skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Union rights and at-will employment are intimately connected.

What do people get fired for? It's rarely a true "performance" issue. Mostly, it's anything that the company judges to be against its interests. (In contemporary companies where managers can unilaterally fire people, it's anything that is judged to be against the manager's interest.) Anything that is perceived as disloyal, no matter how small, will usually lead to termination. That's how human societies tend to work, so it's not reasonable to expect that (absent legal incentives to operate differently) corporations would behave differently.

At-will employment, philosophically, trusts the company to pursue its own rational interests and gives it the right to terminate an employee if it believes retaining him to be outside of its interest. I don't fully agree with it, but that's what it is.

Collective bargaining is something that governments have decided that workers have the right to do, even though unionization is decidedly against management's interest.

The fundamental question here is: is it reasonable to expect companies to continue to employ people who, lawfully and ethically, act against the company's interest? There's no simple answer to that one. Greg Smith didn't do anything wrong, but I can't say Goldman would have been wrong to fire him (had he not resigned). On the other hand, the social benefit to unions (in theory, at least) and whistleblowing provides a good reason for the law to protect some categories of employees acting against employer interests.

Over time, the laissez-faire policy regarding employment relationships has been scaled back-- in the U.S., not enough; in many European countries, too much. It's now technically illegal to fire someone for attempting to organize a union, filing a discrimination or harassment claim, escalating a disagreement to HR, or even publicly disclosing one's salary (try that one in most white-collar contexts and see how long you last!) The problem with at-will employment is that companies have become very good at making illegal firings look "performance"-related.
Browser Garbage Collection and Frame Rate
\\As I pointed out before, there are at least 80 different files that need to be encoded and stored for the approximately 4:15 sec video.

Anyone knows if this is true? Really 80?
Once it's been released? There are various closed source software projects that currently allow you to install software through the Software Center, such as VirtualBox and Chrome. You just add click on a link on their site to add the PPA to Ubuntu's package management system.
If you're really, really serious about getting them to stop bothering you, accept an offer from them but then don't show up for work.
I remember how ridiculous Apple's RAM prices used to be and you're right about their pricing strategy on iPhone storage representing a large markup. As I said, Apple's margins are high for a consumer electronics company, partly because they're able to employ those pricing tiers.

The point of my post wasn't to defend Apple, it was to show that comparing the selling price and bill of materials figures to highlight profit is simplistic and wrong. What actually matters is gross margin and operating margin, both of which are made public so there's no need to refer to the estimated BoM as the OP did. This applies to all companies, the all-too-common misunderstanding of BoM figures is a pet hate of mine.
Ask HN: What's the best use case for QR Codes?
I'm playing with QR Codes and their capabilities. I know QR Codes have a bad rep. Has anyone seen/used QR Codes where they made sense?
Well, we should aim to do better than 'good enough'. There are some bits of android that absolutely rock:

* I really like that the OS can handle so much of the scaling and resizing for you as you move from a 3 inch phone all the way up to 10 inch tablets

* I think google is to be commended for building an eco-system that involves so many different hardware devices, manufacturers, etc

* The latest look and feel in 4.1 and 4.2 is turning out really well. A well designed android app looks great [1][2]

* The intents system and the way you can link together different apps is very innovative. I wish iOS would copy it!

* Android is evolving at a really rapid pace.

There are some bits that are 'good enough'. You mentioned many of them. They get the job done, but are not necessarily the best way of doing things, or they need plenty more polish. I would add one thing to your list: performance. Project butter still has helped, but android still feels nowhere near as performant as the apple devices.

Finally there are some bits with just plain suck. Google HAS to do something about the upgrade story on existing devices. They can add features and optimise existing code until they are blue in the face, but it isn't going to do them one iota of good if 95% of the devices out there will never see the updates!

[1] - Checkout Instapaper and mint here. IMHO they look really good: http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/spotlight...

[2] - http://androidniceties.tumblr.com/
Problem with Adress Book is that it doesn't do page flipping, although it looks like a regular book.
Intentional typo. A lot of people call it Perv, as in perversion of justice.
I hope it breathes some life into iOS. I feel like Cupertino is still thinking people are beating the "iOS is way more pretty than Android" moniker to death when it hasn't been true for a while, meanwhile, I understand it's an opinion, but I don't think iOS has aged as well.

Toning down overt skeumorphism is just the start.
Things like version control should be taught along with the "first week setup" stuff in courses that cover CS topics. For example, in your CS101 class you should learn how to do some basic version control while you're learning to write your first Python/Java/whatever "Hello World". This way you can all be learning about Git (or whatever is being taught) together and students and maybe TAs can help out with skills (though email, course discussion pages, etc) so that the professor can spend more time on course content.

One of the big values of college is having a lot of other people around you learning the same things at the same time. This can be helpful when learning about subject matter and about tools like version control.
CompSci should include at least a semester or two of business classes, including the delegation lessons in the HBS article posted earlier today.
As an aside $200 per month for a CDN is pretty cheap, how are they not charging by bandwidth used?
I agree with integrating version control into the exercises/labs. When I was at school, we had to submit our work over email/Blackboard, but submitting work through a version control system makes much more sense.
Yes, I get why people don't like Address Book. But it's not an e-book or e-reader, so "page flipping in an e-book" is referring to something else (presumably, iBooks).
Because pages in an e-reader are not physical sheets bound together that require flipping over before you can see the page below.

If you can render the next page faster, then why fake a 'page turn' that takes time to animate.

It's the very definition of skeuomorphism.
Nine ways to make your cell phone last through the storm
Restarting doesn't get rid of tabs.
Yes, I get the complaints about Address Book. But "page flipping in an e-book" is either really poorly written, or was not referring to Address Book to begin with, since Address Book is not an e-book. Hence my question.
Amazing PH7
Nicely done. One thing: I think you need to be careful it doesn't get frustrating for users - perhaps have the messages dismiss when you click on website elements, and try to place the bubble so it doesn't hide the wrong part of the app?
How to install Windows 8 from a USB key
I would highly recommend http://www.silinternational.com/lingualinks/LANGUAGELEARNING...

Interviews with successful language learners gives a great set of language learning techniques and methodologies.
Ask HN: Why is Youtube not https strict?
You can access http and https on Youtube. Youtube can handles millions of users, so the argument "encryption" takes time doesn't seem legitimate. Or is it? Maybe not... since youtube serves videos, not text.

I don't think engineers would make that kind of mistake leaving http on. There must be a good reason, right?

Any thoughts on this?
I wonder how many people use FF exclusively. This is what breaks all these fancy bookmarking apps for me. I use Chrome, FF, Safari, even IE, depending on what computer I am on.

If I had to standardize on a single browser for the bookmarks, I'd choose Chrome.
"Some students might have many great teachers and be in a position where school is very positive for them."

I've never met anyone who said this about her public high school education. In university, many people said this about their educations in private schools, so I assume such a positive experience is possible. I'm convinced it's rare in public-funded secondary schools in the USA.
This makes me wonder - who at Apple decided it was necessary to make their own maps app?

It's easy to blame Forstall for a crappy product. But if someone else was responsible for mandating the change, assigning him the project, and pushing an impossible deadline, maybe it's more their fault.
Very little that was directly transferable to the real world. Some may argue this doesn't apply to CS, but I think applied computing science is what I'd look for.

Things that were not covered included:

- Basic business skills

- Basic sales skills (We all have to sell our ideas, be it to peers, departments, customers.)

- Storytelling skills

- People networking skills

- Understanding very few businesses have technology problems, but instead business problems that they are trying to solve with technology.

- You don't understand anything if you don't understand how the data in any system inputs, exists, interacts, and outputs. You don't understand the business if you don't understand the data. You should not be allowed anywhere near building software for an organization if you don't understand the data.

- Understanding that the data in many ways is the system. No software/system is useful without data.

- Learning an organization's competitive advantage and magnifying it with software. Too often programmers interpret things killing the competitive advantage.

- It's not about you, it's about the user. Users rarely care what you code in, or the frameworks, or whatever you've done to make your own life selfishly easier and continuing to neglect actually getting to know their world, their data, and the the problems they face with it.

- Marketing skills - eliminate feature babble and focus on benefits once you've been in user's shoes working on users problems.

- Communicating with the world to first understand, and then address their needs. You are no better than a technically clueless business guy if you make assumptions as blindly in other ways about the business process.

- How the real world does not start every project with a clean slate like CS projects. This is probably one of the biggest gaps.

- Learning to learn other people's code, refactor + more.

Instead, we learned the theoretical using many languages building the same kinds of things over and over for 4 years. It was awesome to the geek in me. Sprinkle in some UI or database skills, and yes, I did get very good at learning any technology I needed, but implementing it in a meaningful, sustainable way. But the real world used very little of what I learnt for 4 years.

When I took CS in the late 90's I had to learn to build web apps, databases, load balancing, administrating servers, all on my own, not to mention getting a business education largely by learning to swim by diving in.

The social skills are really big. Partially I think CS attracts folks that aren't extroverted, and it can be a problem.

We're at or nearing a crossroads in my opinion where the entire world has come to the internet and technology, and those building technologies and online need to be better bridges in interfacing with humanity.
When iOS was new, it was incredible. But it's mostly failed to evolve since then. There have been a few minor improvements over the years, but Springboard in particular feels really old, especially for the iPad. And many of the first-party apps are poor.

Apple has succeeded in the mobile market largely because of their excellent hardware and their app ecosystem. But iOS itself is a little disappointing. It's due for a major evolution, not just more incremental tweaking.
Lest CodePlex perplex — Free Software Foundation
Hm. There were rumours about 18-24 months ago that Ive wanted out of Apple. I wonder if this decision is a consequence of that previous discord.

I also wonder what this means for the future of hardware design at Apple. If Ive must now look after both the hardware and the software, he must be less hands-on in the day-to-day work on individual designs. Does this imply that Apple are not expecting to iterate on the hardware design on a high level from now on and have identified the software as the area with most potential for aesthetic improvement?
Just post good content and comments, and the karma will take care of itself. Some times are better than others to post, but when people flood those time periods with linkbait its obvious what they're doing.
NFC sharing between Android and Windows Phone 8
An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi by Bill Joy
It didn't stop Gruber from complaining about the lack of cell data (which, thankfully, will be fixed when the $300 Nexus 7 flavor comes out).
Hahahaha.

So you've never heard about what the ARM was originally designed for?

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/A500.html

I guess that was a while ago! And it certainly was desktop-class. It beat the pants off a 12 MHz 286.
Show HN: Coder Heya, a central place for programming guides/references.
> Can someone please tell me why this is worthy of HN front page?

Sure! I'd be happy to.

The way Hacker News works is, people submit content.

If people like the content, they vote it up. Sufficiently high-voted content reaches the front page. 55 people have voted this up at the time of this comment, feeling the content was worth their attention. Given the recency of the content relative to the votes it has received, it occupies the position you see on the front page.

Is there anything else I can help with?
OK, so we agree on the title at least?

2) I assume you mean the graph towards the end called Annualized Job Openings vs. Annual Degrees Granted (2008-2018). That seems to indicate the opposite - job openings in Computer Science exceeding degrees by a factor of ~2.5.

3) So it is possible for some universities to foster entrepreneurial spirit, would be interesting to see what kind of factors are important for this.

4) If building Facebook were trivial, they'd have been drowned by competition before they could achieve critical user mass. Their challenges were probably more on the lines of good UI and achieving traction, so I see what you're saying that they didn't exactly need PhDs in CS to build the backend. But they did have plenty of complex problems to solve, I am sure.
Thanks for what you've down, I'll play a little with it. :)
That Podcasts app is really really a piece of "work". whoever designed it should be fired.
There's a hurricane centered below New York right now that is drastically altering the wind patterns.

Unless you're seeing something I'm not...
Why is an ebook ever riddled with typos?
Curiously, I can't get Google maps to show a name for the lake, unlike several other Swiss and Italian lakes in that zone.

May be the reason.
I believe it is the same thing, but I won't swear to it. That it did it at all was news to me.
dear PayPal, please improve the UI design of your site. :)
Actually, pre-university education also includes things that require academic freedom and the protection tenure affords for that.
I think you're focusing on the wrong thing and getting the wrong take away. It's not about the price. It's about the experience. It's classic Android vs iPhone (for some at least): do you want a phone that provides a really good experience, or one that provides a mediocre (well, now really good) experience but with many fewer limitations, more features and more options.

Do you want an iPad/iPhone/WinRT/Android tablet with "apps", or do you want an x86 device with the ability to run whatever binary code you want and an OS that enables that.

It's not about price, because you're right, I can find devices in both categories at literally all sorts of data points. But it is about the experience.

Valve's business RELIES on the experience that enables users to run, in this case, native code. Since they're being pushed out as a result of this shift... they're naturally trying to warn people and shift interest to a platform where they can more easily operate... or survive.

In fact, your example is ironic. People are more likely to go buy a $500 iPad than they are a $300 full featured Windows laptop. That's exactly what worries Valve. Or it should.
The best solution to this unfairness is to give everyone a choice in which school their children attend, by instituting publicly-funded vouchers for every student.
The US actually lags behind most of western Europe and Canada in social mobility. Especially among the poorest.

"European Socialism" is not that different from the US. In Europe you may get free child care, health care, etc. and industries that the government likes get subsidies. In the US, this assistance comes in the form of tax cuts. Tax exemptions for employers who pay for health care, the child tax credit, tax deductions for favored industries, etc. Including tax expenditures, the US spends more on social welfare than most of western Europe while doing a poorer job of ensuring it reaches the right people.
4.2 is officially due on November 13. We shouldn't really be expecting it before that.
Yes, rounded corner is in Apple's DNA.
Gawker sites are down
The term "Israeli Arabs" in particular is something of a term of art, meaning roughly: people with Israeli citizenship who primarily identify themselves as Arabs. Jews originating in the Arab countries (the Mizrahi Jews) tend not to consider themselves Israeli Arabs, or be counted as such in censuses. Since Israel identifies itself as "the Jewish state", they identify with the majority Jewish population instead.

Whether Mizrahi Jews are Arabs in a more general sense ("Arab Jews") is a more complex question with more disagreement. My sense is that most don't identify as Arabs, at least not anymore, though a minority do. But they definitely don't, in general, identify with the term "Israeli Arab", which denotes a distinct socio-cultural group.

(It's probably worth noting, though, that many people who are counted as Israeli Arabs in that sense don't identify with the term either: a substantial number prefer other terms that incorporate a specifically Palestinian identity, such as "Palestinian citizen of Israel".)
It was a decision that was forced by a number of factors. Google wouldn't agree to providing directions for turn-by-turn navigation, so Apple had to seek other solutions.
No. I see each new version tweaking it to be better and better. iOS has stagnated a bit and I suspect Ives is going to change that.
One place to update apps on a system would be nice. I know windows as lots of legacy, but how many apps are optional system updates on windows rt?
I think not 450 it is about 10% of the company. Don`t forget that they employ worldwide and it is interesting where they will lay off in the US or abroad.
That and I see Ives pushing for consistency.
They have SeaMicro: http://www.seamicro.com/
And given Nvidia has never tried to do anything on the server, it might be that AMD is already ahead of many others.
I think jobs-level is unattainable really. I am just hoping Cook is a consistently great CEO.
Scott Forstall Out at Apple, Along With Retail Head
It's horrifying bad. Even the app that I use for my (relatively) ancient Nokia N8 (Podcatcher) is miles better than Apple's Podcasts app. The SO complains about it all the time.
A potent sign of times to come...
If I wasn't months away from graduation I would switch over to Math. I wish I had taken more math classes in school and more programming courses online. I hope that more math courses are offered at Udacity and Coursera. More and more I see that programming is just applied proofs.
I used to use a system like this for my software, and unfortunately I found that it did a terrible job of educating users. People would work through the entire tutorial (~5 minutes), get to the end, and then email/call me with questions that were covered in the tutorial.

I switched to just showing a few short videos demonstrating things and it works much better. It's disappointing because I was really excited about the potential of an interactive guide (and I spent a long time building it), but I can't argue with the numbers. My guess is that users were so focused on completing the steps that they didn't bother actually looking at the software, so they didn't retain anything. I can confirm that this is what happened with me when I clicked through to the link above. I clicked through all of the bubbles and finished the tutorial without reading a single word of text on the actual page.
All true, of course. But numerically accurate data on a proxy quantity that you don't care about are not necessarily inferior to numerically inaccurate data on the quantity you care about. Both pose challenges to interpretation. It's easy to be seduced by clear numbers and worry less about what the numbers mean. We can argue about which fields count as "science", but many fields try to learn from non-reproducible data.

(And I say this having spent my career in the physical sciences. There's too much noise induced by people who present statistically solid analyses of numbers whose connection to the core questions is much more tenuous...)
How can it not be prior art?
Here's a tool that I wrote for practising French verb conjugation that also uses Mac OS X speech synthesis.
https://github.com/euoia/ReVerb
A list of the best free online University courses in USA and UK
A list of the best free online University courses in USA and UK. Some tips to choose between them, successfully attend only the best ones and create your aside University career without spending a cent!
I don't think it will all go. I think the stuff like faux leather interfaces will though.
you hit it right on the money with the nobel prize winners :)
I have to (guiltily) admit reading a krimi or bestseller is fun, you know the words, you're done after a couple train rides, it was usually exiting - of course then you forget it, because the contents where basically nothing. I have liked max frisch though and Kafka is also surprisingly easy when you consider people study him, also thanks for karl may suggestion I'll put it on my to read list. The thing is sometimes you want something to think about and I know there's many great german authors and I'd like to be able to "get" them like I do Borges :)
They are not in danger of outright failure, but they are in danger of significantly reduced earnings and stock price, which is always a big deal for a publicly traded corporation.