skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tl;dr - this does work to a point, but won't necessarily teach you idiomatic and community practices that come with experience, but it is surprisingly sticky

I had the great pleasure, year ago in my undergrad Operating Systems class, for the class assignment to be "write an OS in Java"...which of course was handed out to a group of students who had never seen Java. By the end of the semester we had written the core guts of a multi-tasking OS, a couple shells and the display systems to handle even displaying things like a unix-like console, a sane piping system, all the major user land utilities (sans some of the compiler things, but things like ls, cat, ps, etc.) a simple text editor and intra-system messaging system, etc. etc. etc.

It was a great curriculum and really was the first time we, as CS students, had the chance to really spend time understanding the subject matter without spending time focusing on stupid language tricks like we had in our various C and C++. The code we wrote was fairly straight forward (we were learning the language as we went, so kept to the KISS method) and focused instead of the material. It was probably among the hardest, and best class I've ever had on any subject.

Did I know Java at the end of it?

To a point -- I knew the pidgin dialect we wrote the OS in. A few semesters later I took a fluff software engineering course and had to hack out some various java server bits and had a roughshod time of it as I ran head first into the now common overengineeringitis that plagues modern Java development. I found the syntax and most of the standard library familiar, but the idiomatic ways of writing the code, community practices, the shibboleths, nearly impenetrable without years buried in an enterprise software house.

I swore off Java and never looked back...moving on to Perl and Python for a spell (incidentally my standard "learn a new language" project is to write a simple non-lexical phrase extractor, it touches I/O, data structures, database connectivity, program flow, and if I get daring, multi-threading and a few other odds and ends and usually gives me a pretty good idea how a language works.

Now years later, taking a look at Android dev, I'm finding that writing code for the platform, even though it's Java, to be like writing code for our old OS. It's pretty simple, there's great library support, and I don't have to wrap simple method calls in hundreds of lines of framework boilerplate nonsense. It's actually pretty fun.

But I've definitely been drawing heavily on that pidgin dialect of Java that I learned way back when -- it's kinda like riding a bicycle, except a few bits have changed here and there. So yeah, I think I did "learn" the language, and it's been amazing how much of it I can recall since it's been a decade since I did any coding in it.

(this method also handily solves the "I need a project, a goal, to learn the language, otherwise I'm just twiddling bits" problem).
I can't believe all those cables resists the mission. Reminds me of the Ap.ollo XI capsule. in the Aeronautical Museum
Very fair arguments. The really big point that I'm trying to make is that you're still keeping records for each everyone your contacts. Let's say you have John Smith in your address book and I'm friends with the same John Smith. I will also have a separate record of John Smith in my address book. People are creating unnecessary duplicate records of their contacts in their native address books. With Knok.Me we're letting people create their one profile that contains contact and social information of theirs. So you're the one who maintains your own contact information for you contacts. So each time someone adds you to their address book they are simply just sending a request to your profile. I would love to get your feedback on the idea. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to chat more. I love hearing different perspectives on the problem. dami@knok.me .. I seriously think the address book isn't what it should be in this day and age.
The thing that's similar to what Microsoft did with IE is that Google is leveraging its monopoly position to compete in new businesses.

Search "headphones" on Google and you'll see the massive ad spot taken up by Google Shopping. They've done similar things with the way they integrate Google Local/Zagat into local business searches.

That's the equivalent of the kind of deep integration Microsoft did with IE. IE wasn't just another application in Windows, it was built-in and inseparable. The same is true of Google's products, they're automatically highlighted, and at the top of, every relevant query.

It seems pretty obviously anti-competitive to me. I think their only defense is that they claim not to be a monopoly, but no one who's on the receiving end of Google traffic can agree with that claim.

I actually think they should spin off Google Search for their own sake. To maintain the integrity and long-term quality of the product.
I'm not sure that Google had such a cogent strategy when it made its blockbuster products and acquisitions, like Gmail, Docs, Picasa, and YouTube. It wasn't obvious that YouTube ads could make enough money to pay for the servers, and indeed it took a while to be profitable. Maybe the strategy was just that Google should do better and cheaper than others.

I think individual engineers looked at things (e.g.) Microsoft made, like Outlook, made it better, and made it free. Nobody should be surprised if the corporate go-ahead was made on the basis of undercutting Microsoft rather than driving ad revenue (at the time).
An empowering innovation we can expect int he next 5 years is a shared value business model. One that will free up a lot of the corporate cash of today and bring better returns for business and society. Michael Porter of HBS has been working on an academic framework.
What is a sensible algorithm to generate the letters in Letterpress iOS game?
also - as much as my fiance hates it. I still have all my legos! ;-)
I think before we turn google into the utility, we should turn the infrastructure that google runs on into a public utility.
> They know, just like everyone else does, that Bitcoin is nothing but a modern day pyramid scheme that disproportionally rewards early participants and relies on new entrants to prop the whole deck of cards up.

I take issue with "disproportionately", because I know you cannot substantiate that, as it does not disproportionately reward anyone. The rules for reward and the value of the currency is entirely transparent.

Besides this, that is how all securities work. You have people who invest in it first (Bitcoin wouldn't have even worked without someone mining to protect the blockchain) and others who buy shares of those investments later by assessing the risks similarly, or also contributing to the mining (which will continue for more than another decade).

Turns out (gasp) the technology is perfectly sound and secure. It's open-source so you can take a look, or you can ask me any questions and I'll be able to explain it to you. It's just a transferable credit system that has gradually earned value through commerce, you don't need to be so cynical.
You're going to have a Nigerian President next time, America...
A little bit more info on what the actual app does would be nice. Too vague, so didn't sign up.
LTE speed is great, but HSPA+ is pretty damn good too. The big kicker against HSPA+ is that it's not as pervasive as LTE (or perhaps T-Mobile just isn't as pervasive as Verizon), so while I've gotten really fast speed (+- 60Mbps) on HSPA+, it's usually much more pedestrian.

That said, I'm seldom downloading large files to my phone, and even 1 or 2 Mbps burst is usually fine for the way I use my phone.
Linus Torvalds 4:11PM

Editorial: is Engadget really that stupid? Or just corrupt? Or trolling us all?

Here is another "race to the bottom is bad" article, this time in the form of an "editorial" from Engadget. It's even more idiotic than usual.

The whole "race to the bottom" concept is odd to me: people complaining about how technology gets less outrageously expensive, and more available to everybody, and more commoditized. Like that would be a bad thing? So the whole argument is fundamentally flawed to begin with - any time I see some pundit or CEO complaining about how the competition is making things cheaper, I go "Uhhuh, crybaby".

But when it comes to cellphones, it's not just a flawed argument, it's doubly stupid. Because in that market, particularly in the US, the alternative is the whole broken carrier subsidy model, with all that entails. None of which is good, and all of which is much worse than any (hypothetical) "race to the bottom" arguments.

And at no point did that deeply flawed editorial even mention carrier lock-in issues. What crock.

I have many reasons to like the google nexus phones: I just think that the plain android experience is generally cleaner than most of the skinned ones, and even when there is superior hardware (Samsung Galaxy SIII) I tend to prefer the Nexus model (honesty in advertizing: I've gotten free phones from both google and Samsung, but I actually bought my own Nexus One and Galaxy Nexus on google play store. And I installed CyanogenMod on the SIII Samsung gave me, because I wanted the JellyBean experience).

So I like the Nexus phones just because I think they have a nicer interface.

But I like the Nexus phones even more because they are clearly pushing the whole "no carrier lock-in" model. And price is absolutely part of it.

Link to http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/03/editorial-amazon-and-goog...
Do you really think the UK is a good example of free speech or effective governance? Free speech is extremely broken in that country. It's so bad there that they have to work to repeal crap like this:

http://reformsection5.org.uk/
If there were competing courts to choose from when entering into contracts, people would pay careful attention to which ones were more fair.

An unfair court would be less likely to be trusted by both parties and would not be as able to compete as a fair one.

Consider what options there are when there is only one court and it is terribly unfair. And that has happened many times.

People who are chronically treated unfairly would be much better off having a choice. And they and people that deal with such groups would have an incentive to choose a fair court.

And this is already there to a slight degree. Many companies incorporate in Delaware because they think its more favorable.

Of course, most things are governed by courts where you do business, so for most things it doesn't matter that much. In a more competitive situation, it could matter much more.
Prius Plug-In Hybrid packs Lithium 4.2kWh, 600 Volts battery. Add some seawater to it (which is conductive) and you will get a fire.
By what measure did the value of the currency fluctuate 50%? Could you buy 50% more cats with it?

What year were you thinking of?
Maybe websites should just pay up: they should auction for higher results, if their business depends on search placement.

Isn't that exactly what AdWords is?

As a consumer, I definitely what to know what is being paid for to show up and what isn't.
While I agree with your premise, the thing that is driving the parent comment is the fact that when debugging a language such as Elm, there is no tooling to make sense of the output code. This forces the user to use standard JS debugging tools on a pile of JS that was not written to be debugged. This is a contrast to Java or C, where debugging tools and hooks have been built to indicate where the low-level code is mapped to high-level code.

At the end of the day this is more a call for language authors and the people around them to develop tools to debug the language.
How Qik innovated, survived and eventually sold to Skype
Banking, education and healthcare: all too important to be left in the hands of government, if for no other reason than they are too important to each individual to be left to the whims and ignorance of the general electorate and/or their representatives.
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"The housing boom didn't consist of houses borrowed from a cosmic banker, whom we now have to pay. "

We don't have to pay because people foreclosed and filed for bankruptcy protection.

A nation cannot spend anything it doesn't "have" except by trading with other nations, and trade does not remotely explain the deficit.

When did we start talking about the deficit and why are you suggesting the deficit is related to the economy collapsing/recovering (not saying it isn't)? To be fair, when I mentioned retirement savings I wasn't really thinking public programs, probably should have been more specific.

I think many would agree that irresponsible loans were given to people that didn't have the means to pay them off, especially if (when) the adjustable rates adjusted. If housing prices don't get back to prerecession levels for instance - well I think thats a good thing. People where inflating the markets that they really had no business being in and banks gave them mortgages for these markets wearing a grin...
Ultimately this will end up benefiting the Democrats, since they tend to have a harder time turning out voters, and anything that makes voting easier tends to help them.
And a competition with only one competitor is Solitaire.

Unfortunately, these types of large markets play continuous/repeating games, not one-shots. Ideally, consumers wouldn't want to waste the time it takes for a monopoly to become complacent and be disrupted by a fresh competitor. We can be fairly confident that if the market's inefficient (as it hopefully is in a monopoly), someone would certainly jump in and try to eat that inefficiency as profit for themselves and compete. But that takes time.

Rather, we'd prefer the competition play out continuously. There's overhead in time and wasted opportunity waiting for these games to restart, when we could have been incrementally improving the whole time (say, a lost product cycle or two: 18-36 months maybe?). In this hypothetical ideal, the immediate cost to maintain this competition is higher to the consumer, but cumulatively lower in the long term since we gain though the innovation and efficiency forced by active competition.

Of course, we can certainly think of Solitaire as a one-person competion, but most companies don't have the wherewithal to actively compete against themselves (there are a few really awesome counter-examples, but they're at least partially awesome in light of how much everyone else fails to live up to that ideal). It's much easier to cheat: take the short-term pay-off since no-one is available next round to punish. Lacking alternatives, the consumer can't even properly punish the monopoly for cheating, and will instead have to either pay higher costs or accept passive innovation as the company coasts (or abstain, becoming a noncomsumer and shrinking the market - a worst-case scenario!). Or worse, they drive their efficiencies enough that none may even afford to enter to compete, and since there won't be competition next round, the consumer faces all the same negatives and a much lower hope of competition-driven innovation/cost reduction for the round after that. Now the best hope is a hidden competitor with the funds to jump in suddenly and without warning with a fully formed alternative (say, an iPhone perhaps); this happens rarely, and will likely take years to prepare.

TL;DR: When you're the only player, no one is there to stop you from cheating. And the consumers are paying for the game. That's why monopolies are lousy: consumers can't compete, but are still invested players - albeit disenfranchised.
What I thought of was Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother, which posits the inverse of this situation (a "techno-geek rebellion") rather than draw a parallel: "Big Brother is watching us, but who's watching back?" or something like that.
Isn't what you're describing more an effect of a two-party system? Unrelated policies tend to get pushed together just because they fit best under one party vs. the other one.
I think that people actually like that "noise". It definitely doesn't look good on Google+, I agree with you.

But I've seen a lot of people post stuff in Facebook and use hashtags even though they know it makes no sense. #usersareretarded
For example, if 34% of all drivers are speeding, and speeding is mostly uncorrelated to fatal crashes, then it would make sense for 34% of fatalities to involve speeding.

That's indeed a problem with the statistics, as is their conflation of exceeding a posted limit with driving too fast for conditions. These kinds of games are played all the time -- for instance, consider how an "alcohol related accident" is considered by some authorities to be one in which anyone including passengers in any involved vehicle were over the BAC limit.

The resulting biased statistics make it hard to get the straight story on what factors genuinely affect traffic safety and what factors are overhyped for other purposes.

In this case, it's probably worth keeping in mind how profitable insurance surcharges for speeding tickets are for the companies that sponsor the IIHS.
They'd have some form of scheduling that would just restrict your CPU usage there they aren't going to shutdown your box just because it's under load. This would be for when you are making millions of unnecessary api calls or have a virus spamming the local network.
In truth, if you'll walk through mentioned links at the end of the article - you'll find 80% of all screenshots. All good things come to he who waits
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Amusingly, in an environment with a level of parallelism, the above code poses few problems even if http.get/put are synchronous & blocking. A scheduler handles a bunch of blocked threads perfectly fine, and the series of calls per job aren't inefficient when executed in series.

We hit pain points when we can't have parallelism in our programs, and are forced to make elegant the work-arounds intended to unclog those programs.
Software is why. Apple is really the only company with lots of experience in both hardware and software.
Two key points from the article:

"In order to come out with a tablet, you had to have the ability at that time to influence and manage the power architecture, as well as a software layer" - David Johnson, Dell's SVP of corporate strategy [1]

Peter Hortensius, president of Lenovo's global product group, says, "I think the global view is that everyone got a little bit surprised by touch [technology]. We had touch devices, but the industry just didn't connect the dots like [Apple]."

In short, the iPad sips power by tightly integrating hardware/software. And touch was slick and integrated all the way up the stack.

I think the only question now is how many other companies can move fast enough? It took Apple the better part of the last decade to develop the hardware + software to where they are today. It makes Samsung's alleged copying make a lot of sense considering how far ahead Apple is.

Personally I'd really like to see more competition. Hopefully hi-res LCDs, good UI design, good industrial design, and rapid innovation become common. Also, if everyone is doing "rounded corners" or whatever it is next year, Apple won't have all the patents and will be forced to cross-license. I admit it's not all going to be as rosy as this. But this is better than what happened in the 90's.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-com...
How am I supposed to make a living after open sourcing my code? : /r/opensource
Except judges are so easily swayed by sealed evidence about national security. And national security has been arbitrarily stretched to encompass all manner of things. They'll definitely try and make a case about terrorism and drug cartels affecting national security.
Why would it break the contract model? A carrier could still pay a $150-200 subsidy and give you the phone for free, and people would lap it up.

I think people are looking at this from the wrong side. In the US, they don't sell you a phone with a service contract attached: they sell you a service contract with a bonus phone. Yes, Google or Amazon could give away phones for free to eliminate the value of the bonus phone, but you still need a strong alternative to contracts for service.

Currently you have carriers like T-Mobile that offer semi-decent prepaid service, although it's been hampered by technological issues (the band they use for 3G is incompatible with iPhones, although supposedly they're in the process of changing it). Why are so many people still buying contracts, though? Is it really just because of the subsidized phones? I'm not convinced.

Furthermore, Europe already has a very competitive phone service market, with extremely popular prepaid plans that are far cheaper than anything you can get in the US, and no locked phones; and they achieved all of this without resorting to phone dumping.

For all these reasons, I think selling phones at or below price has nothing to do with disrupting the American carrier model (which hardly makes sense for Google or Amazon anyway - they're not even in that industry!).
The field of Economics has been attempting to answer that for a rather long time. I don't mean to be glib - it turns out to be a damnably hard problem that's been battled by thousands for centuries. There's easily enough modeling, math, and intellectual know-how going into it to make it a fine engineering discipline (albeit ununified). Heck, the quants basically weaponized it into a science.

Of couse, the real problem is which model(s) to use, since that affects the system. The answer to that is probably "all of them", picking whichever one seems more appropriate. I'm thinking like a physicist here: sometimes you ignore gravity, and sometimes you ignore wave-partical duality.
This is pretty great! I had no idea so many people "suffered" from things like this.
I've had a car catch fire on me, while I was driving it down the Interstate. It was a good old fashioned American V6, too: a Pontiac Bonneville. Was it a sign of a design flaw? Of possible risks with gas vehicles generally? Or was driving down the Interstate just more than it could handle?

"Based on photographs of the scene obtained by the blog Jalopnik, Fisker’s cars were parked fairly close together, so whatever the initial cause, a fire in one car could quickly spread to others."

So it's possible one car sparked all of this, though we'll have to wait for a real investigation to maybe know anything.

But it's weird to point to electric cars and hybrids as a scary fire hazard. Have they forgotten the 15-20 or more gallons of super flammable liquid normal cars carry with them everywhere? These cars _work_ by containing _fire_. Hell, sometimes something in the 12V circuit gets hot and a car goes up in flames, no gas or fancy lithium-ion batteries needed.

I seem to remember a recall or two over faulty ignition wiring leading to fires in gas-powered cars in perfectly normal weather, but I can't find the one I'm thinking of in the sea of all the others Google turns up.
>>But certainly sealing a battery so it doesn't short when submerged in seawater isn't rocket surgery either. It's an engineering goof, and a pretty severe one.

No it is not. Look, it's not as if "being submerged in water" is a common condition for these cars. They are commuter cars, not off-road vehicles. I'm sure the manufacturer's engineering team could come up with an automatic sealing mechanism, but that would come with trade-offs from both price and complexity perspective. At the end of the day it just is not worth it.
Agree, custom and unique design matters nowadays and of course twitter bootstrap will not always be enough. Some people just did not have enough imagination, the other - money for unique design, the third - time.

We often offer using TwB either in the early stages of the project in order to save precious time, or for domestic products if they will be used only within the company.
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