skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I for one welcome our self-replicating Teutonic arachoid robot overlords
It is relevant since movement from their hands/body can change the outcome.

With a tripod there would be no blur, but the picture quality would still shine through. The amount of noise difference in each phone's photos is very noticeable.

In an experiment all the conditions should be the same except for the variable, which in this case is the phone.
Maybe you should go for Fraunhofer in Germany. They are doing applied research which usually means that they work with industry partners. The jobs they offer are research positions and some of them might also be for people working towards their PhD. They have several locations throughout the country but IT is pretty strong in Berlin which might also give you an opportunity to dig more into the many startups there.
Yelping with Cormac
Dominos Pizza and Your Privacy
Angry Birds Backpack for School-Aged Children
Articles from Alison Benjamin
Just click the little down-arrow in the upper-right corner of a post, and you'll get various options for hiding posts and unsubscribing.

This is, by the way, something that has been possible for quite some time now.
this is so awesome! my god i've wanted this for so long.

i just want to make sure you know that you at least have SOME users (me) who really LIKE how you have handled preferences. I much prefer your implementation to other OS X apps.

If you can improve on a formula, no need to stick with that formula. It's a philosophy that worked for Steve Jobs...

Good f'ing work man!
[sorry. replied earlier incorrectly]. one of the two transactions would abort in this case. snapshot isolation needs to check that any data mutated in the transaction were not also mutated externally. in the example you are replying to, there is no mutation, and so no problem, but in your example there is. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation

note that it's only mutated values that are checked for conflicts, and only against other mutations (this is why it is efficient - the number of checks required is small). so you can get weird behaviour when multiple values are read while different transactions change each - there's a good example in the link above. this is called "write skew".

the whole approach is, in a sense, exploiting poor phrasing of the ansi sql-92 standard, which doesn't actually require serialisation even though that is the most natural way to interpret it (as far as i understand things). so you can think of MVCC as "exploiting a loophole" that leads to a more efficient system, but one that is less intuitive. on the other hand, this is not new - it's already the standard behaviour for postgres, oracle, sql server, etc.
If you step back you'll realize these are all failures of HTML and the latency of networks that we have to work around, not requirements.

For caching, why do I have to reload a whole page just to change the article part? The HTML 'it's a document' obsession and terrible DOM model that took so long to be updated.

Why don't I define a high level presentation document and then sub-documents? Network latency and the total bizarreness of CSS selector priority.

Screen size. Why can't you dock elements on a page like form based programming language for the last 10/15 years? HTML doesn't have the ability.

And as for accessibility? If accessibility is taking hints from markup about how to present the page, in reality the mark up is tightly coupled to presentation anyway. Accessibility is tightly coupling the markup to the presentation, what it really means is screen readers can format the content nicely without the need for a style sheet.
>I often wondered whether people like Jobs have any ability to see themselves (and others) objectively, and whether that lack of ability [...]

Couldn't it be the other way around? That he saw, as through looking at the Earth from space, his devices being shipped all the way around the world, knowing that any small imperfection or minor annoyance would be replicated millions of times over. In this perspective, a little sweat and tears and even going through dozens of iterations on the part of the inventor seems small compared to millions of man-hours of frustration around the globe.
"Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick."

...As measured by standardized testing, on a good day, and when you analyze the data the right way. And who knows what sorts of longterm problems KIPP could be causing in these kids and within their communities.

The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children, so I think KIPP is really just a hail mary attempt to try to buy some time before the whole system collapses.
Ambitious project to develop biological equivalent of operating system
This is the exact problem cited in the original post. Why are we designing for hypothetical users when we have actual users to design for?
"Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same."

This statement is enormously naive. Bill's money has to come from somewhere so the "everything else remained the same" is just not possible...

Unfortunately if people are getting much richer than other people it is necessarily at other people's expense - a reasonable approximation is to think of money like energy, which can never be created or destroyed (its not quite true) - Bill doesn't make his pile of money out of nothing leaving everything unchanged, the money he makes comes from other people's piles of money - these need not be poorer people, in fact I bet most of them are big businesses, but then they don't get their money from nothing either, and their budget decisions on how much to spend on MS software will be balanced alongside salaries etc... at any rate, that money moves around and naively, if you made too much you would quite literally be making everyone else poor. I don't have access to huge amounts of data needed to workout how this scales in reality and if Bill is anywhere near the point where he is almost certainly making everyone poorer, but it is a trivial consequence of the nature of money.

This is the nature of capitalism - if every one does what is in their best interest, some talented/lucky/greedy people will end up much better off with zero incentive to improve the situation for anyone else. Thankfully capitalism is merely an ideal and nobody follows it that blindly - Bill at least tries to give some of his money away to good causes lately...
Apple is Turned down by CBS over Apple TV ad-based deal
Yes, but from an application perspective your database will be left in an inconsistent state. The next morning the ops guys will have to call the dev guys to "repair" the database by hand.

Truth is ScalienDB runs in W=3 mode at about the speed MongoDB in W=1 mode, so this is not a trade-off that customers have to make.
Integrate your email systems with Google mail or MS mail. You'll quickly find that they do not accept bcrypt. Plain md5 or plain sha1 is all they support (at least that was the case two years ago). When you are forced to inter-operate with the big guys, you'll find not many actual use bcrypt.
BitBucket command line tool
It's C++ - so you get value types and operator overloading. Pretty useful for this kind of programming.

(I bet there's command line support too :)
It looks like a lot of their openings are only for post-graduates or only function as part-time studentships. However, thank you for the link and I will definitely spend more effort looking at their open positions.
Ask Brian Greene Anything
I guess nobody is interested in (or hates) App Engine anymore after pricing plan changes. That's what I think due to no comments in such a post.
Windows OS Coming to IBM Mainframe by Dec 16
Yes. And empathetic yet rational beings can then remind themselves that they have no right and no need to have the information, and can quietly let it pass.
Minibloq: Graphical programming environment for Arduino
Is Numis Network A Scam? Warning: This May Piss You Off
I haven't used mailgun's API (yet) but I worked on a fairly involved incoming email system that used sendgrid's parse API and I'm currently deciding between the two for another reply system. Sendgrid's parse API (in it's current state) is pretty basic - they forward anything that match the MX record to your endpoint without any process. Mailgun seems to smooth out a lot of the nasty things. In particular:
1) Signature/Quoted reply removal - this is the part I'm most excited about (and cautious about since I've seen how much of a headache this can be). We wasted countless hours tweaking regexs to handle weird signatures - if they can get to even 90% I'd be happy.
2) UTF-8 transcoding - Sendgrid tries to parse out which format things are but it's still up to you to get it into UTF-8 (or whatever format you want it in). This wasn't a huge problem, but every now and then gmail would decide to use some really specific character sets that we had trouble converting (this could also be partially a PHP issue)
3) Routing on their server - this wasn't a big deal for what we were building, but it'd be nice to isolate the routing code from the processing code and have actual rules rather than just a catch all.

The other nice thing is that with sendgrid's pricing changes, you can't start to play with the parse API unless you're willing to shell out $80/month. Mailgun lets you use it on the free plan and it's only $20/month for custom domains.
And they don't work - at all - without JavaScript.
Yeah, those are Blasto, Adventure, and Miner 2049er on a TI-99/4A that overheated and had a graphical glitch.
It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't. Or at least can't as effectively.

The rich can run for office much easier than the middle and lower classes.

The rich can monopolize new markets by simply undercutting new entrants.

I'm sure there's many more examples than this of how by concentrating vast wealth to a few people you cut out opportunities for everyone else.
One of the most beautifully animated web pages
http://www.slaveryfootprint.org/

Scroll to "What?" it's very clever, smooth and usable!
On Facebook there's a "Hide all by this poster..." or similarly-worded option in the context menu in the top-right of the post (appears on hover as a globe). This is how I stop myself from seeing updates from things I hate on my falsified profile.
Gay For a Day, Part 1
The Des Moines Post
hmm? you mean like every other journalistic entity out there? Journalistic Purity aside, WikiLeaks was a journalistic entity and did deserve our protection.

We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like.

What kills me about this is that people seem to support that status quo.
Lots of mumbling about how wikileaks should have redacted <whatever> and no outrage at all about how easy it was for this voice to be silenced by our government as soon as it suited them.
Doesn't exactly sound like a "lottery" to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit...

Basically: they have prerequisites for parental involvement (i.e. your parents have to be willing to work at your schooling too), and a high attrition rate (i.e. they throw out the underperformers). That's not a random sample, it's self-selected for people who do well in it.

This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, or that it doesn't work. But it means you have to be very careful about pronouncing it "working well."
Microsoft Active Directory Server systems use MD4 in their central distributed credential database (ntds.dit). Yes, that's a 4, not a 5... MD4. This is the strongest storage hash that one can use in Active Directory.

Shock and horror when geeks meet the real-world. Yes, I know.
I wonder if there's a market for a kind of paid mentorship, for developers looking to improve their design.. A few emails a week and one or two face to face meetings / Skype sessions ...

"wow.. You really need to work on typography.. Let's look at these examples .. I'll send you some homework. Now let's talk about the color theory you went through this week.."
> The message passing code simply does not look like C.

Arguably that's a very good thing, because passing a message has very different semantics from calling a function. Making the syntaxes of these operations identical would encourage a lot of confusion between two very different operations.
Your last sentence has a conflict in it. You are thinking about open-sourcing the project, but you still want to control it? That doesn't sound very open.

Are you at a point where you can launch something? Do you have any feedback from potential users or customers?

Launch before you think it is done. You didn't provide enough details about progress so I will make some assumptions. Scale down your startup to a Minimum Viable Product. Do you have any data that points to this startup generating any income right away to pay off any such debt?
Sure this would have made for a more scientific experiment, but I still argue that such a controlled experiment is less relevant to a user's real experience with the phone because the photos wouldn't look anything like the photos one would actually take. I assume the shooter tried to maintain a consistently steady hand throughout.

The motion blur is significant because it speaks to the increased aperture/ decreased exposure time in the 4S, which are both part of the phone wouldn't you agree? On a tripod these aren't crippling to the quality of the photo like they actually are.
Welcome to LUKESHAVAK.com
Yeah, that last paragraph didn't make sense to me either. I think her point is that for all the systemization and professionalization of knowledge over the last several decades, the boom(s) leading up to the financial crisis were just as irrational and ultimately ephemeral as the false wealth of the roaring 20s, when the financial sector was a comparative free-for-all.
At first blush, this seems absolutely delightful. I'd second most of ComputerGuru's critiques and add that:

1. I find it odd that Preferences is a tab versus its own dialog. I shouldn't need to access it that often, so I don't think it merits the same visual prominence as my library or playlists.

2. If you stick with the all-in-one window approach, it seems like you should fold the "About" and "Check for Updates" dialogs into the main window, possibly as siblings to the Preferences items.

3. I wish the currently playing song was visually highlighted in the main library view.

4. I can't seem to enqueue an entire playlist from the top level Playlists screen.

5. There's no intuitive way to go "back" after drilling into a Playlist's detailed view.

6. There's no easy way to look at the contents of several playlists one after another.

I feel like 5 and 6 could be solved by redesigning the top level playlists view to include both the lists of playlists and their contents, a la the Library view. I get the impression that ComputerGuru wants something similar in his note #7.

Bravo! This is great!
Man, finally somebody that doesn't install stuff on the screencast
Thanks for the feedback. The "why" section is definitely on my radar. Also, I'll eventually port this over to either ruby, or c++. I know it's kind of a pain to have to install node.js, and NPM.
The Xerox star did not have overlapping windows at the time the mac group got to see it. I believe it had popup menus but no concept of a common menubar with pulldown menus the way mac had (and still has). Some of the features it lacked then were added later - overlapping windows was among them.

One account of the differences is here:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_a...

According to Bruce Horn:

"There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk. [Xerox PARC Alto Workstation] Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others.

The [Apple] Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable software. The Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures."
I'm not really following you. "Make a list of all the different things that would break" - these things are things that are in use today by real people. No hypothetical people involved.
A lot of this is based on assumptions, but unless the study was somehow able to seperate "parenting" from pre-school attendence as an intervening variable, I don't necessarily think it's counter to his assertion.

I would argue that pre-school attendance could be a very strong indicator of parenting quality, if we can even try to quantify such a thing.

On the other hand, lack of pre-school could indicate a parent taking the pre-schooling responsibility upon themselves and providing a rather spectacular "home pre-school" environment.
This isn't terribly amazing. I paid $130 for my Android phone, and pay $25/month through Virgin Mobile.
But this disk, unless I'm mistaken, can be updated on the fly. It also provides a primitive starting point to read our current storage mediums, which if the world were to end in 2012 could provide an alien civilisation a glimpse of what we were (if they take the journey).
No offence, but find me a CMS or plugin that can make me facebook or basecamp.

Or any app to be honest. If you want to make a nice application, that path is not in the slightest bit open to you.

For simple websites I agree and say the same thing, otherwise, no.
Sweeeet! Will you be mentioning something on twitter when this goes live? Or do you have a mailing list to which I can surrender my e-mail address?
I think it helps a lot in situations where you can't link. TV, radio, word of mouth etc. Currently you would have to tell people to search for your page rather than get them to remember a short /brand
You seem to have checked in a '.DS_Store' there. A good example of why you should explicitly add files, not use wildcards. ;)
I'd have to agree with this. I also use the iTunes music store, so it'd be nice if Enqueue kept up to date with music downloads (and synced music imports to Enqueue back to iTunes too).
Poor children attending preschool doesn't necessarily mean that schooling is the answer. It could be that the parents who would send their kids to preschool (regardless of socioeconomic background) are the kind of parents who give their kids the skills needed to succeed later in life. There are tons of confounding variables when it comes to stuff like this, so the jump from "preschool is a good predictor of life success" to "we should invest more in preschools" isn't necessarily a logical one. Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.
"In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult."

Great that means that 40% of the top two-fifths will be from people who earned their way up, instead of being born into it. Tyranny of meritocracy indeed, I mean what kind of uppity lower class kids are we raising who think they can earn wealth instead of inheriting it!
QR codes suffer from a bunch of problems - not least of which is that it's cumbersome to read them.

iPhone? Need to find/pick/install/test an app.
Likewise for Android (I think).
BlackBerry's got reader software baked-in, but you'd never find it organically (why is the easiest way to get it open through BBM's Scan a Group Barcode option?).

In the time it took to do that, a user could have just typed the URL in, and known exactly what would happen. I'm on a BlackBerry, and even though I know how to run my QR reader, it's still easier and quicker for me to just type it in manually.

Similarly, it often seems the people who design posters/ads that feature QR codes have no concept of how you'd scan them - if there's a code on a billboard that's three stories up a building, there's no way my camera will pick that up. Conversely, if the ad is a subway poster (which I'll never be more than 3ft from), you don't need a 4ft diagram.

The marketer in me (and everyone) loves them because they allow metrics down to the individual poster/magazine edition, and make it easy - in theory - to jump from something physical to something online. Actual users don't care about them, because there's no perceived increase in value or convenience over the tried-and-true-and-well-understood method of just Googling the product name.
"though I'd want to see some data there -- there's was a recent study showing that for poor children attending preschool was a very good predictor of life success; this would seem to argue counter to your assertion"

In terms of data, here is the graph showing how SES effects achievement for school kids:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1655696/SES_and_school.jpg

It's a little difficult to read, but basically what you can see is that poor kids and rich kids learn roughly the same amount in school. The reason there is such a big gap is because A) there is a large gap that already exists when they get to Kindergarten and B) while rich kids are learn over the summer and get smarter, the poor kids are actually forgetting what they've learned the previous year.

If you want to learn about why there is already a 2 year gap before the kids get to kindergarten, you should read the book Meaningful Differences In The Everyday Experience of Young American Children.

The finding about within school differences vs. between school differences comes from the Coleman report, which is one of the largest social surveys ever conducted, and still one of the most important to date. I also have a blog post here explaining a bit about why within school differences are important:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/the-most-im...

If I remember correctly efficacy of preschool is mixed, and it depends a lot on the type of preschool. However, even the best preschools can never be as effective as good parenting at imparting language schools, for reasons that the Meaningful Difference book explains. (However, preschools may be good for other reasons.)
I too have never seen anyone actually scan one. They won't be around much longer.
This statement is enormously naive. Bill's money has to come from somewhere so the "everything else remained the same" is just not possible...

Only if you see money as a fixed quantity of dollars. We're really talking about purchasing power here.

Bill Gates invented a way to make anyone who used his products more efficient. (You can do a lot more with Windows than older OSes.)

Since everyone is more efficient, your $1 can buy more. Of course, you will probably choose to give some of your money to Bill Gates, but since the rest is worth more it's a fair trade. (Also, no one can force you to give money to Bill. If you think it's not a fair trade, don't buy Windows; ignoring monopoly power here.)

In formal terms, the economy is not a zero-sum game. Your assertion that "money is like energy, which can never be created or destroyed" is incorrect, if we're talking about the purchasing power of money and not its numerical face value.
This post was written by neither.

If he's going to be critical, then I will be too.

A rockstar developer would never think that and a rockstar designer would not have created stiqr.com. I'm pretty sure I counted 4 different sans-serifs.