skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately our sales people are obsessed with agreeing to whatever customers dictate in order to make a sale. The customer wants a full featured, fully customized, fully automated E-commerce solution and they want it for a flat $5000? Sold. Customer says "What is this 'testing' sh*t on the quote? It should just work the first time, or do you only have a Jr developer on staff who needs everything double checked for them? We can go some place more professional" and sales person replies "Oh yeah, that - you're right. Our developer is a wizard and I forgot to take that off."

No matter how many times I explain or quote higher or tell them the feature creep is becoming unreasonable (oh by the way, we have 18 products with complicated interactions, not the 3 we asked for on the quote, but we expect to still pay the same), such that I can't possibly write it all and test it all, they just don't listen and they leave me holding the bag. So, while I'd like to do testing, just getting the thing kind-of working isn't in the budget, never mind getting it working well.

Sorry for the rant and... come to think of it, it may be time for a new job.
May be we are barking at the wrong tree, carriers and device manufacturers that is. Case in point - Google's own Nexus S phone which has not yet received official ICS update! Either google intentionally holding it back hoping to sell more Galaxy Nexus phone with ICS installed or most likely the ICS leapfrogged at the expense of its backwards compatibility with the existing hardware. Google should wake up and smell the roses before it's going to be too late to repair the damage. Next time they announce a major OS update consumers will not even care because by the time they see the update on their phone, the next iOS version will be announced and pushed to iPhones on the same day.
[Photo] عيد ام سعيد 2012 - 18 مارس - Happy Mother's Day 2012 - 18 March 2012
The problem is we have repeatedly had spineless and useless knee jerk Home Secretaries and Teresa May sadly is no different. If the US asks us to jump we merely ask "how high" and sell out our citizens rights.
Yaser Abu-Mostafa was (by enormous margin) the most effective professor I had at Caltech. Despite being such an expert in the field, he understands clearly when a concept is particularly challenging--and what about it makes it so. This class (the official equivalent) was one of my absolute favorites. Definitely worth a look!
Not a surprise, but I for one am not signing up for another Milk app. Why take the time to use an app that will most likely be gone in a few months.
JVC GZ-HM690BUS Review
Ready or Not, Time to Share More
‎#define tau 6.2831853

If you haven't gotten around to it, today's a good day.
Code Review with PDFy
But it's still wrong (in French).
since he included Canada and Japan, I'm assuming he meant Western Europe.
What percentage of Oink users knew Milk's philosophy? What percentage of them cared?

More to the point, what percentage of potential users for their next app will know about Milk's philosophy (or care) when they see it in the App Store's "Featured" section?

It might make the news, and it's a good talking point, but I can't help feeling the naysayers are just stuck in an echo chamber on this.
Posicionamiento en buscadores
¿Que és y cómo funciona el posicionamiento en buscadores gratis?. Diferencias con el posicionamiento en buscadores por pago
The best part of this is the area of a circle, which is the integral with respect to r of rtau, or taur^2/2.

Sure, pi*r^2 is nice and easy to remember, but also remember even the mnemonic is wrong... pies are round!
Some of the things they're asking for are beyond absurd. How does someone work at the FBI and not realize that asking Google for a user's SS# or detailed browsing logs not realistic?
This guy's article blatantly admits he went in expecting and preparing to be on the defensive. That's never a good way to go about understanding another human being. Surprise, surprise he says he doesn't understand the audacity of RMS! =O
That's not Murphy's Law, its lack of coverage.
Backseat drivers
SXSW is a very efficient place to go if you stick to the sidelines, hang out at a nearby coffeeshop and do work. You end up meeting more people that way, seeing familiar faces, and getting more done. Every year I've been there I've gotten things done more quickly (business deals, press meetings, customer feedback) simply because of the sheer volume of people there.

The key is to pick a spot to camp out at, and invite people to meet you there. It creates stability and easy collaboration. I am always surprised by the new and old people I run into there. Easier than spending a week or month going back and forth on E-mails trying to meet.

Allowing serendipity to run it's course is quite efficient. The creativity comes from the conversations and living knowledge in small groups and hangout sessions vs. the panels and the ads. There are many layers to big events like this.
Developing for Windows 8: Photobucket app creators talk Metro
> I think most of mathematicians out there just take math as it is.

Really? People whose job is continually creating new math daily are just taking math as it is?
Interestingly, this resembles the Gmail logo to me.
was mostly thinking of courses that had lectures/vids up, but that also reminds me of this berkeley course i came across on HN a couple of weeks ago:
http://alex.smola.org/teaching/berkeley2012/
π is not "wrong", that doesn't make any sense. However, I agree with the author that expressing things by using π is more complicated and not as elegant as expressing things with τ.
I think this is really tough on users.
But it's also indicative of Rose's power and pull with a large user base.
I think people will forgive him and sign up to his next new thing because he's a smart dude and has a great team.

For better or worse, this is kindof a blip on the cosmic radar, even in the tech world.

I dunno how I'd react if I was an investor - I guess you invest in a guy like that because you're long on him, and in that case, the failures don't matter as long as your equity carries over.
It's a pattern lock, so it must not be using disk encryption (only available on Ice Cream Sandwich with either PIN or password). Is there some reason they can't just open it up and see what's on it?
Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch. Over the past few years Arch has become my favourite personal distro due to how much control it gives me over my system without being _too_ complicated.

Here is to another amazing 10 years for Arch as well as everyone working on other Linux distros. You are all pretty damn amazing in my opinion. Thank you for all you do and please don't stop =D
The article blew me away when I read that he was a high school senior.
Microsoft, Charging Extra to Watch Netflix on Xbox 360 is Greedy
Insight into Google's Input / Output machine
Is it bad that I picture SxSW and groan, and then picture it full of pseudo-nerds who think they're nerds because they own an iPhone and then groan even more?
Speaking for Hackers
I thought about it right after I posted. Answer: not sure. I'll be sure to take note next time it happens.

This is totally not a big deal, at least to me.
I suppose it's just semantics. The fact that you're actually writing the code yourself to do reference counting and releasing of the references is what makes me think it's not garbage collection, it's manual. When you drop the reference, then it actually becomes garbage and the javascript GC will free it sometime after that.
Can't all of this be gotten just by looking at the storage on the phone? Or talking to the wireless carrier?
If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it.

You know, I was more than willing to "agree to disagree" until I read this. Sorry, but I just don't buy the idea that I should spend 95% of my time in front of a computer writing code. I don't think it's practical or even preferable.

Writing things other than code is a useful thing for a hacker. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt pg, does it? Plus, I can't think of very many people whose emails I've read (myself included) who wouldn't benefit from more writing practice.
I totally agree with you. There are huge business development advantages to having all of your potential partners in one place for a few days. My point is that the environment doesn't really breed creativity as opposed to collaboration.
So many armchair commentators… Nobody here has the data about Oink that Milk do. The data required to tell if this venture was something worth doubling-down on or moving on from.

Business is an art. And great artists know that moving forward often requires you to say "this didn't work, let's start again."

"If you want to live your life ... as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away." — Steve Jobs
Because I didn't know about it :) Great tip!
Instead of using capturing you could also just trigger another mousedown event which will be seen by the sortable plugin. This has the advantage of working even in old IEs.

Be mindful though that by deferring the setup of the sortable list until the mouse action, you will introduce UI lag to the user. Sure: The page might load a bit faster, but now users clicking on the sortable elements will have to wait longer for their click to register.

As an aside, it's ironic that as usual, the browsers which would profit the most from these kinds of speed optimizations don't support them to begin with.

It's also always the slowest browsers that require the polyfills with the worst performance characteristics.
It feels like an action button, like I'm going to download something. Something like http://imgur.com/T2muH seems simpler (forgive the crude 2 minute execution)
This implies that "people" think much about the business behind the products they use. I'm not convinced people put that much thought into whether or not to test something out.

Person 1: "have you seen this new app?"

Person 2: "Oh, cool. I'd try it out, but I read on [insert tech blog] that they're practicing lean startup methodology so I'll wait to install it until after their series-A"

Yes, I know that's a strawman argument, but I have a hard time seeing people really thinking like this at all.
The last time I thought this, though, the stories were being planted by Facebook PR to slam Google+.
Seriously? Pattern locks are almost as easy as Face Unlock to get through.
Wow, didn't realize how easy it was.
Direct link to security researchers blog.

(http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/03/fbi-seeks-warrant-to-for...)

PDF of the application.

(http://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.casd.378626/gov...)
Who's On Google Plus?  Why Are They All So Smart?
Wow. Talk about missing the point.

Let's take a look at what really went down here. First, Lunduke decides to ask Richard Stallman about moving from working on proprietary software to Free software while continuing to make. Second, Stallman answers and says that he thinks having Free software is more important than making money, and that if somebody really cared about Free software that they would be willing to take a job in a factory or some other profession to meet their needs in life. Third, Lunduke decides that Stallman hates children and is a lunatic.

Quoting from the linked piece: "Good at making software that helps people and brings joy to others? Don’t do it. Go work 'in a factory' even if you are going to do a terrible job at 'working in a factory' and couldn’t support your family that way."

Stallman never said anything about not working on software that helps and brings joy. Merely that it ought to be Free software. There are plenty of companies out there selling Free software and support. Just because you produce Free software doesn't mean you can't make money doing it.

This is a classic case of an interviewer just not getting it.
Fourth paragraph:

> It should be obvious that π is not “wrong” in the sense of being factually incorrect; the number π is perfectly well-defined, and it has all the properties normally ascribed to it by mathematicians. When we say that “π is wrong”, we mean that π is a confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant.
A Random Walk through Oddly Named Physics Things
There is something about high school seniors and low-level code like this. From numerous observations over the last 15 years or so. I think it might be because your first 5 years in the profession serves in part to teach you what technical issues to be "scared" of, and high school kids haven't learned that yet.
Mobile is killing marketing as we know it - and it's a good thing
He was embarassed to shoot it sooner.
17% of 300 million = 50 million. There are ~10-12 million illegal immigrants so up to 20%.
GS is 30k people, 12k of them VP-level, of which Smith was one.

http://dealbreaker.com/2012/03/goldman-sachs-was-less-than-t...

VP in IB doesn't map to VP in any other industry I've seen. The (many, many) titles become more confusing when employees refer to Managing Directors (highest rank) as MDs, as if that wasn't overloaded. ("gonna see my MD today...")
He wrote 'type', not 'time'. I think there is a huge difference.
So silicon valley's real value is to coddle the needs of wishy-washy primadonnas as they attempt to find them self? When they succeed, we deify them and shower them with worshipful funding, when they fail its an exercise in letting what worked float to the top to build upon it for the next what-if?

I call bullshit.

Sorry, but the idea behind Oink simply wasn't very compelling.

I am actually turned off by the fact that Kevin managed to get investors in his own private sensory incubation tank which has no problem walking away from everything.

The mantra of fail often is being confused with continual failure.
It's the bursting of the financial sector bubble actually: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/finsize.pdf.
At least at Google, middle management doesn't exist to run projects. They exist to provide career guidance, ensure people are happy, and keep them from leaving for Facebook.

This is a task that doesn't scale, because it requires knowing your reports well enough, as a person, that you understand their career goals, their likes & dislikes, their strengths & weaknesses, etc. so you can steer them into the right role. It's the tech lead's job to manage the (engineering half of) the project, and the tech lead frequently doesn't manage any of the people involved. I've found that managers can rarely manage more than 20 people effectively, and usually drop off sharply in effectiveness after 8-10 people.

Open source projects don't face this limitation, because your way of ensuring that everyone's happy is to assume that everyone who's not happy has quit. I suppose some big companies do this too - Yahoo seems to be trying out this strategy right now - but it really doesn't go over well with the public at large, and it wastes a lot of effort spent investing in new employees.
If all your algorithms are as trivial as calculating a weighted modulo 11 checksum, then the sort of case I'm thinking of doesn't apply. However, in real code, we sometimes have to model situations and solve problems that are inherently complex. The algorithms and data structures we work with will necessarily reflect that essential complexity, and ultimately so will our code.

Beyond a certain point, I think automated tests that give simple yes/no answers are no longer a particularly effective way to test certain types of complex algorithm. Sometimes there are just too many possible inputs and interactions between different effects to get a sensible level of coverage and draw any useful conclusions from that kind of testing alone. You might still have some automated tests, but they are more like integration tests than unit tests at that point.

Internally, you could try writing almost-unit-tests for the implementation details, but then you get into the usual concerns about backdoor access and tying tests too closely to implementation details that might change frequently. Alternatively, some form of careful algorithm design with systematic formal proof might be called for. Maybe instrumenting the code and checking the actual values at key points will highlight errors that aren't yet manifesting as faults, things that a boolean automated test would miss because they haven't violated some arbitrary threshold but which form an unexpected pattern to a knowledgable human observer. However, in these cases, you really want the code to be as simple as possible, and hooks to permit internal access to run some automated test cases as well could cause an awful lot of clutter.
Are you referring to smudge attacks on pattern locks?

Face unlock was even weaker since anyone who had access to your photo could unlock it.
Yes, the article is correct and I agree with it, I just feel the wording is unfortunate.
Not really what you're thinking of but in similar spirit:

https://ocaml.janestreet.com/
perhaps kevin rose is joining the bandwagon of SoLoMo to compete with the likes of Highlight, http://LetsLunch.com, Glancee etc
SEC charges SharesPost for Operating Without a Broker-Dealer License
Around 11. Started with Basic. Realized I could do cool graphics with LOGO. Moved to C later on.
The less-destructive version of this demonstration when I first encountered one in the early 80s was for someone to walk up to the machine, open a cabinet, and randomly pull out a (coffee table book sized) card. No magic smoke, no screams of anguish, no sudden chatter from the console printing messages of lament from the operating system.
Whatever magic pixie dust is in minix, I'm pretty sure it's not going to suddenly make redundant CPUs sprout up in my laptop. You're talking about something else entirely. I could just as easily say that if half of Google's data centers were nuked, they could still serve searches, just slower, and therefore prove linux is utterly reliable.

Anyway, if you like anecdotes, I saw with my very own eyes the network cable between two OpenBSD firewalls chopped with an axe to no detrimental effect. So there. Monolithic kernels are superior to motherfucking axes.
I agree. It seems like a big waste of time and energy.

I suspect most of these techniques are defeated in one fell swoop by debugging the process from kernel mode and/or under virtualization.

At best, you're only going to delay reversers who aren't as experienced as this high school senior (and can't find articles on codeproject.com).
I'm okay with the method the FBI is pursuing. They clearly have a case (or enough of a case to take to court), they know exactly what data they need, and they have obtained a warrant for the information. I don't think wiretap laws should come into play on this unless they plan on intercepting communication beyond what is already stored on the phone. The case so far is exactly what the law intended and holds just as relevant today as it did in the 1700s.

Like drivebyacct2 mentioned, though, asking Google for the SSN of a user is kind of odd, and I really hope Google doesn't know that. It's possible the carrier might know, but Google shouldn't unless the suspect was receiving payment from AdWords or Google Checkout/Wallet (do they need SSN for tax reasons at that point?)
I found it hilarious the way Stallman simply brought down any argument presented to him, I'm sure he mentioned proprietary software not respecting our freedom atleast 20 times, no matter what the argument was. It is safe to say that this man is a true idealist. I wonder what Hacker News' opinion is on this.
Yeah, I actually got a lot of work done by just moving from talk to talk with my laptop, filling the spaces with work and using the topics to learn and be inspired. It was a great way to think creatively and get non-coding done.
I paired with a brilliant developer every day for 6 months who really helped to answer all my questions

Sounds great. What else did you learn?
Show HN: Stack Overflow meets MTurk - Minute Favors
I don't think they've ever worked for Square.
Often enough if someone is smart enough to even realize such things they wouldn't be working for the government. And if you deal with the government you start seeing this kind of stupidity quite often. I am sure you'll see in any large bureaucratic structure (private too) it is just the govt is the largest one of all.
1080p is close to but not 2k and 4k is not 8 times the resolution of 2k.

1080p = 1920 x 1080
2K = 2048×1080 = 1.066 * 1080p
4K = 4096×2160 = 4 times 2k = 4.266 x 1080p

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_cinema_formats.svg
I just assumed that they had search warrants allow this form of discovery for years now. It is funny to thing that an investigator tried one time too many pattern attempts and accidentally erased the phone contents. I'm going to go on record as haha'ing the slip up.
Not compromising doesn't mean "black and white". rms asserts that proprietary knowledge/software is bad for society, and he (naturally) gets a lot of resistance from people who have strong ethical convictions in general, but also skin in the game profiting from the way it is: i.e. us founders and developers and consultants. It's easy for us to see that the legal system is fucked up, but hard to be honest about our own field when our interests start conflicting. We talk ad nauseam about patents and engineering techniques, but have comparatively little discussion about the ethics of proprietary software. It's easy to just kinda take it for granted. And when rms does come up, these ad hominems are usually about as far as it goes. There's a line from Mad Men, "nobody knows what's wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away."

rms isn't a businessman or a politician, he's a "prophet". However secular his beliefs, he sacrifices for his convictions (not that he has a "side", this isn't a sport!). He's in the tradition of Jesus, Luther, Copernicus. Their ideas threatened the orthodoxies of their time; what kept the money-changers in the temple, the Church profiting from indulgences and remaining the scientific authority. It wasn't a pity that Jesus waged peace on war, that Luther called bullshit on indulgences, or that Copernicus proved Earth went around Sun. If they'd've chosen otherwise, in retrospect, what good would it have done?

If Jesus led a rebellion against Rome, or Copernicus didn't publish, or, I don't know, Luther embraced the printing press + surplus cloth to trail-blaze the romance novel...

Their common enemy was ignorance, and history's been shaped by those who didn't compromise on what they knew mattered. That doesn't mean we all have to! I'm no prophet. I write proprietary software. But when I run across one of these articles, I remember that most software works best as a public good, that I should release more code on GitHub, that I should keep moving on my back-burner OSS projects, etc. His views aren't convenient to many hackers, but I find his determination admirable.
To quote the article:

> In it, the FBI asks for a warrant to be served on Google. It wants to know:

> The subscriber's name, address, Social Security number, account login and password

I would hope the FBI is bright enough to know that in all likelyhood Google stores their users passwords in hashed form. How would Google actually be able to comply with this request for the password?

What would happen if they can't comply (they can't)? Would this eventually lead to legislation that forces services to store passwords in plain text or reversible encryption (which is pretty much the same thing)?
I have a feeling that you are just venting your specific personal frustrations in public while pretending that they represent some universal truth about Google.