skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $REDACTED, like other $ETHNICITY families who spoke about the exam in interviews in the past month, did not deny engaging in extensive test preparation.

Can anyone see this sentence coming out of the New York Times for any other ethnic group? It's like studying geometry has the whiff of something suspicious to it.
Copyright is normally copy and other rights. Thus, for many years, "this edition not available in the United States" was printed in UK editions of many books.

I think (but I'm not sure) that the UK makes a difference between personal sales of out-of-country goods (this is okay) and a business selling out-of-country goods (this is not fine). A notable case is Tesco vs Levi jeans. There have been some other cases involving DVD importing.
I bought up a half dozen Touchpad chargers when they were being cleared out for $5 a piece. I did it mainly because they were the cheapest 2A adapters that work with anything I'd come across, but it's good to know they're efficient and well-built as well.
Here is one cheaper solution: simulate a multi agent system on your laptop. You don't need parallel hardware to ave multiple agents.
Why not just work out the bugs in his redesign? You said he got it done extremely quickly. It didn't seem like he was presenting it as a final version, but rather as a demo. Instead you throw it all out? How long did the replacement version take to finish? How many people worked on it? Was it feature-complete and free of bugs?

This reads like someone getting their spirit broken.
Excuse my irritability, but no one here needs to hear that "one should not leave [the internet] out altogether".

And this is obviously not what Hamming was talking about in 1986.
I'm guessing he was just open and honest to all of the founders and sometimes being open when you run a huge VC firm is a risky challenge. So not recording it means he can offer insights without a clip of it going on TechCrunch.
Brent, thanks for this. It is odd because Windows 8 Pro is really smooth. Lets hope someone at Microsoft gets a hold of this and they release an update sooner-then-later.
Latest VUC Podcast - Ameche App Platform
The VUC guys had me on their show yesterday for a casual discussion about Tropo, Twilio and the future of voice APIs. Tons of fun.
Totally agree, and this applies to almost every creative endeavor I can think of. If you want to write a book, throw words on a page. If you want to start a company, launch an MVP and iterate fast. All things being equal, doing is better than not doing, and doing well is better than doing poorly.

If you're interested in this topic w.r.t software engineering, check out Michael Lopp's article in The Magazine about Stables and Volatiles[1]. Really good piece on how companies are composed of and need both Volatiles like The Kid who move fast and innovate, and Stables who clean up the mess and move the company towards profitability.

[1]: http://the-magazine.org/1/stables-and-volatiles
No that will be gross values, the statement about ~77K being on the high end for the UK is right.

Easy experiment I went to jobserve.com a well known UK programmer job site and did a search for the word "programmer"

its breakdown of offered gross salaries is this

Not stated on job 39
Below £15K 1
£15K-£20K 28
£20K-£25K 79
£25K-£30K 173
£30K-£40K 286
£40K-£50K 247
£50K-£75K 166
£75K-£100K 27
Above £100K 11

Suggests a bell curve to me with the median being £35000
Brent the author here. I'm heading out on a two week road trip to speak at a few conferences. I hurried to get the device usable before I fly out to Vegas on Sunday for DevConnections, and I started putting it through its paces right away. I wanted to feel confident that I'd be able to rely on it as a backup presentation device and leave my iPad at home. After the 2-week road trip, I'm home for a few days, then out of the country for vacation. I wouldn't be able to return the Surface easily over the next month, so that's why I made the decision to bail.

Plus, I gotta be honest - I don't think there's going to be a resale value for these, so I didn't want to take a $200-$300 bath by selling it on eBay in a couple of months.
Bing?...ew
Looking Under the Covers of StatsD
Go at Google (presentation at SPLASH)
If my slides are PDF, what's the simplest path to implementing this? Can iMovie do this?
I like the idea, but I'm not sure how well it would work in reality. Conspicuously absent are examples of products already reduced in size. Airplane seats immediately come to mind.
The title "Facebook Asks Rogue Blogger to Adhere to Responsible Disclosure Policies" would present a completely different viewpoint while not requiring that the body of the article change at all.
Ask HN: What are good resources(videos/blogs/books) for ext js?
At my work, we are attempting to work on ext js for the first time. I would like to ask fellow hackers about the resources that can help me pick up and get up to the speed on ext js framework.
Short answer: not really.

Long answer:

In [1]: from operator import attrgetter

In [2]: class Person:
...: def __init__(self, name):
...: self.name = name
...:

In [3]: me = Person('walrus')

In [4]: getattr(me, 'name')
Out[4]: 'walrus'

In [5]: attrgetter('name')(me)
Out[5]: 'walrus'

This is potentially useful if you're using `map`:

In [6]: people = [me, Person('aschwo')]

In [7]: list(map(lambda obj: getattr(obj, 'name'), people))
Out[7]: ['walrus', 'aschwo']

In [8]: list(map(attrgetter('name'), people))
Out[8]: ['walrus', 'aschwo']

Really, though, the functional programming idioms don't meld too well with Python. I think this is a lot nicer:

In [9]: [person.name for person in people]
Out[9]: ['walrus', 'aschwo']
"These corrosive tendencies were reinforced by a new policy of officer rotation after six months in command, which encouraged many leaders to simply keep their heads down until they could move on—and likewise encouraged superior officers to wait out the tours of bad officers serving beneath them. Instead of weeding out bad officers, senior leaders tended to closely supervise them, encouraging habits of micromanagement that plague the Army to this day."

Some companies have this policy and it seems to be at the root of their management trouble. It causes short-term thinking and what make me look good as opposed to what makes this place better.
Why do you find it strange that the department in charge of enforcement of the laws of the United States would have an opinion on a case concerning the interpretation of one of those laws?
The energy density of pneumatic storage are pathetic
This is a good writeup in general, but it fails to mention the fact that under glibc, POSIX AIO is implemented with a thread pool anyway. Only native (non-portable) Linux AIO is implemented by the kernel.

In general, unless you're doing something super high-performance, you should not bother with AIO. It's kind of one of those "if you have to ask, you don't need to know," situations.
I've had a side project on the go for 18 months now and am about to complete the third version. Each time I've started from scratch but the difference is each time I have cared just a bit more about the quality of the code and planned things more in advanced. It's still not perfect (by a long way at that) but if I had't just dived in on the first version I fear I would never have shipped the first version let alone be on to launching the 3 do over. This one, should (fingers crossed) be the one that I stick with, hopefully it is extendable and I actually cared about database design and normalisation this time around so that should work well for a while too.
Anyone can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99
Just register here -
https://windowsupgradeoffer.com/en-US/Registration

Date of purchase: Make up any date within last 2 months.

Name of retailer: Just say whatever retailer.

PC Brand: I typed in dell

PC Model: I typed in random anything.

That is all it requires, no receipt verification is needed. Anyone can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99. It gives you a promo code, and you download and install from there.

Personally I am loving Windows 8 Pro. Best $14.99 I have spent in a while.
I, in turn, have no reason to believe that the average systems programmer is smarter than Robin Milner or Guy Steele. So what?
Keeping an open mind is always great. However, being unable to focus on one task and become superior at it is quickly becoming an issue. Today, if I remember correctly, the average attention span is only 8 seconds.
Remember: Jack of all trades is the master of none.
They just haven't got large scale systems designed and installed for storing power.

Its not impossible. It just wasn't a requirement before so there hasn't been a lot of focus. There are technologies out there right now that would probably work ok. If not, energy storage just needs more focus.

This one looks very promising (http://lightsailenergy.com/tech.html) and I'm sure there are a lot of other viable approaches.

The fact that they have excess power that needs to be stored and then redistributed is GREAT news.

One person mentioned something about needing to store power for months. Obviously, that long time frame is not the requirement.
If you look at Neo's bookshelf at the beginning of the matrix, the books are on cybernetics and skeptical hypothesizes. (At least as far as I could tell the last time I saw it.)

A subtle touch that probably went unnoticed by most of the audience.
Hi, the author here. I'm using voltage sag to describe how the voltage drops as the load increases. (This has nothing to do with the presence of a battery or not.) Chargers normally are designed to output a constant voltage until the charger hits maximum power. But with the iPhone charger, the voltage is 5.2 volts if there's no load, and steadily drops to 4.6 volts as the load increases. If a device is expecting 5 volts, this could cause problems. Also, charging times could increase since the voltage is lower.

Generally, if the voltage drops under load like this, it's a sign of a poorly designed charger that doesn't regulate well. But since Apple's charger appears otherwise well-designed, it's a bit of a puzzle. One possibility is that maybe the exact voltage input to the iPhone doesn't matter, and the designers knowing this didn't care about the voltage sag. Another possibility is for some unknown reason they deliberately designed the charger this way.
Ask HN: How do you get to VCs if you don't live in the valley?
Assuming you don't live in any of the major US tech spots (SF/SV/NY/etc), and you don't have any existing "relationships" with VCs, advisors, mentors, or incubators, how do you get yourself and your product in front of the people who can help you go to the next level?

AngelList, Caplinked, and the rest all appear to require that you have an existing network in place to be remotely useful.
I was just at a Microsoft store this morning and I did not find the above experience to be true at all. In fact when I stopped by the Apple store the staff was much more intrusive.
I can assure you that as a run-of-the-mill customer, I will likely never check a UL code. I don't know if you get your casings from the same place, putting your own electronics inside, but I feel that if you want to trade on your identity as a purveyor of quality products you're going to have to look at least a little different from bad products. To borrow and twist a line from Seinfeld, "Adjacent to trash, is trash."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKC5jjFkfgo

I did make the mistake, though, so sorry about that.
Show HN: Spring + HTML5Boilerplate + GAE = A cool mashup in one weekend
this is why I'm going to the US, in a nutshell. Sadly, there are not a lot of options at that level here.. (aside from working in a local Google office)
This is what happened to the river in my town last year when it "rained a lot" during Irene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p47txwmuwCY

This is what it normally looks like:

http://franzphoto.com/index.cfm?p=i.19
"Surface RT" is not "Surface for Windows 8 Pro". Windows RT is a stripped down version of Windows designed for lower power CPUs. It's also designed to be 100% Metro based. You can't install non-metro apps on it, you can't even buy Windows RT, it has to be pre-installed on each device.
"Surface RT" is a touch-based device for holding in your hands while surfing the net and using the typical social apps.

That you even had to clarify that, on a tech site like Hacker News, speaks to what a marketing and product-segmentation disaster Surface is. So tell me - which one do I buy to get Office? That I can run office means I can run Windows 8 applications, right? It has an x86 chip in it, right? Or is it ARM? There IS one that is x86-based, right?

I predict brisk sales, and even brisker returns.
I agree. I've written a fair bit of python and I lean fairly far towards the FP style. However it feels like ice skating uphill compared to using a language that has FP baked in.
I still have that issue around here somewhere. Makes me feel like an old fart when I read stuff like this, or see my old typewriter in a museum.
Wow. Kindly+thoughtfully toned, pertinent and constructive criticism that is rewarding and encouraging. And at the top. I wish this wasn't as refreshing in HN as it is, but it is damn refreshing.
Thank you. This is a really cool project!
Peter Norvig at the 2012 Singularity Summit
I did, though there isn't really a spot for it. I doubt they'll do anything, but oh well. No big deal.
Good to know Monoprice makes a good product.
I feel you on this. I am a seasoned dev and have worked on lots of projects. But it is always someone elses vision and I kind of fill in the blanks and make it happen.

When you have to supply the vision, it gets A LOT harder! I think it is also distorting when you've worked on projects that have had success finacially but are not really great in the dev department.

A lot goes into a profitable project besides just good development.
Stuyvesant has plenty of bad teachers. The good schools are largely defined by getting the good students. If we switched the student body of Stuyvesant with that of Washington Irving, Washington Irving would become one of the best high schools in the city and Stuyvesant would become a school where parents beg their students not be sent.
attrgetter takes an attribute name and returns a function that, when passed an object, returns that attribute from that object. So it's a curried getattr. These are equivalent:

f = attrgetter("some_property")

f = lambda obj: getattr(obj, "some_property")
The Windows world has had this for years with windows tablet PCs. Buy one of those.

Too big? Too bad - that's a laptop. Not enough battery life? Too bad - that's a laptop.
> This is not uncommon in the security world where vendors get some time to get their stuff together and release a fix.

What is the fix to data that is already out in the wild? The only fix is to warn everyone affected as soon as possible.
This is an intriguing article, whether or not this true.

Now to be honest.. Facebook's platform is so open and easy to get information from people and their friends, that a typical web developer could create an App that requires the user's email address upon signing in via Facebook Connect. Upon successful connection, the developer could write a script to save that email address and post some article about the user using his/her real name. This could get the users attention, attracting their friends. Once they sign in, however, the script will store their email address as well.
How long will this work for? Until Facebook denies the rights to your application.

If you want to make $5, sell that list to this guy.. again. haha.
I think that more experienced programmers can achieve the same results as The Kid. In a larger organization, you may have separation of programming roles so you may not have a 'Kid' at your disposal.

If you have a method for rapid prototyping or something which allows you to bash out a quick proof of concept. Sometimes management needs that as the visual impact goes a long way to getting projects approved.

So long as you then convey to others that there are bigger long term concerns and proper design to look into when making the full version you can take it from there.
Unsemantic
> Relief of generals has become so rare that a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of the war.

This is a part of our society's disconnection from meritocracy and transition to a state where a privileged caste rules and extracts from society on the basis of arbitrary marks of differentiation.
It must be great by now. I was regularly playing TF2 in Wine 4-5 years ago, it was good enough for me then.
Stochator: a little JS library for random value generation
Slideshare have a feature called "slidecasts" that lets you upload slides and sync them up against an mp3 recording: http://help.slideshare.com/forums/326091-slidecasts

Our site Lanyrd encourages the creation of a page-per-talk which can embed slides, video and other talk materials - here's an example: http://lanyrd.com/2012/jquery-san-francisco-conference/swmdt...
But this is not for users. These are slides used in a talk served by presentation-oriented software. The user of the software is the person writing and doing the talk, not us. The fact that it's HTML5 makes it very easy to share with people who have not seen the talk, but the primary purpose of the tool is to help the speaker, not late readers.
Not really answering your question, but more to the point of the discussion in my opinion, a() + b() could be ambiguous if a() and b() are functions with side effects and the evaluation order of the +-operator is not specified.
"But I may do the same project for $100k which allows a company to reduce its internal helpdesk needs from, say, 25 people down to 5 people, saving $400k per year. That should generally be a no-brainer too."

Here's the problem I have as a manger. Answer me these questions:

1. How do I know your software will actually allow me to replace 20 people?

2. How do I know the project will succeed, i.e. actually finish in a usable state?

3. How do I know the project will be on-time or on-budget?

Historically, software projects fail all three of these questions rather regularly. And most people who have any kind of dealing with software know this, so they know that it may end up costing them $200,000 to replace old software with buggy new software which doesn't do everything the old software did, requires training new people, and maybe doesn't even reduce costs.

That's what the parent meant - software projects are not as predictable as accounting. They also tend to take much, much longer and cost much more before you see whether they worked or not.
I'm sure there's great programmers out there who can do things fast and well, so hopefully people won't be too quick to judge any fast workers because of this story. Tempting to think there's a quality cost to speed; could be the true cost is just a high salary.
> a language like Go, which is aimed at more advanced developers

Reading this the average developer devices to continue using C++, which is all fun and games...
Your ebook reader is more than a store portal
There's http://www.videolectures.net, but I think that they only host their own material.
Facebook: Our Sustainability Efforts
All Youtube livestreams blocked only in Germany - why?
Can you give us more details on how you are using this feature to improve your developer documentation? I'm working on yet-unreleased developer docs and I'm trying to figure out the analytics that will be useful for growing our developer base and for improving our docs once they are released. Analytics for products is familiar territory for me, but not analytics for documentation since it doesn't follow a predictable flow/funnel to optimize.
I played around with the Surface for a few hours and I had almost the exact same experience as the author. I like the iPad but I also really wanted to like the Surface. I just can't.
Taking courses isn't going to make anyone a skilled programmer. As Norvig himself pointed out, that usually comes from having on the order of 10,000 hours of experience:

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Very knowledgeable opinion sir. This is indeed true. Us as windows developers are required to add a sleep statement every few lines of code so as it not make it appear responsive.

A sleep() statement?! Novice! That won't even busy-wait! I like to loop around for a few thousand times writing nonsense to dummy variables. I earned those time slices - no way am I going to just give them back to the OS scheduler.
Agree completely with your first sentence, well said and thanks for saying it.

Disagree with the second statement - I may be wrong, but I think at least a lot of Google's revenue comes from placing ads in search. No selling of privacy, or at least done in a way that people completely understand.
It would seem the insurmountable stumbling block there would be the need to move whatever was acting as the stylus against whatever was the recording medium at a fairly constant, or at least discoverable, rate for the duration of the recording.
Infoq do this, but I'm not sure if they accept arbitrary content.
To be fair, part of this is because companies consistently cheap out on programmers in a way they don't with accountants. I've worked with some tremendously good software consultancies that can really turn out product, but they charge exorbitent rates, just like PWC, etc.
1 + 1 != 2 if the 1s are magnitudes of vectors - if the directions are opposite, then they can be 0. In fact, 0 <= 1 + 1 <= 2 in that system.
But there will be no damage which is more important. My iPad simply slow charges (1A) on my old iPhone & my newer/current Samsung & LG 1A phone charger. Meanwhile my iPad charger works on all my devices - retired iPod Mini, my old iPhone 3G (now iAlarm Clock), Samsung Admire, LG Motion 4G, iPod Touch 7G. In the latter case, charging isn't any faster of course since the devices will only pull 500mA (Admire) or 1A.

The only chargers that I have that won't charge my all of my modern iDevices are old ones meant for iPods (500mA, no signal on the data pins) and my old Belkin iPhone car charger doesn't work with my iPad (Probably only 500mA w/ signal for iPhones. I'd have to check).

Another interesting tidbit: It appears that my car's Pioneer DEH 9400 head unit (aftermarket of course) seems to inform my devices that it can supply 1A of power through its two USB ports. This is the first time I've seen that outside of dedicated chargers and Macs (I assume of course that some PCs do this as well but I haven't seen one yet).
Do you see anything wrong with using StackOverflow to manage community Q&A over self hosted?

Also, are there any good self-hosted versions of StackOverflow? Is there a way to use SO on your company site in a way that works as a portal to SO, but with all the Q&A visibility limited to tags/queries relevant to your product?
Do you see the same issues with mail and word slowness and saving issues?
OTOH: if Windows 8 were as glitchy as say Windows 95, it wouldn't make it in the market, either, and I bet you could have sold thousands of iPhones with the stability of Windows 95 in '95 for $10000 a piece.

The market is more competitive and there is progress in the crap people accept, not only in phones, but everywhere (still too little, though. Recently, someone asked me to figure out how to set their new €100 or so radio alarm clock. I read the manual. The thing looked nice, but was a nightmare to operate. Things like "wake me an hour earlier tomorrow" were impossible to set, even with the manual in hand. So, I advised to return it. The guy listened, but I would hope that, sometime in e future, people would not need my advice to vote with their wallet)
I think any community the size of Ubuntu is going to have parts that are sub-optimal. I think it's unavoidable at that scale.
Sales of the Galaxy S III rose following the unveiling of the iPhone 5
What makes the iPad feel fragile?