skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly, people in the West buy iPods because they get brainwashed to do so. They may explode or Apple might lie (iPhone MMS anybody?) or kill its employees, the consumerist zombies will still blindly follow the brand.

Apple is a cult not a company.
Tell me what the Roman Army didn't know and don't cover it with 'pseudo-scientific', jargon.

Though the exact numbers of men in a legion varied, the basic pattern of organization remained the same. The smallest unit was the tent group (contubernium), composed of 8 men who shared a tent, a mule, and eating equipment. These were organized into a disciplinary unit called a century (despite the fact that a century typically had 80 rather than 100 men), under the command of a centurion. The basic fighting unit was a cohort, composed of six centuries (480 men plus 6 centurions). The legion itself was composed of ten cohorts, and the first cohort had many extra men—the clerks, engineers, and other specialists who did not usually fight—and the senior centurion of the legion, the primipilus, or “number one javelin.”
It's easy to do very stupid things, which at the time seem brilliant, and you don't realize they're stupid until they're so intertwined with the rest of the project that they're harder to fix than to just deal with.
http://2dboy.com/2009/03/06/the-world-of-goo-wasnt-built-in-...
I had a science teacher that would always find news articles related to what we were talking about in class. It was really great to see how this weird crap we talked about in class was actually being used in the real world, and how people were still studying things we didn't even know about it.
i know i'll be downgraded for saying this and i'm ok with that because most of the hackers are apple lovers and this is hackers community and not marketing forum :) but anyway if you think that apple charges reasonably for their products then you've no clue how apple is doing in other parts of the world - marketing research says that companies like apple had made money from westerners ONLY !!!

yes, apple offers quality products

yes, apple charges for premium

yes, apple has all the innovation working for them ....

But

Apple is a hit in western world only where people spend blindly .... look at the success rate of apple in 3rd world countries (where population is huge) - you will know that they are nowhere in top 10 --- surprised? let me give you an example:

ipod: a music player that is a huge hit in north-america is a super-flop product amongst south-asians!!! WHY? Why people who are known as a smartest consumers in the world don't buy ipods? the reason is not only the price of an ipod but also the lack of features in ipods ... the other mp3 player offer way more features than ipods ... and sound quality is as good as ipods .... So why one would pay more price for less features and get a same quality of output???????????? this is not me who is saying it, its a huge market research for all the premium products that has a good following in western countries but no takers in other parts of the world.

So the same product that we call "premium" in america (or western world) is labeled as a "rip-off" in other parts of the world where a person is called as a foolish for paying more price and getting same quality output but way less features...
CRUD not only good for, but is the only consistent way to build REST over HTTP
It depends entirely on how many people you're teaching. If you're sitting in a lecture hall full of 250 students, asking continual questions is just not going to get any response. No-one wants to embarass themselves in front of an audience that large. You'll just slow down the lecture while you pause and listen to a stony 10 second silence every couple of minutes. I've had lecturers do this, and it's extremely frustrating.

Personally, I don't mind lecturers "telling" the answers straight away. Obviously give motivation and lead into it rather than just delivering it with no introduction, but I've found a lot of problems are simply too large or too non-obvious to take a straw poll from the class.

The best teachers I've had have been:

(i) Really bloody good at their subject. My probability lecturer (the Field's medallist Tim Gowers), when presenting the proof of Stirling's approximation, said something along the lines of "now, the normal method for proving this bit is a bit complicated, and on my cycle in this morning I thought 'There must be an easier way', when the following struck me. Now, I've never written this down before, so hopefully it works...", and of course laid out a simplification of a famous proof that worked perfectly. Inspirational. (See http://gowers.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/removing-the-magic-fr...)

(ii) Incredible elucidators. The ability to take a complex concept and pick exactly the right words or metaphors to explain it is a powerful ability.

I feel these criteria are far more important than asking the audience questions. You need both -- I've been taught by plenty of talented mathematicians who had no idea how to teach, and certainly a handful of great teachers who simply didn't have the aptitude to really grasp the more complex topics.
it's just not painful to write a library that does just the parts you need

And this is a bad thing?

a lack of incentives about not using it capriciously

That's an argument against higher-level languages. If a language lets me do what I want, it lets me use it capriciously if I want. The only way to inhibit capriciousness is to inhibit power and flexibility.

I suspect this complaint about Lisp, which seems to get trotted out every time, is made by (and for) people who haven't worked much with Lisp. It's just too remote from reality, or at least the corner of reality that I've personally traversed.
I'm one of those few people who completely hated Primer. I found it to be masquerading poor narrative as intellectual mystery. It's possible to present an intricate, complex logic puzzle as story without being totally incoherent, but Primer doesn't even bother.

For a movie that matches Primer in everything it does right, but none of what it does wrong, check out Timecrimes (Los Cronocrimenes). It is far superior.
"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary" -- Thomas Carruthers
The only strong case I see is if you have a small child in the house. We have a 6 month old...and having a landline seemed like a small price for additional security and connectivity if I need immediate access - dont want to boot skype or pray for an AT&T cell signal as I run around my apartment in a crisis
This quote is personally why I support health care reform:

"There are enough risks associated with choosing to start a business over being an employee, but the Europeans don't have to worry that they will go bankrupt for lack of health insurance."

And this is an interesting quote from a Krugman post a/b the study (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/big-business-ame...):

"Another possibility, more favorable to the United States, is that in some European countries (Italy comes to mind) firms stay small to escape onerous regulations."
> You're better off just using a constant-time algorithm which uses the same number of operations for all inputs.

That's easier said that done. Also, you have to come up with one for every security-relevant operation.

And, "algorithm" isn't the issue, implementation is. Given caching and the like, that's really hard to do.

An easy way to implement the "sleep to worst case" idea is to simply time each call and keep track of the max. If a given call instance returns in less time, sleep the difference. (It's probably good to add a decay mechanism.)
Must Have Apps for the iPhone Photographer
The TDI diesel's get great mileage and last forever. You can hack on it to make it run straight veggie oil at some point if you want.
What about profiling? I hear that will often tell you what part of your program is slow.
If my Swiss cheese like memory doesn't fail me:

I think it was Israeli scientists who were first able to separate regular cancer cells and stem cancer cells in the lab.

It turns out stem cancer makes regular cancer. If you implant regular into a cancer free mouse it almost never develops cancer. But implant stem and you've got cancer.

Further more, regular c. cells grow too fast and are thus more susceptible to treatment then healthy cells. But stem c. cells don't, and they often survive treatment.

And stem c. cells tend to be in the center of tumors, surrounded by and protected by regular c. cells.

Makes you be in awe of cancer a bit a more doesn't it?

I am not impressed by promising results in mice, mice are a terrible model for human cancer. But what I found interesting is this:

They then used rapid screening techniques to test 16,000 commercially available chemical compounds.

This is a brute force search and I hope we see more of it. It can be automated and done by machines.
From what I've seen, good teachers are those who A) earn the respect of their students, and B) understand that different people learn differently.

Respect is important because no student will be engaged in a class with a teacher of whom he has a low opinion. At best the student will ignore the teacher and turn to an alternate, respected, source - ie textbook. At worst, the student will entirely disengage from the subject.
To earn respect, I would suggest first that the teacher respect the student. A student who is respected will find class more enjoyable and engaging, knowing his ideas mean something.

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences states that there are ~8 different types of intelligences. A student who is exceptional in one of them will learn best in that one - and will usually be more interested in information reaching him through it.
Out of the blue, it occurred to me that a file format analogy lends itself perfectly to the situation. A program may be able to open files of several formats, but it is built around one. This format will generally produce the best results for the program, even if it can interact competently with several other formats. Think excel (because I've had to deal with it recently). You can work with CSV files, certainly, but you can do much more with xls files.
So teach your material in different formats. Have the content available in both visual and auditory formats as a default, but whenever possible (and you really want to reach for these!) make it available in kinesthetic, verbal, musical, and social formats as well. (I've missed a couple of Gardner's intelligences. But you get the idea.)

Teaching to multiple intelligences will also increase students' respect for you. If you help them to understand something (by teaching it in a format that naturally makes more sense to them), they will A) realize that you know what you're talking about, and B) see that you are a better teacher, likely to teach them more stuff.

I don't mean to imply that everyone is naturally interested in learning everything, and it is only the format of the data that is interfering -- but how much more enjoyable is working with a dataset if you don't have to write a parser for the input format? ;)
Bloomberg presents the research finding in a different light: the article focuses on the fact that 1 compound out of 16000 researched was identified as the most effective at targeting cancer stem cells. However, the main outcome of the research, as NYTimes[1] points out, is that a new screening method has been developed to be able to quickly identify drugs that effectively target only the cancer stem cells. In fact, 32 chemicals were identifed as effective at killing stem cells. Only 1 of these is an approved drug.

The NYT article is more interesting because they mention two schools of thought among cancer researchers: on the one hand, there are researchers who think that only the stem cells must be targeted in order to completely kill off the cancer. They believe chemotherapy is ineffective because it kills all types of cells but fails to completely kill all the cancer stem cells. Even if 99% of the cells are targeted, the presence of remnant stem cells may result in the cancer returning. The other camp takes the view that it is not sufficient to kill stem cells only.

This is just my understanding of the articles. I'm not a biologist in any way & I'd love to read the views about the significance of these findings by hackers more versed with the topic

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/research/14cancer.h...
Just some quick responses:

"Compare our industry to Medicine and Law. It's actually illegal for people who aren't doctors or lawyer to dispense medical advice or legal advice."

Dispensing bad medical advice can result in serious injury or death. Dispensing bad legal advice can result in long prison sentences. Writing bad software wastes time and costs money. Industries where software CAN kill people are more stringent with their development and hiring practices because of their liabilities.

"Oh, I know lots will cringe at the thought of that. I know the thought is that stuff like this subsidizes crappy coders through artificial scarcity."

We all know that good programmers are scarce. The reason we cringe is because no one knows of a good method to draw the line between good programmer, and not-good-enough programmer, in a world where programmers do so many different domain-specific things.

"I see so many people without a background in programming write poorly architected code that performs like a dog and just breaks... it breaks because some wanabe hacker just jumped in and started hacking without knowing wtf (s)he was doing and it ends up costing the company paying for the work more money later on."

This is how people get their background in programming, by writing poorly architected code, watching it perform like a dog and break, and then fixing those issues. That is what gaining experience looks like. Companies that hire inexperienced junior level programmers and trust them with large architectural decisions have made a managerial mistake, do not blame the novice programmer for this.

---
And on open source
---

Much of open source revolves around building and maintaining tools that support people in our trade. Having open libraries, operating systems, servers, text editors, compilers, etc, helps everyone out there be more a more productive software developer. Other professionals also look out for each other and work collectively to advance their profession generally. We are no different, it just happens that due to the nature of our field, we have much more powerful mechanisms to do so at our disposal.
Early Access Program for JetBrains Web IDE
Agreed.

Like I said, I'm just in a 12-Step "Debbie Downer" program, so I'm trying to be more positive. Baby steps ;-)
This is definitely a problem. I'm trying to write a paper now (in applied math), and there's no way I can fit the true details of the implementation into the paper (there's just too much detail in the implementation!). While I can skim over some of the less relevant details in order to get the 'gist' across, it seems ridiculous to me that no-one will ever be reading my code! At least for rigor's sake.

This brings up other interesting questions too, actually: Should I be going out of my way to make my code readily available via a website in spite of publication norms? Are the supposed benefits to the scientific community significant (I'm in a field where the minority of researchers can read the code at all)? What are potential costs and benefits to me, as someone attempting to establish themselves in the field? I can imagine this sort of action improving or deteriorating my credibility as perceived by others.
IT Certifications Recommendations
I am a Senior Developer with a very large government contractor - primarily developing web-based applications in PHP and Python.

I was hired for this position in November 08 and started in February 09, after my separation from the US Air Force. At the time of hiring, it was never mentioned that a valid permanent IT certification was a requirement for the position.

Now, I am being told I need to get a Cert, and quickly. My company will reimburse me the cost of the test (not study materials), if I pass.

So, looking for two things:

1) Is this right? Really, there isn't much I can do about it but I feel as if I am getting screwed here somehow. If it was a requirement for the position you'd think I would have been told before now.

2) Any recommendations on a certification to aim for? The logical choice is Zend Certified Engineer but I have heard it is fairly difficult. Plus, it's a certification I actually do want to work towards and get, something I want to do for myself on my own time. I don't have the time in this scenario to do that so I am leaning towards something easier just to get the requirement out of the way. Maybe A+ - I'm fairly certain a blind monkey can pass that.

Ideas?
Ask HN:  Would this idea to simulate live chat on YouTube work well?
Just replay whatever people type whenever someone views a video.

For example, if someone starts typing something at the one minute mark, then replay his/her typing at that time.

Is it likely that anyone would respond to a comment that you make in this chat?

Perhaps. If the video is being viewed by many people simultaneously, then you might get a response from one of them.

Even if the video is not that popular, your comment is probably not that original and perhaps someone has already responded to one like it. So you would eventually see the response anyway.

But maybe we can take it further and actively look for the response and replay it earlier or repeat it if it was already replayed.

You will want to avoid duplicate/similar comments. Moreover, if there are too many comments in a given time segment, you will probably want a way to select which ones to show in that time segment.
http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/9435
Also, Aviary's stuff is really, really cool.
So you got person A on earth writing code and person B going around REALLY fast (very close to the speed of light lets say) writing the same code.

When person A finishes (say a week later) and comes back, he'll find that person B finished "a long time ago." That is, person B finished, and then waited till person A came back (say for a year, depending on how fast person B was going).

What happened? Time went at different speeds for each person. They each took a week from their own point of view!

Which one is right? Both of them. Thats what relativity says. There is not one thing called "time" but that its "relative" (hence the name).

So, if your going to choose to hire one of them... you'd hire person B (assuming your business is on Earth).
The book on time travel describing model which made most sense to me for years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technicolor_Time_Machine

This novel presents a clear use of the restricted action resolution of the Grandfather paradox. The actions of the characters can not have changed the past because the past is what their actions brought about.
What I mean, a novice programmer would do that in any language anyway (and I'm no exception) while an experienced developer would avoid these traps in any language.
It's in fact hard to capture what Worse is Better was getting at, because it's sort of incoherent. I've tried 2 or 3 times to understand it over the years and concluded that, beyond the most general point (which you describe well, I think), it's not clear what he's really saying. I noticed Rich Hickey said this the other day, as politely as one possibly could: The arguments made in Worse is Better are very nuanced and I'm not sure I understand them all.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programmin...

By the way, Dan Weinreb has an interesting piece in which he reveals that he was the MIT guy and Bill Joy the Berkeley guy:

http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-...

I recommend Kay Schluehr's comment on that page, which argues that arguments like WiB are drawing overly general philosophical conclusions from instances of success or failure in the market.
This struck me as a ranting collection of unsupported claims.

Unfortunately, scarcity is, and always will be, a reality. And that is a fact hard-wired to natural science. Sure it may be possible to create an economic system that delivers "free software to everybody," but it could never go much further than that. We still need to live in houses and wear clothes and even build the computers that will be used to write all this software. All of these goods are made from scarce natural resources and no amount of tinkering with the rules of the economy will change that fact.
I dunno, Java FX looks better suited for webapps.
It's more of a gradient, not a strict inequality; cf. argument from parsimony, inference vs. deduction.
I share your concern, but this is an argument that applies equally well to all of WP's process. It's orthogonal to deletionism.
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I know what part is slow. I still can't believe I did it that way. It wasn't until last night when I put all the pieces together that I actually saw how badly it sucked. I was trying to be "slick" when I should have just done the job. Lesson learned (again).
If the US is truly not a nation of small business anymore that's bad. Small businesses are the true engine of the economy and tend to be more stable. A "top heavy" economy is more typical of developing nations.
> Ah, you're talking about lifetime costs. I was thinking in terms of per-incident.

Lifetime is the only rational way to think about it on "govt scale".

Per-incident is really hard to sample correctly. Yes, if you can get someone to not be diabetic, you've saved money, but we're already trying a lot of preventative care so if you look at the incidents as opportunities, you're wrong.

Yes, we're already doing a lot of preventative care, and we're not seeing the results that its advocates claim. (Simple example - Every doctor already says "lose weight".) Most chronic diabetes folks are fairly resistent to preventative care, at least the inexpensive sort, and the expensive stuff isn't close to cost effective AND they backslide.

Here's a question - smoking has gone down by 50% over the past 20 years. Are we spending less on lung cancer?

> The politics of elderly care are a moral minefield.

Yup. 70% of US medical spending is on old people. If you're going to cut spending by 30%, a huge fraction of that has to come from old people.
> you can also say that 'food' is a right and everyone should get it. Should government get in to business of taxing people and making sure that food is provided for everyone?

More to the point, even if you think that food is a right and tax people to provide it to the less fortunate, should we have "Nationalized Food Service" or a subsidized "public option"? How about a tax on employers that don't provide acceptable "private food service"?

And speaking of this "food right", does it apply to folks who aren't capable of full participation in civil society? I ask because one of the White House advisors on health care believes that health care as a right does not apply to such folks, giving as an example folks with dementia. Would folks with Downs syndrome qualify?

He also thinks that old folks don't qualify.
If you're introducing a 1-second delay for login, and that's not what you wanted, you're doing it wrong. The point of bcrypt is that it's tunable, and its defaults are nowhere near that slow. You do not need to slow hashing down to user-perceptable time to make dictionary attacks infeasible.

Also, bcrypt is pretty much the de facto industry standard adaptive password hash. It's not Phusion's crazy idea. There's a PKCS function that works on similar principles (PBKDF), but it isn't as resilient as bcrypt is.
Isn't this like the last bug? Limited to being an exploit on systems where the default security policy is (was) to allow writable mappings at page zero? If so, shouldn't the SELinux treatment for those be effective here too?