skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$42 for basic cable?

I have Comcast and pay -$2.09 (not a typo) for basic cable. I have internet from them (FiOS not in my town), and they give you $10 off internet if you also have a TV package. Their cheapest TV package is $7.91/month for "basic cable". Even if I never watched it, I'd buy it...
There is no splitting hairs when you use phrases like "unequivocally user-unfriendly". This is not a minor detail. You are wrong.

Comparing to the previous interface is a non-starter, as you don't account for the differences. Previously, none of the file sharing protocols had an interface for choosing which folders to share and with what permissions. Now that there is such an interface, the three options for sharing files are grouped behind that common function. This makes the first layer consistent about what is being shared and the second (Options...) about how, an extremely common and familiar style of interface. If it is "unequivocally user-unfriendly" here, why is it tolerable in a hundred other places in almost every GUI?

Dismissing my view as that of a developer (which I am not) does not give you the authority to speak for the supposed "average user". It does not take a particularly sophisticated user to find the right pane (as my previous post showed), and once found, even the solitary use of jargon is at most a speed-bump. Even the help button on that very same pane leads to a clear answer. Using unambiguous and factually accurate terminology in the interface is not arcane or secret just because the meaning is not immediately obvious to all potential users. Consider terms like "Ethernet", "WiFi", or "DVD". Should we banish these terms from interfaces, too?

I have no idea what you mean by "un-automate". The entire process here is user-driven. The operating system is not doing anything without explicit user action. Are you against the idea of using sensible defaults?
Imagine being 19 years old and entering ANY unfamiliar course of study. Who's going to rock your world -- somebody who is engaged in esoteric research and finds lecturing a distraction, or someone who views himself less like a guardian of arcana and more like a streetcorner pusher who has recently run across the most AWESOME brain-twisting drug in the ENTIRE FREAKIN' UNIVERSE and YOU GOTTA TRY THIS SHIT!

That's not to say that somebody at the forefront of research (or, for that matter, somebody of "a certain age") can't generate that kind of enthusiasm for his/her subject -- one of the most entertaining and informative lectures I ever saw was one given by Bill Phillips of NIST at the Perimeter Institute on time measurement, cooling and the Bose-Einstein condensate. Nobel Laureate, unapologetic geek, energy and sense of wonder not often seen in the average six-year-old. Gimme a grad student with that kind of unbounded love for the subject over an expert any time.

I like to think that's what I brought to the classroom when I taught, but then I like to think a lot of good things about myself that ain't necessarily so.
I agree with alexkearns. Having been in both positions I would have to say that you are going to build a better team by letting them communicate with each other. IM, IRC and email are excellent tools for this, allowing you to easily decide when to answer their questions.

How is the new programmer supposed to integrate with the rest of the team if they don't ask questions? As well as the fact that Google generally sucks for programming questions these days. Your project will progress much more quickly if the newbie spends 5 minutes with a senior developer learning than 3 hours with Google sifting through answers they don't have the experience to analyze.
OP's one question would not be my one question, which would be:

"What would be different here in one year because of your presence?"

Their approach, as well as their response, would teach me a lot about them.
Microsoft put out Small Basic a little while ago. It's actually a lot of fun, and really simple (well... for me... the kid would be the real test) to pick up.

I did a quick overview here
http://www.issackelly.com/Blog/entry/Hands_on_with_Small_Bas...
Well, personally I always had a fascination with software but not (yet) with hardware. Mindstorms sounds a bit like hardware... so I don't think it would have necessarily worked for me. YMMV.
Some of it's the regression effect, where the extreme results really are flukes -- and the achievers are aware of it -- while average results are more likely to be statistically representative. Of course, "aware of it" is key, which is why the results sometimes diverge at the other end of the scale.
From the title on the webpage, it looks like it was last updated in 1998. In 1998, using Javascript probably wasn't quite as appealing as it would be today.
The article mentions their 8 core Xeon running SQL server only cost $5,000 in licensing... Either the article is wrong or they haven't appropriately licensed their SQL server. Microsoft is pretty explicit that for web-facing applications you must use per-processor licensing. Which would mean the licensing on that server should have cost $40,000 for SQL Server Standard edition.
Yup, expectations is right. When I started out, I was dragging apps to the dock and the desktop -- and they worked! I did this even to huge packages (100+ MB) and they just worked with no process. It was mysterious, almost disconcerting. And if I did things this way, other users didn't know where to find them.

Then you have other packages which launch the installer. As longwinded as they are, they give me a sense of control and make me feel more comfortable even if the same process is happening.

You can tell that I'm a latecomer to the OS X scene; frankly still don't know where the apps are going, but because it is hidden from me already, I don't want to bother. I always launch with spotlight and I have only opened the Applications folder once.

MacPorts was also highly confusing: you get a second Python. OpenCV installs to the system, PIL installs to ports. Now I'm sure there's a way to do so-and-so, but coming from w32/linux, it's just download, install.
Say what you will about Mark Cuban, but he knows how to promote. And it's this one skill, probably more than all of his others, that has made him rich.

I love the 2 paragraphs before "You get the picture." Reread them. Obviously, no one actually needs to do what he's suggesting; that's not the point. You just need to think like that.

We all need to take the same imagination we already use on our hacking and use it on our promotion. Just think of the possibilities of those who could benefit. That, as much as anything else, is what turns a successful geek into a successful entrepreneur.
In general, having O(1) access to everything you need during development will greatly increase your productivity (it will help achieve and sustain flow more often). You might (or rather, will) have to write some tools to achieve that. This is where having an easily extensible environment like Emacs comes in.
If they didn't like food, they would die, or they will start to like food when they realise how it relieves their hunger.
Do you have a website or blog entry which explains in detail why using bcrypt is more secure than hash+salt, and how one is supposed to properly store passwords with crypt? Is it because Blowfish is more computationally expensive, and if so, how by how much compared to SHA-1? How does it compare to using larger hashes such as SHA-512 and Whirlpool? Why Blowfish instead of AES?
Erm, I'm pretty sure 99% of the people hear can figure this stuff out for themselves. Run of the mill Ubuntu tutorials definitely do not belong here.
"Code less."

I find this philosophy depressing in the long run. If the first concern that pops to mind whenever you need to add a feature or change something is "how can I do this in the least amount of code", you'll be depressed when comes the time to code something that simply inherently takes a huge amount of code to tackle. You'll be less likely to make that big refactoring that would greatly enhance the consistency of your codebase and facilitate further developments.

As it is, my codebase is a place I spend most of my life in, so I like to keep the place tidy and know where everything is. I want to feel at home in my home.
Processing + Javascript = Flash Killer
I google more before deciding how to code to a specific problem. I want to understand the problem better, see how it's been approached by others, if there are standard approaches, etc. This helps me crystallize my thoughts and get quick prototypes put together.

Your question is about your "internal toolkit" and your speed when coding. As your experience becomes richer and more varied, your feel (or dare I say, taste) will improve and you'll be quicker because of it. A problem will tickle some part of your brain and you'll have a much more intuitive understanding of how to use your external tools (php/kohana) to best solve it. For that you do need some strong understanding of what's available in your development language of choice - memorization isn't the answer, but you should be able to remember off-hand that library X solves problem Y and might apply here . . .

It has been valuable to me to expand my knowledge of development styles and languages, so try to work in some tasks that use some very different stacks than php and kohana. If you can find a good mentor or peer group, I think that can be valuable in your growth as a programmer.

There's a bit of the gunslinger mentality floating around right now re: coding speed. Stuff like the Yale programming class where data exists on the time it took students to correctly solve a programming assignment (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/HighN...). The conclusion made there is "(t)he quality of the work and the amount of time spent are simply uncorrelated." So right now, hackers seem to be making sure people know how much faster they are than everybody else. Ignore a bunch of this fluff.

There are arguments that if you're not one of the "rock-stars" you'll never create software as beautiful as one of the 1-in-100 hackers. I think this is a little true (innate talent is something that exists) but we as hackers should think more about our work as craft. Maybe most people can't be wonderful artists, but craftsmen (and women) have built some beautiful things over the years.

So work on your code as a craftsman. Care about it. Read what others do. Ask for feedback. Develop a habit of deliberate coding. Be patient, and be your own worst critic and best supporter.

And good luck - what we do is quite a bit of fun.
My 2 biggest helpers to "coding quickly":

1. I have written over 10,000 programs, but I have started about 5 of them from scratch. I just grab the closest thing and proceed to change it. I realize that doesn't help you much right now, but it tells you the same thing you'd hear in any endeavor: start building now.

2. When you start building now, build "building blocks", pieces of code you can use over and over again. A good program that's 300 lines of code could have as many as 100 calls to other functions or subroutines. Isaac Newton achieved greatness by "standing on the shoulders of giants". You should do the same thing, even standing on your own shoulders once in a while.
Larry Page Commencement Speech
Noprocast is a good feature, but I use SelfControl(http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/) to block other sites as well. Highly recommended.
I love how HN is the only site where "[x] would be cool" turns into a feature request implemented by the vendor.
I personally support extravagant pay for no work at all, however I don't think many people will give me a $5 mil salary for sitting at home all day.

There's always the slim chance interest rates will hit %10,000 and I'll be able to cache an unemployment check for $5 mil, but that kind of defeats the prospect of being a millionaire by not working.

It's quite easy to back a policy that rationally doesn't make sense. I agree with him, I support the principle of equal pay for both men and women, however equal pay is complete BS. There shouldn't even be equal pay between solely male or female workers, because quite simply no one does the exact same amount of work.

Even if you're tasked with making 50 microchips a day and two people produce 50 microchips a day, there's still lots of other factors involved. What if one person's trained in first aid? What if one's a real douchbag and pisses everyone off, shouldn't they be punished because they aren't conducive to a company environment?

The variables are huge, and unless two people are identical duplicates beamed down from space, then I don't believe they should be paid the same just because it's nice.
Building a Business One Bagel At A Time
Here is the original:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots
For someone like myself that hates working with flash but likes JavaScript i'm glad things like this are being made.

This is one of the ares which will really pay off from the new wave of
browsers competing to create the best JavaScript engine.
stock prices
gas prices(granted they use 9/10 as a fraction, but it can be stretched)

p.s. you'll be happy to know that if you search google for "real world numbers with 3 decimals" this thread is the #1 result
A Peek At The 100 Million Views Club: You Won’t Be Invited Any Time Soon
Think, then think again, then code.
Visualize. Code structure should morph as you discover the problem more.
If you feel like a contortionist, you're probably doing it wrong - think Cirque du Soleil acrobat instead.
NoScript author apologizes, releases 1.9.2.6 to undo the changes
Why do you hate working with flash?
Larry Page's University of Michigan Commencement Address, Spring 2009 [video]
I only ever do ask one question in an inverview. I decsribe a simple application and then ask the candidate to design the database schema and business objects to support it. That usually takes up the time I'm given with the candidate, and tells me a ton about what techniques and technologies they've been exposed to and their maturity level working with same. I also watch for how willing they are to involve me in the process. The best team candidates have me working along side them (but then I get to toss in a few curve balls)
thats just stupid
I used to play a bit of ATRobots which is a similar thing except you program them in a "Robot Assembly" language. Lots of fun and taught the basics of ASM coding.

I've been thinking for a while about a more complex form of this sort of game. The basic idea would be that your robot (and the robots of your opponents) is sent off to a distant planet where they have to compete for resources to make new versions of themselves. Each robot would be a Linux virtual machine (xen or something) communicating with the virtual hardware via a device driver so you'd get plenty of computing power to play with compared to any previous versions of these sort of games. Could be quite a lot of fun to play.
That's a 4 year old bug. Do you think it is fixed by now?
temperature averages?
"oodles of time", "some old gasbag"... sounds a lot like Kurt Vonnegut.
Internet tax on the way in U.K
Wow. I was including the original DES CRYPT function in my BSDCan talk as a purely historical element... I guess I'll need to revise that slide now.

I don't think that RHM made mistakes often, but using only the first 8 characters of a password certainly qualifies.
There are several mentions of math courses in this thread, so I'll bring up some examples of academic politics found in the book A Mathematician's Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development.

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate...

The author, a math professor, points out that a department has to keep up its enrollments to maintain departmental resources, and those resources include funding for more professors. He tells the story of one state university system that had a main math department in university's main college of arts and sciences (whatever the exact name was) and a set of first-year calculus courses for forestry majors taught by the School of Forestry. By university rules, all first-year calculus courses were deemed equivalent, and by reputation of the courses reported by students, the calculus courses in the Forestry School were the easiest calculus courses to pass. So of course over time the enrollments in the calculus courses for forestry students increased quite a lot, including many students who were not majoring in forestry. That kept the main math department from having the enrollments necessary to justify hiring more junior professors, more secretaries and graduate students, and so forth.

Another example he gives is of a different university where a department's offerings to non-major students were so irrelevant to their needs that a different department took over teaching those courses. In some state university, the engineering school wanted engineering majors to be able to take courses in Japanese to learn to read technical documents, but the Department of Asian Languages insisted on teaching courses in reading medieval poetry and the like. So the engineering school hired its own instructors of Japanese, with no tenure track, and taught its desired Japanese courses in-house, again denying the Department of East Asian Languages a chance to grow and to gain more resources.

University departments, unless they are very well endowed by a specific endowment, have to compete for resources by appearing to meet student needs. Students may not always take a long term view of what their own needs are for a good education, but enrollments matter in allocating resources.
Medicine: the pH of an arterial blood gas (ABG) sample is typically given out to 4 digits. 7.380 is about normal. 7.211 might seem about the same as 7.219, but if one sample is 7.211 and 15 minutes later it's 7.219, you're doing something right. If it's 7.219 and in 15 minutes it goes down to 7.211, something is very wrong.

Machine shops and engineering: every machinist makes every cut to, at a minimum, the nearest thousandth of an inch, and often to the tenths of thousandths; often over several inches (like piston heads and cylinders) This is what slip-clutch micrometers are for.

A red optical filter for a physics experiment could easily be accurate to 720 nanometers with a band pass of 719.998 to 720.003 +/- 2 in the next digit. There are lots of examples in physics, go get a physics supply catalog.
video with minor failed audio at the beginning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfNayaL9MYc
http://www.opencoffeeclub.org/
Here's at least why I hate working with flash:

1) I have to use their lame tool

2) Flash UI feels super cheesy (imagine gmail in flash)

3) The workflow is very tedious
They usually last a couple hours, so I figure people can dip a little early from work, or pop away for an hour.
MyBrute? Anyone wants to fight ?
Twittering in Church, With the Pastor's Encouragement
We used the IBM Alphaworks Code Invaders project for our first year Java class. Most of the students were delighted to see their code translated into on screen "movement".
It is a Java project, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/codeinvaders
Don't use slugging percentage - it's not a percentage at all. Singles are 1, doubles are 2, triples are 3, and home runs are 4. It's a terribly named statistic that's on its own bizarre scale.
Absolutely beautiful.

Kudos to everybody involved in Processing.
"You can treat a lot of software as a set of mechanical problems versus abstract ideas."

I disagree. There are a lot of things in software that have no counterpart in the physical world and that definitely obey no law of physics besides self-consistency, so I'd call them abstract and not mechanical.

Sometimes you'll be able to visualize some parts of the system as "mechanical" but if you stick to that representation you'll never be able to see the bigger picture.
that would be RHM
Switch languages.
Btw, how is memory consumption compared to silicon-melter flash?
I'm an elementary teacher

Definitely baseball statistics for that audience. Also finishing times for sprints to thousandths of a second.

Not to answer your question, but to suggest useful resources for elementary math teaching, I'll suggest

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

an essential book for someone in your profession, and

http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Elementary-Mathematics-W-Sawyer...

a book with wonderful teaching tips, and

http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Mathematics-for-Teachers/dp...

a very excellent set of exercises for any elementary mathematics teacher preparing lessons, and a great guide to the best available series of mathematics textbooks in English.

You might also try asking your question on the appropriate forum

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/index.php?f=300

(the forum is really for middle school math, but you could give it a try) on the Art of Problem Solving site, a generally good site for discussion of math.
Its not advisable to switch to Ext4 until at least kernel 2.6.30, which is not out yet.

http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-Log-What-s-coming-in-2-6... (Read 'Data Security' section)
What immediately struck me about this speech is its normalcy, especially being given by such an extraordinary person.

I sorta half expected Larry Page to give me the golden secret...how to start the next Google. His answer? Dream Big.

It's such a cliche phrase, but the caveat is that life is incredibly precarious. His other message is much more profound to me: Love those who support you and give that same love back.
"The fact that we in computing keep trying to visualize introductory computing concepts is another piece of evidence for me that spatial ability is linked to success with computing. We naturally try to use visualizations of algorithms and data structures in order to communicate how we imagine these computing processes and structures. However, there's some evidence that this is the wrong answer.

A visualization may not be designed so that it's cognitively easy to process or easy to learn from. Worse, providing the visualization may prevent the student from internalizing the spatial mental model. You can only succeed in computing (my hypothesis suggests) if you can mentally transform your spatial models. If it's concretely in front of you, you may not develop that ability. Some of the SILC results suggest (to me, at least) that gesture may be a better way to communicate the spatial model. Gesture is ephemeral, and still serves to communicate spatial meaning."

My take: in computing, "visualizing" how systems work actually requires thinking in N dimensions. If you try to represent something composed of a large number of dimensions in 2D or 3D, then of course you lose a lot of semantic context. But if you have to explain such an N-dimensional concept or structure to someone, of course you'll probably try to dump the model on a piece of 2D paper and the person you're explaining to will never really get it if he sticks to the 2D representation. "Internalizing" the model is simply reverse-engineering the 2D model back to the real N-dimensional model.

If you try to represent something N-dimensional in M dimensions where M < N, you lose information and your new model will never be able to represent the full reality of the original model.
When recruiting I've thought of saying that anyone who can get on the hill will get a job, but I've realised that fitting in with the team is critical in our line of work, perhaps in all lines of work. Some of the programmers who work for me simply don't care about this kind of competition.

I'm still on the hill, though, and that earns me some technical respect.
A Look Inside the Twitter Admin Panel
How satellites could 'sail' home.