skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I'm just not in the right areas of the airport, but I can never recollect seeing anyone armed beyond a small pistol in the airport. Which airport was this?
Oh God yes. I've been to JFK/LGA/LAX/SFO and I've NEVER had to wait in immigration as along as I have at Heathrow. What is the point of even being part of the Commonwealth (as a Canadian) if Europeans get better treatment.
At least you don't need green cards. Poland is more or less USA troyan horse these days (see Afghanistan, Iraq, missile defence, etc), and still to go to USA you need to participate in lottery..

I think it's somehow playing out for Poland good - it makes brain drain a little slower.
I fear that developers will flock to developing Metro apps in the future instead of regular windows apps. And thus forcing desktop users to use the crappy metro experience and crippling the desktop experience even further.

They need to do something progressive but a touchscreen OS for the desktop is not it imo. I'm sure though that it'll be a blast on a tablet.

If they can manage to explain it well to new users and to have 2 different app ecosystems it might just work. If either fails I don't see it ending well.
The problem I see with the Android market is that there tends to be far more competition. You state that no one has stepped up on Android, however there are a number of decent apps that do exactly what's needed, and Readability have already launched on Android to some success.

Android users are often aware that they're missing out, but there is always something to fill that void. As a result, their users have a siege mentality towards their platform and the businesses that ignore them. As Instagram is likely to figure out when they (finally) move to Android arriving late to the Android game could be fatal to the perception of their brand.
Interactive editor based on the 'Inventing on Principle' talk
The Github repo referenced here could have been a blog post, but instead he choice to make it a repo. I really love that.

Any advice-giving blog post that the author intends to have a long shelf life ought to be a Github repo. It allows for updates in the future with a clear version history. And, more importantly, it allows for others to make suggestions and contribute to the body of advice via pull requests.
Lego Millennium Falcon: Assembly in stop motion in 3D
Our chickens aren't exactly free-range, but they have a large fenced-in area. The fence is electric, and the chickens do go in at night. But when a cat walks by and scares them, they have a tendency to get outside the fence and not know how. And outside the fence... some of the cats would be interested in getting them. And since a big siamese-like cat comes around that will hunt ground hogs, a chicken isn't such an intimidating target.

While I understand that cats are born predators, I can't afford to lose chickens. I wouldn't kill them because they do keep pests down and may belong to someone, but I do want to scare them away from the coop.
What atrocious writing.

The message (which was poorly conveyed) is correct however. Have results as soon as you possibly can (just try not to sacrifice too much elegance).

A (lousy) example would be Linux & GNU Hurd.
I use the same kind of system, however I also have a tv card and torrents set up on the same machine for a more complete media solution.
Boxee Box
As a loud critic of Windows 8, one aspect of the counter-argument that bothers me is the argument that we're simply unwilling to accept change, sticking to what we know, etc.

I adapt to and accommodate change willingly and eagerly where it benefits me. The problem with the change in Windows 8 is that it provides a significant negative change for desktop users. It forces a seriously crippled experience all so Microsoft can try to funnel desktop users to their mobile experience.
This is the closest to home for me.

I started coding when I was around 10. I wrote software every day for 12 years, enthralled and eager to try new things. I learned every language I could get my hands on. When it became a job, I lost all my passion for it. I quit coding for 10 years. Not a single line. I decided to become an automotive mechanic instead...

Today, I'm in IT and my creative outlet is board games. I not only play them, but I design them as well. Last year I licensed my first game and suddenly this dream that I have always had of being published was fulfilled. My first instinct was to embrace that success and use the boost to create more success. I had to pause. I was trying to force success again.

The difference this time was that I realized quickly that I was trying to monetize a hobby. Forget it. I'm not abandoning passionate game design for money. It's just not worth it.
Review – Windows 8 Consumer Preview
It’s clear that Microsoft is attempting to unify the computing experiences in the latest version of its operating system. With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft is clearly making a bid for the enterprise tablet market. The big question is – Have they made the impact that they were hoping for; and will Windows 8 draw people away from iOS and Android? Let’s take a long look at Windows 8 Consumer Preview and see how they did.
Strangely, instead of cry-babies, I saw people making a cogent argument that the costs of moving are high and the job market is very uncertain, and that under those conditions the risks of moving to a place without an adequate support network outweigh the benefits.

They might be wrong, but you haven't made a single point that contradicts this, nor have you made any constructive suggestions.
Here is one MySQL user's naive response.

Generally speaking, postgresql is not as performant for short queries as MySQL. The MySQL community size is larger than postgresql, although postgres has a substantial community.
> Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers

According to the official Copyright Alerts site[1], the only "other bandwidth provider" that has signed on is AT&T.

[1] http://www.copyrightinformation.org/about
Irish person with a CS background here. I think Ireland has similar problems regarding churning out 'talent' to the UK
in that there are initiatives in schools for people to use computers but that's about it.

The fact we have a much smaller population also means that the small percentage of really good hackers you'd normally expect generally is a small number. To compound things further, those in this category are also more likely to immigrate, not because of some hardship, but because there are simply better opportunities elsewhere. To put it bluntly, those who dedicate large amounts of time hacking and getting better are a lot less likely to be 'tied down'.

Universities, yes the number of relevant applicants have gone up, and that's good and all, but to me this looks more reactionary than anything else. I think the primary problem is more of an image one, CS itself remains a mystery subject to many. I realise that this problem may also exist elsewhere, but to me it seems a lot more pronounced here.

I'm glad the government is at least doing something about it, but I feel that simply chucking money at it probably isn't the most effective way to tackle it.
"* https://github.com/LaPingvino/The-Puzzle-Pits

oh wow, I worked on puzzle pits for a while trying to get it to compile.

I ended up figuring out that the original binary ran perfectly fine in dosbox (which I played for a bit) and that the original code was pretty much useless and it would be easier to do a complete rewrite of the game to get it to work with a modern system. Not to mention this doesn't even use a recent standard version of C. So I ended up losing all motivation because of this and because of being a 1 man team.

It was a fun project though, it was this project that introduced me to the hacks that made dos games possible :)
I inspected the 3rd gen iPad image, trying to figure out roughly how much gap there is between rows, because it looks unexpectedly large. It looks like the pixel-to-gap ratio is about 9:5. This would seem to indicate that the screen is 35.7% black.

Obviously, the eye doesn't perceive this large of a gap at no magnification, but still, I was surprised at how much of a gap there is between rows.

(Contrast this to the iPhone 4S, which is about 9:3.6, or 28.6% black.)
You'll be able to make some money but the number of hours it will take you to find the loot will make it a dismal waste of your time, financially speaking.
My last employer actually said something along the same thing during negotiations. I countered with "then why even have it in the contract?". He was a reasonable man.

Also that whole "related to their business" is over-reach as well. If I work for (say) a database company and am providing quality work but spend my nights at home designing a new kind of database, what possible (reasonable) claim can the employer have on my private work? All this and yet we are "employed at will".
It's hard to point blame in one specific direction. Yes, you are right they should take responsibility.

But these are people who grew up doing the "responsible" thing and listening to the advice of teachers and parents. They made good grades whether or not they learned, did extracurricular activities whether or not they enjoyed them, and otherwise put aside any sort of personal decision-making for 21 years, in the idea that a college degree would get them "success."

Given that, it isn't enough to just say "get a job, bum." They need some new, concrete picture of how life works. With ideas like, do things you enjoy and practice hard to get better at them, not to impress other people. Or, work hard even at things you don't like, if it gets you the money, time, or skills you need to do something else later.

And then the question is, how would you arrange a family or a school that produces people who have these ideas naturally? Probably there'd be a lot more opportunities for kids to do meaningful work/play, apprentice learning a trade, and less focusing on getting into a prestigious school.
Doesn't the 4G LTE connection on the iPad 3 solve this problem, at least partially?
I don't remember the last time I've printed out code.
Understanding PHP's internal function definitions
Thanks for the pics! Since you have these devices and can simply count up the number of pixels and divide by the size of the display, would you please consider photoshopping in scale bars to reflect the length of some unit of measure?
> At US airports there are also soldiers or guards carrying big scary automatic weapons in plain sight

When I was in Frankfurt in the 80s, it looked like every airport and train policeman carried a submachine gun.

In both Germany and the UK, I saw ordinary police carrying submachine guns outside the airport. (The UK surprised me.) Again, the 80s.

Has that changed? (I saw a couple of Italian police outside of airports with submachine guns post-2005.)

I've never seen more than a couple of automatic weapons in a US airport (and I spend way too much time in them). (BTW - M-16s aren't "big scary".)

I've seen maybe 10 US police outside of airports with automatic weapons in the last 30 years.

I was surprised how well armed the Indonesian airport police were in 2010.
What offended you - 'Communist' or 'friggin'?
The Apple TV streams. I don't know why none of Apple's other options do (iTunes on a Mac, or an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch), but I assumed it might be a studio restriction?
Meh, I'm a long time progress quest fan - see no reason to switch to AFK RPG except that its web based.
Wow, really? Source?
Yes there was.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/nasa-retires-its-...
Ze Frank said it better in Braincrack - http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/replay/?p=363
> In the end this is not good for the web, because it’s just too bloody much data

What does that even mean?
Telling people to "stop whining" isn't that constructive.

I was unemployed about 5 years ago before the recession had really dug it's teeth in and even then it was tough.

Spending days applying for every posting I was vaguely qualified for online and also physically hitting the pavement and handing out my CV to every business on the street.

Also having to make decisions about whether it was better to get my suit dry-cleaned so as to be more presentable if I ever got an interview or whether I should eat next week.

After a few month of this I get all kinds of people telling me I should "try harder" and "If you really wanted a job you would have one". Well what exactly do you expect me to do? I applied for hundreds of jobs and for the most part heard absolutely nothing back, I would try and call up and inquire about my application but whoever answered the phone generally had strict instructions to get rid of people like me ASAP.
The fundamental problem in most of these is "lack of a safety net".

While there are safety nets in society they often exclude the years when someone is most likely to take economic risks - for example, in the US a minimum free medical coverage is provided to those people under 18 or over 65.

Personally, I'm thinking that if people knew they couldn't incur permanent damage to themselves or their futures, they would take more risks. As falling out of health insurance when you have a chronic condition (which is likely genetic and not the person's fault) in America is one of those situations, people stay in crap jobs that go nowhere, and aren't out there creating new businesses.
Harsh.

Let's assume, for this discussion, that what you say is true, and that many people are stuck by perceived not actual problems. That's not good for them, or for the economy.

What would you do to help them move forward with their life? How would you help them break out of this cycle? What changes would you make?

Or is it really as simple as telling them to "man up"? To "get on their bike"[1]?

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Tebbit)

> *"I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking 'til he found it."
I think you have Moore's Law confused..
> What did they ask me? Name, DoB, place of birth (all info IN MY PASSPORT ALREADY!),

They ask because folks using false papers occasionally don't know what their papers say.
Whenever you buy stuff "Let the buyer beware" applies. I'm sure your brother has stories about unwary customers who paid ridiculous amounts of money for awful work that he had to fix up.

A smart customer isn't an expert in cabling -- you just need to know enough to question the person you are dealing with. Or ask more than one person. Or ask google. The whole business model of Futureshop is to be a convenient, one stop shop. Their vision of a satisfied customer is someone who walks out the door with anything that the store thinks they need.

I can do rudimentary carpentry, but I know what I can't do. So when I needed to have a new front door hung, I got a couple of quotes. The prices ranged from $250-$1,500. I think I paid around $600 to an old school carpenter who did an awesome job.
Now that I think about it I stopped printing out code when monitors got larger. I think I used to do it because I could only see a small number of lines at a time.
I've wondered for a while now if this whiner generation actually complains about how the world is against them more, or if it's just easier for them to be heard. In particular, I'm thinking social media is the big culprit here.

I also would expect some sort of tipping point: "Oh, you can't afford to live in the city because you can't get a job in pharma too? Wow, our generation is having a tough time."

I'm 30, own about 15% of a home and have a wife and kids. I've never been unemployed. I attribute this to not expecting the world to give me anything, like a living wage, student loans, cheap mortgage, etc.

Plenty of people in my peer group are also successful, but there are still those who 'fail' and go from scheme to scheme trying to get a high paying, easy job.

At the end of the day, life is not a video game and you are not the hero. If you're lucky, you might might be a middle manager on the death star construction team.
>stop complaining about externalities keeping them from success and just go out and succeed.

The majority of people do not want to be entrepreneurs so their only option is to work for someone else where you are faced with more external forces. When you're in that situation, most people want to do the minimum and earn the maximum which we know rarely works. Let's face it, being an entrepreneur is not for everyone. It's a lot of work and responsibility; something the majority of 20-somethings can't handle.

>Another quipped about a living wage

I would feel discouraged too if I was only being paid $15 an hour after going to school for 4 years.

I agree with you, there are definitely things you can do to ameliorate yourself and improve your chances of finding a job. You don't seem to have the "average person" mentality of doing just the minimum to achieve your goals, so I sense some disconnect there. I could just be reading into it too much.
at will, that easy? please tell me how
I have heard of performance differences and memory requirements being lower for MySQL but at the end of the day it doesn't matter much.
I suppose it varies. I am a non-EU citizen who lives in the EU, so most of the time I come to the UK on EU flights. Situations like the one you describe happen, but more often than not you actually have three planefuls of EU citizens crawling through the control while the handful of people who do need a visa breeze through. Although obviously you will have more non-EU people at Heathrow than at Liverpool.
Paypal Here offers stores smartphone credit card reader
Apple Is Now Bigger Than The Entire US Retail Sector
1.) You do not need to configure your local environment - everything is there and ready for you to use (e.g. git, PHP, python, ruby, pearl, terminal, code editor).
2.) Git is supported. Thus you can work offline if you also setup Git on your local machine.
3.) "Cloud" = can access from everywhere as long as you have the internet and browser, so you HDD crash? No worries, buy new HDD, access to the internet and you can continue your development straight away because your file is there.
4.) You know where you host your stuffs: koding. Isn't that simple and easy to remember?
Cheers! =D
Pre rant disclaimer: I have yet to use windows 8, and I rather enjoy Unix based OS's.

But lets be honest with a few things, this sentence irks me: "In hindsight, I suppose that Microsoft's quest to combine a desktop and mobile OS into one was damn near impossible to begin with." And there seems to be so much backlash against attempting to do so.

I'm pretty sure this is the direction all OS's we will be using are going to end up in the coming years. Some people will cry and yell and holler that there is no way something can be made for both keyboard, mouse, and touch screen. I see this as simply a failure of vision. That's absolutely the way things are going to be going, and it's coming sooner rather than later. (I actually think the OSX launchpad is pretty close to allowing this implementation) Devices are getting smaller and smaller. I use a Mackbook air. but guess how it gets hooked up at home? That's right, wireless keyboard and mouse, nice big monitor, I never see the actual computer. It's only a matter of time before my laptop gets replaced by a tablet that has comparable hardware specs. The OS allow for my normal desktop interfaces, along with a nice touch screen interface. I'll use it to pick out movies to play on my TV, from my couch. I"ll use the same device to write code at my desk. My kids will use it to play video games, both mobile, and on the TV. I'll use it to send email in the backseat of a car moving at 65mph. (As a wireless comms guy, I fully appreciate the technology it takes to perform that last action.)

But the bottom line is, It's going to happen. Sooner rather than later. And Windows, and every other OS, is going to try their damndest to build the first, and/or best implementation of this model. Windows my not have it sorted out yet (like I said, I haven't used it yet) but they HAVE HAVE HAVE to try. I'm sure they'll produce something useable eventually. Everyone has their Vista moments...
This is so stupid, I'm a bit surprised it came out of a normally excellent site.

The crux of the article is that retina graphics use more bandwidth, and thus Apple should have "thought about it" first.

By that logic, the first iPhone never would have existed, because it used way more bandwidth than any phones before it.
If you're looking to use it with OSS projects there's still a big MySQL bias. If you plan on using it like MySQL, you'll quickly run into casting problems because Postgres is much stricter with types, which is good. Basically, all the downsides are actually upsides.
That kind of mindset is a lot easier to espouse when you (and a lot of the visitors to this site) are in one of the few industries that wasn't particularly affected by the recession, and for that matter is arguably in the midst of a bubble.

We're all lucky -- if your chosen profession (and, say, one that you invested 8+ years of expensive American college to get into) was an industry that had the air sucked out of it in 2008, you might not be so condescending.

I do get what you're saying, and I think there definitely is a type of person you're describing, but you're oversimplifying a measurably more complicated problem.
Yeah, politics, that must be it ... if everybody in your country would've just voted for the other guy the problem would've solved itself by now, wouldn't it?

You sound exactly like one of those higher educated Chinese college kids arguing that whole censorship thing really isn't as bad as they make it sound ...

Or, rather someone defending their abusive husband. "It's just a lot of poltics" == "Sometimes, he's just had a really rough day at work, you know?"
My attempt to solve the problems in recruiting
To be fair, the drop in economic activity necessarily means that everyone can not simply tug harder on their boot straps. Could most individuals do more? Possibly. But it would only deliver improved outcomes if they're doing more relative to everyone else.

It's rather the definition of the slump we're in: the economy as a whole is spending less and taking fewer risks. So no matter what they do, there are only so many jobs. No matter how many of them start their own businesses, there is only so much spending going on.

And while it's obvious and correct that perspective- and attitude-adjustments can only help and that whining and blaming never does, to think that a run of life like that won't have eroded people's attitude and outlook is something between naive and crass.
The Most Brutally Honest New iPad Review You’ll Ever See [video]
Joe Zadeh, Airbnb presentation at Lean Startup SXSW
I don't know if it still exists but for Germans the most "fun" question is wether we are Nazis.
If the iPad 3 retina display really does pose a problem to web bandwidth, this piece would have been more interesting if the author had said at what point in the future there will be sufficient bandwidth.
What is the microscope that you are using?
I have not seen any myself recently - I'm an infrequent air traveler. But for up to six months after 9/11 there were a lot of National Guard guys hanging around, with M16s.

Knowing how government work it would not surprise me at all to read that each airport now has TSA officers with SWAT training and they have all kinds of weaponry stashed in a locker somewhere.