skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>We hired some graduates from big named universities and I am constantly amazed at their incompetence.

I experienced the same exact thing due to my ignorance of programming. I wanted to launch an idea that a friend and I came up with, but neither of us knew how to program. A friend of a friend attended a top university for CS so we assumed he competent. Two-three months after joining us he had not done much except write code full of bugs and didn't understand the concept of OOP. He had some half-assed PHP scripts written; that's about it. When I confronted him he said "it's too hard, I can't do what you guys want." Well, needless to say we were both upset because we pretty much wasted 3 months. I was so frustrated one day that I decided to look up some PHP tutorials and see if I could fix his code. Well, after a couple tutorials I felt pretty comfortable and said "screw his code, I'll write my own." Three months following that (puts us to about a month ago) and I finished nearly 75% of the coding for our website and I feel pretty good knowing that I was able to do what this guy said couldn't be done (also knowing he has a CS degree and I don't).

I learned that you can't pass responsibility to anyone during crucial times unless you truly know that person's abilities , or if you know the basics well enough to keep tabs on that person (who hopefully knows more than you).
Would you use this if available as a Phone App?
App Store Metrics
I guessed 5 ml; but I was off by an order of magnitude, it's more like 0.5 ml.
I interpreted the was to mean it was an option. Flash used to be the easiest option. Now with the runtime not being present on apple devices and it's total demise imminent, it's still just as easy to use but it's no longer a viable option.
Good find. Have to say, that's a great obscure reference.
Next: Zynga! Please.

Restore balance to the force!
A couple months ago there was an article about people in NY who wanted to charge $3K+ to teach others how to program in Ruby. HN went ballistic, "How could you charge so much when you can learn it all on the Internet?"

Yet for some reason when the field isn't exactly an area of expertise for most HN readers, and the author of the book is giving only common sense financial advice, you get tons of people here saying that the book is pretty decent because it reaffirms common sense financial advice. Never mind that you can find most of this advice on the Internet... For Free!

So my question is, why isn't there more outrage that Robert Kiyosaki wrote a book and charges $11-20/book for common sense advice, but when people try to charge money to teach Ruby, people on HN get angry? Is it the price? Wouldn't you say that to someone who knows nothing about either subject, that a $3K class that teaches you a skill is worth more than a $20 advice book?
im my opinion this blog post is kind of a very clever marketing FOR the book
Restaurant sites. For Mobile Firefox our main test case for Flash is dairyqueen.com.
The best solution, in both the government and private sector, is to keep things small. Smaller governments and smaller companies.

On the small scale, it's very easy to ask "what exactly is it that you do here?" to everyone involved in the entity.
A more formal statement about mathematical publishing
Is February a Sports Data Wasteland?
Measure your conversion rate for a statistically significant amount of time.

Deploy new version of site that is 0.5 seconds faster to load.

Measure your conversion rate for a statistically significant amount of time.

Compare conversion rates.
Key takeaway: Vehicles powered by petroleum fuels are incredibly power consuming. Driving a car a single hour on a highway consumes as much energy as an iPhone does in about 46 years.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+hour+*+100km%2Fh+%2F+...
Ha, I can assure you that it's definitely not intended to be, even if that ends up becoming the case!
I don't think that can_enter_jit and jit_merge_point are hints for optimization. I'm not particularly familiar with JIT compilation, or RPython, but it looks like RPython provides other methods for doing trace optimization.

For example, there is a decorator `@purefunction` which hints to the translator that a function will always return the same output given the same input, even if it is operating on a data structure that could be considered "opaque".
I would be interested in knowing what the value of Higher IQ would be?? I quite curious as to what the HN community believes?
its hardly dismiss-able as circumstantial evidence when apple themselves have said they do it.
Cool stuff T!

The nested threads idea is pretty neat, I've been working on something similar and it's also very alpha. (The site doesn't even have a real domain). Check it out here:
http://ec2-50-16-106-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com/0
Agreed.

Hell, even 20-50% safety isn't necessarily a productive strategy, if you pay too much for it.

I think the main trick is to reduce the unit cost/training investment in astronauts so that we can send up more, and making very cheap vehicles to get them there, so that we'll not have to worry about losing a big investment when (not if) something goes wrong. Putting hundreds of millions of trained meat into billions of dollars worth of aerospace tech is not sustainable.

If it would get me to the moon with a 1 in 3 chance, hell, give me a banana and call me Albert VII.
Well, for me Rich Dad Poor Dad was free, because I got it out of the public library. People actually pay for books?
No...he's a figure of documentary/journalistic interest. Else, virtually every photo of a perp walk would have to be blurred out.
Past a few million, wealth has basically no correlation with consumption. So to the extent that economic inequality is about unequal access to consumer goods (vs unequal numbers in a brokerage account), those high incomes are not a factor.

But they have an important indirect impact: wealth correlates with power; if you're richer, you can control more businesses, and run them the way you'd like. Thus, high marginal income taxes keep the old guard in power longer, and mean that ambitious people with new ideas take longer to take control.

High income taxes and capital gains taxes will mean that proportionately more of the world's companies will be owned and run by Rockefellers and du Ponts rather than Zuckerbergs.
Patent Troll Claims Ownership of Interactive Web - And Might Win
So...how did they find his real identity? Was that covered in the entire episode?
Fine historical example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Please don't downvote me - I'm not invoking Godwins Law here ;-)
I guess I should add that I am certain that a really low IQ would be disadvantagous, I'm just not sure that a very high IQ is of more confirmable value than an above average IQ....thoughts?
White House science/technology extravaganza
Anonymous leaked damaging emails from Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs
It's obvious you need to go and live in some third world countries for a while. Spend 6 months in each of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador then try and tell me this stuff. Watch what actually happens when people don't pay tax and do (pretty much) whatever they please.

You will never look at the world the same way again, I guarantee it.
>So very, very tired of founders trying to convince everyone that tiny stake as an employee in a startup is worth a giant haircut, or really, any haircut at all.

Agreed. If engineering matters so little to a company that they can neither spend money nor equity on decent engineers, then I don't need to be there.
You can go through any catastrophe in a complex system and piece together a chain of events that show how "obvious" it was that it was going to happen. What you miss are all the chains that say every complex system is going to end in catastrophe, because when they don't end, nobody looks. It is kind of an anti-survivor bias.

It is also why it is a bad idea to make policy changes strictly off the cause of a single failure, and that is where things like commissions should help: you can move the focus to looking at the entire problem set for weaknesses instead of just leaving it with "make a better o-ring".
War is what I found more anachronistic in most sci-fi. And I believe it works as a justification: showing advanced civilizations at war makes us forget the shame that we're still primitive enough to kill one another in highly organized ways. It's always been like that, it always will. Really?
Yeah, that would have been swell had Apple worked with all their might to bring DRM to Safari! /s

What is wrong with you?! You are talking about the tiny slice of all possible stuff that pretends it needs fucking DRM. What. The. Hell.
"I bet they're going to talk about the total amount of energy in a gallon of gas, without mentioning anything about how that's translated to electrity, and how much of the energy is lost in the process"

click

"Yup."
Agreed. Right now, there's a very low S/N ratio with all the anon posts.
I'm not familiar either, I'm just going off the article.

"One thing the trace optimiser knows is that because program_counter is passed to jit_merge_point as a way of identifying the current position in the user's end program, any calculations based on it must be constant. These are thus easily optimised away, leaving the trace looking as in Figure 3."
UX Ideas for GrubWithUs
Interesting concept, but needs a greater number of relevant apps.
I know the email validation was just an example, but since we're on the subject, if you've got an email validation that includes a maximum number of characters for the TLD you might want to update that before the new TLDs start rolling in later this year or next.
I think this is "caching", with extremely high latency. And, truthfully for most marketing materials the latency isn't an issue, since approval time are probably much higher.

Really to only reason you'd choose a dynamic language for marketing materials is to ensure link and image relational integrity. (people are bad at this, computers are good)
Node uses libuv, which supports Windows and abstracts over a few other things too.
If you've read Fenyman's appendix to the report on the accident and investigation (http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html), I don't see how you can possibly believe that the decisions made around the Challenger launch were made with the right process.
Looks great. I hadn't considered localizing my future iPad game using Cocos2D and now I'm thinking about doing it for at least 4 languages (Spanish, English, Portuguese, Chinese)! I'll get more if I can get hold of some friends who could do me the favor.
This would be a more accurate review that the OP :)

Another big takeaway for me was that you cannot have a healthy relationship with your money until you stop working for the money. Work for passion, curiosity, experience, whatever satisfies your mind, and you will start seeing the bigger opportunities for profit; the ones that can free you from the rat race of selling away your life (time & effort) in the hope of improving it.
Thanks. Wouldn't this need to be done simultaneously? For example, serving half your users methodA and the other half with methodB.
There is an interesting podcast with Steven Kaplan about the same issue. His research showed a similar result: CEOs are paid fairly and have had wage growth similar to other highly skilled fields (doctors, lawyers, etc).

Conversely, he found that hedge fund managers have absolutely skyrocketed past everyone else. They have totally blown past any type of normal wage growth and are the real culprit for the "1%" phenomenon.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/11/kaplan_on_the_i.htm...
We don't mine batteries from the ground.

Misleading industry puff piece. The question isn't how much would it take but rather how much does it take.

Petrochemical / coal, fossil fuels in general are already generating our power at increasing cost in terms of the raw materials, processing (more difficult processing of oil sands, frakking, etc.)

Give me modern nuclear combined with alternatives like increasingly cheap solar.

Of course, at this moment the US government is mulling tariffs on chinese solar panels since they are too cheap. Evidently the free market is awesome except when it results in cheap products that threaten an established industry.
DNSSEC-Tools 1.12.1 Released – New DNSSEC apps, updated tools, Android support
Well, firstly I never seriously suggested we systematically do anything to trolls as a form of real justice.

Secondly, you ( and other people) shape society's culture and norms. Trolling is a matter of culture, not just law, and it is not simply the governments responsibility or not. The people pass laws which the government enforces (or at least that's how its suppose to work in a democracy).

Thirdly, I actually made the same comment as you the other day, regarding "don't take internet comments seriously". Here's a great reply:

I will play the part of the alarmist and also be the first to invoke Goodwin's law by stating that unchecked rhetoric was the first psych-ops that the Nazi's used. Group acceptance of dehumanizing a different group is the first step down a horrible path. It should be checked at every advance. The seed in America seems to have happened with Muslims, as it was acceptable in good company to view them all as fundamentalist psychopaths, the government and media where all to willing to reinforce such group think as it strengthen their case for war, now that the seed has set it has grown to bear fruit. Vilifying or dehumanizing a group of people always leads down a path of darkness. I would not hastily blow it off as being stupid and crap said on the internet, it is a dangerous mindset, that is easily infection to those susceptible to group think and the sewers of it tend to be far too willing to act when they feel emboldened by numbers and the echo chamber.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559345
This is a facepalm on so many levels:

- oil company predicts oil will still be used in (a lot of) years

- oil company realizes that a) there is an incredible amount of energy in oil and b) the most efficient machines available use only small percentages of that energy

Dumping the remaining energy as heat in a climate-change world. Great!
Even for very highly paid CEOs, you wouldn't expect their remuneration to be much more than a single percent of revenues, and so underperformance as a direct result of overpaying the CEO is unlikely to be an issue for any big company.

Statistically, the direct effect of CEO pay on the bottom line is dwarfed by the indirect effect of his/her work on the bottom line, making it hard if not impossible to isolate, and so I don't think these numbers quite tell the story you think they do.
Create The Perfect Schedule For Your Round-Robin Tournament
Nothings perfect, not even you, or I.

But, just because something isn't perfect, means it's no good. This mindset too, is troubling.

I think it's troubling to over-trivialize or generalize what any book can offer.

At the end of the day, it's up to us as individuals to take the good in everything. I found some things helpful in this book.

It's not at the core of my dominant world viewpoint, but helped me understand how to better (not perfectly, or completely) frame what I wanted in my future. It certainly didn't teach me how to get there.
All vehicles are incredibly power consuming (compared to iPods) and there are basic limits to improving this. If you want a vehicle that is large enough to hold a human and can push air out of the way at 60 mph, it's going to take a lot of energy. Driving habits, aerodynamics, and size can change this usage by a factor of order unity, but they can't do it by orders of magnitude. Thus, alternative energy sources must approach the energy density of petroleum if they are to be competitive.
I really don't know what your point is.

And how does the Challenger explosion in any way suggest that there aren't enough engineers? Certainly this one major issue had engineers urging for delay, so there doesn't seem to have been a lack of them.

You know that all of the shuttles risks are well documented, right? It's a mountain of issues that basically gets the "ok to be ignored for now" stamp at every launch.
$60 Aakash tablet to be given to students free of charge
SF shouldn't see itself as being in the business of predicting anything; or if it does so, then that's a niche subcategory of minority interest. I don't want to read about SF predicting Facebook, and nor do I want to watch compelling dramas played out on comment threads.

SF is always an artifact of the time in which it was written. It's not about the future. It's about the present with a frame shift, and what that tells us about ourselves here and now, from a different perspective. Prognostication - especially about the future - is a fool's game. A compelling story should relate to the reader / viewer here and now, not in 20 or 40 years on the haphazard chance that a bunch of predictions play out.
I realize you're being slightly snarky...

If the chart on the website is to be believed, gasoline is second only to diesel in terms of energy density of viable fuel sources.

The power consumption of a vehicle has little to do with gasoline, though there is an important consideration for efficiency in terms of converting the fuel to linear motion (internal combustion engine and drivetrain).

Vehicles powered by any method are incredibly power consuming. Your average vehicle weighs more than 10x the weight of a single passenger, or in many cases 10x the weight of 2 pax.

Public transportation (impractical in the suburbs), or self-navigating vehicles (more practical) would seem to be a key in reducing the vehicle:occupant weight ratio and increasing overall efficiency.
Building the Ecosystem: Paying it Forward
Does anyone know how AirBnB and Uber and their likes do this? Are they also "third party payment aggregators"?
Also, success is not necessarily correlated with happiness. Success is more about getting what you wanted, while happiness is more about wanting what you've got.
If, like me (and the US Constitution), you think we should have extremely strong freedom of speech protections, that doesn't mean you automatically think there shouldn't be private repercussions to some speech.
It's good to see Facebook has it's moderating priorities straight. Just for the record its:

Holocost Deniers: Tolerated

Breastfeeding Mothers: Not OK
This is, again, problem which is very common. Developers add -webkit- and forget about others like -ms-, -moz-, -o-, -kthml-, ... and most importantly the unprefixed original (if it is a prefix that is a part of some pending standard). I would love if people didn't use these prefixes at all but with W3C being so freakishly slow it would really hold the web back.
Facebook Jumps the Shark - IPO commentary
The Happiest Words A Founder Can Say: “I Got Into YC”
I've managed workers in different countries. I can confirm that it takes much, much more communication to keep remote workers "in the loop" and energized. It wouldn't appear that way at first glance (the distraction and needless meetings skipped).

Tech companies are run by people. They want to be understood and have an ongoing dialogue, as things develop very rapidly. Many decisions are reached at lunch/bathroom breaks/bar which is naturally inclusive of local talent (meaning you don't have to really explain much, as others will carry the message for you vs remote)

One missed point, cities have personalities or rather a group of people predisposed to certain ideas. You have just a little more certainty understanding who you are hiring when you have a vague sense of which (cities/communities) they are chosen. It's small, but makes a huge difference when trying to create momentum in a company.

Tasks will be outsourced...team members won't. As the tech scene continues and the high transitional cost of tech talent continues...i think more employers will want a little more 'buy in".....we know can do the job as well....that's not really the question.
Simple Security Rules
Unfortunately I am at least two years behind on movie releases, not even sure I'd see that film anyway though.
Define "ripoff", angry birds is a rehash of a concept that has been very popular in flash games since pre-2000.
I /just/ finished re-watching "Past Tense" last night - a two-episode arc where Sisko, Dax, and Bashir get stuck in 2024 San Francisco.

Everyone poor is isolated into ghettos - those without ID, those with no job, those with mental illness. They aren't allowed to leave, and thugs rob people of their ration cards all the time.

It's hard (but possible) to see this kind of future in the US. What struck me about the arc was the complete lack of mention of the constitution - had it been suspended? why? I mean, this is only set 29 years after it aired.

All communication is semi-internet, but done over channels - like cable tv. The user interface for it looks like the graphics used in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?". The internet wasn't quite commercialized, yet - that would come the year after air. But we already had BBS' and other connectivity. Surely the writers worked on some sort of network at their office.

We also already had user interfaces more interactive than what they showed - giant desk-size consoles, a 5" monochrome screen and a series of menu options. Is this what people thought of computers, even in 1994?

The entire premise seemed to be 24th-century Federation, but regressed ~200 years -- instead of present-day, progressed 30 years.
SXSW Announces Complete List of Exhibitors
IPad multi touch Screen allows flipping pages e-book
The iPad multi touch Screen prototype is implemented on an Apple iPad but this uses an undocumented private Apple API, and it seems very unlikely that one day such an application can be seen in App Store.
> And energy density is one of the key factors behind the reliability

Density can actually be per-mass or per-volume. Per mass hydrogen is pretty attractive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

Now we just need an efficient, safe and clean way to turn gasoline into electricity and problem solved ;-) right ?
What WordPress can learn from iOS
Attn Samsung: Size matters, but not in smartphones
Why the iPhone is worse than a BlackBerry
Regarding the hints: without those hints the compiler would also trace the interpreter dispatch loop. If you trace them, too, then your generated code would contain unnecessary branching code. Hence, in a sense, these mechanisms allow the trace recorder to record the sequence of interpreter instructions executed without the interpreter dispatch interfering.
> If chrome tries to pull the same tricks today, people
> will just build chromium without it and compete.

I doubt that. As ootachi mentions, this isn't a purely technological race. Far from it. Chrome succeeds for multiple reasons, one of them of course being Chromium's engineering; however, without Google backing the browser heavily, it'd die.

You make developing and maintaining a viable Chromium-fork sound like a trivial thing, but it isn't. (Plus, this fully ignores community inertia -- shit would have to hit the fan before people "just build chromium without it." The community took Dart and NaCl in stride!) So in the end, open source doesn't give you much immediate protection from IE5-ification. Look at how long it took to make Mozilla/Firefox competitive.
Been thinking of making iOS and Android apps, looking for feedback.
MT 2.0 FTW!
wait, the title seems misleading. Chrome wont be replacing android browser as standard in ics. it has not even been confirmed for any future updates either. "Standard browser" is probably poor choice of words.
What Men Buy for Valentine's Day Infographic
Don't Over Engineer Your Engineering Team
They neglected to mention that even modern internal combustion engines can only capture about 18%-20% of that energy.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#Ener...
Please keep your comments civil/constructive. Calling someone a douche because you disagree with their materialism does not add to the discussion, and is frowned on here.