skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, everyone's views on Android are different. While I may have some threshold for the number of positive articles that would be necessary for Gruber's writing to be useful, someone else may have some other threshold depending on their priors. For me, the threshold is quite low because I do not like Android at all, and Gruber falls short of even that low bar. I don't think there are many who can make significant updates based on Gruber's work, since P(negative review of Android feature) is nearly 100%, even for features most people consider good.

In other words, Gruber's writing is entertainment, not evidence. The post you were originally commenting on, as I read it, was based on the assumption that Gruber's writing ought to aspire to be evidence, and thus lamenting the fact that it's not useful for most people. Personally I don't believe in the idea of "ought," but I think that asking for a quota is a sort of intentional missing of the point that the previous person was trying to make.
You can connect to any database you want to just like you would anywhere else.

You write to your logs by writing to stdout/stderr: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/logging#writing_to_your...
"Since game systems are computers containing high-density and highly-integrated ICs and LSIs, even a single speck of dust can cause a malfunction."

They aren't kidding. I think I remember this being a problem...
Not commenting on whether or not this is an effective idea, but it won't be a breach of fiduciary duty as it actually protects shareholder interests in the long(er) term.
funny, i played Quake2 with Kim Dotcom (aka Kimble) back in the 90s and he was actually very good at it. He went on to built a couple of scammy businesses, got arrested for insider trading and left germany to resurface as the guy behind megaupload which apparently is very successfull, but still a bit shady ;)

Be aware of this guy, his hands are dirty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz
#1. It's unlikely that the boss is deciding on SOPA.
#2. Your comment does not contain any particular insight on SOPA or shitty bosses. It's just a repetition of the meme about SOPA. SOPA awareness is important, but you have not contributed to it.
#3. As a joke, your comment is not particularly funny.
To be fair, Michael Dell said something similar about Apple circa 1997. A miracle did save them.
I would suggest : sign up with mailchimp or something like that and avoid the hassle. It will actually save you a lot of time, frustration and possibly money.

You should focus more on your product and building your brand.

just my 2 cents.
What you don't get here (and he didn't really spell it out because I guess it seems obvious once you're in that position) is you don't have time to (nor should you even want to) follow every email thread about every project that you (should, theoretically) already have complete faith that your employee is successfully executing. If you need an update, you just want an update (hey I noticed Bill's getting a little antsy, here's the status of project 127: "status") not to find and trace back through a discussion of x y and z aspects of implementation or marketing or whatever.
One month ago:

me: Hey, everything is alright with project X?
boss: Yep, perfect.

Next monday, employee call me.
employee: Can you walk me through the code.
* me explains everything*
employee: Ok, just to let you know you are fire.
me: :-/ Why?
employee: Boss will call you
me: ok

next day, boss don't call
I write an e-mail
No answer
Another email 6-7 hours later
Boss: Sorry, I'm really busy. Calling you tomorrow

*Tomorrow*
no call
*next day, for a week*
no call.

I go to the office to talk to him.
boss: I have a meeting, I have to run. I'll call you when I get back.

And he still haven't call me back, and I have no idea why I got fired.
نتائج الانتخابات النهائية للمرحلة الثانية من انتخابات مصر 2011-2012
i would use posterous. they allow you to quickly throw some thing up and also allow you to edit the html/css. you can create pages, etc..while also maintaining your blog.
Yeah, he's against it. https://twitter.com/#!/timberners_lee/status/137195434794958... which has a broken link, should be https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opinion/firewall-law-coul...
Like, vote in the upcoming elections?
That's a fair point, but I'd still expect anyone to understand the part about how it ran fine under a test load, but now runs very slowly under a much larger load.
Gracias. Happy holidays!
I, too, thought this griping about Ontario was beside the point - someone is working out their pet peeve. Did RIM move to southern Ontario after becoming a big success? If not, then isn't this talent pool that is now supposedly holding them back the same one that made them great in the first place?

Businesses get disrupted. It happens, and it happens in much the same way everywhere.
This is unfortunately a very American-centric and hacker/san-fransisco-centric view.

All the tech for SOPA has been build and used for years in countries such as China and Iran. They already have their great firewalls and have had them for a long time.

What's more, a lot of the tech they used was built and sold to them by american companies. This war was lost probably 10 to 15 years ago.

All this bill is about is dog-fooding your own censorship products. ;)
While that might actually be true no one looks at the long term, only quarter by quarter.
Monday : Ticket 453 is your top priority, fix it asap.

Tuesday : Ticket 923 is your new top priority, fix it asap.

Wenesday : Client xyz needs ticket 1921 to be resolved, this is your new top priority, fix it asap.

Thursday : ...

You get the pattern. Running around with duck tape makes awesome products in the long run
“Miracle” is imprecise. How about this definition: A company is “done” when the probability of its success falls below the probability of a startup in the same space succeeding.

Apple was “done” in that sense before Steve Jobs returned. he did turn it around, and RIM could be turned around, but as a business exercise, the optimal strategy is to extract as much value as you can for as long as you can rather than try to hit another home run.

True, you could always hope for a visionary CEO with the credibility and skills to do something productive with what you have, but that isn’t the way to bet.
1. If Linus is a geek (he is, isn't he?), then the next Linus is a wannabee geek. How is calling a wannabee geek a wannabe geek somehow wrong?

2. It was an example and he never said basic training was ONLY for infantry.

3. You say all reflexive action is pavlovian but then say that using the term pavlovian reflex is wrong. That is wrong.

4. He never indicated that basic training doesn't teach some decent things. However, it does also teach people to act on orders without thought. You may not like the reality communicated, but the reality is that one of the objectives for basic training is to indoctrinate and enforce conformity. So that when you do have to run below a shower of bombs and bullets you don't question it, you just do it.

In short, nothing he wrote was wrong. You just didn't like it.
"But if you hate meetings, you should not be a Boss."

I disagree. If you cannot tolerate meetings to the point where you avoid them, you shouldn't be a boss. But if you hate meetings -- be a boss. Be my boss. Because I want a boss that only calls me into meetings when it is absolultely necessary.
Exactly the same for me and unit tests.

"They're nice, but we can do those once the product is finished". It didn't finish.
Is the example code on their homepage really using Perl to build a blogging engine that stores posts in LDAP?
It would be nice to filter out the reprints, we all know about The Art of Computer Programing. Having that second on your list of "Books Released in 2011" kind of kills the article's credibility.
exactly. people like to believe their choices are stellar in order to feel validated in their existence. They will jump at every opportunity to re-iterate why their phone/computer/car is a superior.
i've stopped being baited long ago into such discussions and usually when someone asks why i am buying some phone that is not an iPhone i merely point out that i don't like iTunes, and 9 out of 10 times they politely fuck off.
Like many of you (I suspect), I got into CS because of video games (had an Atari 2600, a C64 and an Amiga 500). Sometimes I get really nostalgic for the good old days. I came across a hilarious series called "Code Monkeys" a few years ago that seems appropriate to point out here ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Monkeys
http://www.g4tv.com/codemonkeys/index.html
I use DroidX. Moto/Verizon combo seems better than alternatives in US for Updates.
The browsers themselves are already built and powered using JS. Maintaining a comprehensive API at the speed that web tech advances in more than one client-side scripting language would be hellish -- browser vendors already have enough trouble agreeing on CSS and JS standards. The Stack Overflow article already raised a number of good reasons why not. Not sure why this is garnering so much attention from HN.
Most bosses would love to give you more money if you're really doing a good job. Which is in fact, most likely, the reason why they're not allowed to do so.
SkyNet now officially online - sync your watches - December 12, 2011
On December 12, 2011 congress has authorized offensive military action in Cyberspace -

CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 1540, NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2012 -

SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE.
The stumbling block is not OS customization ...

Let me explain..OEMs give a price to MOs on the update services. These OEMs have consistently underestimated the number of upgrades and work required to get updates to the MOs.That under estimate impacts the resources at the OEM brought to bear on the problem.
Nice stuff, I liked the approach.

But what is the benchmark for this kind of structure against regular JS workflow? I guess it will be slower, but how much ?
By "last words", did you mean, "last words before they were fired/quit/'laid off'," or "last words before I, edw519, quit"?
Oh, I hate dragging you into meetings. That’s why I go, and that’s why I make sure that they are productive enough that we don’t need to have ridiculous conference calls with ten people on each side that range from grand visionary pronouncements to discussing individual tickets with developers :-)
Why don't you start with a problem you or someone you know faces and then work backwards to an idea to solve that problem.

I find people often build things because they are possible and interesting but unless you solve a problem they don't add a lot of value and therefore don't get used.
It's a new edition with an extra volume. How is that not new? :)
Here's my preferred version of this koan:

http://i.imgur.com/p7WU7.jpg
Tension Between Text and Taxonomy
Is this kindergarten play time or are we shaping laws for an entire country?

I'm lucky to be an American. But lately, our government is a real embarrassment.
>The first is the ambiguous definition of surprise.

He doesn't actually use the word "surprise" anywhere in his statement, and spells out pretty clearly what the nature of the surprise would be - "students won’t know exactly which day until the exams are handed out. Nothing, other than coming in on a particular day, not knowing for certain that the exam will be that day, but getting the exam on that day nevertheless, would do - e.g.an exam on the Friday would not qualify, as you would already know that this was the day of the exam. And nor would red paper.

>The following week, none of his student are surprised since the set of surprised students is empty.

Again, he doesn't claim that anyone would be surprised. He said that they "won’t know exactly which day until the exams are handed out." I suppose you could argue that if they are dead, then they won't even know on that day either, but that's a pretty tenuous point and anyway technically he doesn't explicitly claim that they would know at that point, just that they wouldn't beforehand.

>"on the day the exam occurs, nobody would be able to say ``I knew the exam was today''".

Which is pretty much what he did say.

>A contrafactual of this nature cannot be built for Thursday

Why not? The argument against it being on Friday (and I think we're both agreed that it's impossible for it to be on Friday and still line up with his statement) is that if there's only one possible choice for what day it's on, then the pupils - or at least any that are still alive - would know that the exam was on that day. And if it can't be on Friday, then when it gets to first thing Thursday how many choices are left for possible days for the exam to line up with his statement? One - so we're back to it being a certainty as to which day it would be.
They're what you make of it. Those problems are generally far removed from what you would actually do at most tech companies. Regardless, if they're complicated enough and you come up with a working solution, it does hone your problem solving skills. Don't do it to be top on a leader board or to get an interview.

Contributing to an open source project is also valuable, but in a different way. Open source projects require you to navigate through bug lists, socialize with other coders, read specs, analyze and repair a (mostly) functioning system. Overall, it will help you gain perspective on creating software.
I am from rural Ontario, about an hour's drive away from RIM. There seems to a disproportionate number of people skilled in high tech and design coming from my region. I've seen some pretty amazing work coming from these people.

Technology and design was a strong part of the high school curriculum, which may explain the amount of talent we have. Our schools even had labs of SGI machines, when SGI was still a hot company, for design courses, which I think would have been fairly unheard of for most high schools at the time.

So I believe the talent is out there, even in the rural areas. RIM is just doing a poor job of acquiring it.
I ask myself this question all the time. My answer is that I try to enact as much dissent as possible in small ways, including HN comments. This is not a satisfactory answer, though.

Even among HN readers there are a lot of people who are still very pro-establishment in the sense that they wholeheartedly defend the NY Times, major political parties, etc. This is part of the same youthful optimism that leads people to do startups... the idea that they will soon be part of the establishment so they might as well defend it now for karma.

What do you think we should all be doing?
Finding a lost dog's owner with Perl
Lawrence Lessig argues that the fundamental problem in government is money. Getting elected is expensive, so candidates have to build a network of donors, which creates an obvious conflict of interest if they get elected. A decent introduction to Lessig's ideas can be found here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/...

Public financing of elections would be a definite step in the right direction and meets all of your constraints.
Congress is going on the assumption that the people who support SOPA will hire their children and spouses for more lucrative fake employment than will the people who oppose SOPA.
Exactly, once you settle for a specific amount during an interview, it's over.
Agreed. I knew his 3 months excuse was a straw man argument but I wasn't in IT so I couldn't argue against it.

The truth came out only after another 3 months of failed scaling when we found out that he'd oversold the benefits of cloud based scaling to the nontechnical leadership.
On December 12, 2011 congress has authorized offensive military action in Cyberspace -

CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 1540, NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2012 -

(see some comments at http://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/congress-authorizes-offe... )
SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE.
You work for the government don't you?
PCI-Express 3.0 is Finally Here…
HOW IS THIS NEWS?

And who are the retards that vote it up?

Please, make sure you also vote, when Fox reports that a Congressman farted with his mic on.
> "Amazon was essentially protecting the publishers from themselves"

Pre-iBookstore, Amazon was offering a 65-35 revenue split, with the fat end going to Amazon. There are certainly pros and cons to each approach, but Amazon wasn't protecting anything but their own interests and profitability.
The dual input warning doesn't inform specifically that copilot 1 is pulling back on the stick. It's clear from the report that was the problem, copilot 1 was pulling back the whole time and nobody realised.

I'm not suggesting adding "warning after warning" but an improvement to the existing warning, after all, when the plane is heading for the ground the warning is "Pull Up! Pull Up!" not "Ground!". If you want a software analogy, "Stall" is akin to "Error: Read Failure" and "Stall! Push Stick Forward!" akin to "Read Failure: Insert Disk".

Anyway it's a cheap to implement improvement and could save lives.
Politians are petty and ignorant in general pretty much world wide. Look at broadcasts at other countries political procedures and you'll see name calling, witty speeches and so on.
No, I read that and it didn't answer my question, which is why I asked it. "Partner" = ? Cofounder? Mentor? Etc.. Its not clear. Is everyone on that huge list in SV? Or are there mentors in NYC? Seattle? Austin? Etc..

Its just light on the details that someone would actually want before hitching an established business to it.
It's fundamentally a different thing. While the general process of logically working something out should be the same everywhere, the particulars are different. The House is full of politicians and what they say is televised and comprises part of their campaign. Ego always comes first to politicians, not problem-solving, because politicians are elected based on image and appearances, not hard results. Also, when you represent such a wide swath of people with so many conflicting interests, all of your decisions become watered down with so-called "compromise".

Someone wrote on another thread about SOPA that a politician is always campaigning. I believe this to be true. Politics is almost exclusively posturing, and it's reasonable for one to tire of the senseless bloviating, especially when it pertains to technical topics on which the speaker is obviously very poorly informed.

Not saying things should be this way, but that's the way they are.
> None of the cities blessed with Occupy camps proposed censoring the internet, for example.

Mostly because internet regulation has been federalized. When they can, cities attempt to ban things left and right; many of the Supreme Court precedents on film censorship involve municipal statutes. Not to mention their love of "free speech zones".
Linux Systems Capacity Planning: Beyond RRD and top
I'd argue that it's not just about holding politicians accountable but laws accountable. What percentage of laws accomplish what they claim to? But rather than admitting this and going back to the drawing board, people dedicate their lives to blindly supporting or opposing specific laws, placing loyalty above problem solving.

That our political system (in general) rewards loyalty over problem solving is strong evidence of corruption.
Once you start down that road, it comes to mind that estimates generally say that something like 50% of all IT projects fail.

Hmm....
Direct Action: A Programmers General Strike Against SOPA
The world depends on software. We, the world's programmers, write the software. SOPA threatens many things we believe in and care about. Letter writing and traditional means have not worked to stop SOPA. The only alternative is direct action.

In the 1960's direction was sitting on buses and swimming in pools. During the industrial revolution it was strikes in front of factories and rail roads. Occupying may get a lot of news coverage but protesters can be removed by force. No one can make us write code. If we stop, no one can do it for us.

I call for a General Programmer strike. We should set a day.
RIM is not done and saying this is nonsense. BlackBerry devices are still selling and will keep selling. They may never again have a huge market share but they are far from dead, a decent market share is all they need. Some people are delusional believing that people don't want BlackBerry smartphones anymore. As a current Android user I can tell you that my next smartphone will not be an Android one. I will not be recommending Android smartphones to anyone I know either. To me BlackBerry smartphones seem like a good choice and that is what I will be recommending if asked.
I'll preface this with the disclaimer that I'm a University of Waterloo student, so my opinion might be biased. Despite this, I have no particular bias for RIM that I'm aware of, and couldn't see myself owning any of the products they currently produce. I've also never worked for RIM, but I have a number of close friends who have for co-op work terms.

There are a lot of things wrong with RIM, but I think the author of this article missed most of them, focusing largely on a bunch of points that were either irrelevant or incorrect.

First of all, as many have mentioned, Waterloo is not located in the rural heart of Canada, nor is there a particularly huge problem finding talent in the area. Like many universities we have a co-op work program during which students find employment at a variety of companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google. Bill Gates has stated that "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more"[1]. This leads me to believe that it's not a lack of available talent that has plagued RIM, but the ability to attract and retain it.

Each term, RIM hires hundreds of students for co-op work terms. From a student's perspective, it doesn't feel particularly challenging to get a job there the same way it would for Google or Facebook. For this reason, I suspect the best and brightest of our classes likely end up working in the States, rather than sticking around here.

There are certainly some cultural issues at play here. Many of the people I knew who worked at RIM were never challenged by their work or held accountable for it and this lead to an incredibly low productivity. I've known people that show up to work there drunk occasionally and high consistently. That same individual went to work at a smaller mobile company his following term and was working unpaid overtime on weekends simply because he enjoyed the work. Of course, this is all anecdotal, but it paints a picture for me about what working for the company must be like.

In my opinion, RIM needs to hire fewer students, and pay them more competitively. They need to hold their employees accountable for productivity and team leaders and managers accountable for the people they oversee.

All this being said, I sometimes can't help but wonder if RIM's problems are over-exaggerated. True, they're losing market share, but they're still profitable on the order of billions aren't they?

[1] http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20051013/billgates_waterloo...