skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To me, this mostly sounds like Apple taking US laws too literal/general.

Unfortunately not. The relevant definition of "export" is the one at Export Administration Regulations § 734.2(b)(2)(ii):

(2) Export of technology or software. ...:
(i) Any release of technology or software subject to the EAR in a foreign
country; or
(ii) Any release of technology or source code subject to the EAR to a foreign
national. Such release is deemed to be an export to the home country or
countries of the foreign national. This deemed export rule does not apply to
persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States and
does not apply to persons who are protected individuals under the Immigration
and Naturalization Act (8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)). Note that the release of any
item to any party with knowledge a violation is about to occur is prohibited
by §736.2(b)(10) of the EAR. [0]

Apple's interpretation is the one almost all export-control lawyers will give their clients and is the one the Bureau of Industry and Security will give you if you ask for clarification.

EDIT: By the way, the reason Apple won't/can't sell iPads to foreigners in the US but can sell them the same product abroad likely comes down to paperwork. I am not Apple's lawyer, but I imagine Apple exports iPads under a provision of the export-control regulations that allows export of (a great many) controlled products without needing to obtain a license so long as the use of the regulatory licensing exception is properly noted on the export documentation. But Apple's retail stores presumably are not equipped to fill out and submit those documents, so they simply won't/can't sell to foreigners.

0. http://www.bis.doc.gov/policiesandregulations/ear/734.pdf [PDF]
If you mean the ATI proprietary drivers, I can believe that nVidia's suck slightly less. However, the majority of Radeon cards have full 2D/3D support in Open Source drivers (and those drivers actually have developers from ATI working on them), whereas the reverse-engineered nouveau driver supports a smaller subset of nVidia cards with much lower 3D support (and no support from nVidia whatsoever).

So, I'd still take ATI over nVidia due to ATI's much better Open Source drivers with some development done by ATI, though I'd take Intel over ATI for having entirely Open Source drivers with much more direct development from Intel.
I'd argue this is more about survivorship bias than fundamental attribution error.

The tech world buzzes for days and weeks about Instagram being acquired by $1 billion, about securing higher and higher amounts of funding. Often, its deceptively rare that you hear about great people with great ideas that just don't make it off the runway.

So when your venture fails, you're tempted to think its a fluke that can be overcome with a large enough sample size.
I like this a lot. I'll add a few of my own points too (though I think Zach's are great):

1. Practice, practice, practice. Now, I'm a hypocrite for saying this because I do tons of speaking engagements with little or no practice (which is a combination of hubris and the fact that I'm often pegged to do stuff at the last minute). Still, if you aren't comfortable speaking off the cuff or in front of a crowd, practice makes perfect.

Something I've often done is to do screen recordings like Zach says -- but instead of doing them of the talk live, I do them before the presentation. The advantage here is that I can practice what I want to say, listen back to my cadence and then adjust and readjust if necessary. By the third or fourth time, I'm usually golden and I have a great master copy that I can try to mimic live on stage.

2. The better you get. -- This is true of almost anything, but it's especially true of speaking in public. You'll become more comfortable and natural on stage (or on camera) and have a much better sense of how to steer a talk, how to keep your energy up and how to come across as assured.

3. Record yourself in advance. For beginning public speakers, it's important that you record what you sound like so that you can adjust your speed (slow down or speed up) and cadence. It can be odd to hear yourself speak at first, but once you get used to it, you can adjust what you look and sound like. This is especially important if you are doing any media appearances.

4. Watch Yourself After -- If your speech or conference is being recorded (or if you are recording yourself) -- watch it back after. Again, it can be disconcerting but it's a great time to learn how you can improve next time. It's also a great way to see how you progress over time. If I look at my first CNN appearance in April of 2011 and my most recent appearance, it's like night and day. That helps me when I get up to present at an event, keynote a conference or do another media appearance.
Learning LESS: Put It Into Action
We’ll finish our Learning LESS series today as we talk about putting your LESS into action on your web projects. Today’s post will be slightly different than previous posts, as we won’t really showcase new techniques and code examples as much as we’ll talk about how to use LESS, projects you can work on to jump start your LESS development and more.
How to Love Your Customers
SaaS: A constant rate of customer acquisition is not enough to outpace churn.
In journalist parlance, "people close to the company have told us that there is no concrete release date at this time. The team is aiming for late Fall 2012."
It's funny you say that actually because I would fall into the category of being all about the web. I'm self taught and learned 100% in a web environment. I actually didn't have any experience with pure scripting (data-mining and processing) until my job required it a couple years back.

I think it probably just comes down to preference. I'm positive that a large portion of people that "want to learn to program" really mean "make a web application", but that's not to say that scripting isn't equally rewarding/fun. HN is filled with cool posts about how to make little command-line utilities that do xyz -- yes very nice indeed!

Lastly, FWIW, I sure am glad you say "ruby" as opposed to "rails" because I can't imagine the DOM being harder to learn than everything that rails is taking care of for you under the hood.
Ubuntu ODM UEFI requirements for secure boot
You choose to make an argument around: since you assume I am a man, I therefore do not know and I am wrong.

Learn to form a valid argument before you open your mouth. Your comment is not even deserving of a retort.
Funny to mention Ev and not blogger.

Also, when you can get Morgan Stanley to eat 2.3 billion to keep launch day stock at the number you want, you're not overestimating your own smarts. You're doing something far more profitable, you're duplicating the mythic reality distortion field.
Yeah, the Burj is itself mind bogglingly tall, this new one is only 10m taller.

I'm wondering when we're gonna see the first true Mile High tower? We're 1/3 the way there!
> Gondor 1.1 is an optional upgrade, but we will force everyone to upgrade by the end of September.

So then it's not optional.
UVA Computer Science professor resigns over incompetence of board
Shweet!
That's a great essay, but the author is talking about random-walk situations, which are independent random variables. We know this, because that's how the automatic software testing tools are (currently) written.
Yesterday's episode of "Back to Work" went over public speaking and confidence as well -- it's definitely worth a listen:

http://5by5.tv/b2w/72
Search is here:

https://www.cueup.com/login

More info in this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132603
Google wins Mobile Grand Prix
But his stance actually makes us much MORE beholden to the 3rd parties. If every minor kernel version didn't require the vendors to recompiled drivers, and quite possible change code because Linus changed the ABI again, that would result in more hardware working better for more people.

Live the open source dream if it makes you feel good. I live in a world where if it doesn't work, I couldn't care less about it.

Pragmatism > Dogma
Well, if you're Lenovo and you're already struggling to keep margins in check with Windows RT (and you have to pay an $85 licensing fee for the software) and you're unsure of the consumer demand for a Windows 8 tablet, do you still go gangbusters after an unproven product segment when you have a huge competitor that is showing off a flagship version of the Windows 8 tablet experience?

I don't have the answer to that.

As for APIs, it doesn't seem impossible to think that there might be apps that take advantage of the Pen technology in the Intel version of Surface or the Touch Cover and Type Covers and that those APIs might only apply to the Surface devices. I really don't know. That's my point.
Smartest legislation ever... (NOT) Any sane person will tell you that there's no way to police or check it. If I buy an iPad (as a Dutch citizen in the US or in the Netherlands) and happen to sell my iPad to a North Korean or Iranian, what's the US government going to do?
Anyone have a firebase beta code? Never got an invite from 'em yet. Email dan'at'thestroots.com if you have one please!
Or "eltism" to follow that example.
Work on interface, it's kinda ugly.
Is the inbound email support documented at all?

http://help.mandrill.com/customer/portal/articles/search?q=i... doesn't look very promising.
the only reasonable way to enforce the export law

That's sort of stretching the bounds of the word "reasonable" :)

The law here seems to be over-broad. Retailers should be able to sell to anyone in their stores and not be held responsible for what someone may or may not do with it once it leaves their store.

Alternatively, I guess they could do ID and background checks, handgun-shopping style.
Has Apple said this? Or are you just guessing?
This article has bunch of stuff but the author doesn't clearly justify the premise. Much a read about nothing.
Startup Principles: The 3Ps
Yeah...I'm not saying they shouldn't be about the web...as I fit in that boat too. But when I think of most of the web creations I've produced, virtually all of them have come from being able to crunch/gather data (even if it's just spitting out HTML for every row in a dataset) at an efficient speed...when you have that much info, the incentive to publish is greater :)

But yeah, ruby != rails. That is most definitely something I clear the air about right away.
That was the secret of Ronald Reagan's political success.
How does the policy not apply? Is Apple being irrational, or is Apple making their best effort to thread the needle between stupid laws?
US CBP routinely inspects people leaving the USA by car (entering Canada). Many items that are unregulated in the US itself (e.g. firearms accessories) are illegal to export under ITAR.
Exclusive New 'The Dark Knight Rises' Trailer
MIcrosoft succeeded in giving PC users another high quality tablet path.

Enterprise users can use Windows apps the rely on for work and still enjoy a tablet experience.

If they nail the keyboard/touchpad feel then this solves the need to buy a laptop and a tablet.
> a.clone().equals(a) is false too.

a.clone().equals(a) HAS to be false in that case. It's more than a bit of a given if a.hashCode() != a.clone().hashCode().

> you can't use Array as a thing to route on any more than you can use Object

Oh, sure you can. You just need to use java.util.Arrays's methods for "equals" and "hashCode" (or potentially deepHashCode).

Also, ArrayList does work.

Yes, that is totally F'd up.

> The point is that in standard java objects with value semantics have stable hashCode implementations, and this is not true in general

Value semantics are pretty rare in Java. I'm not even sure what you really mean there. Pass-by-value is doesn't happen with Java objects. I could see you referring to immutable types, but that doesn't include any of the collection classes. I'm guessing you mean "primitive type wrappers and collections".

It'd make more sense if you said something like, "pretty much anything that overrides Object.equals(Object)"... because that's the way it is supposed to work. They are rare in standard class library, because there is little business logic there. In practice, anything that resembles an identifier, and therefore all keys, tends to do the override though. Indeed, most of what people tend to call "business objects" tend to do the override. That's why the convention is there. Most importantly: almost all overrides do so in a fashion that is stable across processes. That's also why distributed frameworks can and should employ the convention/protocol.

That equals/hashCode methods in Object are following the Smalltalk trick of having protocol defined in Object even though you shouldn't really use it without subclassing. The Object method isn't a "reference implementation" of the protocol, but rather a placeholder (one they forgot to override in Array objects, and then tried to backdoor in with java.util.Arrays).
Warning: slight pedantry ahead.

Specifically what this article is noticing is the law of large numbers [1], that sums or averages are "close" to their mean. The central limit theorem says that sums converge in distribution towards being normally distributed. But convergence in distribution isn't a strong statement about tail behavior, and so shouldn't be used in the sort of argument in the post.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
It's not just the C spec you've got to watch. I saw a wonderful bug last week where the author hadn't spotted that write(2) returned a ssize_t, not a size_t (or didn't appreciate the difference), so was gleefully checking an unsigned variable for a -1 error result.
I had a friend who went to baseball umpire school. He said that the main thing they told students was, "Call it quick, call it loud, and then turn and walk away."
<strike>Selling to any customer at a store in Alpharetta, Georgia, USA is NOT "exporting to Iran", which is the actual prohibition, nor is it a reasonable interpretation of that.</strike>

edit: Guess I'm wrong, see post mentioning § 734.2(2)(ii) below.
The Health of LA’s Tech Ecosystem Relies On a Few Large Companies
That is no excuse. Been a Apple hater myself, but, their presentations are impeccable. I am sure that Jobs did not had any doubt of what he had in hand to present was actually working.

So is no excuse. Better wait a month or more but smash eveyone with what the device is doing software wise and not what periferals it has.
As Tablets Take Hold At Work, More Look to Android Than iPad
Gotta love the "build it and they will come" naiveté of a startup intern. The great thing is: that naiveté is what gets great companies built.
Of course you have access to historical data; you're on the Internet!

And you're right - it's estimated to have dropped 13-15% in the past 30 years.

http://www.awwa.org/files/Resources/Waterwiser/JAW0211rockaw...
Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out.

In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. A modestly subjective question like "What are the relative merits of frameworks X, Y, and Z?" is not anything like a rage comic. Neither is a reasonable discussion on programming mistakes.

Your "opportunity cost" argument strikes me as entirely wrongheaded. You pretend there are only two things people can do in the world: subjective questions and the objective ones. Your worry that a topic expert is spending 10 minutes on something he enjoys rather than the thing you want him to do is paternalistic and controlling. Every real community bonds not just over the practical stuff, but the fun stuff. It's as if you're saying that Golden Gate Park should be removed because those people should be out picking up trash or working to pay taxes.
Using pre-fab construction to build world's tallest building in 3 months
I'm afraid I'm no expert - I just reviewed the converters because I would have liked to use Python both on the client- and the server-side; however, I eventually abandoned the idea.

I'm not sure how a converter could "skip over stuff it doesn't understand while translating stuff it does understand": it may make sense to work on "small" translation units (e.g., a function or method), but the code that comes out of the translation of a unit should be -at least syntactically- correct in the target language. Indeed, the more mature Python-to-C translators (e.g., Cython) do restrict the Python that are allowed in the source file, and refuse to compile the entire file if your code contains unsupported syntax.

If you are willing to invest some effort into adapting a translator yourself, (besides Pyjaco! :-)) PJS and Py2Js are both very clean and easy to understand/patch. Although they are no longer developed, they might provide a good starting point to build the "simple minded" translator that you would like to have.

(Thanks for the remark on the blog layout - I just picked one of the standard styles and did not pay much attention to the details.)
It seems like it would be more accurate to say "assembled" in 90 days. These things are pretty much pre-built off-site and just need to be plugged and stacked.

It's very impressive and I look forward to seeing some greater modification (away form the standard boxy look) toward more expressiveness and personality --similar to the turning torso building --which looks like it could be modular as well.
Obviously, most of this is prefab...so I wonder how much time was spent building all the individual pieces before the official ground breaking?

With 220 floors and 104 elevators...that's more than 2 floors and 1 elevator a day. I imagine just the fitting/assembling in place process per floor is enough to fill up a third of a day on its own...so is this basically a huge vertical jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces have been made and just need to be moved onto site?
Consumer vs enterprise makes a big difference here - there are a lot of successful repeat entrepreneurs in the enterprise world.

the success of consumer startups, especially one that relies on network effects, are often random. That's why so many of the 'How did X get traction' stories on Quora boil down to "It suddenly took off with group foo, we weren't sure why". That's why a lot of these consumer startup founders doing repeat companies fail - they can't replicate the same conditions again.

Enterprise startups are a different story. Since the variables (who the customers are, how much they can pay, how they buy, what they want) are better known and existing relationships counting for a lot, repeat entrepreneurs have a better chance of having a success. Of course, enterprise startups have their own separate issues to deal with.
We're actually over 1/2 way there.

1 mile = 1609.344 metres
Burj Khalifa = 828 metres
just started using it. Its simply amazing... users seems to love this app like crazy - https://twitter.com/#!/mightytext/favorites
If they care enough, they can probably extradite you. Having laws that you can selectively enforce are great that way.
"There’s one mistake I consistently see made by speakers both novice and experienced: they’re not excited about their talk."

I'm a nervous presenter. The way I used to combat this was with a poker face. No smiles, no laughing, no gestures, monotone voice... I'd do anything not to clue them in to my nervousness.

This is a flawed approach for me. People are very forgiving of humanizing nerves and foibles. People aren't so forgiving of boring, monotone talks.

What I try to do now, with some success, is to embrace (not suppress) the nervous energy. To 'feel' the same way I do before a challenging ski slope. I'm in my 30s and I don't get adrenaline spikes very often like I did in my 20s (like say, when flirting with someone new that I really like). So I'm teaching myself to seek out places to present, so I can get and enjoy that intense energy spike.

Adrenaline is the best, cheapest, healthiest, and most legal drug available to you; don't shy away from it. And give some of that energy back to your audience.
1:

Most of a nuclear plant is concrete (the containment building) and iron (the reactor body). And both those materials are easy to get. The pipes are minor in comparison (in terms of materials, not in terms of construction). There isn't much if any tungsten used in a reactor, it's all ordinary iron, copper, concrete, etc.

In contrast a wind turbine uses hard to get neodymium rare earth magnets.

Nuclear plants don't require exotic materials.

2:

It's about the same for nuclear plants and wind turbines - you make a mold and pour the concrete. You might have thousands of miles of pipe, but you also produce a thousand times as much energy.

Not much waste in either during manufacturing - any extra metals are reused, and the concrete is poured in place. So it's about the same for turbines/nuclear plants.

> weight of resources/watt of generation was a good measure

It's an approximation of how much resources are needed (mining, energy, etc). We are worried about CO2, but mining also causes pollution, and uses energy.

3:

In a turbine it's the tower and blades both that need to be replaced due to material fatigue. The generator can be reused. The tower is wasted (it's poured concrete). The blades can be melted down, but they are light, and it's not a lot of metal - making them is the hard part.

We've never reused a nuclear plant (that I know of), so it's hard to say what would happen there.

They last a lot longer than wind turbines though, in the range of a 100 years vs 20.

Most likely the nuclear core would be removed, and the building reused for the next power plant. The building itself doesn't wear out, but they might redo the control equipment (pipes, wires, all very recyclable stuff).

4:

The weight of the fuel is tiny - less than 100 tons of fuel for a 1GW reactor, and it lasts around 10 years. That's equivalent to a couple of bolts on a wind turbine (which produces 1/1000 of the energy).

Waste is troublesome, but doesn't use a lot of materials. It's about one semi trailer load - every 10 years, for a plant that produces 1000 times as much as a turbine (which also fits on a semi).
People Over ProfitsPeople Have Defeated,Corrections Corporation of America
Has anybody here complained about wanting off-topic questions? The linked article sure isn't.
On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention.

I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough.

But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.
No mention of Quattro Pro.. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattro_Pro
I’m reminded of the classic triple constraint ‘cheap, fast, good’. They’re promising cheap and fast…
I've tried to sign up but you wouldn't take my password ("the input must contain at least one number or symbol"). Although a minimum length make sense, requiring a symbol doesn't. Would be great if you could remove it!

See this for discussions on the subject:
http://tech.dropbox.com/?p=165
http://xkcd.com/936/
The Power of Language
It may have been worth a listen for you, but I think YMMV applies very strongly to podcasts.
This reminds me of my logic professor in college. He would often tell us stories about Kurt Godel, who he'd worked with at the IAS.

My prof blew me away one day when he said that Godel had 3 good ideas -- Godel numbering, and two more that I can't remember.

He didn't say it in a way that was meant to put down Godel at all. I took it as an homage to original thought and what it really meant to have a good idea.
Microsoft. Kicks. Ass.