skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on the humidity where you live, and what kind of clothes you wear, and if you're on a carpet or tile, or probably what you had for breakfast etc. I've had ESD fry a hard drive a RAM module, and maybe an SSD (or maybe it was bad firmware).
Web economy in G20 set to double by 2016, Google says
This is seriously cool, but can't there be a better way to embed fragment shaders in javascript for WebGL? Check out this effect:
https://github.com/brianchirls/Seriously.js/blob/develop/eff...

Or is there a tool that needs to be created that will compile a fragment shader for WebGL down to .js, kind of like CoffeeScript?

Now all you need is for someone to write an OpenEXR implementation in JS or WebKit and you'll have all you need to build a Nuke killer in the browser. Well, you'll still need the UI framework for the node graph.
Livejournal starts deleting accounts
Is it simply hubris that makes a Japanese company like Nintendo think they cannot release their IP's on other platforms? Look at Sega, they were almost done before they stopped developing expensive hardware to ultimately released their games on all platforms. Nintendo's stash of IP's far exceeds Sega's and everyone elses except Disney.

Nintendo should be raking in cash from all directions at this point, their strategy makes absolutely no sense.
Nintendo already support Indy games in WiiWare. My boys 7 & 10 love their 3DSs & Wii and rarely use the the iPod touch or XBox. Nintendo is after a younger market. There is lots of room for them. They have been pronounced "nearly dead" many times.
I choose Expert Friendly to User Friendly
I would love to hear more about this hardware. Can you elaborate?
Apple is trying to be transparent about their suppliers and the working conditions there. This is pretty much voluntary, to my knowledge nobody is forcing Apple to release this information.

Now Apple is getting attacked and people are using the facts from their own report as ammunition. Other companies that either don't care at all (don't audit their suppliers) or don't publish this kind of information are safe from this kind of bad publicity.

I don't think this kind of activism is very productive. I would like to see more focus on the things Apple has managed to improve within their suppliers. Some people seem to demand Apple to stop working with suppliers not complying with the regulations. Is this really the best way to improve workers conditions there? The logic seems to be that if Apple is no longer buying from that supplier, it must do some improvements to stay in business. What if it doesn't, what if it just finds another client that does not care?
http://ycombinator.com/people.html needs updating. There are at least 3 people missing.

I would like to know if YC has data mining/analytics specialist that reviews YC applications and helps people.
I guess that's slightly less expensive than just getting a crazy fast SSD drive.
Generally speaking, you don't want to run.
Am I the only one who's still waiting, version after version that they let users put the tabs on the left?
I think the judge was confusing them too. He let the 'up-to-no-damn-goodness' (as my old law professor would say) of the defendant prejudice his judgment on the copyright issue.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

I can't speak to the quality of it, however. I use ctrl+l for URLs and ctrl+k for search, and am so used to it I don't even notice (especially since Firefox's AwesomeBar tends to have better results for me than Chrome's OmniBar).
Because apple is one of the most profitable companies in history. Every quarter we see the staggering amount of money they make, and seeing that, many people go "why aren't they paying workers more, why aren't they sucking up the difference and manufacturing in the US?". There are logical answers to those questions, regardless of whether they make moral sense. However until we see other companies posting world-record breaking profits, we will likely see more articles concerning apple's decisions and their human costs.

Edit: I am not making any judgements or criticisms, this is just an observation on why people feel the need to criticize.
// The solution test in JavaScript

var a = 10, b = 20; // Declare variable values

a = b; // Assign b to a

console.log(a); // Output a to the console

console.log(b); // Output b to the console

// Log: 20

// Log: 20
"VP of Engineering" (his title at Google, according to Wikipedia) is a management title.
Eh, that test seemed like it could be unintuitive to those that have never had programming exposure before.

How are they to know that "=" is assignment and not testing equality? I guess you could glean that from the context where they immediately ask you the values of the variables after the operation but I could see someone misinterpreting the semantics of that operator.
Is this supposed to be impressive? Show me what you can do with how little resource. Anyone can brute-force it.
No, nike wasn't. If you open a factory in a country that previously had little or no manufacturing sector, offer people jobs at 3-10 times the typical competing wage, and greatly improve the lives of said people, you'll still be accused of running a "sweatshop". However, using the lie "slave labor" against Apple's workers is particularly egregious.

This is really easy to reason out-- why would people work under these "appalling" conditions? Why wouldn't they just stay home or work somewhere else?

Simple: They are vastly better than these alternatives.

The core argument of these people who criticize giving third worlders jobs is that they would rather see those third worlders starve.

If these "sweatshops" weren't significantly better than the alternatives, they would not find any workers.

Of course, that simple truth is irrefutable, so you'll hear all manner of rationalizations about how these people are really masochists.

Of course the really ironic thing about this is, the same people making the "sweatshop" claims are often the same people who supported the brutal regimes (aka "workers paradise") that ultimately lead to the economic destruction that resulted in the "sweatshop" being a vast improvement.

Edit: Unless of course, you consider using giving foreigners jobs instead of local unionized workers to be a "particularly egregious" offense. In that case, nike was.
>First of all, nothing works out of the box. You will have to manually set up the driver for your video card, support for your sound card (which can be a little difficult if you use USB headphones), wifi support, Xorg, your desktop environment and/or window manager of choice, etc.

I've been using Arch for a number of years and I don't see why the author thinks it's so difficult to set up.

During installation I only set up partitioning and /etc/rc.conf which is the main configuration file. I'd set up partitions and change some default settings (like keymap, locale, etc) on any computer, so it's not a problem. I also make sure wicd is installed for painless Wifi configuration.

After the first boot, I install most of the stuff I use with a one-liner, something like this:

pacman -S xorg xfce4 chromium-browser pidgin gdm thunderbird mc skype htop vim gcc ruby

and that's my base system.

Plus, being a rolling release distro means that you don't have to do major upgrades (which tend to break things more often than not). The installation I'm currently using on my main computer is about 20 months old and I've even changed my machine since then.

My video card works after installing xorg, sound works out of the box, wifi works out of the box, etc.
Is it simply hubris that makes a Japanese company like Nintendo think they cannot release their IP's on other platforms?

No
!Leaving.NET();
No, I don't have it confused.

Some people really like producing something someone else can use. Especially if people then actually use it. There are quite a lot of people like that, actually. And such people would be absolutely screwed in the world you describe.

What's the point of making movies no one will watch? Is it worth writing if no one will read it? Painting if no one wants to see them? For some people, yes. For many, no.
Several YC partners (Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and Aaron Iba) know something about data mining. Geoff might too; I'm not sure. Aaron in particular has been working on statistical analyses of YC applications themselves.
I was 2/4 for understanding the acronyms in your post.

RHEL 6 = Red Hat Enterprise Linux
NUMA = Non-Uniform Memory Access
Blood Money Starring Mitt Romney.
Try this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
You can buy that sort of kit off-the-shelf now, from HP and others. It's nothing exotic, it's basically your desktop PC on steroids.

NUMA is 90's tech from Sequent.
Currently, I've got a 60GB database of indexed n-grams, for an art project / data vis. I've also got ~20GB of relational data running a Latin website. I like manipulating and visualizing lots of data, so it'd be better not to denormalize it too early.
> I see this largely as a failure of education. You see this issue in many areas and much earlier on like teaching mathematics. In schools there tends to be one method used and that method doesn't suit everybody.

I've found that education, at least K-12, is slowly shifting attitudes from 'Why are students so dumb?' to 'How can we teach this better?' Computer Science is notoriously bad at believing the former over the latter, and papers like this are demonstrations of this.
Mac OS9 wasn't scrapped. It ran next to OSX for many years and powered apps that hadn't converted to use the Carbon API that allowed OS9 apps to run on OSX.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Price, Galaxy Tab 8.9 3G, Wi-Fi, Features
New Samsung Galaxy 8.9 is very nice technological mobile phone. It is also known as Galaxy Tab 730 Tablets sports 8.9" WXGA. The new and latest Samsung Galaxy 8.9 has launched with latest and new features and specifications. It has some nice features and specifications like; it has fully large touchscreen display, 3G, Wi-Fi, Dual Core Processor, 1GB RAM, Android Operating System, Camera with auto focus, LED Flash and so many other features and specifications are available in New Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Mobile Phone and all that are present here.
Despite the actual verbiage used, Gate's goal wasn't a PC on every desk, it was a computer, which he didn't sell, running his OS and software, which he did sell, on every desk. Software that locked the user into an ecosystem that Microsoft controlled and profited by. He helped get the hardware in place, but never got the software lock in he wanted. Not from lack of trying though.

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft)

Ironic that Jobs's emphasis on maintaining quality and interfacing with human psychology is faring better towards that goal; as a side effect.

While I admire your attempt at parallelism, no where in my post do I denigrate Gate's philanthropy. Read it again. Ruthlessness and vanity have their social uses. I grew up using a Carnegie library and am a better person for it. They had a hell of a time tearing it down in the 1970s in order to put up a much inferior glass box. The wreaking ball kept just bouncing off... Literally.

We'll see how well Gates's legacy performs historically. Myself, I wish he had an interest in the space program or in energy production. But it's his loot to spend as he sees fit.

Jobs is through changing the world. At least directly. He's left some ongoing projects, but such things seldom can continue without their visionaries. Look at what happened to Walt Disney's urban planning experiments. Job's legacy will be changing the way people think about and interact with technology.

My bet is that will have farther reaching consequences than any actual technology.
You make a number of good points but I want to respond to one thing - the failure of education.

I think it may not be so much a failure of education as so much the economics of education. The use of a single curriculum reduces complexity and administrative overhead (teacher time) which at the professor level is expensive. If the computer science courses were designed to use multiple methods you could indeed better educate a variety of students but at an increased cost.

In my mind the question then is whether or not it is worth the money to educate those that can't succeed with the current teaching method. The entire CS department would need to charge students more per class in order to have more successful students and in order to justify this cost there would need to be a corresponding beneficial pressure for the student to pay those costs (increased demand or higher pay for programmers).
Scheiden of Blijven
Getting VP-level role at top companies is very hard and if a developer of an acquired company could score a VP-level role elsewhere after the acquisition, he could probably do so before the acquisition

The scenario is not "I was engineer #3 at a startup which was just acquired by Google. I'll take a corner office at Facebook now, please." It is "I was engineer #3 at a startup which was just acquired by Google. Hello, Mr. VC. Sure, I'll join that company you just funded as VP of Engineering."

This second one, ahem, does not strike me as supremely implausible.
Methinks age is the most important factor here.

We teach children the basics skills needed for most studies well before that age. Reading, writing, math etc. You can't expect someone to successfully study literature if they don't know how to read.

Programming is a skill, not just a matter of knowledge, and the foundations for that skill must be laid at an earlier age. Most skills we learn after that are just extensions of those basic skills.

I'm not sure about the current generation, but in my age group (40+), everyone who programs started in their early teens.
Some places get very dry and staticky in the winter. Grounding yourself can be as easy as pressing a bare ankle against a metal table leg; better safe than sorry.
That reminds me of the 2005 ICFP contest (http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/spec.html)
But then you have a different problem.
See http://xkcd.com/927/ (it's the one about standards.)
Why You Shouldn’t Worship Your Heros
Thanks. I knew they included Bluetooth 4.0, but Low Energy was left out of the specs page. I actually still can't find any mention of it except in CoreBluetooth - their site organization is a bit painful if you're not there to buy.

There's also a demo implementation for Android by one of the radio manufacturers - not great, but maybe usable for initial development. This is much more significant on iPhone because it diffuses into the market more rapidly than a single model of Android handheld usually will.
I was that way for years. After accumulating a certain number of cubic meters of books (wish this was hyperbole, but it's not), having shelves to put them on so that they're accessible requires a pretty hardcore commitment in terms of the layout and decor of your home, and moving becomes something of a logistic nightmare.

Many thousands of titles on a nice portable device I can take with me anywhere? Yes, please.
Facebook Aims For IPO Filing Next Week: Report
While it might be broad, I'm not sure if it is unreasonable. In paragraph 37 the judge quotes case law and emphasizes: "defendants deny infringement but they do not advance a case of independent design".

In paragraph 67 he explains this further: the defendant "could have simply instructed an independent photographer to go to Westminster and take a picture which includes at least a London bus, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament".

I think that if this work was done as a "clean room" effort where the requirements were specified and the designer wasn't shown the template to replicate, the output would have likely differed in many other ways and the court case would have swung the other way or avoided completely.
Drawing iOS app icons
You need the w's. http://www.dev.github.com/

The links at the bottom of the page go to other "www.dev.github.com" pages, but the links at the top go to "cbwa.info". Both domains resolve to the same IP, "65.74.177.130".
Sky is quoted as saying

There is no authority that an infringement in these circumstances attracts four times the usual licence fee. To the contrary, the usual measure is what the reasonable cost of licensing would have been.

I find this hard to believe. If it's true, then the best course of action for any actor is to just screw the copyrights and use whatever the heck you want. For those copyright owners who catch you, you'd be out no more than if you'd paid them the standard fee up front. And for those who don't catch you, you've gotten a free ride.
I like the idea in theory, but there's a few of practical issues

1) I got the circle, and I tried 8 times before giving up. I was pretty damn close but it just denied me. There seems to be more lenience in the straight line options, perhaps just stick to them.

2) What's the fallback for blind users?

3) There are 16 images that are used, and you can have as many guesses as you want. I'm guessing that it's easily brute forced. How about dynamically generate a shape from n lines?
I have been curating a bunch of really handy links that helped me to learn. they are at newbietoruby.com in the resources section.

I was in your situation a little while ago and moved to SF to be where just about every other person on a bike is a developer. If you want to learn and you want to learn quickly, SF is the place to be.
Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_uncertainty_principl... describes nature's limit to precision of measurement of position and speed vector of objects. In physics, it does not make sense to discuss position (nor boundaries) of object with infinite or absolute precision.

There are suggestions that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_distance is the smallest distance (or size) nature handles.

You could say nature has no concept of real numbers.
I'm suprised bookstores are still viable business. I can not come up with any real benefit of buying books in a store.

The only reason that comes to my mind is the joy of browsing, maybe buying something you've seen somewhere recommended before. Are impulse buyers a huge part of the market?

I've been to a local private bookstore twice and the only customers I've seen there are people who probably prefer face-to-face and resent the distant and modern way of buying things, where the only social interaction is saying hello to the mailman.

Could the bookstore provide me with anything amazon couldn't? Books that were unavailable to amazon were unavailable to them. Imports took even longer and due to not living in an english speaking country, 99% of the books on the shelves were translations which I don't want to read.
Which is even more of a problem in bookstore chains. We have one with four large floors and a café. How many shelves of Twilight in German the day on release? About 10. How many shelves constantly filled with english literature? 1. Out of a number that probably goes in the hundreds.
I like a little (cheap) abstraction in my device development. I can always go back and bitbang in Assembly later once I'm certain what I want it to do.

I also think that reprogrammability is a significant feature for some of these IOT applications, so it may make sense to maintain compatibility with the Arduino stack longer-term if possible - and since it's open, you can do so while using your own board.
More "unauthorized font use" lawsuits against television and film producers
Reddit also found EBS to be unreliable; they've moved all their high traffic data to ephemeral storage. They have an interesting summary of their technology stack here: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/january-2012-state-of-servers...
Just out of curiosity, why is Facebook doing this? I'm unfortunately not very knowledgeable on the field of IPOs, but aren't IPOs usually just needed to raise money? I always thought Facebook is in a position where it does not need to raise money, since it gets sufficient revenue, and being public has its own disadvantages?
The problem with that approach is that given the orbital dynamics of the Sun-Earth-Mars system, there's a relatively brief window every couple of years when it makes sense to launch a mission. If there's a crippling error in the first launch, it's somewhat unlikely that it can be identified and fixed before the second one hits Mars orbit.
The LifeSaver bottle is remarkable but it seems like the filtering process doesn't scale well. Imagine having to use this throughout the day each time you fill up.

My company works w/ a charity in rural India that makes BioSand filters. The filters allow people to clean large amounts of water and then save it in containers for later. 90-95% of the impurities are removed. More info here if curious: http://faucetface.com/pages/1-for-100
True, our printer does do a vintage/distress print as well which we could use. Would have loved to get one of those Kozmo shirts from the old days.
I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale?

I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit.

So I think the only real options are:

1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road
2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a
century-long timeframe, but who knows)
3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology
developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I
would bet on)
URDU SEX STORIES: Choot Phaar Dali
I wonder if these smaller, indie bookshops would benefit by being a bookshop+cafe . A place you could grab a coffee and snack while catching up on reading or news. There was this very nice place back where I went to grad school. Old used books, good coffee and snacks. I really miss having such a place where I live now.
Scalable vertical search engine with Hadoop
funny to me that twitter has benefited so much for being a disruptive source of information and has proven itself useful in political uprisings around the globe. This move seems to be stating that they will now decide "how" people use the service and if the usage does not meet their criteria - the user is SOL. The Pro/Anti Nazi argument is pretty stupid and entirely subjective - but the bottom line is that this is indeed censorship and just plain lame.
Like a Gangly 8-Year-Old, the Mobile Web Needs to Grow Up
The point of the test wasn't to determine whether or not people who had never been exposed to programming could correctly divine what operation '=' performs in C.

Rather, the idea was to see whether or not, over the course of 20 or so questions, their answers indicated that, whatever they had decided '=' did, right or wrong, they applied their conclusion in a consistent manner.

Thus it was irrelevant whether or not they got the semantics of the operator right; what was important was determining whether or not they had operated as though operators in general have semantics, or whether they operated as though things behave essentially randomly.

It's more or less an attempt to determine whether the test-taker behaves as though the universe is a rational and understandable place or not.
As a matter of public policy, owning a house with a yard isn't really subsidized. Buying is subsidized over renting, but that's an indirect thing at best. But cars are massively subsidized.
Co-sharing workspaces in Palo Alto or surrounding areas
we're looking for co-sharing places to host a couple working desks and conference rooms to run demo/meetings. There are hip places like RocketSpace or Hatchery in SF, or CitizenPlaces in San Jose, but we'd like to be in the peninsula areas. Any pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks.