skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Greg Proops is another comedian who also 'gets it' - he releases a free podcast almost every week recorded from his gigs: http://smartest.libsyn.com/

Occasionally he has a sponsor, and it feels a bit forced in but for a free hour of comedy every week it's a very minor inconvenience
Entirely OT, but you did bring it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age. It would be iron age. And no historian disputes that an actual letter was written to Corinthians (and most are certain on Paul), so that takes out the mythology. At best, you can call it "Iron Age history of uncertain veracity". Sorry that it doesn't have quite the same demeaning effect.
Here's the actual picture. Stunning.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2492349945119&se...
Not sure what the age of the reference has to do with anything, but ok, here is a modern one. I write a poem, and send it to my girlfriend via email. Who is the author of the poem? I really don't get how intended recipient = account owner.
>And reading the project status: "No support for threads yet"; Than, isn't it too early to re-release it yet?

Surely it supports some other form of concurrency?
Who's Participating in CodeSprint 2?: Week 1
Interactive shell to a running Python process
I don't think I would have foreseen this circumstance either, but googleserver.com would have been much better than 1e100.net for the reasons I just mentioned in another comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3341017

1e100 has a lot of characters than can easily be misread.
One common scenario are the browsers. Imagine websites with real 3D model e.g. nike.com with a modeled shoe. Browsers are becoming an application platform and to deliver rich client style UI, it takes juice.

Video editing is becoming more and more common place with cheap digital video cameras and the ones on camera phones.

I agree that the upgrade cycle may become longer, but to me it seems like there is a market for more CPU power on the desktops. I think there is some normal fluctuation where you improve one or more corners of the industry at a time.
Except, of course, that COPPA has a parental consent provision. The problem is the burden of verifiability.
A pretty bad story - not that I'm surprised though. Google have never been good at customer service (obviously with the web so large and most of Google being free, you can't expect much, but what is 'offered' is usually sub-par, even for paid products).

On the plus side, this is #1 on Hacker News meaning Matt Cutts should reply any second and internally flag this up inside Google.

One of the comments on the Google+ entry also stuck out:

"The same happened to me. It also means my daughter can't log into her Chromebook!"

If that's true that's pretty awful. It does bring up a good point though - if Google close your account (rightly or wrongly), it does make owning a Chromebook somewhat useless.
I come to HN for the comments. Every now and then I'll read something that really inspires me. I'm not necessarily talking about great advice, either. Sometimes just reading over other people's frustrations will lead me to new business ideas.
Touché! Though the contents of said communiques do, indeed, form mythology.
Is there any actual incompatibility that prevents building an Objective-C runtime for NaCl, or is it simply a matter of ObjC not being included by default?
This is absurd. Instead of not collecting data for children Google is blocking access to children. I am seriously looking for alternatives to Gmail. Any suggestions? I don't want my email account hooked up to a social network and advertising machinery.
> I really don't get how intended recipient = account owner.

You can't send an email to someone who doesn't own an email account.
Yeah, It was kinda ironic on my part. Laughed pretty hard about the PG'ing though, they could have thrown in a little bit more irony themself, but yeah it's forbes :)
Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
I use plain C and a small set of plotting functions I created to generate PPM images. If I were to create 3D stuff I'll probably settle for generating POV files automatically or something along this lines... But my usual thinking is: get it done. If it is open sourcey, better, if you need some proprietary stuff and you get it done (and it's for you!), what's the problem?

Also, Montecarlo things have this noisiness, comes with the algorithm :/ Usually it is a tradeoff: I have an algorithm that creates sharp images of bifurcation loci, but is awfully slow. If I turn on the randomness, it can go between 4 and 10 times faster, but the images are no longer sharp and crisp. The advantage is that adding this kind of "Montecarloing" is just adding a ?: condition in some for, together with a special flag and a mod operation: easy to do and no need to add nasty inner loops!
You don't mention security (1) or compliance. I'm guessing these don't feature? What does "file sharing" mean to you (could SkyDrive do it, or cloud-based SharePoint)? Speaking of SharePoint, have you considered Office 365?

I know it's fashionable to do everything in the cloud these days, but my personal preference is to have control over my digital assets, so I like to keep everything(!) in-house. For 20-50 -strong team, AD/Exchange/SharePoint/ForeFront setup would be mostly accepting defaults (2), and keeping everything running won't take much effort.

1). An AD is not neccessarily a bad thing. You could create accounts locally and push them into Office 365 automatically (ditto for Exchange accounts). You could use DirectAccess to meet the remote use requirement, although someone who knows more about the Linux/Mac world would need to comment on whether that will with DirectAccess.

2). Depends on how far you want to go with your file share - you could spend ages on an information architecture, if you're so inclined/have compliance requirements.
Apparently gpoaccess is no longer being updated and is shutting down in 2012. It looks like the new system is:

http://catalog.gpo.gov/fdlpdir/FDLPdir.jsp?mode=-2
Personally I find writing MapReduce jobs (in JavaScript no less) to be unbelievably clean and easy when your stack is Riak + Node.

Of course if you've been using SQL for years then this probably sounds difficult in comparison. Except what if you're a JS guy with zero SQL experience?

"Ok, it's a database. How do I query it?"

"You learn this completely new language and dynamically compile your questions down to it, but you have to be really careful because the process is notorious for being a first-class attack vector."

"Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?"

I'm not trying to say anything about the merits of SQL. I'm just pointing out that it's a matter of perspective.
I used to kid people that Spirit and Opportunity's longevity were themselves a problem.

They were built in an era of faster, better, cheaper and at the beginning of that time, the theory was that it was better to have more spacecraft even if some failed than to build expensive too big to tail projects that consumed the entire budgets.

That Spirit and Opportunity went far beyond their 90 day requirements was a indication of overengineering, and wouldn't it have been better to have had 20, or 40 Spirits and Opportunities launched, even if 1/2 of them failed?

(Now their longevity could be, not because of gross over-engineering but because the minimum engineering required to bring them to 90 - 120 days naturally makes a 5-10 year lifespan easy....)

We seem to have since gone back to wanting huge, too big, we're too afraid to let them fail projects.

I haven't followed it closely, but I am saddened that apparently Curiosity is a one off, and not part of a dual, triple, twenty member fleet. It could also be that I am just unaware of NASA's planned follow on to Curiosity.
Science is hard, but don't lose heart: in due time we WILL know.
I prefer POP3. Then just mix in Dropbox and local backups, and my email is pretty darn safe.
FYI, you can still log into a Chromebook with a Anonymous/Incognito/Guest account and use it as long as you don't care about persistence. Chromebooks are designed to be orthogonal to a Google account so changing the accounts that are attached to a given Chromebook is trivial.
The experience of second-hand pot is one hell of a lot better than second-hand cigarette smoke (and not just because I get to worry less about cancer or strain on my heart; it just smells better),

I generally (and thoroughly) agree with a lot of your points, but will note that I appear to break out in hives in reaction to second hand cannabis exposure. I don't do this with tobacco cigarettes.

Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things. Just sort of an observation that "YMMV".
I'm a bit disheartened to see that everyone is buying the COPPA bullshit. Yes, COPPA is the law that applies, and has some restrictions. But that doesn't force Google to act like a total dick about it!

Lets assume there's an automated process for detecting underage accounts. Why can't they just prevent the account from being used to send email? Or why can't they say "Sorry, we have to disable your account; but you can download all of your emails at (insert some secure link to a ZIP file)"?? Or, as the post says, migrate these accounts to their COPPA-compliant set of accounts?

You know what the real problem is? The real problem is that Google collects a shit-load of data about its users. And they don't want to put in filters which will not log the data of underage children, because that opens them up to scrutiny. So they would rather keep this blackbox closed, and in the process if a few kids get screwed, then, well, screw 'em!
It's probably a pretty good proxy. The charts in the article are dominated by a few huge investment rounds that resemble privately offered IPOs. If you think going public would be a good indicator of success, that's closer to what's going on in those charts than it appears at first.
Former independent bookseller here, and former employee of Borders and Amazon.

There is little new to see here in this story. In general retail, physically checking out the competition's pricing has a long history. The only new twist is the barcode apps to check price immediately. Brick and mortar bookstores or "showrooms" are going to have to compete with better service and markup on non-book items. I don't think that's going to save the bookstore chains, though.
It's a bit more complex than that. In order to comply, Google would need to verify that you are a parent/guardian and that you are giving permission for your child to join. Faxing of identity documents would likely be involved.

Google's approach is heavy handed, but it's a really bad law.
It seems like a very straightforward solution to me.

If an account is created for a person under-age, suspend ad service to that account (end data collection) and require a nominal fee to activate it (which provides abundant evidence of parental consent). Cutting off the next generation from email does not seem like the answer. Would a Montessori-educated, eight-year-old Sergey Brin have appreciated such treatment?

Since that won't happen, I mean, when we have kids I guess we just have to pay for hosting and administer their email ourselves?
I think I agree with sunahsuh. When a system is stacked in a certain direction, appeals to personal responsibility can win battles but will lose the war. In the prisoner's dilemma, we can hope for mutual co-operation, but until the rules of the game change it's nearly inevitable that defectors will make out better.
Schemaless doesn't necessarily mean "document-oriented." Sparse-column / ColumnFamily databases like Cassandra are a lot closer to "schemaless" than they are to "traditional rdbms schema."
Even if they send their entire income back home, they'd still be contributing to the economy. The value of their work is worth more than the wages they receive (otherwise why would their employer hire them).
There's a lot of discussion in this thread around "junior" vs. "senior". This misses the point, which is to hire good programmers and avoid bad ones. It's as if the industry has finally burned itself out of the "programmers as replaceable cogs" model and has replaced it with the next-laziest model, "hire senior, not junior". That is an improvement, but it's still so off-base that the words "junior" and "senior" applied to programming make me cringe.

Here are two factors the junior/senior model does not take into account. First, a good but inexperienced programmer will learn so quickly that they will run rings around mediocre experienced programmers in no time. Second, experience isn't only a good thing. Once people have repeated something a certain way enough times (and surprisingly few repetitions are required), they become locked-in and unable to see alternatives. This loss of flexibility is toxic to effective programming.

Of course that happens less to good programmers than bad ones, but that only puts us back at the real question - how do you tell a good one apart from a bad one? - something we have no satisfactory way of answering that is compatible with current hiring practices.

What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior". Our industry lacks this. What is our path to learning? We have the sink-or-swim model in which people once hired are installed in a silo and told to work on their tasks. Everyone recapitulates all the classic mistakes and has to figure everything out for themselves. I know I did. It cost me at least 5 years developmentally, and I'm only putting the number that low to save face. This way is so inefficient that it must eventually yield to something better. Hopefully when that happens there will also be less of the prickly auto-didact about most of us - but that's another story.
C++ had implicit reference counting for many years now (more than a decade for sure).
Quantum Dots TVs coming in 2013
I felt the same way. Turns out there was a story in July with an almost identical title, but they seem to be different occurrences. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2725983
COPPA explicitly provides for a parental consent mechanism; Google simply doesn't choose to implement it. Everybody else implements it just fine.
I never can quite buy in to fuss like this. They are just a company, and I am not surprised nor do I get upset when I get caught in a cog. Knowing that it can happen, I prepare.

As they say, "Luck favors the prepared".
> Google isn't just a communication system, though.

Gmail is. It's not positioned with anything like the complexity you describe. So it's not unreasonable, as OP suggested it was, for a user to want to use it, without giving much thought to age.
I have a proper fully equipped office at home, and a designated workplace for the company i run where developers i work with operate. I instead prefer to work from Coffe Shops simply because they offer distractions at such a minimum threshold. It works for me because
A) Crappy Wi-Fi : So i can't stream Youtube or Hulu or download movies or Tv-Series yet not bad enough for me to be able to look up online documentation, parse through StackOverFlow, hold voice calls over Skype or make SVN commits.
B) My external hard disks that contain the bulk-load of my sources of distractions, are no longer a moment's click away.
C)No useless camaraderie, noone ambling by your desk to engage you in menial distracting conversations. It's just me , and my Macbook.
D)For about 10$ (Two coffes per day), i get a serene and beautifully decorated place, that's hot in winters, cold in summers,complete with a comfy Sofa and a little table all my own, and for what is a sheer bonus in this part of the world, no power interruptions ! (7+ hours of no power is regular over here in summers).

If i feel a need to have one of my devolepers or my designer collaborate with me more closely than Skype voice calls can afford, i prefer to call them over to the coffee shop rather than go over to the office.It works for the kind of work i do.It may not for everyone. It's cheap, it's comforting, and it's completely distraction free. I get more done in 3 hours over here than in 10 at any other place.
So then everyone who doesn't want data collection or ads, but wants to use google just applies for an under 13 account.

Google products are free, they make money on data collection/advertisements. People who they can't advertise to aren't profitable, and it's unlikely a nominal fee would make up for all the overhead. The user is their product not their customer.
There's nothing inherently wrong with Windows Server and Exchange, which will give you just about everything you ask for. You probably wouldn't need Sharepoint, which is a cash cow for implementers.
If you buy tickets to a concert, and then something comes up where you can't make it, do you get to go again for free?

I don't see this as being unreasonable, especially for $5 with no licensing or DRM or anything around it.
Great idea. This is an excellent tool for quick prototyping and troubleshooting. +1 on using Sencha Touch 2. ST2 PR3 was released 2 days ago - http://www.sencha.com/forum/announcement.php?f=90&a=17.
Oh boy, you're right. I replaced the word "Touch" with "Fire" in my mind while reading the article and didn't notice even once. My apologies.
New Ext4Yii Framework videos
Uploaded a new Ext.Direct demo using the Ext4Yii Framework
I also don't think it's the peak. Perhaps Ivy Bridge (the next iteration due in 1H2012) since it's rumored to have more or less the same TDPs but with 20-50% more performance. Although the TDP is going to be programmable so OEMs could decide they "underclock" the chip.
Institutional Ennui: Teach Yourself for Only $49,999.99/year
Why, then, did we get plus.google.com and not google+.com? (and aside: I find those (google.com) suffixes on HN that turn out to be links on plus.google.com confusing. For google.com URLs, I expect either search results or pages that represent google's position)
The microsoft stack does work quite well, but usually for 50+ staff. For less than 50 the cost of administration becomes a disproportional overhead.

I take vendor lock-in with a grain of salt... if the solution works well, the lock-in (almost) doesn't matter. When it comes to mission critical business systems, most companies have vendor lock-in, whether it's with Microsoft, Google or some other company.

I think most startups stick with Google Apps. For network filesharing have you tried Dropbox? If large files are an issue - you will need to setup a fileserver in your office something as simple as a samba server could do the trick.

You could also trying to get an invite for AeroFS.
I wasn't sure what ARC is: It means Automatic Reference Counting. http://clang.llvm.org/docs/AutomaticReferenceCounting.html

In C++, you have std::shared_ptr (or boost::shared_ptr and many others) which do automatic reference counting (although you specify it explicitly that these pointers have automatic reference counting; there is no way to simply enable it for all raw pointer types).
Wouldn't the prudent thing be to give everyone equal opportunities, and then require solid science for every step away from that.
For instance if you want to go on a campaign to specifically encourage women to make different choices than the ones they currently make, you should be pretty sure that what you are doing is helpful.
The thing that this 1997 is missing is the retain - release mechanism, found "only" in classes, that are derived from in NSObject, and still a key Obj-C feature.

I don't really know when exactly was this added to NeXT/Cocoa API, but I think it's important to note.
Absolutely correct about the Canadian prices. I have spent the last 2.5 years here, and I get your point about selling other stuff (like Chapters/Indigo already does).

The thing is, that other stuff can also be bought online. People browsing for books in store (before buying it from Amazon), don't really buy those other items either (why should they). So, these stores aren't really gaining anything from people browsing their selection, other than perhaps taking a cut from coffee shops.

On the other hand, if I want to gift a book, I almost always pick it up from a store. I generally don't plan ahead enough to order from Amazon (no Prime in Canada either :)) and dropping into a store works well. I am caught in two minds about these stores, I love going there, but I can't figure out a way for those guys to turn a profit without charging us the premium that they do.
So you limit it to 500 MB of storage and show blanket Club Penguin ads instead of targeted ones. Whatever. It's a completely solvable problem. And it's fine if Google doesn't want to solve it. They should just let their ad agency know.
knowing the childs email address in and of itself appears to be data collection in regards to COPPA.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus45-how-comply-childrens...
At the time Apple was tiny with little money. It had sold only 50 Apple I's to Byte shop. Regis McKenna was way bigger than Apple. It was common for PR firms, lawyers, even landlords, to do work for free or a little stock in the expectation that the new startup would grow up into a big client. Some even did. Pro-bono doesnt catch the spirit; it was an ad hoc investment.
> What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe "I downloaded but didn't share" will be the new "I smoked, but didn't inhale.")

Just like the generation that smoked but didn't inhale changed everything about that, right?
"I've done Ruby for about 7 years and can tell you that after a while, things fall in place, including (most of) the syntax."

I would expect any adroit HN reader to be comfortable in a programming language after 7 years :) What is odd is that you say "most of the syntax". Would you please elaborate (aside from what you said about function creation/passing)? I like ruby, but I'm not to the point where the syntax falls into place as easily I wish it would.
"I'm closing in on a year myself. One thing that HN has clearly done for me is turn my interest in technology into an interest in businesses driven by technology -- it's moved me up a whole meta-level."

Hah! It made me go in the opposite direction, but in a good way. I started drifting away from CS and SE, getting more and more bored by it. Slashdot was my only half-decent "tech" news site. Other things become more interesting to me.

Then I discovered this site. Now I'm very happily being dragged back into developing my hacking skills. For a while I was letting my skills slip. But now, I'm getting good at it again. Thank you, HN.
The fish-eye is nice, and their use of ultra-light UAV is very interesting. The crowd though is a bit on a thin side :)
Seems like with network filesharing you'd be happy with Google Apps. So what's keeping you from just buying filesharing from another vendor?