skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a shame you were voted down. The brevity of the blog post causes it to fly right over the head of the target audience. There is a difference between significant digits in measurement, and significant digits in analysis.

First, a quick definition from Wikipedia [1]: leading and trailing zeros which are merely placeholders to indicate the scale of the number.

In measurement, significant digits indicate the precision of the measurement. This eliminates ambiguity. For example, if I were to write:

> The prongs should be spaced 1.000" on their centers.

This means that the level of precision should be to the thousandths of an inch. If I were to write:

> The prongs should be spaced 1.0" on their centers.

This means the level of precision should be to the tenth of an inch.

The former might be used in the engineering of something like a rocket booster control, while the latter might be used in something like woodworking of rudimentary farm implements (like an ox yolk).

The author's lament is that computer scientists -- although I'm not sure who exactly he's talking bout here -- don't pay attention to the meaning of the significant digits in use.

Let's say I (not a computer scientist) were to publish benchmarks that said:

> Under Ruby 1.9.3-p125, the method DateTime#parse takes 3.098193 seconds to parse the string "2011-05-25 00:00:03 -0400" at 100,000 iterations.

Because I used six digits to the right of the decimal point, I have implied that my level of precision is six digits. Put another way, I'm claiming that my benchmark is accurate to six decimal places. This is obviously not true. The value varies each time I run it, and my system isn't nearly controlled enough (I have lots of other processes running) to express this level of precision.

Most hackers just make this assumption. Because of our familiarity with the subject matter, we know that there is variation in benchmark runtime from execution to execution. Many hackers lack a background in formal engineering training as well, so we don't see the implied precision in significant digits. It is a useful tool for communication, however. I plan to pay more attention to it.
UX Journey Mapping - Feedback? 
I just created an Ebook on UX Journey Mapping. I am looking for some feedback on everything - from the landing page, to the Ebook itself, even to the cost of the Ebook - I am a university student (and an Australian) trying to make ends meet and this is one way I thought I could try! I would greatly appreciate every perspective; you will have more experience than I.

www.madintelligence.com but if you guys want a free copy just email me seb at madintelligence.com and ask!
Yet the maker says exactly the reverse in his blog...

"Although there is no metal shielding as you would have in a conventional chassis/PCB the amplifier exhibits no unwanted noise or RF interference as you may associate with an open chassis design such as this it is dead silent even though it is next to my mobile phone and WiFi router."
torbutton kills some of it -- they lock your window size to a multiple of some fairly large number of pixels. not sure what else they do....
This seems like a very bad assessment of software engineering forgetting the cursial reason why older programmer have trouble finding job. The fact is that computer science is only really been a legitament profession for maybe 40-30 years. When it first was taught no one could of predicted the speed at which software engineering would become a dominate force in the world's economy nor seen how fast technology changes. So in the begginning computer science was viewed like math, physics, or any science it was taught so that you learned the basic first then you learned the newer and more innovative things. This is no longer the case. Yes most programmer will experience c/c++, some may even lean x86 and MIPS, but we now know that computer science require a constant change. It is no longer acceptable to just know c/c++ you must learn new languages all the time. Whether you decide to learn node,js, ruby, scala, or what ever cutting edge languages we are not groom to pick up languages in 2 weeks if needed to. Most great programmer are taught to teach themselves the newer technologies to stay relevant. Something I see my professor in college never really learned.
A look around the PlayStation Suite tools and SDK
Sure. Privacy is something that is covered via 10 National Privacy Principles. Principle 5 covers "Openness" http://www.privacy.gov.au/materials/types/infosheets/view/65...

Basically, it states "an organisation must set out in a document clearly expressed policies on its management of personal information. The organisation must make the document available to anyone who asks for it".

In general, the best way is for a link to the site's privacy guidelines. Crikey has one at http://www.crikey.com.au/about/privacy/ - they could easily have published a short link to it on the site shown in the article. I'd say this was an oversight on their part, but from my POV quite a big one!
Israel attacks Iran oil infrastructure again?
Chrome 19.0.1084.30 beta on OS X Lion is seeing nothing past the first screen for me. I hear sounds, but its a black box otherwise.
Google is doing the same for Chrome extension development (http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-exten...).
Does anyone have any idea how well this works with corporate enviroments where the typical workstation is a clone of all the others behind the same (NAT'es) address?
If we had a small government what would stop the rich from spending money to make it large? Some might argue that's exactly what happened in the US. I think the US' behavior as of late demonstrates that writing something in a "constitution" won't stop it from happening.
Publication time or request time doesn't matters, Varnish is in front.
Would also love some constructive feedback: picdazzler.com

Note: still waiting for the before/afters and copy to get here, disregard that please.
At Sun, they ended up promoting this one troublesome executive to "Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job".
Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.

If this is really true then where do they all go? There's only so many seats for managers and architects.
How close are the controls? I never noticed they were similar... maybe I should try to ascend again, as I'm terrible in VI
TV either comes over public airwaves, or through a cable service that I pay (a lot) for.

So no, I don't feel obligated to sit through commercials.

My GMail account, on the other hand, is a great service provided directly to me. The ads on it are well done and don't interfere with my usage. Sometimes I even see ads I click on, since they are interesting. Seems like a good deal.
A good sprint retrospective in Scrum should be similar to what I've read about After Action Reviews (AAR).

One the dust settles, spend time to figure out what went well, what can be improved, and what the on-going issues are. They both seem like decent continuous improvement vehicles to me.
I totally hear you. Back when I was in the IT division of a major (really big!) automobile firm, I asked my manager for the approval to install SVN, since I didn't see anybody using any version control system. I was told that the department doesn't approve of anything "open source" and I was asked to build a version control system so that everybody could use!
Yeah, we've discussed this before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2945463

I think the ubiquity and ease of use of things like WordPress causes people to overlook this solution. Also, I believe the caching plugins that people use with WordPress are doing something very similar.

There are a lot of static site/blog generators out there like Jekyll, but not many of them are targeted toward a general audience. WordPress is easy and well-known.
Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 crashes on modern Intel CPUs
Facebook Style Emotions Jquery Plugin
I guess Crockford better pack his bags and send himself to a retirement home.

There are always going to be under qualified and over qualified candidates. Some people simply loose interest in their field after 20 years. What a load of over generalized garbage.
I hope you succeed in what you are setting out to do, if your goal is to truly protect privacy. I have to admit, though, that I am highly skeptical if the solution turns out to be closed, and proprietary. It is a huge risk to place one's security in the hands of something that is a black box.
It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.
It got us to click to link, didn't it? :)
I like the idea of this, but so far I have not found it to be a good fit for me. I already familiar my fitness through kinect. One of my biggest problems is knowing what to do. I can't go to the gym, which seems to be what fitocracy revolves around.
I don't use hjkl to move around in vim. At this point it's counter intuitive. Lame
Relevant (and fun): F*ck You, Pay me.
http://vimeo.com/22053820

Making money is difficult enough. Don't leave all that money on the table.
How many 40 year old software programmers could there be the area of science has only been around 40 years.
The latest on Firefox for Windows 8 Metro, status update 4
Apple Predicted to Discontinue 17-Inch MacBook Pro
I fear you might have just caused that thing to spring into life.. I only hope that it wasn't actually rule 34 that triggered it.
Creating methods at runtime in C#
Mainly because currently people's time > computation time.

Is it even worth my time to setup caching on a blog that gets 10 hits a day? Probably not.
It can't have been that long ago because I've been able to copy public folder links and share files with users who don't have Dropbox since I first signed up - back in June of aught 10.
He seems to have missed making the point in the title. Why would software engineers work for english majors? He thinks that a 20 something english major is a better manager for a software engineer than a 40 something software engineer?

Plus he seems to completely miss a separate alternative for software engineers over 35-- start their own businesses.

I think the perception that 40 year olds are not up to date on technology is laughable-- just look at how resistant 20-sometings are to erlang. This resistance or letting skills get old can come from two sources: First, some people just are kinda blub programmers who never want to learn something new. The second is that its possible to be pigeonholed. I was that way- forced to write windows software for years (several companies who had mac apps who hired me with the promise of working on the mac app then switched me to windows because I had windows experience) until I seriously de-emphasized that experience on my resume, and started outright refusing.

The reason companies hire people right out of college is really simple: They want engineers who are going to accept being over worked due to bad management practices. They think it is easier and cheaper to just hire out of college than to fix their broken processes. I've seen this everywhere - from Microsoft where the managers have some technical back ground but the company culture is broken- to Amazon where the managers are DMV rejects and the company culture is broken. (notable exceptions exist in both cases, of course.)

It is cheaper to hire someone right out of college than to hire someone with 10 years experience... the problem is, "professional" management thinks both are equally productive. In my experience this is not the case.

I had to laugh when, in 2007, Zuckerberg was on the stage at Startup Weekend claiming that 20 year olds were more productive-- at the time he was too young to even know the difference! Standard issue youthful hubris, that.
مشاهدة مباراة الشباب والنصر بث مباشر
-- "Although the very term “coding” evokes an image of tedium"

This is ridiculous.
I get the odd feeling there is something personal going on for the author. There isn't anything in there to back up English or humanities majors taking more managerial positions in tech companies.

"If you choose a software-engineering career, just keep in mind that you could end up working for one of those lowly humanities majors someday."
Cadillac promises self-driving cars by 2015
I love this site actually - wish there was something like this in Australia! Are you planning on adding links to the tenants and landlord pages? Links to the searches from within the text would be really good - I looked for some in the text, but couldn't find anything.

Overall, the site is fast to use, now that the button issue is largely fixed it's easy to navigate. Question though - why make the headings with a solid blue colour? Seems a bit jarring... wouldn't a bold heading do just as well?

Another thing: If there were more links to dive right into searches at https://www.openrent.co.uk/Tenants this would be grand. As a suggestion, a standard link to the "Browse properties by location or by commute time" page would be great, and perhaps consider making the image into a link also.

One last thing: the grey text on white background is OK - but it would be better to make it a little less light. It can make legibility a problem for some folks.

Overall though, love the site - great work!

Edit: one more idea... why not make the link to the blog more prominent? Right now it's right at the bottom alongside the legalese that almost nobody looks at. Blogging may be a pretty good way of getting repeat business. It looks like you've got some pretty decent blog posts already, why not highlight this to show that you are adding content all the time? Just a thought :-)
I think newer programmer's just work for less. There really isn't that much new under the sun in software engineering.
> This technique can be used to find out some of the softwares installed on your system. For example I can say that you probably don't have Adobe Creative Suite installed.

Sorry, I have CS3 installed and fully licensed. But still a nice demo.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d15vvo4h7h88xx2/aLdsKAd0qZ
Working URL from the example
That's an absurd interpretation of the article. It never said everyone is out of the field by 40, just "most".
Works wonderfully in later versions of Firefox, sounds like there might be a canvas bug causing poor performance in Fx 11
Every major blogging framework has caching either built in or as a plugin.
More To Instagram Than Meets The Eye
I completely failed to parse the title of this article. I thought it was about some union-like action in which some set of software engineers will donate their salaries to some set of, supposedly, poor English majors.

The more I read, the more confused I got since it never seemed to get to the point: who are doing this? Heh. English is not my native language, which I guess this served as a good reminder of.
> Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs.

You make several assumptions about him that don't seem supported, but worse why make this personal?

> It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.

So, older people don't get jobs because it takes them a day to pick up what a young programmer can understand in a "few weeks"? Really?
ZX Spectrum: 30 years old, and still one of the cheapest computers ever made
I read the original as an indirect question.

Will anyone be able to pronounce this?
I don't see that this adds any more than is already in the previous four submissions of this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878007

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3866664

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3863134 <- This has some discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3862973
5 Interface Laws Every Software Designer Should Know
Alex Russell: Class Warfare in TC39
You have to remember that it's not just about the physical tracking, it's also about time. If the page takes seconds to run it's not feasible on billions of requests because the tracking software sits in between the page getting paid and the target destination. If your tracking script takes seconds (this technique only works after the page is loaded), or provides a white screen jump period, it isn't something that will be desired. Unless of course all other options are removed.

Getting all pages on the web to remove the old image based cookie tracking in support of JS etc... also will never happen unless extreme circumstances occur. Most of the people running ad sites have no idea what you are talking about anyway in realms outside of Cookie and Tracking.
“I Want Startup Experience”
Well, it's actually TeX that's pronounced with a chi. Lamport doesn't care either way.
In an era where employers (especially larger corporations) see all employees as disposable temps and where hot technologies change in a matter months, OF COURSE my resume bullet point goals are going to take priority in front of concerns about long term stability of the enterprise technology stack.
Twitter Can't Beat Facebook
I agree. I have Dropbox for a couple of years now and the Public Folder was always there, allowing me to drop files in an ask (by right-clicking) for a public link, that "just works".

Perhaps DB made this feature available for all files and not just those in the Public folder. But is this really prudent? It makes following which files of mine are shared and which aren't harder...
How is this significantly different from http://panopticlick.eff.org/ ?
I think `Insert` does the same thing in Vimperator
Ask HN: How to hire fresh or recent graduates?
There seem to be quite a few articles talking about how the market is tough for recent college graduates. E.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/business/economy/19grads.html

We are looking to hire fresh/recent college graduates with pretty much no experience for sales positions with an adequate base and a very strong incentive structure. We are hiring for our niche industry focused SAAS products selling into enterprise customers.

However, we are struggling to attract & hire folks who show even a modest amount of determination with good communication skills.

What could we be doing wrong? Any tips/thoughts/advise on how to hire in this segment?

I thought "hiring recent college graduates with no specific experience requirements" will be in the "not so challenging" category of growing our business. But its apparently not that easy!
Organizational departments destroy innovation
A lot of modern jobs have only existed for <= 40 years.

Trust me, there are a lot of us.
I made exactly the same comment hours ago. Instead of answering it got downvoted way into negative territory.
Taxes and Startups: Getting it Right From the Beginning | 21times
The title initially made me angry, but there's a lot of truth in this post. The sad fact is that once you cross 35, the salary growth slows considerably for most engineers and you have to jump to management roles to make more, even if your output translates to more dollars.

Contrary to the article, I think people in Law and Finance go through the same thing, but they get about 10 years more than us. My friends in Finance can stay in technical roles well into their 30s while still making double what even a typical Software Engineering Manager would make. When they finally have to go into more managerial roles, their kids might be getting out of the house and their personal responsibilities are lower, so they can take less stressful roles, or even go into consulting and start traveling if they want to be more hands on.
Hi Brian,

This is Joe from the Healthy Games panel. I used a Fitbit, until I lost it. I just got the Fuelband. What I found with both is that they are helpful to gauge level of activity ("it's noon and I only have 1000 steps, move!"), but lack a second gear. What I'd love to see in products like these is a coaching feature - If my goal is to lose 10 pounds, how much more do I have to walk?

It would also be great to see a similar thing in Fitocracy. I have no idea how to start with lifting. Your UI is really nice, but assumes I have a plan. Pre-populating it with a starter plan would be a huge step forward. Same for Nike and all these other products.
How is this substantially different than Paypal?
Replace "coding" with "writing" and you'd describe most of my k-12 and undergraduate educational career.

Many people can't seem to grasp the differences in ways a computer could be used, and lump it all in with "data entry".
No, that's not. You have no idea what you're talking about. Keynesian economics, for instance, uses a similar example to justify government spending. You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords you really don't understand because you're just corroding the conversation.
Wow, what hogwash. I still don't see where the article connects the dots -- why, exactly, would I end up working for an English major?

As for the balance of the article, most of the finger-pointing to dead-end oblivion for 40+ programmers is that they're priced out of the market. While that may be true in some cases, it's certainly not a trend I'm seeing -- rather, the opposite.

Mostly, this article was written by someone who has no idea what programmers/developers/architects/engineers do with their time, nor why companies value them in those endeavors.
Really? And here I was thinking that my discipline was one of the most rapidly evolving on the planet...
The last word of your comment made me respond..

That'd be considered 'wrong' or missing out. Which the game tries to correct. Supposedly later levels will teach you about vim 'words' and you'll combine hjkl with lots of other commands. You cannot do that the way you use the software. How's that 'lame'?

And what kind of an attitude is this if you click on a game that is supposed to teach you about vim and complain that it's forcing you to learn something right afterwards?
Yet another new username I see. Welcome back.

Flagged. Again.
If you want you one, Essays 1743: http://www.thibault.org/fonts/essays/
Just a tip: basic grammar and spelling contribute more to your long-term professional success than you might guess.
Try reading what I actually wrote instead of what your preconceptions and prejudices are telling you.

It took my a day to find out that ListView's do not work.
How long ago was 1992? Anyone that was working as a developer as recently as 1992 is now almost guaranteed to be 40+.
So, you're not an English major then?
There's a persistent myth that needs to be put down:

It doesn't get at all harder to learn new technologies when you get older. In fact, it gets a whole lot easier.

There's an old saying "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", and this is true, to the extent that any cliche can be, when referring to people becoming set in their ways. For many professions, where the technology doesn't' change, this is true. For programmers "set in your ways" simply describes the method by which we pick up new technology since that's what the profession is all about. (I prefer books to youtube videos, for instance.)

Learning new languages and new technologies and new platforms is a whole lot easier now than it was 20 years ago, in part because the technology for delivering information is a lot more available (hell the internet alone is a huge impact) but also because, having learned a dozen languages the next language is a lot easier to pick up.
Instruction and service are some of the cornerstones of mainstream open source. No, it's not something RMS is a fan of, I believe, but it's what has allowed companies like Red Hat, and Canonical to stay alive, and to employ a large number of open source contributors.