skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting perspective into the shortcomings of our military system. The article is worth reading through, but in summary: The author suggests that our drawn-out, meandering wars are the result of a perverse incentive system among the higher ranks of the military. Leaders are not rewarded for successes or, perhaps more importantly, punished for their shortcomings and failures. Instead, they are given short, time-limited appointments in leadership roles, which changes the goal from military success to simply ensuring that nothing too bad happens on their watch. Likewise, these time-limited roles result in a diffusion of success, where everyone can claim that progress was at least partially due to some of their own actions.

Perhaps the most succinct explanation from the article:

But the Army continues to do too little to sort the average performers from the
outstanding ones. That has long-term consequences for the caliber of military
leaders. A recent survey by students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
found that good young officers have left the military in large part because of
frustration with military bureaucracy and the sense that the armed forces do
not have a performance-oriented system for managing personnel.

The author proposes that the military should more frequently relieve poor performers from their positions until they find the person with the right personality and intelligence for the position.

I've never been involved in the military, but I feel as though this perverse incentive structure is common among many businesses as well. Most big companies I've worked with have a few obviously incompetent employees in leadership positions, but harbor an unwillingness to demote or fire them because they've "earned" their position through hard work and loyalty to the company. Taken to the extreme, this is the famous "Peter Principle," which suggests that employees will continue to be promoted until they reach a position beyond their abilities, at which point they languish in mediocrity. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle )
Ask PG: Why is Ben Horowitz's startup school 2012 video not available?
It's the only link that says 'recording unavailable'.

Is it that it will never be available, or not available yet?
Except it does have a trackpad. It's right there below the spacebar. It's tiny, but it's there and it works.
Counterexample: I got a National Merit scholarship. I didn't study for the PSAT at all.
Right on. Perhaps the company we deride for not letting us remove the battery could be excused for not optimising for devices with no battery.
i started learning functional programming with python, it falls apart at ~300 loc which is absurdly low, which makes python basically useless for production FP.

python's data structures are mutable, and mutable data structures necessarily expose a different interface than immutable data structures. using mutable datastructures in immutable style necessarily has severe performance penalties; and to do meaningful stuff you need to use a statement, and you can't put a statement in a python lambda. And Guido thinks lambda's are un-pythonic and a misfeature which he seems to regret [1].

python is a great sandbox for imperative programmers interested in FP, and these are great slides. it's awesome to play with these concepts in a familiar language - thats how i started - but its important to note that FP is just not pythonic, and thus it's probably a mistake to put functional-style python into production.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3962316

if you are interested in functional python, i wrote about it a bit this year in my blog, because despite all this, python is a nice language for evangelism aimed at imperative developers.

[2] implement generators without yield http://www.dustingetz.com/2012/10/03/implement-python-genera...

[3] easy monads http://www.dustingetz.com/2012/10/07/monads-in-python-identi...

[4] hard monads http://www.dustingetz.com/2012/10/02/reader-writer-state-mon...

[5] peter norvig's Lispy refactored using monads https://github.com/dustingetz/monadic-interpreter
Utter nonsense. Either a function/method is semantically compatible with the expectations of its caller, or it is not.

Whether or not the function/method's author typed the words "implements Foo" has absolutely no impact on this.
Track Hurricane Sandy
And all the independent developers have had a chance to see what makes a fast program on a Windows-based ARM device?

I think as people begin programming for Windows with an actual RT instance to test on (for example, the Surface), apps will become faster and more efficient. Personally, I haven't seen a problem with this as of yet; but, I haven't used that many apps in the store, just Netflix and MetroTwit, FreshPaint and a couple of others.

Disclosure: MSFT Employee
And you can't pass them as simple functions to do stuff via the multiprocessing module because they can't be pickled. I don't understand this infatuation with FP in Python. To me the essence of functional programming is immutable state. Python has mutable state to the core. List comprehensions are novel syntax for many FP-esque operations (so much so that map, reduce, & filter were almost removed from Python at some point) yet, to their core they're full of mutable-state disgustingness. For example:

>>> a = range(12)
>>> [a.pop(i) for i in range(3)]
[0, 2, 4]
>>> a
[1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]

As long as list methods have methods that change state of the object, even when processing said object, Python handles FP at a very superficial syntactic level.
You have to factor in that the heat and power generated from incinerating the waste replaces coal fired powerplant in many cases. So the environmental impact just need to match a the burning of coal for it to be a environmental win.
Idea?

With Uber investing in the cloud (literally) with BlackJet, I wonder if the same idea could be used here. Well, the same idea... in a sense.

Like what if there cloud-like arbitrage system (in the positive sense). Like a private jet with extra seats, if people had private clouds they could offer "seats" (i.e., space) on some system such that you reduce the likelihood of an outage, but also you can make money.

Cloudshares!
Innovation also means finding ways to adapt
Just because it looks the same doesn't mean it has the same internals, especially with cheap made-in-China kit.
There's an interesting bug if you arrow past the end of the slideshow. It moves a distance not on a slide width boundary, so if you arrow back from there you're in the middle of the last slide, and so on.
> electronic goods

But this case is apparently about copyright, and hardware isn't usually subject to copyright. Though I suppose firmware, etc. might be.

Of course, I think it's ludicrous that anyone could be guilty of a copyright violation without having, by any imaginable definition, made a copy of anything.
The Office team is notorious for getting their way inside MS, from what I understand. Which could very well include "we won't be touching WinRT with a 40 foot pole".

More practically speaking, "portable" is a word that I highly doubt describes the Office codebase. If there's a team working on a Metro version, I do not envy them at all.
This was ever the way. The needs (and goals) of a peacetime armed forces (which is what the US still has, despite meandering wars in the Middle East still running) are different to those of a wartime armed forces. The only question is how quickly, given the shift to wartime footing, one can replace the peacetime command with that needed to win wars.
No, they all are.

* http://www.weather.com/
* http://www.weather.gov/
* http://www.accuweather.com/

Not trying to argue, I just think even the weather people are blowing this out of proportion, not just the media.
Yeah, I did the Windows 8 Pro upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium.
In the long run, open source is far better for engineers than it is for executive douches.

To learn Oracle, you needed a job where you had access to Oracle. This gave employers a lot of leverage. They could hire young people eager to learn the ropes (and willing to accept a salary that was small compared to their ability to add value). This reduced the leverage of older people, who were in competition with young people willing to work for peanuts to get into the game at all.

Now, with options like Postgres, people can learn and use a production-quality database without having to pick up a phone and pull out a credit card. The effect of this is that engineers have more options, and are more aware of how much value they actually add.

In the very-long term, this is a wealth transfer from relationship-peddlers with fat stacks (money, capital) to technologists who can actually think and solve problems. It might take a decade, but possibly a century, but it is happening. It's just very slow, and progress is not monotonic.
WinRT supports BitLocker (with remote wipe) and all native Windows VPN standards. You are not going to get the install-able VPN connector 'applications' (Cisco etc) on WinRT, but if you have a standards compliant VPN this is not an issue.
It's Easy Being King
Could be, but to be fair their implementation is in line with the DNT draft which says that DNT=1 is a valid default for user agents. Maybe the draft writers didn't think through what the consequences would be for DNT support if DNT=1 became the default in any majority of browsers.

The way I see it either the consequences for not respecting DNT need to be greater somehow or the default implementation can't be DNT=1 because third parties will simply ignore it. Without consequences, a default of DNT=1 just weakens the draft and hurts the people who really do want to block everything.
Programmers Are Still Massively Underpaid
No, you're not alone.
I assure you that just because two adapters look the same do not have any relation to the insides. (After all, counterfeit Apple adapters look the same as genuine ones, but you wouldn't think they are the same on the inside after reading this article.) The black plug casing is a common molding style used by many factories - but its the electronics inside that count :) The best way to know if they are identical is to look for the UL certificate number, those are unique to each design.

We have a photo of our label here
http://www.adafruit.com/images/large/ID501label_LRG.jpg
Apple’s Game Center Seems to be Malfunctioning Today. Blame Letterpress?
It's as if the author really hurried to return the device so that he can write the blog article. Insane.
Wow, really? What if they're all made in China using the same enclosures, does that bring us back to the "check the UL code" method? I know I don't memorize UL codes, so that may be a nonstarter in at least a few situations.
There is a place in the ecosystem for programmers like this. There are times when a quick demo can have a huge effect on business prospects. The key is to understand that the whole thing needs to be recoded, by engineers who understand process and architecture. Then just put "the kid" on the next flashy demo.
Too long; Didn't Read

TL;DR

TL

We're already seeing conventions popping up to deal with this change in behavior. They just aren't formalized yet.

I think this will be another advantage that hypermedia will have over regular old print, you will be able to present your information in "layers". A TL;DR for reference, a summary, and then the full article.

Of course, that speaks nothing to the nature of the actual articles. I think theres a point where you've "read enough" and need to go do something else for a while, see what works and what doesn't. I took a two month long hiatus from HN to focus on other stuff recently. It helped. The first n articles at some point become much more helpful than the next nth articles.
A fast-charging solar iPad cover
Isn't that (multiples as pledge awards) a direct violation of the letter and spirit of kickstarters new rules?
UK salaries are always stated gross.

BTW while I am correcting people, I will also point out that the UK is very rarely described as "European", though nobody would (or can) deny that it's part of Europe, geographically speaking.
Probably because of the "No Bitch Ass Ness" shirt he wore during his talk. https://twitter.com/MCHammer/status/259783902699339776
Programmers aren't "so well-paid". In fact, I think we're underpaid, when you consider that the top technology companies earn several hundred thousand dollars (and sometimes, low millions) per employee, averaged across all employees.

I actually think we're underpaid, and that's a problem, because if an engineer only costs $100-200k, then executives can cost-justify using programmer time on a lot of stupid shit that doesn't add any value (the hits, the projects that deliver $1 million per person per year in value, make up for it). The fact that software adds so much value (on average) should give us a huge risk allowance (that startups have visibly capitalized on) but it's only people with VC connections and executive douches, for the most part, who can actually take that risk.

It's not even about money, from my perspective. Engineer salaries are low compared to the value we add, but reasonable for the most part (we don't starve). What bothers me is that 90% of software engineers have to do stupid stuff with minimal autonomy or career growth, and I think that engineers (as a class) would be better treated if they were more expensive. Of course, the AbstractVisitorSingletonFactory crowd (who bring down the reputation of the field) would all be fired, but that's a good thing, too.
And this is one of the reasons I despise modal dialogs of all kinds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W...

When they go bad, they're catastrophically bad.
Ex-CIA officer jailed for two years for leaking torture chief’s name
Oh this is way cooler than I thought. It's already easy to uPnP/AirPlay CONTENT from Android to AppleTV/XBMC/whatever.

This does screen-sharing, but not the same way Apple does (Apple's method does not work with XBMC).
If you mean the paper linked as "slightly older research" (http://rump2009.cr.yp.to/8d9cebc9ad358331fcde611bf45f735d.pd...), it's slides from a talk entitled "Cross-VM Vulnerabilities in Cloud Computing" by Thomas Ristenpart, Eran Tromer, Stefan Savage, and Hovav Shacham, presented at Crypto'09's "rump session" (a session for short, amusing and/or late-breaking talks). Downloads slowly for me too, but eventually finishes (6mb pdf).

The following paper by the same authors, from a few months later, appears to be the published-paper version of that research, though, which is probably more useful: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~rist/papers/cloudsec.html
Mmind - hmm, no, I didn't write it to create controversy. All of my blog post titles start with why, what, how, etc, and I wanted to explain why I wasn't posting the original in-depth review that I'd promised my readers after I preordered the Surface RT. I actually walked away from the post without thinking twice.

When you say "the word preview issues are easily fixed with a simple SW update that is coming soon, as Office is already RTM" - how do you know they're fixed in an update that's "coming soon"?
That is not the case in the UK.
Biggest issue so far for me with Surface's WinRT - no alternative browsers, so no Adblock. I can't believe this is what the desktop web really looks like.
Yes but one should not leave it out altogether. There is always a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. One needs to explore around for ideas but not forget to dig deep into the task at hand (or whatever it is).

If one has read Richard Hamming's "You and your research", this is what he refers to by advising one to keep his/her door open while working.
"Wiley, with the Justice Department in support, dismiss those scenarios, and say Congress would be in a position to ensure libraries in particular do not suffer from any high court ruling against them."

It's strange that the Justice Department would have a reason to have an opinion in this court case at all. And why would our executive branch be siding with the publishing business and against the average citizen on this case?
It has a trackpad and also supports USB mice, even a range of weird USB wireless mouse dongles.
Dude loses Nexus 4 in bar, Google goes Rambo to get it back
It's not just reliability though. The quality of I/O is also better. You don't see such slow I/O, with crazy fluctuations, with local storage.
From the comments:

> I admit, I fully expected a tablet version of my laptop. I wanted it to do everything my laptop could do, but with the added bonus of the touch screen, so I can play my games that make my phone freeze up while I’m sitting at my kids dance or karate classes.

If you're technically savvy enough to understand and follow focus of GUI elements, and don't mind a stylus, then there are a number of existing tablets that will fit this bill. In fact, they've been around since ~2000.
I for one was very disappointed in iPad 1. Your point?
Who rents GPUs?
I have it in front of me and confirm that the RT does have a desktop environment with office, and if you hit window+r some other programs, like cmd, and powershell.
It's made out of a very solid-feeling metal (VaporMG), and it feels like it'd be quite difficult to shorten. I do really like the idea of replacing it with a shorter piece though.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of this passage from HPMoR:

"But Father had once told her that the trouble with passing up opportunities was that it was habit-forming. If you told yourself you were waiting for a better opportunity next time, why, next time you'd probably tell yourself the same thing. Father had said that most people spent their whole lives waiting for an opportunity that was good enough, and then they died. Father had said that while seizing opportunities would mean that all sorts of things went wrong, it wasn't nearly as bad as being a hopeless lump. Father had said that after she got into the habit of seizing opportunities, then it was time to start being picky about them."

Or, in context: You can't skip directly to writing quality code. First, you have to get used to writing code, and to do that, you have to write a lot of it. You have to get used to getting things done. Only after you have a good grasp of getting things done, of seeing a project to completion, should you start worrying about code quality.

I have a lot of unfinished projects, and a lot of smaller projects that I have finished. I'm sure all of us do. But once, I decided not to worry so much and just start writing, and I started and shipped an incredibly ambitious project. It wasn't my best code, but it taught me a lot about not sitting at a blank screen trying to plan everything to be perfect before starting.
Unfortunately, I already returned it. Your best bet is to get one of the folks who really love their Surfaces to record videos similar to mine. I've heard a lot of anecdotal stories about "It works fine on mine" but I haven't seen anyone post similar videos demoing that it works. I'd want to see it working myself if I was you - I wouldn't take anyone's word at this point.
tl;dr - microsoft word on a brand new cpu architecture, ui style and input system is a bit laggy.
I forgot how big the minicomputer version was. They ended up splitting the CPM version into several games. Probably couldn't fit the whole thing on a single cassette.
So apparently the stores are too much like Apple's, but the tablet is not similar enough.

The one to one feature comparison to the iPad is silly. The surface is not trying to be a carbon copy. Features like retina display come with trade offs in power, speed and cost that were obviously not worth the trade off. It seems that ever since Apple raised the issue pixels have gone from being something few ever thought about to being physically painful to consumer's eyeballs.

There were a few factual inaccuracies in Marco's post. The touch keyboard does allow you to rest your fingers on the surface. It's smart enought to recognize what is intended to be an actual keystroke. Rotating the screen does show a transition too; the screen shrinks, fades and expands.
SPJ's comment had nothing to do with lexical syntax.
Any idea why this is in USA courts?

Surely the sale occurred in another country and the terms and condition of that sale are dictated in that country?

The transfer of ownership happened in the original country. If that breached the law it happened in the other country.

If Ownership of a book is a property that survives crossing international boundaries (that is it is not seized by the state) and ownership in that nation confers certain rights then so be it.

Don't sell something if you still want to own it. Don't give something to someone if you still want to keep it.
What specifically about the iPad was disappointed you?

Was it a) because it was not quite ready for prime time, and subsequent updates fixed it, or was it b) because it simply didn't (and still doesn't) have features you wanted?

When the answer is a), that shows a product was rushed and not ready i.e. the Surface RT from the sounds of this review.
I've heard that complaint (gorilla arm) as a big detractor for touch-based user interfaces, but it didn't bother me much when I was using it. The biggest change was that I had to adapt - I'm so used to using the touchpad, but the touchpad on the Surface RT keyboards is just too small. It's easier to point and touch the screen, and it wasn't too uncomfortable. I'm already used to using tablets, though, so I might not be the best person to answer that.

My bigger concern was the very tiny touch points on the dialogs, especially in Office. I repeatedly touched the wrong spots, wrong options, opened the wrong folders in Explorer, etc.
> But this case is apparently about copyright, and hardware isn't usually subject to copyright. Though I suppose firmware, etc. might be.

There's no might, here. The firmware, OS, hell, even the branding text on a label is subject to copyright. See, for instance, the ruling in Omega v Costco, where a logo was enough to bring copyright infringement charges against Costco for importing foreign-market watches.
>If they condemn the sales, they strike down the first sale doctrine and it is a massive blow to fundamental property rights. As commenters have already pointed out earlier this year regarding this case, since most electronic goods are made overseas, it would be officially illegal to resell them without permission

You've left out a possibility: they condemn the sale without striking down first sale. They can easily distinguish these book sales from other potential first sale situations because the former involve goods where the first sale occurs outside the US and the goods are then imported without permission of the copyright owner, whereas the later involve goods where the first sale occurs in the US and if the goods were imported before that sale it was by the copyright owner.
Submissions cannot be downvoted. (They can be flagged, but that is supposed to be reserved for spam and other egregious violations of norms.)
I've been using Windows RT and the Office preview for months, and I still have to try to hit the click targets very carefully. I usually end up using my pinky, which is still not 100%
But the big problem is that the vast majority of children in New York City (and many other cities all over the world, of course) come from families where the parents are either functionally or completely illiterate, have no understanding of how to study, and/or simply do not value academic achievement.

I think this is by far the biggest problem with education in western countries, to the extent that it dwarfs any other consideration. Better textbooks, better teaching methods, better equipment, better teachers, better curriculums, better classroom sizes - they are all minor issues compared with the children wanting to learn and their families supporting them on that point.
I can attest to the going abroad thing, I made the move and have been astonished by the jump in salary and autonomy in the US over the UK.

What makes it weirder is I didn't change company only location
Shiny Stuff with SVG