skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least processing them linearly gives a reasonable upper bound on the wait time. With random waits, some customers would be processed instantly ("WHY do THEY get to skip the entire line when I'm still sitting here?") and others would never be processed.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply daily. As professor Bernard Cohen meant it, as a competition with Ralph Nader, I was a one off meant to show that the equivalent mg dosage of caffeine would kill you much faster then plutonium. A daily ingestion is much different.
Student edition of Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 to go on sale tomorrow for $249.99
> You should have a strong opinion on every major area of software development

Strong implies stubborn, and stubborn implies inflexibility. The last thing I want when trying to debug a legacy system is a new hire complaining up the wall about XML bloat. It wasn't my decision, we are stuck with it, and let's move on and ship.

I think every developer should have some (shred of) experience in every area, and have knowledge of various options and the tradeoffs between them, but don't go around becoming that die-hard religious guy on the NoSQL/SQL debate (or any other for that matter).
STL Hackathon Canceled After Social Backlash
I do not recommend using floating point numbers for integer math. I am saying that if you have integers stored in floating point representation, equality comparisons are fine.

> I've not used lua or javascript, but wouldn't it be better to choose an implmentation that silently switches between ints, floats, doubles and big-nums as needed?

If you want to go through the engineering effort, sure, it might make sense to have separate int and double encodings. You have to check for the possibility of integer overflow and convert to double in that case. In particular, this is useful if you want to use Javascript's bitwise operators. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/SpiderMonkey/Intern... for a description of how SpiderMonkey does it. Lua just has one representation for numbers, double normally but it could be float or long depending on how you compile it. There would be no reason to have single-precision floating point or big-num representations.
What about simple time lapse? With images and video the larger the time lapse the faster things appear to be moving especially with blur. What if something similar held for memory?

The key memories that are remembered will typically have longer lapses for the older than for the younger. Cognitive expectations might then correct this gap by fudging a perception or sense of elapsed time, creating a quickened time lapse like effect for experiences, which strengthens as you get older.

It would be interesting to ask people with autobiographical memories how they perceive time - according to my analogy it wouldn't change since they maintain most 'frames'.
Recognizing the Flaws in the Way We Learn
Who owns you after you die?
Why I don't use Racket or any other Scheme
I'd say that goes directly against one of the theses of the article -- that "uncertainty magnifies the stress of waiting".

The most excruciating waits that I've had to deal with in the last many years are at the Ausländerbehörde here in Germany -- the "foreigners' office". It's the place that you have to go to get a work permit if you're not German.

They use a randomized system. You don't have any idea if you're going to be waiting 10 minutes, 3 hours or even if you'll make it through the line at all before they close for the day. Combined with the stress of the possibility of rejection or missing some critical piece of paperwork, the uncertainty adds a huge amount of cognitive load. Need to go to the bathroom after you've been waiting for an hour? What if they call your number while you're away for 5 minutes? I would love for them to switch to a linear system so that I could produce a ballpark estimate of where I am in the queue.
You needn't be old to know what J. Irr. Res. is; you only need to be paying attention.
note that i said "... as a separate entity"
taskrabbit, exec, craigslist, etc.
HD Video of Mars Curiosity Landing
I agree about the human curation. Try 8tracks, they're perfect for this.
I think most non-tech people wouldn't know that you were using stripe, and would abandon the site at the point of sale (but I could be wrong). Me being a tech person, I would still abandon the site after not seeing an SSL connection, in my opinion it's not worth it to not have one
And when you eliminate all of the default cert stores, then important things on the standard OSes most people use like Mac OS X and Windows will break, such as online banking, webmail, and security updates.
This is doubly false. First, offshore jobs has not led to high unemployment in the US; 2 million jobs were offshored between 1994 and 2007 even as the unemployment rate dropped from 6.6% to 4.4%[1][2] - apparently most of those people found other work. Secondly, the reduced emissions is not caused by offshored jobs, either; US manufacturing output is up this year[3] even as emissions have dropped 8%. Not that a cleaner China wouldn't be even better.

[1]http://www.trivisonno.com/offshoring
[2]http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
[3]http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/
So you value people solely by their contributions to society. I do not.
I'm pretty turned of anything to do with Scrum these days. It's such a cargo cult of process (remember the "people before process" part of agile?) and focuses solely on the development process to the exclusion of almost everything else about the organization.

I've seen too many organizations and teams try to use agile to "fix" things while completely ignoring issues like product development, customer development and even culture.

Any gains from applying agile will still be barely incremental when compared to addressing the real issue of product development and doing so holistically. I think lean and even lean startup make some significant strides past agile in doing this, but even that is starting to show it's cargo cult side (a/b test all the things anyone?).
I agree, and this reminds me of two other quotes.

"Strong opinions, weakly held" http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/strong-opinions-wea...
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinio...

"I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong"
http://blogs.hbr.org/sutton/2010/08/its_up_to_you_to_start_a...
Am I the only one who is wondering how this comment ended up on top of this discussion?

The argument seems highly problematic. How far is a government allowed to go "to minimise the probability of false, duplicate, or un-recoverable identities". Let us pretend for a moment, that these are indeed core issues, that justify a billion dollar project.

If a government is allowed to intrude personal freedom just because the technology is there, why don't we make caring a gps tracking device mandatory for everyone leaving their registered residence. I mean, it is keeping the streets save, right? What gives a government the right to demand from someone fingerprints and iris scans, but not demand the GPS tracking or mandatory DNA samples of every citizen.

If we go on and just lament that this is just how it is and government has to keep the streets clean, these steps are consequential. After all a few decades ago nobody cared about fingerprints, and it was purely some crime-fighting technique. And so are DNA samples and monitoring anklets today.

U.S.'s tracing abilities given in the example based bank accounts or cell phones are voluntary, i.e. I can take a bag of cash and a throw away phone and government agencies would have to put substantial manpower into keeping track of my actions. With the iris scan, all they need to do is have a high resolution camera installed at the front of the store and they know where I spend that money.
Given that when I first heard of it I assumed it had something to do with the new Windows 8* app store, yeah, it's confusing.

* Or whatever it's called now.
I don't think that's the case. I haven't heard PostgreSQL users trash Firebird or SQLite. The complaints about MySQL are rather specific and have historical roots regarding MySQL saying things like:

* you don't need transactions
* you don't need foreign key constraints
* you don't need ACID-compliance

At least the NoSQL folks tend to be honest about their products not replacing the traditional RDBMS approach....

Granted many of these don't apply anymore, but then legacies live on interaction-wise. This being said, I know very few real Pg users who harp on MySQL anymore. Most of us figure that Oracle does better advocacy on this area than we can.
They could see if Microsoft wants to buy the name. :-)
at my previous employement, we were using agile (scrum, to be specific). We used to pair-program. Always, the head of the team made sure that you have a new workmate for a every new project. As such, you got used to know and leverage the different talents of the co-workers. We used to have fun through freestyle coding (once a month) and pseudo-random brownbags where we were learning new techniques in the indurstry. Being in Africa, brownbags were great and everyone of us was always making sure to keep track of what was happening in software world.

But when I changed jobs in July last year, I met a different team. I call it a dead team. There is no collaborative development, no source code versioning and tracking. (I am comfortable with git and mercurial). No brownbags, no codefests, no freestyle. Everyone works like a cowboy. I tried introduce agile, the team was just rigid because of the head.

Now the head of the team is quitting early September. There are high chances that I may acting as the head of the team after he is gone. But even if I may not be acting, I think I will try again to bring back the culture I used to love. I am guessing it was the head who was refusing to change. Two months ago I tried to introduce git to some workmate, he liked it only that he could not do more with it since the team doesn't use versioning.

I have learnt something: some people refuse change.
Well done. I suppose.

But may I ask why the hell every startup story has to sound like Indiana Jones going on an adventure.

Why do we keep idolizing stories of people taking huge risk for very little chances of success?

It feels like this is a story from the wild wild west. Because it is. I just hope he's not too late to dig gold.

EDIT: on second thoughts, I commend you for taking on an amazing journey and going full steam ahead. I moved to Australia when I was 21 all by myself, so I can certainly relate. I can't imagine doing it with kids, 12 years later. So bravo.
- Facebook earned one billion dollars of cash on the day of the IPO. Subsequent stock swings don't affect the ability of the company to operate day to day, or make capital improvements.

- Facebook has a number of old, less efficient datacenters running older, less efficient servers. By replacing this old infrastructure with their own self-built datacenters in Prineville, OR, Forest City, NC, and Lulea, Sweden they are actually over time decreasing their total cost to operate the site, and riding moore's law to more efficient and powerful server systems. This actually saves the company money to operate the service, as well as streamlining and standardizing their production infrastructure for more ability to "move fast".
From an experience:

Difficult time passes more difficultly, i.e feels longer. Example on a day if you are fasting, time always seems earlier than what you expect. For example on days I may think 'Gosh its still 12 PM, still 7 hours to go before the fast breaking time!'

Only yesterday, the fast breaking time was 6:54 PM. And my wife called at me from down stairs to come down for it at 6:53 or so (I work from my SOHO on the upper level), I thought gosh 1 more minute, how can I wait!

So it could mean that the perceived time (that has passed) is also a function of how frequently we sample it. Or if differently said, how much we 'live in the moment'.

Edit: minor rephrase for clarity.
Griffon 1.0.2 released
JBoss BRMS Best Practices - tips for your BPM Process Initialization Layer
I always liked to think that our perception stays the same - it's just that time is speeding up.
More like, Pinterest: A jQuery Masonry-style social media sharing site.
Ah, I wondered if there would be a reply like this. Thus my weasel-worded statement ("... many flavors ...") <sheepish grin>. Thanks for the info.
the server seems really down...
The winning team comes up an with idea, it becomes IP of Teralogix who are then sued by a patent troll for infringement. The current state of affairs..
And now, what if it's a stranger employed by someone else, and they deliver the beer to under-aged individuals?

It's a real and valid concern, and dismissing it with silly questions about friends like a weasel doesn't resolve the concern.
Which part does it mention news.ycombinator.com?
I saw a biographical film about Buckminster Fuller a few years ago. There was a story about his kindergarten teacher expressing concern to his parents about Bucky being "different". One deviant thing she mentioned was that when the children were given blocks to play with and told to build houses, Bucky refused to make normal houses. He would only make structures consisting of triangles. At 5. How amazing is that.
Haha. This is great. Seems young programmers are not so naive about IP after all, eh Teralogix? Nice try. Way to go St. Louis hacking community. Always read the fine print, and ask questions.
Midwesterners consider those vegetables. Not kidding. Ask for
a "vegetarian option" and they might hand you chicken.
I'm pretty disappointed with Teralogix on this, front and back.

I reached out to them early to offer help since their organizer wasn't plugged in to the local dev or startup scenes. There was no follow up. Then when that nasty legal note was discovered, I reached out again and found out that their intent was to make it an offer to join Teralogix and be funded by them, not a requirement. Alas, they fumbled both and I'm disappointed we won't get to see some new ideas from this event.
Other comments have covered the France/Germany thing.

I will point out that I'm actually a fan of the electoral college in the present day, and believe it serves a useful purpose.

The quintessential problem in American politics is the different regions of the country, which all have their own set of interests and values. And, in general, people get very upset when they feel they aren't represented at all; for example, I live in the lone county in my state that consistently trends liberal, and I know that my vote effectively doesn't count for anything state-wide or any national election, because I'm surrounded and outnumbered by far more conservative voters. This is frustrating and leads to apathy.

Similarly, when a significant region of the country is effectively disenfranchised in this fashion, serious problems result. And that's what would happen if we replaced the electoral college by direct popular election: a small number of coastal population centers would essentially decide every election, leaving a huge swathe of the country realizing that their votes don't count.

Under the current electoral system, meanwhile, candidates for President have to be responsive to the interests of a broader cross-section of the country in order to get elected. On the whole, I think that's a good thing, because it ensures that we don't end up in a tyranny-of-the-urban-majority situation.
On top of this, consider that sexual interactions thrive on ambiguity and mixed signals and that both men and women play on this and use this to create sexual tension. "No means no" is a very narrow statement and is not at all incompatible with the idea that "No means not right now, maybe later, or keep trying." It simply means that as far as one's bodily autonomy, one has veto power over any actual contact.

So "no means no" does not mean you have to take no for an answer even there. It does not even mean women want no to be taken for an answer. It just means certain specific limits are to be accepted.
Github 404 page now uses CSS parallax
After talking to Teralogix, it seems this was the result of an overzealous legal team and a novice marketing lead on the project--as opposed to well informed and well orchestrated deviousness on behalf of the organizing company.

I agree, applause for those who discovered the clause, but the better outcome would have been for Teralogix to do it right. Sadly, that didn't happen either.
But even there, "no means no" really only means "if I tell you to, keep your hands of my body." It is a strong statement in context but it is a narrow one. That isn't incompatible with "no" meaning "maybe later."

It doesn't mean "if I tell you I don't want to go out for coffee, don't ever ask me again." And there is no way that asking a woman for a date 100 times and getting rejected is the same as so-called "rape culture." (scare quotes because the term really is over-used. I have no problem with the term applied to some idea that mixed signals means "yes right now" but mixed signals are an inherent part of generating sexual tension and both men and women do this a lot. )
This reminds of of a similar calculation I did in college when thinking about big computing problems.. I called it "hurry up and wait".

Assuming Moore's law continues (computing power/$ doubles every 18 months), and you have a big computation to do, should you start now or should you wait?

If you have $1000 to spend on a computer and a problem that's going to take 3 years for it to compute, you can actually wait 1.5 years before you start. The computer you buy then will be twice as fast, and you'll finish at the same time.

On any problem that takes more than 1.5 years, the fastest thing to do is just wait until you can afford a computer that can complete it in 1.5 years.
Indian govt, like any other, provides a lot of subsidy to the needed. They have some programs and funds to do this. However, most of the funds don't reach people who need them. Why - too many middlemen, corruption, etc. Through this program they are trying to cut the middlemen or at least hoping to. Most other forms of ids can be faked, these possible in Bond movies but difficult in India.
New Zealand: Wish you were here?
And how many active accounts...
First - I'm quite happy that the event has gotten shut down, for now.

Second - I've always felt like this was the case of a company trying to do something they didn't fully understand. I got the vibe that these terms were cooked up by a lawyer in order to "protect" and "provide value" to Teralogix.

I just wish they would have been more responsive to the community.
I had known of this before, and I'm fairly certain I've used it before. However, one thing I didn't consider is the equals issue commented on the site. As attractive as it may be to use, I think from now on I will refrain from using the double braces.
Oh, that could be different. We're probably missing a case. Appreciate your letting us know. Is this for inviting friends or messaging them? If your privacy settings prevent this we should be more graceful in catching the error than a connection failure.
Your pet hypothesis and mine are quite similar. Hey there pet hypothesis buddy.

Once you get a good routine down, you figure out the best grocery stores for everything, find the best routes to and from work/school, punch a clock for half your weekday waking hours, days start blending together.
The time spent doing things like washing dishes, doing laundry, prepping meals, shopping for consumables, your brain is on autopilot for most of that time once you have done those things 100+ times.

Variety being the spice of life and all, doing new things forces you to actually engage your surroundings and have memorable experiences.
I don't think the first statement is a valid argument. One could instead note the number of jobs offshored between 1994 and 2012, and see that the unemployment rate has increased from 6.6% to 8.3%.

That's not to say the original comment is correct either. It's just that there seems to be many more variables that just one in what determines the unemployment rate.
what surprises me are not the comments here but the comments about steve jobs. sure, the guy did a lot, but from all accounts he is someone i would never work for, and i'm pretty sure most of the hn crowd would hate working for in actual practice.
On a separate note, does anyone notice that there are no facebook like/recommend buttons on Yahoo Finance?

Nice article thanks
I think what the GP meant was that the numbers on the slip would be randomized, but the queue still ordered like a queue with the numbers in some database.
With offboard cooling you could charge a ~300 mile range EV in about 3 minutes without over-sized onboard cooling.

I.... I just don't know what to say to this.

Except maybe "Good luck."
Congrats on 2 million! We hit 1 million a few months ago and we had a great party.
That's still an incredibly lame excuse. Someone took the time to write that language into the contract, and whether through malice or inaction, no one corrected it. It's unforgivable no matter who you point fingers at internally.
Risk analyst at PwC. This also sounds very similar to my role.
Blue is the default color for hyperlinks. I've had a circular avatar on my site for 2+ years.
Unrelated - these Svbtle clones are getting out of hand. I guess this one isn't so bad because the button placement and giant caricature are different, but still.
This post deals more with setting up the best possible environment at the beginning of a project, rather than joining a team. You obviously have less say in that. This section's not about being sycophantic about a particular option, it's about knowing what works, what doesn't, and why. Starting any project with a lackadaisical approach to how you're going to execute can come back to bite you in the end.
1. Now? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056629 Though I'll admit in a way it never gets old :)

2. That's javascript, I wish it was possible with only CSS.
Actually I think that men who are good at seducing women say no and maybe while obviously meaning yes all the time.
Thanks, fixed that - dyslexic moment or something.
Is that a "pirated" svbtle theme?
How the Wet-Dog Shake Gets Mammals Dry in No Time Flat
You seem like a smart guy, and I really like your writing style... but why use the flakey Svbtle clone... you can do better than that :)
"WP-Svbtle" by Gravity on Mars:
http://gravityonmars.com/2012/03/28/svbtle-based-on-wordpres...
... "Treat them like the serious business and tech minded ADULTS".

Last time I ever make a post on my phone with a time limited edit function. Especially when sleepy, with Swype.
Google Play Store Gift Cards May Land In Stores On August 26th
Biometric security has always been a disaster which is why real projects using it almost never end up being realized. The article portrays it as if the reason India is the first to do this is because they are somehow uniquely able to take advantage of technology. The reality is that the reason they are the first is that everybody realized how flawed it is.

In terms of liberty - a biometric id is, by definition, an "involuntary" identity. It's something you're unable to change or refuse to yield, even if you choose to. A person with a non-biometric identity can freely destroy all forms of that identity and then they cannot be identified any more by it. They have the freedom to produce it when they wish to be identified, and to choose not to when they wish to remain anonymous. A biometric identity is a non "opt out" identity. It can never be changed or altered, and can be forcibly read by anybody with physical control over you. Hence there is a great loss of liberty in a biometric identity, and when you really think it through, almost no advantages that can't be obtained from a non-biometric identity.
Behind the Curtain: A conversation with Wifarer