skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We work around this problem with our own XML runtime parsed UI Library. It lets us have a set of layout files for each screen size of the application. Since we've implemented it for almost every platform out there, it means I'm mostly writing application logic. (Which has it's own set of pitfalls)

As much as I hate buzzwords, it really helps to take an MVC approach to mobile development. Different screensizes and input methods just require different views on top of the application logic.
Yes. Surprise, surprise...
People are going to look back on those as the good days. Thanks for sharing that link.
Personal genomics firms must come clean
We feel that pre-constructed tweets are downright lame; it's basically like saying "Hey, Mr Customer - we neither trust you nor value your opinion, but we want you to get your friends to buy our stuff anyway". Really old-school!

--
GymFu Jof
Still getting free good in Google Chicago as well.
Actually i just saw that it's fake steve, that changes the intention i thought he has quite a bit.

Nevertheless, i don't want to know how many iPhone lovers will now look down (even more) on Android that, imo, is the best mobile platform out there, from a technical point of view (i'm not talking about ugly underpowered devices or the ugly standard theme, but the architecture).
Don't know much about Palm Pre, though.

Second point: Most of the comments in the story now say "yeah, that's what killed Windows Mobile".. Errr, fine. But i am wondering how Nokia became world leading mobile manufacturer with a freaking lot of devices? It sure has nothing to do with screen resolution. It's just sad.. and as always i'm falling for the trolls :(
Why programmers are not subject to protective labor laws
RethinkDB looking for a technical cofounder
The problem with the argument is that it doesn't explain Argentina's performance when compared to all the countries with worse education levels (which are the majority).
From the article:

Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy.

That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done.
More Money, More Happiness? Not for Your Employees
I don't think that you understand what you're saying. Let's look at a few examples:

Scenario #1
===========
- I have 3 online accounts: gmail, hacker news, okcupid
- I use the same password for all accounts
- someone hacks okcupid
- they now have the password to my gmail account
- they also have my email which is attached to the okcupid account
- hacker uses okcupid password to access my gmail account.
- hacker users access to gmail account to reset password for hacker news

Scenario #2
===========
- I have 3 online accounts: gmail, hacker news, okcupid
- I use the same password for both hacker news and okcupid,
but I use a different password for gmail.
- hacker breaks into okcupid
- hacker now has my email address and my password for
okcupid/hackernews
- hacker attempts to access my gmail account, but cannot
because the password is different
- hacker attempts tot access my hacker news account, and
gains access since it's the same password as my okcupid
account

Scenario #3
===========
- I have 3 online accounts: gmail, hacker news, okcupid
- I use separate passwords for each account
- hacker breaks into okcupid
- hacker now has my email and password for okcupid
- hacker accumpts to access my gmail and hacker news
accounts, but cannot.

You're saying that because it's possible for someone to gain access to your gmail account, you use the same password everywhere, but this is the wrong conclusion to draw here.

Scenario #3 where each account has a different password is the best, but Scenario #2 is still better than Scenario #1. Just because a compromise on your Gmail account is a 'Game Over' scenario just means that you have to apply extra security measures to your Gmail account. Your Gmail password should definitely never be used as a password anywhere else and should be the strongest password that you use (other than maybe an online banking password).

tl;dr version:

You email account password should be your strongest password, even if you use the same password everywhere else. The odds of someone hacking your email account are low, the odds of someone hacking a no-name website and using your account information to get your email password are high.
Related article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=867803
I've seen this happen time and again, where developers or project managers will decide to "improve" some part of the clients business process rather than just do what they were asked to do. It's almost a "we know better than you" attitude.

And they then don't understand why the clients are unhappy with the system when it is delivered.
Was twitter down? :) It's back now.
You know, if I had a terminal emulator that I could run vim with 24-bit colour depth in, that would go a long way towards turning me from the path of heresy.
I imagine people might say they prefer salary over the equivalent in perks, but that doesn't mean they actually do.

Getting paid 50% of market rate, but your boss flies the whole company to Europe for a week? Awesome company!<sarcasm/>
While it's true that we can see how poorly the American system is run, how does it compare to the rest of the world?

I don't know much about the subject, so I'm hoping to get a bit more insight into this.

I suspect that even if our system isn't great and as good as it could be, it's still has a leg up on most education systems out there
forgetting the fact that GTK is quite some years old and software has evolved. You really think it's impossible to have a scalable UI? Ever surfed the internet with different resolutions? Now imagine you don't have cross browser incompatibilities and a framework that behaves the same everywhere.
No, it's still javascript running in a browser.
True, but keep in mind that, to do that, I would have to return the [Kindle]

I dunno, it is a computer system. As far as I know, it's not jailbroken yet, but there are folks working on it: http://igorsk.blogspot.com/search/label/kindle
> Argentina is (and has been) doing better than Brazil by pretty much any indicator of education, but Brazil has obviously done much better in terms of economic development

Well, first I never claimed and don't think that we're doing much better than you guys. Honestly, I am not bragging on anything.
Now, I agree that Argentinian education is better than Brazilian. Your stats show it and I know it.
But put it just like that is simply lying with stats. Argentina has 32 million habitants, Brazil has 180 million. Scale means a lot here; Brazil has almost six times more people. Similarly, India has a worse education than Brazil, but produces more knowledge and science simply because it is 5 times bigger.

> Argentina had many governments that were not elected by the people

I might accept that for a small part of the country's history, the military dictatorship. It is not valid for the whole period of Peronism and everything else since the 80's.

> Second, can you prove that educated people always make the choice that's best for the country

No I can't. And that's not my point. My point is that, in average, uneducated people make worst choices than educated people; not that educated people are infalible.

> Third, there are abundant counterexamples of dictatorial countries that did great in terms of their economics and industrial development.

Also not my point. I am not interested in seeing dictatorships working. I want to see democracies working.
Indeed. I hate to contribute to this, but when I get home, I am going to blog about my coroutine-based echo server. Fewer lines of code than the original, scales linearly over active connections (and constant time over idle sockets), and my tiny eeepc laptop can easily handle 1,000,000 open connections.

Sometimes "worse is better" isn't.
I smell a business idea... keyfob service provider.
And with one deft stroke you've just eliminated 98% of the CS-related content on the internet. Bravo!
So true.

Computer programmers are never taught how to read papers. Someone should write a paper on how to read computer science papers.

(For me, the issue was with getting over the "this is too hard for me" mentality. Some papers are hard, but you have to read them once, keep them in mind, and then read more. Then come back to the original paper, and it makes sense. The first paper that I noticed this effect on was "Applicative Programming with Effects". The first time I read it, it made no sense. Functor? Application? Category? A few months later, I read it and thought "this is brilliant". Like everything, practice makes perfect.)
That is true in some sense.

Yet, on the other hand, the first versions of Linux were written without consulting the extensive literature (which was all about microkernels) [1].

As another example – a guy studying with me made his own circuit boards (had his own acid production line project going on in his dorm room). You would never use such a circuit board in any professional setting. Yet he learned a lot about other stuff with his electronics projects.

Sometimes the goal of learning isn’t really implementing something directly. As an example, a recursive function isn’t really the best way to calculate Fibonacci numbers. If someone wants to learn about forking by writing a simple web-server thingy then it may be a good idea?

Most of these projects were probably done in their free time. Who would be the better programmer – the guy that wrote this, or the guy that knocked back a beer and sat in front of the TV?

[1] I am not an operating system expert, but this is at least the impression I got after reading the flame-wars email.
You should just read the (very readable) MapReduce paper, rather than content-free blog posts like this one.
interestingly, google's offered pay rates for system administrators when they've tried to recruit me have been industry standard--for Austin, TX. but the jobs were in silicon valley. maybe other roles have higher pay scales, but i turned them down because i didn't think they were paying well, and i am only used to salaries from state jobs, which have tended to be very nearly median for the industry.

last time they tried to recruit me was 3-4 years ago. perhaps they've changed. but it held true for at least 4 years before that as well.
Sometimes it pays to click through to the article before commenting.
I too was impressed by the video, and the demo. The team seems like they are building some great tools.

But that is where my fascination with 280 ends, they are taking a great language, Javascript, and turning it into something its not. Take a look at Objective-J its not javascript. It doesn't really even look like javascript.

As a JS developer, I am not certain I will be willing to give up JS, just so I can use these visual programming tools.

I am going to spend the 20 bucks though, I really want to see how much of the Objective-J I can strip out just use JS.
If the man could code as well as he writes these pseudo parables...
Why not? The TCO is done on the caller end and is completely transparent to the callee. You just don't bother pushing your return address when calling a function, so it'll return to the previous one instead.
The blackberry argument is exactly the place where open source is the answer. I have a python script that I fully understand (and wrote much of it myself) grabbing email data off the internet, and only it knows my password - I wouldn't dare trust proprietary software with something that sensitive.
"Perhaps--and this is pure conjecture--the biggest problem the industry has is that people rarely take a process or methodology and apply it as written,"

Hmmm. Perhaps the biggest problem the industry has is that processes and methodologies are written by people who are poor programmers?

Think about it. No methodology is written by great programmers, great managers or great product designers. Why should people use them "as written"?

Taking all the "agile" methodologies as an example, All the signatories of the Agile Manifesto put together never coded up any great software. The same applies for CMMi or RUP or whatever.

XP starts from a failed project at Chrysler. They are essentially process consultants who are good at thinking up processes. Implementing their reccomendations "as written" would be insane, just as trying to run a company as per the prescriptions in latest management fad book as written would be insane.

Come to think of it there are similarities to management books. Comparatively few of them are written by great businessmen. Most of them have written by people who've never run a business in their lives.

I don't get it. Logically no one should pay any attention to such methodologies or books. But people do, to the point where software methodologies and "Who moved My cheese" books are multi billion dollar industries.
'plots'? Someone needs to tell the BBC the cold war ended over a decade ago.
Subtle. People choose higher pay, but are happier with jobs that have more perks.

Many of them are not even costly to implement since they cost mostly time and result in higher productivity. Eg RDOs.
This sounds familiar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866378
your boss flies the whole company to Europe for a week? Awesome company!

Until you return and don't have rent money:)
Is it just me or does his bold formatting detract from rather than add to the interview? I found it hard to follow with the constant switch back and forth from bold to regular text.
I think what's against the app store terms is to show disabled features that are only available in the paid version of an app. (which Apple has done for years in QuickTime ironically)

This probably falls in a grey area: if you compare it to game levels that are only activated after you achieve something, it's pretty similar in spirit. Now that I think about it, I think some games are borderline then…
We have KiokuDB for Perl. It can store any Perl object graph (including closures; the code and the closed-over state), and it has full transactional semantics.

(And in fact, the transactional semantics are all on by default. If you load an object graph, do some stuff, and save the object graph in a transaction, it will abort if something else modified the data you read at the beginning of the transaction. This prevents you from silently overwriting new data with old data, which is something I did a lot before I knew how to turn this feature on.)

I have used KiokuDB extensively for the typical "web app" things, and it has worked wonderfully. Testing is simpler than with a "real database", and the application goes together much more cleanly. (No O<->R impedance mismatch, since everything is O.)
I would love having a key fob for my bank accounts, if anything just not to have to make stuff up for the "security" questions…
Perhaps it is much better than the educational systems in third world countries, but compared with the European educational system Americans are definitely behind. Or course being an American myself it may just be a case of "The grass is green on the other side of the fence." However, from what I have read they definitely seem to run the colleges better in Europe.
My favorite shark-jump moment was when someone in HR sent out a blast email announcing a new HR initiative for a "wear pajamas to work day" highlighting Google culture. When HR has to manufacture culture and call it a perk, things are on their way downhill...
The article seems trivial compared to what I see as the real security risk - unrelated sites that have an "I forgot my password" option which relies on e-mail to reset the password.

If an attacker has your gmail, they can go to your bank, your stock brokerage, your retirement accounts, your credit cards, etc and say "I forgot my password" and use the e-mail access to reset those.

I hate that my bank wants me to put in "Your mother's maiden name" as a "security question" when that information is painfully easy to get (relative to password). I always enter fake information, but I really wish there was just an opt-out for the password reset feature.
I guess you've never started a company and poured your heart and soul into it.

Your nonchalance about the whole thing reads to me like:

"Well, you know, if it dies, he can always make another kid."

Factually correct, but rather inhuman.
Yet, on the other hand, the first versions of Linux were written without consulting the extensive literature (which was all about microkernels) [1].

In the early 90s nearly all of the operating system research was going into Microkernels, but there was already 30+ years of standing research to borrow from (and Linux very much did -- the fact that it's similar enough to run the same software as Solaris and BSD systems is not due to spontaneous re-invention).

Despite the fact that Linux and the BSDs did not adopt the microkernel architecture -- and pure microkernels, for most purposes, died out -- quite a bit of value did come from that research, such as the Mach VM system, which was then borrowed by 4.4BSD operating systems and others.

Most of these projects were probably done in their free time. Who would be the better programmer – the guy that wrote this, or the guy that knocked back a beer and sat in front of the TV?

Rather than taking an incredibly assertive but misguided blog post at face value (and propagating it further), what is wrong about reading the widely available, easily discovered literature and implementing an event-based/event+thread-based implementation instead?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-qu...

It's basically very accurate.
The headline is quite unfair to the article's content and to what schmidt and Sergey actually say.
Cloud Computing: It doesn't mean what you think it means
Disagreed - it's the responsibility of those who are professionally or academically publishing such materials, not "everyone." It's also important for readers to consider their sources and realize that personal blogs are hardly to be taken at face value.

Publishing things that are imperfect or incorrect is essential in order to get feedback and to improve. If it were necessary to do significant study before making a blog post or a similarly ephemeral statement, hardly anyone would bother and the field would be dead for lack of newcomers.
Software category - Mininova
Why would you want to restrict it this way? I could understand some limitations like editing, commenting…* but accessing the answers? Sounds odd.

* StackOverflow (or StackExchange precisely) is actually built so that trolls and their friends are limited in what they can do anyway
Failing that, make as many assumptions as possible, but correct the failed ones in a reasonably short amount of time. Some minimal cost/benefit analysis on the assumption would also be good.

As a corollary to this, try to arrange that any failures will occur as quickly and obviously as possible. For instance: Component X, which is essentially a black box to you, will be a small but critical part of your project. You don't have time to extensively test it, so you make assumptions about its behavior. Ideally, you should start integrating Component X into the full project immediately such that it's heavily used in development and testing environments, so that any violations of your assumptions will show up incidentally to other work.

On at least a couple occasions, I've been bitten by assuming that a Component X (which I thought I understood) would do what I expected and thus leaving the final integration until near the end of the project. This sounds like an obvious, easily avoided mistake, but it's surprisingly easy to make in the heat of the moment.
Logically no one should pay any attention to such methodologies or books. But people do, to the point where software methodologies and "Who moved My cheese" books are multi billion dollar industries.

If you think that's insane, let me tell you about this book written by a guy who translated a book written by a guy who knew a guy who knew twelve other guys who knew a carpenter...

People are searching for answers wrapped up lists of ten or fewer commandments. See also Paul's essay on essays that are lists and why they are both easy to write and popular with readers.
This technique is as old as handwritten assembly and anyone who has done significant assembly coding has probably done it at some point whether they realize it or not.

What's interesting and new (and presented in this paper) is automating this concept in a compiler.
I don't see the attraction to working for Google. Unless they buy my company. o.O
Accelerating Ruby with LLVM
AOL Error Code c0fe1701
I disagree. I think the perks would have continued if it wasn't for the down encon.
They're fantastic products.

Working with Jira is lightyears better (imho) than Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, etc... It integrates with Eclipse, SVN, and Confluence. Easily customized issue types, permission rules, and workflows mean that it's simple for us to handle development tasks, creative changes, bugs, hardware change tickets, and everything else in a single system.

"Oh you're creating a feature request for Client X? I'll automatically use their special workflow so you get all the right approvals and estimates."

"Oh you're entering a Sev 0 production ticket? I'll page the right people!"

"Oh you want new hardware? I'll prompt you for all the right fields."

Honestly I could go on and on about how much time and pain Jira has saved us and our clients.

Confluence is a really great Wiki. Most importantly for us it integrates nicely with Jira and Crowd, and let's us manage many independent spaces with group based permissions for access.

The wins totally depend on your usage. If you're 1-2 people, Trac might be fine (although with the new super cheap pricing you should give Jira and Confluence a try). But in my experiences at a Fortune 500, contracting for several companies, and finally running my own small company, Jira/Crowd/Confluence have been absolutely no-brainers as far as being well worth the purchase price.
I'd question the expansion if Harvard was bloated, but they're not. If anything they're serving an absurdly small group of people considering their size.

They can afford to expand without diluting their quality. They ought to. (Hell, it would be a good competitive measure along with everything else, and chip away at Princeton and Yale.)
"If you think that's insane, let me tell you this book written by a guy who translated a book written by a guy who knew a guy who knew twelve other guys who knew a Jewish Carpenter..."

You have a great point there. Whether the Jewish carpenter ever existed or not, the book with the stories about him and his disciples provided something that people needed and liked to believe in, rationality be damned. Of course other people had different and contradictory books, all claiming equally fantastical fiction as "THE Truth", and then they could fight one another about which of their books was "The One True Word Of God" with nary a piece of evidence any way.

Maybe the need for (sw dev and business) methodology comes form the same part of the brain - irrational and needing comfort in the face of an unpredictable world. A sham that nevertheless makes you feel secure. Interesting.

And the people who'd write these up would be skilled manipulators or perhaps deluded themselves. Faith (in the sense of needing to believe something without supporting evidence because something "feels" right is the key to understanding this.)

Thanks.
Control Your Tab Order And Cursor Focus
I'm guessing there's no incentive for Google to care. If your gmail gets hacked, Google loses 1 user. (even though you lose a lot more) If someone hacks a blizzard account, it screws up the blizzard economy.
I thought the article was about Cricket