skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm from the second half and had some pretty cool chemistry sets as a child. I've noticed recently that all the chemistry sets are really rubbish now. Where's my strip to magnesium to set fire to?
crappy camera? Have you used an iphone?
If "undefined behavior" were an argument for keeping features out of the language, the language we would have ended up with would not be C.
> Good friends are as much an investment of your time and energy as anything else.

Absolutely. So, what is the ROI on your investment? And, do you understand what "sunk costs" means?

> I couldn't imagine deliberately splitting away from them in order to meet more business-minded people.

Then don't. However, the consequences of your choices don't depend on whether you want said consequences.

While you're at it, look up "false dilemma". Your current friends and "business-minded people" aren't the only options.
I feel the reality is that Android is open when you look at gerrit, Cyanogenmod, and the Apache license.

The closed view is the inability to view the source of what is on the devices that people buy, view the in-process development work by the major contributors, and the bootloaders on all of the popular devices.

Android as a side-by-side simple competitor to the iPhone is dead because it is so much bigger now than what can fit on a single Cupertino conference table, and that's awesome.
Most tall stools I've seen have something at about the right height to rest your feet on, whether just a brace between the legs of the stool or a ring that looks like it's intended as a footrest.

Even without that, a detached footrest would still be rather easy to find.
I found this guide very useful, so thanks for making it. :) I've used SVN, Mercurial, and git before, so knowing those made this easy to digest. Plus it covers stuff about git I never knew existed, like gitk. So cool!
> probably because I was already too stupid from the lead fumes out of the crucible.

Ha! Remembering back all the nights I hovered over electronics, soldering, breathing all those fumes, blown capacitors with nasty smoke billowing into a small apartment. You know you got a heavy dose of all kinds of nasty compounds when you can tell what kind of component blew by the smell only.
The problem with this advice is that if you have all these skills, you'll be already paid so much that you'll never become an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship as a whole is done on the margins and by definition that implies having a lot of time, not too many skill but also having the mentality that your willing to do whatever it takes.

In the job market its impossible to find a job that lets you cultivate all those skills he listed. Better is to start something on the side and learn all these skills part time.
Contact Congress - Talk directly to your representatives
ATLAS is fast because its C code is generated beforehand by a more intelligent program. ATLAS is essentially the output of a compiler that has access to the information that would have been thrown away had your project been written directly in C. All the latest numeric libraries use this approach now, e.g. FFTW's backend is written in ML. The ATLAS overview paper (http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~whaley/papers/atlas_siam.pdf) explicitly states, "ATLAS does not require an
excellent compiler, since it uses code generation to perform many optimizations typically
done by compilers."

The point is that neither C nor the C compiler used to build ATLAS's output is what makes it fast. What makes it fast is essentially a different compiler which operates upstream of the C compiler.
Some reviews of Path for Android [1]:

"No options for lower Res screen, so this app isn't an option for me."

"Has potential, but doesn't resize for smaller screens, so can't see half of what's going on. Interface is snappy though, which is good."

"screen resolution issues: Doesn't display properly on my Samsung Galaxy Ace. Hope you can fix this. Otherwise, quite an interesting app."

"My phone screen is too small for this app"

Along with a slew of other problems with bugginess, lack of feature parity with iOS, etc. Telling is the variance of its score (http://cl.ly/0m3b2a2v3s1Y0x071Q0e) versus iOS (http://cl.ly/030I0M3z1I181g3T2p2T), suggesting that the Path developers have this product working well on some phones, but terribly on others. That's one of the clearest examples of fragmentation that I can find.

[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.path&hl=en
If you're in the SF bay area and enjoy this kind of stuff, there are lots of cool places to explore. Alameda NAS is especially good, but there are many others:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/telstar/sets/56935/
Not to pick too many nits, but I didn't use free() or malloc() for about 7 years of my career in programming C.

Embedded systems sometimes still frown upon willy-nilly memory allocation ;)

Of course, days when your build breaks and it's because someone, somewhere defined a piece of data as 8 bits, but your latest build has shifted some stuff around and suddenly two memory definitions have become one because of memory alignment...was probably more painful to track down than free() issues.
An official lead casting kit? That's pretty neat. I just pulled cells out of discarded car batteries that I found while playing on a construction site, and melted it in bottle caps over the kitchen stove.

I cannot believe my parents let me do ANY of that. The joys of growing up in the USSR.
The childporn system in Denmark was used to something similar. The actual list of websites is/was hidden, but got leaked to wikileaks -- a large amount of those banned sites were simply (adult) gay sites that had pissed somebody of.

I am not sure, but I think the end of it was that the leak was blocked too (since it contained addresses of child porn).

Personally I guess they just didn't wanted to have to explain why they blocked a site for a Duck forklift renting company (to be fair, those were some sexy forklifts, they were less than 18 and they didn't have much clothing on).
Yes, this is a problem that has existed for a long, long time. Consider the origin of HLLs. Waaaay back when COBOL was born, at least some of the people involved, seemed to be thinking that, instead of writing a new program each time one was needed, they only needed one program: a compiler. Non-programmers could interact with an easy, human-readable description of the software (in COBOL), and the compiler would do the actual coding.

For those who prefer to think of the "inner platform" effect, the above is a clear example. The two platforms are the HLL and the machine code. But then we can see that the idea of having multiple platforms, might not be a bad thing (unless you'd prefer to do all your coding in machine code?).

A lesson to be learned from all this, is that duck programming is not a problem with the tools or the code itself, but with the way we think about and manage these.

> ... that is thought to be “not programming” ....

Exactly.
Great storytelling and I have no doubt that it is all true. One thing that bothered me in this monologue was he kept saying things like, "Do you think that THEY don't know?" "Do you think that Apple doesn't know?"

Problem for me being that Apple is a corporation and doesn't have one mind. Does anyone at Apple know? I'm sure people who visit the factories do. Does the information get passed around throughout the organization so that everyone knows? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Do most people who work at Apple want to be intentionally ignorant? Probably, but I don't think there's some huge conspiracy going on. Most Apple employees are no different than consumers. They have no knowledge of this from Apple internals and don't think about it much.
I'm permanently 45, since I was 15 and started worrying about my first "investment" (rare comic books).
I'm 30 now, but still feel like a very young 45 years old...

edit: oh jeez, I've read the article after I posted my comment... almost same age as Mr. Adams.
Just cancelled my Spotify subscription. Money talks.
I have a degree in physics, so I guess it was a mistake to leave out the (two) punchlines and leave them implied:

1. "absorb vibrations by trapping pressure waves" is a meaningless concept in physics. Sponges, rubber, styrofoam, springs and crumpled paper all "absorb vibration" in the same way - converting mechanical energy into heat. Apart from a rather pedantic system in which somehow air pressure is used to add angular velocity to a flywheel, there is no sense in which vibrations are "stored". There is also the case of an irreversible deformation, as when a car crumples. And in that case, the object would become monotonically less capable of absorbing energy - a curve that would be easy to measure (place crumpled paper in a vice, repeatedly attempt to squeeze a bit, measure maximum and minimum circumference, repeat, graph)

2. Thermodynamically, any excess energy is going into heat. Period. This could be tested by very carefully measuring the temperature of the crumpled paper before and after being deformed several times, as with the vice above. Eventually (and with paper, sooner rather than later) there's going to be microscopic breakdown at the fiber and even molecular levels, and that increase in entropy must be factored in, too. (Now that is an interesting experimental challenge: how to measure the "looseness" of paper fiber in a crumpled sheet. There are some easy destructive ways but I cannot think of any non-destructive ones.)

So yes, I call shenanigans on this professor and, apart with the (already admittedly) interesting problem of describing the geometry of particular crumples, I think his research is laughable. Although I would enjoy being shown how I am in error, if that be the case.
I'm not saying to avoid IDisposable (just the opposite in fact).

The `foreach` statement and the `using` statement just so happen to desugar to similar code when it comes to handling IDisposable. The C# compiler will guarantee that Dispose() is called on the iterator and that code in the `finally` block will execute... even if you exit the loop early due to an `exception` or a break/goto. Just like the `using` statement.

The benefit is that it's even more of a pit-of-success feature than the `using` statement because you can't possibly forget to call Dispose().

It's also only slightly more work for the library author and slightly less work for the client but the client is going to use the code many more times than the author will write it.
US expels Venezuelan diplomat for planning cyber attack
In .NET, open source does not beget open source
I wonder how sensitive they are. What's to stop some jerk from buying uranium and scattering it around the city triggering a rash of false positives?

http://www.unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&c...
"...waiting to be shipped to rosy-cheeked little scientists?"

Or whatever address those rosy-cheeked little scientists decided to put on the form. I remember sending ants to unsuspecting neighbors using the refill from that came with my ant farm.
Polonium 210? They were not fucking around.
Not this one, I meant the one from Bell Labs.
Same here, Linux laptop hardware direct into my HDTV, no clicks, just worked.
It's more difficult to code for lots of combinations of keyboards, screen sizes and ratios as well as with cpu/gpu/memory constraints, and API/OS versions in mind for developers.

With that in mind, the final product will get a lower quality if the developer can't afford the costs of optimizing for every device. Or your device incapable of running the app at all.
programming skills - yes, i still can't compare, namely, communication skills with the scientist's knowledge. i believe first come with practice, the latter come with learning and understanding.

> Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it to the letter.

oh, not in my case! :)

actually i got what you're saying
1.4 million orders for world's cheapest tablet in India
Gassée on Samsung vs. Google
Samsung develops emotion-sensing smartphone
Enjoy:

http://www.sparehed.com/2007/05/14/dagwood-splits-the-atom/
It's a Google Web Font. I'll check that later. Thanks for the hint!
What Hacker Apprenticeships Tell Us About the Future of Education
10 Extremely Useful DSLR Camera Lenses
Johannes Gutenberg would beg to differ. A publisher is not a requirement for a book any more than a record company is a requirement for a song.
The only way to practice entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is to start a company.

Correct me if I'm totally missing your point, but there are different types of businesses and companies, some of which lend themselves to "entrepreneurial practice" more than others. Sole-proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, S Corps, C Corps, whatever, they get progressively more complex and risky.
They're trying to convince people opa isn't a load of trash.
Write some code, tag it with "built for the cloud", say "it's the future / next gen / teh shit / extremely awesome / nice / etc" and hope people believe that crap.

After all, they should bet their startup / business on something which is very new, seems to lack large real world use and testing. Yeah, that's right, weird looking code mixed with HTML is just the thing I was looking for. Trust an untested new database system with my data? Sure, I'll do that....reaaallyyyy soon...NOT.

They've failed to convince me.
I was at Super Computing 11 this past November.

I haven't done it personally. But I saw a demo at the CycleComputing booth that looked pretty slick.

They've brought up to 30,000 linux nodes. Not sure if they have an offering for windows or azure.

There are entire companies being built to solve this problem.
> I just pulled cells out of discarded car batteries that I found while playing on a construction site

Dodging the acid in the lead-acid batteries?! Now that is dedication.

I raise my cup (of coffee) to you in honor of your superior talent for self-destruction.
and what's inside can't get out easier. Which is the whole point of the "greenhouse gases" what energy gets in can't escape as easily so there's a net gain over time causing the globe to warm.

I thought this was explained to people.

I believe the current Anti-Global warming argument is not whether or not the earth is warming, but whether humans have any significant factor in it happening.
This was submitted sixteen hours ago with a different title and sank without a trace. I have a feeling that the title may have been the issue.
I think it does matter.

If I buy an Android Device (tm) and get something that has a (both in terms of visuals and functionality) botched and outdated version of the Android project, I care.

If that software will be forever behind the platform and _not_ as you state it 'work perfectly fine', I care again.

For me this was a very real scenario with the HTC Hero (no idea what the name outside of the EU was). I preordered the phone, got a brick with an old version of Android with a non-standard ui and while the world moved on I saw more and more applications on the market that didn't like to support my 1.5/1.6 device at that time.

I claim it's better now, but mostly because Google took a lot of time between the last handset release and now ICS. Phones could catch up to 2.x, crawling sloooowly from update to update, while Google didn't release 3.0 and worked on ICS for a while. I'm pretty sure we'll see a great gap in adoption again very soon: The manufacturer are going to drop support for ~most~ handsets or take month to create an update for existing devices.

The main problems I see with this is (apart from people like me that feel left behind/screwed if you sell them a device that is more or less DOA) that the "brand" loses a lot of value. If you compare a shiny "Android phone" with another "Android phone" and one looks gorgeous and runs fast while the other looks wildly different and is slow as molasses you're alienating the customer. You force your customers to do a lot of "search the reviews" dances before buying a mobile or they end up with a POS that is never going to do what you see on "other Android phones" around you.
It's really not that hard, actually. Developers typically don't need to worry about different keyboards at all. CPU/GPU/Memory/screen constraints? It's a lot easier to do this for Android than it is for the Web. Or for any desktop application.

> Or your device incapable of running the app at all.

If your device isn't capable of running the app, it won't install (or even appear in the Market for that matter!) assuming the developers aren't entirely incompetent.

Credentials: I'm an Android developer.
I think the problem is that the guide doesn't explain the vocabulary it uses at all. There are programmers (and definitely non-programmers) who might not have heard the word "tree" used to describe a directory filled with files and other directories. It's immediately clear once it's explained, and the guide even has little drawings that look like a directory tree, but for people new to version control and people who have used CVS or SVN this use of the word might be foreign. The same with "commit" since someone coming from another system has a different idea of what that means and someone new to version control has no idea.

Honestly, I'm not even sure you need to talk about "trees". The first chapter of Pro Git doesn't mention them at all, and this section describes the working dir, the index and HEAD without using the word: http://progit.org/book/ch1-3.html Instead he talks about "snapshots" and "stages".
Nowadays they have things like Genetics and DNA Science Kit for 30 bucks which seems insanely cool to me.
Are there significant advantages to doing this in the database as opposed to a middle layer?
Nice. I'm often conflicted over whether to bookmark the actual page or the HN comments. Sometimes the comments are so valuable, I'll bookmark them instead, since I can always get to the page in question from the comments. This provides a nice alternative. Thanks.
Yeah vinegar and soda is now the most exciting stuff you can get for kids' science experiments.

Not many people mind kids playing contact sports, getting concussions, broken ligaments, but when it comes to stuff like this is "Oh, no! Hide all the science equipment, we don't want them to burn their little fingers on the Bunsen burners".
Javascript: Call vs Apply
Found them suggesting scraping unfair dismissal laws:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/26/unfair-dismissal-...
I'm pretty sure that they are not trying to avoid hurting people's feelings. The problem with "discipline" is that people see the word and assume that we're merely talking about strength of willpower. The key to discipline is building good habits and sticking to them, not mere willing yourself to do the right thing. People often make this mistake.
Exactly. I have a colleague who worked on some part of the control software of the Space Shuttle code in the 70s and he tells me that at some point, NASA's management decided to freeze the source code so no more modifications to it were permitted (sensible, if it's done) but they still wanted to be able to change the behavior of the software. The inevitable result was that someone wrote their own DSL for patching the object files generated by the original source code directly.
No one likes making mistakes or missing opportunities, but even with your mistakes and missed opportunities, you're smart enough to recognize your mistakes and missed opportunities and learn from them. Maybe even because of your mistakes.

There's two ways of learning why you shouldn't swim with crocodiles: The hard way and the easy way.

We would prefer our children to learn the easy way, but sometimes they need to learn the hard way.
Politicians already make a lot of their wealth from insider information. Even if you somehow stopped all donations, corporations would just trade more knowledge for favors.

Politicians should be prohibited from direct investment, both during and sometime after serving. Doesn't stop someone from enriching some partners who agree to pay him back at some later date. There probably is no end to the corruption.

I think that letting foreign companies shape our legislation is such a manner ought to considered at best a stones throw from treason.
One word: ChromeOS.
The i and j not being incremented is actually an error in the original blog post - I'll leave it here for consistency.

Ah. In that case, I wonder how the author managed to get an infinite loop to complete in 0.8 seconds ;).
The readers' editor on… the trouble with numbers in Guardian reporting
Thanks for putting this together, it looks great. I should mention that the word "shit" in the title of this will make it challenging for me to share this with many professional colleagues.
Mac OS X Lion ships with Git by default. So no need to download Git for that platform.

Also, brew is a better choice for installing and keeping git up to date.
Intuit's Quickbase is a perfect example of this:

http://quickbase.intuit.com/

I was unfortunate enough to inherit a project management system running on Quickbase, and in the end it was faster for me to re-implement it in Rails than make even small changes to the workflow.
Many commenters are saying your decisions are right. That's true enough, but they shouldn't be your decisions. If you can't trust your lead developer to make these kind of choices correctly, what the hell are you paying them for? Live with the mistakes, or find yourself a better lead dev.
Actually, substitution is used in the CPI basket of goods. Fresh fish can be replaced by canned tuna, for instance.

More amusing is the application of "hedonics." This is perhaps best explained by an example. Consider that the cost of gasoline went up when certain additives were made required by the government. This cost is not fully reflected in the CPI, because there is a "hedonic thrill" associated with the perceived improved environmental friendliness (or similar nonsense) of the new required formulation of gasoline. Basically, the new gas should make you "feel better" about using it, so there is an improvement of quality that offsets the full increase in cost. Does this make sense given that fresh fish can be replaced by canned tuna? No...

Substition and hedonics are very useful for keeping the CPI from rising, which has a number of benefits for the government, as various welfare payments and wage structures are based off of it.
It's funny how right he is. Reading all these articles thinking you're learning all sorts of great useful things when really they leave out the most important parts. Then you go about trying to implement the things you read and you're left scratching your head wondering why things didn't work out like how the blog post said it would. By the way, not sure if someone has ever said this before, the author could totally be a stand-in for Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I remember collecting and playing with mercury from thermometers (here in the US), probably why I can't recite PI to anything more than 6 places :)
Same here. My keyboard is around one feet below the monitor.
I just built some boxes out of plywood and put my existing desk on them. It was still a bit too low (my back was hurting) so I added a 2x4 on each side between the box and the desk leg until my back stopped hurting. Works great and very inexpensive!
> At least that’s what I’ve heard; I don’t really know how holograms work.

Followed by a number of paragraphs incorrectly comparing things in code to his incorrect model of how holograms work. Come now, I'm sure we can talk about things like code without having to compare against things we don't even know about. Or, at the very least, we can read a wikipedia article beforehand...