skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is awesome, and I would have loved to go to a school like this.

However, I wonder if the school will become a place for people who are passionate about software to expand their coding talent at an early age, or if it'll become a place for kids whose parents want them to make money later in life to slog their way through a curriculum. It seems like there's a mixture of both types even in college CS programs, and one kind is a lot more pleasurable to learn with (as well as a lot more useful) than the other.
I wonder why none of these benchmarks measure the performance of _optimized_ Java? All of our builds use Proguard optimization and some of the resulting bytecode is noticeably faster.
Not just that; in Chrome 16 (OS X), I can't scale the font up myself like I used to be able to do with the page zoom options. (I could probably define myself a CSS for DDG, though...)
We certainly understand that for some specific billing situations, Stripe's subscriptions API may not be a good fit. That said, we've tried to accommodate as many use cases as possible, and I just wanted to make sure you knew we have a prorate => false flag that you can pass when switching subscriptions. We also have a concept of usage-based charges (invoice items). Your larger point of course still stands (that there are always going to be edge cases and custom billing logic).
No need -- will fix.
Keep in mind, the people who answer your calls are (likely unpaid) high school or college interns, not "staffers." They are not the people who research or discuss policy issues, they likely are not very aware of the candidate's legislative positions except on issues that generate lots of angry calls from constituents with time on their hands, like Medicare benefits for seniors. They are not making official statements.
The singularity seems, to me, to be based on a few simple ideas:

1) There is nothing supernatural about thought.

2) Investigation will lead us to understand it well enough to emulate it.

3) Once we can do this we will be be able to do it better than people.

4) Once this happens it will be able to improve itself better than we can.

5) Once this happens, we have no idea what will happen next.

2/3 are arguable, but don't seem unreasonable to me. The rest seem obviously true.
If the past months are any indication, no news organization is interested in reporting anything remotely relating to SOPA (except maybe as a short piece to promote it as "the legislation that will stop piracy for good" and that anyone who opposes this is a criminal).

SOPA did not get any media coverage, and I'd be surprised if flippant comments made by an anonymous staffer changed that.
The fundamentals of Cache
wish the laucher would be more quicksilvr like. e.g.launches best match on hitting return and open by some keystroke. not used it a lot yet - just a very first, quick impression on the released version...
Hmm, won't that be a problem for the students given that the ratio of males to females is going to be far from 1:1?
Xbox 360 still the Best Selling Gaming Console in the U.S
The call wasn't recorded and I did not get the person's name. I took clear notes and asked him to repeat that the Senator is in favor of "censoring" illegal content, which he confirmed.

The way he said "censor" really made my skin crawl - it was so pompous. Gillibrand's people were nice, fyi.

I asked twice if he had spoken with any constituents over the phone who support the bill and he confirmed twice that he had not.

But still, I am not a journalist and didn't plan to blog about this except that I was so shocked by the replies I got. Surely people who work the phones at these offices must assume that everything they say could end up "on the internet"?
Lorem Ipsum is supposed to show you the "experience" of the design, and leave out any emotional or cognitive associations you might have with specific text. It's used as a content-free placeholder in design. It really has nothing to do with "engineers".
"It's about what you can do and how you can be a valuable contributor."
Certainly.

"Look into problems that affect you in a very personal way."
This sounds very much like things you are likely to be passionate about, and the title is therefore quite misleading.
35 life hacks in one infographic
Coding Skill and the Decline of Stagnation
Cool, I will update the piece with your point.
This article ends with direct lines to call both DC and NYC offices of Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand. She also lists a sample script. Someone, if they have the resources and money (for paying for calls), could easily create an automated Twilio script to auto-dial this number with a pre-formatted script and insert some dynamic text for a name and phone number. You could then create a website for people to voice their concerns and auto-dial with an automated message on their behalf.

Thoughts?
While he seems well meaning, his point is a bit silly and shows a lack of understanding as to how capitalism works.

>>Instead of measuring ourselves by the size of our Series A or our average profit per employee, let’s measure in lives changed.<<

In an article that talks about the power of software to scale and effect entire populations of people, just how does he propose to "measure lives changed"? He doesn't, really. And how could he?

For example, if you rescue me from a burning building, you've certainly changed my life. But by how much? Do you now get credit for every accomplishment (or bad act) I do from that day forward? Or, if you're polite and let me get the cab we both hail, which allows me to get to my meeting on time, which allows me to close the sale and get the promotion... you've actually changed my life quite a bit, and you'll almost certainly never know about it.

The problem is, many more lives are changed by actions that are seemingly trivial, and often even unseen, than by those that are visibly heroic. Measurement then becomes impossible. Except we've figured out how to measure it. We use money.

If you're getting paid a princely some to design some system that end users will never see, you can be sure it's because the middleman thinks its valuable. He thinks he will be able to change people's lives. And, his belief will be confirmed when the end users pay him. In exchange for money, the end users get something that makes them better off. And that's the entire basis of capitalism.

So, while it's sexy to say that we have a responsibility to better the world at large because of our privilege, don't overlook the fact that by performing some service for pay, you are already bettering the world at large. By definition.
Sounds like the staffer is being a bit grumpy and perhaps does not fully agree with the Senator's position.
It's OK, a half-decent journalist wouldn't want to take your word for it anyhow, and would hopefully make their own calls to verify. Just go for it.
I find it hard to believe that anyone here takes this crap seriously. If you're making good progress as a developer, it can be very taxing on the mind and body. Do I really need to point this out here??
Actually you probably wanted to link to the top comment in that thread that has some actual information from a NOC operator: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/of0lu/wtf_is_goin...
How the G-Cloud will make buyers think like service integrators
How the G-Cloud will make buyers think like service integrators
Agreed. This is definitely true, unless your product is so trivial that it can be done in a few days, it will take some investment from them.

As far as prototyping, well not sure exactly what is meant by this as it could mean hiring a designer who knows some javascript to hack together some pages that act and feel like a real app but that is just a hollow shell. In this case, sure you can get this done somewhat cheaply but it can only then be a bridge to getting funding as its still going to take an investment to build the actual application.
Does Oxbridge really matter, anymore? I mean for those of us who aren't planing on becoming the next PM.

Similarly I am sure Eton (which seems to be one of the most popular ways into Oxbridge) provides a very good education, but I am also certain that it is almost impossible to pay that much for most people.
Indian Govt has sanctioned prosecution of websites incl Google & Facebook
Congratulations OP, and keep up the good work. Also, another good python web framework to learn on is Flask ( http://flask.pocoo.org/ ).
Nide (Node.JS IDE) v0.2 Released
Right, 10 would be the most complex software you can think of related to what you are working on. What in layman terms could be referred to as "rocket science".
If you really are afraid of peaceful civil protest in the USA, I'd say that's all the more reason why we have a responsibility to practice peaceful protest now before things get worse.
This is great. You should add a color picker to the text field boxes.
The American press loves quoting 'sources close to the senator' or a 'White house senior staffer.' Most journalists have no problem quoting anonymous sources (when it promotes their agenda).

I wouldn't worry about not having taken the name of the person on the other end of the call.
Where Are All the Widget-Makers?
Whether it's theft or not comes down to whether or not you honestly believe the money is yours. The reference to the size of the amount is there because the larger the sum, the less likely it is that someone could reasonably believe the money was theirs.

In the UK (and other common law countries), there's a legal principle called estoppel which often operates in mistaken payment situations. Basically, if the court decided that even if the OP did in fact spend the money in the honest belief that it was his, Codemasters would be entitled to recover the money unless they are "estopped" by reason of the fact that he had significantly changed his position in response to the receipt of the money.

It's ultimately meant to be a "fairness" test - if you had £10,000 in your account and someone mistakenly paid you £100, even if you spent that £100 in the belief it was yours, it's hardly like your financial position has been dramatically changed in reliance on that £100 payment. Therefore, you're likely liable to pay the £100 back.

However, the situation at hand seems to be more in favour of the recipient - sounds like he did rely on the additional money by paying back some debt, and that could mean that Codemasters can't get it back (or, perhaps, only get a portion of it back).
It is not the first time, there are dozens of specialized schools in NYC alone. There are thousands of specialized schools across the country. Arts, sciences, sports, you name it.
We'll have a permit from the City. Nothing to worry about.
I can't help laughing at all the people jumping to conclusions, quoting the "don't be evil" mantra and so on. Why not wait a little bit until the fog clears up? Disappointing that boing boing also coins the phrase "Google's Kenyan ripoff", as if they were already certain of their guilt.

Will be interesting to see which news outlets will ride along with it for cheap thrills ("Goolge might be involved in a scam" etc). My guess is: most of them.
Sounds mostly reasonable, but would you mind explaining why you ended up using RoR if you are mostly a Python shop?
I'm unsurprised people aren't calling in support; after all they don't need to campaign...

I also think people, i.e. the masses, aren't really aware yet. Most I am sure will be opposed when they figure it out, but there will be a proportion in favour.

I have seen people on Facebook posting in support.
Stuy High alumnus here ('04). Applications to the Stuy, BK Tech and BX Sci are more rigorous than most college applications - considering this high school is not basing entrance acceptance on GPA/Attendance, what could they possibly be using as an acceptance metric? While it might be good for a few kids who believe (or are told to believe) that Comp Sci is the only way to a six figure job and a life of happiness, something tells me the other aspects of High School might be largely deficient and ultimately, dare I say, self destructive.
Newspapers and 7 Core Statistical Concepts
I had a 6 inch hunting knife in my bag and it went through security in Denver, Chicago, New York (JFK), Zurich, and Amsterdam.

Found it when I get back from my travels... was hidden in one of the folds of my bag.
The Power of Enthusiasm
Great. If you can add customization of top bar, it would be awesome. Thanks for creating this tool.
So basically extradition laws state that if courts of some random country feel that British citizen violated their laws and they claim that this happened on their territory although this citizen never actually was there, he can be expelled from UK to be judged there if British judges believe that he will get fair trial there, whatever the laws there might be?

So Iran could put some "secret" documents up on the web. SEO it, grab credentials of all British citizens accessing the site and demand their extradition?
That day the Senators will be hearing testimony from USV's Brad Burnham and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian.

Mostly we will be showing our strength in numbers. There will be a few guest speakers and we will also take collective action.
Letters and a rebuttal: computer chess world champion ban
I've been thinking of making a pure-ruby javascript interpreter in order to embed it into ExecJS as a fallback for when nothing else is present.

I believe this is only the case on Linux, but I've found that it gives my coworkers who are trying out rails for the first time quite a bit of confusion. (For that matter, it would help if execjs appended #readme in its error message instead of just to the github page, since the same coworkers were also unfamiliar with github, and didn't realize they had to look below the fold for the list of runtimes.)
that's clever. now tbh I don't even know how long is snooze on my phone, I just assumed it must be even.
How Larry Page Plans To Change Google Forever In 2012
For the record, I switched to DDG in part because of the duck. (All right, so it was a very small part, but the point remains--the duck is awesome.) :)
An Easy Way for Everyone to Participate in the 1/18 SOPA/PIPA Protest Blackout
25 Brilliant Sports Advertisements
20 Fonts for Winter Designs	It’s that time of year again and every good winter design needs some really great typographic elements to drive home the theme. Whether you need a centerpiece for your printed posters or just a simple way to bring some winterized visuals to your website, this collection of fonts has it all.	.	printed posters, poster printing, fonts winter designs
Also see Apple's mini-site about this: http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/ (which has apparently been around for about a year[1]).

I'm very pleasantly surprised by this news. This is way more transparent than I'm used to seeing Apple being, especially since the report itself doesn't paint an entirely rosy picture about the current situation.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/14/apple-supplier-r...
Dwolla did some questionable things with chargebacks last year [1,2], and you may have heard about that.

Unfortunately, it was apparently in reaction to scammers. The scam, I think, was to transfer money from your bank to Dwolla, move it from Dwolla to TradeHill, buy Bitcoins, slightly launder the Bitcoins by transferring them to yourself in another account (with Tradehill or Mt Gox), and sell them. You can do that all in a few hours, easily with thousands of dollars.

Then go to your bank and say that the Dwolla transaction was fraudulent. Dwolla gets stiffed by the bank, and has no recourse. So they started hitting TradeHill with chargebacks. I think they did it before their Terms and Conditions said that they could do chargebacks. (In fact, I think I remember reading somewhere that a feature of Dwolla vs. Paypal is that there would be no chargebacks.) Now, I believe their Terms say that they can do chargebacks.

You may also have heard about how some people's Dwolla accounts were vulnerable when they used the same user name and password on Dwolla as they did on Mt Gox. Mt Gox was hacked [3], and it was (supposedly) VERY easy for people to have their bank account cleaned out via Dwolla. Since people link their bank accounts to Dwolla, if a thief gets their Dwolla password, then the thief can simply transfer money from the bank to Dwolla, and then from Dwolla to a Bitcoin exchange (like Mt Gox). Then launder them as above, and you have yourself thousands of dollars.

I should note that it's likely possible for people to get their bank accounts emptied via PayPal as well (hence all the Paypal phishing attempts), but it's more difficult to launder Paypal credits, since you can't easily convert from a Paypal credit balance to cash like you can with Dwolla (thanks to Bitcoin).

But overall, I have a favorable opinion of Dwolla.

[1] http://tradehillblog.com/2011/07/26/why-we-are-no-longer-acc...

[2] http://tradehillblog.com/2011/07/25/tradehill-audit-discover...

[3] http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=55
It doesn't matter if the service is exactly the same or not, it just matters whether it meets the need of the consumer. In my example, consumers needed a way to get from point A to point B. Both a cab or a bike could do that. If you prefer, I could have asked if Ferrari should get pissed that Kia is offering cars for a super cheap price. Then we are comparing cars to cars.
Cool idea, in addition to the color picker you might want to let it change the current page live via DOM manipulation so you can see what it will look like before you download it.
Sound Toy (WebAudio demo)
Everyone, keep calling. This is evidence that Senators are getting lots of calls opposing PIPA. Even if it seems like they are not affecting anything, they are still (presumably) recording the number of opposition calls they get, and most of these Senators (presumably) still care about re-election. I still believe in tipping points. I have to...

But thanks for this information as well. The tipping points do not seem to be on our horizon, and information about the responses from senator offices, if it goes viral, can hopefully have a much-needed amplifying effect...
DÜNYANIN EN BÜYÜK KARİKATÜRÜ; Erdil Yaşaroğlu'ndan
I mean turning off the internet would put a huge dent in piracy. It's kind of true.
ARM CEO not impressed by Intel's 'Medfield' chips for smartphones, tablets
That's a great idea... until you end up with the automated menu when you call the Senator as the author mentioned.
John Sculley Tells The Real Story of Steve Jobs' 'Firing'
If anybody starts to pepper spray them, it will be posted to so may blogs that it will be everywhere by the end of the day.

Combine that with pointing out that he has admitted he is in favor of censorship and you have the ultimate head-line (especially if somebody brings their kids).
That's interesting but not very surprising. I would say that's traveling with alternate ID (or unofficial ID), not flying with no ID. It sounds like she would not have been allowed to fly without ID.
This Guy Buys Startups For IBM -- Here's What He's Looking For
Not just Canadian. Amsterdam airport has extra security theatre where they ask you a bunch of really dumb questions because the United States mandated such questions be asked, and then verify your boarding pass and ID against the flight manifest (good thing!)
Yes, I agree it's often misquoted. I don't see where it says anything about ingot slices in his original statement (see eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#History) though; I was thinking of the statement "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year", etc.
I went to Stuyvesant HS 10 years ago, and I took all the CS classes that the school had offered from Mr. Zamansky ("Z", as we affectionately call him), and can add some more specific information as to why this was necessary.

Stuyvesant opened in the beginning of the 20th century, and there are some vestigial components that should've been amputated long ago: in addition to the standard math, science, language (English and foreign), gym requirements, it has some requirements that truly made it historically a technical vocational school. To wit:
1 year of technical drafting (1 semester of drawing mechanical designs on paper, 1 semester of CAD), and 1.5 years of technical shop (1 semester of single-period shop, and 1 semester of double-period shop). By technical shop I mean the following: you get to choose two of ceramics, woodworking, metalworking (aka jewelry-making), electronics (aka computer tech), photography and video editing.

It's worth repeating: taking drafting and shop is required to graduate. By and large, these classes are not popular with students at all, the most obvious reason being "why the hell do we need to know this outdated shit? If someone likes it, they can take it as an elective."

Over the years, Z developed an ass-kicking CS curriculum: Intro to CS, AP CS (1 year), Systems/Network Programming, Graphics, and Independent Research. They are extraordinarily popular with the students, partially because Z is a great teacher, and partially because of the support of the previous alumni who would regularly take junior and senior-level college classes in their freshman college year thanks to that curriculum.

It's worth pointing out that none of the CS classes qualify for any graduation requirement. If you take them, you are taking them on your own time because you are interested. Aside from the knowledge itself, there's no carrot, even though the rest of the world is pointedly indicating that we need more software engineers and less metalworkers.

Now, Z goes to the current school administration and says "hey, can we add CS as an option to fulfill some graduation requirements?" and for 10 years straight (not kidding) the response he was getting was a consistent "GFY". Welcome to the NYC public school bureaucracy and people defending their own turf. It's not even that he asked anything outrageous. He didn't say "Hey, can we get rid of drafting and shop?". He said "Can we give our students more choice as to what is required to graduate?"

So, about two years ago Z decided to try a different avenue - working within the structure of Stuyvesant was not feasible, so he might as well go outside of it. Someone I know connected him to Fred Wilson, they chatted, and the rest is what you see in front of you. None of this would've happened if the Stuy HS administration had a few less heads up their asses.
For a while now I've been thinking that there should be a divide between software engineers, programmers, and computer scientists.
Software engineers should be considered the people who go out and design a system, who are the primary create force and technical experts. Programmers should be people who implement.

Computer Scientists should be (mainly) scientists.

I see a lot of people who I have gone through school with enjoy the first 2 years where it's mostly practical work. Then they hit the last 2 years where it comes down to theory and they struggle with it.

A 2 year vocational school that focuses on learning a couple of languages, data structures, and gives a few options for specializing a bit sounds like a good idea to me. Then you can software engineering which is focused entirely on the actually engineering of a system.

In a seperate but equal sort of setup you can have more theoretical CS.
Alright cool, thanks. I actually have a video course, and what I tell people is to use the videos to get them "over the hump", then use the book like homework to complete. I may make that more explicit in later versions and point out that watching me make mistakes will help them.
Startup idea: a weekly email newsletter containing a list of bills your representatives in congress voted on (or introduced/co-sponsored), along with some "like" and "dislike" buttons. Home page maintains a prominent list of representatives most "disliked" by their constituents.

This whole SOPA debacle has convinced me more than ever that the feedback loop between constituents and representatives is absolutely terrible. This would be an attempt to solve the problem (via public humiliation).
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