skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Something' is indeed wrong when no one can seem to even identify what that is. Opacity is the first problem I suppose.
How NFL Star Larry Fitzgerald got super vision
You can't let someone down if you don't build them up.

Google fought for years on net neutrality.

And they caved completely on it to make Android popular.

Apple didn't help but they didn't say they would. You're welcome to criticize Apple's inaction but that's very different than spending years promising to the world and fighting for a cause, only to do a total 180 and sell out what you claimed were your core values for the sake of market share.
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/FAQ.html#virality

The license requires that Modifications (as defined in Section 1.10 of the license) must be licensed under the MPL and made available to anyone to whom you distribute the Source Code. However, new files containing no MPL-licensed code are not Modifications, and therefore do not need to be distributed under the terms of the MPL, even if you create a Larger Work (as defined in Section 1.7) by using, compiling, or distributing the non-MPL files together with MPL-licensed files.
This is as well thought out, rational and meaningful as his writing ever has been.
Funny anecdote, but does "hot swap" necessarily mean "yank out without warning"? My understanding is that you might need to tell the kernel that you are going to yank out a component before doing so. Similarly after adding in a component you might have to poke the kernel and say "hey, new stuff here" before you can use it.
They have fixed that recently: http://floss.freebox.fr/

Here's the press release from FSF France (in French):
http://fsffrance.org/news/article2011-09-14.fr.html
The free exchange of scientific information and a free market economy based upon intellectual property are antithetical.
37signals is lazy
I generally like 37Signals stuff, but they seem to be getting very lazy. I am not one to badmouth another company, but let me know what you think of the following.

I am a long time users of Highrise and are becoming very frustrated with the lack of support and fixes.

First and very importantly, we would like to export our data to be able to quickly assign Addresses and Countries to our contacts. Adding tags in a batch fashion would also be great and seems like a basic requirement. And then re-import that data back into the system.

Another, bigger item is their lack of support for their APIs.

Over 3 months ago we filed this ticket:

http://groups.google.com/group/37signals-api/browse_thread/thread/75792fe951e39968/06768234fb07a4c2?pli=1

https://github.com/tapajos/highrise/issues/29

The issue, as far as we know, is clearly a bug in their API and limits what we (or others) can do with Highrise. It is rather frustrating that this has not been dealt with. We adhere to tight products, agile development and limiting new functionality in our own products - but this is starting to simply smack of laziness on 37signals part.
Yes, because you have that amount in HSA. That is the entire point of the high deductible.
"The Twitter for Android app just sent my entire address book to Twitter (...)"
In what hypothetical world? It sounds like the hospitals in the US couldn't care less how much they charge people since they'll just sue you into oblivion if you don't pay.

What's the difference between a $1K deductible and a $10K one? How's that going to make one bit of difference?

Consumers have no say in how much the procedures cost. There's no "price pressure" from anyone but the group buyers, those being the insurance companies and Medicare.
Then why are you still in Italy? Entrepreneurs don't whine about how things can't change, they figure out how.
Handing a Drupal website over to a client was always hard. No wysiwyg, no automatic updating, built-in dependency hell (that the client can see in /modules), _constant_ warnings about module updates and security updates and core updates and updates of every other kind, make Drupal an extremely tough sell.
It's never mentioned in the article, but this only applies to
the "Get Big Fast" flavor of Startup. Where you're hoping for a big payout in 4 years time if you sacrifice every waking hour between now and then building as fast as possible.

So when it concludes that you can't build something small and profitable, and that you can't do anything other than work yourself into the ground, it's just restating its assumptions as conclusions.

If, on the other hand you're looking for something to replace your $150/hr consultant gig, you absolutely can build something small that brings in a little profit. And you absolutely can build that thing without working "harder than is healthy".

I keep a spreadsheet that tracks the hours I've worked on my startup alongside the profits it has made. It tells me exactly how much my time has been worth for the hours I've spent working on the thing in the last 4 years. And it's creeping up to look like a respectable consulting rate.
The goal is laudable, but there's such a small chance of success in startups that selecting for anything other than likelihood to succeed is a dangerous strategy. Is that likelihood to succeed correlated to gender? Possibly, but not so likely.

I could see they believe that there's an untapped reservoir of talent that's both highly likely to succeed and does not have an appropriate path to startups (which is what it sounds like). But it'll be a long, long uphill battle to develop the support network that can help such people succeed.
WordPress core is not trying to be all things to all people. But can he tell me a CMS that makes it simpler to build out the requirements for a vast majority of the websites in the world?

If you are looking for a custom feature set on a project that you claim WordPress doesn't meet your needs, then build a custom CMS for the job and charge appropriately. WordPress allows organizations and individuals to have massive power in their website for a fraction of the cost of a custom CMS. And in comparison to a custom CMS, it gets a great deal of testing.

WordPress is always looking for new contributors, and if your solution isn't something that works for core and the WordPress core philosophy, then you can extend your idea via a plugin.

And in the author's list of things WordPress "has either no, or severely limited" support for, he is way off the boat. There are a slew of highly talented developers that either having working solutions for or are working on almost all of those things, and more.
>and management of the damn thing is difficult even for the developers among us.

Understatement of the year so far.

I love Drupal, but since there's no bright line separating configuration and content, rolling features up from a dev environment to staging to live can sometimes be a nightmare, particularly if the Features and Strongarm modules don't have you covered.
Li-Air Battery with an 800-Kilometer (500-Mile) Range
[citation needed]

If you're claiming that the basic underpinnings of society are at odds with human nature, you need to do better than the old "studies show" handwaving. I can't find anything on born-to-learn.org or 21learn.org that cites anything with even a vague resemblance to data. There are a few citations in the FAQ, but they're mainly to articles in the popular press or PopSci books.

Shame on everyone who upvoted - if the linked site had made an argument that ran counter to our prejudices as hackers, we would have rightly deplored it as pseudo-scientific demagoguery. We should condemn anyone who uses vague references to "science" as an appeal to authority, regardless of whether we agree on their conclusions.
If you choose to get elective surgery for a condition rather than waiting in the queue for the NHS your room isn't covered by the Govt, your post-op prescriptions aren't covered, etc. If you do wait however they are covered. If you need corrective surgery afterwards to fix something that went wrong in the first op you normally aren't covered for that by the NHS either.
if(someNumber && someNumber.HasValue)

You still have to remember to do this check. Will the compiler complain if you use someNumber.Value without checking that its valid first? If not, then its not really the same thing.

The point of Haskell's Maybe is that the compiler will make sure that you take both cases (that there is a value and that there isn't a value) into account (because to extract the value you must pattern match and pattern matches must be exhaustive, otherwise you get a compile error).
SemiAccurate loves drama. Take everything you read on that site with a grain of salt. (Especially if it has to do with Nvidia. Charlie hates Nvidia.)
If you read the full article, he explains that there was an underlying medical cause and that the second hospital found it.
This is what happens when you try to use a blog as a CMS.
Try going from Mac/Linux to Windows (or vice versa) and see if "getting [your] development environment running for [your] applications [is] just as easy"...
That is a very good point re: medicare.

I was a management consultant in the healthcare industry in a previous life. One interesting study I did found a direct correlation between percent of patients on medicare/medicaid and hospital profitability...

The higher the percent of medicare and medicaid patients, the lower the profitability. The correlation was essentially a straight line.
DHH doesn't seem to agree. If you're running Windows 37Signals isn't going to hire you.

http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html
I've had to retreat from the over-exposed groups and into the smaller niches, but that's hardly a way to run a community. It's too fragmented and discovery is hard, with word of mouth or casual linking in the sidebar being about the only way to reasonably discover new places to explore.

Reddit's user community has never been stronger, but the platform is in serious disrepair.
Well, yeah, if you ignore all the studies and only read libertarian blogs, then it's hardly clear. Administration accounts for 31% of healthcare costs in the U.S., and 16% in Canada, for example.
The PCification of Ultrabooks
I'm not sure I agree with the final point

All you need these days to build great things is a
browser, a text editor, and the programming language
or tool of your choice.

Even when developing web apps there's sometimes need to use a network traffic analyzer, a debugger... Not to mention a plethora of tools for reading/analyzing/parsing log files, graphing benchmark results, generating test SSL certificates and a lot of other things that are not equally available on all platforms.

And there's another consideration: if you're deploying your software on Linux it's just plain easier to develop it on Linux as well.
I would highly recommend having a portfolio of some sort. If you already have one, please add the link in the OP.

Thanks!

Will definitely give this a try if it meets our criteria.
It is also BSD and APL compatable according to http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/FAQ.html#mpl-bsd-and-apache which I believe will make it much easier for my team when contributing and interacting with Apache projects such as Hadoop.
Instagram coming to Android soon
Another commenter here also pointed out Windows and niche Unices. That's probably more the domain of IBM and CA. Cfengine can do it if you want to put in the time. But how often does Cfengine come up on this site? It's too barren by default. A promise lib that targets the EL/Debian majority shop and makes opinions and assumptions based on the smaller problem set would be welcome by many. Even if Windows is in play, it's probably self-contained in most shops. Let the big timers support themselves if you want to unify niche commercial OS.
What I've liked about switching fulltime to a mac laptop is the polish. It's a unix install that quickly sleeps when I close the lid :-P
It's a fine CMS... better than most.
Completely agree on this. On the other hand, this is also a fault on Facebook's side at not being open with their social graph. If FB had been open, maybe Google wouldn't have had decided to build G+ in the first place...
Ahh, that app doesn't actually use any web services other than for the in-app purchasing.

The numbers that are calculated are from direct user input, but the things that are stored like shipping and tax rates are stored using NSUserDefaults.

Caching data locally is fairly easy... just put the downloaded JSON file into the application's sandboxed /Documents folder for easy retrieval later.
I rarely look at username either. Well... until now. Now I feel I have to look at every username. So... thanks for that. :/
Don't confuse writing unit-tests with TDD. TDD requires unit-tests, unit-tests do not require TDD.

And unit-tests don't require writing unit-tests for everything.
It could be controversial and the conclusions could be somewhat crackpot, but if the methods and reasoning is sound so it's of good quality otherwise I don't see why it shouldn't be published. If it can be demonstrated to be flawed by others, that's an easy win for other academics.

Clever people can come to totally different conclusions based on the same data, science is supposed to help us with that. I find it more worrying that so much focus is put on keeping it out of the literature is made, if it's so bad then it should be easy to debunk.

This is what upsets me with science and politics gets mixed, it turns into a political game about who gets into the special club of peer reviewed literature, instead of about scientific merit.
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/FAQ.html#mpl-and-lgpl

This seems to say that you can block that possibility:

"Software can become “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses” ...the original author marks it as such by adding the file header in Exhibit B"
Sound advice.. then again: take everything you read online with a grain of salt :) And everything you read offline or hear on TV with a truckload of the same :)
Lying about salary to recruiters?
First of all, disclosure: New account to protect identity.

For a while now I've been poking around and seeing what other opportunities are out there for me. For the last few years I've been with a company that notoriously underpays it's developers. In the last few months, I've been held back from promotions and working / planning new projects.

For these reasons I've decided that it's probably time for a change. However, I've been stuck at this lower salary now for quite some time. In past discussions with recruiters about positions, I've disclosed my salary and only got offers that were a little bit better. Nothing ground shaking, but still not enough to ditch the few perks that I still have where I am.

So I decided to try something new. When asked by recruiters what my salary is, I first try and dodge the question. If they persist, I tell them my salary is what I feel I should be making instead of what I actually am. I usually raise this number by around 25 - 35% more than what I am making now. After doing this, I am getting interviews for positions that are willing to pay me between 50 - 70% more than what I am currently making.

My questions to everyone is this:

1.) Do you think this is unethical?

2.) Have you ever done this? (If Yes: Have you ran into any issues after doing so?)

3.) Am I stupid for not doing this sooner?
There are some services I know that offer a virtual mailing address. Not knowing where you live I would highly suggest taking this into consideration as we have one and works perfectly well with our system.
Didn't look like he was trying to fake anything at all. The VLC control bar was in plain view on a screen in front of everyone! Then he lets the audience in on the gag by letting go of the wheel while the video continues to roll.
Meanwhile the NSA/CIA/FBI has complete access to all FB data. I have no proof of this but they have access to everything else.
These are the growing pains a lot of WP developers face at some point.

The problem is that WordPress is really, really good at basic things. Things which involve end users and ease of functionality, this covers quite a bit of actual work.

The problem arises when you need to extend that functionality outside the box, you're used to working with something great, you're taking it for granted that it can do anything.

Well it can't, some very basic functions like say a forms API or media API which you consider essential , does not even exist.

I think there has been a strain lately that the core team, especially with J. Wells leadership, has concentrated WAY to much on UI and Design. Developers are starting to look elsewhere for actual functionality that keeps up, the problem is so far there is not much out there that is easy to use.
Yeah, but it is not really relevant in this context.

The distance between C# and Java is much, much smaller than between lisp and any member of the C family (except objective C).
I can't think of a bigger waste of time. That is, unless you've somehow convinced a client to pay you to do it.
Thanks for the kind words. I agree and disagree with your comment on the about page. Some people probably don't care, but I think some others will find it interesting to learn more about products we use to get the job done.

Thanks
The problem with CMSes that have "all the features you want" is that they have so many features that the average user who just needs to plonk some content down on a page and periodically edit it can't wade through all the features to figure out how to do that.

(I don't say this to pick on Plone -- I'm a big fan of the TYPO3[1] CMS, for instance, which does lots of the things that he mentions very well, but the downside to that power is that it's insanely hard for normal people to pick up and use.)

[1] http://typo3.org
I'm familiar with this paper. Unfortunately it's deeply flawed.

The RAND health experiment studied 30 measures of health. Two of them were statistically significantly improved - vision (due to free eyeglasses, p=0.001) and blood pressure (p=0.03).

Simple math shows that 0.97 ^ 30 = 0.4. This means that the RAND experiment had a 60% chance of showing an effect in at least one particular submeasure even if there was no effect in any of them.

(The result on eyeglasses is strong enough to avoid this effect, however. So we can conclude that free glasses help people see better.)
The person you're responding to believes that if medical charges are vastly different between providers it must be due to evil government regulation, because after all in other sorts of stores we never see wildly varying prices for the same item and healthcare, where people have plenty of time to comparison shop (even if you're choking on turkey, you still have a few minutes to contact the various local hospitals and determine which provides cheaper ER service before you pass out) is a perfect example of a transparent market.
Randall Munroe had a much more terse post on the subject:

http://xkcd.com/934/

(Some of you may balk that a cartoon is not a blog post, but commentary is commentary.)
In the video they talk of profiling it in IE — maybe it wasn't profiled and improved in other OSes/browsers.
Elegance and purity are the last thing Common Lisper's care about. Common Lisp is a by-committee spec, after all. If you're going to characterize the "shitty attitude" around Lisp, it's much more about the language being pragmatically well-designed. Dynamic, but not unmanageably so like Ruby. Tasteful API design unlike Java. Performance much closer to Java than to scripting languages. Etc.
Well put. The biggest depressive factor in a work environment (to me, at least) is having a feeling of hopelessness, of being "stuck" in a job - even if it's a job you kind of like, being stuck in it makes it much less enjoyable.

You don't even have to quit, but look around, find prospects, prove to yourself that you can find another job if you choose to, and you may find your outlook becomes much brighter. It's a feeling of being in control of your destiny.

And hey, if one of those prospects looks like a more promising path, then all the better.
America's labor market is hollowing out
OP argues that callbacks are less complex than type-checked null because it eliminates checking success at the call site. Branching on success at the call site is similar complexity as implementing onSuccess and onError. I don't think its the check itself that matters, its remembering the check, and both a success/failure interface and type-checked null meet this goal.

As to which is better, type-checked null is referentially transparent, which is a nice objective measurement of complexity, and referentially transparent functions are generally more reusable than those that aren't. It also keeps my mental model of the stack tidy, tail-call optimization or no.

QED, right? have I missed anything?
Gorbzel, I read this and many articles by MG, who turn out to be full of tricky rhetoric to prove the same point again and again; "I love Apple, and I hate everything else."

Android source code is open, Carriers, Amazon (Kindle Fire), B&N(Nook), zillions of hardware manufactures are freely copying android source code to do whatever they want. Although I like the Nexus, and non-Carrier based versions and independent ROMS I admire the possibility that someone other than Google may come one day with some more innovative stuff based/forked on Android. Although I do not like most of them, I like diversity and the potential that better stuff will come up. I myself plan to use Android source code to create small robots with central intelligence. An opposite to "faux open", If you and MG defend "vrai Open", please give me the iOS5 source code and I promise I ll try to use it instead of Android in my project.

Your fallacy is this; you hate Carrier control; I hate it too, in addition I hate control from the Software producer (Apple/Google) & I hate manufacturer control (Apple, HTC, Samsung).

Your concerns about Verizon etc are right, but It would be ridiculous if you believe few years of AT&T/iPhone deal was more open and good for everyone. AT&T and Apple "consistency" you admire is simply due to a single product/single manufacturer/single carrier(was). I am for diversity for anything in my life. I know that the single biscuit they sold in some Soviet countries provides consistent, non-fragmented, smooth experience every day. But I am for diversity; I am for the guys who jumped from the Berlin wall (ed garden) to experience diversity and openness and freedom.

One last word, if you are not yourself a proponent of "Open", and you defend "Walled gardens and total control", why you or MG/others spend your words to convince me that Google is not open with Android. Leave the word to people like me who know the value of freedom and openness; believe me we shall criticize Google and Android harshly and better; by not forgetting that Google has come with Android open-source and not closed. At least they have a good starting point compared to Apple.
This piece is not particularly constructive. While it's not required for an opinion piece to present the perfect alternative in order to rant against the status quo...to say "Wordpress sucks" and say nothing about the alternatives...? What good does that do?

I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great detail describe how WP doesn't meet his needs...I'm really fascinated to know what alternative he's considered that does meet his clients need and that is realistically doable?
Kinect comes to Windows
Honestly I learned about the PHP mongo extension by going to MongoDB's website & reading how to get it to work. My first thought was not to do 'pecl install mongo'. This probably has more to do with 10gen taking the effort to write a proper extension for PHP rather than letting the community come up with a module for node.js. Also I don't think node has had time to "settle" since it's still evolving, so you'll experience package fragmentation like what you see with mongo.

I do agree that along with package management there should be a strong community/social component involved that critiques & communicates about packages available.