skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should go play with one in person. It is a really neat tablet experience. Spec for spec it may not appear that competitive, but the user experience is really slick. Snapping apps side by side (have your music on a small pane, and another app on the larger one), the app switching model, side swipes to pull up menus, and the look and feel of Metro are all really refreshing takes on a touch os.
Seems like Mediterranean climes are good for startups.
Whats your use case for LTE? With most carriers in the world, 5 minutes of continuous LTE usage at the advertised speed will race you across any traffic limits and put you back into 64k stone age.
I don't think this is a large company vs. startup thing. In most companies, large or small, you're hired to fill a particular job opening (that's described as part of the recruitment process) and usually interviewed by the group of people who you'd be working with. Does anyone know of any other companies that do this kind of random assignment the way Google does?
So in other words, the Surface wasn't ready...
Stick CyanogenMod on <whatever android phone is the right size>
In fairness to the usual suspects, their reviews of the nexus 7 were all pretty fair (and for the most part, favourable).
The reason 'michaelochurch invoked Enron in his comment was to link Google with Enron

This is pretty much it. The companies have diametrically opposite reputations, so it arouses not a small chuckle that their performance review systems are almost identical.

as if to imply that Google's internal management practices would eventually result in a similar comeuppance.

Unlikely, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Enron's executives were criminals. I think that Google's top guys are decent but unseasoned judges of character, which is how stuff like Perf gets through. Companies like Google have an unusually high rate of decent people getting the top jobs, but said decent people are generally terrible at telling when their underlings are lying to them (which, if you're high enough up, is almost always).
A high quality simple sketching app like Paper by 53 on the iPad.
Software developer performance in the US has been terrible for many years as well.

The cost of software has been going up while the output has not been improving? Um, what?

Maybe we should institute some standardized tests?

Big companies already do this. They typically have very rigid processes for evaluating consultants/outsourcers and pretty much just follow the numbers. For higher end work it's trickier, but for standard stuff (build X screens in Y CRUD app) it works well.

The only real difficulty in measuring the output of individual developers is heterogeneity. Last year I built a search engine, this year I'm building a realtime data framework (and other stuff). That's not a problem for teaching, since the output of teaching is homogeneous (and is defined by the syllabus).
My thoughts as well.

Other than the recent front end redesign, PayPal's interface and overall product has not changed since I started using it 5 or 6 years ago.
No. Why? Because they are psychopaths.
At least in my language of choice (C#), the general wisdom is that feeling a need to unit test against an object's internal state is a code smell. It suggests that your class is violating the single responsibility principle and needs to be separated into multiple smaller ones.

Writing tests against implementation details makes the code less maintainable, since it means that you won't be able to change those implementation details without rewriting (or worse yet, just commenting out) unit tests.
Very impressive pricing!

On the other hand, it doesn't support LTE. When will Google realize that basic things like fast network speed are more important than fancy things like face unlock and NFC.
Launch #001
> I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives.

if i could fix just one thing about the educational system, this would be it. it's the laziest option, so it ends up being implemented pretty much everywhere (this is not a us-specific problem; i grew up in dubai, and every time i visit my old school the place looks more like a prison), and all it does is alienate and disinvest students at precisely the time they need to be engaged and nurtured.
OCSP Stapling: How CloudFlare Just Made SSL 30% Faster
The original article specifically mentions self-driving cars and augmented reality sunglasses as "geek toys", FYI.
But possibly Svbtle isn't that original? https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle (scroll to FAQ)
I don't understand the wording of your first sentence. Did you mean "idiotic" or?
This is probably the best landing landing page for any product I've seen in a while, if not ever. I immediately had a good idea of what the product does, how it works and how easy it is to use. All without having to read too much text or watch a video.
I don't understand why news organizations haven't adopted this kind of visualization yet for hurricanes. This has been around for awhile, and I always pull it up when a hurricane hits the US. Its a far better way to display wind than the standard precipitation-oriented maps.
I did, and then overclocked it. Totally worth it to combat my tendency to switch over to hacker news while compiling.

http://xkcd.com/303/
This isn't a courtroom; they use agreements. I could be parsey to hunt down and list all the exceptions, but my point is true for the general case of legal discussions on the Internet. "If you have no client relationship with the person offering the advice" just seemed kind of clunky, you know?
The email sign-up doesn't work on IE 8 :-(
Never heard the family crossing the bridge one. Which one is that?
I think even the Pre+ came with inductive charging built-in. Only the original Pre required the purchase of the replacement back.
I like the concept. However, to me, it was a little bit too easy to accidentally move my mouse outside the thumbnail area when trying to look through some pictures.

Could you try extending the mouseover area beyond the images themselves? I'm not sure if that would be more intuitive, but I think it's worth trying.
right. why fix the system, when you can be part of an elite?
Yeah I can see where you pay someone not to go to a competitor. I can see where you don't care and don't let someone go to a competitor. I don't see where you pay someone the same or even less than they would make over that 18 month period AND expect they don't go to a competitor. Of course, this guy signed it too so maybe it's equally shared.
The article you mentioned about Google's tough interview questions is from a community manager, not a programmer. If I was hiring a technical community manager, I would not subject them to the same interview process as engineers - that would probably eliminate the best community managers.
Our mobile carriers in the UK seem to be getting the message, fortunately.
Quite true! I am surprised to read this, and thrilled that the technology industry is having an impact for Palestinians as well.
This is completely unrelated to the post, but I was at the Airbnb tech talk and it was extremely interesting - thanks for putting that on!
Data presentations should always be both aesthetically considered and correct, the right aesthetic can aid massively to help interpret the data. See Envisioning information by Edward Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/
"Perv" history? They can see what you search for in incognito mode? :-O
More info: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3569688/why-nexus-4-does-...
I read this as "if any area is well-served by standardized tests, it's math" rather than "standardized tests are the best thing to happen to math". Sort of like a honey badger is best served by a snake bite.

The AMS Notices has an interesting article about a mathematician using his sabbatical to teach high school math that overlaps a little bit with this post: http://www.ams.org/notices/201210/rtx121001408p.pdf
Exactly, Peter. It's not tremendously hard to read the C code and understand what it is doing (usually), if you're familiar with C syntax. But it was tremendously difficult at times understanding _why_ it was doing what it was doing.
20% time can easily destroy your career. Most managers view it either as a waste of time or a flight risk. If the manager has to put someone on the 5% shit-list (which has more to do with his performance than yours) and you're 20%ing, then you're probably screwed.

Blind allocation is imbecilic, but I think even the idea that people need to be "allocated" to projects is moronic. It doesn't belong in this fucking century. Closed allocation makes managerial dinosaurs think they control something, but they lose control of the most important thing, which is their ability to retain talent and enthusiasm. If Google wanted to actually deserve its reputation, they'd man up and go for Open Allocation: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...
I think you're reading a bit much into the symbolism there. I mean, if he didn't put it in his pocket, one could have just as well said "Hey Nokia, how does it feel being left out in the cold?"
Nexus 10 vs ipad 4 vs kindle fire hd vs surface
Get any offer in writing, and if it's rescinded, the words you want are: promissory estoppel.
I, for one, never want to use someone else's poop phone...even a friend's.
This is a question about the philosophy of science.

How do you know clinical trials are better than observational methods? How do you know controlled experiments are better than post-hoc reasoning and logical deduction?

Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here.

But if you are asking for an empirical method to compare the scientific method to "other ways of knowing", there isn't one.
I used to work for an American company with a large Israeli workforce.

When I left the company they were actively trying to hire engineers from the West Bank. Apparently this used to be hard to do, but has gotten easier thanks to a government-sponsored (from both sides) program.

I believe it's a win-win -- Palestinians of the West Bank are cheaper than Israeli engineers and in need of better paying jobs. And hopefully working together will lead to more cross-cultural understanding.

I found myself quite depressed by the politics of the region and didn't like flying there -- but this provided a much needed glimmer of hope.

More info for the curious: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israeli-high-tech-compa...
> That's not a problem for teaching, since the output of teaching is homogeneous (and is defined by the syllabus).

The syllabus is typically defined politically, which is anything but homegeneous. In fact, pretty much everything surrounding the teacher is defined by politics, which makes it a huge problem.

Until we're mature enough to get rid of the politics surrounding the teaching of even core subjects, like science, we're screwed.

And I don't blame the teachers one bit for walking away.
I experienced this exact situation a few weeks ago. Fortunately, I wasn't laid off but it did spark incentive for me to find a new employer. I landed a great position at a new company a couple weeks later and feel much happier now. I've heard through the grapevine that the megacorp I worked for is now in the downward spiral of 'fucked'.
De Tocqueville says something like this--no doubt thinking of the US performance in the War of 1812.

But the US Army of WW II was led at the highest levels by men who were careerists, graduates for the most part of West Point before WW I. (Marshall, ok, VMI, but the point holds.) Collins had held his commission for a quarter century before he was firing all those 90th Division commanders.
Yes, that's what I meant - even "1 + 1 = 2" can be ambiguous if no context is provided.
What do you mean by "O Ladder" and "T Ladder"?
Define "no optimization". On most CPUs, the compiler will have to run some register assignment algorithm. If you insist that every variable load and store must hit memory exactly once, performance will be dreadful, and the compiler probably still would have to run some code to decide which intermediates to spill to memory. Also, compilers typically have to decide on instructions to use. To clear a variable, do you use CLR, XOR, or SUB? In short: there is no clear definition of "don't optimize that"
Google’s new Android Nexus lineup: More Barometers
FYI My download kit includes a mobi file, and it looks acceptable on the kindle. But yes, in black and white you'll lose a lot of the value of the diagrams I drew.
Beirut, Blood and Twitter
Some very trivial parts of K-12 math can be tested, but they are the least important, imo. The main purpose of high-school math isn't to have students memorize trigonometry formulas: honestly, it doesn't really matter whether high-school students memorize trigonometry formulas or not. The main purpose that might actually have some benefit is to get kids thinking mathematically, and hopefully some proportion of them interested in STEM careers.

Same with high-school CS. You're not really going to learn a lot of specifics in high-school CS, and what specifics you learn are unlikely to be that important. What's important is to learn computational thinking. The tests, however (at least when I took the AP CS test) only tested trivialities, stuff like the syntax of a particular corner of the C++ STL, and the course was therefore set up mainly around that. We literally spent about a month on minutae of iostreams! In an introductory course where most of the students had never programmed before! I could hardly imagine a more stupid way to teach introductory CS, and can't imagine it could've been invented except via ease-of-testing brain damage.
"Alex is the maintainer for KDE project's IDE - KDevelop."

I remember that from the application, so we must have been impressed by it.
Geo-located Evac and Shelter Guide for NYC (Hurricane Sandy)
Well google search has been doing this for ages. If you hover over the search results links it would show the url of the page, but if you click on that it goes to a google url which then gets redirected to the url you see. Google does this so that they can keep track of which link you clicked. Other search engine probably does the same, I haven't verified though.
In (a small subset of) Europe. Smaller, poorer countries like mine get shafted.
I love the short effective intro copy and animation. To nitpick a bit though, the font-size animation on your h2 heading is a bit clunky in Chrome, since Webkit rounds font-size values to the nearest integer. I would suggest animating on -webkit-transform: scale(...) instead, starting with scale(1) and animating down to scale(0.66ish). Then the animation will be nice and smooth, and the text will still render nicely (since you're not going above scale(1)).

Also, a minor correction in your demo: "parking break" should be "parking brake".

EDIT: I'm realizing that jQuery's animate() method doesn't work natively on CSS3 transform properties[1][2], so this would probably require some additional tweaking that may or may not be worth it. Anyway, something to think about at least!

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5029035/how-do-we-add-css...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5462275/animate-element-t...
I do value the importance of milk from a survival standpoint, but I think today's milk is a bastardized version of milk our ancestors survived on that they drank directly from the cow. With the whole factory farm system and terrible diets most (American) cows eat, not to mention the steroids and antibiotics that a lot of cows are given, I don't believe the idea that milk is a nutrient packed elixir.

Not hating for those who want to feel good about their love for milk, but I don't think today's milk is much more than a treat and baking ingredient.
Last I checked it was the other way around, iTunes and the App store are basically run at cost to get people to buy more devices.
Nice themeforest referral program link collection.
You could use the "Show by rating" feature above the movie list. For example: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000288/filmorate#actor

That's what I use if I want to find the "best" movies by a director or actor. It's also a better source for the movie rating data in your extension rather than sending a get request for every film in a filmography.
One of the more interesting findings from the most recent AWS outages is that Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), the best-practice way to handle multi-AZ deployment, has a dependency on EBS. I know from various talks that Netflix try not to use EBS these days, but I wonder if you had any ELB problems, and how you might have coped if you had evacuated a zone but your LBs were out?
Nice! I think I have my design concept for RUAM part 2! :)
I like the concept, but the thumbnail should somehow show that there is a 'stack' of photos that you can page through. At first glance, it's not obvious that you can hover over a thumbnail to see more.
> " If you're unwilling to provide proof you're not a bozo, you're probably going to be just awful to work with as well."

I do not see any justification for this in the general case.

It is true, I have seen it myself, that even students who receive good grades in a CS program can be bozos when it comes to actually building things. However, these same people are likely to do well on a coding interview because these people study for coding interviews. These students can also be miserable to work with, as their high opinion of themselves leads them to be uncooperative and terrible at communication.

I would much prefer to work with someone who has built wonderful things than with someone who can study to ace a coding interview. I would also much prefer to befriend someone in the first category (who wouldn't?).

I do not see the fault in an engineer with a full portfolio of past projects, be they personal or open source, expecting to be evaluated on the basis of that work rather than on some arbitrary algorithms assignment. In fact, I would be likely to have greater respect for such a person should she refuse the quiz, as clearly she values her time and is not willing to have it wasted to satisfy a recruiting bureaucracy.

And let's be clear about why algorithmic questions and interviews of this sort exist at all: because companies like Google are not interested in finding the next Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, etc. They are interested in finding engineers to do grunt work. Google already knows who its stars are, they are the guys sitting in the room during executive meetings.
Unfortunately they are selling it for £239 in the UK, which is more like $380 - Still an absolute steal for a headline retail price, but not quite the incredible £185 I thought it would be initially.

So for now, having paid only slightly more for my sim-free S3 months ago, it's not that good a deal.

Still patiently waiting for a nexus with a hardware keyboard like the good old days...
Sorry, but I'm not the author.
Strider: Open Source Continuous Deployment Platform
Hakim El Hattab, the guy behind this concept, is on fire right now, with innovative UI concepts rolling out pretty much every month.

If you're interested in bleeding edge HTML5 experiments, you can watch Paul Irish interview him here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogumRA9LxR4
They probably also thought (understandably?) that the use-case for a tablet is more likely to involve sharing than a phone.
Interesting idea, the interaction would get very difficult with more pictures in the stack. Also lacks a way to work in mobile. But you are really onto something here, would be interesting to see how this can be improved!
No response?
I had the privilege of being part of a delegation of American businessmen sent to the West Bank earlier this month. It was planned by the US State Department in conjunction with the Aspen Institute and we had the opportunity to visit with business leaders, politicians, and startup founders all over the West Bank and Israel.

Very eye-opening. A lot of great innovation in that region (on both sides). Met a team that's independently constructing wind mills in the West Bank to power up to 20% of their energy team. Another that is making custom furniture for small spaces in Gaza.

There were Israeli companies outsourcing to Ramallah instead of Bangalore, and ideas and ingenuity was very impressive. All in all, I was extremely impressed.

The path forward, I've always believed, was rooted in economic prosperity. Nothing creates chaos like poverty with no chances of escape.
The quote about PayPal (and all institutions which deal with money) being like an iceberg ring true here. Anyone have the link?
Generally speaking, when questions like these are asked (I used to work somewhere that did them, and was often responsible for evaluating the responses), nobody cares that you come up with the right answer.

Rather, I should specify, the right answer looks like this:
Let's say a golf ball is approximately 2 inches in diameter, and let's say that the bus is approximately 20 feet long on the interior, with seat backs that are approximately 6 inches thick, seats that are approximately 8 inches thick, sit 18 inches off the floor, and are supported with posts of approximately 1.5 inches diameter.

The key is in being able to break down a problem, identify the challenges (seats are wonky shaped, for example), identify all the components of the problem (e.g., seats take up space, seat posts take up space, buses aren't perfect rectangles, etc.) and all that.

For what it's worth, I've evaluated that question more than a few times during interviews, and I have absolutely zero idea how many golf balls you can fit into a bus. If you don't know what kind of bus, ask. If you don't know the dimensions, ask.

If you're going to throw up your hands and claim that the problem is unsolvable (plenty of people do, some even got hired), then perhaps a job in solving problems with possibly unforeseeable parameters isn't the job you want.

There are plenty of other problems with the question, sure, but the key is in being able to figure out what the parameters are, at least loosely define them, and come up with a strategy for working the problem out. In the best answer I ever got, the guy asked to borrow the whiteboard and started charting out equations to calculate it (with variables such that if he was off on the diameter of the golf ball, you could replace it with the correct value and re-run the calculation). I stopped him well before he got anywhere close to actually solving the problem and recommended he be hired.

Of note, I do not now nor have I ever worked for Google, so I can't say how they perform those, if it is even true that they did, but that's how I've always approached them.
This is basically unusable with a mouse pointer because the bounding box is too small. The user interface is also non-obvious, at first I didn't know that I could move my mouse around and I would not have discovered it if this wasn't a tech demo.