skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've got some armed psychopath (or maybe more than 1) holding a weapon to you or threatening you on a dark night your probably not going to be thinking rationally.

All sorts of stuff is going through your head like "should I use the duress PIN?" , "can I remember the duress PIN?" , "will they know if I use it?" , "how could they know?" , "What if they somehow DO know, is it worth the risk?"
This doesn't explain one thing to me:
If I have an app that is misbehaving, and x it out from the 'recent apps list', when clicking on that app again it will behave like the first time I'm using the app after boot. To me it looks like it did kill the app.
If you don't need the money, take time off. When I left the last startup I co-founded, I decided to set an arbitrary "1 whole year" date, during which time I would explore my own projects, hear about other peoples new ideas, and talk to existing larger startups (Dropbox, etc). But I wouldn't allow myself to commit to anything until about a year was over. It's too easy to be come enamored w/ half-baked ideas, and I wanted to make sure the next one was meaningful and had a high probability of success. Long story short, I learned a ton during that year, turned down some great options, and eventually chose the BEST of all possible options. (Starting a meaningful company w/ killer co-founders, gaining traction, and having a blast)

If you have the chance, give yourself the space! It'll be worth it.
Do you know why they die out so quickly? Is it just because they didn't generate enough interest? It doesn't seem like it'd be costly or time-intensive to maintain.
Laura Yecies, SugarSync: Big companies are riskier than small companies
This is exactly what came to mind for me. To see Don Knuth say that he was afraid of failing is downright shocking... I would have thought he would have spent very little time thinking about classes and would have already been in a world of his own at that point.

One interesting happening I've noticed too is that with mathematical and computing knowledge specifically it seems that as people gain knowledge it becomes easier to add new knowledge. The curve seems exponential. It's easy to pick up Python if you're already familiar with C and C++. It's easy to understand a new comparison sorting algorithm if you know it can't be faster than O(n lg n) and can place it in perspective with merge and quicksort.

This is why I still go on Stack Overflow and am floored by how few questions I can answer and how much more experienced guys know than me. But I have hope that learning will beget faster learning.
I'm not really sure why you think that this only applies to frameworks and libraries. In my eyes this applies to any unit tested code. It is really hard or near impossible to test tightly coupled code. Or do you disagree about testing code in general?

Also I don't really understand why you think that factories are an antipattern. As I see it factories play an important role when using dependency injection.
They should have called it Copiology, in honor of that other religion which also subverts technological concepts to advance a secret business agenda.
What about simply having an emergency gun dispenser inside the ATM?
This perfectly encapsulates my unease about the MicroPHP Manifesto. Neither drummer was doing it wrong; they both chose the most fitting tools. The reviling of "overkill" solutions is a natural step in becoming an experienced developer but that doesn't mean it should top HN every time someone has that epiphany.
Groupon shares fall as merchants cut back on deals
pretty tough!!!
UC lab makes robot that emulates leaping lizard
https://github.com/nasa
The discovery of the electron led to the electron gun that helped build the cathode ray tube which gave us television.

It's quite amazing to see how one thing leads to another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron#Discovery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_gun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television#Electroni...
The Data-mined Last Meal 2011 [Infographic]
When I read about this "Nuclear Option", I can't help but feel that it is nothing more than a PR ploy. How much money would be lost by companies like Amazon, Google, etc. by shutting their sites down for even a single day? Even more, this sort of stunt would be a Customer support nightmare for any of these companies. Though an interesting threat, it comes off as completely impractical from every angle.
Maybe the encryption doesn't matter?
By default in Windows users are hidden from each other stuff but the files aren't encrypted so only the FS permissions are stopping them from reading each others home folders.
I suggest you do some research about the author of the MicroPHP manifesto before throwing snark out there like that.

Ed is a personal friend (and we do a podcast together) with many, MANY years of experience building applications using PHP. While I don't agree with him on some points in there, he does deserve to not be shit on by people who can't be bothered to do 30 seconds of research about the author.
What is a day in the life of a performer in Cirque du Soleil?
That mentality, in Samsung, is exactly what makes Samsung suck
Couldn't you say the same about the iPhone? People wanted the iPhone. Plenty of people now want, and are very happy with, Android phones.

The same hasn't been the case for tablets because the Android manufacturers haven't made anything worth wanting. The iPad can be competed with, even if it's only on price.
memcached (binary) protocol for both doc manipulation and "changes" helps performance considerably. We looked at inventing a new protocol to stream stuff in and out faster, but we decided to go with the one we already had. Though the internal APIs have been shifting a bit, it was built entirely without touching the couchdb core and gave us a huge performance benefit over http: https://github.com/couchbase/mccouch

rewriting (not core, but slow) components in C is always the right way to do this sort of thing. We've been in the process of building a NIF for document updates for a while now (TBH, I don't know where the source is off the top of my head, but we don't keep stuff closed). We've got massive performance gains in pure erlang, but we expect to cut CPU consumption down more with this new code. It's intended to be available to Apache CouchDB if they want it.

I like CouchDB a lot myself, and use it for lots of projects (including critical parts of couchbase, inc.). If we can't solve the same problems with the new product, we'll know it because we use it ourselves.
pretty much, I think you can do anything you want in an android service. with iphone you can't run arbitrary code indefinitely, you can only run specific api calls.
I get your argument (Which is "What about that slippery slope!!!")

The issue with the argument is that normal people don't work in real, crazy absolutes. That's a certain type of technical person thing. Normal people don't get to Richard Stallman levels of consistency in action. They stop their environmentalism at perhaps picking up some trash or buying a Prius, maybe even bringing bags to the grocery store, they stop their pro-choice stance at perhaps sending a check to the tax deductible (aka, non-political) branch of Planned Parenthood

Google WILL eventually stop this sort of thing if it becomes pervasive. When it's isolated, and arguable that it shouldn't be fixed, they likely will not fix it.

It isn't like Google lets the billions of spam blogs effect search results when they can detect it's going on. They did at first, but once it became a problem distorting results, they stopped.

I get that you're trying to loudly assert "BUT THAT LINE HAS BEEN CROSSED", and the rest of us are pointing out that "that's debatable; Google surely will figure something out when it's and issue that's very clean cut".

Would you likely see action faster if were say, a conservative renaming of the liquid made after an abortion? Perhaps, due to those political leanings you ascribe to googlers. But will it stop for "left wing" terms eventually as well? Surely.
Facebook Cards from MOO
That's an awfully high horse you're atop, there. Be careful you don't fall off. This is a cause that the Penny Arcade guys had an audience for and the means to pursue. Helping out sick kids and their families is a worthwhile charity--the Ronald McDonald House has been in that business for years. It's grown from a small effort to make a few kids' holidays better to a fairly sizable charity. Kudos to the PA guys for making it much larger.

Would you like to condemn charities such as Donors Choose, the Ronald McDonald House, or anything else that helps folks in the US while you're at it? Who else should be paying more attention to you and your values?
Isn't the whole point of using apps powered by Google that everything I do is synced to "the cloud"? At least, shouldn't that be the point?
That would be good - but then you begin to talk about a unified logging interface and standardisation like folder structure, class loading, class interfaces and so on.

At which point it's basically a framework (perhaps without the routing/initialisation code).

One thing I would like to see (no idea if it exists) is a core package architecture (that did all of the above) and let you hang packages as and when you need them.

I've been keeping an eye out for such a thing for a while with no joy.
I would submit that the biggest reason for this view and the reason many people hold it is that 37signals as well as most of the programming jobs are CRUD jobs where non-algorithmic skills are probably more important than algorithmic skills and IQ is also less important. Brainteasers are an IQ test where you are not concerned about false negatives.
You know we should all never buy a DVD, Blueray disk or a movie ticket ever again until the industry gets the message. Read a book instead
From what I have heard, from contacts in the mobile hardware industry, Motorola is not currently working on a Google tablet, at least not one out in the next 3 months. I don't think that Google is going to push the other hardware partners out of the scene just yet.
Broadcom to show 802.11ac "5G" chips in products at CES
Android provides a "puzzle piece" which is not available in iOS in the form of "services".

An Android application is composed of any number of Service components (0 or more) and an Activity (I think this is optional, so a package can provide services to third-party applications, see Bound Services[0]).

The Android "Activity" is what corresponds to an iOS Application: it's stuff with an UI which the user can interact with. An activity can not "act" in the background, if it's not visible it's frozen or dead.

A service, on the other hand, is headless (it has no UI). As a result, it has no concept of "foreground" and "background", if it's been launched it runs until it's been killed. I believe services also have little to no restrictions.

In Android, background activity (for applications needing those) is generally implemented via a dedicated service. These services can do whatever they want, which is a strict superset of Apple's limited set of backgrounding APIs. A drawback is that, because services can implement arbitrary behavior, it's harder for the OS to optimize them and it leaves them more open to abuse or coding errors than iOS's (or WP7's) more limited multitasking provision.

tl;dr: Android offers pretty much full multitasking, iOS only offers a limited, Apple-defined subset of it unless you jailbreak.

[0] http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/bound...
Agreed. Given DirectX and Direct3D, MS is unlikely to support a derivative of OpenGL. That may eventually change if WebGL becomes widely adopted, forcing their hand, but current lack of support in IE9+ is a major inhibition to adoption. I doubt they would create a competing standard (such as WebDirectX).

Instead, MS is pushing performance improvements and hardware acceleration for Canvas and SVG. This is NVIDIA, but to give an example of the possibilities:

http://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering

IMO, focusing on these isn't a bad thing, because these 2D technologies are substantially easier to use (e.g., SVG is declarative and integrates with CSS). Though, WebGL is obviously more expressive.

We may also see some WebGL-derived technologies make their way back into CSS + SVG. Similar to SVG filters for CSS:

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/fx/

Proposed GLSL shaders for CSS:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css-shaders.html
I didn't "shit on him", I criticized his tenor in that article.
this does seem to be the behaviour on iOS, which leads me to believe that "x'ing it out" does actually free up memory.

on android before ICS there was no way to remove apps from the recent list, but you could shut down an app from the app management in settings.

i'm not sure if android 4's swiping apps away on the recent list "closes" them in a similar way to the android <= 3's app management "close app" button? anyone else able to verify?
Because book publishers are doing much better in regards to respecting user's rights, since their product has gone digital?
> To me it looks like it did kill the app.

On iOS it does. Removing an app from the "recent apps list" 1. removes it from the list and 2. kills it if it was "alive" or suspended.

But because it's a "recent apps list", not a task switcher, most of the applications in the list are likely either already dead or suspended (frozen in memory with no CPU activity)
Again this might be the simplicity issue, tablets are sold partly on the idea that they are simpler than PCs.

Once you start adding stuff like login systems, seperate file permissions you start becoming a PC with a touchscreen.
Making a Play for Video Gamers
Entropic sees shrinking set tops at CES
The same day it bid $55 million for the set-top box SoC business of Trident, Entropic’s CTO shared his views on what he believes will be the shrinking set-top at CES next week. Get the interview for $4.99 at EE Times Confidential.
Canonical announcing Ubuntu "concept" device at CES
The new Couchbase Server is based on Membase (it adds JSON documents and incremental Map Reduce). Most of critical code is already in production today on lots of very big sites: http://www.couchbase.com/customers

So when Couchbase Server 2.0 comes out of beta, we'll mean it. The developer previews we've been releasing are as solid as some open source projects ever get, and yet we are still putting a full QA team on torturing it before we'll call it ready.
Reading List on Theories of Modern Programming Languages
Looking at it now I see you're right. "PHP developer" is meant to be less limiting than the options the author of the MicroPHP Manifesto was considering.

When it was brought up in the context of this article, I read it as someone being proud to be a developer of PHP. Among many academic crowds and HN it feels like PHP is a dirty word.
I know I'm late to the party, and I know you're looking for a sound bite, but here is how I would put things. It might be a mouthful, but it is an actual explanation (more or less) that relates to censorship in a concrete sense. I think a lot of smart but less technically inclined people might appreciate that.

Computers are like people that can talk incredibly fast. Two computers can now exchange the contents of an entire book in the time it takes a person to speak a single word. "Piracy" on the internet is the equivalent of declaring it
illegal to say certain combinations of words without permission.

A website is like a building where a very large number of visitors can talk to each other using their computers. This is what makes the internet great. SOPA will make it possible to shut down such a building if a single visitor says one of the forbidden word combinations. If SOPA passes, such websites will be forced to either forbid talking entirely, or attempt to prevent a huge number of people from saying the forbidden word combinations, which would be incredibly expensive and essentially impossible to do.

Thus, SOPA would make it legally possible to shut down virtually any website that permits talking, effectively destroying the thing that made the internet great in the first place.

Even with SOPA, people could still speak the forbidden words to one another in the streets or in private buildings, so what was the point of SOPA again?
Yeah, I don't think that guy actually meant what he was saying, either because he had some alternative agenda or because he doesn't know what he's talking about. I want to know what the other forms of online piracy are. Technically with streaming, you're still copying a file and sharing it - just in little chunks...
It is not however, a human right.

I, for one, disagree.

If it was, the nearly every other country in the world would be violating fundamental human rights by denying their citizens the opportunity to carry a weapon that kills with such ease.

Yes, yes they are.

What could possibly be a more fundamental right than the right to defend oneself? And arming oneself to do so obviously follows from that, IMO. Heck, a wildly popular definition of what "government" is, is based on the idea of self-defense as the fundamental innate right (I'm referring to Bastiat and his idea of "government as the collective extension to our individual right of self-defense").
GRUB-IMA (based on TCPA) and TBOOT (based on TXT) have been around for a while: http://linux-ima.sourceforge.net/

Google invented their own verified boot system for ChromeOS: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/v...

Or you could use upcoming UEFI secure boot: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/6054.html
"... there were even some doubts on whether it will work at all as designed."

I recall a documentary which said that some physicists believed the bomb could cause a runaway reaction which would consume our entire atmosphere. Maybe we should be concerned about such a reaction resulting from the "nuclear option" for SOPA, or maybe it will just fizzle like a firecracker thrown into a bucket of water.
It was for a front-end design/programming position.
My wife and I have four kids all of them homeschooled. We made the decision when my oldest was in 3rd grade. Up until they are 5 don't worry too much about adopting a rigid formal homeschooling plan. Just use everyday situations to cover the basics, ABC's, 123, basic addition, subtraction etc. Use every "why" question from them as an opportunity to turn it into a simple science lesson. If you don't know the answer tell them lets go look it up. Just get them used to the process of how to seek answers.

After they are 5 you need to formalize it more, start to think about what it is you want you child to learn and start to form a schedule of subjects that they need to know. Understand that as they grow and become more independent that they need to be able to take over this schedule and do more and more things that they are interested in. For example if they like Chemistry let them opt to do more science in Chemistry over Astronomy.

As for curriculum, up until about 3rd grade it does not matter all that much, because you are dealing with reading writing and basic arithmetic. The last one being one one that curriculum is the most important for. We personally used Math-U-See and like it pretty well, but more and more for our older child we have been using http://www.khanacademy.org/ as a resource for her. One thing to beware of is that there are a lot of religious organizations in homeschooling, I have nothing wrong with religion per-say (I attend church and read the Bible) but I tend to not teach my children Science from text with religious affiliation, just as I don't teach them from text with an environment or activist affiliation. I share common beliefs with some of those groups, but for science I want just the facts with no agendas. Religion or environmental concerns are a separate study in my household. I say this because we have had to filter some of the science books provided to us from other homeschooling families.
Disabling WPS on Wireless APs via Firmware Modification
Shameless self-promotion: my startup (http://movableink.com) lets you add real-time elements to email. In fact, we have a group messaging company using it to show real-time conversations in status emails.

It doesn't allow interactivity (which is what you're probably thinking of) but it does provide real-time content.
Then ask for a cash bonus. Or a disprroportionate share of the next few month's sales.

Decide what you think is fair, and propose it. Being silently angry does no good. And you might just get what you ask for... or maybe better! Maybe your partner is oblivious, and this will provide the wake-up call your business needs!
I'd like to see it if nothing else I think it would force those of us who have been to lazy to do something that day... as in "Well I was going to browse around for an hour before doing actual work but with all my sites down guess I'll do this SOPA letter to my representative thing that's been on my ToDo list"
As a developer, testing the multitasking lifecycle of your app can be fairly difficult. I'm surprised Android doesn't make it easier, especially on a device (as opposed to the emulator).

For anyone interested in the hoops you have to jump through to force the extended lifecycle situations on a device, check out a recent write up by Theo at Bricolsoft – http://bricolsoftconsulting.com/2011/12/23/how-to-test-onsav...
yeah, that's pretty cool.
> I interned at the US embassy in Madrid and I can tell you that it was not bullying of any sort but a long negotiation and collaboration process between the US and Spanish governments. Furthermore, the US government also sends out proclamations of policy all the time called "demarches"; the US does it, Spain does it, they're all just formal statements of policy and requests for action from one country to another, this is likely just another demarche and thus not out of the ordinary.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/o3za7/us_threaten...
I've been wanting an API key to nokia's 3D maps for a while. There are a lot of gaming possibilities there.
Every time I read this it frightens me, I don't have an active github account, therefore I am a failure? I'm currently working a 16 month internship before graduating with a Computer Engineering degree. My code from this work will not be available anywhere of course.

Not through any fault of that though, I realize that having a github account with projects and such that you work on is a great help, and I accept that myself not having one yet is a great disadvantage. What do you recommend to get started out on github? Is helping out open source programs still viable? Or now it seems either writing self-run projects, or forking others projects and helping them with those. Is there any clear starting point for githubbing? (and how do you squeeze it in after a 10 hour work day!)

Just questions from someone worried about my empty github profile :)