skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure what you're saying. You say that unlimited users use significantly higher average data than the capped users but that is not what the study shows. Although that might have been true before the carriers introduced throttling, the actual article shows that the top 5% of unlimited users use about the same data as the the top 5% of limited users. That is what is surprising about the results.

What you're saying -- which is that data hogs push the unlimited average much higher than the limited average -- is not actually what is happening. AT&T doesn't have to try to match the medium data useage (although that is indeed what is happening). I think what you should be saying is that AT&Ts throttling keeps both the medium and the mean about the same. This is because people on the unlimited plans don't necessarily use more data than the tiered people.

If you look at the actual data (which, unfortunately wasn't in the NYT article) the top 5% of data users across all plans and carriers is about 3.7GB. This is already below the 5GB cap. I think what the article posits makes sense. The purpose of throttling unlimited users who are already below the 5GB cap is to get grandfathered people off unlimited. It's a rotten deal because they (and by "they", I mean mostly AT&T) want to make their unlimited plans undesirable so that you never use much more than 5GB, which is the cap for the tiered plan anyway. Sure, you get theoretically higher monthly bandwidth but the quality of service is actually worse than the tiered plans.
CodeSprint: Systems starts at 11 am PST, w/ problems from Stripe & Socialcam
RESS, Server-Side Feature-Detection and the Evolution of Responsive Web Design
You are absolutely correct.

A good programmer with zero experience in a platform, is a better hire than an average programmer with 10 years of experience in a platform.

HOWEVER, the job market does not know this AT ALL and ONLY hires on the basis of platform experience.

Actual managers of programmers may understand, but their HR department incompetency filter is ONLY going on the basis of keywords in the resumes.

It's terrible. If you create a resume with the right keywords[1], in the most desirable techs, and put it up on job boards on Monday, you will get hits on Tuesday, even if your prior job title was "Senior Child Rapist" and your previous employer was the Penn State Football Program.[2]

.

[1]And they have to match precisely. I was recently told I could not be an Oracle Linux sysadmin, since I only had experience in CENTOS and Red Hat EL. (They are all identical.)

[2]no disrespect PSUers, I just needed a funny example
Is it as crippled as the lua ide? Or can you import/export scripts without copy/paste?
I totally agree, the smb market needs to standardize all of their websites, but I don't think wordpress is the solution.

If you want some ideas, you should really check out some IYP sites like yellowpages, AT&T, etc..

Yes, IYP's have horrible names, but some of them are trying to innovate on top of their huge customer base. If anything, you'll get an idea on pricing.

You might want to try to build something, and source someone locally that has a salesforce to push your product? Another idea, would be posting this locally on craislist that could be 100% commission based... something a starving uni student would love to push for you.

good luck!
I've been told there are torrents of exclusive Netflix content.
Single page link for those who prefer reading their articles whole instead of chopped up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/your-money/why-its-so-hard...
Convert PDF Files into PNG, JPEG, TIFF with Page & Text Extraction
The long awaited version of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java 4.1.0 has been released. This release provides excellent support for converting PDF files into various image formats such as PNG, JPEG, TIFF etc. In this release, we have also greatly improved the bookmark and page extraction features. With every new release, we try to provide best of breed components, so that our customers can get the best out of our products.
Sifilis Pada Wanita
I don't tend to think it's that dangerous, but it's certainly messy. Another couple hours of work could have had proper mounting with nicely routed cables, doors that close and status indicators. It still wouldn't be super safe, but it would look much cooler.

And really if you're jamming servers in a file cabinet you're probably going for looks, not fault tolerance.
What's TOR?
Thanks for the link, dude!
Red Cross in Syria fails to evacuate reporters
This looks neat, but does it support other Git repos or just Github?
Java Memo Calendar Application
Ask HN: Do you think quantum computing will need equally fast-paced language?
I'm just lingering on the thought, and it sparked a intrest but, i don't know enough about coding to do a thought experiment. I was thinking, maybe no use for a certain function anymore because it's not fast enough.
> You've started with a fallacy here. No one is getting paid to push smalltalk.

I wasn't using the word 'advertise' to suggest he was getting paid to push it. I was using it in very much the same sense in which you use the word 'sell' here:

> To be honest it doesn't seem that you are arguing against this concept that strongly, you're just not overly sold on it.

To which I respond: Correct. I'd even go so far as to say I'm not arguing against the concept at all.

Considering that all sorts of approaches to software development continue to be extremely popular, including among very smart people, it just seems crazy to me that people get so acrimonious about such issues. Programming is a very wide and varied field. If two developers try something and come away with differing opinions of it, isn't it just possible that those different opinions are both informed, but informed by different experience resulting from working in different problem domains? I'd submit that developers don't give each other nearly enough credit when they offhandedly dismiss each other's sharing of their own practical experience as "FUD".

To bring it back to Kay's paper: He's got some very interesting ideas, but the specific examples he talks about are problems that just don't cause me any stress in my day job. Yet he implies that people in my problem domain are suffering for not using his preferred programming paradigm. Now I don't want to accuse him of attacking me, and I certainly don't want to attack him because I believe that paper represents learned speculation and not a stake in the ground. But it remains true that he's not necessarily coming from the same place that everyone else is, and his experience of what works well does not necessarily translate into a universal best practice.
Why did you not add your portfolio, github etc on your post? You might get a lot more interesting projects that way. Otherwise you're liable to get "idea" people with "equity" propsals :-)
"The essence of human motivation is that we want to be effective"
"You think you've made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties."

That about sums up American politics.
I have also moved to markdown for nearly everything, using pandoc much of the time for output to HTML or PDF. It handles a few things (like citations) a bit better than multi-markdown, although I find multi-markdown tables to be more convenient.
Oh that was reported on 3 months ago by the New York Times: http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-...
It sounds simple, but telling them you trust them to make a better product than your mockup helps a lot.

Give them creative freedom to solve your idea in their own way. You may understand the technical specifics and big picture of what you're trying to do, but acknowledging that they know their craft better than you do (that's why you're talking to them) and that you want them to design it out in the way they think is best - just saying that will go a long way. Giving them a mockup helps - but let them know you're ok with their interpretation veering from that.

Obviously if the person you're talking to is an awful designer, nothing will fix it; but if you have a good one - the ideas that will flow will make your product awesome (even if they aren't implemented in the end).
This is not new technology. A company called cyberkinetics commercialized this 12 years ago and made it work in humans. See their coverage in wired from 2003.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html
Unit tests that give you code coverage, but don't test anything
5 Reasons Why Corporate Blogs Fails
Are they decrypted from the stream or screencapped and transcoded? If it's the latter, then that's trivial and doesn't require breaking anything, it just causes a good bit of degradation.
I am a designer and I already work that way, if I am not misunderstanding you.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter
Kickstarter, entrepreneurship, social media, and making a difference
> A lawyer ... can't argue in front of the judge.

AT&T could simply make the lawyer a corporate officer with just enough authority to handle small-claims court.
This hasn't been the case with Blu-Ray, right? We've gone weeks and weeks without breaks in whatever the most recent updates to BD+ are.
but I'm surprised Gruber didn't further emphasize the fact that Battelle runs an ad network

Everyone has an agenda. Gruber is an very pro-Apple/anti-Google advocate. He could also be credibly classified as anti-web (where the argument suits his prior agenda. As I'm sure many will call shenanigans, I could happily reference at least a dozen examples of his misinformed anti-web sentiment). Did Gruber declare any of that in his observations? Did the submitter?

Given that Mozilla claims they "fight for the users," is there a reason Firefox doesn't also default to only allowing first-party cookies?

To most people the benefit of third-party cookies outweighs the detriments. Outside of the functional benefits, the economic foundation of most of the content that people rely upon depends upon third-party cookies.

Firefox isn't an irrational group. They realize that undermining the platform doesn't do much for their users. Apple, on the other hand, has no advantage helping the economic cause of the web as a whole. Quite the opposite, in fact. Which is how they chose a default that is contrary to every other web vendor. If you want to monetize users you'll just need to wrap that HTML up into a WebView and submit it to the app store -- be sure to add some iAd support.
What are better ads? If I want something specific to buy, I can search 1000 million places on the web and find it with unprecedented ease. So why I need "ads" at all? (and much less "better ads").

Plus, if I searched Google or visited sites for "depression", "dildos", "flatulence problems", "David Hasselholf CDs", "weight loss", "quit your job" etc, I sure as hell WOULDN'T want to see "better ads" targeting me for such topics --especially when I'm browsing with other people around me.
New York Man 'Grows' Six Inches Through Surgery
Can you tell me more? I am currently looking for a solution.
Looking at jersery. What are you working with?
I think he has some valid points. The emergence of mobile and web 2.0 industries since the article supports rather than weakens his main argument.

just look at the evidence,

-founders of the most successful startups are always in their 20s or 30s. They don't have 20 years of programming experience.

-ruby, python, objective C are all fairly new

It means that a 50 year old programmer with 20 years of programming experience doesn't have too many advantages in learning these new languages / environments compared to a fresh college grad. In addition the 50 year old probably has a family and kids and other social obligations that reduces the amount of time he has to learn.

In other industries where the innovation isn't as fast, and the entire environment changes every 10 years, there is more value in seniority and experience.
The question is not what you or I would do, but what the general population would do. How many people consider gmail to be critical enough that they will pay for it?

> You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market.

The free market involves advertising. How much entertainment in paid for with advertising? Should none of that exist? Should, e.g., "How I Met Your Mother" be cancelled? I seriously doubt it would exist in an advertisement-free market.
Six inches?! Wow! That's quite long.
How about: "Would you like to pay $5 a month for services from Google, like Maps, Gmail, and Search, for an advertising free experience, better privacy and the entitlement to being the actual customer of Google resulting in better service and fewer surprises down the road"?
Windows to Chrome funny picture
I would like to share with you a funny picture that describes how Google converted Windows to Google Chrome. The picture is really funny and well-designed, so I am sure you will like it.
Online Buzz for Oscar 2012 Nominees in Social Media
How to hack a ZTE MF61 hotspot from tmobile?
Hi i bought mine off ebay how do i get to use it for free?
Have you seen this Bret's talk about his principle http://vimeo.com/36579366 ? It's not really about simplification of things.

The principle is basically "to see what's going on", or "to have immediate connection with what you are doing". Basically when you design something, you have to try to think or simulate in your head what's going on. Bret wants to remove that barrier so you don't have to think.

There's some great examples in the video where the principle is applied to graphics, game design, electronics, programming etc.
The internet is becoming more satasfying than marriage companionship and soon procreation, at least in the minds of the internet generation. When we create the holodeck on star trek, then human companionship will be in real trouble, I can get all the joys, minus the awful parts... Plus the added benefit of pressing pause, edit, augment, delete and start over.
What do you mean "no evidence that making ads better targeted has been good"? You mean no evidence as in you A/B tested your on app and found no reasonable increase? Or you mean no evidence, as in you never bothered looking for evidence?

Judging from my personal anecdote with A/B testing targeted ads, there's a lot of evidence that it's good for both advertisers and users. Just try running tests and you'll see it for yourself.
The author's second and third points are either disingenuousness or ignorance.

* The omission of variable declarations has nothing to do with dynamic typing. Some dynamically-typed languages certainly do this (Ruby and Python). Some dynamically-typed languages make variable declarations optional or optionally-required (JavaScript and Perl). Some dynamically-typed languages require variable declarations (the Lisp family), and so do not suffer from the identifier misspelling problem.

* In my experience, Eclipse and other IDEs are not completely reliable when it comes to refactoring and variable renaming. Yes, they are good at it, but at the same time, they all offer preview modes and encourage the user to double-check the IDE's changes. I have seen Eclipse fail in renaming identifiers in Java code. For Lisps, I have found http://brian.mastenbrook.net/display/26 to be just about as effective as Eclispe's Java renaming.

As for the first point, the misuse of the word "macro" makes the entire argument rather difficult to address. It seems to boil down to taste.
The coolest magic trick I've witnessed was at a small club in Los Angeles, by a regular of the magic castle. He had me pick a card and without showing him the card, he had me rip the card into pieces and asked me to tightly close my fist. He said he was going to reconstruct the card. I stared at my hand, keeping the fist clenched and waiting for a misdirection. He simply tapped my fist and asked me to open my hand. There was the card, back together again, folded up with the creases -- as far as I could tell -- where the rips had been earlier. To this day I'm still unsure how it works. One of the coolest things I've ever seen.
My Evernote
I don't like what Facebook and Spotify are doing.
I'm in a similar situation -- transitioning from another profession, with a background in public health (epidemiology and biostatistics) and interpretation/translation (as a certified translator). I've been programming for fun and as a small part of my job for the last few years, but now have reached the point where I really need to find a full-time job as a developer since I'm find myself constantly drawn to writing code for side projects instead of focusing on my current job's requirements. I've been bitten by the programming bug, so to speak. I'm starting to pick up freelance jobs, and am working on open source projects in the hopes of gaining experience. I'm hoping to enter the profession through the machine learning/NLP route -- with my graduate studies in biostatistics, and fluency in several human languages, it seems like a natural fit.

I'd love to hear from others who have transitioned from another profession to programming in recent years. Advice from experienced programmers on how to break into the profession full-time would also be most welcome.
I enjoyed this article. I've lived with other people my whole life and it seems most young people I know live as roommates even into their 30's (if they are not cohabitating with an S.O.) I have had "Days of Chad" though and wonder what it would be like to love totally alone. I personally would just feel less social and more bored.
Money and The Fed: Myth and Reality
Zed,
Do you have a timeline in mind for filling out the rest of the exercises in the alpha release? Do you call it a beta at that point? I think you're doing great work, btw. Thanks.
I dunno, it's just some suburban sprawl.
Yep. Same here - I had always thought I agreed with all the arguments mentioned in the post, and then I found Clojure. I'd like to add that I don't know if there are any existing refactoring tools for Clojure, but there certainly could be. All the things that you might want to rename safely - say functions and keywords (used for hashmap access, and serve as sort of Clojure class fields) are proper symbols, well defined in a namespace. You could have a tool that renames them safely. In Scala, OTOH, a statically typed language, you can't even rename methods safely because they're not always referenced through their defining types, as they could be called through an injected so called "structural type". So nowadays, some statically typed langiuage lose, through cleverness, many of the advantages of static typing, while dynamically typed languages, through disciplined restraint, manage to gain them.

EDIT: actually, the one thing I miss most from statically typed languages is the immediate error highliting in the IDE. The REPL alleviates the need for that, but it was still cool immediately seeing files and lines highlighted in red as soon as I type in some error. I wish Clojure could do that.
3G vs. 4G: What's the Difference?
That variance example seems contrived. I'm expected to believe that the programmer explicitly asks for integers in a dynamically-typed language and then is surprised by integer overflow?

"in a statically typed language the language would force.. coercion"

But R just did an implicit coercion, right there. You gave it ints, it gave you back 1e12. I don't know R well enough to understand what the int() call does, but there's no reason why a dynamic language can't perform implicit coercion. Python does:

>>> type(1000000)
<type 'int'>

[define sumXX]

>>> sumXX([1000000,2000000,3000000,4000000,5000000])
55000000000000L # <--- type long

I could wrap the elements of the list in int() calls but that would change nothing.

The whole point of dynamic languages is that you don't have to think about the types of your numbers. They're just numbers. If you have a use case that requires "4-byte integers, goddammit!" (and there are many valid ones), why yes, you should use a static language and think about overflow. If you don't want to think about overflow, the languages that go to the greatest lengths to shield you from it (lisps) are all dynamically typed.
12. Use meaningful names for methods. The name must specify the exact action of the method and for most cases must start with a verb. (e.g. createPasswordHash)

This depends. My classes often have side-effect-free methods that just return a value based on the state of the object. They are just properties the storage of which would be redundant. I never put "get" in front of the names of these methods. For instance, in a math Vector class, I don't have getNorm(), getUnit(), etc., I just have norm() and unit().

I struggle with what to name methods that compute, for instance, a dot product of two vectors. I don't like a.getDotProduct(b), nor a.dot(b) for that matter. The way the implicit parameter ("this") is special-cased in the notation makes everything so ugly. Nowadays I usually just have a class V with static methods that act on double[]s (so I end up with V.dot(a, b), which still sucks but at least isn't so confusing).
The three main points in the argument are wrong. I present as evidence this flower and a pack of cards.

Dynamic languages DO have refactoring tools. It's just that not many people use them.

That typo error WOULD have been caught with a static analyzer or with unit tests.

Yes, if you supply a function with a type you haven't tested for it might not work. Solution: test for that type, and validate your inputs.

The fourth argument that debugging is more expensive is not substantiated. I find dynamically typed systems easier to debug, especially when they don't have four hour compile times like some statically typed code bases do. Being able to more quickly change, and rerun code in dynamically typed systems gives them a big debugging advantage. Many dynamically typed systems even let you easily change code at run time (which I know is possible with statically typed systems too).

I think more major reasons would be dependent on the types of problems people are solving.

Also... vi forever!
Thanks, great advice
Completely agreed. The italicized clause actually expands the scope of illegal data compared to what it currently is in the USA. Besides, I'm not even sure if content can ever be illegal, only the act of producing and distributing certain kinds of content with certain kinds of intent. If you say "illegal content", you're most likely buying into the rhetoric of censorship advocates.
And you have to be willing to do it for about $5000... That's enough to stop me from considering it.
I think autocompletion as a selling point for static language is underrated. With autocompletion I feel I type less than half the characters that my code requires.

It is not just about completing a word. The completion can be a pattern of several lines of code with placeholders where the IDE jumps and waits for you to enter one or two characters that it completes again.

The resulting experience is that things just flow. The IDE frees your mind from details like name spelling, api method list, exact language syntax and usual idioms.

And it is probably just the beginning. The completion is still pretty basic when you think about it. At some point maybe, IDE will switch to a rule engine to manage thousands of completion rules.
Is Udacity running on Google App Engine?
Looks like so!
On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to.

It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss.

In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.