed to teach engineers problem solving techniques using calculus. As a result, the intro calc courses don't do a particularly good job of imparting either theory or applications, unless you have an unusually talented professor. I came out of Calc II being able to solve some nasty integrals only to realize that you really only need a couple simple techniques, and with no idea how to set up problems until I went through a few physics courses. What was the point of all that - we could have learned integration by parts and u-substitution in a two week session and moved on, or actually spent a semester of analytical work preparing for higher level math.

(edit: differentiation -> integration)
"At my school, it wasn't intro programming courses that weeded out so many CS students, it was sophomore level discrete math. That class had a 50+% failure rate."

At my school, the CS program was designed so that the Intro to Programming class and the Calc I class were filter functions: students had to get at least XX% in one and YY% in the other in order to be admitted to the CS program (and thus be permitted to enroll in the upper level courses required for the degree). As at your school, more students bombed the Calc class than the CS class.

There was no effort made at disguising the filtering function of these courses - in fact, when program enrollment was high, XX and YY increased, and when program enrollment fell around 2004-2005 they decreased (at one point YY was 50%, effectively meaning you simply had to pass the class).
Yes, we block IPs that seem to be crawlers ignoring robots.txt. We've always blocked abusive IPs, but I tightened up the blocking a few weeks ago. A lot of people were crawling HN, most of them unnecessarily because they were doing things they could have done more efficiently through HNSearch's API.

Some users may remember that the site had gotten really slow a few weeks ago. One of the reasons it's faster now is that we cracked down on crawlers.