skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Never underestimate people's willingness to hideously degrade something beautiful to attain a small amount of practicality.

I'm always fascinated by people who buy iPhones because of the design and then slap the most horrifically ugly cases onto them. They would never have bought a phone in that state but are more than willing to transform it into that state having bought it.

> It's awesome because of how much it can do across use cases.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. The iPad is exactly good because it does a number of specific use cases extremely well but it is not really good at generalizing from those. In many ways Apple has gone out of their way to stop that.

Eg: if you really do a lot of typing and have to have a tablet, I'd think something like an ASUS Transformer is a better device, not just because it has a keyboard but because the whole ecosystem is better for that (eg: the device has a file system shared between apps, you get a mouse cursor, happily accepts external media, etc.). It was meant to be used in a huge number of different ways not anticipated by its makers. But it does not do the things that the iPad is meant for as well as the iPad does.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou I have stupidly lost the link to this site and was unable to find it since. I've also used http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html, but it's not nearly that usable.
Here you go http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath... Shipped direct from Oak Ridge!
Try exploring http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

The later has weekly mission reports all the way back to 1995. I also just submitted information about its onboard computers:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204224
Yes, that is why I think it would require a sufficiently large part of the market to be afraid to be on the losing side that could make them combine their strengths.

As to that Dropbox WebDAV support: I just checked, and unfortunately, I was wrong (http://www.dropbox.com/help/62). There is third-party WebDAV support for dropbox (dropDAV.com), but that, IMO, barely counts.
JRuby just piggybacks on Java. That doesn't invalidate my point, as far as I can tell.
A URL shortener that uses memorable word combinations instead of hashes
I don't know if companies are allowed to let immigration affect their firing decisions. But, in terms of how other human beings are treated, there is a difference for the holder of a temporary visa...

If an H-1B visa holder is laid off or quits, the visa immediately expires. That leaves two main options: almost immediately find another job (at a company willing to spring for a new visa, no less), or leave the United States within a very short period of time. And when the economy is bad, good luck with that first "option"; the replacement job has to be visa-class, it can't just be flipping hamburgers.

A temporary visa doesn't last long (1-3 years), but it's a rotten status to be in if there's a layoff. Imagine: you're living somewhere new, you've made friends, you have possessions, and suddenly in addition to having been fired your life is turned upside down; and if you don't sort it out quickly you'll be given a plane ticket and told never to return.

So while companies probably aren't allowed to consider any of this when choosing who to fire, I wish they would.
true, but their product is not software, nor do the dev team develop anything outward-facing. i'm not saying that some of the funds aren't great places for a techie to work (anecdotally, if jane street capital had an office in san francisco i'd have been tempted to apply there), it's just that there is no perception of them as enjoyable places for a dev to work. pushing money around simply doesn't excite me, and i daresay a lot of other devs (especially those who work in product companies) would feel the same way.
This will just encourage people to burn instead of shredding.
This post is from 2008, so the next post is already posted here http://prog21.dadgum.com/16.html?_
Mistake Made By Newbies In MLM
At Google, Sr. SWE makes about $155K if female, about $180K if male. Base salary. Bonuses and refresher grants are also skewed accordingly.

These are 2011 numbers, personally researched.
That's actually a really good point. When I wrote that I was typically using single user Linux systems, but as a general tutorial this issue should at least be explained. I'll update it as soon as I can find a few spare moments. Thanks for thinking of that!
I got it from a geologist buddy of mine a few years ago, I think he said he found it lying around in Arizona. It's fairly harmless, just looks like a rock really (unless you have a gieger counter).

As far as I know, there are no restrictions on such things. You can pick up pieces of uranium glass and old fiestaware on ebay for a couple of bucks (both about as radioactive as my rock :)
I think the Berkeley starcraft AI used some similar concepts to move units around.
AP Denies Their Reporter Attended Rossi's Demonstration, They Says "Stay Tuned"
in austria it is always before. heck, i know a lot of people who don't even know how much they make after taxes
Pythy syntax for C++
Yeah, this is unfortunately common, but it's also fairly common for professors to give their students a free book, or one that costs whatever the university bookstore charges for printing a spiral-bound softcover book. That usually happens with professors whose class notes grew over the years to the point where they basically formed a textbook, but for various reasons (disinterest, saturated market, etc.) they didn't take the final step of actually publishing a textbook.
If that's the case, why in the world wouldn't they tell the guy?

Just a guess: worry of a lawsuit.

If they give no reason (as they are entitled not to), it's hard to make a "counter-attack". If they give any specific reason the OP potentially has some sort of discrimination angle to pursue.
precisely because i'm a developer. i want to spend my day writing code, not dealing with the myriad other concerns of running a business. (and, to a lesser but still significant extent, i want the security of a steady salary while i do so; i'm not by nature much of a risk-taker)
World of Warcraft and Minecraft: Models for our educational system?
I think one of the reasons that NoSQL databases have been oversold is that a lot of projects don't have people on them who are good at engineering databases. The result is that folks use ORM's badly.

If you are going to use the database just to store data structures form your program, you might as well use NoSQL db's. However, in most cases, you get integration and migration wins by:

1) Placing your engineering effort on the database. Looking at the sort of real world data you are collecting, modelling it well in the database and then presenting an API to the application. The API will either be a relational one (i.e. views) or a procedural one (stored procedures). After a couple of iterations, the schema shouldn't be being fundamentally changed too much though there could be some minor tweaking.

2) Now, with a good API you can build an application on the database using a methodology of your choice. This could be done in an agile way.

Now if integration is not a goal, then sure you can do all the data validation in your application and you can use NoSQL databases. But relational databases are also powerful integration tools in their own right. I can't imagine LedgerSMB, for example, doing well on anything else for this reason alone.
Why is the material taught different? Surely all kids should need to learn the same information.

Why is Minnesota cutting out so much of the math that California and Texas teaching? The students often end up going to the same colleges, where they will need to do the same work?
I switched from bloglines.com to google reader years ago. I went back and checked it out after the redesign disaster and it looks quite good. I think I'm switching back to that.
If you have a shortage, raise the price until you don't.
I don't know if they have posted in the "Who's Hiring" thread but Yipit are hiring, one of their developers mentioned they have sponsored people before, in another thread with regards to H1Bs see: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3203421

Note: I am not affiliated in anyway to Yipit
As someone who has dropped their iPhone and smashed the back up (thankfully it was not the other side), I can understand people buying ugly cases.
How about

eat = lambda chars: lambda s: s[1:] if s and s[0] in chars else None
alt = lambda p, q: lambda s: (lambda r: q(s) if r is None else r)(p(s))
seq = lambda p, q: lambda s: (lambda r: None if r is None else q(r))(p(s))

going a bit far in the short-names direction, oh well. :) It's too bad Python has this artificial statement/expression distinction.
Co-founder needed to work alongside mad scientist
Are you are interested in the parsing of the HTTP requests? I think I've recently seen some hand-coded state-based C implementation (I guess it can even be O(n)?) in some fast open-source HTTP server.
No. I am talking about something like LDAP, not OLAP. LDAP may suck badly in many many ways but it is almost exactly not like OLAP.

OLAP is typically used to refer to environments which provide complex reports quickly across huge datasets, so a lot of materialized views, summary tables, and the like may be used (as well as CUBEs and the like). Hierarchical directories are different. In a relational model you have to transfers the hierarchy to get the single record you want and you are not aggregating like you typically do in an OnLine Analytical Processing environment.

This is why OpenLDAP with a PostgreSQL backend sucks, while OpenLDAP with a non-relational backend (say BDB) does ok.

I am not saying anything new is under the sun, just that some of the old structures haven't gone away.
I think it's great that these teachers are taking initiative to make up for the system's deficiency (i.e. expensive textbooks targeted towards the biggest markets). However, I agree with this - I would hope that the goal would be enhancing learning, understanding, and appreciation of the subjects as opposed to passing the standardized tests. Granted, the two are not exclusive, but I think focusing on the first is more likely to lead to the second than the other way around.
I just tell people to use Swatch Internet Time when setting up meetings. Also known as Biel Mean Time, it has no Daylight Savings Time, and it's the same everywhere in the world.

Example: the time is currently @24 beats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Why I Write Ideas Every Day
The notion of weak artificial intelligence hurting the economy by taking away jobs is a complete misunderstanding of the situation. To understand why, you need to read and understand the parable of the broken window:

http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm

The key lies in seeing that when humans no longer have to do mundane repetitive tasks, then they are freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things. The last job to be completely automated is the programmer, engineer and designer. And that too will one day be automated. I like to believe that humans and AI will merge so that together, a human and the machine will always be more powerful/more in control than just the AI.
What you are describing in your last paragraph sounds a lot like Khanacademy...
>If growl didn't exist, every application would provide its own mechanism for notifications

As I see it now, as a developer, growl doesn't exist anymore. I loved using it both as a user to receive notification and as a developer to send them to users, but I now I feel there is no way I can rely on it anymore.

Even if I was selling my software instead of giving it away, I'd have a hard time asking users to swallow that pill "oh, now go buy this other thing to make my software work".
> CPython was never explicitly engineered for performance, whereas the JVM had decades of work poured into it.

* Often IO latency and throughput is such that fast CPU processing doesn't really matter. IO is the bottleneck and Python is often fast enough.

* Look @ speed and improvements in PyPy (keeping in mind their team size and budget) in just recent years vs JVM's man hours over the years. Just because there were decades of performance poured into it, doesn't make something proportionally better.
The outcry for Cassini was because they were going to use Earth for a slingshot boost. People were worried they would miss and it would crash (despite a gravitational slingshot never having failed in that way in any other launch).

In response NASA ordered Cassini to navigate slightly away from Earth, and NASA would transmit orders for it to redirect to earth at the last minute.

It made no real sense, but I suppose this way just in case NASA vanished into a alien portal Cassini would not crash into the earth :)
Be aware of your position and play accordingly
This should just be called "How Not to Teach." It doesn't matter what subject we're talking about, if these factors are in play (bad teacher, bad book, mostly irrelevant tests), students won't learn.
How To Get Visalus Science Leads Online  A TO Z Article Directory
Knewton Gets $33M For Online Learning In Colleges, K-12
Killer Videos: How To Create Killer Videos without Being on Camera
Would probably be cool if it worked?

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/_webapp25.py", line 701, in __call__
handler.get(*groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/s~reallyeasylink/5.354500738469749318/main.py", line 267, in get
self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'template_values' referenced before assignment
You do realize you're using one of them right now? I don't see any cat videos.
So I've heard. And yet, I can guarantee you Google has hired at least two dim bulbs. Well, that can happen. After all, it can only be so efficient, and some people sound a lot more intelligent than they really are (which is why we hired them).

But it all makes me wonder how good Google's internal processes are, and how long it's willing to wait for people to become productive.
> the founders hold zero risk

There is zero evidence for this claim.
The problem is that there are not a lot of people capable of doing engineering/programming jobs. It is one thing to make the transition from a farmer to a factory worker, but another entirely to move from a factory worker to an engineer.

The learning curve for the jobs that may be created might be too steep for those whose jobs were displaced.
Same here in Germany
Perhaps we can build a giant firewall to keep Illegal Intelligents out.
This was added in a version released this week. Prior to this it was impossible - which I suspect is what the parent is referring to.
I'd like to know how much of the $60 billion tax shortfall the US government doesn't receive ends up in being spent by Google (at their discretion) on public works, education etc.

I don't know enough to suggest this is (or isn't) the case, but perhaps this model would allow companies who genuinely want to look after their community to basically choose how money, that would otherwise be tax money, gets spent.

I think lots of people would rather see money spent on public health and education than lots of other areas tax money gets diverted to.

Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that this will take off anytime soon...
Ok, let me rephrase.

MySQL has a niche too. It's somewhere between that of a NoSQL database and that of a real RDBMS. MySQL does well for single app databases (as NoSQL does), but where the relational data then needs to be fed through other database systems for multi-app access.
Does History Say China Wins?
It is actually how most of the world works: you tend to remember people you meet in person (versus those who cold email or call you), and as long as the pitch is not canned or scripted (people who do this well can be very conversational about how they describe it), it can lead to a follow-up meeting and further discussion.
File this one under goofy-idea-I-had-and-rejected-due-to-aforementioned-goofiness.

That said, best of luck to y'all. (Seriously.)
My knowledge of international corporate tax law is practically nil, but if I understand this correctly, the money sitting in Bermuda is still subject to taxation when it gets brought back into the US; so Google isn't avoiding taxes, but is rather postponing taxes by doing this.
Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture.

Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on.

Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten.

Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.
Here is my email address so I can escape this painful conversation. It will be much easier to ignore your email.
The books the article mentions do know about both that parable, and the Luddite episode, and analyze extensively whether they apply to the current situation; as The Economists notes, some of the books are more optimistic than others. There's a bit of a dynamic aspect to it as well in terms of how the change happens and how human work patterns adapt in response. When people are "freed up to do far more powerful and interesting things", does this result in paid work at the same rate as the freeing-up happens? Or will there be significant lags where, say, 20-30% of the population might be unable to earn income at any given time? And how long-lasting will that be? Also, to the extent that automation running on robots and computers is what produces advances that humans could perhaps symbiotically work with, will everyone have access to the same starting point (software/hardware/etc.) so they can do so, or will there be a rich-get-richer feedback loop where the tools of automation are mainly in the hands of the better-off part of the population?

I don't really have a guess myself. I think it depends pretty sensitively on some hard-to-predict parameters; change some rates 2% here and 3% there and technological transitions (and the distribution of labor/wealth that results from them) look much different.
Off the top of my head: could be a breadth/depth thing, could be that the books are a union of California and Texas (in which case CA and TX also have the problem of unused chapters), or it could be that the time not spent on those chapters is spent on something that MN brings in with supplemental reading already or just teaches without a textbook.

It almost certainly isn't just that MN is a simple subset of the CA/TX material, or else the Byron district's scores wouldn't have gone up from the new material.
Show HN: Twitter for Debates
I don't see this as a bad thing, except:

In the 1950's people wondered what the future generations would do with all their free time. They predicted, correctly, that worker productivity would rise immensely. They also assumed that people would be just as wealthy while working much less.

People are wealthier in some ways. In america, its pretty much standard issue to own at least one car (partially perhaps because a car is needed to simply get a job in most areas).

But in other ways it does not seem like the average worker is as well-off as the past had predicted.

I could say things about concentration of wealth and other reasons the productivity gains were not matched by gains in free time, but I'm not sure I know enough to make those arguments.
I may have a biased sample, but six out of my seven engineer friends 25--35 have salary + bonus + equity in that range or higher. The only one not making that is at a very early stage startup. Even my friends making iPhone apps independently are in that range.
My title is literally Chief Handshaker at FreshBooks. I wheel and deal for a living.

When walking up to people randomly, I find it is immensely helpful to be genuinely interested in people. They will often pay you back the favour by being genuinely interested in you afterwards.

To be honest, I do what I do because I love people. They are endlessly interesting. I don't do it to build my Twitter follower count.

If you walk up pitching they will just turtle and get rid of you. Have faith they will ask you about you in due course.
Joe the forklift driver is never going to do powerful and interesting things when he loses his job. It's completely unrealistic.
What you want to index regarding a large text file and what indexes you can create and use may be different.
the root problem is that school funding and teacher's reviews are linked to the students' performance on standardised tests. another significant problem that this causes is that teachers who work with the kids who most needed it are harshly penalised by the way the metrics are structured (e.g. someone working with troubled kids from poor backgrounds, who manages to raise their standardised test scores from an F to a C, and, more importantly, taught them how to learn, will still be rated far worse than someone who has simply drilled a classroom full of bored upper middle class kids till they can do well on the tests (whether or not they have actually learnt anything))

this article, for example, is a good read on the subject: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/06/27/ed...
I don't understand why anyone is surprised or bothered that this would be an anonymous post.

Has anyone commenting ever used a piece of software that caused them major problems, while watching others with less experience talk about how great it is? For me, it is beyond my capabilities to refrain from speaking up about it.

His identity does not matter, and it would start a war between people or companies. He is not interested in doing that, and he is not speaking on behalf of a company. There is not really any other way to do it.

Sometimes people need to put information out there but don't want to be personally associated with the information. This is fairly logical, because they are not associated with the information. They just discovered what was already true.
They can always spend it elsewhere.
If you believe H-1B's are there to address a "talent shortage" I have a bridge to sell you. Tech companies use them to lower costs and help to suppress the wages of American workers. That said, makecheck is right, in that an employer is sponsoring an H-1B so if they are laid off they may have to essentially be deported. All, in all, I don't blame the people who come here on H-1B's but I really feel that there are enough unemployed, under-employed or under-developed workers here that could fill the jobs if there truly was an interest in doing this.
In addition to the documentation, videos from the conferences are a great place to start:

http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongoboston-2011/schema-d...
http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongosf-2011/practical-sc...