skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of eating at McDonald's is not to get the world's best burger. It's to get a McD burger which always tastes the same no matter where you are. They don't really even taste like regular burgers, they taste like McDonald's burgers. People aren't dumb, they know approximately what the burger at Bongo (or wherever) will taste like. But you have to figure out what they put on the burger, what to drink, etc. At McD you get the same thing every time, no fuss. It's much less cognitive load to eat at McDonalds, plus it's almost certainly cheaper. Everybody has their reasons.
This is an excellent post.

I'm somewhat in the same circles as you (friends with Wesley, working with guys from Penn right now) and have been trying to make a decision on staying in my mediocre school and getting a degree in what I'm interested in learning (economoics/math) and dropping out of school and working full-time at all of the companies I've gotten offers at in the last few years.

I quit a six-figure job last year to go back to school and now that I'm doing summer work again I'm really regretting that decision, so I've been trying to make my mind about this for a while. It's amazing to see how clear headed you are about the similar situation you are in and what you have decided on. I'm definitely going to consider it when I make my decision.

Thanks Dan.
I share some of your sentiments for the softer social sciences. I've also grown increasingly skeptical of significant portions of economics as well. Another author I've recently learned of, still need to start chewing into his work, is Jonathan Nitzan, whose Capital as Power is predicated on the notion that splitting Economics and Political Science apart was a mistake. I'd been leaning that way myself.

Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture notes that much recent copyright wrangling is really a return to feudalism. I've been suspecting that it's rather more than just copyright.
When you present conclusions in an academic paper, the onus is on the author to bend over backwards to prevent the reader from interpreting a stronger conclusion than intended. I think davesims' interpretation is fair given the language, and I were I reviewing the paper, I would have asked the author to temper his conclusions in a similar manner.
One MacBook to rule them all
Thunderbolt and mini display ports aren't the same thing. Although they use the same connection type, thunderbolt has additional features which allow it to transfer far, far more data. It also lets you chain devices together, which is going to be needed for all of those devices. You can't just slap the DVI adaptor and hope it'll work- especially if you need to chain the devices together to support all of them.
How much "noise" in terms of false leads must the world create to make scams like these unprofitable? Would it be sufficient to mine a spam filter and auto-respond en masse with various canned responses? How about a site which facilitates scam baiting, sans the hand-carved 80's era computers and other extremes of 419eater? It could be positioned as entertainment and a public service rolled-up in one. Want a break at work? Check-in on your currently active scams and send out some email. The site would link-up to gmail/hotmail/whatever accounts you create (to avoid TOS issues) and use Twilio to facilitate anonymous phone calls. It would be like a virtual customer service/call center application. There would be suspense, intrigue, and surprise. How will the authors of this piece of spam attempt to con me?
Thunderbolt supports DMA pretty much unrestricted iirc so it's a stupid standard.

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

http://www.breaknenter.org/2012/02/adventures-with-daisy-in-...
It's almost like I addressed that.

1. This isn't about Microsoft having control. This is the only way to ship devices with Secure Boot enabled. What do you suggest exactly? That OEMs ship with Secure Boot enabled but without MS keys? Great. Everyone goes out, buys a new Windows laptop... and Windows doesn't boot.

2. You conveniently ignored everything about being able to disable it and enroll your own keys.

Your false ad hominem attack is insulting and wildly inaccurate. You'll note that I don't defend the use of Secure Boot on ARM where user-key-enrollment is forbidden. Not only is it insulting because it's blatantly ignoring half of my last post, it's also insulting because I've spent years campaigning against things like the Patriot Act with that quote and I'm well aware of the sentiment and enjoying freedom on my personal devices (as I tout my Galaxy Nexus with CM9 and unlocked bootloader).
Ever been to Japan? The burgers and fries at McDonalds there are not lukewarm or squished like you get here in America, rather they're hot, toasted, and all puffed up.

They're also more expensive.
That's because it takes years or even decades to really get this right, like a lot of other sophisticated technology. Look how long it took to get the JVM to where it us today. This is fundamental research and hard stuff.
Beautiful parallax effect (scroll down)
>They have taken a far too totalitarian approach to their offerings and it is not getting any better.

You might have missed the part about Microsoft being equally as eager to lock down everything
they can get away with. This isn't going to make things better, it's going to be worse.
Why Big Monitoring Software Sucks
How is it is massive overkill? The total amount of structure is the same in both of the solutions. Only in the one you mention it has less gates. Same amount of input resources. Gates a free. 5 years from now kids will be making LEDs blink using vixie cron and a python script talking the GPIO lines of a 32 microprocessor and this is O.K.
My original iPad is now legacy barely more than 2 years after it's release. It's last available update is from June 6, 2011. So essentially about 1 year and 2 months of support.
I think this is called "Straw Man": http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html
Many people don't realize there's a graphical interface built into git: gitk
> The opposite is true of ARM, however.

There isn't even a non-proprietary standardized ARM platform. You have things like OMAP, but that's defined by TI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAP
Show HN: My company's new turn based strategy game for Android
Hey, it's been a long time in the making, but we're finally ready with our public BETA version of our Android application. We're anxiously (and nervously) awaiting your feedback, so please lay it on us. Our biggest fear is hearing nothing.

The game is called Super Tic Tac Toe. It's a new take on the old, boring tic tac toe that more often than not ended in a cat's game. The game board is a large tic tac toe board with each square comprised of a smaller tic tac toe board. You and an opponent place your marks on the smaller boards, each move dictating where your opponent may move next (and vice versa), to achieve victory on the larger board.

You can Connect With Facebook, but if you'd rather not, you can create a normal account in our system. You can add and play any of the developers / founders (usernames: nuri, Gootz, QippArgent) or invite your friends and play against them!
Please, check out the application and leave us your feedback! You can leave a comment here and myself or QippArgent will try to respond as soon as possible, and feel free to send either one of us a private message as well.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cannygroup.superttt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UGTWHg_wUM
I think that a study over a broad set of applications of considerable complexity could provide enough statistical evidence that most people would be comfortable coming to a conclusion. That study, though, would take a very large effort. Large enough that it may never be done.
and someone with a 3 year old iPhone 3GS will still be able to run brand new apps made for iOS 6.0.

At half the speed or less compared to when the phone was bought, be driven insane and then be forced to buy a new phone.

Or at least that is how I experienced iOS updates while I was still in the iPhone camp.
Battle of the smart watches: Watch out Pebble, the Cookoo’s in town
I've been running two external displays for some time on my MBP. One mini display port, one USB. The USB has a mostly negligible lag.
Ah, apologies, I was being a bit unclear.

The only way to daisy chain any series of displays anywhere in the Apple universe is by plugging Thunderbolt Display into a Thunderbolt Display into a Thunderbolt port. Daisy chaining is not being demonstrated in this post's picture.

(There is a limited and unsupported scenario where this not quite true, but it's not worth getting into.)

Given adapters, you can plug basically any display ever made into a Mac and expect it to work. But it's got to be going straight into the Mac.

(USB "DisplayLink" soft-displays break every one of these rules via special drivers)
Well done, I should have emphasised the principal.

Looks like the maximum power that a US kettle can produce is 110 * 20 = 2200 watts, so will take about 3000 * 2200 = 1.36 or 36% longer than an EU kettle to boil.

Microwaves make more sense in that scenario
Good read! My experience with Linux is very limited, but I wouldn't mind tinkering around with it if I could set up a safety machine (i.e. not the one I use for work) to make sure I could manage.
probably not apple reasons since thunderbolt is really just intel's lightpeak spec. you probably can't chain a non-thunderbolt display at the end of the chain because the data packets are probably encoded with some device id, and if it doesn't match the current hardware, it would just forward it along the chain, so when these packets arrive at the non-lightpeak compliant display, it wouldn't be able to interpret it.

tl;dr: normal displays don't read packet data
"In the current environment (at least where I am) of well-funded startups with no shortage of benefits and work/life balance, a lot of people will think you're crazy for not taking advantage of it."

The reply to those people is: there's no such thing as a free lunch. All that funding isn't coming out of the goodness of people's hearts, there are strings attached. We all need to make our tradeoffs.
Hmm... an unfortunate name choice given that Google currently auto-populates to tell you all about this Mauritius-based asset management firm: http://www.mithrilassetmanagement.com/

And, does anybody know if they have a site up?

Edit: Added question.
The assumption that PMs, or anyone else, get higher salaries is just wrong. Depending on the company, pay scales are all over the place. At the company I am at now, 'Engineers' (valley speak for programmer) have the highest pay scale, meaning an Engineer is paid more than any other role at the same career level.

Some businesses see programmers as replaceable cogs. Some don't. If you are a really good developer, and you want to be paid well, one sure fire way to do it is to physically move to an area where great developers are in short supply. Silicon Valley is the nexus of demand in the US, for programming talent.

If you do our engineering challenge at http://www.codeeval.com/public_sc/48/ , we'll immediately get back to you. We are always looking for talented people, and working here is awesome.
Read Allan Carr's book, you do not actually disagree and he's done the work you ask for. The writer has taken several short cuts on the steps to epiphany in the book, which is why you may be confused.

His use of 'slavery' is merely an illustrative device, truth be told he's not a very good writer, just a man with a working solution to nicotine addiction and his writing may be poor but is good enough to communicate it.

He also repeatedly asks you do not refer to it as 'quit' or 'give up'.
I don't understand the allure of the laptop for developers.

For me, performance easily beats portability. I also have a laptop, but I'd never use it as a primary desktop.
Secure Boot is only going to hinder legitimate users in the long term.

iphone boot exploits, wii boot exploits, PS3 boot exploits have all been published freely mostly because they are very hard to capitalize on (these machines all have secure boot implementations, albeit not the UEFI one)

If UEFI secure boot exploits really protect against malware, they will be traded like 0-day exploits and will be worth a lot (I suspect it will be harder to update the firmware against these 0-days than running WindowsUpdate).

It's a landgrab; slow and cunning on the x86/AMD64, quick and merciless on the ARM. But it has a lot more to do with grabbing land than with end user security.

edit: drivebyacct2 claims that none of these 3 had security comparable with UEFI SecureBoot. I don't know enough to argue about that - my assumption is that it will be implementation flaws that will be exploited, rather than theoretical flaws. But I might be wrong.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that.

I just wanted to point out that trying to fix this bug 'up front' might be a timesink. I think for conferences, you should try to optimize the 'details' once you're at a point that your product could 'ship' :)
FWIW, Comprehend is a YC company – YC W11.
I am from the Rails-land, but I think what action.io is solving is something that all developers face in general - setting up a local development environment is a pain. Think about it, you cannot easily have multiple Ruby versions in your own local box. Or even having multiple versions of databases in my own local machine is a pain. A lot of people ended up running virtual machines just to have different server configurations. I think action.io does it nicely to solve this problem.

I think action.io is going to help a lot in the case of trying out the latest versions of a framework before migration. Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out.

I see huge benefits in the open-source community tool. There are so many different open-source projects out there, but the last thing I want to do is to spend 30min (or more) messing with my local development environment just to try out and play around with a open source project.

Cool stuff man.
GCHQ: Code breaker challenge
Which worsens its image further--"I've got an amazing new method better than the scientists could come up with, but it's secret!" smells of incompetence at best.
I guess full control over the VM stack is a big plus compared to Heroku
I highly recommend Dan's blog.. http://danariely.com/
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To simplify: there is a difference between "static typing is better than dynamic typing" and "all static typing is always better than all dynamic typing". It's basically the difference between ∃ and ∀.

Saying that "static typing is better than dynamic typing" is like the former: there exists some static typing system that is better than dynamic typing. Saying that "all static type systems are better than any dynamic system" is like the second. All the paper ever says is the first: "Based on these results, the conclusion can be reached that while unit testing can detect some type errors, in practice it is an inadequate replacement for static type checking." Note how it never claims to apply for all possible static type systems; rather, it just says that tests are an inadequate replacement for type systems in general (i.e. there exists some type system that catches more errors than tests). This is exactly like my first example.

In summary: a being better than b does not mean that all a is always better than all b. Just because static typing is better than dynamic typing does not imply that Java is always better than Python; it merely implies that some statically typed language is better than Python.
Was anything like DRM (sanctioned in law or not) happening in 1985 when Stallman wrote "The right to read"?

I'm very interested in the details.
While I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that analysis, Valve time has more to do with announcing release dates and then going way over them than it does not shipping on internal deadlines.
I've never seen a good way of handling footnotes in HTML. Most systems pile up all the footnotes at the end of the document. However, if the footnote references an image, you're now scrolling back and forth trying to understand what's happening. With LaTeX, the footnote is placed in context.
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Twitter's New Logo - An Analysis
33 years ago today, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House.
"A BAs/PMs can reach the conclusion that a private label implementation (or 3 of them, with some outsourced integration work outsourced to competent integrators) is a much better solution, whereas a programmer (with any ingrained survival instinct) is unlikely to say "you need to fire me and all my team, and outsource this", or even think that, regardless of how true it is."

Ah, but that's management at a consultant-level - you can hire an external consultant to do that for you. A company (or at least I wouldn't) won't hire PM/BAs as permanent employees to do that kind of stuff - particularly when you need independent advice - BA/PMs also have survival instincts, you know - they will always insist on "project management" regardless of how trivial the task is - if their job is at risk.

(I think the quant vs developer example is an exception - the marginal returns for a bank investing in desk quants is more than that for investing in devs - although what's the critical ratio is something hard to determine)
Why are you URL-shortening all the links? This just introduces an unnecessary point of failure and bitrot into your results. It's especially silly when you have the full-length link in the display text, too...
So, Adam Osbourne does a facepalm [1] from his grave?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
When they show the image that is half prepared burger and half store bought burger (3:20), you can see that they're almost exactly the same height. We perceive the store bought one to be smaller because it has cheese covering up most of the patty and melted on (whereas the prepared one has the cheese resting on top), it's darker/less vibrant, and the bun is hugging the patty tightly, which makes the patty seem smaller when compared to the space provided by all of the toppings in the specially prepared burger.
Open Source Self Driving Home Project
NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs
I've worked for some of the largest corporations in the world, 3 of them in the fortune 100 one of which is a fortune 20 company.

I've seen it done well and done poorly at that scale. What the person I replied to was describing is a dysfunctional organization, not a functional large organization. Creating a large functional organization is just like creating good abstractions in software. You have to figure out how to structure things so that teams/business units can work together with minimal communication across teams.
Why do so many job postings on HN not mention the company name?
It seems like half of all the job postings on Hacker News fail to mention the company name.

Take this latest example, for instance:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138709

Why would I apply to a job when I don't even know the company name and can't research it?
Well, there's at least one way in which academic papers are a great discussion forum: People think a lot before posting and do thorough research on their arguments - and those of their opponents.
Xbox is a failure by almost every financial metric. Microsoft is not anywhere near recouping the initial costs. The entertainment/devices division is rarely profitable and last quarter lost over $200 million.
"Programmers tend to think that programming is the most important part of making software. However, managers think that managing is the most important part of making software, and business analysts think that defining business requirements is the most important part of making software. Asking a room of programmers about the value of business analysts is going to result in feedback that is heavily biased. As you say, we've invented a narrative of moral superiority, and it's a seductive one."

I think I thought that way about 15 years ago or so, but by 10 years ago I realized that ... almost without exception, I can get the tech stuff done. Of course, I'd like to do it myself, but I can get others smarter than me at XYZ to do the tech stuff. While the tech stuff is sometimes hard, it's almost universally doable.

Have you ever had a project fail because you didn't know how to write to a file, take data input or query a database? I bet not. But... we've all had projects that failed because none of the people involved could accurately communicate what needed to be done (and in some cases, establish reasonable timelines for those needs). Communication is key, and PM/BA types are generally better at it than typical developer types. There are always exceptions, but the PM/BA types are perceived to be better at it, often because they're controlling the communication, almost by definition of their role.

So, while everyone thinks their part is the most important, they're pretty much all equally important, but the PM/BAs tend to be more visible on projects, rightly or wrongly.
Don’t ask me if I know any engineers you can hire
That is an excellent point. I know it will be next to impossible, but the best tactic at this point is to ignore him and not rise to the "threat".

He's decided to blindly start swinging. While it is certainly possible that he will not hit anything regardless of the community reaction, the minimal probability of success will be such a pain-in-the-ass that it is not worth it.
The known and unknown pioneers of modern computing
Here's one that I know of that is pretty big:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
Sure, be the topic of the discussion were developers who do.
That probably supports tptacek's contention (apologies if not your contention) that actual, specific rules do not really exist?
Rendering 16,000 Schematics in the Cloud with RabbitMQ and PhantomJS
Yup, get yourself out there, sharpish. Form/join another peer group. Is there a scifi writer's group in your location? Join it. If not, start one.

If you work in tech, start some workshops on something mainstream in your local coffee shop/community centre ('blogging for charity workers' or 'podcasting for beginners' or something)
Quality isn’t a tool–You can’t install it
Read the whole article. That's what this person comes to at the end.
My solution has been to make my "side projects" my entire work. People often ask me.. "so, uh, you actually do this as your job?" because most of my projects look like frivolous side projects that I love and enjoy almost like hobbies, even the ones that bring in the money. (The annoying hidden part to this tale is it took having a significant "runway" in the bank to be brave enough to try this idea out..)

I've turned down some interesting jobs lately because I thought they wouldn't pay well or they wouldn't offer enough autonomy.. but this post has made me realize it's just because I don't want "a job," there'd be no time left over for "side projects"! :-)