skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think 2 hours would be sufficient for 90% of the candidates. That's acceptable when you're in a start-up environment (where you generally have to fight for candidates and the pool is self-selecting to start with), but the 10% at Google could really make a big difference: google's pool of applications is bigger and the "laws of large numbers" come into play.

Also there's something else I haven't thought which is also a matter of "laws of large numbers": you simply can't hire every qualified one (and there would be opportunity costs in hiring the first person to pass the minimal qualifications).
What he mentions isn't fundamental, but half-baked, like not having bouncy scrolling or flicks or being laggy. Something can't be fundamentally broken if it can be fixed with a simple update in a few months. Other things he mentions are personal opinion (ie he doesn't like suretype very much) or are things present on the iPhone, for example:

"It can take two full seconds for the screen image to change when you turn it 90 degrees, three seconds for a program to appear, five seconds for a button-tap to register"

Take your iphone, open up contacts and count how many seconds it takes from the tap to being able to scroll or click. ~5s on mine, and I remember it being worse with OS 2.0. And what about switching orientations in ipod? At least a second unless it happens to get stuck and not rotate at all.
The difference is that people are more reluctant to IM you a question, and you can readily signal that you are unavailable.
No due dates. That's something that helps me. If I give something a due date, I will procrastinate until the due date has arrived (or in the case of non-critical stuff, I might just not do it at all). It doesn't even matter what the task is, either. "Finish ticket #30 by Friday" and "drink a beer by 9pm" are essentially equivalent; I will avoid doing both until the last minute. And I love beer!

For instance, I make it a point to never tell myself "tomorrow when you wake up, go to the gym." I just wake up, think "hey, you should go to the gym, jackass" and I go. There's no time for excuses or rationalizations against the task. No, "There's no way it will take me 2 days to do this; I will wait until tomorrow!"

Having known I run on impulse for a long time, I've developed a few tricks. When it comes to work, I try to make vague plans for what I want to accomplish the next day, but I try not to think too much about them. This way when the time comes I can just start working and wait to get sucked in. The best tasks are things like "research X" or "learn more about Y" because they're easy to start and usually easy to get lost in and/or branch into other tasks. The key is not making any concrete plans. If I decide "tomorrow I will have X done by Y time" it's like there's another part of me who, just to be an asshole, decides to prove I won't accomplish that.

As for life, well, I just take 90% of the stuff I want to do/say and throw it out the window. The other 10% gets me in enough trouble as it is.

P.S. If you're really desperate, having to survive in the Army taught me another trick: Learn to turn off your brain. It helps.
OK fair enough. I did think you were the same person. However like the first post your post does tend to perpetuate a meme that exists in the absence of evidence or common sense. Without any evidence it falls into the same category as 'Obama is an Ayrab' and for further propagating it you deserve criticism.
...and Solaris doesn't even ship with GNU grep or find! I have to do crazy perl gymnastics to replicate grep -C (though that's mostly because our crazy systems group refuses to allow non-Sun binaries).
Here's the linked article http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/2008/11/turning-ideas-into-a...

I wrote a simple app that mode it into the AppStore yesterday. It sold 4 copies in the first day. Not much for some people, but it made my day.
agreed, and particularly love the idea of the chalkboard bathroom walls.
Of course, if it ends up being a G45 class chip, it's not going to be much to write home about (performance wise).

This is the dirty secret of Fusion. Moving a dog-slow GPU from the chipset to the processor still leaves you with a slow GPU.

I'm interested to see what AMD and Intel end up doing with an on core GPU. It could be really interesting from a GPGPU perspective as you could eliminate the current need to ship things from main memory to GPU memory.

Unfortunately, a GPU tends to have ~150 GB/s of memory bandwidth while a processor socket has ~30 GB/s. Is it worth a 5x drop in bandwidth to avoid the PCI Express bottleneck? Maybe...
You'll need a friend at UCLA, but I just had a buddy pick up a previous gen Macbook Pro for me this morning for $1099+tax. It's definitely better bang for the buck than the current MBP.

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/880148

Anyway, there should also be good deals coming up for Black Friday.
try not to laugh, but I got a gateway a few months ago, and i'm crazy impressed with the specs for the price.
I got the t-series, which doesn't output to the built in screen at the resolution you want on the 14", though i'm pretty sure it will bump up to that on an external monitor. but I think the 15" m series does.

From the looks on their site they are getting ready to upgrade the t-series, so the next version might have higher resolution.
That's a very broad usage of the word "article".
http://www.idesitv.com/ibnenglish.php
A better title description:

Twitter drops SMS in Canada
Right. Emacs modes are more context-oriented ("I'm editing XML, so give me navigation commands that natively understand that syntax") while vi modes are operation-oriented (either inserting/appending or navigating/editing). In the vi sense, Emacs is always in both modes, so you need to press modifier keys to categorize actions (and if you're unlucky, you may find yourself gradually growing crab claws for pinkies).

There's an editor synthesis waiting to happen, but decades of old elisp means there's a lot of inertia for new editors to overcome.
Hate to be a hater, but I don't take anything David Pogue writes too seriously. He pretends to write impartially, but he's definitely very very pro-Apple. Aside from his article about the Mobile Me fiasco, I don't think I've ever seen him write anything bad about Apple or anything nice about its competitors.
What static web site generators would you use?
Hi All,

I need to build a simple static web site. Previously in the past I've played around with StaticMatic <http://staticmatic.rubyforge.org/> and found it quite good.

Howeve the version number does not seem to have changed for a while and you are tied to HAML, not that that is a bad thing, its just it would be nice to be able to use other template languages.

I've also read an article here by Tom Preston-Werner <http://tom.preston-werner.com> about his tool Jekyll <http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/tree/master>. It looks very interesting, has anybody used it? Is it more blog orientated, by that I mean is it harder to use it for a different context?

Finally I did a Google search and found this tool: <http://webgen.rubyforge.org/>. Again has anyone used it or got any comments about it.

My requirements are to create a simple 4 page site where the content isn't going to change that often. I would like to use Markdown / Textile / Haml / ERB.
I also like code to be clean and efficient therefore the HTML generator should be pretty small and easy to use. Ideally I'd like to use Ruby and Ruby gems, but I'm not fussy.

Anyway I'd appreciate your input.
Many thanks,

Ben Emson...
Indeed, this is quite true; I have functions which are as much as 18 times faster in SIMD assembly than in C. This is one reason every programmer should spend a few days learning assembly: it teaches you that the compiler is stupid.
Yeah, I think I'll stick with that "Get out of Earth" one, but thanks for the suggestion.

"On a grand scale we simply want to save the world, so obviously we're just letting ourselves in for a lot of disappointment and we're doomed to failure since we didn't pick some cheap-ass two-bit goal like collecting all the Garbage Pail Kids cards."
-- http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0044_Subject...
Wow, that's a steal! Unfortunately I live on the opposite side of the country (NC) and don't have any friends at UCLA. I've looked at the laptops on sale on Black Friday but I haven't been able to find a decent one yet.. looks like all the big stores are running pretty weak promos this year.
The per capita expense of keeping a thousand frozen heads in a pool of liquid nitrogen is essentially negligible. You wouldn't notice it as a budget item. If it really bugs you, fund it yourself through private philanthropy. But out of all the things that government was ever proposed to do, this would be the most cost-effective in the history of time - even I, a libertarian, draw the line at not doing this. Cryonics is cheap, people are crazy.
I could work around the problem, yes, but why bother when Git prevents this situation for me? A version control system shouldn't require me to manually backup the working copy to avoid losing my work.

Basically, svn has no features I want, and it doesn't work as well as git... so there is no reason for me to use it.

If you like svn, that's fine... but you have to realize that it's losing mindshare because most people don't like it as much as git -- often for reasons like the one I mention above.

I think you're just inventing problems for the sake of finding problems with a system that you don't like.

No, this is a real problem that has caused me much annoyance. Obviously I didn't die, but who wants to waste time dealing with inadequate tools?

Subversion is very simple; these situations aren't that hard to figure out.

No, it's not. Read the source code before you write a rebuttal, though -- it's enlightening.
Giving Thanks for Drop.io
Army to spend $50 million on video games
Elevator Pitch: Yudu's network for publishing and content discovery
I need to build a simple static web site.

It depends a lot on what you specifically need from the tool, but given what you have used previously, Webby may be your best bet. It is a wonderfully simple yet powerful tool.

http://webby.rubyforge.org/

I've also read an article here by Tom Preston-Werner <http://tom.preston-werner.com>; about his tool Jekyll

Jekyll is a nice tool but it is geared toward blogs. Tom noted this as the reason he created it instead of using Webby.
This article is overly simplistic to the point of uselessness. Population growth peaked in 1963 not because of food production limits but because of cultural and social changes related to growing wealth. That destroys the whole Malthusian argument.

Similar demolitions can be performed on the rest of the article's key points:

The same thing will happen with technology - eventually we will run into insurmountable barriers to growth and progress will stabilise at this level. It's just a question of what the barriers are - the food for progress so to say.

The food for progress is human intelligence. Singularity models are built precisely on an exponential increase of intelligence that can be used to produce more intelligence. The Malthusian model breaks down there again.

To presume that Kurzweil doesn't know about Malthus is pretty cocky and very likely wrong.
I have been a content Dell Latitude user for about a year now. I have the D630 and it is fantastically rugged (on par with a thinkpad) and has great battery life. The new E series expands on these qualities.

Thinkpad quality has diminished slightly, but they are still good laptops.
Nowhere close to prime time, but essential for the future of diagnostics, especially if we want to measure multiple analytes using very small samples. There are some systems on the market today that go in that direction (although not quite where the Health/Hood systems are)

http://www.e2v.com/applications/medical-science/biosensors.c...
The Money Mafia - The SEC has shut down Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending site.
i am wondering if Blackberry made the wrong move by positioning itself as a reactor to the iphone?

what i mean is blackberry's position in the market (enterprise market anyway) has been solid and well understood (if not appreciated). for example, people (again atleast in the enterprise world anyway) wanted the keyboard and had gotten used to certain "ways" of using the blackberry..

by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone... this i think was unnecessary.. blackberry, with their "me too" products i think has now essentially acknowledged the iPhone as a potential player in the iphone, without actually (as yet) making a dent in the consumer market that iphone enjoys...

this is not new but amazing how it happens again and again by a big player in a certain market reacting to a potential threat..
Kind of makes sense: isn't it the default in Wordpress now? Or am I wrong and this is unrelated?

Congrats to the team, though! That's excellent.
"... Twitter isn’t the place for solid facts yet - the situation is way too disorganized. But it’s where the news is breaking ..."

This is a useful insight with respect to your comments (
I was following #mumbai on twitter for a while and I have to say, It was more noise than signal ) So it shows the communications bit is there just the switched on person on the ground is not. Consider how real news organisations achieve this. My source of local news happened to have an ex-journalist in India to do a phone interview ~ http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/news/audio/news-audio/200811/200...

So Twitter is good for a short bit of info but is pretty useless to get across important information.
I find it a little odd that no decent news recommenders have emerged (I expect they will eventually). Possible reasons:

- The recommendation problem is very hard (or the solution-space is very large)

- Good recommendations require lots of user data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem

- Not enough people care enough about it

The answer is probably a bit of all three. But it is suprising that such an obvious opportunity hasn't been done right yet.

Good luck to all the people working on it!
Interesting suggestion that resources for computing will eventually run out in some fashion, thereby invalidating the Singularity prediction. But what resources?

I wonder where energy costs fit into this. Already, Internet companies are seeing energy as a significant part of the costs for running their business. How much energy would be consumed by a $1000 computer with the same computing capacity as the entire human race? How much heat would it produce?
I'm sure Kurzweil knows about Malthus. The point is that nowhere in nature or sociology is there such a thing as unlimited exponential growth - it is always stopped by lack of resources.

Why should computation be any different?
Of course, Kurzweil took this into account. The first link for a "kurzweil malthus" Google search is directly to a page in The Singularity is Near, via Google books. He seems to think the energy requirements are not significant.

Here's the URL, but might just work better to do the search yourself.

http://books.google.com/books?id=88U6hdUi6D0C&pg=PA427&#...
It seems to me that Git's ecosystem is rather more developed than Subversion's, despite its younger age. I haven't seen any hosting service for Subversion repositories that approaches GitHub (and even `gitweb` is pretty nice actually) and the amount of stuff in e.g. http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/InterfacesFrontendsAndTools is pretty huge compared to what I've seen for SVN.

When it comes to documentation, not only is the reference manual excellent in the usual way of Unix reference manuals, but I also know of six tutorial Git books, several of which are free online: the Git User's Manual, the Git Community Book, Git Magic, Pragmatic Version Control Using Git, Pro Git, and Git Internals.

As I said in another comment (now deleted), I'm using Subversion on a project for the first time in years, and I constantly find myself wishing the project was using Git.
Vinylscrobbler: packet sniffing Shazam to update Last.fm from analog sources
JSON is not insecure, technically it's the browser here.
I didn't find it misleading either, especially considering that twitter killing features is par for the course. Gotta consider things in context. If it was about nearly anyone else, it would be about adding features.
Energy production is also increasing exponentially.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
I've found git pretty frustrating to learn too. darcs is a lot easier. Still, it sure is more powerful than SVN, and once you know what you're doing (and maybe have a cheat-sheet handy) it isn't much harder to use.
Stanford students open the door to embeddable ads in videos
i would have liked to see llvm bindings to python... i am sure they are out there...
How convenient, considering I am returning to Vim after a very long absence!

Step 1: Start reading online.

Step 2: Buy it because releasing books for free is friendly.
sure enough!!!

http://code.google.com/p/llvm-py/
this is totally garbage.. i dread calling my phone company to settle bills that are never delivered on time and each time i have to spend 5 minutes going thorugh "Yes", "No", "Cheque"... dont even get started on my name... aaaaaah
Looks like IntenseDebate have been acquired already (by Automattic, the maker of WordPress)

http://blog.intensedebate.com/2008/09/23/automattic-acquires...
Ask HN: What are your favorite visualizations for data?
Here's an example: Digg Labs. I'm curious because the startup I work on has a lot of data (and a full API built) but I feel like we need to be more creative in how we present it. What are your favorites?
Wow.. I don't make near that much writing iPhone apps - never have - and I've been in this world since before it was legit. Who are these people?!
I think the article is missing two big ones. [1] Observing those around you that are very successful and entrepreneurial. I could name 5 people right now, I've seen all of their YouTube videos (probably more than once), read all their interviews. [2] Surrounding yourself with highly driven people. The same applies if you surround yourself with apathetic and lazy people. It probably sounds cliche by now, but that energy is contagious and will affect how you work, think, behave, etc.
I'd say press F1 F1 and follow instructions on the screen.
Your parody (?) doesn't work. For one, as far I as know there was never a group of "flightists" crying over the fate of non-flying humanity, blaming God or Mother Nature, talking about foolish non-flightists...

There's a big difference. Avoiding death is not merely a hard technical problem. It's a moral and existential issue. If some people became immortal, imagine the whole lot of new ethical, existential problems we would have.
Giant catchers mitt ordered from ACME!

In all seriousness, the mountain takes care of that for them I suspect. It's probably burned all the fuel in flight and thus they just have to stand clear once it lands on the other side.
% vimtutor

An alternative.
Not unfair. Chances are you could get away with it too.
you really should try and get it to redirect to it's own page on Sep 19th. That would be awesome matey.
Helvetireader Makes Google Reader Gorgeously Minimalist
Indonesia Worries About Bird Flu Pandemic Outbreak - Associated Content
So.. I'm just plain curious: why doesn't the above comment contribute? (Why was it downmodded?) I'm trying to educate myself about this.
Suggest Bob leave the company and build a competing product.
THere was a whole series on Hulu that followed EarthClassMail for about a year or more. It was called StartUp Mojo, best I recall. Was very enjoyable!
Mini project: share NYT articles, without the login prompt
Slightly off-topic, but another really important thing to consider when evaluating offers is the IP agreement: Make sure that you retain your rights to work that you do on your own time.

If you're not careful, you might inadvertently sign away all title to that cool little startup that you get going on the side. As a corollary, just because "everybody signs the same contract," it doesn't mean that yours can't be different -- but make sure it's changed before you sign.
I've got a post-Lenovo Thinkpad (T60) - and it's been pretty solid for me. (At least as solid as my T30 / T43)
How to be a Programmer:  A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
I'm probably missing something, but this seems like an opportunity for Twitter to charge for a premium service...
Dup:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=370874
Here's the iTunes link (will open iTunes)
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...

It's just a simple resistor decoder with a few subtle enhancements
A brand new, sealed, warrantied Macbook Pro (the previous version) can be had on eBay for $1200 shipped if you're willing to do the following and use both ebay and paypal:

a) sign up for a Live.com cashback account, do a search for "wii" or whatever the term is today (google for live.com cashback) on Live.com, and click through the eBay referral link offering 25% off, max $200 (it fluctuates, but has been 25 or 30 for most of the last few months)

b) find a new macbook pro (early 2008) offered by a reputable reseller (100+ feedback, 99%+) selling for $1400 or less with the Buy It Now option (required for live.com CB) and pay via Paypal. Make sure the 25% CB banner appears at the top of the ebay page.

I did this a few weeks ago for $1220, and I didn't spend any time at all waiting for lower-priced auction-- just bought one on the results page. I'd guess you could find one for $1100 ($1300) at this point, or at least $1150.
Was this on TV, or VHS? I've been waiting for Netflix to get this on DVD, but it hasn't shown up yet...
by trying to create products to compete with the iPhone, blackberry has essentially conceded that their brand is inferior to the iPhone.. Wait, What?

How is competing at all the same as conceding? The opposite is true in fact, not competing is conceding. RIM is going after a market of people that enjoyed their Blackberry's but loved the 'trendy appeal' of the touch screen iPhone. This doesn't mean that the people who want an actual keyboard can no longer use a Blackberry. They can stick with the Bold, which I'm sure will not be the last real keyboard phone that RIM ever makes. The Storm will serve to keep plenty of already existing customers from switching to the iPhone or G1 because they like the Blackberry system, or it's standard for their companies. It will also likely drive new customers who want the professional appeal of a Blackberry with but still dream about the iPhone. In plenty of industries iPhone's are regarded as a tech toy, not a business tool.

RIM has also already deviated from the full keyboard with the introduction of the Pearl, which was targeted as a more consumer phone to compete with Motorola and Nokia and this has been a great success.
Tie the other end of the cable down, make sure it's the appropriate length?
A $1000 computer with the equivalent knowledge of the whole human race won't happen because it is physically impossible.

There are 10^11 neurons or so in the brain. There are 10^10 (say) people in the world (more like 0.5 X 10^10 but anyway).
So loosely there is an order of 10^20 neurons in humans on earth total. Avogadro's number has approx. 6 * 10^23 atoms in 12 grams of carbon, so, basically, you'd have to have 1 neuron simulation per atom to fit the entire human intelligence on say, your hand held mobile device, or close to a 1 : 1 simulated neuron to atom ratio. Transistors are cool but they ain't that cool boys and girls. Won't happen.

Now, you could fit a 10^10 neuron simulation in a 10 meter square server room 1 meter deep, that might be possible. So replicate this set-up 10 billion times and then you'd get the population of the human race on a computer. Slightly more than $1,000 tho. :-)
I just convinced my friend to learn the iPhone SDK and build an app with me, now I'm even more excited!
Either people developing for big companies without experience, or crooks.