skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"My computer has never frozen!"
Whats a "good" startup idea anyways? One where the VC rocket doesn't crash straight into the ground? This article seems to hint that the only good idea you'll have is one that investors pour money into and it turns into a big hit like Facebook. I see way too many successful companies that didn't take that approach to believe in that.

Maybe the problem is too many people believe in that.
this is complete example of racism.
Congrats guys - met Zach a couple of days ago as a friend went working for them... these guys will do big things!
Google Developers Live, all year round
Who on earth decided that when a foreign citizen is on US soil, selling to them consitutes "exporting"? What if he's a refugee or has dual citizenships?

To me, this mostly sounds like Apple taking US laws too literal/general.
Python vs. Ruby: Four Weeks on Hacker News
You are clearly not talking about MySQL. CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE simply creates a physical table on disk that is destroyed at the end of the session, which can be created with any storage engine. Explicit temporary tables are handled just like "regular" tables and is dependent upon the storage engine (w/ MyISAM, indexes are stored in the key buffer, InnoDB keeps both recently accessed data and indexes in the InnoDB buffer pool).

KEY and INDEX are literally the exact same thing and are just there to support different syntaxes: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/alter-table.html

Perhaps you are referring to primary keys vs secondary indexes, for which there is a difference in how they are physically stored on disk and in memory, particularly with InnoDB. There is a substantial performance gain to be had by having a relevant primary key that is referenced in the where clause as the data is stored in the same page as the primary key, both on disk and in the buffer pool. Secondary indexes reference the primary key, thus require two lookups.
Or maybe elitism.
Stateful Web Applications pt.1
thanks, smelter. keep your eye on codecademy soon :)
I've found this in my interviews on Mixergy. If I ask a founder to tell me why he made it, he often exaggerates his abilities and his answers are more B&W. If I ask him to tell me the story of how he did it, the lessons are more nuanced.
I do not like Matt Drudge, but I do admire him.

With that out of the way, his site is exactly as the author describes: easy to use, iconic, etc. I can go there and know that I am up to date on everything major that has occurred in the world in the past 24 hours (ignoring his bias) with nothing more than a brief glance; no other major news source can claim this.
Quick Sign-In Forms and Why They’re EVIL
JavaScript awesomeness: Set, Map, Default arguments,…
I absolutely agree that salary ranges should be specified. It makes it easier for both the candidates and the hiring manager/recruiter upfront. The idea of a range is that the lower limit is absolutely guaranteed if hired while the differential of upper-lower is negotiable depending on candidates skills, experience and how well they impress the hiring manager. Also, most hiring managers do not have a lot of flexibility over a range since the salary ranges are decided by HR (would you believe:).
The first thing I ask any recruiter is the money part. Yes it is not the only thing when you look for a job but that covers 80% (made up number) of what we all need. Warren buffet once said "money is not everything. but make sure we make enough of it before talking such nonsense"
Did you miss the "Sabet is a U.S. citizen" in the article?
Broken Xen Security vulnerability process
No, these actions have nothing in common. The application had a reasonable, one-time fee, that anyone who could afford an iPad could pay, so they were not blocking access to it at all.
One difference (relevant to me, at least) is that Google Voice does not yet support MMS messages.
Whoops. Yes I did.
How is it a cost if the company isn't paying you a salary?
really appreciate your comments here - i'm the cofounder of codecademy.

we're working on fixing a lot of these problems. much of our content is community generated and moderated/rated by the community. we're getting better at course quality and won't stop until you'd recommend us over books. thanks again - feel free to email me if you have any further questions!
The Secret VC Handbook - according to Rick Segal
As far as I understand, there is basically zero support for power-saving modes in Nouveau. Thus, it's continually running at full speed, and so is heating up.
Not only can you get away with mistakes by moving past them with gusto, but your entire speech can be a mistake if you pull it off with confidence.

The Dr. Fox effect:

> Forty years ago, a singularly interesting lecture was held at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. The subject was "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education." The speaker was Dr. Myron L. Fox from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a pupil of von Neumann and an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior.

> The attendees were psychiatrists and psychologists (MDs and PhDs) who were gathered for a training conference. They listened to the lecturer with great interest, asked many questions and were satisfied with speaker's replies.

> They gave him flying grades in the satisfaction questionnaire. Nobody suspected anything wrong. In reality the speaker was an actor and knew nothing on the subject of his lecture.

http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/123...
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r30034/PSY4180/Pages/Naftulin.ht...
Paul Graham: What Startups Can Do If (When?) Facebook IPO Affects Valuations
I liked the article but think that it's missing the point: very soon there will be no other choice of what direction to take. We are saying "It's risky! Let's just sit back and watch." as if the status quo can go on as our energy consumption and populations both continue to grow. There will be mistakes made along the way, but mark my words, the Germans are going to be eating our lunch faster than you can say Energiewende.
appreciate the comments, bentlegen - we're working on our evaluation of answers. we try to be fairly loose, but we're always improving. hope you (and your girlfriend!) will give us another chance.
-Taxes.

-Don't try to do everything yourself at first, if you can out source it for a nominal fee, do it. Focus on your circle of competence.

-Get a written contract. Always. No matter what. Not kidding.
hi, apitaru - i'm the cofounder of codecademy. we're incredibly focused on living up to that promise and we will never stop improving course quality and worrying about outcomes for our students.
thanks, eric -- we're working every day on achieving that potential!
Are your links fresh enough to share?
If you really want to make your brain hurt, there was an article on HN a while ago about the following statement:

i = i++;

Evaluating that expression takes a real dive into the guts of the C spec.
You could make the case that the Forbes author themself fell victim to the fundamental attribution error that they claim plagues SV.

It's easy to point out how THAT OTHER industry engages in groupthink, now isn't it...
> You realize that, with just a handful of exceptions, the NVIDIA part on most Optimus laptops simply doesn't work under linux, right? And that NVIDIA hasn't so much as lifted a finger to fix this?

I have an Optimus laptop (Thinkpad W520) and that's not really true. The problem is that you can't run both the Intel and NVidia chips at the same time without it being a PITA. If I want to use my internal display while I'm on the road, I move my NVidia Xorg.conf out of the way and it's fine. I'm not saying it's optimal, but it definitely works.
Except that user name quirks are required to login to gtalk with an xmpp client :(
It is relevant to the controversy if you are being called "the worst company to work with in the Linux community" by the chief Linux guy.
You created an account for this? And didn't even spell racist right? Wow.
Just an idiot that's part of a large corporation wrongly trying to enforce a policy that doesn't apply (and is probably not his to enforce). It is clearly not Apple's true policy, as the woman in question was eventually able to purchase her iPad online.

Regardless of the calculus behind the employee's decision, I can't help but wonder if this story would be on the frontpage if it was anyone but Apple.
The software that powers the device has been out and has been played with by millions by now. So you can't compare it to playbook. Price is unknown but that will only decide how appealing the product is not necessarily the fact that it still makes the iPad feel incomplete. For some people the full OS and keyboard would be worth more money for some it won't.
They are most likely Chinese and consider Taiwan part of China, without thinking about it.
These crypto export laws (while better than they were in the 90s) are silly given that crypto approved for top secret material (AES with large keys) is pervasively available on the internet.
"The island formerly known as Formosa"
Not necessarily very good support, though: http://communities.intel.com/message/158477
Loop Vectorization in Visual C++
How about using parse.com's new javascript database layer to abstract the requisite server-side dependencies. (disclaimer, I've never used it myself). Then you'll be able to teach a user how to setup a simple one page web app, maybe a todo list, that used jquery's xhr requests to set and get data from the database.

Alternatively you can do this entirely with localStorage, problem there is that you need to provide an extra lesson about why localStorage doesn't work "online" (across the network).

I definitely think javascript is at a state where it's actually easier to understand the underlying principles of programming, i.e. why design decisions are made and how each component is integrated with the next component. Contrast this with rails where everything is magic, and I would much rather learn from a bottom-up kind of approach. When the front-end logic is all taken care of, Your next lesson will be to build "the part that parse.com is taking care of". So you throw up a sinatra app maybe, provide 2 REST endpoints etc. Thinking about applications as a composition of integrated services (database, database api, UI, application logic, etc) proves a lot more understandable and also has the benefit that it's a very mature way to look at things actually!

Just writing this get's me excited to start teaching my friends again. The problem is it's very hard and very exhausting (in a good way but I only have so many hours in the day!)

The biggest problem for me keeping the iceberg manageable. I should let them know just how many TONS of stuff they will eventually need to know, but ideally I want to do that in a procedural fashion so that it makes elegant sense.
really impressive work, Greplin team. I've moved this app to my home screen already.
that's the plan :) thanks!
I am confused: Is the act of selling something that has export controls to an alien national in American soil equivalent to an export?
The pragmatic and technical tradeoff is essentially that the proprietary drivers interact well with the GPU but don't interact well with the rest of the linux ecosystem (they are significantly more crash-prone, have many quirks which can't be fixed and need to be hacked around, and generally do their own thing instead of using established APIs), while the open source drivers interact well with the other software in the ecosystem but don't interact well with the GPU (such as the power management issues you mention, as well as lower performance). How big these problems are varies greatly from person to person and machine to machine.

The proprietary drivers likely won't ever interact well with the ecosystem due to their closed-source nature (although the situation could certainly be improved), while the open-source drivers could do better talking to the GPU if they had specifications and not just reverse-engineered info.
Couchbase on Azure: Installing Couchbase
It's only groupthink when it's in other industries. Otherwise, it's "conventional wisdom".
I believe most of those are still supported with binary-only drivers.
ILawyer: What Happens When Computers Replace Attorneys?
Wow, thanks for showing me this. This is a beautiful product.
I can't agree with the article. Quite the contrary, I believe the term engineer is grossly overused.

I'm a Software Engineer student in an Engineering University, sitting through purely engineering-related (as opposed to development-related) courses such as software requirements analysis and studying software development processes. It pains me to see articles like these where people belittle the engineering profession. It's not about pride or entitlement, it's about the fact that a software engineer (at least here in Quebec) is someone part of the Order of Engineers and who bears along with his/her title the burden of social responsibility.

Designing great UX/front-ends is a very tough job and I believe should be rewarded and designated as such but writing code and creating software does not qualify you automatically for the title of engineer. You went to school, passed the Order of Engineer exams (or equivalent) and were granted the engineer title, you get to be called as such (and get to have the word engineer in your job title). You didn't go through all of this? It doesn't make you a worse developer or person, but it certainly doesn't make you an engineer either.
Only insofar as that quote lives out of context. Linus was quite clearly responding to a question about graphics drivers.
Thanks, Mark. We had to trim sails a bit for the 1.0 release with respect to documenting how to use it from JVM-based langs other than Java, i.e., Scala, Clojure, Python, & Ruby.

That's something we'll work on for the 1.1 release, i.e., expanding the docs about how to do that.

We're also adding stored procedures in any JVM-based language, for the non-Java RDF hackers of the world. :>
There was also a call to ban the ICE between Munich and Frankfurt following the 2500 people that died when a Japanese train was hit by the Tsunami.

Just because there hasn't been a Tsunami in Bavaria YET doesn't mean we should take the chance.
Linus: NVidia, f*ck you
Top Things Entrepreneurs Never, Ever, Say
No. The manager has grossly misunderstood corporate policy.
Beta product running beta software froze!!!!
I threw together this gist which does your suggestion: https://gist.github.com/2955953

Use like thus:

var tmpl = document.getElementById('myblog').template;
While we're adding relevant Wikipedia links,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing
Probably a worm.
Assange in Ecuador embassy, asking for asylum
And, to be honest, I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that it's going to take a revolution to fix the problems with the American government...

Likewise; though is a U.S. revolution even remotely possible in this day and age?
The system is highly inter-connected when it comes to protecting power. A threat to the NSA is a threat to the CIA and to Homeland Security and the general super state we have. You can't tear one down without vastly reducing the others, as it's all premised on unchecked expansion of government into private lives at every level.

Any member of the House or Senate that attempted to pull the funding for the NSA would either find themselves at the center of a scandal (they know everything about you), or the more powerful politicians on both sides of the aisle that are invested into the super state would go on the attack and bury the person. The NSA is six times the size of the CIA. They own Congress across the board, Hoover would be envious.

This is not a friendly government, they demonstrate that all over the world regularly, it should never be a surprise that it translates domestically.
The Stored Communications Act allows arbitrary copying of most private emails and messages that are stored on a third-party server. See https://ssd.eff.org/book/export/html/41
Blogspam.

Rewrite of http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230382220457747...
I seem to recall at least one attempt several years ago at making an "open source" video card. Not sure if this is the one I remember, but it seems similar (from 2008):

http://www.tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/21/2136243/Open-Sou...
Actually the $250Bn never existed - you printed the dollars and gave the Saudis pieces of paper for the oil.

They essentially loaned you the oil - and if they ask fro the money back you can just democratize them.
Obj-C in Haskell
You make a good point, not 100% of the brick and mortar stores would be actively hostile. That wasn't what I meant to imply although perhaps there are more stores, with a high degree of value based locality, than I was originally supposing.

These are also precisely the businesses that currently have the loosest idea of their actual inventory and would incur the most changes to move to the kind of inventory tracking necessary for this to work.

They are also frequently the categories of items that consumers would comparison shop the least. Few people care about going to a few corner groceries to get the right brand of milk. They all carry mostly the same group of products and anything were consumers care about choice (coke/pepsi) they already carry all the options for the same price as everyone else.
That's great to hear. Overal I love the concept but worry about your marketing. The Bloomberg stunt was clever and fun, but placing the words 'code' and 'easy' side-by-side can lead to frustration on the back-end of your proposition. Coding is hard. Hard-Fun [1]. And that's OK.

[1] http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
I think this is a new apple policy. I called 1-800-MY-APPLE from Argentina and mentioned that I might want to buy an iPad and have it shipped somewhere in the US (but that I happened to live down in BA). The guy said he couldn't sell it to me and that I should hang up and call back and not mention where I live. This happened last week.
Intel. Works very, very closely closely with Linux devs, and AFAIK releases full specs. Given that Intel are expanding well beyond their CPU origins (Intel NICs are among the best I've worked with, graphics chipsets are pretty good, others generally work well), this is cool stuff. In the case of my most recent Thinkpad purchase (May 2011), it took updating to the latest kernel on Debian 3-4 months after purchase to iron out all the bugs (hangs/restarts), but since then it's been golden.

AMD aren't far behind, and since they picked up ATI (Radeon graphics), the Radeon support is also quite good.

S3 were making some noises about being very solidly behind Linux as of 4-5 years ago (bought me a round of drinks at a Linux conference, so their support is demonstrably liquid, if not solid). I've had pretty good experience with older Matrox chipsets, no idea where they are now.

My experience is largely desktop, server, and some light video viewing. Hard-core gamers may have other complaints, but my understanding is that you'll probably end up on Windows or a dedicated gaming platform in that case anyway.
There isn't much you can do.

I would just move on.
It's a Microsoft tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA
This is a fine civil rights lawsuit in the making.
Is it really 30% of your silicon even discounting caches? I'd love to see some analysis (and comparison against arm) of this from an expert; I've heard everything varying from "x86 instruction decoding is majority of the power drain" to "ISA doesn't matter, it's everything behind the frontend that matters" and it's hard to find actual analysis. I guess partly because this is all highly confidential.

And I know even ARM has instructions that make chip designers want to get all stabbity (ldm, stm)
If it is really to enforce export laws, why dont they check that at the airport when people are actually leaving the US ? This store should apologize and teach its employees to behave better.
It sounds like these situations are more complicated than that.

http://distributioninsider.electronicproducts.com/articles/e...

"Similarly, sharing documents containing technical data with non-U.S. persons, either overseas or in the states, without export authorization would be an ITAR violation. “There are very few people who understand that an illegal export can be as simple as discussing design and technical information over lunch, if the person you are dining with is a non-U.S. person,”
The funny thing is that the author himself talks about having "your brightest idea", as if success only depended on you - and your idea - and not on the right timing, the right team, and all the planets aligning for you.

The fundamental attribution error is so ingrained in our thinking, that it's really difficult to obviate it even when you're writing an article about it.
Got Early Startup Competition? Here's Why I Think You're Fine
(blog author)

Howdy Joel,

its really quality not quantity and my subjective opinion of the appeal of the site(s).

Why did you shut down the old JoS forum?
This is an overly simplistic argument:

1) are the raw materials the same raw materials? (Iron is easier to get than tungsten for instance). Are the materials used in either type of generation actually hard to find or in danger of becoming scarce?

2) How much extra energy is spent on processing the raw materials to the finished product? The vast majority of weight in a turbine is the tower, which is relatively simple to build compared to the thousands of miles of piping welded together in a nuke plant. Even if weight of resources/watt of generation was a good measure, you are not factoring the weight of a) fuel to create energy consumed in manufacture, and b) weight of wasted resources in the refining and manufacture processes.

3) How reusable is the material base? How much of a nuke plant can be used to create the next plant? Presumably a wind down can have it's turbine or airfoils replaced independently of the tower structure itself, reducing tco. (and total resource consumption).

4) Your analysis is not including weight of energy production fuel put in, nor the weight of all resources needed for dealing with post energy production waste (not insignificant in nuclear waste storage).
If you're looking for free books, I'm a big fan of Chris Pine's Learn to Program and Eloquent Javascript. Both have online versions and EJ's online version is far better than a paper book, due to its console.

As far as sites teaching coding, I'm a fan of http://www.codeschool.com/

Most of its content requires a $25/month membership, but last I checked just its free content is more and higher quality than what you can get at codecademy
I'll say again as you appear to have missed it the first time:

"Any professional in her situation, male or female, would have spoken up if they had a problem. Period."

There are no exceptions to this rule. This is not male/female issue. If a male had written that article I would say the exact same thing.
Why the central limit theorem is usually off:

http://daniellefong.com/2008/01/28/outliers-why-the-central-...
Microsoft Surface Just Made the MacBook Air and the iPad
Sales date is "around the release of Windows 8" for the Surface and "3 months after that" for the Surface Pro. The variable is the release of Windows 8.
Stanford Teams Up With Piazza, Apple To Bring Social To iTunes U