skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't start any faster. It doesn't even appear to start any faster. The dock icon just doesn't bounce. People obsessed with application first-launch times but unwilling to run actual benchmarks measure "launch time" by whatever their monkey-eyes happen to be fixated to at moment. In this case, the dock icon they just clicked on. Oh man, it didn't even bounce once! It launched so fast!

Meanwhile, normal users click the Chrome icon and the window appears, and they start using it, instead of continuing to stare at the dock icon. Or even more likely, the app was already running.
The article is a critique of the increasingly navel-gazing direction literary criticism has taken.

It would be a mistake to paint all the "humanities" with the same brush, particularly philosophy (which is more like the wayward, less rigorous brother of math than any of the other humanities) and history (which actually deals with factual content). In fact, "the humanities" is probably a mistaken grouping for these subjects, since they vary widely.
um...i would imagine that if SSDs provided the illusion that applications loaded faster without actually improving performance, people wouldn't be shelling out $$$ for them.
> The patents have stayed with OLPC.

This tells us nothing about how they will be licensed. They will be available for free use by the well-connected, but certainly not to you or me.
Thanks for your comments. I'll try some alternatives for (1) and see if I can come up with a better UI.
A link to this classic XKCD seems appropriate :

http://xkcd.com/451/
Clean, careful, and slow. Good luck.
Yes, I completely agree, and that was my point :)
Now did Michael Lewis really have to go and call Goldman Sachs a "Vampire squid?" Nice to receive this helpful epistle from the upper class to us blood donors.

I wish he'd inserted a call to action.
let's hope mono catches on!
To anybody looking for a PDF version: I've written a script that converts the Markdown version on github into a PDF via LaTeX: http://github.com/duairc/progit/master/latex

I don't have the PDF on Github because it's so big, but you can get it here: http://netsoc.tcd.ie/~duairc/progit.en.pdf

Its output is mostly fine, but there are a couple of very long lines in verbatim environments that go off the margin. I'm working on a fix for this, but it's not too serious a problem really.
Why is this being upvoted? GS has become the LOLcat of HN.
This project is only weeks old. I wanted to get it running asap. I'll take the time to get the validators running locally soon.
You're welcome.

I do plan to try to add some Gaussian noise to the sample points -- thank you for reminding me. I also hope to find ways to optimize the fitness function and selection function. I think there is much that can be done to fix it up.
Having faster CPUs and removing the Virtualization layer, your results are as expected. With the exact hardware you will have better results without the virtualization layer. Virtualization is not about performance. If you're moving to a cloud (vps/virtualized hardware) infrastructure take into consideration, there's no exact equivalent on the cloud/shared environment.
Best Blackberry Weather App
Do you mean something like this?

http://www.deadharddrive.com/
The "1984 take-back" was a huge blunder, but it didn't affect my copy of 1984, so the blanket statement that they're becoming "too powerful" seems a bit alarmist. The gay/lesbian book delisting was a clever hack and only made me laugh. I stopped reading after that.

In summary: EVERYBODY PANIC!!1
Apple is making a huge mistake here. I love my iPhone, but in the wake of this GV business, I find myself seriously considering a switch to an Android phone. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm sure I'm not the only iPhone fan out there who feels this way.
Inside the Microsoft Store With Wall-Sized Screens and the Answers Bar
Being the “Adult in the Room” for Social Media Initiatives
This person is not, and has never been, a software developer.

I take issue with: "Such issues have been largely overlooked in the Amazon.com discussion, which takes for granted that "glitches" are inevitable and self-correcting, that the market will police itself. (We've seen how well that worked on Wall Street.)"

In a very large, very complex application like Amazon.com, glitches _are_ inevitable. They're not self correcting - there are hundreds of highly competent, highly intelligent software engineers that correct them. It's not Wall Street, where people have an incentive to game the system and naturally collude to do so. It's doing something profoundly more complicated than most people really have a conception of, and not being able to execute flawlessly all the time.

Amazon fully deserves the heat for the 1984 debacle, and their communication left a lot to be desired in the politically sensitive, but probably actually a bug, issue that delisted large swaths of gay literature (while embarrassingly leaving anti-gay rhetoric as the primary search results).

But this author seems to think the reaction is to attribute some sort of malice to the entire culture of software engineering, that we accept some level of imperfection and bug fixing in a major project. This is just not a reasonable expectation, and it does nobody any good. Some companies may not spend enough on QA and testing (and I'm sure more than half of you just thought of the same company), but this stuff is hard, and there will be bugs, and we'll try to fix them, and we really don't need some knucklehead from the L.A. Times trying to infer about a process that's too complicated most times for the managers at Amazon itself to really have a handle on.
Resolving Device Fragmentation Issues - Mobile Web and Local Apps
http://www.wikihow.com/Swap-Hard-Disk-Drive-Platters

Is pretty much all the advice I would give.
In a similar vein I want a puzzle solver where you take a photo of the box and the piece and the app highlights where the piece probably goes in the picture

http://ideasfrommydreams.blogspot.com/2009/04/iphone-apps.ht...
Daring Fireball on Apple's Rejection of Google Voice Apps From App Store
Hack Day tools for non-developers
Saying, "epoll is already enabled in [the] most recent kernel[s], but some strange distributions (which will remain nameless) have this feature disabled," is cute, but it would be more useful if you named the distributions so people know if they need to worry with this or not.
Vote with your feet, don't buy the iPhone. There are a lot of arguably better smartphones out there that are not handicapped in the way that the iPhone is.
Streisand effect, FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Mike Masnick originally coined the term Streisand effect in reference to a 2003 incident where Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.
Maybe. I wonder what happens if there's a ruling forcing them to stop stuff like this? Will it let them get out of whatever contractual agreements they've made with AT&T which are affecting their behavior in regards to the App Store?

A part of me likes the idea that Apple will continue to make increasingly bad PR moves while discreetly pointing a finger at AT&T.
Cloning was never tenable--it would have run Apple out of business and destroyed the platform.
The later is definitely important to them. A lot of rails apps use solr as a search engine, as I did with my EY slices, and they were very upfront with their desire to get more expertise on the jvm.
SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2009: winners announced
The Need For Innovation In Corporate Web Site Search
Adobe's Flash Flawed; Time to Do Without?
What makes you think they'll stop in September?
Michael added that the company has a "good reputation it wants to preserve." - Not for long if you are making statements like that.

It's tough to imagine how they could have handled it in a worse way.
An interesting take on short-term predictors and how they bear out in the long-term.

To continue the dating analogy, you don't just get married after a romantic dinner for two (unless, perhaps, you're a celebrity); you 'test drive' the relationship first. You also, hopefully, maximise chances of success at bringing up kids, sharing finances etc, by getting a chance to learn the other person's values and attitudes.

This seems to me bang in line with the 'give an interviewee some real work to do' school of thought. I do wonder why so few types of jobs involve a trial or probation period, though; perhaps due to mistrust? When you start dating someone, you're not committing to the next n years with them, yet when you join a company, you kind of are.

I've seen from MMO guild leadership that having a trial period can really help stop significant problems further down the line (although, unfortunately, not always). Yet I'd not consider hiring an employee, at least in the software dev world, on spec (i.e. the 'do some real work' part of the interview is actually the start of the job). The only intermediate is perhaps contracting someone first, then bringing them on fulltime. I wonder how customs have evolved this way; respect for other people's need to pay the bills? Desire to minimise short jobs, churn, and to maximise the ability to seek new jobs while still in one? Hmm.
"What’s interesting is that the Chrome developers are actually doing this to workaround a completely unrelated issue involving the WebKit UI and it has even been filed as a bug. And to think we all thought they had done it deliberately to give the impression of a faster launch. Shame on us all."
Interesting and meaningful work.

Everything else is just a detail.

I have sat in the worst conditions (too hot, too cold, too loud, hungry, tired, sore, lonely, etc.) working on something cool and meaningful and got into it so much that I completely lost track of time for hours.

OTOH, I have had employers or vendors give me the best Class A space you could imagine with ergonomic furniture, gourmet food and snacks, the latest technology with multiple large monitors, even a massage twice a week, but if the work wasn't interesting, I was looking for a window to escape from.
hahaha, I don't even care if if wasn't actually moldy. If Horizon Realty's policy is "sue first, ask questions later" they don't deserve good PR. Congratulations Jeffrey Michael, you're prince among spokespeople... no not really.
Declines in Online Ad Revenues Partly Due to Ignoring Mobile Visitors
Start-Ups Share Space to Shave Costs in Slump
I'd call the Dutch a small population...but yes, you are right. They're not the tallest. But going from Chile to US, it's astounding how much taller people there are.
Chinese Iphone coming Soon but can they sell 1 Million in First Year?
That's real BS. I hope the judge rules the case in favor of the lady. I don't think someone with 20+ followers on twitter is going to cause so much damage enough to warrant a court case.
What an unbelievably botched response for a company that wants to protect its reputation... wow. Their spokesperson looks like a complete idiot and by drawing such attention to this otherwise minor/nothing situation, they've reaped tons of bad PR.

The Steisand effect continues to live and flourish!
I have used Common Lisp and Clojure, both at a novice level (so take this with a grain of salt).

I really appreciate Clojure's concurrency / STM mechanisms. I think they're very well thought out and pretty straightforward to use. Additionally, the ability to use libraries from the Java ecosystem is really, really, really nice.

Common Lisp has some really nice things as well (for the purposes of this post, I'm referring to SBCL). I have a very deep appreciation for the flexibility of CL - being multi-paradigm is one of its charms, and it feels like the most flexible language I've ever used. When I first started messing around with CLOS, I immediately hated every other object system. Cells is pretty awesome too, although I hear it's being ported to Clojure right now.

I also really like that all the libraries are also written in Common Lisp; although it may just be my preference for "turtles all the way down".

Clojure wins from a deployment perspective; CL wins from a tooling perspective.

I would say there is a definite trade-off between the two, but as it stands today, they are both very solid choices.
Time pays $30.00 for cover - Photographer Ecstatic | Lightstalkers
Jay-Z vs the Game: Lessons for the American Primacy Debate
My friends came up with a 5 level model for levels of success for a hobby (photography) we had Ramen at level 3 - http://photoatomica.com/2007/10/16/the-five-levels-of-financ...
Student files lawsuit after coach distributed private Facebook content
In the opening paragraph she mentions that you may be convinced that 1 = 0, if you believe infinity is number. I don't think she showed the proofs there, so here goes:

Take equation: ∞ + 1 = x

Suppose that ∞ is a number.

Suppose ∞ ≠ x. Because ∞ + 1 = ∞, (same cardinality; you can make a bijection), you get ∞ = x. This is a contradiction, so x and infinity must be the same.

Suppose ∞ = x. Then the equation becomes x + 1 = x. Subtract x on both sides. 1 = 0. This too is a contradiction.

Therefore ∞ cannot be a number.
China Puts Online Mafia Games on Its Hit List
This seems to be a common experience. Felix Dennis mentioned the same thing in his book - earlier on in his career, he'd just 'flip out' and go somewhere remote for a couple weeks, without even telling people ahead of time (more quirky and unplanned than your vacation!). But the same thing happened; he found that rather than adding tremendous value every second he was there, the company did much better when he got out of their way.

It's probably a good thing to do.
Tremendous effort by Negroponte, to be sure.

I am fortunate enough to be able to afford to give my children laptops. For some reason, it doesn't seem important to do so. I guess I just don't get it.

Perhaps teaching children to read and giving them access to books is more worthy of effort than giving them laptops. Not as newsworthy or noteworthy though.

Anyway, enough of my quibbling. If more of us had the drive and will to make the world a better place that Negroponte has, surely the world would be a better place.
"We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization"

Believe it or not, it is a business model.

I know quite a few slimeballs that will sue anyone big with money because they know that they often prefer to settle just to get rid of them.

(I call them slimeballs because it's the only way they know how to make money. They sometimes run for years with negative margins, but those settlements keep them alive.)
You'd be surprised. CVT's (Continuously Variable Transmissions) in cars will smoothly adjust upwards in engine power, RPM, effective gear ratio, and audible pitch instead of pitching down and jerking at upshift like a traditional transmission. Supposedly, people had the illusion that CVT's weren't powerful because they didn't have audible "shifts", so CVT's were actually redesigned to provide the illusion of behaving more like traditional automatic transmissions.
This is ultimately set in the low-level domain "com.apple.launchservices". So although the article warns against deleting Safari or Mail, it is possible to use the command-line "defaults" program to fix this setting at any time.

Also note that the domain holds all URL handlers, allowing you to set up ones that may be less common, such as ssh, sftp, telnet or news.
Alright, then Apple, can you please provide a comparable service to GV??
Swapping the just the platters has zero chance of success.

If the drive isn't working and it's not making grinding noises, it's possible that the controller board on the underside is zapped. I've had a 50/50 success rate recovering data by swapping boards -- you have to find identical drives, and be lucky too.
HTML 5 Spec And Disparate Impact In Practice
It depends, I think.
In some circumstances ∞ is just a special number, as 0 is a special number.

Consider the operation (||) of parallel coupling of resistors

1Ω || 1Ω = 1/2Ω cf. 1Ω + 1Ω = 2Ω
1Ω || 0Ω = 0Ω cf. 1Ω + 0Ω = 1Ω
1Ω || ∞Ω = 1Ω cf. 1Ω + ∞Ω = ∞Ω

For the operator || ∞ is the identity element as 0 is for operator +
NPR Moves to Rewire Its Approach to the Web
I guess these are more science/engineering than hacker, but I think the following cooking sites match the title pretty well:

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
When I want to make something new and complicated, I go here first. Great layout, photos with every step, and no assumed prior knowledge.

http://www.cooksillustrated.com/
The magazine has more content than the website, but when I took the time to read a two page essay about how to make pork lo mein, down to what cuts of meat I could reasonably expect to find in an American grocery store, I was not disappointed. These are the same people who endorsed wadded up paper towels as the best turkey lifters after extensive testing.

Of course, for real recipe hacking, I go to the substitutions section of the Joy of Cooking to see what insanity I can dig up. My best to date is a non-dairy chocolate cake that used lots of mayonnaise, and I really want to experiment with flax seeds as an egg substitute.
That may go down as one of the worst public statements made by a company. Certainly a "teachable moment" for the PR books.
A sinecure.
Anti-competitive behavior. Just sayin'.
One of the nicest online book companion sites I've seen. O'Reilly's book related sites, as much as I love O'Reilly books, look crufty in comparison.
And yet this was the reverse--someone big with money suing someone small without it.
I think the issue is assignment in R is an expression rather than a statement (I think), but there are some other places where '=' gets used for different syntax, and you always use <- for assignment, even in those situations. For me, it doesn't come up, because as a Python programmer I've fully bought into the idea that assignment should be a statement, and so I don’t try to use it as an expression in code. If you’re used to Python, then you’ll be used to seeing "=" for both assignment and keyword function arguments, so there’s no real confusion.

I've never had a problem, but again, I've never tried to write R libraries for public consumption, or hack on large chunks of existing R code, so YMMV.
On a side note, I'm thinking about starting a blog to review products and businesses. But I'm kind of worried about this kind of stuff. If I report a true incident that happened at a business (e.g., Best Buy not accepting a returned computer because I installed software on it), is there any danger of libel suits?
No distractions would be lovely. Currently, I'm "enjoying" the following in our open-plan offices:

- Cellphones w/annoying ringtones going off every 10 mins (I don't care if you're the company's sales guy/gal who needs to be reachable every second of the day)

- Impromptu meetings in the hallways

- Obligatory foghorn-voiced American employee yacking on the landline

- Resulting volume increase of person on the cellphone, person on the land line, persons in their impromptu meeting just outside the office door

The obvious answer is "get your own office", but that's not likely to happen.

Chip on my shoulder, what?
Could you elaborate on your claim of abusiveness? I'm not sure such an unsourced rumor is sufficient evidence, nor am I aware of Groupon having such Walmartian clout that it can bully vendors into deals. Surely the spa signed its own end of the contract?
These 'questions' are not allowed on Ask Metafilter. No hypotheticals, no "I'll go first", it'll get deleted as 'chatfilter'
When I read that quote, I was like, "Okay, okay. This is some kind of joke." Check the date. Nope, not April 1st. Check the URL. Not the Onion.

Really? A spokesperson said that??
Robotic firefighting team
In Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, he referenced how Professor Gottman can predict which couples will survive the long-term with just a short meeting.

"University of Washington researchers who have been putting marriages under the equivalent of a microscope say it is possible to predict which newlywed couples will divorce from the way partners interact in just the first three minutes of a discussion about an area of continuing disagreement.

Couples who later divorced began these talks with significantly greater displays of negative emotions, words and gestures and fewer positive ones than did couples who remained married over the course of a six-year study."

And with a longer study (one hour interview, past relationship research):

"Psychologists trying to determine why marriages flourish or end in divorce have refined a tool that predicts with 87 percent accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81 percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years."

http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/1999archive/09-99arc...

http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/2000archive/03-00arc...
Game utilizes human intuition to help computers solve complex problems
If you were to get a twitter following like this suit is getting - my bet is they'll drop the suit. In any case - it's not libel if it's factual information that benefits consumers. That's free speech. Libel is like calling a political opponent a child molester just to give him bad publicity.
You can set your connection (possibly your db) to autocommit. I forget how offhand, maybe do a search.
Did they test the hardware by putting it in production or did they run a series of benchmarking tests (so that the experiment can be duplicated)?
You're putting a lot of faith into IBM as far as user experience goes. You, my friend, have apparently never used Lotus Notes.
The top thing I want is a boss that lets me do my job. That means limit the team meetings to absolutely what is necessary. That means give me the tools that let me do my job most efficiently. For anyone that has ever worked in a bank, I'm sure you know what I am talking about.
Couple thoughts:

Developing for Android involves their odd little JVM; Objective C on a more traditional UNIX architecture is more familiar to more developers.

(A development Mac is a bit of a roadblock, but not much.)

The 'Apple tax' in the handheld space is negligible. It's more in line with the absolute value of 'apple tax' in the mp3 market than in the laptop market; let alone the desktop market of 1984.

Being even just a little clunkier is a much bigger deal when you're talking about very short session times.

But perhaps the biggest difference:
Apple no longer particularly cares. If they make mad profit off the top 10% of the market, they won't waste a thought toward what's powering the other 90%.
The talon robot mentioned appears to be developed by http://www.foster-miller.com/lemming.htm

It is nice to see military robot R&D making an impact in general public safety applications.
Nissan's Electric Car Prototype: Rough Draft of the Car of the Future?
MySQL is set to autocommit by default (you can check with "select @@autocommit", there are probably some other ways to check as well), then it comes to which engine you use, many of them don't support transactions, but some like InnoDB do. So it really all depends.

in response to lincolnq below:
you are correct, if the engine does support autocommit it is turned on automatically. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/
Well, I suppose that's true if you limit yourself to the reals, but it doesn't hold if you're dealing with the surreal numbers :-)
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