skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Add in security camera networks and you get all sorts of geographic applications without the need for always-on GPS!
If I could get to the cloud, I wouldn't need a WPA key cracker+..

(+Comment does not not endorse theft of wireless networking).
At least some of the HTC phones with "Sense" UI, like the Verizon Droid Eris, are still shipping with Android 1.5.
Do you have a reference for that review?

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/1997-November/000128.htm...
Personally, I don't think Photoshop will ever be able to automaticly slice a document into valid, standardized, optimized HTML/CSS. I think a human has to be involved in the process, unless HTML changes completely.

In the meantime, tools that can copy the CSS styles of text to the clipboard, and things that can generally decrease time spent developing will be a plus.
Great points, especially the one on multiple perspectives.

If you haven't read it already I highly recommend Thurston's essay "On proofs and progress in mathematics" - http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236 .
Guessing the password? Yes.
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I should have noted in the title that it's in London, UK.
It's not working for me. I'm guessing it's much like new features for webapps, only rolled out to a select number at first and gradually expanded.
Fraiche is quality. They imported some kind of industrial European yogurt contraption. No idea what id does or how it works, but my understanding is that it uses traditional yogurt-making methodologies, and that they are the only company in the US that has one. It's very good yogurt, especially the unflavored fresh whole milk variety.

Also spotted Zuckerberg and Jobs chatting it up there one day in 2007.
Why not list apostrophe as &#39; and include a link to that article? If you omit it, users will just look it up somewhere else and maybe get it wrong.
It doesn't give you that much. Servlets (kind of a CGI for Java) and JSPs, which you can use as a simple template engine or to interweave Java and HTML code (kind of like PHP). An ORM is not included for example.

But the point is: If you add additional stuff, the larger part of the memory footprint of that additional stuff is only added once, because you don't need a new Tomcat for every request which you process in parallel, but only a very lightweight thread.
what a long explanation!

i assume that's equivalent to slicing the "tube" while rotating the knife completely around the axis of the "tube".

and if you only do half a rotation you should get a mobius bagel :o)
Rambling thoughts your comment triggered:

When we model position of things in code, we often put the position within the thing being modeled - car, game character, window, etc. So you can do things like: aCar.position - but I think that might be conceptually wrong and have been thinking that for a long time but haven't had much chance to explore the idea.

The idea of putting the responsibility for (eg.) location of each object within the world into the world itself seems to fit better with reality, too. After all, in our physical reality there's rules that "the world" imposes on things within it. One big one is that only one physical object (atom or what-have-you) can exist in a given location in space at a given time. Having the location of an atom in space be stored in the atom itself would seemingly make it a lot more difficult to make sure that rule goes unbroken and, arguably, can't be how the universe works as we seemingly cannot "see" location encoded within physical objects in our universe (that I know of). Therefore the location of a thing is probably "stored" within the fabric of the universe itself...

Anyway... If you write up your experiences, please post them to HN - I'm betting they'd be interesting!
And a random name for your network.
Ok, fair enough. Does that hold true when you load it up with stuff to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, though?
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At the level of this question, checking out Scott Meyer's 50 ways will show you some that he got wrong. An interesting one is how to write a smart pointer class, and how many ways it can go wrong.
There actually is a custom of doing that. I'm pretty sure The Editors will do it if the submitter doesn't (eventually).
On proof and progress in mathematics
My father-in-law was a fan of that one as well. I was not as taken with Hardy's "my life is useless" argument, and I find it a delicious irony that advances in cryptography have made Number Theory applied.
He is especially known for workshops he has led around the world constructing very large models of four-dimensional polytopes (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), These extraordinary activities expose participants to important conceptual ideas they might never experience otherwise... his alternative introductions to mathematical topics are often effective for engaging students who are not attracted to traditional mathematics teaching.

http://www.georgehart.com/research/hartbiog.html
This is a bad interview question for another reason -- I don't consider myself to be a good C++ developer and I answered it correctly. This is only because I reversed enough C++ code to understand how memory allocation, vtables and compilation works and have a decent grasp on implementation of object oriented languages. Would I make a great C++ developer though? Probably not in my definition of a "great developer."
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Gödel's intent was to show that there are things that are "true" but not "provable". So to say that math is the study of things that are verifiably and undebatably true is at odds with that.
If someone can explain what happens, then one of two things is probably true: they've purposefully memorized an edge case for the sake of trivia, or their knowledge of language semantics and runtime behavior is deep enough to figure out what happens in an unusual circumstance.

I agree that doesn't tell you if the candidate is good at solving problems using C++, but there is potential to discover how deep their understanding is.
Math seems to me a bit like love, you have to experience it to understand it. Definitions and discussions like the OP might help a little, but don't get at the essence. No-one who reads such a definition will suddenly come away knowing what mathematics is.

I had a few epiphanies in my life that made me understand what mathematics is. One of them was understanding why it is that there are infinitely many primes - I think I learnt more about what mathematics is in the moment that proof clicked than I have from reading hundreds of discussions of "what is mathematics". The experience was, simply, miraculous.
So very true.

Since learning Ruby, I've noticed that my attitude towards Java has taken a complete 180. It feels like doing anything in Java is like mowing your lawn with a pair of hand scissors. You can get the job done, but it takes a lot of extra steps/effort when compared to more powerful programming languages.

I don't think that the majority of people who are using something else besides Java to build their web app are doing so just because they read some Java-bashing statements on a website. They're either basing their technology choices on prior experience or are just picking something that appeals to them and rolling with that.
> Rather than arguing against my simple, well supported conspiracy argument, you instead implied that I argued for some vast and implausible conspiracy. Why not just go for broke and act as if I claimed Phil Jones was behind 9/11?

If you're claiming or implying, as you have been until now, that 'conspiracies' are the only reason that the current scientific consensus is still standing, then it has to be a vast conspiracy, no?

> Regarding McIntyre, whether or not he made a major improvement to the existing record or a minor incremental one, the point is that he is correct. A crackpot is a person with wild and incorrect theories completely unsupported by evidence.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. We can argue back and forth as to whether he's a crackpot or not but all we'd be doing is arguing about the definition of the word. (And it would remain a matter of opinion and not fact!)

It is, however, true that his more substantial allegations practically require a widespread conspiracy, or something similarly dramatic, within the current consensus in order to be correct.
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> Eliezer & co. with their "Friendly AI" are trying to invent the circuit breaker before discovering electricity.

Electricity isn't going to make humanity extinct. An AI might.

Creating an AI is potentially incredibly dangerous. Not considering the dangers very very very carefully would be like playing with matches in a room ankle-deep in petrol.
I'm torn on whether this is a good question or not. The important part of the question is definitely the "why?" step. Finding out whether a developer will question their own assumptions, fall back to solid knowledge and ask questions to acquire the knowledge needed to proceed or if they will simply bumble down the garden path of ignorance, making things up as they go with no basis in fact other than a gut feeling is very important.
According to the story, Apple wasn't keeping tabs on it. They only took action when an independent third party pointed out the problem to them.
192 GB of RAM or 192 GB of disk space?
It also selects for developers who deliberately code up to the limit of what the runtime will allow, regardless of the obvious fact that having code like this is like sprinkling landmines across your product.
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It depends on the number of parallel request you want to handle. I don't know where the break-even in favor of Java is, but I guess it is a low single-digit number of threads.
Don't worry about verbosity, Armed Bear Common Lisp is the way to go. However, I think you'll have to alter some of the code in it because when it loads up scripts, it places them in the armed-bear or script package (I can't remember which).
In fact, standardization and a written spec will make it more likely that faster interpreters will be written for it.
Very cool. It seems to work on the first few things I tried with my droid.
I am absolutely speechless that I am being downvoted while you are being upvoted...

What exactly are these imaginary fixed costs that marketers don't have? You mean hiring advertisers is free? You mean buying commercials is free? You mean flying out to conventions is free?

I can tell you of quite a few startups led by MBA marketers who burnt all their cash trying to outsource their technical work. All the money went into hype which they don't even have a product for. Would you rather have imaginary hype or would you rather have a physical product?
My favorite definition of math, courtesty of http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/08/what-is-mathematics-r...

"Mathematics is the minimal environment to preserve ideas."
Nope - it's a waste of time to even try.

Your intent does not determine the effect of various measures. Regulatory capture does (at least in this domain).
Do you consider boilerplate to be verbosity? Because I don't.

Verbosity is a bad thing, because it can cause bugs etc. But that's not what Java is.

"private static void" is just boilerplate. It's stuff you type to get what you want, but it can't really be considered verbosity.
It would be cool to hook it up to a virtual reality treadmill:

http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/19/cool-videos-of-virtual-...
One common theme I learned when working with Java developers is that there are vast amount of information out there regarding:

* Design Patterns (GoF + newer patterns)
* OOAD/OOP
* Refactoring
* TDD, Agile, and XP
* "Reusable", "Generalization", "Framework"

that Java developers read the topics lightly and apply immediately without taking the time to understand them and when to use them. This doesn't happen much in other programming language communities because I rarely see someone writing design pattern tutorial in Perl. I won't be surprised that we will see these issues again in Ruby...
192 MB RAM. Sorry, I corrected the typo.
Then we have different definitions of verbosity.
You're conflating actually doing it with being able to reason about what would happen based on prior understanding.
Ah, the joys of unsupported third-party hacks :)
That is categorically NOT verbosity.

"public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything.

If you really can't learn to look past the "stuff" into the code, get your editor to hide it from you if you must.

Using "public static void" as an argument is almost as ridiculous as people who cite the lines of code needed to program HelloWorld.

Verbosity in a language should be measured in terms of actual code that does stuff. Not characters in source code.

For example, would you consider Basic with line numbers to be a verbose language since it has a number at the start of each line? Well no, because those numbers aren't code.

Another example:

Regexps are extremely terse and compact. Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with? Is it easier to make a mistake and introduce a bug in a regexp, or in java code?

The argument that less lines/characters = less bugs is not a good one.
reminds me of a much more practical version of some of the cool bits from the "sixth sense" interface that was presented at TED / all over the news awhile ago - http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/ . There, their prototype was also able to "look at" an object and return information about it immediately (e.g. you hold up a book in front of the camera, a processor recognizes it and pulls some relevant information, and the mini projector next to the camera projects the information back onto the book cover)
Since the only way to make money is to provide something people want, if you are doing something that provides you with money, you are making your customers' world a better place, at least they must think so.
If the population as a whole learned just the principle of intellectual rigor, I truly believe the world would be a better place.
Most people in my industry just use Backtrack for this, which is why it's the top hit on Google for "Backtrack".

We don't do much network pentesting, but Backtrack is still really handy to have around, especially for anything involving wireless, since the driver stack is all set up on it.
Whether or not more than one object may occupy the same place depends on kind of objects e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson
Perhaps not Google. Maybe Google and Facebook.

Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on the ambitions of Facebook.

"Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...
The Sprint HTC Hero which launched two months ago as well as T-Mobile's MyTouch both shipped with 1.5; the T-Mobile G1 can be upgraded to 1.5.
Rich Hickey released a few things for Java-Lisp interop before he decided to start over completely with Clojure.

See http://jfli.sourceforge.net/, for example.

There are other approaches (JLinker, etc.)
That's a glide ratio of ~4.7:1 whereas the Gimli glider managed ~12:1.
Yow. Patrick Farley meets Chris Farley.
I disagree, I think this actually a pretty good question, if asked properly. If you expect the right answer right away, then yes, it's a useless piece of trivia. But if you ask people to think it through, you might uncover a surprising lack of understanding of what's going on under the hood (stack vs. heap, etc.) If your goal is to have people think it through and explain their thinking along the way, it's not a bad question at all (assuming your goal is to hire someone who knows C++ well - whether it's a good goal is a whole different question).
If I understand it correctly it just uses your GPS and magnetometer to work out where you are, it doesn't actually use the video data like it does for the still pictures you feed it.
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To sell it to Americans, switch your example to restaurant menus. ;)
Even with heap-allocated objects there are lots of cases where you can't safely "delete this", which is what makes it a worst-practice. If you just want to know whether the candidate knows what the heap is, ask them to explain why alloca() is evil.
This helps people in your vicinity have a unique data point when using geolocation technologies that are powered by SSIDs of wifi networks.

Seriously though, I doubt it adds much, even in obscurity.
My smartphone contract isn't ridiculously expensive -- and lets face it, if you've got an Internet tablet you're still going to need that service contract to get connectivity.

The small screen is an advantage when on the move. The small footprint as well -- it's pretty hard to even remove a large device from your bag while standing on transit. If I can sit, I can use my netbook.

I work an web startup that provides business software for users who are typically not at their desks. An affordable tablet would be a huge boon for us -- we could distribute them to our users (or just recommend them) and they would love it. But at this price it won't work for us. I fully expect that Chrome OS is built entirely for this market and we'll see a lot of tablets from netbook manufacturers next year.
Do you have any links for information about his last startup? I would like to see it.
My parents were in the book business as both retail and book distributors; my sister is a published author, my brother owns a 30-employee publishing company. I left the book industry for my first love, computers, a while back; but the numbers I threw out are still the norm for the industry.
FG's claims are more easy to refute than TC's. FG says they did virtually all the technical work and they signed no contracts. Easily refuted claims are more credible than vague ones.
See my description below:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982368
It's hard to compare but Tomcat is functionally equivalent to something like Passenger, Paster or Mongrel. And last time I looked, it actually ate 80MB. It doesn't make sense to compare empty application servers: it is your running application you should be concerned with.

JVM is fine if you're running only a single instance of it: just use threads instead of processes. The problem with JVM is that you often can't afford to have several of them running: in Java world everything is measured in hundreds of megabytes, that's the smallest unit of measurement they use (often supplemented with references to 32GB servers, "they're so cheap now"). Check out Batik Java library for rendering SVG. A single 45Kb SVG file, when fully parsed, eats up 150MB right here on my laptop. After serveral repeated test runs, JVM memory usage grew to a sweet 540MB, where it stopped because I capped it there via -Xmx. For comparison: Inkscape, which is an entire SVG IDE powerhouse, not just a parser, consumes only 3MB more when I open the same file in it, so that's like 50x less, plus it doesn't grow.

See, unlike CLR or Python/Perl/Ruby, JVM truly is a virtual computer, i.e. running a WAR file under Tomcat is kind of like running an Office 2008 inside of an invisible VMWare image with Windows pre-configured to occupy either 500MB or 1GB or comparable number. I just don't get why Java people are so damn proud of it. Moreover, they find nothing strange about this bizarre arrangement because they're completely absorbed by that JVM instance.

To demonstrate why Java doesn't belong on UNIX I invite you to implement find, grep, less and sort as Java programs, pipe them all together in a bash console and enjoy the show. :-)

In the end, there is nothing with Java that can't be dealt with by paying a few extra $ for hosting. The main issue is that JVM is an OS, a much more corporate, boring, uptight and over-engineered (and much less fun) than UNIX is.

I also want to address some of Tobias42 comments: for the most part I absolutely agree with him, except I don't follow his comparisons to Rails: we are comparing platforms here, not languages or frameworks. JVM is a memory hog compared to UNIX, and if he wants to compare Rails, I'd recommend loading his Rails app into JVM via JRuby/Tomcat and seeing what happens to his 192MB VPS box. Moreover, I wouldn't call 100ms/page (i.e. just 10 requests/second) "lightning fast", which makes his next comment about "Rails taking 10x longer" sound a bit strange: how hard does one need to try to build a web application with 1 request/second performance?
can you please elaborate on what you'd like to see improved in OTP?
I like Sproutbox. Seems like a more hands-on Y-Combinator. How has the success been so far?
The Kindle has unique attributes, Internet connectivity, and is relatively affordable. I'm not saying an Internet tablet is a poor product -- it's only poor at this price point. It might even be just this tablet that isn't worth it.
For me, I've always thought that the 'greatest developer' was really the one that was the greatest at debugging. Any developer can write code, but my experience has shown that only a subset can properly diagnose issues to find their root cause. Those on the team that can do that will save you huge amounts of time and money because things will go wrong (especially in C++).

If you add up all the time it takes to write a particular system, I think you'll find debugging and fixing bugs to be one of the largest chunks of time, probably beating out the time it actually took you to write and possibly design the system. Obviously a design more suited to maintainability will decrease this somewhat.

Given this, I'd say this is an excellent question. Especially if the interviewee can tell you why it's a bad idea, or what the gotchas are with using 'delete this;'. It might not find developers with other positive characteristics like what makes for simple and elegant designs. But if you have a mix of questions to cover the many aspects of development in the interview, you should be good to go.
Seriously! I know this moron who named his site Facebook but hosted it at thefacebook.com!
Maybe it's bad at proving how good a C++ programmer someone is, but it's good at seeing how good a programmer someone is.

As the author says, he doesn't expect anyone to get it on their first try. It's more a test of if the candidate can figure the answer out or not. Would you rather have someone who can figure questions like this out on their own or someone who will dismiss this as "trivia"?
Great point on the technical founder. Actually, really good point. Will add it to our notes.