skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I probably average spending around six hundred dollars a month on hard drives, before the price hike, so I've been watching this closely.

what I found interesting was that prices shot up almost immediately if you buy on line or through a distribution channel, but at Fry's? it took over a week, and even now, prices are lower at Fry's than at newegg, if fry's has stock.

That's the kicker; 'enterprise' stock at Fry's is hit or miss at the best of times.

On the other hand, Fry's quickly started getting serious about the 'limit X' - normally, if you want ten hard drives marked "limit 2" you ask a sales person, and they print you out five quotes. You take it to the front and get your ten drives. Not anymore. Now they actually limit you to the limit.

I was able to buy enough 2tb RE4 drives to hopefully carry me through the end of the year.

The other thing I did right away was test my stash of used and questionable drives, and return the bad ones. That's another 10 or 15 drives right there, The testing took a period of days (and I returned bad drives as I found them) - the replacements are trickling back, and it looks like all of them, at this point, are in the mail. But if this behavior was common, e.g. people that had large stashes of broken drives laying about that they returned all at once when news of the shortage hit? I can only imagine that the stresses on their stock for warranty returns are making the problem worse.

Oh, also note, I have some 3tb, 7200rpm 'consumer grade' drives (hatachi and seagate) new, sealed, that I bought for a storage project that is suddenly looking not as realistic. I'd be willing to trade them for 'enterprise' drives of smaller capacities; contact me if you have 500g 'raid edition' drives or similar and want to trade.
How to Change a Tire
I couldn't agree with you more araneae, personally I am tired of seeing the statements where it is hinted that you need to have done xyz otherwise you have no business calling yourself a (good) programmer.
I know people who haven't touched those books and they may be considered the so-called "bad" java programmers, yet that is not the case...these people know the intricacies of J2EE, have read & understood the many JSRs and have in-depth knowledge of the many java libraries and frameworks..yet they are not traditional computer scientists with CS backgrounds
Hmm, I think it depends on what "meaningful" means. I don't mean to break out the Clintonisms but it depends on what you are looking for. I've worked in hardware product firms, software product firms, and trading firms.

Is it "meaningful" to spend my days figuring out ways to get more people to click on more adverts? Not really. Build a social network for dogs' left testicles? Not really. Squeeze another dollar out of the equity markets? Not really. Build a faster database? Build a web analytics tool so people can squeeze out a few more conversions? Take a few cycles out of a market data feed handler to lower latency for a trading algorithm? No, no, and nope.

Are there good side effects from the above? Sure, we can come up with examples. For finance, you can take a look at the tightening of spreads (e.g. hft tends to make spreads go to their minimum making trades cheaper for everyone). Or adding liquidity in regular conditions so when someone small like a retail user comes along to sell some stock they get a good price quickly (not always of course, I mean really, you expect smart teams to take obviously dumb trades in an illiquid market?). Or more rapid price discovery (i.e. if something is mispriced it tends to get arb'ed away pretty rapidly, so that is faster info dissemination).

Can it be fun? Sure. Is it more good for the world than bad? Yup, I think so. Is it /meaningful/? Is it bollocks.

None of the above is meaningful compared to other things in my life. Important things like my family and trying to leave the world a better place than I found it (e.g. I give to charity -- probably more than most will ever earn).

That, and I'm with Vonnegut. "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.".
Sony Nextep:Technology Beyond Your Thinking Power
Right now, just "number of nodes". But that's definitely something we'll be adding soon.
See my answer just above.

tl;dr no more or less than other silicon valley jobs I've had, but then again, I don't expect it to compare to the important stuff in life.
My first "real" job was with a software company, in the QA department. I got lucky getting that job, as I had no requisite skills. Anyway, I wanted to learn how to program. I took a C class at a local university. I remember, vividly, being so frustrated that I was in tears when trying to learn about pointers and recursive functions. Very basic to me now, but at the time, extremely frustrating - I simply didn't understand the concepts. I reached out to a few of the developers at that company and they helped me. I'm not a stud programmer, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I've made a good living over the years - and I have not once programmed in C since that class. BUT --- the things I learned in that class have helped me tremendously. For example, it helped me when I was programming in VB and needed to tap into raw winapi functions. A combination of C programming basics, along with OS basics, will get you a LONG way when trying to understand and solve challenges you'll come across in "normal" programming challenges.
Man this is some awesome stuff. I wish it was smaller though. Any chance of a minified version?
In the case of a business, that business had to grow to justify the increase in value, and that growth typically occurred via some taxable event, such as income. Then, that growth makes the business more valuable. If you sell your interest in the business, you pay taxes again on the increased value.

So, yes, double taxation. Very similar to the double taxation experienced when taking in taxed business income and using it to pay taxed salaries. It's a repeated net drain on the economy, which occurs almost every time money changes hands.
I think everyone is tired of the flood of coupon startups, but the argument there is simply it is generally a stupid thing to be focusing your engineering talents towards. This ivory tower argument about the new global middle class is unnecessary and effectively tries to apply a business-centric argument to something that is much more obvious: life is short, why are you working on the 100th daily deal or cat photo site?
FrejNorling,

Thanks for posting this. If you want to see what's coming, visit http://beta.experts-exchange.com for a sneak preview.

ep
Actually, TouchFire does hide itself when you don't need it. It quickly retracts when you want to use the entire screen, and you can easily pop it back up when you want to type again.

All use cases are equal, but some are more equal than others. Being able to touch-type fast without looking at the iPad's screen is a pretty big deal...
Propane services Idaho
Don't forget that companies are in the end made up of individuals. The key is when those individuals find it difficult or impossible to innovate within the confines of the company. This is what you should look for as it is the trigger that results in the inevitable downfall. The individual starts to look elsewhere (even starting their own company) and thus a new giant, monolithic corporation is born.
By IE, I assume you mean IE8-; IE9 has an excellent SVG implementation, and IE10 continues to improve.

Chrome Frame is an excellent option, especially now that it doesn't require administrator privileges to install. I wish I could recommend SVG Web, but it's still work to use, and necessarily slow. You can use D3 without SVG, but there are other DOM incompatibilities with IE8-, and besides, you can't do much interesting stuff without fast JavaScript and vector graphics. (And if you're generating static graphics, there are easier ways.)

The best option, of course, is to do whatever you can to get your users to switch to a modern, standards-compliant browser. If we all move forward together, it gets easier.
How Much Does The Internet Weigh
How Much Does The Internet Weigh
The estimate is based on the size of the Internet of five years ago, however, is a little dated. And it is only the energy required for the operation of the Internet.
Well all that is true until Google launches something like siri but better, because they have been doing voice recognition and (of couse) search for long time.
I'm guessing it has something to do with a lot of people confusing which direction is the "savings" time. As in, did we just enter or leave DST? (I hear people making this mistake or its converse every year.) "Summer" time is harder to make that mistake with.
In the clicks of a mouse, a betrayal
Daily7nov11
"The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product."

yeah, it's not like increases in productivity could simply create a surplus that is then directed into other sectors. I write for the economist and cannot into economics hurrdurr. This is like saying that a machine that lets me do laundry faster is bad because I don't need to do 20 loads of laundry per day.
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This only one of the many task a radiologists must handle, including interaction with patient, which is the most important task. We are far away from replace that service with Ai.

Well, yes, except that when an algorithm is doing all diagnosis and analysis, and all you need is someone with bedside manner to interact with the patient, your job requirements go from "N years at a good medical school" to "Experience as a receptionist". It is virtually guaranteed that compensation for this type of position will be driven downward.
https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/d3.min.js

20K minified and gzipped. You can also make custom builds using the provided Makefile. (And maybe use something like Ender for an even more specific build?)
I think the threat Siri poses to Google is that it relegates Google to the background.

People on Smartphones can ask a question of Siri in 2~3 seconds as opposed to typing that question in Google within 10~20.

And if Siri can't answer the question she offers to send you to Google without having to type that question again.

I've never used Android search before, but I hope it's as good as Siri if Google wants to stay competitive.
I'm heavily using CS for my new business and I absolutely love it. I can't thank you enough for being brilliant enough to create it.
Google has one advantage for the time being in being able to support more languages and regions.

My Siri can't give me directions or maps in Japan yet which is a bit of a disappointment. Hopefully it'll be rectified soon.
Does it blow anyone else's mind that we have a piece of technology 9 billion miles away and we are actually talking to it?!
yeah, standards of living will remain stagnant as the evil rich overlords accrue ever increasing wealth!

Oh wait 200-2010 was the single greatest decade in all of human history for the amount of people raised out of subsistence living to a reasonable standard of living and 2010-2020 promises to be even better.

Darn reality messing up my morality plays. Real life is not a status game.
I've never had to deal with OSHA. I managed to get them to consult some of our former safety guy's recommendations that they had apparently forgotten about and find some stuff that addressed the heat issues. So they spent a few grand or so on swamp cooler fans to cover areas they should have a long time ago and they got some of those cheap necklaces that absorb water. Those work much better than fans, BTW, though it can be hard to get people to wear them (ironically, I had to badger the one guy who needed one the most and he benefited more than anyone).

A lot of things were forgotten, I guess, because the guy responsible for safety was laid off back in 2008 or something like that, which is probably what made them seem so nervous.

Anyhow, no one got sick from the heat, and this was a downright miserable summer, even by Arizona standards, and we did pretty good from the look of things. Nobody has anything to sue over that I know about. I'm not the type who'd sit back and watch someone get hurt if I could prevent it.
> [Tests] only catch certain classes of errors. But, when you have them, you have the assurance that the code behaves as it does in the test when the same conditions occur in production.

The trouble is, tests typically don't guarantee to catch an entire class of errors. Rather, each test guarantees to catch one specific case, and when you write your tests you try to cover a useful number of representative cases.

This is not to say that executable tests don't have their place, of course, but the plural of "unit test" is not "proof". On the other hand, if you can verify a certain property totally via your type system then executable tests for that property are unnecessary.
Great article. I haven't used App Engine before but plan to very soon. I was just at the Google Developer conference in South Africa and the reason they cited the price increase was to force more efficient implementations, implying that the cheap pricing allowed people to be lazy. At the time I thought that was a positive spin, but it seems to have worked in this case. Good work!
Learn Calculus
ORMs encourage bad database design and little interoperability on the db level.

On short folks build their db around the ORM instead of vice versa.
Upon reflection, I'm guessing that the managers weren't technically allowed back inside per the policy, but were the only people there safely able to ignore that policy and stay warm....

Though I guess they could've been helping the fire department locate the fire or something; I'm sure it'd take quite a while to check for fires before giving an all clear.
Fair call. I intended to say the same thing with my comment, but I should have been clearer (rather than appearing to encourage a flame war). Sorry 'bout that.
good, google creates more value than the average government program.
>People on Smartphones can ask a question of Siri in 2~3 seconds as opposed to typing that question in Google within 10~20.

Umm...Siri is cool, but that's not the advantage over Android. Android has had awesome voice recognition built in for ... over a year now? Not sure exactly how long, but my wife's dirt cheap ($150 with no contract) phone does voice recognition really well. I haven't had to type in a search query (with a 3G or WiFi connection active) since I got my new Android phone, either.

In addition to the basic Google search, it will send you to Google Navigation, send SMS messages to a friend in your contacts, and other things (I don't have the list in front of me). Siri adds to it by having a bit more context ("when I get home", for instance). It's cool, but it's not the voice recognition that's new. Except on the iPhone.

The big significance to Google is that it cuts them out of the iPhone search. But there are more Android phones than iPhones already, and the Android is growing faster, so that's becoming less relevant as well.
I'm not sure, but it could be that the math text books are just plain bad. I did a rant about this a few years ago when a friend was homeschooling her kids: http://boston.conman.org/2004/01/21.1
I felt that the GP's point was a little stronger than the one you're making here. If you're just saying that society has adjusted to incorporate these new technologies, yes, that's true. I don't mean to argue against that. Not having a cell phone is a greater inconvenience nowadays than it was in the '50s, but I still think you're overstating things if you say you need one, and definitely if you say you need one that costs anywhere in the ballpark most people pay (one friend of mine makes about $700 a month and pays $80 of that for her phone). If you're paying more than like $5 a month, you're paying for convenience.

And thanks for the correction on landlines. It's been forever since I had one, so I didn't know how much they cost these days. My bad on that one.
Health Risks With Obesity
Its the third that's bible-based maths. :-/
I had a very similar experience. During my internship with said startup, there was talk of giving me some equity at the end of the summer, going big and doing some really nice and fancy things.

At the end of the summer, I wasn't even paid for the work I did (this was supposed to come in a lump sum at the end summer). I could have tried to harass them but concluded that it wasn't worth the effort as things could have gotten really nasty.

The lump sum was pretty much peanuts anyway, and wouldn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things.

My takeaway from the episode was the experience of building a lot of really cool software, and because of the work I did over the summer, I've gotten interview calls from Ebay, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, and the list goes on.....

Life is too short to be stuck on things you have no control over. Take the positives from the experience and move on.
Do you realize that there is almost 20% real unemployment?

This means that employers who are actually hiring have so many applicants, if you don't answer the phone, they just go to the next applicant.

This isn't the Google hiring process. This is where there are 50 applications for a single opening at a crappy part time customer facing service job like the McDonald's drive-through.
> a mass effort to take . . . smart unemployed adults, and administer some simple tests to see if they have large amounts of hidden programming talent, screw the college degree.

This is the huge fucking source of programming talent that has remained largely untapped ever since CompSci became a recognized standard for employment qualification, due to the "monkey see, monkey do" best practices effect in businesses across the US. That blind best practices urge in hiring processes, in fact, keeps many actual programmers unemployed while firms in need of programming talent lobby congress to make it easier to import talent from other countries to fill the void created by their own hiring practices.

It's a perverse market right now.
I don't care how much my boss is making, I make enough money. How can you be happy worrying about everybody else's salaries?
Just to note, the iPhone has had voice recognition for a couple years as well (since the 3GS).
Pox parties taken to the next (illegal) level
Salesforce & Verizon Help Pump $15m More Into Urban Airship
Anybody still watches teh moviez?
I agree. C is a great language to learn at first. It's exacting and forces you to think like a programmer, but it isn't that hard to do very basic things. It's only when it comes to building larger, useful programs that it becomes difficult. The key though is you learn a lot of low-level stuff that's really useful later.
Hear, hear.

This is the reason that we need a wage for displaced workers. People who will probably never work again, due to lack of education or ambition. It's socialism, yes, but are we going to be responsible for allowing millions of people to become beggars while we enjoy the fruits of our labors?

I started my career right out of uni by developing software which eliminated hundreds of low skill jobs. Hundreds... really, what can you say about that? That I should pat myself on the back for boosting productivity by 3000% for a junior programmer's wages? That someone else would have done it if I hadn't? That these people have been freed up from tedious, repetitive jobs to become the creative people they always wanted to be? Honestly, the excuses ring a bit hollow.

It's my belief that as a result of our efforts, our drive to untangle complexity, that there will likely be 50% unemployment in the US by the end of the next decade. Let's design for that. I wish that our mentally absent congressmen would give a damn about what is happening to our economy under their watch.
The Art of Naming a Startup
Combined Urban Airship + Simple Geo Take $15 Million Series C
That could be a portmanteau. Consider that "cartel" has "el" near the end, and "delicious" has it near the beginning. Voila, portmanteau: cartelicious.
So check this out. I finally have a data point to use to prove this. I've been out of there about six months. One of my friends recently transitioned male-to-female. This is a unique opportunity to find out, right?

She is now being passed up by people visiting her team's cube to ask about things regarding the service. Their default response is to go ask the guys in the cube instead.

"Welcome to my world", I said.
Starcraft II replays for MacOSX
The main reason it's not an option is because virtually no-one is interested in early 1900's style living in exchange for lots of free time. Most of the system's constituants want more, and to improve the lives of their children, so the system is not designed to accomodate the 1-week-a-year worker. It's hardly intentional- I can think of very few steady jobs that don't require at least a week just to get into the swing of things!

Now, if you worked at a good job that is actually 50x as productive (a waitress is probably not 50x as productive today as she was 100 years ago) I'd wager that you could work there for 1 year and live 1900's-style for the next 49, as I'm pretty sure 1900's-style subsitence farming is far more spartan than most people imagine.
As a programmer, I know that DST (and time zones and durations and relative times) are all problems to be solved in the presentation layer.

All business logic uses well-engineered, heavily tested third party libraries for time arithmetic. All data storage keeps time zones with timestamps and durations.

Anyone who argues that "I don't need to store timezones because all my dates are UTC" has a long and painfull learning curve ahead of them.
"how Python/Ruby/mobile apps/ditching my boss made me fall in love with programming again"

How many examples do we have without that qualifier (i.e. people who had never enjoyed in the past)?
What is the endpoint you have in mind?
And your vacuous optimism is any better?
I actually don't disagree with your opinion: I wouldn't pick C++ as an environment to introduce programming either. But your reasoning was frankly awful. If those are the reasons you think C++ is "too complicated", then you really need to spend some more time learning C++.
Not mine, just sharing the work of a friend.

This project aims to provide a quality Quick Look generator to display useful information about StarCraft II replays. The current version of the plugin (v1.0.0) correctly handles replays of StarCraft II patches 1.3.2 to 1.4.1
It's highly parallel, and suggests also how multiple agents might collaborate to seek a goal (such as blocking all the possible exits that a pac man might take). See section 3.2 of the paper (http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/OOPSLA06antiobj...) for an example of this. It's also an approach they've taught with some success to very young students. Seems extremely significant and need-to-know for anyone implementing game ai, even if they've already implemented other pathfinding algorithms. I'm certainly happy to see this! It's awesome and eye opening.
Add enough concurrent connections and CPU will be a bottleneck again.
You can enjoy programming and not necessarily enjoy slogging through books.
Maple syrup is great, but in the midwest, at least, most people don't eat it; instead, they put corn syrup with maple flavoring on their pancakes. Ugh.
They can't even buy the right numbers of T-Shirts (hint: unisex isn't. One word: breasts), so why would they get the big stuff right?

Seriously, ask any woman who's still left in SRE about the Mission Control jackets in 2008-9. There was an impressive post-mortem written about it earlier this year right before I left.