skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What APIs would something like Google Now need that don't currently exist? The only one I can think of is a way to launch it easier, rather than with an icon. But the push and local notifications, geo-tracking, ability to access your Gmail, and even the ability for Google Maps to pre-download map tiles are available to Google on iOS. What else does it need?
My experience with NFS failures is that they're an order or two of magnitude higher (and much more binary) than local storage issues.

Speed of light matters in that it sets an lower absolute limit on the latency of connections between two points, particularly if they're outside of a single datacenter. While non-local storage can be faster (and more reliable) than local storage within a well-architected datacenter environment, even a link of a few tens of miles, let alone thousands, will introduce SOL latencies, carrier inconsistencies, and switching and other equipment idiosyncrasies. Your point that actual propagation rarely hits SOL speeds only compounds the problem.

I've looked at iSCSI. NFS, for its warts, allows multiple concurrent access, iSCSI binds storage to a single system. Management/diagnosis tools, vendor sophistication, documentation, and support are sorely lacking (or were on my last exposure). NFS may suck, but we can quantify, analyze, diagnose, and understand its suckage.

My own preference is for distributed network/application based storage. Caching for repeated static queries. Direct remote database access (if your network and remote storage are fast enough for NFS, they're fast enough to put the DB server directly on hot storage), Hadoop/MapReduce type solutions for higher-speed access, git or other change-and-push state for less aggressive changes. Getting to my earlier point: this requires architecting your application to take account of remote storage capabilities and limitations. It need not be specific to a given technology (and ideally you'd abstract out to the level of "a cache", "a database", "a keypair storage", "a versioning system"), but you're also not just expecting local filesystem semantics and reliability.

Ironically, gitfs is a thing.
Really helpful! This is my new reference in my quest ;)

Thanks!
If you're talking about whole europe & not just the UK it's getting more complicated, credit cards are not that omnipresent here. You could try http://www.ogone.be/en/Extra%20Services/Payment%20Methods%20...
I guess...Greece?
Well, there has been some push from at least one Senator (John Cornyn, R-TX). He does appear to be asking some embarrassing and obvious questions.

http://www.cornyn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=InNews&C...
Apparently he refused to "cease and desist" his actions. So...he brought on the expulsion!?

Dawson statement on the article: The reasons cited in the National Post article for which the student was expelled are inaccurate. The process which leads to expulsion includes a step in which a student is issued an advisory to cease and desist the activities for which he or she is being sanctioned, particularly in the area of professional code of conduct.
Apple Expected To Report First Earnings Drop in Nine Years
PayPal, PayMill, Braintree etc are all 3rd party payment
processors. So I don't quite understand your distinction.
I believe FastSpring may mean you avoid having to get a
merchant account directly so perhaps that's the
difference you see?

The main difference is that FastSpring acts as a reseller. One of the consequences being that Europe based startup doesn't need to handle VAT - technically it's selling to the US.

The biggest objection I've heard is the 9% flat rate they
take vs 3% and 30 cents per transaction that you'd roughly
see from a payment processor.

Well, it's not cheap but we have EU regulators to thanks for it - not having to deal with VAT can be worth the price in some cases. And when a company grows, it can optimize in the payments area.
There a difference is finding an exploit accidentally and reporting it from running a penetration testing tool on a production server.

What did this kid expect?
As I understand it (I could definitely be wrong) China's concern isn't geopolitical but pragmatic: the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the DPRK would be a gigantic flood of refugees into China.
Take a peek at Mandrill and SendGrid, too.
Imagine a North Korean in his thirties. He's a citisen of a paternalistic state. He mostly wants to get by, then entertainment and no trouble.
For him, Internet is a very abstract thing and RSS means nothing. And you won't be able to supply a reliable connectivity.

And anyway (s)he's at the cultural stage where one (moving) picture is worth a thousand words. Consider South Korean news feed (North Koreans don't know any other language) - 95% of topics would seem abstract and arcane.
The site is now 403'ing but I'm really curious what else he could have done and didn't admit to for his story. Personally, this all makes sense right up until the point where the president of Skytech says Ahmed should not have run his tests but that he understands Ahmed was not being malicious. But then Skytech wants him expelled, and the university wants to protect Skytech's interests? Expelling him would get the story out and accomplish literally the opposite of saving face, even with his inability to disclose details.

Based on other stories of bureaucratic ignorance it's easy to jump on the administrative / cover-up blame train, but something about this doesn't quite mesh, and the fact that the story's only alibis are 1) Ahmed and 2) a generic students' rights organization makes it difficult to digest.
All the contracts of some form or another in the jurisdiction of California that I've reviewed recently include some language to that effect, usually at the end among the warranties and disclaimers.
Seth Godin on the art of staying relevant
Also, transmitting MAC addresses and IP addresses in the clear really isn't anything to write home about -- that's how all TCP/IP packets are transmitted over ethernet, after all. The real question is what they do with that data on the server side. If they so desire, they could change that behavior far more easily, and retroactively apply that transform to all the data they've retained.
I've never been a fan of the Nexus product line, so hopefully a company with a better design ascetic. The HTC/Samsung/LG triumvirate clearly focuses on a market saturation instead of flagship products. Frankly, I'm a bit shocked that none of the other manufacturers have tried shifting focus to less, but much better handsets.

RIM is trying it now though, so I guess we'll see how that works out for them.
[Sequoia Capital] Investor Friendly Business Plan Format for Startups
You use stripe, so your market is US-only. You're missing out a huge chunk of Facebook's user base.
Despite the defense of InstallMonetizer, their payment model and practices do not appear to be what you would find with a legitimate software business.

InstallMonetizer has been used by malware as a method to make money as early as April 2011. It was being silently installed by a large botnet, and I assume that the botnet affiliate was making money off the installs.

Their installers are also labeled as a malware by AV vendors, and treated as such by network monitoring infrastructure.
"The usage info is (a) collected only for the first 30 minutes and (b) is only used to prove to the advertiser that the install is by a human and not a bot."

Well that sounds easy to spoof.
Amen. It REALLY IS possible to be a dumbass and a victim at the same time. Many (definitely not all) of these women are clearly both. And now they may cash in on their poor life choices.
The Nexus 4 is honestly an excellent piece of hardware. I'd still say the iPhone is better-built, but I don't feel like the N4 is far enough behind to leave me feeling jealous.

The screen size is a sticking point for some folks, but the device doesn't "feel" big (my dad is a vocal critic of too-big phones, and he rather likes my N4) like some other phones of similar sizes. The battery life is absolutely an issue, but that's a software issue rather than a hardware one; I average about 36 hours on a charge on my N4, but that did take a bit of tweaking (turning off location reporting services that are on by default, primarily) to get there.

All that said, I feel that in terms of software, stock Android is so much better than iOS at this point that it's not even a contest; the "battery life" issue is part of the double-edged sword that is developer freedom - on the other edge is a system that lets developers do wonderful things. Apple is absolutely still top of the game in terms of hardware, but they're going to have to do a hard burn to catch up on software.
Asus is one of the main brands I'm considering right now because of the cost/benefit relation (at least in my city), so I'm glad to hear that it worked fine with ubuntu.
To be fair, QuickSort is particularly suitable for actual computation hardware which has hardware features like numerically addressed, stateful random access memory. Imperative arrays happen to feature "in-place modification of arrays" not because it's a useful language feature but because it's a straightforward abstraction of the actual machine being programmed.

That distinction is really important, and something I think many language nerds completely fail to understand. Sure, often all that's "really" important is the abstraction of the "Human Design Space" idea being implemented, and that's a regime where high level language abstractions have lots of value.

But sometimes you want to actually direct the hardware. And there, as everywhere, it helps to use a language with the proper abstractions. C has them, Haskell doesn't. There's absolutely no shame in that!

But somehow people get fooled into thinking that somehow Haskell (or whatever language is involved in the argument, but it seems like Haskell people fall into this hole more than most) doesn't need those abstractions to be "as fast a C". And that's just insane.
I'm seeing the same thing: http://wheresitup.com/results/50fd9b39d331167b5a00017a
No, it was originally linked to techcrunch.com, that's why he post the url.
How to increase productivity and make your life better by not answering email
Yup. It's more like greed-driven police state.
Part of that depends on the type of advice or guidance. Some of it might be a symptom of the project's bus factor being too low (inadequate documentation, ambiguities or holes in processes, etc), which your organization can fix by paying down some of that technical/process debt. Other forms of advice (career-related, higher-level tech stuff, etc) would seem more like a mentor role. For that stuff, you may want to schedule "mentor time" in a slot advantageous for yourself, such as the last hour of the day.
As a college student, I do a lot of pair programming. IMO, the efficiency of pair programming comes down to how well matched the two are in skill, and how well they can communicate with each other. Depending on those two variables, it can be much more productive than a single programmer, or a huge roadblock to getting anything significant done.
Should we discuss your experiment?
You're right - the invention you mentioned did not put stores out of business. But there have been inventions and technologies and new business models that have put people out of work before. That's not a controversial fact I think...

My point is that if enough of those disruptive technologies get introduced in a small enough time frame to put enough people out of work, then we might see some unexpected pushback.
Lobster game programming language
I've been a developer with a private office and I've also been on a small (< 10 person) team in an open office plan. Give me the open office any day. If there's a side conversation not of interest to me, I tune it out. But frequently there are ones that are of interest to me that I'm able to either contribute to or learn something from. It's great for group troubleshooting of sudden issues, too.
>Let us do what we want.

Pretty much everyone I know who has ditched iOS has done so because of this reason. Seems to me like the author is just a bit behind and finally caught on.

I love the Apple hardware, dislike the closed options I get on iOS.
They need to have a way to set defaults for different types of apps too, coming from android that's incredibly infuriating. Also intents. Oh, and fix the complete mess that is notification centre, it's so cludgy and awful compared to android - e.g why the hell can't I swipe away individual notifications? Why do I have to clear all or none of them * rage *. (I'm a recent convert to a 4S as I'm putting an app into the store and need to use it).
I think stripe accepts credit cards from around the world?
At my last company us developers complained that we were getting interrupted too much, so the boss asked us to keep a list of interruptions. By lunch on the first day we all had 3+ pages, so he believed us and we implemented the following:

Each week, one pair of programmers would be designated the "consulting developers", and a big sign would be put above their desk. They were the only developers that could be interrupted for the week, allowing the rest of us to get a lot of work done. If the consulting developers needed to ask something of other developers, we tried to save it up for lunch, as we mostly all ate together anyway.

This made an enormous difference to our productivity, which everyone in the company took notice of when the number of "development days" we got done each week increased dramatically.

At the start we thought of "sacrifice one for the good of all" and we didn't look forward to our turn. As time went on it actually turned out differently. We usually enjoyed the "consulting" time as it meant a break from the routine of working on endless tickets, and it also kept us in touch with what the rest of the company was doing with regards to deploys, environments, configs, etc. etc.

AFAIK they still do it today
I'll answer your questions in order:

1) Python was my first programming language. I started teaching myself python during my freshman year of college.

2) I am currently employed in a job that is mostly programming. Technically my job title is Data Analyst.

3) I got my job primarily because I had experience with Economics/Econometrics (my major in college), and applied for an internship based on that experience. Because I knew Python, I was able to create a number of predictive models during my internship, and was hired on full time after graduation.

4a) I haven't "stuck with" python so much as I continue to use it as part of my ever expanding tool belt. For my programming work I use ~70% Python, ~20% R, ~5% SQL, ~5% other (C#, VB, C). For fun I dabble in Haskell, Javascript, C, ASM, Forth, and others.

4b) I don't think I would say that Python itself has helped me to learn any other language above and beyond the fact that learning one programming language makes the next one easier. Instead, I think Python, by virtue of being a language that is not particularly extreme in any way, has given me a solid basis of comparison for any other languages that I have picked up. It's a good reference point for what makes other languages unique.

I'm glad I started with Python. The simplicity of getting started with Python was definitely a plus, and it continues to be a useful tool that keeps me employed doing interesting work.
Google doesn't care about your Chrome bugs
Even though I rarely use headphones, the idea that there are actually companies that don't allow engineers to work with headphones blows my mind. I thought I worked in some pretty strict places, but never anything that extreme.
It might not be black or white. The kind of people who will abusively kick someone out to cover their ass are the same kind of people who will bend the truth later.

We just don't know.
It was, and I did use that to verify the new ethernet drop worked, but I would have to spoof it 24/7 for ~6 months. One slip meant losing the internet. So I thought the $10 on a LAN card was a good investment.
Designer News is invite-only and will remain so forever.

While it's still in its early stages, we want to future proof things quite a bit. Currently, we can map our users onto a directed graph which will help immensely with spam, dead accounts and so forth. (If you're a spammer, everyone you've invited gets their account nuked along with the person that invited you.)

Also, one of our users put together a sweet visualization of this in action, which you can see here:

http://ejfox.github.com/DesignerNewsMembers/
This is why you would either have a "support" rota in a team or a dedicated resource for such queries. Interruptions are annoying , but they are much easier to bear if it's just a week in a month. Of course it's not perfect due to the lack of telepathy, exchanging knowledge is not immediate but such rota will help facilitate sharing inside the team as well. I've seen teams that did that, been a part of one for some time and it was really good compared to standard workflow (whoever is closest or nicest is being interrupted).
Yet another Java Zero-Day
Yeah, I was thinking more like Therac-25 giving people radiation overdoses or the Patriot missile failures due to floating point roundoff error
Looks like it also explains why caret (^) was chosen in regex and vi to mean "beginning of line".
the ability for Google Maps to pre-download map tiles [is] available to Google on iOS

Google Now will automatically pre-download the map vector data before your trip, without you asking it to. For Google to do the equivalent on iOS, they'd need to be able to perform periodic background jobs, which isn't something that iOS supports currently.
Are there any studies that quantify the impact of Google Talk on programmer productivity?
I'd love to be able to actually replace Apple's apps with Google's. When I hit a link I don't want it to open in Safari, I want Chrome. Ditto with Map links. I want Siri to be replaced with Google Voice Search (and for there to be APIs that allow Google to fully replace Siri).
I think the idea of the hash for IM is to prove uniqueness in a dispute. Salting the hash would make it useless in that case.
Aircubus: web powered light cube
Yes. However to be really effective the questions need to be coming from both sides of the aisle and from all over the country. That will only happen if you, yes you, reading this; go to your representatives and write, call, and send snail mail.

This is not a partisan issue, it cuts straight to the core of our system of government; when prosecutors misuse their position for political purposes it undermines our system of government and eats at the legitimacy of our institutions.

It's bad when done by Republicans like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leura_Canary and equally bad when done by Democrats like Ms. Ortiz.
Thanks for open sourcing this. Could you please add your license details to the project, as I'm pretty keen to build a podcast player from it (assuming certain permissive licenses).
I'd say "bunch of fonts that are widely used." Some designers have obscure favorites that they use regularly.

If you're really looking for a good grounding in HCI fundamentals, The Design of Everyday Things, The Humane Interface, and, oddly enough, the OS X Human Interface Guidelines are among the best. For type, try "The Elements of Typographic Style," and for a basic, general overview of some concepts you should understand, "The Universal Principles of Design" is, well, not bad.
Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroutup
Government Will Loose the War on Piracy
> Thus you posit a contradiction.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?
The gratuitously large amount of whitespace in comments pages is a little off-putting. The very, very light gray meta-info text on white bg is hard to read in the comments container; as is the kind-of-blue text on light blue bg. The icons are not descriptive enough as stand-alones to exist without text indication of what they do, or something similar.

So basically, this is just walking into the 'flat' fad without any careful thought. I'm just in disbelief. I'm primarily a back-end coder but I've designed better sites than this.

Edit: I realize I'm being a little bit mean, and I don't like being mean... but I think it's perhaps warranted this time given the name of the site.
Did you ever bring it up?
Confusing inept users into installing random toolbars[1] that break their browsers and force them to call IT pros to 'clean up' their computers is pretty scummy. Sorry, but it is.

You can make a lot of money doing all kinds of popular things -- pimping women, selling drugs, selling 'likes' on facebook, selling botnets that create fake clicks on advertisers, ponzi schemes, etc. Some are illegal, some are just barely legal, but they are all damaging to someone. This line of business is known as 'scummy' and InstallMonetizer is plain 'scummy'.

Simple fact, trying to rationalize it doesn't help.

[1] http://installmonetizer-review.blogspot.com/
" 3. Which type of bundled software does Install Monetizer include in your installation package?
Most of the bundled software are toolbars, though the company is always changing which software are available. When I first started Install Monetizer they offered just two softwares. A toolbar called White Smoke and good old Real Player. Today they have about seven install packages available. However, only USA Search and Facebook Profile turned profitable."
In high school I had to write a long apology essay in part because my computer teacher testified to the principal that the Windows command line is "a high-security area of the computer that students have no business accessing."

I tried to explain that she was wrong, but you can guess how well that went.
would love to hang out with folks interested in figuring out the API / a simple plugin-in format for developers to come up with their own triggers.
Unnecessary or poorly planned meetings are probably the biggest interruption here. God-forbid the pre-meeting meeting. I tend to stick to small, mundane work until a part of the day where I can focus for while. You can get more done instead of frustratingly failing to get deep into larger projects.
>"Unauthorized security testing is indistiguishable from Malicious attack"

Of course it's distinguishable. Testing comes before attacking, to provide information. The two are otherwise completely unrelated. It'd dead-easy to distinguish between someone poking your fence and someone stealing your jewelery, for example.
The counterargument to that is "3-4 times a year" is 3-4 times too many, that we're not spending enough time and effort to address.
How I (mostly) taught myself to program -- and then got a job as a developer
Honestly, I used the N4 for a few hours and was left wanting. The size of the device really throws me off because I can just barely use it with a single hand, and it is extremely awkward.

It may not sound important, but as a parent of a 5mth old, being able to use a device with a single hand is essential.
Assigned mentors, perhaps on a rotating schedule. If I know I'm bound to be interrupted (in my case by a pager), I do work that I know won't require more than 5-10 minutes in "the zone".

The downside is that an assigned mentor will not get as much work done during that time.
My suggestion is to ignore the design feedback you're getting here. It's not that it isn't perhaps accurate; it's just not your biggest concern.

I largely agree with this. As long as it's functional, let design take a back seat to community. It can work, it just takes a lot of work. However, since your community is designers, you might want some way that they can contribute in a creative fashion outside of comments.

Best of luck!