skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My advice to the guy would be the opposite: I'd say "suck it up."

I get it that he doesn't like his co-workers, but what's the big difference between disliking them at the office and disliking them for one day at a charity site? View it as just another work assignment, if you are unable to see any intrinsic value in giving clothes to the poverty-stricken. Sheesh.
One of the ways we're tackling this is by letting teachers use Classlet without needing their institution to support it. Any teacher can hop on and start using classlet immediately, which is great because I've never met a teacher who likes their universities' current solution.
But if we in the blogosphere can censor what we don’t like why can’t the Government censor what it doesn’t like?

"Free speech is a principle imposing restrictions at the legislative level in order to create permissive space at the individual level." -Julian Sanchez (over at Ars Technica)
On the other hand, the author is 13. It's a novelty piece, not an attempt at serious news.
IStimulus: Apple to Invest $1B in Hard-Hit NC Town
A few days ago, there was a post on LinkedIn's blog that discussed the results of the survey: http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/19/nico-posner-translating-...
I actually used a Walkman couple months back. I was traveling by bus during a baseball game and wanted to listen to the play by play, which was on an AM station. Good thing I had my circa 1990 Walkman with AM tuner collecting dust in the back of a closet. Worked like a charm.
My favorite line there is "Cell phone masts ward off cancer clusters 99.985% of the time". I have a friend who specializes in RF safety and finds himself counter to public hysteria on this topic constantly.
This received plenty of exposure at the time it happened:

In a statement, Professor Rodolf Tauber from the Charite clinic said: "This is an interesting case for research.

"But to promise to millions of people infected with HIV that there is hope of a cure would not be right."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7726118.stm
I like it... maybe you can improve the difficulty of your AIs some?
> He can call but can't receive calls, sms, ... Very odd

So, in essence, your friend has a malfunctioning phone.

How many iPhone 3GS devices are out there now? Over a million? Given that some portion of the stock will be defective, let's say one in every few thousand, you're going to have hundreds or thousands of devices with major problems.

From the symptoms described above and in the article, it sounds like some combination of software and hardware is causing these phones to burn through battery power at an alarming rate. Ok, fine. So tell your friend to take it to a Genius Bar and let us know if Apple states that this overheating is expected behavior.

Given all that Apple is stuffing into these devices, I'm surprised they work so well for the vast majority of users.

- written from an iPhone 3GS
I'm curious, how large is this support team and what do they do? What modifications have they made to the software?

As an aside: Angel was recently acquired by Blackboard.
Yeah, the fact that most mobile devices these days lack radio functionality is something that's always baffled me, especially now that some phones are being equipped with TV tuners.
A problem you'll face is that teachers probably wont be allowed to run email addresses of students through a third party site like that.

I know for definite su8ch things would be frowned on in a lot of institutions here in the UK: probs in the US too.

Another major problem I suspect your going to face is that there are quite a few full on school management systems coming into use (there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand). It's kinda hard to see the advantages of a one off system like this in that context.

Dont get me wrong it's a nifty system if you can convince people to use it. But I think that might be hard.

In terms of commerical prospects that might be even tougher - will you charge per teacher? (possibly unpopular) or will you allow a school/institution to license a bulk lot of accounts to hand to it's teachers?
Best case long-term survival rate for bone marrow transplant is probably less than 90%.
No, the GPS is not a reliable backup device. The issue is not latency. Aircraft GPS systems generally update faster than 1 Hz, which is plenty fast for most things. The real issue is that GPS gives you the ground speed, and not the airspeed. The wind speeds at 30,000 ft can exceed 200 knots [1]. Therefore, depending on the wind speeds and direction of travel, your airspeed and ground speed can be vastly different. Of course, it is theoretically possible to correct the GPS groundspeed using weather data (would have to be downloaded from external sources) to correct for upper winds, but this is not reliable over much of the surface of the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream
Be wary of generalizing from a sample size of 1, or from peculiar audiences, such as those on hacker / startup-oriented social news sites.

I, for one, have observed surprisingly compulsive reactions to advertising in some of the people around me, things I'd never do just on principle of being bidden by an ad. You'd be surprised.
But doesn't the checkbox suggestion take care of that situation?
Thanks for checking it out. I do plan on improving them by using the list of moves that I record...I am thinking of making a Robot API or something too...but it's hard to be motivated to improve them too much when a large majority of people lose to Rex. This also makes the idea of finding the best move out of the moves that have occurred flawed (for now anyway) too.
Neilsen's article makes good points, as does the sans.org article reviewing it.

But isn't any security solution a little invasive?
Well, if this does work, I hope that the medical community will finally get past the "no money in exchange for organs/body parts" thing. It has good intentions, but unfortunately it prevents thousands of people from receiving necessary parts (whether it is a kidney, liver or bone marrow).
Far from being suppressed, this was covered in the news media when it was first announced and received some minor fanfare. It's interesting from a research point of view, perhaps, but it isn't a feasible treatment, because the procedure (full bone marrow replacement) is too risky, not to mention extremely complex and expensive. The normal AIDS drugs are still the state of the art. Even if you were an AIDS patient with an unlimited budget, you would probably not want this treatment unless you could somehow foresee that the drugs weren't going to work for you.
More details: http://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2009/JUNE/FUJI...
Optimizing for Virtualization, Part 2
The story of Mel 2.0:

He spends 16 hour days fighting with browser incompatibilities, catching up with an ADHD-afflicted industry, answers massive amounts of emails, and does more SEO than coding.
Conservatively:

3 programmers * 2 weeks * $100/h = $24k

Or, the ability to run this right now for 10m to 2 years.
2 words for you to ease user acquisition: Facebook API.

Let students do the pitching for you.
I do enjoy this story, even if it is oft repeated.

I worked with a fellow once who very much reminded me of mel. He once built a telephone controller with an intel 4004 because the office he was working in needed the features it provided.

There probably nothing this fellow couldn't program.
I don't understand what kinds of analysis one can do. Following the old link, I downloaded the paper. It mentions in the abstract that it "allows one to evaluate circuits over encrypted data without being able to decrypt".

What are circuits in encryption parlance?
Ouch, that is going to be a pretty tough sell IMO. As others have said the schools have so much invested in whatever software/process they use they will be unlikely to switch.
First of all, it wasn't. Like I said, as long as we assume reasonable effort towards readability (i.e. we're not code golfing), this kind of size difference is usually going to be much easier to maintain. Code size correlates very well with maintainability.

The guy who did the code review found the 1950 very readable, and much simpler.
I've heard of it before. It works, and it's not as obscure as this article makes it look.

The downside is that it's simply too impractical. There's too much chance that you will develop complications following the bone marrow transplant. Overall, you're better off just taking medication.
Thanks to frames, javascript, etc., space bar is already broken. The last browser I remember where space bar consistently worked right was Netscape 1.

I'm not saying this particular feature should or shouldn't be added, but "right here" seems a strange place to draw the line. I can see either (a) don't let webpage authors muck with it at all, or (b) give them enough control to make it do something intelligent. What we've got now is enough control to screw it up for the user, but not the right abstractions to do what authors really want anyway.
I go to pennstate as well and I completely agree with you on this. I hate angel because it sucks.

I am a part of a startup Watermelon Express and we are developing a platform Web/Desktop/Mobile which syncs, has chat rooms, secure system and content. Even if the universities don't accept it as a universal platform, we are hoping students will use it because of the convenience factor. It is not mentioned anywhere on our website, because it is still 2-3 months away from beta launch.
Why Users are Running Away from the Dunkin’ Run iPhone App
why? Im sure people would have made as good suggestions if the offer hadn't been made. Offering a (one assumes small) cut for creative input that could well heavily influence sales seems a nice gesture :)
Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple...
I wonder. None of the 13-year-olds that I know or knew would be anywhere in the same zip code (or postal code) as the word "plethora".
Installing Rhino on Mac OS X or Linux
Humorous, but interesting talk by Daminan Conway, with the full title:
"Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!"
(there is a big one kicking about that plenty of schools in the UK have but I forget the name offhand).

SIMS.net
Job consultants
eproject help offers jobs, job consultants, job interviews, it jobs, employment training, staffing agency, recruitment consulting, accommodation, travel, local events and etc.
Is it part of the job I'm paid to do?

Is it valid unpaid overtime of the sort that happens in any tech job, when the darn thing won't work and there's a deadline and I have a responsibility?

Would I have volunteered to do it anyway?

If none of the above, I'm going to tell you to shove it, in sufficiently polite but not in the least ambiguous terms.

You think I'm a jerk? Poor team player? I can live with that.
Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator
On the other hand, the instant a manager starts making salary/bonuses proportional to the inverse of code size, you'll find that my assertion becomes completely false. But if you start from an empty slate of two developers making a genuine effort to code a good solution, the less LOC rule will probably be pretty accurate. Especially when one program is 4x the size of the other. (See http://paulgraham.com/head.html for a related take on the same idea.)

There are no absolutes. But that doesn't make these metrics useless.
This tool feels great. And the simple interface to start a game is a breakthrough in my eyes. I like and will use it.
Actually, the survival rate for the bone marrow transplant itself is about 75%. When the story was in the news some time ago, this was widely mentioned as the main reason why this is no viable AIDS treatment: unless you also have terminal leukaemia, you lower you survival chance by undergoing the treatment.
Thanks a lot for your detailed response. Many times, I forget treating an app like a black box and instead of enjoying/appreciating it, I think about the underlying stuff that makes it.
The wheel still uses energy from the water source to lift the craft. The real advantage is it takes far less water while looking cool. It’s also tall for a lock.

I think the most efficient system to build and use would be a "bucket" and pulley’s attacked to a counter weight. Granted it would have far less summitry and not look as cool. The main advantage to locks is they scale really well but they use more water.

PS: I can't help but wonder how they counterbalance the buoyancy when one end dips into the water. Those curved tips might help and I can world out the geometry in my head but I think they just brute force it.
LogMeIn wants $107MM, I wonder if they would like a pony as well.
Gotta love these CS 101 C++ projects becoming weekend web apps.
The resources I was referring to was the kid's time and the point I was making is that this article provided no insight that an adult who thought on the issue for half a minute couldn't have come up.

If you're going to have this seemingly intelligent kid spend time writing a piece why not try to get some insight out of him that is useful and that the rest of us don't already know.

Heck, if you asked the kid a series of questions and had one of them be "What do you think of this Walkman?" that would be ok. But the whole reason the piece is so frustrating is because it's a waste. Have the kid hold a walkman for 5 minutes and he'll tell you everything you heard in this article.
> Their journey will have them try more disconnected paths than someone on a traditional career track. And one day all the seemingly random data and experience they’ve acquired will end up as an insight in building something greater than the sum of the parts.

I'd sure like to think that this is true. Oregon -> Italy -> Oregon -> California -> Italy -> California -> Italy -> Austria -> Italy has made for a lot of random data and experiences:-)
Sphinx: Queries and APIs
I'm explicitly asking how people would respond to a worst-case scenario.

This isn't something that has ever happened to me (although it theoretically could) and it's not my situation now. I'm just curious how people on here would handle it.
Sounds like a manufacturing (or sourced part) problem for a few of the phones. Not terribly surprising.

Somehow the issue gets amplified with the level of secrecy Apple maintains. Some are rather quick in assuming it's a cover-up of some sort.
I don't think any of it dips into the water. It looks like there's a dug out portion for the wheel to turn into.
I keep thinking I should get a voice recorder (my MP3 player can record, but starting up recording takes several seconds). But the sound of my own voice makes me uncomfortable, and I'm doubtful I would follow up.

I also get ideas e.g. when driving. A voice recorder could capture those.

Recently, I discovered while trouble-shooting something else that my old cell phone has a sort of half-*ssed recorder built in (requires extended button press; voice notes limited to 1 minute, despite having a 1 GB card in the thing). I imagine this feature is available on iPhone, Android, etc.?
Networking is always hit-or-miss, and I'm asking about a worst-case, not average case, scenario.
We're concerned about the 3rd party fear, but there seems to be some recent precedence here. Gmail and Hotmail have seen a lot of adoption by schools and there are a number of medium to large schools which host Blackboard for smaller local schools. If this proves to be a serious blocker to adoption, we can talk about inside firewall installs.

As for the finer details of the monetization scheme, we are open to suggestions. Our current line of thinking is to offer a freemium model to teachers at a price subsidized by enterprise sales. We've got some ideas for features which will only be activated when a school buys into the system for all of their teachers and students, as well as some features that would benefit from being hosted and linked with other schools.

How would you approach it? Why?
What really got me into programming was making web pages. In school they never really go past "Here is how to make a link and make text bold". I think a lot of kids could see the artistic and creative side to making an interactive website that all their friends check out. I could see kids competing to see who can add the coolest feature or make it look the best. But alas, my public school never got far enough into anything for people to make anything fun.
One could spend a lot of time writing about how worthless Chris Anderson books are. The number of startups based on his Long Tail theory, which is proving almost totally fallacious, and in fact comes from a very inaccurate data set, is staggering. At least with this book, people have already been building startups around the theory for 10 years.
The Blurring Lines of Languages
Is Hadoop Performance Optimization (HPO) the next big thing?
Highways are "relatively" safe? Relative to juggling chainsaws, maybe. After disease, cars are the leading cause of death in just about any country wealthy enough to have cars.

Drivers need all the help they can get from automation, even if it backfires now and then. The fact that any idiot who can spell his own name is allowed to hurtle through crowded streets with a two ton killing machine and no failsafes of any kind is clearly absurd.
Wikipedia held page hostage to protect captive NYT reporter
Not exactly - he said Kindle sales make up 35% of Amazon's sales for books with a Kindle version. Not clear whether it added sales or siphoned off physical book sales.
I could supply some as well to support your claim.
"Your claim only makes sense if everyone else involved sat around idly during the time that they would have been working on the project he 'packaged.' I seriously doubt that would be the case."

It's not about the people, it's about the brands, and the brands would be sitting idle. Let's say you want to take the brand name of a magazine and use it to start a chain of hotels, e.g. Field and Stream hunting lodges or something. That brand would be sitting completely idle in the hotel category if not for someone like Seth coming along and licensing it.
I almost did something similar to this during this past year. Perhaps we could have a chat when school starts up again in the fall and I could tell you about some of the things I found.
The "Burnout" graphic is from despair.com, by the way. They have quite a collection of similar "demotivators".

http://www.despair.com/viewall.html
This technology doesn't seem to have come a long way in the past several years. I remember reading about that Duke University experiment in 9th grade (I'm a 5th year college student now).

I guess it's progress because it's Toyota, not a University research project.
Sure, you're right. There is work involved by everyone else as well. I guess I was oversimplifying.

For content producers getting the lion's share, I think it depends on the situation. There are definitely some untalented pop artists these days that are only popular because of their producer's distribution. In those cases, the producer probably should get the lion's share.

Ultimately, it comes down to market forces. If people are willing to pay Seth what he charges to do the packaging, then who are we to say what is fair? If he charged too much then they either wouldn't do it or would hire someone full time to do packaging for them. If his advice to newbies is to charge a lot then it must work.
I really like being able to use Javascript's prompt() and alert() dialogs (when the case really calls for a popup, of course) for the reasons you describe. But it seems like some browser vendors are pushing to make them as cumbersome as possible. Internet Explorer, for instance, will alert the user with a security warning if you use prompt(), saying "This page wants to ask you for information from a script" or something like that. I've encountered quite a few people who think that's a bug in my site's code.
He presents a lot of good ideas, but I'm weary of singling out H1B visa holders. It seems the US immigration policy is counterintuitive to just about every other countries' visa policy. It is hopelessly complex and random. It rewards family connection over any valuable skill. I could sponsor a distant cousin and he would get in before a highly talented programmer who doesn't have any famillial connections in the US.

And as a programmer I feel like my best years are starting to be behind me. I've still got a fresh mind, but when I leave the office my wrists are killing me. I've just entered my 30s and I'm already telling my wife I don't know how long I'll be able to do the job I love. I won't discourage my son form seeking the same profession but I don't know if I'll have the same passion to encourage him in this profession. I sometimes wonder if programming will evolve to fit the human body or if the body can cope with the intricate work of banging at a keyboard constantly.
I would have prefered a "copy" of the app, even though I don't own an iphone. Offering me equity for something trivial that I would have done for fun, for free, well .. just makes me feel both horrible. I don't want anybody to go through paperwork or calll up the lawyer or print me a stock certificate for $1 just because I suggested a name for the app.
A 13 year old who works for CrunchGear too:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/29/one-of-our-interns-make...
Yeah, so you're a stupid asshole if you say things like that, but that isn't a punishable offense; not even in France.
Cholesterol to statins (translational science takes time)
IIRC, you can do anything in NC1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_(complexity)
I disagree: LOC is useful, but in an inverse way than many large organizations claim. Smaller is better.

As a long-time programmer, it was pretty clear to me what Charles was doing when others around him thought he was doing nothing: analysis, design.

And sometimes if you get a problem solved right, it doesn't need tuning, and if the solution is a small number of lines of code, your prototype might be just what you ship. Many large entrenched shops cannot imagine that this can possibly be true, so the bureaucracy resists or eliminates any such solutions.

To me what is troubling about this story is that it represents what happens in software organizations--both sides.
Wikipedia is not a single entity that can simply announce how "it" will resolve such a thing. The idea that a perfect consensus can be reached on any given issue among the myriad of interested parties (including among the administrators and other higher-ups themselves) is simply naive.

In particular the BLP policy has likely been the center of the most controversy and debate of any policy (using this in the official meta-Wikipedia term for policy). Most of this debate surrounds over how far the interests of the subject should be respected over the truth, particularly when the truth is reported in what Wikipedia considers reliable sources. As Jimbo Wales himself states in that article, HAD this incident been reported in such a source, it would have been much more difficult to deal with.

Frankly, when BLP was drafted and discussed, no one foresaw an event like this occurring. This was the first time a subject was actually in real-time danger and any edit could literally damage his well-being. The events that BLP had in mind were things like libel (google for daniel brandt), unsubstantiated celebrity gossip, invasion of privacy (Allison Stokke, the star wars kid), misinformation (sinbad's death).

What's interesting is that Wikipedia has a culture of decision/discussion transparency that is at odds with protecting privacy in this situation. This could not have been discussed on the typical Wikipedia boards without totally giving up privacy. It's amazing they were able to keep this under wraps as they did.
Since is this repost made #1 on the front page, two other links are worth noting.

The newline-mangled, and more fun free-verse version: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

The Wikipedia article about Mel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Kaye