skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by this (child gone missing)? You don't care about child kidnappers even though you could potentially see the child and alert someone?

I can be pretty cold myself from time to time, but if that's what you mean that's pretty heartless.
The first one to pop up on google was this: http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/09/21/obama-yelling...
There are plenty of examples, as soon as people stop relying on the left wing media to feed them what they think everyone should hear.
But a decent motherboard has 16 slots, so 32GB or less should be cheap; it should only get expensive above that.
Your suspicion is correct. I just got hired by Google as a new grad software engineer. New grads might have a better shot in situations like this, because they are cheaper. Many companies made the mistake of not hiring them during the last recession, and paid the price. Also, with companies like Google, it's always a crapshoot as to what kind of person they are looking for at a given time. A friend of mine who I thought had a better shot than myself didn't make it.
>He concluded that your thoughts become more and more random and flooded as you get closer to actual sleep, until your brain gets overwhelmed and passes out.

At one point when I had trouble falling asleep in less than 1/2 an hour, I used the reverse to fall asleep quicker: I'd guide myself into thinking outlandish things, then my brain would naturally progress in this fashion until I fell asleep.
Supposed to, yes. But few companies have a person who's job is as specialised as hers. Google is about efficiency and her job is to keep the meetings efficient and organized.

I can't tell you how much I hate the meetings I have to go that devolve into time wasting because there's no agenda etc.
... NextWave ...

My understanding is that NextWave was bidding with the expectation that they would be able to pay for the licenses. (In fact, didn't they make the first few years of payments before they went bankrupt?)

Oh, and I love Tarsnap!

Thanks!
Rather than getting your fuzzy estimate by dividing, use a more accurate website to see there were 633,000 doctors in the US in 2006 (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos074.htm).

The rhetoric of the Obama stimulus is to create state jobs now that will somehow make the US economy more efficient later and then decreasing state jobs when economy is in better shape and letting private sector take over. I am not saying that is what will happen, mind you.
What I am trying to say is that these things are within the domain of local news. I have no problem with these things appearing within the local news. My problem is with the national news choosing one arbitrary murder to broadcast nationwide when these things are happening in communities all across the country everyday. It's sensationalism, nothing more.
Of course, but would you really want to use a more advanced menu just to find a single-serving app on a mobile device?
From the article:

"Hopefully Palm will think about opening up their software to 3rd party manufactures so we can see it on some other devices"

People have been making this argument about OS X for years, and all have failed to realize the importance of hardware/software synergy.

Palm would be better off engineering this tablet device themselves. 3rd parties are nothing but trouble.
I think 70s-80s was a small depression, but they can call it a recession if they want. A recession is more like the dot-com bust + 9/11.

Off the top of my head:

* 1807 (Embargo! Political cartoon: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Ograbme.j...)

* 1837 (Specie speculation: Weird political cartoon: http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a10000/3a18000/3a1800...)

* 1873 (Railroad collapse; government too tight with money. Weird political cartoon: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mpimages/mp105.jpg)

* 1890 (Panic of 1890: Specie and railroad speculation)

* 1929 (Great Depression)
What sort of computer was it?

My own particular set of computer horror stories include a batch of Olivetti laptops (Pentium I-era) that refused to run a critical business app, a Gateway Desktop that refused to run a critical database app, a Sony Vaio desktop that was cute but completely useless ... all of which I would cheerfully have shot.
Novell and Red Hat both are real world corporations, and Ubuntu + others are on their way to joining them. Claiming that linux cannot survive as a business is quite frankly foolish. It exists and thrives in a capitalistic market, and with all due respect, it most certainly can make enough money to survive as a business. Note my comment was not specifying the linux kernel in itself, but rather the larger scope of the OSS and GNU/Linux projects. I welcome any counter-arguments.
It cheers me endlessly that the majority of HN commenters really grok the news situation -- it's essential for society, has no business model, there aren't yet any valid alternatives. It seems simple spelt out, but it's amazing how many people both inside the industry and out don't get it. And if they don't get the problems, they're never going to find the solutions.
How many times does "Joel on Software" show up on this blog entry? I count 5 times, including the Title and email address. Pot...kettle...black.
I'd just let the market decide. With so many identical-looking screens of apps, most iPhones already are getting cluttered. I expect that we'll soon see a better (hierarchical) Springboard.
It actually IS more than both Google and Microsoft combined. They're required to break up the revenue from the iPhone over 8 quarters -- its supposed to be spread out over the life of the iPhone's subscription. But its all paid to Apple upfront.

While that listing didn't show you exactly how much earnings was reported that quarter from Apple, but its fast becoming their bread and butter. And yes, if you end up multiplying that value by 8, Apple's cash on hand last quarter was something like $40 billion.

(Still looking for a URL to back up my sources. DaringFireball.net did an analysis where he was quick to point this out. I think the closest I can find to the number crunching was this: http://daringfireball.net/2008/10/the_phone_company )

I remember the post addressing re: iPod Touches and charging for updates -- because they're not part of a subscription, but yeah, either way, there's a lot of evidence that the "cash on hand" is significantly larger than what's being reported, due to accounting reasons.
If all of your questions can be answered by replying to your email you must have a very easy job. You know the kind that computers will be doing soon.
You typo'd Adrian's last name.

In any case, dang neat stuff. I would definitely enter if it wasn't my day job to do these same sorts of things at the Post.
<sarcasm>
Why do we have previews in movie theaters before the movie starts? The screen could just be black until the main feature begins. Or, the screen could just read "There are other movies coming out" that would pretty much say the same thing.
</sarcasm>
When I read the title I immediately knew the answer: bonfire! There is nothing more sattisfying than seeing all that metal/wood/rubber light up on fire the wood will burn, the aluminum will melt, and the rubber will stink to high heaven. Just don't think about how much that computer costs.
Thanks! That's really encouraging. Glad you had such a positive experience.
Yet only once in the body (well, the info paragraph at the bottom). All other references are actually part of the page itself. Futhermore, the info paragraph is probably boilerplate, dropping the times he "mentioned" his blog title down to zero. I wouldnt say that was the pot calling the kettle black in any way, shape, or form.
I imagine it will be equivalent of 1-2 semesters of college courses ($3-5,000). It's not like we can just throw a highly discoverable UI at them and hope most nurses can figure it out.

The medical office assistant now needs to understand the whole system well enough to figure out which external records are mine (and not those of another guy with the same name as me living in Buffalo). That's trickier than figuring out ebay.

It might be a bit short of $15k/person, but its not too far off.

There are deployment costs. Existing business practices will need to be changed. The transition will need to be seamless, or else treatment orders get lost. Add in the costs of it being a government operation, and you get a number on the order of $100 billion.

Maybe $50 billion is a better number than $100 billion, but $1 billion is probably far short of what it should be.
I sent this out to my colleagues two years ago and they took it as an insult. The real problem is that meetings are an inefficient form of communication. I once had to sit through a weekly around the room status meeting where everyone tried to shine in front of the boss and brag about what they had been doing- for two hours! That's 5% of my supposed 40 hours per week being subjected to others bloviating about their accomplishments. I used to beg for timeboxing on certain people, but it was never enforced. I started dialing into the meeting on my cellphone from my desk so I could at least work. We even tried to make the meeting into a daily update blog or something, but the idiot manager liked to gather all of his subjects into the room and hold court once a week.

I like the board meetings I run. We talk about an issue for a designated period of time, and then we vote on it. Closed. Meetings without a clearly defined decision process tend not to make any decisions.
I guess the problem is that newspapers started in a time when they had to satisfy everyone. Therefore, there is no depth in their coverage. They also invest in topics that are of interest for the "general" population, like celebrities and economy.

For example, I have no interest whatsoever in the latest fight happening in the middle east. However, the TV news insists in spending >50% if its international coverage time telling me about this.

Journalism follows a model from the last two centuries, and it will take a long time to change. Perhaps it will lose relevance completely, when compared to blogs and other web sources.
That reminds me of a hot-dog-eating contest.
nah, its more a preview that goes as such: "Check out this movie! Critics love this movie! Come see this movie! It has action, romance, comedy! If you watch this movie, you will know how much you like it!"
‘Just Leap In’ Tries To Succeed Where Lively Failed
This is the perfect use case for my new site:
www.skuttlefish.com

Basically you can rate YouTube videos second by second like you can do with those funky Dial Polls.

The idea came from watching dial polls during the debates with several dozen people sitting in a room moving a dial from left to right depending on how they felt about what the person speaking was saying. It is beta and have lots more planned including comments, other video formats, etc. Let us know what you think.
I would. Joel is doing exactly what Sun is doing...saturating your mind with key words/phrases. It's Branding/Marketing.
It really is fascinating how people's likes and dislikes color their perception. We look at the same video and you see screaming while I see a regular townhall meeting-type Q&A. I am not being argumentative here, I just really fail to see the screaming - he looks to be speaking loudly both before and after that question.

One thing I will say is that it's unfair to allow senior citizens to ask questions, but then say that Obama is scaring them when he answers. I doubt the specific lady in question would want to be treated differently than others just based on her age. If she thinks herself fit to attend a political debate, we should respect her decision.

Also, I am not sure why you presumed that I am being fed by the left wing media. Like I said, I watched the actual candidates' debates... so I really just saw them however they chose to present themselves.
meta-environment? That's basically what a VM is in the first place. As for the automatic download-install, linux package managers will already do that for you. Of course, not for web apps, but who wants a web app telling their computer to download and install a program???
Angostura, thanks for the feedback.

1. I'm aware that the initial create workspace wizard is too complex. You can do what you suggest by inviting no-one, adding your content and then editing the workspace to invite the users but clearly that's not intuitive enough at present. Will try to improve.

2. Hoist by own petard here! I surfaced some functions to the list view in order to try and reduce / simplify the interface once you were inside the workspace. Will add rollover as suggested.

3. I'd love to support more video formats in time - Silverlight natively supports .WMV files so this is what colaab supports presently. In the future I'd like to broaden this out and perform server side conversion for display inside the application. The point about the way the wizards move stages is noted, will see if I can improve on that.

4. Thumbnails for all resources is in the JIRA features list, will put a note on it saying someone else requested it. At some point I had to stop implementing features and get a beta version out there and unfortunately this was one of the features that didn't make it - it's in the works!

6. Editing is such a huge area, and while I'd love for colaab to provide some additional editing capabilities with the resources I have available it's just not possible. For the moment I am hopeful that the need to collaborate in this way (comments and annotations) over a wide range of content types will fit with enough of a need to get up and running with an initial user base.

Many thanks for your feedback, will see what I can do!
An anecdote about Graceful Degradation.
Yep. Except the saturation has context. It isn't blatantly uninformative.
Given the JVM startup times, shouldn't it say "Please Wait.............Java Loves You". Ha ha...ooops not really actually funny at all. I'll leave it though. Sorry.

(I'm not bitter, I just had to restart tomcat over 50 times today. It has its upside: 12145ms x 50, enough time to read a couple of items on hacker news. I wonder how much this post will cost Sun? There will probably be a bug in their tracker by morning. Maybe Joel's just making an issue out of these little things so their bug tracking will be overwhelmed and they'll have to turn to FogBugz?)
What's Cool about Windows 7...
I found it particularly amusing that after seeing "Joel on Software" in the title here on news.yc, "joelonsoftware.com" after the title, and "Joel on Software" twice on the page before the article, the first words after the article itself were "You’re reading Joel on Software". I had to scan the entire page to see if he's spoofing Sun's behavior.
Isn't this effectively the same as

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431033

Perhaps this site could do with a flag to cross-reference semi-automatically. This is the second time today I've done this ...
I find the best way to learn a language is to do it when I should be getting other work done.

Sunny parks are not meant to have computers in them.
Building a car probably costs more in production than in design, so you could afford to have several design projects. But building software is nearly nothing but design... I couldn't imagine building 3 DB backend with 1/3 the programmers workforce each and still making a profitable product.

Sometimes not deciding anything is good though. If instead of basing an app strongly on a specific library/platform/etc., you program something fairly generic and get to decide later, the more power to you.
Well, I was going with the C++/C# is the "do more" option and VB is quicker / easier.

Just a note: ObjC has reflection.
Despite the name of the magazine, there's very little actual "info" in there. Who would be interested in that article?

Regardless, I am glad they cover a few things that don't advertise.
So why not add another level of meta? Why should the user even have to go to the package manager? If the user has stumbled across an app for which she/he doesn't have the right VM+runtime, why do they have to do any more than wait for the download to happen?

OS X has a mechanism such that a program only sees the versions of system libraries that it needs. There's no reason why Java couldn't have one as well.

We programmers may not like a web app telling the computer to download and install a program. The average user would rather have the system do it for them -- just so long as they don't have to worry about anything they don't understand.
It's nice to see a level-headed assessment like this. Too many programmers rely on trends or religious convictions to make decisions. All choices involve trade-offs, so make yourself aware of them!
An acoustic device that produces high-amplitude waves at the resonant frequency of the human cranial cavity: head goes pop!
Seriously? 2009 and he's talking about the broken windows theory as though the average developer hasn't heard about it, and more as though it has never been applied to software development before.
"Sure, I know time pressures mean waterfall wasn't rigidly adhered to, and also that it had deficiencies, leading to the 1980s flowering of alternatives like agile-development and object-oriented programming. But at least we had a model"

This guy really really doesn't know what he is talking about. OOP is an alternative to waterfall? Is there some sort of procedural or functional programming process inherent to magically deriving the requirements, creating the big design up front, and only testing at the end? (Are test/fix cycles eddies at the bottom of the waterfall?) This idiot is getting paid to write that drivel and here I am writing this comment for free...hmmm, maybe I'm the idiot. I going to write to information week and demand they hire me to replace him, just to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
He says the "new" process is to jam features in and fix it in beta. Apparently he hasn't ever used the waterfall method.
Glad they were at least marginally useful.

1. Perhaps the Wizard should initially ask 'what would you like to do first - add resources, or invite people to the space'?

2. I'm not sure that adding a roll-over is the correct idea here, so I don't want to send you down a blind alley. It may be the correct solution is to actually avoid surfacing the functions at all (they still have to be provided inside the workspace, I presume so you aren't reducing complexity).

Instead maybe it is worth looking at how you could amend the workspace design to make it look more 'clickable to enter'.

3. Understood. All I would suggest is you list the supported format(s) to avoid Mac users like myself attempting conversions blind.

6. Completely understood. The comment was a bit brutal but I thought it was worth making.

The very best of luck.
That range 3300-1200 is for everywhere.

In that part of the world the bronze age was over. The bible talks about worked iron, and it's known it was over for Egypt and the Levant as well.

The palestinians didn't exist then, when they did come along it was over for them as well.
If you visit a page that needs java doesn't it already prompt you to download the jre?
Startup cofounder lives with his website users
Whoops! We fixed it.
I don't buy it. And just what exactly is their "success"? Apart from being a very outspoken group of a dozen people, I don't see that stellar success where their business strategy supposedly takes them.

When we were trying to buy their software, our company had 45 employees. It's something we built from the ground up. But we didn't go around shouting so much.

I'm just saying that you should take the 37signals hype with a grain of salt. There is a lot of air and very little substance.
The argument of the article is that if everyone who felt stupid did that, no one would be left.
Very much so, I really believe in the idea of putting something out there, gathering as much user feedback as possible and then iterating quickly as a way of developing software that meets the needs of users.

Obviously so much easier to do when dealing with a SaaS style web application than a desktop one!
it is true that all choices involve trade-offs, and one library is going to likely be "best" for you based on your individual needs.

but i wouldn't call this article level-headed, it has an explicitly stated tilt towards prototype.
i just checked their homepage in chrome, and the center image flashed briefly and disappeared. anyone else getting similar results?
I can imagine lots of big companies doing this with internal software and coming out way ahead. Instead, they bet all of their money on one bug uber project, and it comes out bloated and mediocre.

In the startup space, the entire company can be one trial project. You don't need a meeting because one person can just decide what they're going to use.
> Most magazines don't operate like this.

Yes they do:

Gourmet: Cookbooks, PBS show

Saveur: Cookbooks, Travel Tour Packages

Bon Appetit: Cookbooks (at least)

Food + Wine: ?

Cooking Light: Cookbooks, pretty sure there was a TV show for a while

Fine Cooking: Cookbooks

Martha Stewart Living: Cookbooks, TV, merchandising, etc

Disclosure: I frequently do photography for Saveur, and my wife is an editor.
I think you meant microrecyccoop.org.

Donating to those who need a computer would be my first choice; donating CPU power to something like BOINC my second.
The Dark Google Myth
Thanks for sharing. In the spirit of reading comments before actual links: The title brings innovative physical invitation mechanisms to mind. This, however, is a collection of funny/interesting email invitations to a regular hacker meetup at MIT.
Not having extensively used either jQuery or Prototype, I found this comparison interesting. But the entire discussion about jQuery "stealing" `this` is somewhat misinformed. Javascript closures don't caputure the value of `this`; instead, the value of `this` is determined at the call site. If the function is called as a method (using the `object.method()` syntax), `this` is bound to `object`; otherwise, `this` is bound to the global object (called `window` in browsers). The behavior I just described makes `this` is almost useless in Javascript closures, and the "idiomatic Prototype" example the author gives cannot possibly work:

// Prototype
$A(this.columns).each(function(item) {
this.buildHeader(item);
});

If you want to do that, you have explicitly bind `this` to a (differently named) variable in the outer scope:

var self = this;
$A(self.columns).each(function(item) {
self.buildHeader(item);
});
No idea why you would install java using some UI like that in the first place.
Ah, ganzfeld. It reminds me of Altered States, a movie about sensory deprivation that went horribly wrong. I was fascinated by this movie when I was a kid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_States

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbYT3UclhNY (trailer)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTqFXfn3kdo (few scary scenes)
Actually any project manager worth their pay knows they should be doing this.

But even if they do, odds are they're going to run into problems of just trying to schedule meetings in the first place (hence regular, weekly meetings even if there's nothing to discuss), people unprepared even if an agenda is provided, and not having enough political clout to make sure that the everyone who needs to be there actually is or to shut someone up who's wasting time.

Mayer is in a position where she's not handicapped with those issues. Most executives wouldn't be either. The question would be are the rest of the meetings at Google this efficient?
Structure of Intel CPU Caches
Y Combinator Firm CO2Stats Caught in Frenzy of Environmental Cost of Google Search
Very clever spoof of Joel on Software. You've captured his unintentional irony perfectly. Now that I've seen "Joel on Software" 7 times in this thread, I can't help but think "Joel on Software" when I see "Joel," "on," or "Software."