skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that civil service salaries haven't been spiraling at all. Since 1969 they've gone up 428%, yet the consumer price index has risen 477%. See http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/94-971_20100120.pdf .

Meanwhile CEO compensation has more than quadrupled just since 1989. See http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-pay-20-year-historic... .
Were Turntable.fm and "Group Listening" Just a Summertime Fad?
Funniest Siri Videos Ever
Siri, our favorite personal assistant is also the most popular native feature on iPhone 4S and also the source of inspiration for many entertainment websites like CollegeHumor, FunnyOrDie or even for YouTube members. Check out the funniest Siri Video ever!
Good read but also pretty frustrating. Sure, management has to buy in, but the author portrays a defeatist attitude. The ScrumMaster should help promote and foster agile acceptance.

An agile edge case should be a temporary catalyst to cut teeth and lead to full blown agile adoption, otherwise agile is pointless.

I've been a part of couple of cargo cult teams in the past few years and it's really frustrating to try to get others to think in Agile terms. Having an agile authority to help enforce various agile methodologies is beneficial when sometimes you're ignored as a piddly code monkey.
-webkit prefixes have basically the same effect. Apple has been constantly encouraging the use of -webkit prefixes ever since the iPhone came out. Notice all the discussion lately about other browsers having to adopt -webkit prefixes. This is necessary to compete on mobile, because of the mobile web essentially being the domain of one rendering engine.
Sprint Activates 1.8M iPhones, 40% are New Customers
ASCII interactive fluid animation
Lessons learned in error tracking
I've written about my situation at my soon-to-be previous company earlier.

My situation obviously wasn't as critical as being an engineer for the Challenger. But immature managers did whatever they wanted: no lives were lost but people were laid off, money was wasted, opportunities were squandered etc. I've been spending the last few weeks wondering how as engineers we should deal with this.

Its frustrating that after so many years (decades!) managers still don't know how to deal with engineers.
> RPython makes you insert these hints to the trace compiler (can_enter_jit, jit_merge_point) about when to start/stop running a trace, does this buy you anything?

As I understand it, those are hints as to domain-specific optimizations that can be made by the trace compiler. The author mentioned that a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the converge vm was down to correctly hinting to the trace compiler what assumptions it could make.

"The second tactic is to tell the JIT when it doesn't need to include a calculation in a trace at all. The basic idea here is that when creating a trace, we often know that certain pieces of information are fairly unlikely to change in that context. We can then tell the JIT that these are constant for that trace: it will insert an appropriate guard to ensure that is true, often allowing subsequent calculations to be optimised away. The use of the word constant here can mislead: it's not a static constant in the sense that it's fixed at compile-time. Rather, it is a dynamic value that, in the context of a particular trace, is unlikely to change. Promoting values and eliding functions are the main tools in this context: Carl Friedrich Bolz described examples in a series of blog posts. The new Converge VM, for examples, uses maps (which date back to Self), much as outlined by Carl Friedrich."

I'm sure that you could provide such an interface to LuaJIT but it wouldn't be as trivial as just writing the interpreter in Lua.
How to hack your health
> In fact, your average NASA employee doted on astronauts like a star struck little girl. What the crew wanted, the crew got.

This is the question I've always had about the Challenger, but never heard addressed: How much of a factor was the crew's opinion considered to be? I strongly suspect that the astronauts themselves exerted informal but real pressure to prefer flying, since it would be their moment in the sun.
The mobile web splash screen antipattern
Some thoughts about "download our native app" splashscreens on mobile sites. Quite interesting.
Recently Google has shown little interest in working with others; witness Dart (which essentially nobody but Google wants) and NaCl (which no other browser manufacturer wants).
Thanks for the explanation. I'm trying to understand whether 83b elections would apply to me-I'm an employee who received options that will vest over a certain number of years. Should I be making a 83b election every time part of my options vest? I expect the fair market value of the stock in the future to be higher than when I receive my options.
I do not agree with the statements of the troll but will defend his right to say it. The internet is making the world like a small town. Piss on people on the internet will be like pissing on people in line at Walmart. You can, but people are going to hate you, and you will never be forgiven by anyone for anything bad you do unless you hire a professional to erase your histories.
I don't honestly know. I didn't work on the orbiter - I did the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission payloads. I don't know what techniques they've figured out after the accident, but I'm not sure there was a reliable way to go out and look at the time. The shuttle's arm is only so long, and even if you could put an astronaut in postion to look, the EVA time required would likely be prohibitive. You'd need some way to inspect the underside of the orbiter from a satellite, earth, or some other vantage point. I'm sure google can tell us what they'd do today to help mitigate this kind of failure.
Is Facebook Fatigue Spreading? | mcgvr
Wouldn't caching do a similar thing? I guess you'd have the complexity of removing it from the devserver (so you don't have to wait for the cache to invalidate to see changes), and cache invalidation is always ugly.

Wait, I didn't read the bit about JS and CSS aggregation. OK ... but surely there's other ways.
SEO,Traffic,Panda - How To Succeed in the New World of Internet Marketing
Last I heard these were still issues. Do you have a source about what Google has done because I'm rather interested to know more.
Lake Vostok Reached
Cabron con clase blog de gifs, videojuegos
It's not really possible to compete with Chrome just by building the source. For one, Google has an exclusive OS deal that can't be replicated -- which is the main point of this article.
Spying on Europe's farms with satellites and drones
Yeah, he even goes on about compromised health. After a couple of his big scores he looked around the celebratory dinner table and realized how the preceding three years had badly aged people.
I find it interesting that the static website ever went out of favour for this kind of site. The simplest approach is usually the best.

I have one website that is compiled using make and sed. Tools most programmers already have on hand. It took no virtually no time to setup and it gets the job done quite gracefully, while still leaving room to be integrated into a more complex system should the future site's needs dictate it.
Not to mention you can't smoke in pubs in Britain - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban_in_England
The things people ask of Google
I agree with the author that the social subtext on DS9 (and Star Trek in general) was very old fashioned (i.e. no gay crewmen). But to it's credit, DS9 had a very modern political subtext.

DS9 was a show set in space dealing with an occupied peoples that suffered decades of repression and were trying to regain their sovereignty. The show was filmed as the first Intifada and Oslo peace process happened in the real world, and I feel the a major part of the series arc is about Israel/Palestine. I have not seen a show on TV since that attempts to have a smart political discussion about this issue.
The point is that he's 81 now. He doesn't have many more years to spend his millions (or billions). A few more percentage points in taxes isn't really going to matter to him.

It would have matter when he was much younger.
"In the 1970s, CEO pay was much lower and companies were well run. Now, CEO pay is very high and the results are awful."<citation needed>

How can you possibly make the assumption that companies are run worse today than 70's? What quantitative measurements show this 'steep negative correlation'?
Boisjoly recommended setting up a team to solve the O-ring problem

And there was a team working on it. IIRC, a redesign of the joint was being worked on. But no one suggested, before the evening before the launch, that launches should be stopped until the redesign was completed.
I don't have anything to hide and it's not like google doesn't have tabs on everything we do anyways. They might as well just give us gift cards for using android, chrome, and any of there services in general.
> Battle re-enactments are eminently useful for military officers

But what good are they for a doctor and an engineer? To paraphrase Ender's Game, how do you apply the lessons learned at The Alamo, or on the fields of ancient Ireland to three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space?

Another thing that struck me is that perhaps nobody wastes time because of the culture the Federation has become. They don't have money, either, and don't seem to particularly miss it. Perhaps Star Trek depicts a humanity that has finally decided to better itself consistently, on a mass and individual level.

Or perhaps when anything is accessible via subspace radio, holodecks and replicators, the only thing that truly brings peace and a sense of accomplishment is actually accomplishing something instead of clicking on cows.
Complicated to explain without being able to refernce the figures, but they basically had "symbols" that consisted of short DNA sequences. These were followed by longer sequences that made a "tail" of DNA.
...Having an agile authority to help enforce various agile methodologies...

I would be very careful with that position. It presupposes that a centralized knowledge-base is necessary for true adoption. If nothing else, this gives you a central point of failure. Also the word "enforce" gives me the heebie jeebies. Don't like seeing "enforce" and "Agile" used in the same sentence :)

How about his? "Having a trusted outsider to make non-binding recommendations about Agile practices can remind us that if we don't follow Agile practices, we're not going to get any improvement from Agile."

Most Agile adoptions, even ones with Agile authorities, achieve only a 5-10% improvement. This is because it's all too easy to give up on the team and take control, whether you're doing it for Agile or non-Agile reasons. You end up killing the very thing you're trying to promote.

EDIT: The only exception I would make to this is if the team really doesn't understand what they are doing, yet are convinced it's a bad idea. In that scenario, usually a coach or somebody can help teach the team (by insisting they try something) until they know enough to make their own decisions.
Google could have implemented it. Firefox Mobile Nightly (which is essentially a completely different browser from the currently-shipping Firefox Mobile), for example, implements the necessary support to run Flash on Ice Cream Sandwich and on Gingerbread and below. It's just a matter of exposing the plugin hooks.
Policing seems like a good way to spend a little of the $100B in cash Apple has lying around. The happier their developer community, the healthier that ecosystem will be, and the more phones and tablets will be sold.
> RPython makes you insert these hints to the trace compiler (can_enter_jit, jit_merge_point) about when to start/stop running a trace, does this buy you anything? If I had to guess, I'd suspect that this is actually a net loss because you have to guess ahead-of-time where it would make sense to start tracing. This sort of guessing is notoriously hard to do.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that by inserting hints, you're simply defining a point at which you want to compare your execution frame. I don't think there's much guessing involved. You can place jit_merge_point at the top your interpreter's main loop, this is where you want to compare execution frames. Then can_enter_jit simply defines what is considered a loop in your language.
Since they don't really follow through on the original question: the article implies it will take ~137 micro gallons to charge an iphone. The size of the fuel would be slightly inferior to an M&M [1].

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+%2F+20+%2F+365+gallon...
The Go runtime keeps track of the number of goroutines that are currently executing and ensures that this doesn't go above GOMAXPROCS. As soon as a goroutine enters a system call it is excluded from this count. If there aren't enough threads to run GOMAXPROCS goroutines the runtime may launch a new one.

See pkg/runtime/proc.c (entersyscall, ready, and matchmg).
My grandparents live off "income generating real estate", and my father is on his way (it's his nest egg for his retirement).

They were not "flipping" properties; rather, they bought good properties when the market wasn't inflated, and rented them, maintaining them and keeping the tentants happy.

It does take some work, not as much as being employed of course, but you have to be on top of things and it takes some mindshare.

There's a real estate bubble here in Uruguay because property rentals pay above-average returns - currently way above average, but market forces are pushing them down as they should, rent is starting to drop as more apartments enter the market.
Google offering $25 in gift cards to let them track you
How to Break the Cycle of Lost Dreams
I think the problem is not the failure to admit - most entrepreneurs would admit the struggle with honesty. It is more like an availability heuristic - success stories make the news, failures usually do not, and so many people have no idea what the success rate is.
CSC left reeling from billion pound NHS failure charge
People are wasting time in Star Trek all the time, more so in the Next Generation spinoffs than in the Original Series. DS9 probably showed the most time wasting of them all.

Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings. Those holodeck/holosuite episodes? They weren't there for training. Picard is always reading or trying to read a book, Sisco does baseball and Janeway paints and whatnot with Da Vinci.

Its just that it is also a TV series. It's just not interesting watching Keiko tweet that O'Brien's favorite food is horribly unhealthy and she hates eating it.

Keeping the show interesting is basically the most important thing for the writers, so its probably best not too look too deeply at what is portrayed as if it is some realistic situation.
Facebook addiction explained: study shows arousal from social media
I can't opine on the crew's input to launch decisions because I didn't work in that area. I suspect that they have little say about it.

I did work on astronaut EVA training, however. In that case, the astronauts were king. No matter how silly the request, their wishes were catered to - but only in areas of usability, not safety. It turns out it's really difficult to connect wires in space, for example - small things matter a lot. I can remember at least one case where what they wanted was just plain dumb. But we did it anyway. Usually, though, they were pretty good about that sort of stuff.
What is Free Information Costing You?
Trivia:

Nimrod 7 is an asshole cyborg character from a Cyberpunk game Bloodnet (Microprose 1993).

Basically Nimrod is an excellent cyborg warrior. But if you have him on team you will face A LOT of unprovoked attacks.

http://www.sysabend.org/champions/characters/mweisler@rz.uni...

This guy seems to have his character covered pretty well.
Please link to the actual research, not the journalist's article.

http://www.scripps.edu/news/press_releases/20120207keinan.ht...

That being said, am I missing something here? Information encryption and image encoding are two entirely separate things.

I'm not paying for the research paper, but the abstract states:

> Parallel computing with molecular finite-state automata and fluorescently labeled DNA molecules has been used to decipher two different images encrypted onto a single DNA chip (see picture). The images were deciphered by a mixture of input molecules that were processed by biomolecular automata, a strategy that potentially offers a huge diversity of encrypted images.

Again, this isn't encryption as I understand it in the traditional 3DES/AES/pgp sense. This is something closer to stenography or encoding/decoding.

Can anyone clear up what exactly is going on here for me?
Tax breaks. A surprisingly large portion of the book is in praise (what's the opposite of a screed?) of having a company you control pay for your meals, car, and house so you avoid personal income tax.
It's interesting that you mention planes. Boeing and Airbus (with FAA's help I guess) have figured out a way to build astonishingly safe planes. Yes, their systems are simpler and get a lot more use, but the fact that there has been exactly one hull loss for a 777 with no fatalities in 20 years with 1000 planes might also be telling us something about them getting the organization right.
The idea of a "passive investment" is a joke.

The example of a web app as a passive investment is crazy -- how many apps exist that won't require support, ongoing maintenance, etc? That's significant work.

Stocks, bonds, mutual funds -- the returns here are small enough that you can't generate income to live on without a huge up-front investment. If you could manage a consistent 8% yield you'd be doing well, and it would $1M to generate an $80k annual income.

Real estate -- I know a couple of part-time landlords, and this is not passive work. They have to deal with tenants, maintenance, etc. Sure, you can hire a property manager, but that cuts into your returns.

Royalties -- This is hardly passive. What's the half-life of IP these days? You can write a book, but it will likely be out of print within the year. If you manage to publish something reasonably popular, you'll likely have to build a franchise around it, which means that you'll have to work at writing more books. Even if you hire ghost writers, you have to find them, manage them, deal with marketing, etc.

One of the takeaway lessons I got from b-school was that "there are no long term economic rents". In other words: if something is profitable (easy money), then other people will enter the market and the profitability will decline. Sure, there are barriers to entry, etc. but all else equal the crowd will follow the easy money and suck the profit out of it.
How would one go about correlating the slightly quicker load time to a 5% improvement in the conversion rate?
Everyone is battling over why corporations or Apple specifically doesn't like GPLv3, and noone has mentioned Linus has said he doesn't like GPLv3 either and will stick with v2 for Linux.

Linux is still shipping under GPLv2.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stabl...
I type between 85 and 105 wpm on average. I have a few inefficiencies that slow me down (I only use the right shift key, for instance), but by and large I'm very competent. My accuracy is over 99%.

I think the best way to learn to type is to do things that require typing, and play games. Programs like Mavis Beacon and their ilk are good for one pass through. You should run through the program to get to the point where you don't have to think about where the keys are any more. Usually this is around 20 wpm or so.

After this though, it's all about practice. I like to practice with TypeRacer.com. It takes just a minute or two per race and you'll be given a wide variety of things to type. Typer-Shark ( http://www.popcap.com/node/215 ) is another great game for drilling yourself.

And above all, typing regularly and avoiding shortcuts is the best way to improve your speed. If you read the newspaper daily, every day pick one article and transcribe it after reading it. If you use facebook chat or another Instant Messenger on the computer, always type out whole words instead of using short-hand. Simple things like this make your habit of typing more consistent and over time lead to great speed increases.
Saturday Night Live had a skit that was similar to this a few months back:

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/18/internet-trolls-on-snl.html
'App economy' creating jobs
Using a Mobile Device as a Desktop Computer
Mouse manufacturer
So what can you look for, when you say good computer mouse button? Frequently, when you buy a complete laptop or computer established, any mouse has already been provided...
40 New Tutorials for Photo Manipulation in Photoshop
Take a dose of inspiration and skill from these tutorials that cover some of the most interesting and exciting photo manipulation and effects.
Zero correlation is a surprising number. That seems to imply that CEOs are paid fairly; I had thought they were overpaid.

If they're underpaid, there should be a positive correlation between CEO pay and corporate performance (i.e. the companies that pay the most can hire the best people). If they're overpaid, there should be an inverse correlation (i.e. the companies that pay the most are likely to overpay the most, and thus waste the most money). So the exact middle ground implies--the exact middle ground. I didn't realize the market was so efficient.

The other possibility is that CEO pay or market performance are totally random. But all you need to do is identify a few very effective and very well-paid CEOs to argue that this is false. Just look at e.g. JCP's new CEO (they nabbed him from Apple thanks to, in part, a generous options package).

This might be clearer in another context: it wouldn't surprise me to find out that your average hunger in a given day has no correlation to your daily caloric intake. That wouldn't imply that calories don't satiate hunger; it would imply that most of us eat something close to our daily calorie requirement.
While WebKit is doing well it’s by no means a monopoly. Opera is at ~24% for example: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201101-...
Survivorship bias and narrative fallacy pervade almost everything, it seems.
DARPA's AlphaDog robot pack mule begins real world testing
While I find it good that the article explicitly addresses issues with trace-based compilation (usually this is not the case), a completely fair account needs to present the additional memory requirements for using the PyPy tool chain. Quite recently, somebody here has addressed this by mentioning that he does not really care for all the performance speedup he gets, if the memory requirements become outlandish at the same time.

It would also be very informative to know what the differences in automatic memory management techniques are (i.e., what did the previous implementation do?) Personally, I am also interested in interpreter optimization techniques, and it would therefore be interesting to me what--or if at all--the previous VM used for example threaded code or something along these lines.