skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source.

It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge.

Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).
Yes. I have seen this a lot with friends and co-workers. They always google the site instead of typing in the URL or even creating a bookmark. Even for sites they go to 20 times a day.

Interesting consequence, one person, who had just created a new web page using a GUI website building tool a moment before, tried to get to the site by googling it and was surprised that it did not show up in the search results. I explained that the site was just created and Google hadn't indexed it yet. The person just gave me a blank stare.
I think it's OK. Someone can still talk shit at a pub and say something worth auditing on Wikipedia.
How Not to Install Software
There are a huge number of educational and recreational apps for the iPad for kids, apart from just games. My plan for years was to get a netbook each for my kids and put something like Edubuntu on it, but now I just don't see the point. I have a netbook, but the battery only lasts a few hours, it's woefully underpowered compared to an iPad, takes several minutes to boot/wake as against instant start, is fiddly to use, with a poor screen. It's just a non-starter. If you're not used to the iPad ok, but if you are they're worlds apart.

I'm hoping for a relatively cheap mini-iPad to come out this autumn and I'll get one for each of my two girls, aged 7 and 8. That, or get their rich uncle and grandparents to sort them out. Then I can get my iPad back out of their little fingers. It'll be just me and the wife fighting over it, though actually there are quite a few puzzle games we play together.
This is incredibly useful - thanks so much.
The Rise of Third Party Services and Fall of Google in iOS
Nah, that's just displaying competence. The vast majority of cross generational pop psychology is just evergreen bs to sell adds.

There are entitled brats in every generation. Put another way, there are plenty of ivy leaguers throughout history who's dads called a friend to get their kid a raise. just keep doing good work, you'll be fine.
IKnode has a new Code Editor Theme
I brought up the problem with a hard-coded encryption key where I used to work (the same key was shipped to every client site for data encryption). The problem was basically swept under the rug -- kind of the same scenario you ran into, claiming 'only people who knew the problem would be a risk'.

Eventually they hired Microsoft to bring in their project analysis team and the hard-coded key became problem #1! Fortunately for me, I'd learned long before that 'I told you so' never goes over well in the workplace -- I kept my sense of smug satisfaction to myself.
I know taking issue with Einstien is not a good idea - but I'll do it anyway. Learning - and putting as much relevent material in your working memory is beneficial to seeing the bigger picture and quick informed decisions. A collection of one line facts (what you get when you look something up) does not make wisdom. Sure, most of us have extremely small working memories, but it does not negate the benefit for learning and retaining material on a subject.

as an example, I find when I have to look up the syntax for each.. and... every.. function... my programming proceeds at a snails pace. Just an example.
How impotent it always was.
http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2012/03/chesterton-fe...

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.
No, the majority wanted to stop it from continuing to be inverted, as it has been for decades. If you do a significant percentage of your computing on a touchscreen, having the touchpad work the same way is really, really nice. After a few days of Lion, I switched all my other machines to do scrolling the same way. Now that I'm moving to Linux instead of Mountain Lion, I was happy to note that I can swap the up and down scroll with a simple command, and almost everything respects it (oddly, some things don't).
While Apple would certainly like you to believe that the image of iOS sprang, fully-formed, from the mind of Steve Jobs like some sort of medieval cathedral, the reality is anything but. In fact, much of Apple's success is due to the extent to which it functions like a confederation of very well funded startups. Cupertino is very much a bazaar, wherein a shopper with very refined tastes (Jobs, for example) can pick and choose the finest wares.

This article concludes that quality only happens if someone takes responsibility for it. Yes. You'll find no argument on that point from me. But cathedral's are not (edit: should say "not only") about one person taking responsibility for quality. They are about a priori design.

Quality control can happen ex post facto but creativity, once strangled, dies.
My brother's two year old "hogs" their iPad. The amount of read along books in the iBooks store is amazing.

I think an iPad is better than a cheap laptop because kids like to touch things and the direct interaction is amazing. Some of the books I read as a child like "The Monster at the End of This Book" are amazing interactive on the iPad.
Education needs to change not ONLY by just making it available online
The problem is that you can't fully control the meaning that someone takes from your statement. As a spacecraft enginner that knows many of the possible justifications for these "why don't they just"s, it's the negative connotation that springs to mind first, even without the "just". I think it is because that phrase is often used in the imperative sense, and not in a knowledge-seeking sense. Google autocomplete for "why don't you" suggests "stay", "get a job", "love me", and "do right" and if someone were to ask me any of those questions, I would not assume they were sincerely wondering anything.

Now, if you're wondering how better to phrase your questions of this sort, I'm afraid I don't have any specifics, because I'm not sure if I'm just as guilty of this, or if I've successfully rephrased my questions of this sort. What I do is try to imagine that I've spent years designing, building, and debugging the thing in question, and gone through multiple reviews by outside organizations where every design decision was scrutinized, and had many meetings with coworkers (formal and informal) to discuss the thing in question. And then I ask my question in the affirmative, rather than in the negative, such as:

"Why did you do X, would Y also work?"

"I would have done Y. What is it about X or Y that I am missing?"
The only problem with display ad is that you can't effectively measure ROI for small campaigns. The value that Facebook is supposed to bring to the table is a scalable platform for small, well targeted campaigns. As a result, big ad spenders are still spending their big money on tv, newspapers and billboards.

Here's an advice for FB. Make your targeting more relevant for photos. Why not do some object/brand/keyword extraction from photos and sell that inventory. Hire some computer vision scientists and let them loose on your photo collections. But of course, when the whole company is focussing on shipping code twice a day, there's no place for someone who can sit back and think.
Wow! this is amazingly useful, thanks so much.
Needless to say I'll be replacing my crappy date forms with this asap.
While I would love to see things like a ROWE, better maternity leave, a more thoughtful environment, the reality is, lots of jobs are crappy, and really the work environment is about having a semi-skilled warm body at the desk/counter/whatever. I don't like those jobs, but there are a lot of them, and those employers will be happy to find anyone who doesn't give trouble, shows up on time, and keeps their nose clean.

I think it will become apparent over time that some people are willing to work hard and will reap the rewards thereof, and others are willing to complain hard and will reap the rewards thereof too.

But it's good to work towards having a good work environment when possible.
I think he's referring to the OS X users that started out with the iPhone, iPod or the iPad as their first Apple device and then bought a Mac. (Not that I agree with the argument).
underscore-cli: Command-line toolkit for hacking JSON (Pipe JSON)
Try reading again ?

Microsoft didn't architect their software as software, they shaped it as tools of monopoly enforcement.

There are numerous accounts from people involved about how marketing decisions relating to cutting of 3rd parties or trying to bludgon somebody into submission caused them to cripple their own software and its architecture.

See the evidence in the M$/Novell case for ironclad evidence of this.
I wonder if the phenomenon of growth-mindset vs. fixed mindset is related to an ability to delay gratification, (another trait with a high correlation to succes in children [1]). That is, the "growth-minded" individuals are willing to slog through frustration and failure, because they know the payoff will be greater in the long run, while the "fixies" can't look past the immediate sense of frustration

[1]http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...
IKnode now supports Custom Objects in Apps
McDonalds owning Chipotle isn't an urban legend, it was true but is no longer. In 1999, Chipotle was a subsidiary of McDonalds (http://www.chipotlefan.com/index.php?id=chipotlemcdonalds), but McDonalds was fully divested around 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipotle_Mexican_Grill).
Link to a link? :)

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:30cf16d23446f98217c67b3b8840fbdb21ba1c9e
Apple Becomes Most Valuable Publicly-Traded Stock Ever
To be honest, FreeBSD lacks quite a few things to be a desktop OS for anyone else than hardcore geeks, mainly because it's not at all the main focus of the developers and maintainers. If you want something that just works, you're better off with something else.

Notably, the package managing system shows its limits for desktop, because you have much more packages and more complex dependencies when using Gnome and Kde that in just a basic server. Compiling everything is what works best of FreeBSD (binary stuff tends to have random quirks), and there are a few unavoidable monsters in graphic-land that are very painful to compile. Webkit comes to mind, I'm sure I'm missing one or two others.

Plus, the actual developments of desktop things are influenced quite a lot by linux, so you end up having to port quite a lot of internal linux things to make the most high level programs work. Browsers will rely on alsa with no alternative, network managers will rely on linux-specific tools, etc (old examples I have encountered, I don't know the exact current state of things, but there is no reason it would improve).

In the end, desktop isn't really where FreeBSD shines, because all the programs you'll end up using will be developed by and for linux users.
The site itself is a little misleading. It says "The Baserock Slab is a multi-processor server". To me, calling something a multi-processor server implies that a single OS instance has access to all the hardware. Instead, this is eight independent systems in a single chassis. Which is still awesome for that suggested use cases, such as an ARM build system.
HP has also been working on Project Moonshot which (I believe) is based on Calxeda.

http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/iss/110111.aspx
I Don't See Any Evidence That We'll Live Hundreds Of Years
This is not his personal affairs; this is a public speech he's giving about Wikileaks, and an alleged international conspiracy to destroy the organization. Maybe it's trumped up, I'm agnostic on that point. But it's highly contentious whether or not this is about Assange's personal affairs, or if his personal affairs are being used as a weapon against Wikileaks.
Have any actual data on that (to be clear, data that says that people didn't like / wanted to change the way that computer scrolling has worked for the last 25 years)?
That is crazy. I thought that was behaviour reserved for people my dad's age. My dad does that all the time. I tried to teach him what a URL is, I don't think he got it.
> 1. The FBI flew across the world to NZ. 2. They
> performed an assault on the Dotcom house with an
> armed chopper.

I find these statements disingenuous though. This makes it sound like the FBI led an FBI assault on the Dotcom property using FBI property. The reality is:

1. The FBI (+ other US government offices) convinced the NZ government to arrest Kim Dotcom.

2. It's unclear if the decision to make this arrest so over-the-top was made independently by the NZ officials or influenced by the US.

3. The FBI were there at the assault, but everything that I've read states that the assault team were NZ authorities. The reality is that the FBI were probably there as observers (seeing as this arrest was being made to extradite Kim Dotcom to the US).

It amounts to "Hey, can you arrest this guy for us and can we be there to watch the arrest?"

This may or may not be excusable depending on your persuasion, but attempting to say that the "US assaulted Kim Dotcom with an armed helicopter" is horribly misleading. It draws up images of some US cowboy operation where a bunch of FBI agents piled into an assault chopper, flew to NZ, and just started attacking the Dotcom compound out of nowhere (possibly unloading heavy machine guns and missiles on the compound... it is an 'assault helicopter' after all).
My reading of PHK here is that Cathedrals often lead to better systems than the anarchy-bazaar that he feels has come to be most of the OSS world.

I think bazaar's like the Turkish one referenced above (with guilds and standards of quality) are the best of all worlds. but to get there, a guild needs a strong, opinionated leader. Torvalds perhaps. (PHK seems to fit the bill too :-)

So, what I suggest is the issue here, is too many people trying to build a cathedral in a bazaar - they want everyone to build it their way but cannot persuade enough others to follow them. As such the bazaar is full of many half-finished carpets instead of less, perfect carpets made by engaged teams.

Software needs many talented people, working together, mentoring new ones in "their way". A bazaar is great for getting different talented people to find each other and choose between many different projects. A Cathedral is great for encouraging apprenticeships, the promulgation of culture and so on.
I'm curious as to why you believe the engine to be broken, or why Cliff would be the one to fix it. Unlike "brogrammer," Cliff's professional title /is/ found right at the top of the article: Design Director. He makes games, not engines; Tim Sweeney runs that show.

And if the only reason you find the UE3 to be broken is due to some Console vs PC/Them vs Us issues, then your anger is probably best aimed at PMs and Executive Producers who choose to put so little resources into the PC versions of games, not an engine.
I know, but if he's speaking to expectations, the brand of computer isn't relevant.
what do you consider the use case of this service?
And only current Macs to boot... it doesn't work under Snow Leopard.

EDIT: Looking at his home page, it’s pretty clear he is designing towards tablets first, and other machine types second…
Design & Technology of Autonomous Vehicles of the Future (Part 5/6)
I don't have a specific resource to add, but I want to point out that Rails has a rather steep learning curve. Once you get over the "aha!" hump, though, it's really productive.

Edit: Nevermind, here's a resource you should bookmark (even if it is obvious): http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

I still reference pieces of it, and I've been using Rails for six years or so now.
>Pretty much all your arguments about the Cathedral model being superior fail in the face of the most common cathedrals known to man: Microsoft Windows and Office.

It's been twelve long years that OpenOffice moved from the cathedral model to the bazaar model. And it still suffers from the same criticisms you level against Office and more.
Watch out for the Anchoring Effect:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/07/27/anchoring-effect/

Is the population of Venezuela greater or fewer than 65 million?

Go ahead and guess.

Ok, another question, how many people do you think live Venezuela?
Competition is great.

But there's a point where the "copying" that we as consumers like and benefit from crosses a line and becomes a shameless "knock-off" that we as consumers truly do not benefit from.

It's not at all clear that Samsung has crossed that line, but the line exists none-the-less and we as consumers benefit from there being a legal process to determine when the line has been crossed and penalties for those who cross it.

And in recognizing that we need such a line and a legal system to determine whether it's been crossed, we must allow that fuzzy cases such as these are inevitable. No matter how we might reform the system.
That (externalizing our memory) has been ongoing for long time. Going back in time; Computerized searching, Indexes, Libraries, Books, Written language, probably something like counting stones in pre-history.

I think it's utterly awesome. Combined with viable wearable computing I know everything ever put online. Just might take me a few moments to remember it (search time/connection speed).

It is the #1 reason copyright limitation, net neutrality, information freedom must be fought for.
Conversations with YC Partners: Harj Taggar
I like it, a lot.

Some notes:

* The actual site isn't great. The casual style logo and professional looking site appear to be at odds with each other.

* I'm not keen on the price model. It would make more sense (to me at least) to have a limited number of tours as opposed to tour runs. What happens when I reach my tour run limit? Does the functionality disappear? Do I get charged more?

I do like the product though.
NASA ALIENS ARE ON MARS LEZLOW'S NEWS
Radical-sounding perks such as unlimited paid vacation — assuming you’ve finished your pressing projects — are more common among companies concerned with attracting and retaining young talent. By 2010, 1 percent of U.S. companies had adopted this previously unheard-of policy, largely in response to the demands of Generation Y.

This "previously unheard-of policy" has been in practice for much longer than I've been working - it's called "salary". I'm referring to the department head who takes 2 weeks off in July, 2 more in August, 4 in December, 1 in March, and 3 from May into June. The retail store director who takes 3 weeks for New Years, takes his family to Europe from April to June, and still leaves the office early for his kids's events.

These aren't straw men, and they aren't Gen Y'ers either.
All patient databases that were known to be hacked. Can we improve reporting?
That's interesting. I didn't know people would think like that. Your post explains a lot, now the world makes much more sense. Thanks for posting it :)

Now I wish people online would put a huge disclaimer saying "I'm only interested in arguing for the fun of it, not in finding an actual solution" before their posts. That would have saved countless hours of online typing wasted for nothing.

I mean, nothing wrong with finding it fun to discuss. But I wish I could accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.

Well, anyway, already learned something new today. My day is complete.

edit: wow this is bigger than I thought, now I've been reading through older HN posts where I was mind-blown about "why would he even post that? What's his motivation?". Now I feel like I can finally make sense out of it. I feel so stupid for never noticing something so simple. The world is different now.
In addition to what chrisaycock said, phks writings are typically very "lacking" and assumes a certain knowledge about whatever he has chosen to write about. He writes interesting stuff, a lot is implied and/or not very sufficiently explained.
Not to mention Tilera, who makes 36-core chips/cards [1], with 4 in a 1U box [2], with each processor with connected to each its four neighbors by a 250 Gb/s link.

[1] http://tilera.com/products/processors/TILE-Gx_Family
[2] http://tilera.com/products/platforms
[3] http://www.tilera.com/technology
Speaking of celery - I was looking at celery over the weekend. Do you know if its possible to submit jobs from languages other than Python (specifically, I would like to use Java)? I have some Clojure code running on Storm from which I would like to submit tasks to be executed in Python on other machines. Do you know if this is possible with celery? I couldn't really find any information on it.
I find articles like these obnoxious and nothing more than Another example of cold readings, so to speak
It is worth searching through all these comments and reading what Mitchell (mitchellh) has to say. It's been very informative getting the author's perspective on every important issue brought up in this thread.
It's the classic battle of urgent vs. important. It's easy to fall into a trap by always focusing on the most seemingly "urgent" task at hand while neglecting things that are actually more important. Responding to emails, fixing bugs, or hiring a new developer might seem urgent, but what longer-term goals end up suffering? Things like building company culture, fostering business relationships, or developing long term strategy are hardly urgent, but extremely important things that often get neglected when we fall victim to the day-to-day tyranny of urgency.
It seems to me these reports are pretty vacuous from a defensive posture. I would like to see the software that was running (database, OS, any other running servers)
This is great, but could use a small tweak: Once you select a start date, it should grey out the dates before the selection in both calendars. That will make it easier to pick an end date that's valid. And vice versa for the end date.