skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the unions are partly just getting caught in the middle. They may have a high hourly wage, but that's all they set, and it's certainly not $250 an hour. The convention center is taking the money and the union is getting the blame.

OTOH, it is true that the union will aggressively police their job roles, which may have expanded over time to include things that are just silly, like moving a cart from A to B. Ideally those would be rolled back to sensible jobs that require workers, but obviously no one has an incentive to do that.
because they can be

Because they have to be, due to simple supply/demand. I/O sold out in 20 minutes and some suspect that was even throttled.

It's a shame, as the author says, because it tilts attendance in favor of either veterans with deep pockets, or employees of corporations.

Good of Google to offer I/O to students at discounted rates; bad of them for not following through with filtering the attendance down to coders: http://googlecode.blogspot.de/2011/11/google-io-2012-extende...
There is no async MySDQL JDBC driver. If you encapsulate it in an async layer, you need to keep a thread for the connection.
All of those modification times/users should be in a separate audit trail table, which likely will look like an EAV table. That's OK because it's tracking the history of updates, e.g.
(time, table_name, column_name, old_value, new_value, changed_by).

The current (rather than historical) values should not be in generic EAV tables because putting data of different domains in the same column subverts both the relational model and the DBMS's indexing capabilities.

If the point is to label telephone numbers with a role, then a person_id, phone_number, phone_number_label table should be fine.
Pry 102: Advanced Features
30 EMTs posted at the event.

Concussions considered normal.

Player on the author's team still hasn't regained full use of his right arm after tearing his bicep off his shoulder. But at least they came in third place, so he can feel like it was worth it.
I don't love DRM, but the hyperbole could be notched down. In particular, this cliche:

"DRM starts from the premise that all readers are slimeballs and thieves."

Such a dire pronouncement doesn't logically follow. DRM starts from the premise that there exist many slimeballs and thieves. Next, that we should thwart as many as we can with technology, even at the inconvenience of paying customers, presumably yielding greater profit than in the absence of DRM.

The first assumption's undeniably true; the second is open to much debate. But "all readers are scum" is a needlessly cynical attitude to read into it.
Indian Fashion
With more money, you'll have more options in life.
With less money, you've to pick the right option.
Google has lots of money.
How about this idea:

Much of the congestion is caused by people stowing their bags overhead further down the plane than their seat, then having to reverse against traffic for X rows to sit down. Also there is a large fixed time cost once the overhead bins fill up and X passengers are forced to check their bags; they have to haul them all the way to the front against traffic.

What if a system was installed at the security checkpoint that recorded whether a passenger were boarding with a suitcase, and then assigned them a bin overhead. The bins would have small LED screens that displayed the passenger's name or seat number. An algorithm would match the bins to the nearest seats, and reduce or possibly eliminate downstream luggage-stowing. It would also be able to tell passengers that they were too late, the bins were full, and they would have to check their bags.

Difficulties --

* some bags are small or irregular, can fit 2 in a bin (measure bag during X-ray?)

* initially people won't understand the system leading to chaos
One thing which this (and a lot of boarding systems) ignore is that high-revenue customers for airlines demand preferential treatment

If I'm a frequent flyer, regardless of whether i'm sitting in coach or first class, i'm going to expect to be seated first so I don't have to wait in line and can be sure I get a space in the overhead bin. Airlines (like southwest) who don't provide this lose out on business travelers who book last minute, full-fare tickets -- and major carriers who rely on this revenue will be reluctant to switch to systems which don't account for this.
I consider that software engineering. "Doing" computer science means you're doing research. To keep abusing the physics analogy, your work (software engineering) is to mine (computer science) as mechanical engineers are to physicists.
At the risk of sounding glib, I don't think that's how most drug dealers in prison began dealing drugs.

I could be way off, but the scenario he posits, wherein all hits mates are buying weed and he arbitrages, is probably not how most drug dealers come into operation, and certainly not how I suspect the prison-time crowd got into it.
Give Groupon a Break
C2: Clojure(Script) data visualization
I have programmed while on LSD. All I managed to accomplish was writing a program to make the cursor jump around randomly on a Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal. I then turned the brightness way up on the terminal, and the bright jumping cursor induced some pleasant visual effects.
I can really recommend Learning Python. It's a great book, it goes into all the fundamental concepts of python really well and in a very readable manner. I read it after I had a year of experience with python and while I also recognized all the concepts, I learned a lot from the book and it's a constant reference when I need to figure out why something is the way it is in python.

I also have Programming Python, but I mainly use that for reference on some advanced topics. I hate the hundreds of pages it spend on GUI programming though...
I think he's talking about when an app is in a bad state, and you can kill it to force a cold launch. If the app truly crashed it would cold launch anyway.
People treat college like it's a checkmark to check off. If try get through four years of it they will make good money for the rest of their lives. False. College is about learning. If you just scrape by and don't learn anything from it, you'll be no better off four years later. In fact, you will probably be worse off, with six figures of debt and no salary.
I think in issues of public safety like that, it would be more a matter of law and not digital rights. Tinting your windows too dark, cutting a brake line, or adding distracting lights to the exterior are all ways to modify your car that are illegal (where I live, at least), so there's really no need to have other protective measures against that built into the car. I'd suspect driving software modifications would be treated similarly, with DRM or some similar system mainly being used to detect the illegal modifications as opposed to trying too hard to prevent them.
Maybe I'm one of the weird ones, but I absolutely love types and would probably write everything in JS if it had typing similar to Java or C++. As it is, I'm using Java on Jetty instead for my current web application but would love to see a really solid event Node.js style typed framework. With that said, at this point I'm not sure I'd give up my Servlets, frameworks(like CometD) for doing WebSockets, and the other niceties that a true servlet container gives me. I can't wait to see where this goes though!
Dangerous does not have to mean deadly.
Quick and dirty one-line comments should be used very carefully. Before a block it can break the selector, so no styles get applied.
The disappointment that the Galaxy S III is. To be frank, Samsung has never been the innovator. They copy well and hit the right price points and feature sets. It's over to Cupertino now to lead again. Sorry Seoul, you blew your chance.
"We launched your career, handle all the hard work, and give you the freedom to create. We need DRM to keep doing this."

The rights holders have a very compelling argument from the perspective of a creator. How do you convince someone DRM is bad when the person showering them in money and fame is telling them it's good?
> I tend to like command line / REPL interactive development... but does this really add any significant benefit when making iPhone Apps? I would imagine if you have a lot of calculations or String manipulations involving non GUI/device interaction this could be handy.

You could certainly us it for GUI interactions. Take the MacRuby equivalent to:

[[[[[[[UIApplication] sharedApplication] delegate] window] rootViewController] view]

That gets you the main view on screen, to which you could add or remove elements at your pleasure.
Antidilution Protection For Investors
Maybe this is completely dumb and impractical, but could there be a way to remove the seats from the plane, individually or in groups, maybe on a track (overhead?) like a roller coaster, so that there could be a large boarding area with plenty of room for people to get situated. Then once everyone is in their seat, the seats would roll and lock into position.

This would also allow you to quickly deplane, but have the next group of passengers already seated, ready to slide into the plane.

The boarding problem is human, and also spacial. And you can't really get rid of the humans, but you could change the space.

Freight transport has been containerized, how can we do it to passenger transport?
First, it's prison. So, y'know, punishment on some level. In addition to rehabilitation. So my gut reaction is that I'd rather see more educational programs going on. Especially since a lot of "entrepreneurship" is really just either scammy behavior or flat-out fantasy (my start-up's the next Facebook!). Especially when the education isn't in place.

That said, I'm not entirely opposed to the idea. But, as a tax-payer, the idea that someone is getting free room and board on my dime while they make a good income grates a bit. What does it cost to keep someone incarcerated for a year these days? $40k? If the inmate were to repay this -- the sort of rent and bills every other entrepreneur has to pay -- then the idea would be more palatable.
The lack of IB support makes the otherwise "Ruby that Looks Too Much Like Objective C" a bit of a net loss. You lose IB, and the ability to easily integrate the approaches all the thousands of examples and questions do.

I'm very interested to see where this ends up however. I'd love to do iPhone programming (with IB support) in python or ruby. Just not with this tool, just yet.
Computer Science has always seemed to me to be the study of algorithms and information, correctness, methodologies, and their applications. Math is used in order to advance this knowledge. It is readily apparent to me that everything in CS is applied math and logic.

And in the same way a mechanic uses physical principles (arrived at by way of math), software engineering uses insights, practices, methods, and languages (which are mathematical entities to control a Turing machine) developed by computer science. Computer scientists in turn also learn quite a bit from challenges found and attacked by the engineers.

A few computer scientists I've met have math degrees and they enjoy exploring intersections of discrete math and formal methods; some also do research almost exclusively in engineering / application domains (e.g. computer graphics). And, some engineers I know do quite a bit of graph theorizing before hitting the keyboard (whether they recognize it or not) because it's useful.

A good SE will be a computer scientist when faced with a new, challenging problem and a CS will engineer on occasion to help her research.
DRM-Free Day, forever.
Like getting your sac tickled at the airport? Now available on trains too
Stop charging fees to check bags, and start charging fees for carry-ons. Airlines should WANT checked baggage. And so should TSA.
Its not listed but tech stocks like apple and google hover around 15-20 P/E. That means that the FB has to grow their earnings so their P/E ratio ends up being in line with the industry or their stock falls. I.e. either Price moves or Earnings move. This doesn't happen immediately - right now LinkedIn is around 1,000- but the market or company needs to correct itself overtime. While its "correcting" that means earnings will go up w/o the price doing the same thing. That means as a current shareholder, lots of future value accretion has already been priced in (i.e. the stock wont rise like Google or Apple in the last 10 years, which was being fueled by increased earnings). Of course P/E is only 1 metric, but its a really important one.
Your dads doing the dirty on Social media
You're describing a sub-group of young Valley-centric developers (and the occasional outspoken charismatic CEO), drawn to Rails because of its prominence in the start-up environment. It's simple numbers: since Rails is arguably the most popular for ambitious SV companies, then sure, it's going to reflect that culture to some extent. But the community runs deeper than that, and the "Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice" world still exists and thrives. That's the majority of the Ruby and Rails world I've encountered.

Again, I'm sorry your poor sampling seems to have traumatized you into an an irrational, confirmation-bias myopia, but my experience has been very different.

You like C#'s language design? Me too. I especially like its adoption of Ruby-ish idioms like lambdas and the LINQ collections DSL, and the C#-on-Rails framework goodness of ASP MVC.

"it's just yet another imperative scripting language with a poorly designed runtime"

Sweet Lord what an ignorant statement.

Here's the thing that Ruby does astonishingly well that none of those others you mentioned can do: metaprogramming. None of the languages can touch Ruby for its ability to consolidate expressive, DSL-like idioms that eliminate code duplication (and therefore bugs), increase communication and application logic clarity. This is where Ruby really eclipses everybody else, in its ability to create frameworks, DSLs and micro-solutions that drive interesting and expressive conventions that drastically reduces the time it takes to code and deliver a feature out the door.

This is why frameworks like Rails and Sinatra have been so successful with polyglot programmers like the ones I work with, and why new frameworks like Merb and Padrino keep popping up and offer new idioms and expressive possibilities. It's just a creative, open language to work with, that allows a creativity and level of surprising possibilities that have real business consequences. At the application level, where code conciseness and time-to-delivery are at a premium, Ruby simply shines.
PhD in CS here as well, and I've passed on doing a lot of hardcore math. If you're going to call what I do "math," then I feel you've stretched the definition of "math" to the point that it's meaningless.

Also, one mathematician that I've worked with would object to calling CS math because he doesn't want it infecting his beautiful discipline!
As a long time Ruby and Objective C developer who loves both languages I'm not impressed.

Sure the REPL stuff is neat, but I would position my UI elements correctly in interface builder to begin with. I'm also not keen on typing out the code to assign properties that were done with the GUI before. There doesn't seem to be any support for Storyboards which are awesome as segue transitions save a ton of code that you'd normally have to type. Storyboards provide a visual layout and ease of inserting steps in a flow or changing connections.

Once you have proficiency in Objective-C your coding method in XCode really consists of typing 3-4 characters, hitting tab, a couple more characters, a variable name and so forth. Code completion rocks and works quite well in particular with Objective-C. I would expect all of the examples given there would be many fewer keystrokes in Objective-C than Ruby.

I find the side by side code samples somewhat humorous. I expect to see something like coffeescript to javascript which is visually obvious which one is more concise. Instead I see roughly the same code expressed differently. Sure Objective-C turns people off who don't know it, but once you do it's really not a big deal.

Xcode also gives you great tools for refactoring code that due to the nature of Ruby simply are not possible. This is pretty important for large projects.

The tough part of making non-trivial IOS apps is learning the API and the best practices in using it. That can take months or even years.
Not that it's an invalid position, but when Apple-centric developers proclaim 'ObjC > C++' in such a matter-of-fact way, I always wonder how much that is based on actual real-world experience.
Changing careers makes your lack of a degree an issue. It can lock you in places, make large companies and governments unable to hire you (even as part of an acquisition).
Full Show 5/2/12: Libertarianism Is Dead
Podcast interview with designer Jen Myers
I don't understand why anyone should have to justify this. It's like saying "Why C# Is Better Than C."

It's a higher level language, which allows you to get more work done faster. Case closed.
<3. Thanks!

> What's with the color scheme?

Haha. I promise there's just one cohesive color scheme I'm working on adding to the whole site, which is what you see on the track index and track pages. The thematic differences are just a side effect of shipping quickly—the visual side will be coming together soon!

> When it comes to the changes to the menu screens and such, why the friction?

I think I have an answer to this question, but I'd really love to hear more of your thoughts on this as far as what you think is causing friction on Codecademy. If you have a chance, feel free to drop me a line at allison@codecademy.com!
It is unlikely the average individual will work more than forty hours

Unless you were only working for 10 hours at your course, this is false. You could have a 40 hour per week job plus the 30 hour per week job at night. You were working anyway.

Minimum wage is actually $10/hr. here, so that skews things slightly, but let's assume $20K per year anyway since you mentioned it. It's been a while since I've done the math, so I was actually off by a bit. It turns out to be about $108K by the time you graduate given the current state of things.

However, if we assume you live to be 80, it actually works out to be about $640,000+ that you lost out on by not working for those four years.

In your case, you are definitely ahead, but can the average student claim the same? I'm not confident that they can. More importantly, were you really stuck at $20K for the rest of your life? If you had the chops to go to college, it seems like you probably had the chops to find yourself in better standing anyway. The first four years of my career didn't pay much more, but I leveraged that experience to move to a six figure income soon after.
> protect the rights of both the creator and end user

Take a look at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm... . The FSF holds a consistent position on this: "copyright privileges can be justified only in the name of the readers, never in the name of the publishers"; in other words, we permit limited copyright restrictions because we want more works produced, and that represents a tradeoff. The same thing applies to DRM: tolerating DRM means we might get a few more works produced (though widespread evidence would seem to suggest otherwise), but we lose a lot of rights over those works. That tradeoff doesn't seem worth it.
I'm not sure whether to be upset or take it as a complement that my idle random thoughts would be called propaganda. Rest assured, I'm not trying to denigrate atheists, or Sweden for that matter.

The observation was that in less developed societies there are bad religions, good religions, and better religions that promote social cohesion. It was not a statement about modern society and religion vs. morality and lawfulness. Sorry if I offended you.
Given that the goal of the union is to organize the workers so they get better working conditions and pay and can't be arbitrarily fired, it seems to be working just fine.

If you thought you were underpaid, and you unionized to get a better rate, I bet your customers would bitch about it too and blame the union.

And at heart, your complaint is really that management did a poor job of negotiating a contract with the union.
>Why try so hard to make the visual design and user experience so similar to a native app...when you're not a native app?

For iOS, it's because the native apps feel good is why they're shooting for that target. Things that sorta look like them, but behave worse feel bad.
C++ is a lot stricter about a lot of things, and C++11 added some explicit GC-related language, but I have little desire to parse that particular 10MB document. Bjarne covers it in his FAQ, at least: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++0xFAQ.html#gc-abi
REPL seems to be a crutch for not having a visual interface builder. His example in the video wouldn't have been an issue in Xcode as you'd have positioned and named the label correctly to begin with, and would have seen it in context too.
All books are suitable for casually reading on trams, apart from really old and delicate or oversized ones.

I loved 'The Emperors's New Mind' and 'Shadows of the Mind', and did read some of those two while on train journeys, if that helps at all.
How do you think they got in to it then?
Trying not to sound snarky - I'm genuinely interested in what other route you see people taking into drug dealing.
But you have to dedicate a thread to sendFile() (by nature).
Well put; I share the same sentiment. I feel that one of the strongest arguments for traditional characters is that it retains the original meanings behind the characters themselves. Simplifying the characters just throws information away. It's a lossy compression!
Was thinking the same thing. Or start charging $50 if you can't fit your carry-on under your seat.

Everyone schlepping all their crap through security and on to the plane is 90% of the problem.
This is why Spirit started charging for carry-on bags. However, I don't think they allow free checked bags.
I wrote a somewhat more balanced review based on my experience with RubyMotion over the last few months (beta testing) http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-revi...
I am talking about the cultures surrounding these languages and frameworks. Node's community rejects blocking libraries. Java's does not. I've used the non-blocking frameworks in Perl (POE and my own), C (select, and some of the poll variants), Ruby (event machine) and they are fine if you can avoid blocking libraries -- in these communities it is generally acceptable to write blocking libraries. I don't see it as a technical hurdle, I see it as a cultural one.
I discussed this some years ago with an airline engineer. There are many, many practical problems. A pressurized fuselage with a separable section big enough to load passengers on and off is one of the simpler problems. I was left with the impression that it will never[#] happen.

[#] "Never" is a long time. Certainly "not soon"
What the hell, what Doom is that. Maybe I missed it?
:-) I think another important thing to note is that both software engineers and computer scientists reinforce and add value to each other's work. CS can improve and verify the methods employed by those in SE and those in SE can provide direction (necessity is the mother of invention) to and implement the methods developed by CS. It's a very unrefined observation, but I think it gets the general idea across.
It is amusing that some people have so much trouble differentiating between "not firmly committed to one idea" and not able to generate ideas."
Two issues I see:

* Some bags are too heavy / dirty (wheels on rollers accrue a lot of dirt) to keep in lap.

* These days because of the fees inevitably people carry too much luggage on board and have to check some of it after the bins fill up. Impossible to check luggage while plane is taxi'ing (unless there is some door to the cargo hold somewhere?).