skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ... to address the billions of non-PC owning people out there that aren't using the web and, consequently, not using Google and it's services.

Then they're doing a pretty bad job.

Here's what Google is missing. Most of those non-PC owning people broadly fall into two categories: (1) those who live in 3rd world countries and/or cannot afford computers and (2) people who are just afraid of technology or have no use for it.

Selling to (2) is useless. (1) is where the money is.

Now consider a country like India. Back here, cellphones are bigger than computers, penetration-wise. Reason: a large number of competing carriers which results in dirt-cheap calls (the phone I use costs me about $7 a month since most calls I make are completely free) and affordable GPRS. MTNL and BSNL, who have a penchant for utterly destroying competitors on pricing alone, just launched dirt-cheap 3G services. I think we all know what happens next.

What is the only barrier in the way of cheap mobile Internet? The handset. To be precise, a 3G handset that is fast enough to render web pages and a few basic apps. This is where Android fails. Cheapo handsets from small manufacturers, cheap J2ME phones from LG/Samsung/Sony and Chinese clones of high-end smartphones are pretty big here. Why buy a Rs.30K Android phone when you can get similar functionality in a 10K unbranded Chinese phone? Or even a 15K HTC phone with Windows Mobile?

Unless Android can run on cheap, low-end handsets, I don't see it ever becoming big with the non-PC-owning crowd.
New Processor Will Feature 100 Cores
Most classes I took beyond the sophomore year required rather involved projects to be delivered. Be it a creating a compiler, a mini OS or a peer-to-peer chat client. All of those had requirements discovery, deadlines and checkpoints. We also worked with a partner which meant dealing with integration issues and debugging other person's code, which made me appreciate value of a source code control system.

The classes I regret taking had to do with "hot" industry technologies such as Data Warehousing, Applets, JSP. Spending those credits on something like Graph Theory or deeper dives into Operating Systems/Computer Language design would have been more rewarding.
Google breaks their own rules and becomes evil
It's interesting that Joel purports to treat his programmer staff as professionals, yet has the same unreasonable tradesman-focused expectations that the cube farm managers have about education in Computer Science.

A graduating structural engineer has no idea how to marshal a design through the building inspector's approval process. A graduating lawyer has no idea how to actually engage in litigation. Yet those fields aren't dominated by managers whining that students should be learning "real world skills" instead of "theoretical stuff" like high physics
or constitutional law.

They understand that a professional isn't an automation that gets precision machined by a training program to slide frictionlessly into their workflow. They know that when they hire a graduate, he isn't trained in the mechanics of his job (nor is he even licensed yet), and that the hire represents a commitment on the firm's part to take the
theoretical knowledge he got in school show him how to leverage it for the real-world practice of his profession. They are fine with that because they have a culture -- as professions and as firms -- of respecting and investing in their practitioners.

The computing industry doesn't operate that way. All the lip service it gives about 'professionalism' is, as far as I can tell, entirely driven by a desire to ensure that programmers remain exempt. Why is it that the manager class at development firms is dominated by non-technical MBAs? Why are development firms not set up so that programmers are partner-tracked associates? I can't think of any real profession where that's not the default configuration for a firm. And most apropos here: why do they expect their supposedly professional workforce to receive trade skills from their university education
programs?

I think people like Joel need to quit attacking universities until they can get some consistency in their own views of their employees. Either programmers are the skilled tradesmen we're currently treated as. In which case, the exempt status should be removed and the industry should come up with a tradesman's curriculum. Or they should accept us as professionals, and start treating us that way.
I'm not sure how they justify their claim that the Mac Mini is the most power efficient desktop. According to another post in this discussion, the average draw under load is approximately 35W. The Lenovo M58 & M58p--which have been out since December, 2008--also draws an average 35W under load, and are also EPEAT Gold and Energy Star 5.0 rated. I believe HP has had a similar product for a while too; probably every PC maker does.
I can say the same for the University of Washington. A lot of my peers don't know or care much about real-world development, but those of us who realize its importance seek out jobs, research, and internships to fill in the gaps.
Injury lawyer
Close attention must be paid to injury lawyer. Knowledge is like your favorite dessert, the more you devour the more you want it.
Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
To me the use of keywords on this page look borderline splog-ish. Sure a great way to get page views but how is the bounce rate when people legitimately looking up Thanksgiving land on your page?
Not speaking for gcb here, but every single LG product I've owned has been crap. In fact, my most common advice to family members who want to shop for electronics is, "Get whatever you like, just make sure it's not LG or Samsung".
we're actually doing something similar to this, but have been tracking a number of stocks as well as other things.

twitter + sentiment analysis = prediction market; but in most observable cases, we're seeing twitter lag behind the market, not actually predict it. oh well!
I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving.

Yes, whatever happened to that attempt?
I wonder how the rest of us mortals get firehose access. We could do some pretty cool stuff with it, and it'd negate the need to absolutely hammer the Search API (er.. not that we found workarounds that involve hammering the Search API.. oh no).
One key thing is that students get advanced from grade to grade /no matter what/, unless they drop out.

Once upon a time, schools weren't organized to segregate children into grades by age.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

A lot of scholars think it was crazy ever to start organizing schools that way.
I think the the results quality on Google has been the same or better over the last few months; one thing we have been looking at is helping less savvy users who might mistype a word or type extra words that they don't really need in their query. That can be a little more annoying for power users, but on the other hand the power users pick up tricks like "Use a '+' in front of a word to require Google to match that word."

Regarding the query [Linux asynchronous IO] returning older results, here's a tip. Above the search results click the "Show options" link to open up what we call "toolbelt" mode. From there, you can click to show only results from (say) the last year, or in a certain date range.

Toolbelt mode is really handy, e.g. if you search for a product, you can click "Show options" and then click the "Fewer shopping sites" link to get more reviews and manufacturer pages instead of comparison shopping sites.
Related: the Birds of a FETHR slide deck and audio.

http://brdfdr.com/pres/

A case for distributed microblogging, and a protocol to match.
I miss hoodwink.d.

That said, I am unaware of any uproar over this. Am I living a sheltered life?

This sounds more like what the Web is supposed to be like rather then anyone being evil.

xebidy, do you fear Greasemonkey as well?

I bet it takes less than 255 characters of JavaScript to thwart it if you don't want it on your site.
You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem.

You also don't have to disagree with Alfie Kohn about his ideas on "performance pay" to think that it makes sense in the New York City job market to pay a math teacher more than, say, a social studies teacher. To get a decent math teacher at all probably requires a salary sufficient to draw a math-knowledgeable person away from private-sector opportunities.
Where is the keyboard, I don't see how you would search for a book by title. The videos only showed browsing pictures of books.
Yes. I'm the XX. It just seems a different dynamic than you'd get between two guys or two women. (Obviously I've not directly experienced the former, but I've seen it from the outside enough - it's kind of the model.)

I'm a kind of bloke-ish girl, but even so I think I worry about feelings and opinions and perceptions a bit more - I bring that aspect of looking at situations to the startup. 'Course, my "job" is to code, whereas my cofounder is meant to be thinking about other people; it gets interesting.

There's also an entirely different dynamic: minority programmes. I took part in Astia, a women-in-business networking and training group. All the contacts from that equate the startup with me (the woman) and my cofounder's not being treated very well by them at all. (There are a few other reasons beyond gender there but it is something I doubt two-guy startups have to face!)
@PG If only our 'other ideas' is a response to a RFS, would you like us to check the 'this application is a response to a RFS'?
Directly related to this is the BRDFDR/FETHR distributed microblogging protocol.

For background and rationale, see the Birds of a FETHR talk slides & audio:

http://brdfdr.com/pres/
Markov?

The problem with filtering is that defining interesting is practically NP-complete.
How early in a startup should founders decide equity distributions?
I am involved in a startup with another guy. Right now, things are are pretty unofficial - we are just prototyping and getting something out there. Very very initial stages. But we both know that if our thing catches on, we are going to stick to it. At this stage, is it smart to bring up equity distributions among us? If not, when is the right time? Also, is it smart to have a 50-50, or a more unbalanced distribution?
Actually, this is one thing that I really love about Heroku. They will host apps for free. I put my http://2rgb.com there and am not paying a cent.

For a serious app, I'll have to start paying, but the prices seem worth it to me because they're saving me a lot of time. Maybe it's expensive compared to other hosts; that I don't know.
Remember OpenSocial? Google has been going after Facebook for quite a while.
Don't learn Rails. Learn Sinatra. You can pick up everything you need to know to build complex web apps in Ruby off three pages:

* http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro.html

* http://datamapper.org/getting-started.html

* http://datamapper.org/docs/create_and_destroy.html

I'm not saying Sinatra is better than Rails (although, for some problem spaces...). What I am saying is that once you've mastered Sinatra, which will take a day or two, everything in Rails will make 10x more sense. And, in particular, you'll avoid some major pitfalls that catch Rails newcomers, like relying on scaffolding and generators, or reaching for plugins for simple problems, or overdesigning your application.
A review-relevance filter was part of the engine I built for http://festbuzz.com - I can't really give you code but if I can be of help, hit me up.
This year has brought me to the belief that the forth estate is dead and has been replaced by pundits of all shapes and sizes.

You can argue where every news organization fits on the political spectrum (other than they all fit at one of the sides and the middle is an illusion), but I don't think there is any network or newspaper that just prints the facts of the case. Every network has their favorites and calls the other sides "little people" names (e.g. pinko, teabagger). All the networks throw out opinions and call them facts. Heck, making up crap doesn't even seem to phase anyone (e.g. false papers, trucks with explosives on the gas tanks).

Has any network gone through the current draft of the health car bill and told us what's on it? Has any network tried to get all the payouts the gov did as part of the bailout?
I definitely put extra weight on my friends' opinions, if only because I can interrogate them about what they've said.

If I want more information, I know how to directly contact them, and I also feel like I'm building context for the next time we interact. Since we're already connected, I think there is less of a barrier for them to reply to me.

Maybe this has to do with the size of my network (it's comparatively small) but I have a fairly rich shared history with the majority of people I'm connected to, so I can see how this feature will be really compelling.
What abstractions patterns would the average PHP developer missing out on? You can throw a rock in any direction and hit a PHP framework. Throw a second rock and you'll get one with an entirely different philosophy.

Yes, PHP is a simple language but in many ways that's a virtue not a curse. Jrockway is right about PHP's inconsistency but that doesn't exclude one from building solid software in the language.
Science Knowledge Quiz
I agree with that, for whatever it's worth.
That's a good point. However, I wonder if users might start feeling as if the bump is pointless and they just want to transfer the data right away, but get frustrated that they have to bump the phones and they aren't sure why.
I started sketching out a system very similar to this a while ago - I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of Twitter-using hackers have had the same thought, TBH. The problem is, as you've correctly identified, time!

As well as keyword filtering and friend bonus there are a ton of things you can pull into the mix. I was actually working on two ideas, one to tell you whether you should follow someone based on their twitter fingerprint and your preferences, and one to pull out interesting stuff from the stream. As I replied further down this thread, interesting is just damn hard.

Even trying to concretely identify what I found interesting such that it could be expressed as a grammar or decision tree or set of regexps or whatever... yeah, never really got round to it. I'd keep realising new properties of tweets that made them interesting to me.

It's a fascinating problem, though, and very closely related to the "Oh dear gods I have ten thousand unread RSS items" one - that I still haven't solved, nor seen an acceptable solution for! We're drilling down into sentiment right now, but that's not a solution in and of itself; it's an interesting filter though, in terms of only showing stuff with extreme sentiment or stuff that deviates from an individual's normal. It's almost a boringness anti-filter. Kinda works, but is in no fit state to release - again, due to time!
You may be "right" in theory, but it doesn't matter.

The vast majority of computer science students pursue a CS degree because it has become a prerequisite for being a professional software engineer. NOT because they have a desire to become a computer scientist.

The simple fact is that if you do not have a 4-year college degree you will find it immensely harder to work as a software engineer in the industry. It's silly to pretend otherwise.

The vast majority of today's CS programs do a disservice to all of their students. They are neither good engineering programs training students for industry (for which they currently serve as a proxy) nor good computer science programs. A recently minted graduate of a Chemistry or Physics program (from an accredited US 4-year college program) is, on average, much more versed in the relevant scientific findings and research techniques of their field than a CS graduate. They are so poor precisely because the vast majority of CS graduates do not go on to do CS research or utilize their CS knowledge but instead become software engineers.
Hey Tim, your blog post mentioned the [recency microsoft word misspelled] query. The way I normally check if a word is valid is just do a query for the word, e.g. [recency]. In the top right we show the phrase "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,910,000 for recency" and "recency" will be a hyperlink to a dictionary definition if we recognize that as a valid dictionary word. Looking at the number of results is a good signal too.

Your "Red Room" query is hard in a couple ways. First, it looks like that root page used to have the words on the page: "The Red Room
Doors open 6pm
$18 Pre-Booked" And it's also tough because it looks like the name changed to the "2nd Degree Bar & Grill" at some point. The fact that you can type [red room] and get a suggestion for [red room st. lucia] is actually pretty helpful in my book because it leads you to the answer that the name changed.
Let me also plug my site :) http://www.celebsutra.com It aggregates tweets and pictures from celebrities on twitter. Had submitted it to twitter and have implemented most of the changes people had suggested.
twitter is one of the new programming ecosystems that devs will chose to play in. like fb or aws or gae or iphone, etc. note nasdaq recently released an iphone app that utilizes stocktwits which in turn is built on twitter.
my personal reason for using vim is that i love the modal editing. You drop into edit mode, do a single edit, then hop back into command mode and flip around to whatever is next. This singular edit becomes most exciting when you need to undo or redo. Rather than wait for each little keystroke to undo, your edits become singular chunks. If you hop in and out of command mode with each edit in concert with how you think about the changes you are making, then undoing (something i do alot..) becomes streamlined.
(MyBook connect) Connecting Myspace to Facebook?
Paul Graham: Priority Access to Twitter Is Practical Necessity
Tweaking HTTP
Very interesting. I'm unclear about one thing though -- were the bandwidth caps per account, or per user/session + account?

If it's the latter, did you consider distributing the crawlers to other users? Some sort of system where people with spare bw/clock cycles can do your work for you and free up your bw/clock cycles to receive and parse the data? Would writing something like that up have taken more time than it would have saved?

Regardless, congratulations on your accomplishment. It really is impressive.
My experiences with Puppet and Chef
"in the middle of the country it just isn't so" ?

That point of view seems rather US-centric. (Apologies if I've misinterpreted what you meant.) My point was in relation to different countries, higher gun ownership correlates with higher death by gun. I was not comparing different geographic areas within the US. It's obviously a complicated question with many influencing factors, but ignoring the availability of guns does seem to fly in the face of the evidence.

Given that the US has high homicide rates, compared to other countries, then if high availability of guns in the US is not a contributing factor, then what would you saw were the relevant factors?

"suicide bombers seem to get a pretty high body count without using a gun" ?

Absolutely. Suicide bombers can probably achieve a higher murder rate than people with guns, much as people with guns can achieve a higher murder rate than people with knives, and people with knives can achieve a higher murder rate than people with clubs.

High availability of suicide bombers in a society is likely to lead to a higher homicide rate than in a society where suicide bombers are not so prevalent. High availability of guns in a society is likely to lead to a higher homicide rate than in a society where guns are not so prevalent.

So, given the discussion is about the availability of guns, I'm not sure of your point here.
So if you believe this, then why do you advocate for policies that will further regiment and ossify the school system we have? Shouldn't you want to give teachers more freedom with their curricula?
Google Voice Can Now Take Control Of Your Mobile Voicemail
I really like the Ruby community's willingness to embrace new platforms and evolve. (sorry, that sentence has way to many buzzwords).

The rubyforge guys need to be congratulated for willing to give up their role as the official gem hosters and not let their egos get in the way of progress that benefits the whole community.
Hopefully this moves the development of ATD along. I wasn't particularly impressed with it's results. They weren't that much better than the spell/grammar check in Windows Live Writer.

Still has some ways to go.
Caching time series
Per account, the same user session would be able to see other accounts.
Agile Web Development with Rails, 3th Edition served me well. Still going through the advanced sections, I think it covers most aspects. I have no experience with the book you mentioned so I don't know if they are similar.

http://amzn.com/1934356166
The Mint.com Story by the 3rd person at Mint
Yes. You are right. Should be a mistake while pasting the title of the article.
Having worked with the stream; yes, not trivial, but also not very hard. Just ask @blaine.
This is going to be a fantastic tool for searching about incredibly mundane stuff I don't really care about primarily from people I friended only because I felt awkward declining their request. The possibilities are endless.
It's one thing for bloggers and commentators to say that the industry should move to more open digital formats, but I find it impressive that a group that mostly sells books, literature and movies is now releasing them all on bittorrent as well. http://blog.mises.org/archives/010346.asp

Anyone else have any other good examples of this? I could always use more ebooks.
The author seems to be trying to pass off "programmers are lazy" as his own, unless he's really unaware of that meme. But I could write these "insightful" little counterfactuals all day:

Good classical composers are tone-deaf and forgetful, because they use dissonance and repeat things with variation.

Good marathon runners are slow.

Good comic artists draw poorly.

Etc etc.
Calling my CS department 'trapped in the 1980s' is an insult to the 1980s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL - Appeared in: 1966

Having said that, I enjoyed studying theoretical CS at a hardcore-theoretical institution far, far more than I would have had I studied software engineering and learnt how to use test suites and agile and so on. I learnt version control from coding while studying, especially from OSS. I studied usability and had hands-on experience during an internship. I led a project team. My final year project was certainly more than 20 lines long. And yet I also did stuff like ML and BCPL and algorithmic design and complexity and crazy fun stuff like red-black trees and O-notation and quicksort and formal logic and markov chains and SVMs and Bayesian classification and god knows what else it was 2003. If I'd done the software engineering approach, my answer to 'how to implement quicksort' would be 'google', and I'd long since have abandoned 'Subversion 101' for something that actually hurt my brain.
Berlin wall tribute twitter site used to protest great firewall of china
Nobel peace prizes. I used to see them as the ultimate award that could be earned and the ultimate award which humanity could bestow on an individual. Now I see them as a powerful and influential political tool.

I think many people came to that conclusion many years ago ... I am a bit slow on the uptake.