skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm guessing this varies by sector. I've been involved with trying to recruit people from the videogame industry to academic and academic/industry crossover conferences, and companies tend not to be happy at all with their engineers attending. Afaict none in this sector have any sort of explicit policy; it's more a matter of trying to convince your boss that this somehow benefits the company and isn't going to leak secrets all over. I've heard much more positive stories from other areas of computing, though.

(Shameless plug: if you're a game dev doing anything with a researchy or applied-researchy angle, esp. if located in Europe, consider submitting a demo or paper or panel, and coming to Crete next May: http://www.fdg2013.org)
It's no more boring than half the stupid start-ups that get mentioned here.
This is true of every smart phone in existence. Period. Even when OpenMoko tried it, they still had binaries. Luckily they were given permission to redistrib the binaries.
Where the iDroid Project Stands
John is a really great guy and has done (at least for me) more to advance the knowledge of javascript than any other person I know.

Very fitting that he's now at Khan Academy.

I've personally bought the jsninja ebook for friends and myself because I thought it was a great read and wanted to contribute to this kind of effort.
With the rest of summer and winter/spring breaks, you have maybe 8 more months of school. Just finish! You can spend 20 hours/week on ChemE classes and spend the rest of your time freelancing or studying CS. Take advantage of your school's resources and take some CS classes to round out your SW engineering knowledge (algorithms, data structures, theory, software engineering, etc).
Yeah, I can only hear it as "mail-quools".
There's also at-will employment in the USA (used by Zynga recently to screw employees out stock options), and lack of employee discrimination (AFAIK it's not illegal in US to fire someone for being gay or trans, while it is in EU).

These laws in EU are legal minimum, so they aren't going away. I, as an employee, don't have to worry about a new management team or buy out or poor annual return which results in the company cancelling all paid leave, because the companies in the EU cannot make that sacrifice.
> This device doesn't have any of those

The controller has a touch panel and battery (pretty sure they're wireless).

> reported to cost ~$64 to build

Is that just the BoM or does that factor in manufacturing, QA, having to hold inventory, etc.?
0.5% of the US federal budget goes to Israel as aid money. That might skew the figures a bit.
At some point in life, you ought to develop self-confidence that comes from..... self, and not other people appraisal of you.

If you made a mistake, you should most definitely try harder not to make that same mistake because there is a limit to how many times you can fail in a work environment.

No one wants to stand around correcting someone on the same error more than once.
If your a government employee and something goes wrong you just claim that you didn't have enough money or resources to do the job. At least that's what everyone seems to do and they get away with it.
NYC Turning Payphones Into Wi-Fi Hotspots
I see what the author is saying, but this seems more like how to protect a fragile ego rather than a fragile idea.
Best Place For Professional Advice -  ExpertBooth.com
Mapping conflict zones in remote Africa using Crowdseeding
I'm a former journalist and have rejected a traditional-publisher book advance in the past (£2k for something that'll take me 6 months to write? No thanks!).

Not wishing to sound like a fanboy, but I'm really loving the Leanpub experience, even though I'm waiting till I'm mostly finished before publishing v 0.9 of my book [1]. (It isn't the same one for which I was offered and advance; this one took a about 6 months of a few evenings a week.)

The ability to push updates, etc, does really make a big psychological difference to me as an engineer-meets-author - I'm creating something which I plan to evolve/do point releases on, based on user feedback. It's a little like Agile meets publishing, I guess.

[1] <shameless> http://leanpub.com/freelancedeveloperbook </shameless>
Random event: I just walked by one of these (Grand Central-UN area) on my way to the library today and said "Wow. I wonder why I didn't hear about this before...or see it before?" So I started looking for other payphones/WiFi-stations and didn't see one.

Great idea.
Do you know this expression?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalization
Each node will usually be hosted on a single machine (the only reason to host more than one node per machine is for testing - it isn't require for load balancing like with DHT solutions), so 30M is probably not feasible.

Most communication among nodes is peer-to-peer and uses UDP, so there are a few things that can limit you. First, is your data-structure itself and the amount of contention for items. Second, the first time a node requests an item, it has to find it (no well-known hashing scheme), so it can either multicast the cluster, or ask a central server. Multicasting with 30,000 nodes is probably not the right way to go, so you'll need a server, and that puts a practical limit. Third, Galaxy uses either ZooKeeper or JGroups for cluster management (peer detection, fault detection, leader election etc.), so either of these solutions might also have some limitations. Fourth, if your cluster is huge you might hit network bandwidth issues, though that seems unlikely.

EDIT:
Forgot to address the latency question. Galaxy is consistent (and not eventually consistent), so to get a new version of an item from a node you'll need to wait for the invalidation acks. However, the amortized cost is O(M/N log N) no matter what - the larger and taller the tree, the more nodes you'll need and the more nodes sharing the root, but updates to the root will be less frequent (because the tree is taller).

What I find the most interesting thing about Galaxy is the distributed data-structures people will come up with. Some will be better suited to Galaxy and some will not. But because Galaxy's architecture mimics CPU architecture, I think that modern data-structures designed around caches and NUMA would be excellent candidates for distribution with Galaxy.
The original work ongccgo was done by Ian Lance Taylor(of the gold linker fame) who works at Google, and now is being accepted and supported by the GCC project.

So the answer to your question is: both.
The midwest (Kansas, Missouri, so on...)? Seriously. $40K a year annual salary, and if you add in all the benefits, that might hit $66K.
It's only France and Italy that take August off. The rest of Europe doesn't have traditional "everyone take this month off" things.

Meanwhile, France (along with Germany (with 30 days holidays!)) are bailing out the rest of Europe...
The fact that she approaches media outlets with the story? The fact that her funding didn't happen until she did this? The fact that she didn't delete the comments, or ignore the comments, but rather focused all of her efforts on talking about those comments? Even to the exclusion of talking about the actual project itself that she was trying to get funded.

Why do you seem to think it is some kind of sinister plot? If you were trying to get funding, and someone threw a golden opportunity to generate a ton more publicity and exposure into your lap, wouldn't you take advantage of it?
Since CasperJS is just a set of JavaScript files that run on PhantomJS, you shouldn't have any problems running it.
Ahmed Siddiqui: How Big Companies Can Get Startup Superpowers
Despite the comparisons to C and C++, Go is not really a replacement for either of those languages. Each supports features that are not found in Go, and that are necessary for certain applications.

Go is more of a replacement for Python, Ruby, etc. The level of abstraction is very similar. The design of interfaces provides duck-typing. Obviously, Go is not exactly equivalent, but I find that Go is, in many ways, more similar to dynamic languages than it is to either C or C++.
IMO the preview appears automatically after ~2 seconds without having to press any key. Useful feature indeed.
That's why participation in Grooveshark should be opt-in for copyright holders, not opt-out. They should control how their works are monetized, and they should be compensated for it. It's a matter of respect for the work the artist puts into creating this stuff.
That's not CasperJS that's unreliable. That's PhantomJS crashing. Which version of PhantomJS where you using?
My experience has been that functional tests are excellent and discovering that "something" is wrong, but less good at finding what is actually broken.

Say my "log in" test fails: OK, I know auth is broken... but what part of it? Is there some JavaScript hijacking the form submission? Is my login view busted? Do I have an error in my authorization system itself? Is the LDAP server I'm authorizing against down? Has someone changed the schema? Etc., etc., etc.

I do find functional tests to be a pretty valuable part of my testing toolkit, but unit tests seem to get me a bigger "bang for my buck", so functional tests tend to be something I don't spend a ton of time working on.

(I wish I did write more functional tests, but clearly they're not valuable enough for me to prioritize them. Otherwise I'd already be using 'em more.)
I guess you're right. Though I never recognized this before and since I'm using Alfred, I don't touch Spotlight that often.
The New TBR Business Model
Storyteller: Create A Website With Content From (Virtually) Anywhere
.org files =)
Interactive Website Design And Accessibility
Really, you think this would have cost $33M if a Fortune 500 firm was paying? Enterprises overpay a little because managers are spending shareholders money. Governments overpay a lot because bureaucrats are spending tax payers money. There is a lot less accountability in the latter.
Now you're just being intentionally stupid.

Yes, the idea of a single if statement is over simplifying, but it's an example of how easy such a system is. If I was grooveshark and actually building such a system I would build in common song name matching (eg: If Rihanna is the artist name and the song is "Rude boy" then it's bad, if the song is "Hacker News is fun!" it's probably not!

The point is, a system for matching against names of popular artists is trivial to build, are you denying that? If someone tasked you with building a system that could take an mp3 + title + artist and tell if it was the song of a popular artist in a database could you not do that?
Working in a big corporate environment which I feel is similar to the way the government must work, you must understand that the "cost to develop the application" does not mean what you think it means. It's not the "cost of the development phase".

Coming up with the idea and getting it approved takes months. Wrapped into the project of creating the web site will be the "what should we create" phase and dozens of iterations on design and IA, which takes most of the work. There will be 20+ people involved in this process and one line of code hasn't even been written for the first 6 months of the project. The idea they had last week is different than the idea they are talking about this week, which will be different than the idea they will talk about next week. Imagine this goes on for 6 months.

Once the code is written, testing, security, infrastructure setup and all the sign-offs on that also takes months.

One person full time for a year will cost IBM $250,000 in real costs (salary, benefits, overhead) that they bill out to the Federal Government at $500,000 per person per year. Can I imagine 25 people working on this for one year, where only 3 of them are developers? And the rest of the money is hard costs and infrastructure? Yes I can. Easily.

Sad though.
Free Xbox Live API
One thing I'm scared of is that I probably won't have an opportunity to go to San Francisco for a long time if I finish my degree. Assuming I have a job offer, it will be very tough to say no and move to SF at that point versus now. Does that make sense? Also, financially, App Academy will be less than tuition + board, and I could be supporting myself by January, which is a huge goal of mine. I have taken a couple of CS classes already on OpenCourseWare, and will certainly be taking more.

If I go to App Academy, I will certainly finish my degree, just not for 2-3 years.
Super cool but WAY too expensive for what it is.

That thing should be $5
> Apple did something like 100 iterations on the first iPod.

I don't doubt you, but do you have a reference for this?
I haven't read the book, but this praise of with statements struck me as odd: "The portions of this book that cover features that are relatively un-changing, such as code evaluation, with statements, and timers are continually being used in interesting ways." There also seems to be even a whole chapter in the book dedicated to with statements. What are those interesting and great applications that justify this feature, being considered harmful[0] and even removed from the language in strict mode of ES5?

[0] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2006/04/11/with-statement-consid...
Call it out all you want.

That's not going to change people.
Web 3.0 Era
Moqa Daikh Kar Bhabhi Ko Chod Dya
That's not how the law works, though. Music is subject to compulsory licenses. I haven't heard of any sizable movement to get rid of those licenses, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license

If they don't like it, they should change the law, rather than ask the courts to make up new laws for people to follow on the spot.
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126966 I learned that HP's memristor claims are controversial within the research community:

http://vixra.org/abs/1205.0004

http://www.slideshare.net/blaisemouttet/mythical-memristor

Some of the controversy is about priority, which may not matter so much; I care less about whom I get massive on-chip non-volatile storage from than that I get it at all. But that too is under dispute (e.g. "Myth #3" in the second link above). So it's a little distressing to see signs of vaporware from HP at this point. I really want this!

Also, the OP links to a post (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_pho...) in which Williams says something odd: "We're not going to make money off these chips. We are going to make money by building cool systems utilising these chips." If his memristor claims are true, the chips themselves could hardly be more of a game changer – worth billions to put it mildly.
Another case that HN'ers may be familiar with is that of Simon Singh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh Its a joy to read his books and he hangs out on HN at times too.

Why UK libel laws must change:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-04/16/qa-with-simon...

Simon Singh Puts Up a Fight in the War on Science:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/mf_qa_singh/
PGP for Gmail
Check out this Free & Open Source Chrome extension, to send encrypted messages in Gmail.
I agree, there seems to be a bit of handwaving over whether this is something that is designed for existing android games or whether you are supposed to be developing new ones for this.

I'm not a games programmer , but I would certainly be interested in building a small simple game for this and having at least a demo ready for the console launch.

It's interesting that you mention LibGDX as something that could work well here. Let's say I want to build a game that is designed around joypad control would my best bet be to build a game with LibGDX using the lwjgl backend (for PC) and plug in an xbox pad to test the gameplay? What about testing performance?

Slightly OT: LibGDX seems to have relatively scant documentation in terms of examples of significant working code so it is difficult for me to think about how to best structure the code for the engine. Are there any books that cover this specific to LibGDX? I can't find any.
I'm sure the end goal for FullContact is ROI. Or at least, it should be if they want to stay in business. They are making the bet that true, off-grid vacation each year will help their employees be more productive, efficient, loyal, etc, which certainly is a return on the $7,500 (+ time) investment.
Thanks, Jacob. :-) Follow-up question: Do you do monitoring in production? Does it have the same issues in that it tells you that /something/ is broken, but doesn't tell you what's broken?
As long as your CPU is 64-bit it seems one can use "hackintosh" techniques to run ML anyway.
You're accusing, not opining.
Polyglot Programmer Search engine using Hyperpolyglot
A combo-app that translated that text into a visual todo list (or other mechanism) makes more sense for 90% of users. Sort of like integrations into a more robust email client. You know like Outlook, but modern.
They would be forced to pay a gift tax if all of the pledges were donations instead of exchanges.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=164872,00....
The video is wonderful.

Then I think about the horrible software disaster train wreck that is iTunes.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
Took a look at WildTangent's wiki page: "The company recently announced its upcoming Android games service launching at the end of 2011"
I already tried to get in contact with them, no reply. My optimistic assumption is they are overwhelmed with the response and need time. My pessimistic assumption is that they don't care for apparently small fish like libgdx. Thing is that we power more Android games than Unity or AndEngine according to AppBrain [1], that has to count for something. They need developers, we can get them those if they let us in early. On the other hand it's probably more important to get the marketing sping going with Unity or Notch. We'll see.

edit: [1] http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/libgdx/libgd...
Why Ivy League grads aren't all pretentious dbags
Isn't the whole point of the company being a separate legal entity that its credit cannot affect yours and vice versa?
Yeah, and for $33M they couldn't build in some iterations and bring in focus groups or hire someone competent to get it at least partially right the first time?

These projects are handed out to reward the connected contractors, contributors and lobbyists that know how to work their target politicians and bureaucrats. There are ZERO incentives to do quality work. No one will lose his job over this software travesty. No one will get demoted. Rather than bemoan the waste of $32.9M on the job, politicians will simply push for higher taxes.
I don't know much about Kansas, but that is definitely not the going rate for enterprise programmers in St. Louis. But in any case, what proportion of software jobs are in the (non-Chicago) Midwest, anyway? The government is basically stuck with whoever submits a bid, which is most likely to be companies in the "IBM and competitors" category, and their cost structures are well into the $200k range (I wouldn't be surprised at $250k-$300k).
Hope this helps http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/documentation.html there are quite a few demo games we have in the repo, tests as well as third party oss games you can look at.
They should starting to bring out developer packages asap, because memory is not the only thing you can do with it as you can see from the presentations and papers. I find the stuff it can do BESIDES memory actually more interesting and really would like to get experimenting with it.
The Linux shell will always be with us
Not sure is this is what gp meant, but the cycle of screenshots through the iphone screen slide in and out over the whole screenshot of the phone, not just the screen portion.

You should be able to pretty easily play with the positioning and width of the carousel to fix it so they just slide across the screen.
More money to allocate to the defense budget!
> defense contractors have to meet quotas for hiring veterans

Wow, that's gotta be one of the most boneheaded govt policies I've heard of. Is this because of some kind of patriotic "duty" to keep veterans off the streets? In my experience, a lot of veterans would have ended up on the streets even if they hadn't joined the military - in fact, many joined the military specifically so they wouldn't end up on the streets.
They've moved up to 80k consoles available at $99, so either they have serious funding to cover the loss or they are selling them at cost or with a bit of a profit.

They are taking 30% from all games sold, so it is in their best interest to get as many consoles out there as possible. I would bet that the retail price is at or very near $99
If a Van near the hotspot spoofs the network name running the equivalent of BlueCoat, even SSL traffic can be silently monitored or tampered with.

The problem is 99% of folks don't know how to setup a stunnel and the remaining 1% understand the performance implications of being paranoid all the time.
Copy text/code from OSX QuickLook (Spacebar) directly
> The controller has a touch panel and battery (pretty sure they're wireless).

True, however the issue is different from mobile devices. The battery in a controller is likely a standard off the shelf package, e.g. a pair of AA sized rechargeable cells. Mobile devices generally have a battery custom designed for the needed form factor. That custom design and production is very costly.

> Is that just the BoM or does that factor in manufacturing, QA, having to hold inventory, etc.?

It was a teardown by iSuppli, I can't find the original report now and I believe it was actually the Apple TV 2 not the Apple TV 1 as I originally stated, I forgot there was a huge Apple TV way back and was thinking of the ATV 2 as the original.

The price from iSuppli would be BoM + manufacturing. Manufacturing for a device like this is minimal per unit, just a few dollars and generally includes the factory level QA. For any run of decent size the electronics QA is done by a machine via flying probe or bed of nails setup, its very cheap on a per unit basis. The only manual QA needed would be checking out the packing for defects.
Unless I'm missing something (IANAL or CPA), the donors would have to pay the gift tax, not the donee, meaning that the tax would be assessed individually on each donation amount, not on the total; and each donor has an annual exclusion of $13,000, so unless an individual donor gave more than that amount, it's a total moot point.
Two things you can do about this:

1. Adopt a Fragment-based implementation design that uses layouts to automatically choose the right set of Fragments for each screen size.

2. Use the Android Support Package to back-port to earlier versions (all are supported down to Android 1.6)

3. Target API 15, but make your minimum API level requirement as low as 4 or 5. Test for API availability at runtime.