skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The disks that would fail to high temperature early on might have already been weeded out by manufacturer testing. We need to know what sort of quality testing the manufacturers do before making conclusions. Studies on the reliability of computer equipment need to take into account that there is a selection bias going on: equipment on shelves all passed a battery of tests.
The comment is added information; nothing more, nothing less.
The article suggests that women are turned off by the perception of low status to a greater extent than men.

Regarding middle status jobs, there are plenty of formerly male-dominated middle status jobs which women have successfully broken into, e.g. advertising (c.f. Mad Men).

Any explanation of why women do not enter math/phys/CS must come up with something that distinguishes math/phys/CS from those other fields. Being a "middle status job" doesn't do it, nor does initial unfriendliness. I'd suggest that one possible explanation is that "geeky" pursuits are actually lower status than most comparable office jobs, and more women than men are turned off by low status.
Does anyone know if this can be used between consumers (like paypal) or if it is vender-to-consumer only?
There are regulatory barriers and I'm sure the audio coupler technology they're using is patent-pending.
Reader grabs card data, modulates it, the mic-in audio port hears it, software analyzes it, merchant service processes it, then you tweet it.
Anyone have experience with Flot?
Sorry, but I'm not impressed. It's a credit card reader and an iPhone app. Yeah, nice and tiny and all, but there's absolutely nothing new or revolutionary here.

The buying experience is not going to change for the better until we can do this stuff with a quick swipe (for lack of a better word, since magstrips are definitly NOT the way to do this) and a thumbprint for a signature, with cryptographically signed receipts automatically emailed to your pre-registered address, or posted to an account on a website where you can retrieve them later, or auto-import them into your accounting software.

Blip. Press. Done. THAT will be impressive.
Patapage beta is OUT
RightJS - A New Javascript Framework
There are tons of good non flash ones. Someone mentioned Protovis, which is neat, but last I check it wasn't supported in IE. There is also Flot (jquery) and Flotr (prototype), and a handful of others.

I use a modified version of Flotr, and it works great.
Please, forgive me the off-topic (and pedantic) remark, but the extra apostrophe in "What other's are saying", on the site's front page, bothers my grammatical OCD.
Also, I remember interviewing with an early Bubble2.0 startup, and spouting tons of Design Pattern rhetoric to a Smalltalk guru. Also I tried to make small talk about wife and kids, when in retrospect, it should have been obvious that in SF, that isn't always the way people are wired.
Your mom can't jump!
Adding a 2FA scheme will make it as simple and easy as displaying a QR Code to the buyer that will redirect them to PayPal.
Innovative! Door to Door newspaper selling, Collections. Food Carts, Local Car Service, Donations. Anyone can take a payment for a service in real time. The transaction fees, security perception and ease of signup will determine it's adoption. The hardware cost can be reimburse to the client from the transaction fees.
I guess we'll just have to disagree; I saw no indications of status in the article. All I saw were perceptions of the environment.
because it's impossible to address.

You are doing everything on another person's gadget. Any verification Square can come up with, can be bypassed by simply not implementing it.

Verified icon? Easy JPG

Encoded credit card #s? Who said the fraudsters would need to use your tool?

Square Verified badge? Easily copied.

It basically boils down to trust issue, early on, consumers will just be unaware of how vulnerable they are, but then stories will start popping up all over the place about how so and so, paid with a credit card for a taxi ride using Square, and then got hit with $5K in credit card fraud.
When it comes down to it for rails deployment your going to maximize the number of workers you have based on the amount of available memory. I'd like to see a test where they set the number of workers equal to the amount that fit within 512MB's of ram or something similar. I'd say using passenger + ree you'd be able to double or triple the number of workers for the same amount of memory and blow the rest of the stacks out of the water.
Google To Let News Groups Set Reader Limits
I didn't mean it as an attack, after all there is no accounting for taste.

Unless you like XKCD, in which case you are a bad person and you should feel bad.
37s Podcast: Making people pay
Earth is big, so all of that flux is pretty spread out. I wouldn't want to be close to a small portable magnet able to generate that size of magnetic field.

But hey, we're talking about highly hypothetical situations, so I'm sure we could make it work.
why would someone involved in credit card fraud care about regulatory barriers and patents? These will be the same people who sneak into ATMs, and modify the readers.

This will basically just eliminate all the risk.
Analysis is not evidence. Yes, it sounds reasonable. But that doesn't mean it's true. There are many factors your simple model doesn't take into account.
Funny, but there's something serious lurking in this comment.

Think about how US dollars declare, on the face of the bill, that the currency is good for all sorts of transactions (all debts, public and private). Even a beggar can get in on the use of this currency. People can easily give to a beggar with almost no overhead, and the recipient can spend the currency almost anywhere.

Credit isn't anywhere near that yet, especially since transaction fees are non-trivial. However, there's been a pretty major barrier to receiving credit payments, and even if someone was willing to pay the fees, there hasn't been a good way to interface with it.

Let's say I pay for two coffees with credit, and a friend wants to pay me with credit for one of the coffees. Even if I were willing to pay the transaction fee, I couldn't take their credit card, easily. PayPal is close to that point, but square is closer.

Settling trivial, private debts with credit will be just as good as any currency that works for all debts, public and private.
FF doesn't seem to cache it for me (I'm running 3.5.5), as I saw it more than once.

Agreed that you definitely want to be careful about acting on any psychological theories up front. Observation of real users is the ticket.
Ah sorry, that's what I meant to type too. But I'm still interested to know what you thought of the room.
Iwata: "So you wanted to know what it was that made players insert another 100 yen coin once the game was over and have another go?"

Miyamoto: "And basically, I concluded that this was born of the players being mad at themselves. So I would try to analyze how the game made players feel that way."
The parent said "I've seen in happen, and it sickens me," implying that he wasn't referring to a famous event that happened more than 20 years ago, but rather something that occurred in medicine today, even after this generation of software engineers had all been told the story of the Therac in their first year of school. That makes this much more interesting.
not sure what planet you're from, but it sounds really nice. can I come?
Actually forsee, and don't particularly wish it was so.

It's like when cars got seatbelts. First they were a good idea, then they were the law.

It takes 20 years to completely turn over the most culturally productive sector of society. Children will grow up in the world described by maxklein - and I guarantee they will ask why cows and pigs are still dying. (There will be an element of spite-the-rich hiding under the high moral tone.)

Twenty years after that, "abbatoir" will be a word that lives in history books - and in horrific news stories of police raids on black-market Mafia farms.
Good technology but it's mainly for businesses.

I'm still waiting for the ability to pay with your cellphone to any merchant. This is happening in Japan and Korea right now among others.

Maybe an IPhone or Android will have an RFID chip in the future.

Or maybe there will be a mobile app that displays a QR code that a merchant can scan and grab your credit card information.
Hand-cranked penny-dispenser allows anyone to work for minimum wage
If you haven't read the PayPal story, you probably should. A good version of it is to be found in Founders at Work, as told by Max Levchin (the nerd who mostly solved fraud for PayPal). Turns out the early story of PayPal is the story of solving the fraud problem...so it is extremely relevant to this discussion. PayPal also started as a company doing security and payments on portable devices, so it's doubly relevant.

As far fraudulent devices, I think it's pretty safe to assume that people aren't going to be swiping their cards with random people; rather merchants and vendors that they already have a reasonable level of trust with, but in situations where sales would have been limited to cash only or more complicated and PO-based (trade shows, live events, sales guys in the field, etc.). It won't stop the kinds of fraud that already happens; like your waiter at a restaurant keeping lists of card numbers for sale on the black market. And, I guess it would make that kind of fraud easier, since the attacker would have more information.

But, people are, I think, pretty cagey with handing random people their credit card outside of the context of a reasonably trustworthy business. I doubt this will change that. I'm about the hit the road doing sales work for my company, and I can see this coming in very handy, and I don't think my potential customers would have any reason to be concerned about fraud (since they can easily check up on us, and know that I am who I say I am).
It's perfectly acceptable for me to see fewer women or men or people of a particular socioeconomic or religious background in one field or another. That alone doesn't bother me, except insofar as it can be a signal to another problem.

One thing that does concern me greatly is that there are many women who are interested in science and technology, and especially computer science, who are at some point turned off. It appears to really begin around junior high and high school, and it continues through college.

My concern is that we're losing a lot of interested and bright minds, who might be excited in the course of actually working in technology, who are being turned away for some reason.

I think it's important to try to understand the reasons before we pass judgment upon them.

But it might raise some questions and inspire some solutions that generally makes work in technology more enjoyable. Not just for women; for everyone. Consider the reaction to pair programming. Both women and men just plain tended to like it more. That seems to show that there are many people out there who would enjoy working in technology were it not as solitary. That's a major discovery. And I think we've just scratched the surface.
Really? It isn't pollution that is the supposed cause of man-made Global Warming?

I agree that pollution is a very general term that encompasses things which don't 'contribute' to Global Warming but saying that Pollution and Global Warming are different issues is misleading.

You may have different definitions for Global Warming vs. Climate Change but I have heard them used interchangeably, if there is a difference I'd like to know what it is.
SIMILE's Timeplot (http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/) is great but more specialized. Great for browsing huge datasets.
Hacked together an on_method callback last night for the Python bindings I'm writing:

http://github.com/davisp/http-parser/commit/50e54f95fd4c2eac...
Yeah, I use it for plotting follower data for CustomerFind. The chart on the homepage (http://www.customerfind.com) is a screenshot of part of a user's controlpanel, and was rendered using flot. It was very easy to get flot set up, it plays nicely with the rest of my js, including jQuery. Flot is fast.

P.S. CustomerFind v2 is no longer focusing on AutoFollow, though the copy on the homepage reflects otherwise [http://customerfind.posterous.com/do-you-sell-a-product-or-s...]
Questions to Ask Yourself When Evaluating a Business Opportunity
That's an interesting thought, but it's still a strange trend
What Does it Mean to "Buy" an E-Book?
Well that's going to happen no matter what. It seems to be a lot of wasted and duplicate effort to base it on a soon-to-be-obsolete incarnation of the language. Build it piece by piece, starting with things that are definitely settled, then update as needed.
I'll have to look more into this library. I'm glad to see it uses SVG and VML (edit: oops - plus Canvas). That seems like the right fit for this problem, since SVG and VML have pretty close models and that way you can have native vector graphics in all browsers.

Edit 2: I have a question. Are the charts on the Demo page drawing so slowly because of someone's clever idea of an animation? Or does the library actually draw that slowly?
No registration link

http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:www.nytimes.com%2...
With private debts, I believe credit card companies will treat that as a cash advance so the transaction fees will be pretty high. Maybe you can use bank accounts for that but the transfer will probably not be instantaneous.
A cursory look suggests that Protovis doesn't work in IE. Is that correct?
If I remember correctly, "Unwavering belief and fanaticism" also seem to be near the crux of the argument by the folks equating the global warming crisis as being another form of religion.

http://www.independentweekly.com.au/news/local/news/general/...

http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/opinion-global-warming...
Perhaps, but why would a person give money to someone begging with an iPhone?
I've explore a bunch of JS libraries in the past - here are some thoughts:

Flot and Flotr are definitely past favorites, and its usage has felt the most natural

PlotKit (http://www.liquidx.net/plotkit/) - MochiKit-based, visually nice but not as well documented or, apparently, nearly as extensive as some of the other options

RGraph - an HTML5 canvas library, but pretty basic and definitely easy the least visually appealing

Highcharts definitely looks like it has the nicest animations of any of the previous ones, and also definitely has the best documentation / demo gallery. Thumbs up - definitely coming this way the next time I need a nice graphing library!
Whereas the continued trumped up 'debate' over AGW demonstrates that our society is full of wealthy old men quite willing to sacrifice the distant future for their own profit today. There is no scientific debate here, only the appearance of one. And in the end, that's all those corrupt old men need.
It works fine on the latest WebKit nightly on 10.5.
Ugh, sorry, that totally passed me. It's fixed and will be up on our next deploy. And I totally support your pedantic off-topic remark, so no worries :)
The overall lesson to learn from the article is "Both men and women decide if they belong in an environment based off cues from the environment itself."

That seems clear enough, but I started to think about how the lessons learned here might be applied elsewhere. Namely, how could this lesson be applied to help us, my fellow geek friends, out with the ladies?

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you want women to feel comfortable around you and in your surrounding (ie home or office), then you have to provide some cues to make them feel like they belong - barring that, at least remove the cues that make them feel like they definitely don't.

I'm not saying redecorate your apartment with pink unicorns everywhere, but maybe just start off small:

- Replace the 1-foot-tall Yoda replica with a potted plant

- Replace the wall of empty Mountain Dew cans with a bottle of water on your desk

Like I said, just simple things to make any potential women that might see your environment avoid the feeling that they "simply don't belong here."

I know the article isn't really about how to improve your odds with the ladies, but I see no reasons not to apply the lessons they are learning with actual research to other areas of our lives - especially one that our demographic has historically had difficulty with.

For once we are getting info on how to make women feel more comfortable that is backed by actual research as opposed to mere speculation and guesswork. Why wouldn't we try to make use of that information in as many ways as possible?
Objective-C Tuesdays: goto
Fingerprinting RFID Chips
Bullet graphs and sparklines as default chart options please? After Tufte and Few, I basically look for these first when evaluating any chart library.
Ditto. I hadn't heard anyone specifically endorse this before, but it's what circumstance gave me with my startup. It's a good way to do a 2-person startup with no danger at all of a power deadlock.
An introduction to building Web Services (2005, pdf)
At a higher level, even the specialist journals are still essentially performing an aggregator function. The most well-researched, insightful reporting is still just a recapitulation of something else, some a set of facts or opinions that exists independently of the reporting. Journalists do not create content in the same way as authors, musicians, software developers, etc. They go out, gather information of interest to their audience, filter it, repackage it, and distribute it to their readers.

Traditional journalism is effectively information retail. The internet threatens it not by making content free - there is no copyright on reality; the content is already free - but by connecting audiences directly to primary sources. The main advantage that journalism still maintains - a critical and thorough filtering function - is now being challenged by new infrastructure developments, social networking platforms, Twitter, increasing maturity of the blogosphere, etc. These factors diminish news reporting as a packaged product, and return it to the context of an open conversation.

What I think Murdoch and Hinton are really attacking is not news content being made available for free, but the internet revealing that news isn't actually "content" at all. Their business model isn't undergoing a paradigm shift; it's simply going away. Apart from shifting their operations to an entirely different industry, fighting this battle is the only option they have.
2 years ago I built chartwidget . http://demo.chartidget.com

I haven't quite kept up with javascript charting recently. I was aiming to build a google finance/yahoo finance competitor. The thing that always surprised me about google finance/yahoo finance charts was that they didn't take advantage of data already in the browser. When their flash charts would try to plot a moving average, they would make another request back to the server for more data, Why? The browser already has enough data to derive the moving average.
90% of NFL Wide Receivers are Black. Does that mean the NFL is racist? Or that black people's genetic heritage skews their speed&strength bell curve slightly to the right so that the top hundredth of a percent is slightly above white's top hundredth of a percent?

Or that young white men, compared with young black men, are much less likely to see professional sports as their ticket to an upper-class lifestyle, and therefore the folks who focus their efforts on becoming a better football player are predominantly black?

(Note that in the first few decades of the 20th century, when antisemitism was much more prominent, professional boxing was a predominantly Jewish sport.)
Is it cheaper than getting a terminal? The idea behind this is you already have a cell phone. Why by an additional device to do this, which worse yet has a bad interface and can't be upgraded.
Sure, there are probably better keyboards. I was just saying that "keyboard only" people might buy the Droid and thereby be forced to learn that onscreen keyboards are not that bad after all.
No, it should be other way, merchant displays QR code with merchant's identity, payment amount, transaction ID and you authorize the transaction.
DARPA Launches Network Challenge Competition
I avoided the first edition too. Dave Thomas' blog post about the new edition is what got me to read it.

I've yet to read Land the Tech Job You Love. I know I should, I just sort of have the tech job I love :-) At any rate, they're both supposed to be very complimentary.
I'm quite interested in getting into the business of switching local small businesses from proprietary PBX systems to open VoIP hardware. Anyone got some tips for getting into the field? I'm a competent programmer and system admin but my but I have little knowledge of telephony.

BTW, my impression of Asterisk vs Freeswitch matches the article. Asterisk is pretty ugly in terms of implementation and configuration. However, at this point Asterisk has much more (still small) traction in the marketplace.
Perhaps the culture around this is changing in the US, but I take financial privacy -very- seriously. The kickbacks an investor gets from an investment should be implicitly private.
NVIDIA- Past, Present & Future: An Interview with Jen Hsun Huang
It felt like it cut off at the end, am I missing something? Quite enjoyable read, it'd be fun to see Knuth play the organ, he should sell tickets!
Its not just about the money. Its about increased quality of healthcare.

I think one of the important things to note is that the true benefits of healthcare reform are going to come with IT in the form of payment/reimbursement reform legislation and a restructuring of Health Insurance. As this article also notes, greater public benefit of IT comes from the data exchange pieces which are being put in place, big news this week with Kaiser sharing data with the VHA, I expect this to be a trend that snowballs more information into the NHIN.

Other pieces of Healthcare IT that will benefit outcomes and burden on the system that this article doesn’t mention is Telemedicine for greater collaboration around providers, that is a sample among other emerging technologies that it will take government funding to really skyrocket.

Taking a massive IT project inside the four walls of a Hospital can be tricky since you have to account for some soft metrics like time saved, reduced LOS’s, and other non direct financial rewards. The other piece that does not have widespread adoption is the analytics piece, mining the data and being able to use for process and efficiency improvement is HUGE, doubt that was taken into account either.
One issue I see with this is having to sign with your finger. Sliding my finger around doesn't have the same dynamics as using a pen or stylus.
man, i really hope they borrow a binary api that is already out there. bson, thrift, pb, avro... whatever. just stop reinventing the wheel already.
Yeah, I think the point of his comment was that "deployment" in the title is misleading.
Nice, but pretty slow to render for me (on FF3.5). Actually it's more that it pauses at about one quarter rendered and looks broken for a second before it finally renders.
There aren't very many women in CS because there aren't very many women in CS.

It's a "social norm" issue. How many girls deciding on college can look to a woman in the field? How many of their friends are going on to major in CS? Or will even tell them that it's a good idea?

It's similar to another question: Why aren't there more African-American backpackers? The number I see tossed around a lot is that only 4% of backpackers are African-American.
I used jQplot on a whim project a while ago and greatly enjoyed using it as well.
So, in case we are indeed changing it. Are we changing it for the better? At least where I live, the weather seems to be better now than 5 or 6 years ago.