skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree completely with your first point, there's a programmer shortage pretty much everywhere in the world at the moment.

I have no idea what makes you think otherwise.
There's a shortage of devices because people buy them as fast as Apple can make them.
Most robust "cloud"? Really? You know their main competitor is google right? The company that has been responsible for millions of people embracing the cloud before apple even cared it existed?
It's amusing to see Bill Gates upset about college students not learning much and many not finishing. He's a billionaire. But he's also a dropout. And now he's reading self-help books.

I'd like to see Bill Gates go back to school and earn a degree or two. Is that a bad thing to do? Why? He obviously has the time and money. But how dare I even suggest the idea? Who am I compared to Bill Gates? A mere plebian. So why would I suggest it? Beause it would be a great example to set. In my opinion. Not sure if he is a believer in setting examples and the tendency of young people to emulate "role models". Like, e.g., billionaire dropouts.
So you rather hire somebody who has the same problem but has too much pride to ask somebody for help? Seriously, if all the questions everybody asked ever were on their resume, nobody would ever be able to get a job. At least this individual recognized that there was something wrong and sought out how to fix the problem from people with more experience then them.
Nice but it's been done before: http://www.powersof10.com/ and by Charles and Ray Eames, no less.
Also because of our property-tax regime. Tearing down a depreciated/ing low-rise to put up a fresh new high-rise will cause a reassessment of your property value, and because the building is new you'll get hit with a massive tax increase based on your property value shooting up.

The problem being that real-estate property values are only liquidated on selling a building, so you just end up passing the tax on to renters.

A tax on land-value or space usage tends to work better for allowing high-value construction to be done rather than continual depreciation of a whole city.
Somewhat tangential, but I wish there were more comprehensive learning resources for Clojure, particularly getting started with web development. Given that there is no equivalent of Django or Rails, and web development in clj is really about assembling a collection of libraries (Ring, Compojure/Moustache, Enlive/Hiccup etc), it is much harder for the initiate to understand how everything fits together. The fact that Rails is so opinionated also really helps the new developer become productive in a relatively short timeframe.

I'd imagine this would apply to just about any other language as well really. The Ruby community really is fortunate to have such brilliant free resources out there for learning Rails and the language.
It's funny, I had the exact opposite worry. With a rated life of 25 years, the WiFi components are likely to become obsolete long before the bulb itself quits. If I buy one of these, am I going to end up maintaining an obsolete WiFi network in the 2030s just to run my household lights?
I just got one on YouTube, weird...
Used to work with someone who was a big proponent of 5-7 max layers of abstraction as a design principle. I never researched it, but it seemed to make a lot of sense (he claimed it was documented). So you many not be at all atypical =D.
Is it just me? It's not a good question, it shows lack of core coding experience.

For example a video game consists of millions of possibilities/results in movement based on environment - it's not approached as a collection of thousands of if/then/else statements.

In fact the movement of cows seems very much like video game coding, it needs a "cow engine".
Are you referring to the photo on my post? The photo is a little bit of a lie: I'd just moved into this office, and my desk is not normally that minimalist. ;)

I do use a mouse. And normally my laptop is elevated on a box, with a keyboard in front. I also have a external monitor that's normally beside it.
There's certainly some proto-racist implied nationalism (of the bad kind) in saying that the USA can avoid having to educate its own children by exploiting a continual flow of immigrants.
The article is describing Lloyd's Algorithm. It would be good to mention the name somewhere.

It would probably be a good idea to mention what to do if a cluster ends up with no points assigned at some point.

It should also be noted that there are other methods for choosing the initial cluster centers than choosing randomly from the data. For instance, choosing random points in the smallest d-dimensional rectangle that contains the data points (where d is the dimensionality of the space containing the data points) is popular.

When checking a point against each cluster center to determine which center to assign that point to you can speed things up a little by using the square of the distance rather than the distance. The saves you NK square root calculations, where N is the number of points and K is the number of clusters.
Their main competitor is carrier phones that don't handle OS updates in a timely manner/at all.

I have an android phone with cyanogen, but if someone complained about android I'd be totally understanding. The stock stuff is terrible.
A collection: everybody Gangnam Style, from Moms to Navy solders
Super funny to see this spread like weeds.
This really sounds like a machine learning problem--why hand engineer all these rules yourself (which can be error prone in any case) when a program could do it for you? If you can figure out how to get a large data set together and come up with a good general representation of the data, you're half way there.

I'd consider taking a look at recurrent neural networks if you're looking at your data as a time series or if its more of a static problem that doesn't take into account the last N things that came before, you might consider tree based methods or even DBNs if you can get a lot of data together (say 50000-100000 samples)

Potential pitfall: if you're using a NN based approach, you will judge results based on test performance, but you won't get as much insight into the "rules" your network has learned.
... a very good sign that they're still too green.

When did HN become so touchy-freely? It's important that people start learning somewhere. If you show any interest in programming, I highly recommend learning more. However, there comes a time when you must have a certain amount of experience. This is a profession where important things are made. Even people who should know better end up building systems that leak our sensitive personal information, or let others impersonate us.

I didn't say that such a person shouldn't be hired, but I certainly implied that the original question is a better indicator of their capability than the always positive keyword soup and "years experience" that many people slather on their résumé.

If "avoiding IF-THEN spaghetti" is all you require from contributors, fine. Let's not pretend that this is better than an early high school effort.
Yeah, it is as silly as trying to predict the weather.
The research the article talks about was done in 1990, so the dynamics as to the influence of top-spoken languages may well have changed.

Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]

On a slightly unrelated note, what is interesting is that Hindustani, despite being one of the most spoken languages, has such little influence. Unlike for Chinese or Russian, there is relatively little resistance in it being completely dominated by English as the "business language" in the very areas that the language is native to.

[1]: Some schools in African countries, located near areas where there is Chinese involvement, are teaching Chinese: http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601... -- elsewhere in Americas and Europe there has also been a noticeable bump in people trying to pick up Chinese as their second language.

[2]: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
Meh, put a date on it. If you asked this even a couple of years ago, fine. If you asked this last month, I have a pretty good feel for where you're at. You should also learn from your questions, which would make a great interview conversation.

I've littered the net with my share of dumb questions, and I have no regrets.
I have only read the first two chapters (setup and Javascript an overview).

The content do not look bad (but I have not read node.js specific parts yet so I can't really tell). The bad part is that it would need some serious proof-reading... Some sentences are missing words or are hardly understandable and there are some mistakes in the code.
Typing at a standing desk is comfortable if you get the height correct for your body. And for me it is important to have a riser at the front of the keyboard, like this [1]. My arms are angled close to 90 degrees, but pointed slightly downward, a keyboard flat on the desk would put far too much stress on my wrists.

[1] http://cdn.asia.cnet.com/i/r/2008/pp/43776845/sc003.jpg
I basically agree with you, except in regard to documentation, of which I find exceptional in PostgreSQL, even compared to other database systems.

Your toplevel comparison of the index of both manuals is not very informative to me. What do you feel is missing from PostgreSQL's manual that you find in other documentation sources?
LIFX reaches goal of $100,000 in 1 day . 59 to go..
Stunning Black and White Photography
Today we launch our weekly inspiration series called “WeekZine”. Every Monday we post the most interesting “things” we have found in previous week. This post presents some truly excellent examples of beautiful black-and-white photography.
If their job is in marketing or social media, it seems they are doing it.
Closure Compiler for JS has optional typing.
Is it faster than pdftohtml?
I don't disagree. I agree it's hard to know what "the public" thinks. I do think the public is uneducated about the details of the iPhone 5, but I don't think that makes them not buy it.

I actually think most of the public is so uneducated they don't really know the difference between and incremental or large improvements in most cases, so the incremental thing becomes irrelevant because they are uneducated. They only know when a handful of major using facing features come out (e.g. siri, iphoto app release, retina display, new shape, maybe the earpods).

And they know that Apple says "new and better" and they put some trust in that since they don't know how to evaluate it themselves (a lot of the public would have difficulty telling the difference between an iPhone 5 and a samsung phone or a 4s).
Best voice assistant service? You must've missed all the comparisons with Google's Voice Search, which shows significantly better results, and is faster, too.
If code branches in the woods and no one is around to program it, does it start a flamewar?

Does anyone use Dart?
Shouldn't results from the One X on 4.0.3 (or even all results from 4.0.3) be excluded from the averages then? In the case of the One X the average is ~1000 but without the ~600 scores in there the average would be much closer to ~1500.
> How is coffeescript 'daring' in any way ? It is a thin veneer on top of javascript, syntactic sugar for your coffee.

CoffeeScript does compile into JS, but so does Dart. Both are in that sense just syntactic sugar.

CoffeeScript does make quite big changes to syntax though (often inspired by Ruby, Python, etc.) in many cases more than Dart which seems inspired by Java - and I don't think anyone considers Java 'inspiring' (useful and familiar, sure).

> Dart is a hundred times more daring. It is trying to push optional typing. No mainstream language has such a feature, and not even so much non-mainstream ones.

ActionScript.
All of what you mention may be true (I don't really know if it is), but spending 8 days in line for a phone (even a great one) seems out of proportion even when taking into consideration all of the superlatives you mention. I think that's where "sheeple" gets some traction.
I've actually been thinking of moving away from DH too. Out of curiosity, where did you move to, which host?

Thanks.
I don't know, I've worked with folks who thrive on keeping what seems like dozens of threads active at once. Got to work with some at Google and NetApp who were really excellent project managers. It is definitely a talent. I try to get better at it but rely on crutches like my notebooks for swapping out brain state.
Totally agreed -- that's the first thing I thought while reading the question. OOP made this kind of problem easy to tackle long ago.
I find that creating a simple song is easier. I sing the alphabet backwards, in the same tune as the original.
That solution is generalizable to the entire domain of computer science.
Yes. Sitting in line for free publicity. It's worked for the first seven. (Note to Fortune: you failed to count to seven correctly.)
I'd find this potentially interesting if I had any confidence that it wouldn't burn out in a few months like every other "lasts for years" bulb I've tried.
Thanks for posting this! It reminds me of 'The Axis of Awesome: 4 Chords' - we've hit on the chord progression that 'resolves' nicely and appeals to us...but it begs the question are we becoming too formulaic?
Computer Science Ph.D Student
Looking at the advances in machine translation and speech recognition in the last 10 years, how long before fluency in English becomes irrelevant?

If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)
Even leaked versions of the 4.0.4 update to the WWE One X were in demand because of the large performance improvement on benchmarks and smoother interaction. That's actually a true case. Although partially due to things like less 3D in the launcher.

I don't know what was done in this case, but I do think I remember seeing a statement by NVIDIA on early benchmarks at release that they still had optimizations to do. So that could be involved.

It hasn't been unknown in the mobile world for wacky stuff to get done, like having a dual core processor where you almost never use the second core to save batteries as well. So software can make a big difference.
A large portion of your points don't matter to a majority of consumers: sales channel, distribution, manufacturing channel, carrier support, re-up rates, retention rates (difference?), ARPU, dev support, ASP, margin, packaging, perceived status. Some are duplicates (service/support, re-up/retention, deepest/widest content, status/brand). Another portion are purely opinion... cloud, dev support, "pack ins" (?), voice assistant (google now often performce better), performance (its a wash), UX (many people prefer customizable UX). Some are even negative to certain people such as their brand, ARPU (high margins), and their cloud (not supporting alternatives).

And of course that doesn't count the many, many categories they do poorly in that are important to people. Off the top of my head are customizability, open technologies, keyboard (software), screen size, choice in hardware features and software features (default browsers, default apps, etc), extensibility, tech standards/ports, 3rd part extensibility, navigation (seems like IO6 maps are getting bad reviews thus far), and richer apps that can integrate beyond the strict sandbox, etc.

Finally, their marketing is one of their strongest traits and so of course marketing is a huge driver of sales. Not that I agree with calling anyone "sheeple", so not really sure what your point was.
Show HN: Lil Brother -- Open Source Client-Side Event Tracking w/ Node.js
A finite state machine is actually not a great solution for this particular problem (in fact, FSMs are often over-used), IMHO. An expert system is a far better solution (as one commenter mentioned). The problem with a FSM is that you still must explicitly specify ALL of the nodes (without some complex algorithm to automate such a task). An expert system, like prolog, only requires you to state all of the rules, and then it will figure out any query for you (via propositional logic, backwards chaining, etc). The number of nodes typically grows exponentially with the number of rules (if the rules are inter-related), so for a problem of any significant size an expert system would probably be the method of choice.
No, I saw those comparison videos.

Google's results were far worse. And it's not about "voice search", it's about "voice assistant".
Is Quora planning on redesigning their iPhone app?
"Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]"

Counting the total number of speakers is not a very smart way of thinking about "network effects" of languages. You should count the number of speakers among knowledge and media creators. People will have to learn those languages to gain that knowledge and understand that media.
I frequently split long statements over multiple lines for readability purposes. Having an explicit statement terminator makes this possible.
For high cpu:

http://www.securedservers.com/index.php
Wikipedia says "Evidence suggests that microbial metabolism may have contributed to the formation of some of these concretions".

Yet you state it as fact that these forms "are the byproduct of a type of bacteria" [my emphasis]. How come you're so certain?
There's also the additional problem, from my memories of the school system, that our educational system emphasizes quantity over quality. I could never have passed an AP Calculus class because of the sheer quantity of work they pile on in the attempt to be "rigorous". Yet, when I got to university, I averaged an A- on my intensive advanced mathematics/computing courses: Differential and Integral Calculus, Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math, Formal Languages and Computability and Complexity Theory. I've ended up doing some amateur type theory as research because, as it turns out, once you stopped piling on pointless busy-work, I'm pretty good at math.
Silly Search Match :p - DUAL HS10 - Black ops NUKETOWN YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Black ops shotguns ftw
Octo – A Global Pipe Dream Come True
Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined)

It was a claim like this that motivated me to begin studying Chinese back in the 1970s. But if we are talking about one language community, all of whose members can genuinely converse with one another, today English just might have more speakers than (standard) Chinese has. Social science surveys by the Chinese government suggest that only just more than half of China's population is conversant in standard Chinese,

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

and that squares with the experience of most travelers in China, and most Chinese-speaking people who know a lot of Chinese people outside of China, that there are still quite a few nationals of China who are not readily understood when they attempt to converse with other nationals of China.

Influence of a language depends on a lot more than just raw number of speakers. Sometime way back in the early 1980s, the Xerox company did an estimate of language influence weighted by the per-capita domestic product of persons speaking various languages, which of course boosts the ranking of English (and also of Japanese, at that time) as compared to Chinese.

Looking at what happened to Russian (my apologies to the authors of the first couple comments posted here), I would actually expect the influence of Chinese to decline by 2050, while the influence of English, both from the core strengths of the "inner circle" English-speaking countries (Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand) and the outer circle of countries where English is co-official, and from the unparalleled use of English as a worldwide interlanguage. When someone from Korea meets someone from Japan while both are in Taiwan, either might speak the language of the other, and I have seen that done both ways, but when they want to include a local person in the conversation, unless they really are in Taiwan as students of Chinese, they will likely resort to English to speak to one another. And so it goes with all kinds of unlikely combinations of ethnic groups in all kinds of places all over the world.

I am not at all ethnocentric about my sole native language, General American English, and I am second to none in urging Americans to acquire other languages for additional international understanding, but every mash-up of language groups that happens day by day in today's world is likely to accelerate the spread of English and to increase its influence.
Red Hat's new patent counterclaim: GPL violation
Yes, really. I argue that iCloud is a more robust and coherent offering at this point. It goes toe-to-toe with Android Backup when it comes to backing up relevant user-state (like SMS history, a very valuable datatype), offers desirable features like find-a-phone and remote wipe, offers unsexy but fundamental functionality like Notes round-tripping, and offers ad-free IMAP mailboxes that don't explode on contact with desktop clients.

iCloud still doesn't offer arbitrary file storage like Google Drive and its photo story is inadequate and confusing. But it is competitive on the whole, and Apple found some dogwhistle to blow that made "iCloud" a real thing for extremely tech-uninvolved people. (I'm not sure if this was anything they actually did on their part or if it was just coincident with the "cloud" buzzword coming to mean "I, the user, won't lose my stuff if my phone/laptop breaks")

Also, Android backup is not a freebie: the manufacturer needs to be playing by OHA rules and staying in Google's good graces so that they can get access to all those Google-backed goodies. And then of course there's carrier-cloud and the vaporous S-Cloud and Asus cloud and all the third-party services and and.... and...

Apple's put it together under one brand name and an ID you already have.
Maybe, but reading through, he does appear to be right.
Obama Has Already Appealed The Indefinite Detention Ruling
Installing Node on CentOS
Scientists, what will your career look like in ten years?
Uh, what's wrong with stock Android? The issue is with carrier/OEM modifications.
Do you mind explaining what the problem is? Are you speaking against links in any emails, or just those with sensitive information? Why?
Having to creep around copy protections like a thief takes the joy and pride of ownership right out.
I remember him. Funny mustache. Did a lot of silly black and white movies or something. No sound for some reason.
Self-referential URL
Yahoo Messenger
If the consequences were in line with his actions this logic would work, but life in prison is an extraordinarily oppressive response to this type of disobedience.

Further, using the legal system to extract a huge penalty before any jury has decided on guilt is the worst type of bullying by the big against the small.

Lastly, many of us relate to what Aaron is going through, and simple compassion compels us to help. Saying Aaron should "man up, take responsibility for his actions, and pay his own bills" belittles him and those of us who have chosen to support him.
IPhone 4S and 5 compared on Geekbench (2x is real)
What? The USA doesn't have an official language (like in one recognized by government)?

That's news for me, and it's interesting to think on the implications. I'll point that next time an american complains to me on the web to "speak english".