skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The iPod Mile and other non-SI units...
In discussing a data import we're working on, the unit "items-per-hour" started creeping into office conversation.

This set us off down the path of talking about non-SI units for things, swimming pools of this, bus-lengths of that.

Then I remembered a similar conversation from a previous workplace where we invented the "iPod Mile" as a measure of storage capacity.

Assuming an iPod with 10GB storage being about 10cm long (this was a while ago), one meter of iPods laid out end-to-end would have 100GB of storage. Given that a mile is about 1600 meters: 1 iPm ~= 160TB

It served little purpose other than for our own amusement, though it did creep in to the occasional spec sheet (you've gotta stay sane somehow).

So, my question to you:

What non-SI units do you find creeping into your day-to-day lives?
> I’ll hang onto my iPad for the time being. I’ll certainly keep the Macbook Air – I’m not quite ready to return to Windows yet.

The paradox of monocultures; where you write bold, flowery proclamations that only 2/3rds of your computer devices will be made by Apple.
This seems to me to be far more useful than user-defined literals (the conflicting feature). At least, I can think of many programs where digit separators would be nice - but for user-defined literals, I don't see them as providing much. We could already make invocations like "pixels(200)" and being able to say "200_pixels" doesn't add much to that, except complicating the parser.
Summly hits top 10 in app store
I've built a number of private online communities over the years and have experimented with language around exclusivity and scarcity enough to know that it works well to draw interest where it was previously difficult to get people to pay attention.

I've often wondered why more startups don't try to build some sense of exclusivity to the sign-up process. Everyone is so focused on removing the barriers to sign-up and getting the user to improve their vanity metrics. Getting quality users by creating barriers to entry can be a tactic as well...
I agree that "nearly every computer language" can be considered functional, as "nearly every computer language" can be considered imperative.

What I do not agree is when "functional programmers" claim that language is not "functional" just because it is not "pure functional" or Haskel alike.
Mobile apps upending video game industry
Your link should be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

Interesting stuff!
Ask HN: How to attract a mentor?
I'm sure that quite a few of you had a great idea, got it going under your own steam but then began to struggle with direction, strategy, scaling, volume of admin, addiction to Angry Birds, coffee bean budget, whatever. Then you found a mentor, who helped you get past that or those problems and now everything is going swimmingly.

To those of you - how did you find or manage to attract that person? Did they come to you? Did you have to get down on your knees and beg? Did you make promises, sign your life away?

I'd love to know! I founded Not a Bad Dad earlier this year. It's still a tiny shadow of what I've got planned, and the reception has been great so far, but I'm struggling to figure out what to do next and how to do it. Would love to find someone who's been here before!
Sign up for our upcoming beta release - Staff timekeeping for SME
Extremely true
An Indoor Cloud & The Best Inventions of 2012
Slides: Systems Programming at Twitter
How does this compare to a "attractive female" advantage a girl has in an otherwise-100 % male startup for example?

Of course, being fit, in a good shape both physically and mentally are - always - indisputable advantages over those who lack such qualities. However, this completely misses the point that an attractive female has such a tremendous control over the social structure within the company that it alone is something no single man, regardless of how confident, how superior physically and mentally, can never have. Of course it's another question how a girl can take an advantage of this, if at all.
Coating plastic in this material would add mass, not weight. You can fill a balloon with helium, and in a vacuum it would be heavier because it has more "stuff" in it. But in our atmosphere, it is less dense than the air, so it floats because the air it displaces is pulled by gravity with greater force.

So the weight is non-zero, but it's actually negative in our atmosphere. It's mass is positive.
Experiments on MongoDB with $all query, keyword search and compound indexes
Then ask them that. Really, competent potential hires showing early interest for that reason is the dream of every engineering/R&D HR person. They'll be very happy to tell you what you want to know if you're at all interesting for them as a potential hire. Spontaneous passionate applicants are usually much more interesting to a high tech company than nearly anyone a recruiter can come up with.
Exactly. Most Windows users remained Windows users for so long because they lacked a good alternative. That has only changed, and now many market segments are no longer hostages to Microsoft's OS.
Many people

... who don't know what institutional racism looks like. (One requirement would probably be that the discriminated-against group actually ends up with worse outcomes. Compare to say, Black people in the criminal justice system.)

I mean, seriously, even if you oppose affirmative action, do you really want to say that its advocates are morally equivalent to racial oppressors and make you ashamed of humanity? Martin Luther King, Jr. makes you ashamed of humanity?
That's something I didn't expect from MIT. It's ridiculous that they only support Mac and Windows.
I & millions of others will be proving you wrong this winter.

Though I can afford a $500-700 device, but I can't justify it. Meanwhile, one of the big battery life tips for smartphone owners is to disable 4G. So, no Google has not screwed up.
Why, Hacker News of course! ;-)

You should also check out Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com
Calling something that ships with HSPA+ "obsolete" stikes me as slightly over the top, it's still capable of 42Mbps, and there was a relatively recent test [1] which showed T-Mobile's HSPA+ running faster than Verizon.

1 - http://www.phonearena.com/news/T-Mobiles-HSPA-42Mbps-network...
It's a hard and fast rule. You must either be a US citizen or permanent resident. ITAR is the reason.
Free places available in the beta release of Team Sheet, our new staff timekeeping solution for small business.

Team Sheet will replace the sign-in sheets used at many small businesses everywhere.

Requirements:

Android tablet running Gingerbread or higher with front camera; and

Promise to fill in feedback form.
Most of the world does not have much LTE deployed yet. Large parts of the world has not even begun rollouts. By the time LTE penetration is widespread, current generation phones bought on subsidised contracts will start coming up for renewal/replacement.

Yes, if you're somewhere with decent LTE coverage, you may want to consider alternatives, but that's not a concern for most of us.
Facebook Vulnerable millions of Facebook user exposed
Apple’s Bob Mansfield’s “un-retirement” partially due to Forstall exit
I like the analogy. There is anti-virus for security, but there should be an equivalent for privacy.
Wow! This is really neat and useful. Thanks for making this (if you created it, OP)!

There was quite a few apps that I had forgotten I had given access too, that I revoked permissions. I also really love how it is a Chrome extension instead of yet another app I would have to give full access to, just to delete access for other apps (that would seem just plain silly haha). It makes me feel much safer using it. Great job! :)

Direct link for those that do not want to read the article: http://mypermissions.org/*

Link to get chrome extension: https://mypermissions.com/?utm_source=org_promotions_cleaner...
Quick notes on Cloudera Hadoop Impala
Sorry if slightly OT but we organized a "Raspberry Pi's Impact on Hacking" Web Show with forensics expert DJ Palombo. Thought might be of interest to y'all!

Here is the link - http://www.concise-courses.com/infosec/20121106/

Thanks Henry
Sure.

When I consider the $12K number is from 2010 and folks are estimating a new Model S battery could run as little as $14K...A $30K Tesla sporting a battery that will cost $3K to replace 10 years down the road doesn't seem that far off.
It is a good article, but it's sad that even in a good article like this, which talks explicitly about the realities of sexism, the author feels the need to distance herself from "the feminists."
Err, what?
They are salaried.
It's a "win" for iFone's outside counsel, and a blow for Apple's. It's barely a win at all, most likely.
Yes, they get paid, but companies move legal business around all the time depending on wins/losses and quality of advice (and how that advice fared in court).

I'm always a bit boggled at why folks think stuff like this is a "win" for lawyers, just because some lawyer makes money. Dealing with these kinds of cases with clients like Apple is like running 2 startups at once. You are working 14+ hour days for a year, dealing with tons of emergencies, researching 100 page briefs as fast as you can, etc.

This is not the win. The real "win" is apple paying you 1k/hr hour to do relatively simple stuff because you won this case. If you lose, well, it's "what have you done for me lately". Hell, if you lose, Apple would probably demand an hourly rate reduction if you want to keep their business.
I don't think my comment was making anything into a "fan club battle". I was specifically advocating the kind of precision you describe, because I think calling any language with higher-order functions a "functional programming language" results in very muddy waters.

The scenario I described wasn't hypothetical. When a colleague asked our whole office "what's functional programming?" I listened while someone told him that it was just map, filter, and fold. He'd used these in JavaScript already, and was prepared to accept that as an answer. I didn't think that was sufficient, so chimed in and offered some alternative features from other languages that I think are as important as higher order functions, mostly related to minimizing mutable state with managed references and persistent data structures. I think he appreciated my contribution, but I honestly don't know for sure. Maybe it just created more questions.
Android Web Browser competition: Firefox vs Firefox Beta
>and it always just seems like eye candy. It seems like a list with percentages, instead of fancy graphs, is often just as good and way cheaper.

It seems like a lot of engineering type folks just won't accept that most people would rather look at a colorful picture than a list of percentages. If you gave me a choice between looking at a fancy graph that took up more space and showed less data and a list of numbers, I'll take the graph every time. Because I'm a human, and humans get bored easily, and humans appreciate art and color.

Don't downplay the importance of eye candy. People like eye candy, just like they like mouth candy. Sure, eating raw sugar is rationally stupid especially when there are many more logical, healthy choices out there. But sometimes you just want to taste something really really sweet; sometimes you really would just rather look at something really pretty.
I wonder at the claim that the rate of speciation is increasing. It has to be a statistical argument; fossil evidence is sparse, while current bird species have been catalogued diligently. Sure, we've not a complete catalog, but much better than the fossil-historic one.

So, its hard to calculate an accurate speciation-rate number for say 2 million years ago. We have little idea of how many species existed then; many may not be represented in the fossil record. Perhaps there were more species then; perhaps fewer.
Some of those people are really maladjusted, but I suppose that's to be expected from a subculture based around endlessly celebrating childrens toys.

I guess there always has to be a group of people for others to look down upon.
"It’s like something out of a movie or my old Tintin books. It’s the way space was supposed to be."

Yes! Finally someone gets it!

Motherfucking space! Is aspirational!

We go to space not because it is easy, but because it is hard AND AWESOME.
Best Android browser JavaScript competition
There is no real need for runtime sized arrays, as one could already use vectors (which are more comfortable to use than C-style arrays anyway) and allocate them on the stack (that's one of the template parameters of std::vector, its allocator). If one were to be a masochist, one could also alloca and then use placement new, with all the shortcomings of alloca.

Granted, it's syntactically shorter to say int x[n], but it's the same behavior as above, and one would need to see what changes have to be made to the runtimes and the standard to allow for this, and how to report errors such as "There is no more space on the stack" (which is going to be much more frequent than running out of heap space).

As for "generic lambdas", I don't find that typing the type of your parameter is too annoying at the moment, though I haven't used the feature much. Perhaps this is a baby step in a move to make C++ a bit more Haskell-like: Strong typing, but also powerful type inference mechanism.

Other languages have more features, that's true. But C++ is still trying to advocate a blazingly fast speed, and pay-for-what-you-use mentality. That the language can still be the fastest, one of the most powerful, and achieve feature parity with current dynamic languages, I think reflects well on the language, not the opposite.
That is required for parity with the OO side. Cf. Alan Kay on OO.
You could limit the number of invites that a new customer could offer to be 1 or 2. It might even make them more likely to invite somebody because an invite appears to have greater value. Worth an A/B test at least imho.
Not sure why Apple sued iFone in 2009 "for being too similar to iPhone" when iFone has been around much longer. That was a dumb move.
Yeah, me too. I think I got to this too late to understand what's going on here :)
The problem with this argument is that user-defined literals already exist in C++11, and use of the underscore character for a different purpose in a future standard has to be in such a way that it can be unambiguously distinguished from the user-defined literal usage. Backward-compatibility to the current standard has to be preserved.
These calls are being generated by relatively few robocallers who are collecting money and have service provided by phone companies which track and meter every minute.

This is a significantly different environment from online email spammers who can hide behind bot nets, open relays, and don't take payments directly.

Instead, robocallers appear to operate in a near perfect knowledge environment for prosecutors (with the will to act).
CSharp.Geeklist: Geeklist API binding and OAuth support for the geekli.st API
For those interested, I'm using node, twilio, and redis. Building this thing was a lot of fun.
This was all inevitable. The market has changed. There wasn't much Microsoft could do. Given a typical lifecycle of a Windows OS is about 2 years, in 2012 they had to build an operating system that was truly touch-enabled, compatible with ARM architectures and could compete with iPads and Macs. This way they have their bases covered until Windows 9.
Raspberry Pi's Impact on Hacking Live Webshow
As title suggests, it's a web show November 6th Tuesday - 12 EST which will be recorded and posted on the same URL. Anyways - we have DJ Paolmbo presenting - DJ is a forensics expert and has delivered this presentation at various hacking conferences. Thought you might be interested in this show, its only going to last 10-15 mins. Thanks Henry
Windows8 comes up with brutal UI changes, pushing current Windows users to learn how to use it. This might scare off some current Windows users, and they will consider buying Mac instead, but don't forget that Apple is raising its prices, that might bring people back to Windows.
The C5 library (http://www.itu.dk/research/c5/) has been updated more recently, and from what I've seen tends to be higher performance than Power Collections as well.

It's still not as performant as the Microsoft and Mono equivalents in the spots where their functionality overlaps, but it provides a whole lot of structures that aren't available in System.Collections.
Building Great APIs: The Gold Standard
Thanks, the link's appreciated. I've heard of REL before, but I didn't realise they were doing quite so well at the moment!
Microsoft’s App Deficit Disorder
Oh, absolutely, I just think it's a shame.
I really like the report that's generated, but it took me about 4 attempted scans before one finished. I'll be patient because I'm interested in this, but I don't think most people on the internet will be as patient.

Anyway, great start and looking forward to seeing it improve!
Beautiful. I ended up resorting to RMagick and some custom charting code to build personalized infographics for the weekly digests that Planscope sends out.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2205912/weekly-digest-planscope.png

Weekly digests + sexy charts = unbelievable upticks in retention. It's also a great way to push product updates and blog posts directly to your customers.
BitTorrent Pirate Ordered to Pay $1.5 Million Damages For Sharing 10 Movies
Storage Systems Engineer
So, what's next? Will the world start buying computers and phones without webcams? Seems like stories concerning malevolent webcam usage comes up about every six months.
The whole reason this is stupid is you are just trying to prove a point that has been well established. Facebook has proven exclusivity works already, we don't need clones just to prove the same well known thing over and over. Why don't I start the 5,20,100k club to see if this effect works at different levels! Because who cares! Solve a problem, build something useful, not just because.
Terrible article.

Interviewing companies about their plans to move to Windows 8 less than a month after it's released?

Of course the numbers are going to be low. I would be surprised if 1/3 of the people interviewed had ever even seen the product.

Companies are known for keeping old software as long as humanly possible, not turning on a dime to adopt something that just hit the marketplace.

The author then follows with a bunch of conjecture focused on how individuals make decisions, but corporations are not individuals, and don't make decisions like "maybe I should just buy a mac" on a whim.

There are lots of things to consider like your current system architecture, your employee's skillsets, corporate software, the cost of purchasing hundreds or thousands of new machines, etc. etc.

So what are you trying to analyze, individual decision making or corporate decision making? Because the two are completely different.

This article is literally the bottom of the barrel when it comes to tech news, and I hate that I took time out of my day to read it.
Refinements will be at the 2.0 release but I wouldn't call that feature "multiple inheritance".
"$299 for an unlocked Nexus 4 — I think that’s pretty revolutionary."

Yep. Rather than LTE or OIS, this is in fact the killer feature of the Nexus lineup for this year and it's going to make a huge difference to a lot of people.
It's offensive because it's lazy. There are better analogies and ways of conveying these concepts that don't objectify 50% of the population.

If I'm one of the only girls in the room, and that is how a point is being made in a presentation by someone that supposedly has enough clout in the industry to go up in front of hundreds of people and talk, it doesn't make me feel good about my future or the people I will report to down the line, nor does it make me feel comfortable knowing that this type of humor is acceptable and welcomed by the amount of laughs it gets.

There's also going to be a few people in the audience that look at this image and then look at me to see what my reaction is, and I'm there to learn, not stand out.
> according to the other poster, rbenv is slow

Define slow:

$ time /home/lloeki/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p286/bin/ruby -e 'exit'
real	0m0.012s
user	0m0.007s
sys	0m0.003s

$ rbenv global
1.9.3-p286

$ time /home/lloeki/.rbenv/shims/ruby -e 'exit'
real	0m0.055s
user	0m0.027s
sys	0m0.007s

Hardly something to cry foul for. Your first significant require will blow that time by an order of magnitude.

And hardly surprising either since rbenv the alias calls rbenv the command, which sets a few env vars then calls rbenv-$1 (probably $1==exec), which calls rbenv-hooks $1 (probably a noop by default) then $1 + args. rbenv is seriously thin.

> huge startup lag it adds to every invocation of ruby or any other bin installed via a gem

Sounds more like bundler (maybe automatically started by ohmyzsh when just typing 'ruby' where you have a Gemfile):

$ time bundle exec ruby -e 'exit'
real	0m0.570s
user	0m0.480s
sys	0m0.057s

or as mentioned, someone put too much stuff in his bashrc or something.
> The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Sounds like so many complaints about the enterprise software landscape, and has certainly proved to be true in my own experience. Codified processes usually start with the guise of open communications and education, either because someone wasn't thinking or because of a pressing need to get a few people on the same page. They are soon adopted and enforced as dogma by natural-born bureaucrats who crawl out of the woodwork from seemingly nowhere. It must be an incredible challenge to fight in any large organization, looking at it from the top down.

So far, Musk appears to be doing an admirable job. These things tend to last only as long as a real visionary is at the helm. He is young so hopefully can keep at it for a while longer still, hopefully even long enough to get us to Mars. From this article, he didn't actually say to much about such plans. I wonder if it's just a judicious amount of prudence on his part or if even he fears it may not be feasible in his lifetime.
Elon Musk is such an inspiration. for him, nothing is impossible and that is what I admire the most in him.
Not sure I understand why you say RESTful is more hacky, but I have recently done exactly the same type of project. Except we used C#.

There are a lot of reasons we went RESTful but some are:

1) XML parsing is very CPU intensive for mobile devices and can quickly drain battery life.

2) Payload of SOAP is much larger than JSON, meaning that you are tying up resources and network bandwidth for mobile devices.

3) RESTful intent is easy to understand, POST/GET/PUT etc. Especially if you are interacting with a DB.

4) Coding was simple in both the .NET and the mobile side, at least in comparison of dealing with XML all the time.

5) Performance is generally better, again most of this is thanks to the payload size.

6) Using RESTful allowed us to also reuse the same API's on the website and consume them in JavaScript natively. No extra layers of translation or craziness involved.

Not saying XML doesn't have its uses, but I would not use SOAP again unless forced to interact with a system that required it. I hate bloat, and performance is eaten in CPU cycles wasted on parsing bloat when it comes to SOAP.

I should note, nothing about RESTful says you have to use JSON, you could return XML payloads. To me returning XML for this type of usage is just a bad idea most of the time.
How do you write a function to sum a list of a billion elements in Haskell?

What would happen without tail call elimination?