skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't upgrade my iPhone from 3.0.x to 3.1.x for months because I wanted to keep tethering through the unofficial carrier hole as my carrier then didn't support tethering. I ended up paying for the SIM unlock and porting my number away from that carrier.
Front End developer and graphic designer (xHTML/CSS/Design)
HTML5 makes me cry inside, part of me died when HTML5 gained browser support. To me, HTML5 is all about GIT'R'DONE; it's an evolution, an odd growth on the body of HTML4, rather than setting a newer, better foundation. :(
Comcast.net: News, Sports, Video, TV listings, Email and more
I don't agree when it comes to a movie review as I'd be more likely to consult the blog of an "amateur" who has similar tastes to my own.

W.R.T. hard core investigative journalism, I think the traditional pubs still win. The Cleveland Plain Dealer just spent the past year or so investigating Cuyahoga County (within which lies Cleveland) government corruption. As a somewhat direct result, a ballot initiative passed to significantly change the form of county government. I bet the paper invested well over $1M in reporting. Did it pay off? No clue, but I sure hope so.
not to mention <audio> being awful in mobile safari.
Right now a CSS file for one site won't work for another. With HTML5, sometimes it will. I find that a little exciting. Imagine portable themes.
This is the exact opposite of how I see HTML5.
I do not mean to be condescending to those who are not-in-the-west. I do mean to sound frustrated about them being forced to stay in a no-win situation where they are at the mercy of the bureaucracy.

What I meant is : it's a smart move to realize that it's a dead end and go West if one seeks to broaden one's opportunities, chances to do some good work and realize one's potential, that's all.
It says $289.95 on the left side of the home page. You have 10 days to tell them (call) that you want to return it. You have 30 days to send it.
The man who smuggled himself into Auschwitz
It was more or less invented by Xerox, but they never brought it to market. Why not? Xerox was a multi-billion-dollar company and didn't want to "waste time" on a product that at the time had a very small potential market.

That's how Alan Kay sums up the history, anyways. There's a much more complete account in Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...
It says $389.95 on that page you gave the link to.

I don't think there is checkout fraud. You checkout and you are provided enough information to know that you are purchasing a trial, you will be charged some fee (what it is is hard to determine) if you don't cancel. I think that information is provided clearly.

However if they turn out not to honor cancellation requests, that's a whole other story.
There are some very interesting examples of this given in the book "The Logic of Failure" by Dietrich Doerner.
Aaron Swartz: How I Hire Programmers
> The US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation.

You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was missing some very subtle point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I think I just figured it out:

Myself, American citizen, I've gotten, I don't know, maybe 1/10th of my knowledge and education from U.S. government related things? Something like that? Maybe I'm being charitable here, I've learned a heck of a lot more from books, primary and secondary research, my own experiences, and acquaintances with expert domain knowledge than I ever learned in school. I dropped out of two high schools, and I would've left the education system earlier if I was a little more self assured and independent when I was younger.

So maybe 1/10th of my education has come from the U.S. government, maybe. How much of my defense against foreign warfare has? 90%? 99%? The rest being my utterly trivial-in-comparison training in martial arts, marksmanship, and other survival and combat skills? I guess you could count the time time I've traveled as under the protection of the English government, or French government, or whatever else.

But the basic point is - various government-run military has provided almost all of my defense against foreign warfare, and very little of my education. If you cut military spending by 7/8ths without implementing mandatory service, conscription, or a draft, we'd be a hell of a lot less safe. Multiplying educational spending in the current American public education system by 8 times wouldn't make us a lot more educated.
"By contrast, a small typed pattern calculus is able to support all the main programming styles, including functional, imperative, object-oriented and query-based styles..."

I recall Stephen Wolfram advocating this with Mma nearly 20 years ago.
When I first started thinking about it and studying it, I found it downright exciting. So much potential. But as with most thing the devil is in the details. And we just don't have enough details yet. So much could change between now and when it actually gets implemented that it may turn out to be a big disappointment.
How does that affect you? Your HTML markup will work in HTML5, too. In any case, I keep reading no one will use it for years yet most of the leading developers and designers I know are using it today. And I'm joining them since all my markup is now HTML5 as of six months ago.
That map is really interesting!

Reminds me of the map in Edward Tufte's classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In the 1800s a doctor, John Snow, mapped out where all the deaths were happening in London from an epidemic. All of them centered around one well in the city and it's contaminated water turned out to be the source of the problem.

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/images/snowmap_1854-lar...
You could see he was thinking "I'll be damned if I'm going to unpack all that and pack it back up". So he didn't, and just waved me along.

You are lucky :-) If you do get your hand luggage checked like that, they aren't the ones packing it back up; you are. I discovered this the hard way when rushing to make a 2 hour transfer at Atlanta and I only barely made it..
Also, buying a humidifier might help:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090209205148.ht...
looks like nobody got the real answer, so i'll have to do it.

this question has been asked several times over the past couple of months. one of those times, pg piped up and said that he was experimenting with an algorithm that decides which votes count and which don't. he didn't elaborate, but it sounds like you've probably run afoul of that algorithm.
That's interesting. Can you fill out your profile with sites you've worked on?
I worked a tech support job on campus, which eventually paid enough that I nearly dropped out of school. Many of my coworkers did.

I did put out three pieces of shareware, but never saw a dime from them.

The biggest move I saw were my Pakistani roommates. They and all their friends brought back one duty-free "prayer" rug every time they went home. They could make about $2,000 on each rug.

I did know one student who used a cash-back credit card to pay other student's tuitions. He'd split the cash-back with you, but his real benefit was bumping up his credit rating.
Ironically, the solution of sharing an article through a Dropbox linked text file has created the problem of no text-wrapping, and low readability.
Programmer - No
The idea that we are stuck with javascript instead of a VM is sad.
I host a similar competition at my university. We offer client binding for C++, Java, and Python. We have a C core that provides the game engine, and use code generation to generate the language specific APIs.
Govt departments expect people to work as per rules - the same is true even in the West -an individual coming in cannot just do things his or her way. That will not be accepetable even in USA or Canada.So Shiva Ayyadurai cannot flash his MIT degrees and attempt to take over the functioning of the CSIR.

He has to get in, learn the system, get established and find out how to make himself useful - only then he can expect to do "earth-shaking" things.

All this Indian inefficiency and Western efficiency rot is a bit overcooked
Curious about the downvote here - is my reasoning off? I'll elaborate on my position a little bit -

It seems to me like top-down centralized education has historically done a somewhat poor job of teaching, and extra top-down education funding probably wouldn't make us more educated. Whereas top-down military seems to be the best way to defend against aggressive foreign powers.

Considering that there's always been aggressive military powers in known history - the Khanate Mongols, Alexander's Greeks, Shaka's Africa, Imperial Japan, Fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, the Khmer Rouge, North Korea today, etc, etc - defense against these types of places becomes an unfortunate necessity. And it seems like top-down, state-run military/defense works better than individual militias, individual defense and military, or whatever the alternative solution should be.

I think governments have done a relatively poor job as educators and education typically works well in an individual, decentralized way. Military? I don't think you want that as decentralized, but maybe you do. So when you see that the U.S. government has a much larger defense than education budget, that's because there's lots of quality private education happening, but not so much quality private defense happening. Agree? Disagree?
Point 4 of your summary is not entirely unbiased -- it's still not clear whether the emails show that numbers are truly being fudged or that truly critical data has been deleted on purpose. Because the meaning of the emails is unclear, it is what's being debated in all of these articles. Do the mails indeed show manipulation, lying and a consensus that "something is very wrong"? That's not a closed question.
> Human bodies are poorly built to leave the Earth.

Indeed this is a very limiting factor. Space is a very hostile place.

If we travel just 20 miles into the sky, without technology, our blood will boil and there is no chance for survival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdSeDqU3EY
The guardian link seems very weak in content - trying to get a paper published is not fraud.

It might as well be. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to point out that the consequences of basing political and economic decisions on the content of those papers will run into the trillions of dollars.

If there were ever a field in which it's important to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, climatology is it.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer!

You've mentioned several mechanisms: acidity, drought, insects, and presumably more. This raises two comparative questions in my mind.

First, changes in acidity, droughts, and insect infestations are certainly not events that are unique to the post-1960s environment. Do local temperature data from tree rings from prior time periods also show discontinuities during known periods of drought or insect infestation?

Second, there have been large-scale changes to the environment in the past, some for a short period (the "year without a summer") some for a longer period (the "little ice age"). Do tree rings correlate with known large-scale temperature changes, or do they show discontinuities of the type we are witnessing in the post-1960 era?

Look. Scientists aren't exactly stupid people. When they spend a lifetime studying something, you should assume that they've asked the obvious questions and try to find out the answers they have found rather than assuming that they are stupid and you're the first to notice the glaring issues.

I agree, but as a PhD student, I've found that highlighting errors in methodology, even in peer reviewed articles, is actually pretty easy. You sound like you're familiar with research methodology, so you should know just as well as I do. When taking classes on methodology, one of the principal methods of learning is critiquing the research designs, assumptions, questions, data sets, etc. of other scientists who have been published. It's not hard to find methodological errors, or at least questionable assumptions and questionable glosses over complex issues, when reviewing even the published work of others.

Unfortunately climate scientists are also humans who are under constant assault from people who can't and won't be bothered to actually learn the record.

Because climate interaction is non-linear and operating on a macro- and long-term scale, it will obviously have a hard time standing up to Popperian standards of falsifiability, and the public is going to have a harder time gaining confidence in climate science's conclusions. Just because climate scientists are under assault from wingnuts who see them as a nefarious player in the Culture Wars doesn't mean that they are excused from answering questions about their methods, assumptions, and data.
The piece is clearly labeled as opinion and analysis. Opinion, analysis, and advocacy is part of many actual scientific journals, as it is of science itself. Go browse Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA for starters.

Now, why don't you enlighten us with exactly what you find wrong with the opinion or analysis in this piece, and provide a little more signal yourself. Science is cited in the opinion piece. Do you have an argument with the science cited? Or with the opinion?
> > The US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation.

> You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was missing some point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I think I just figured it out:

There's the small problem that the bulk of US education spending is by state and local govts, not the federal govt.

The feds may dominate college spending, emphasis 'may'.
I consider that part of the argument that emails can be taken out of context

Like I said, it was the best I could come up with. Prima facie, something is wrong somewhere.
Government Data and the Invisible Hand
"So far, 309 people have died across Canada"

...

"it is reminiscent of 1918, when upward of 50 million worldwide died"

SHRUG
The Dreamlifter: Boeing's mega plane
That about sums it up.

Following that rule is also how you can stay in compliance with labor laws (at least in the U.S.).
Based on Apple's behavior during the review process (very strong control over the use of their trademark iPhone/iPod image), I'd be shocked if they don't hit this with a c&d. I am involved with two apps that were both hit with rejections due to images that looked vaguely like iPhones.

Although maybe they just enforce TM during the app review process and don't actually care about it in the real world.
Actually looks sort of compliant. Although it seems like a toy implementation of scheme.
I feel like I see a new brand of these types of sketch books (be it an iPhone pattern or a browser pattern) every day.
> it says $389.95 on that page you gave the link to.

I'm still seeing $189.95. Screencap: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1704650/prof.png

Let's poll. If you're reading this, visit https://www.videoprofessor.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=shopping... then report the price you see listed on that page over here: http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=10e098&t=10e099.
Ask HN: Good free eBook recommendations for travel?
I'm heading on a long overseas vacation (14 hr flight) with my new netbook (and a promised 8 hr. battery life). Any recommendations for free eBooks for the trip?

Also good RSS feeds that I could put into Google Reader (in offline mode) would be appreciated.

Software development / startup related topics a plus.
Wow, this sure got bumped way off of the front page quickly ;-)

Thanks for voting and commenting, this has given me a really good idea of what direction I should go in when I revamp my application's authentication.
I enjoy Steve Blank's writings as much as the next guy, but will not take them as gospel. If you are going to quote the peak market cap during the bubble years you should at least note that it was mostly downhill from there, eventually being acquired for 330 million. As a CRM guy he obviously has a very strong opinion of managing your customers, but his own company could have been better-served in the long run by a stronger focus on the product development process than on the customer development process...
Inspired no doubt by Joel Spolsky's famous (in some circles, anyway) article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...

Their objectives are basically the same. The difference is in the ways of proving the "getting things done" part.

I never assumed the programming questions in an interview were really about getting the right answer in ten minutes or however long you spend on it, but more about giving the interviewee an opportunity to explain their thought process and problem solving approach to the interviewer. I don't agree that asking interviewees to solve programming problems in an interview is useless, but obviously looking at code samples from other work is great, too.
Great advice - I like the fact that Aaron keeps it real simple. I also like how he doesn't like questions along the lines of "counting the number of piano tuners in Chicago". I've been witness to interviews with similar questions and I'm always left wondering as to what the point was.

That said, I'm not sure if all of his advice can be followed by a reasonably medium sized company/organization where hiring decisions are made by a committee, rather than one person.

As a side note, I think that reading a resume can actually be a good starting point to understand the candidate's background.
Something else to consider ...

There are a lot of developers that "get stuff done" without accomplishing anything of use to the company.
I like how the author says
" I certainly don't mean for this to be useful or anything! grin Still, I hope that someone gets a kick out of it."

:)
Probably. On one hand, People Still Use IE6. And the people who still use IE6 aren't people who install things like Google Chrome Frame, or the latest updates from Microsoft (obviously). So for the time being, more features, along with cleaner syntax and the rest, means more work for web developers who want to use those features and whose audiences aren't particularly ahead of the curve.

On the other hand, those developers whose audiences are ahead of the curve, or who don't mind the blasphemous "Please update your browser. Here are some good ones:" link, will push the industry forward until the number of people still using IE6, or FF1.5, or Mosaic or whatever, approaches zero. It will happen because people will get annoyed, or viruses, or new computers running new operating systems and browsers. In that way html5 is the best thing that could happen to the web. A backwards-incompatible version will (hopefully) throw the few stragglers, who spend money on the web but still don't need css2, into the 21st century.

My grandmother was, until very recently, using MacOS 9 with IE4. She did not care that her homepage (apple.com, as it had been since she bought the computer) was impossible to read. People still using IE6 and even IE7 in five years will not be the kind of person who spends a lot of time or money online.
I think that's mostly their manager's fault.
The best "interview" I've ever had consisted of me spending an entire day hanging out with the team. We essentially pretended that that it was my first day working there. They asked me to keep coming back.

Even if they hadn't hired me I would have been happy to do it. It was enjoyable and I learned a lot of interesting stuff. I know some people would say it's unfair to ask this, but I really wish it would become the industry standard method.
Block Google and consumers will lose
If you try to control too much, you'll make the task harder. Just use a hard timeout. Rounds are X seconds or milliseconds.
This thread has some decent discussion about the case-study type questions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940527
Did they have you sign an NDA?

It seems like it'd be hard, using this tactic, to protect trade secrets in companies where that's important.
Hmm, yeah I programmed the survey myself so there might be glitches. I hadn't tested it with Adblock Plus. Its on the affiliate-script.com domain because that's my current startup that I am programming. ;)

You are correct about the US centric race / ethnicity box. I didn't think of that when I made it. I'll have to search and see if I can find any suggestions on how to make it more global.

Also what other kind of genres would you like to see added to the music box other than I don't know?
I think this a terrific interviewing method, but only if you have the metacognition to actually know why you didn't like a candidate, and the courage to tell them how they failed.

If you don't commit to that communication, you'll be an unsettling and depressing interviewer. You can't just play part of the process by the book, it really has to be all or nothing.
A friend suggested the possibility that advanced life might lose the desire to explore or engage in behaviors that would leak EMF (a sort of technical nirvana).
VBA -- because of office macros, it's used and understood by the most people (unfortunately)
The "see me type" thing is a feature you can turn off.
Secrecy always harms something else. Most obvious example is closed source being less convenient for users to work with when they have to peek inside (e.g. bugs in closed source drivers).

Also, I doubt any secret that can e leaned in a day is worth a lot.
"... US government, for example, spends on “Defense” (including “preemptive” warfare) and Homeland Security, 8 times what it spends on educating the next generation... You know, whenever I heard numbers like those, it always seemed like it was missing some very subtle point, but I never could quite put my finger on it. I think I just figured it out: ..."

About 6months ago I checked defense spending compared to education spending in the US. Here's what I found ~ http://www.backtype.com/url/seldomlogical.com/comment/000000...

"... if you add up the money we spend on public education in this country, at the local, state, and federal levels (most of it is at the local level), it's about what we spend on defense. It may even be more ..."

Defence at 4% (2005) [0] and education at 7% of GDP (2007-006). [1] But there is no mention of costs associated in the intelligence community. You can read more about the breakdown of spending for education in the reference.

[0]
4.06%
CIA Factbook, North America :: United States, Military expenditures ~ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[1]
7% of gdp on education
US Department of Education.
"Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries" (NCES 2007-006)
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2007/2007006.pdf
http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:9mKwt-I-OKUJ:nces.ed.go...
Here's the source we used for code generation this semester. http://github.com/joshbohde/megaminer-framework/tree/megamin...

We used templates to create the game stuff. Unfortunately, it's not quite a stand-alone library, but hopefully someone else can use it.
That's exactly why #4 is not unbiased. You say in point #5 that those who seek more context prior to judgement are from the end-is-nigh camp. Reasonable people who are not in that camp also think the emails may have a very different meaning in their true context. Otherwise, great summary.
Did they phone-screen you before they asked you to come over? I can't imagine a company asking each of its candidates to come spend an entire day with them without a prior filtering of sorts..
Is there some history of this actually happening at Google? I can't recall any big products that have shed features. My recollection is obviously limited, but I'd love to hear of some examples. Shuttering whole products/services doesn't count to me.
Online Backups for the Truly Paranoid