skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not much. Hyperinflation is the nerdocalypse for those who don't believe in Keynesian economics, but comparisons with Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic are absurd and overblown.

What does he think the US Dollar is going to be debased in comparison to? The Euro? Europe has pretty severe structural problems of its own, and Britain is both tiny and worse off again. Russia and Japan are stable but rather moribund, and while Brazil is a bright star int he world economy these days it's tin in comparison to the US economy. Which leaves the Yuan, and China is going to leave its currency pegged to the dollar for as long as they feel like it, both because it keeps the trade balance stable and because they have no intention of letting us inflate away our debt.

Oh yeah. Gold. Riiiiiight. Look, we still have tremendous amounts of wealth in the US, though you might not feel that way if you're in Detroit or some other towns. If the Chinese ever grow anxious about having too many dollars on the books, they're not going to start demanding they be paid in gold ingots, they're going to do what the Japanese did and just come over here and start buying blocks of Manhattan or Downtown LA or whatever prime real estate they can pick up for a song (which will be most of it, in the next year or two - commercial RE is in a slump of its own).

Hyperinflation makes no sense for the US because there is no harder currency that can easily displace the dollar, and there are vast numbers of valuable assets which are most easily purchased in dollars here in the US as far as our external creditors are concerned. Internally our debt-to-GDP ratio is rising but not that bad in context, and the administration has already expressed interest in deficit reduction so it's not like they're oblivious to the issue (unlike the previous administration with their proclamations that 'deficits don't matter').
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There's a difference between humans not being able to guess the future beyond a probability measure, and the future not being determined from the "beginning" (or some time far enough in the past that humans don't really have a say in what will happen).

In other words, it's quite possible that humans can't guess the future beyond a probability measure and at the same time have the universe (including their own actions, of course) being completely determined.
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Wow, that's just part 1? Really impressive content, better than several books I have on the subject. Ars Technica continues to impress.
$300 for a average bike is not cheap. Even in USA, where in my opinion the bikes are very overpriced.

Yet, if you want top of the line bike $300 is not enough.
Might be different if there were already numerous libraries that supported it but honestly if the extent of it is support in four languages (plus a few more that support the serializer) it's probably not worth wasting the effort unless it differentiates itself substantially from the existing solutions.
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Google is really hitting the lows these days.

They overhyped wave and when they launched it nobody knew how to use it for anything besides trolling, then Google trolled us and said that Chrome OS would only "support" SSD because seemingly there is nothing special about it except being overly crippled, but they want to make it look like it boots fast.

And now this, Google are jumping on the utterly useless URL shortening fad. Google is losing it.
that is very interesting - I though replication was the nearest to realtime "backup" as one could get.
Is there any other way, one can do incremental, realtime backups for, say, mysql/postgres ?
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I agree, but Washington isn't the only game in town. These socioeconomic/medical issues are costing European governments plenty too, and it would suit them just fine to denounce high-fructose corn syrup as an American imposition as a sop to their domestic farming lobbies (even though European food scientists are just as concerned with maximizing saleable weight at minimum cost as their counterparts here).

It may not take all that long: consider the history of tobacco litigation (also a powerful lobby) and the fact that federal and particularly state finances are in a tight squeeze, in which soaring medical costs play a significant part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agree...
Yeah, posters like pg are really turning this place into reddit ;)
Here is a basic bookmarklet!

javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection().toString();if(q){q = q.replace(/\W/g, '+');q = q.replace(/\+\+/g, '+');q = q.replace(/^\+/g, '');location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=+q;};})()
This is a bug with Chrome on Windows, which is apparently fixed in the latest build.

The bug was exposed by our heavy use of RGBA colour, although it didn't affect earlier builds of Chrome or any other Webkit based browser.
Here is the press release quoted in this article: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-14sta...
Using the Q & A style to introduce a topic works really well. I hope more people start writing like this.
A good sight is not just about absolute accuracy & precision, but about speed of acquisition of a "reasonable" sight picture given the existing context and time-task window for making the decision to fire.

They talked precisely about that; according to the inventor, part of the reason he thinks it might be better is that filling in a shape is a natural and fast.

Other than that, your point appears to be that if there are no tables and numbers, nobody should write an article about the invention, lest it becomes "cheap 'pop sci' link-bait jurinalism", and then you go on to insult the "author" of the "article" (do we really need the condescending quotes?).

Not a big deal, this being the internet, trolls trolling trolls, etc., but I've been seeing this kind of ultra-negative comments get upvoted a lot recently. It used to be an honour reserved for Techcrunch and Coding Horror posts ;)
I've been active on HN for more than a year but it still makes me smile when I see that someone has sat down and pounded out a comment like this that is so informative and well-crafted. An upvote for you, good sir (or ma'am).
thanks. every time someone uses the password as input to some "secure" hash, i cry inside. why is the password even relevant to a user session identifier? it's not.
Ives' Unanswered Question

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trkFgIMC-Ks
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Courtesy of jf: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=996118
I was hired: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelfranusic
It seems that nowadays you can get pretty much anything through by playing the "think of the children" card even if it won't do anything to protect them.

I'm not adverse to interventions that will keep children safer (although I think their vulnerability is overplayed) but it'd be nice to see useless proposals get shot down at least once in a while.
Right! For example, people in Sicily have darker skin.
There's a good number of beginner programmers that write HelloWorld applications. But it doesn't really make it a 'space'.
If you like this you should read The Little Schemer (if you haven't yet, that is) it is written in dialogue/question-answer format. Very Socratic method. I can't recommend the rest of the series; I haven't read them yet. The Little Schemer is excellent though.
I think this perspective is overly simplistic. But then you might have meant it that way, so the rest of us can fill it in with our sundry biases. So, here's my chance to make my biases obvious. :-)

Hiring a programmer who has built stuff is like hiring a contractor who has shown an ability to do carpentry work. It's swell when all you need is the carpenter equivalent of a programmer; but often there is more involved than just nailing lines of code, classes and modules together from someone else's specification.

So, having a criterion of having built stuff is not sufficient, although I think it is reasonable. What qualifies as "stuff" is pretty subjective, though, and probably can't be anything but subjective. As I mentioned above: biases abound.

You also need to make sure they are able to figure out what to build and how, and sometimes what not to build -- whether that means they buy it, or it is a superfluous component.

You need to make sure they can think about what they are doing, rather than just being able to do things. The couple of outside projects I've become involved in so far, and some of the code I've read for other projects I'm not actively working on, suggest that some people don't do enough thinking. They've built plenty, but they didn't appear to build it with any goal but to build version 1 and be done. Think the software equivalent of a contractor coming in to fix what the first carpenter screwed up, because the first carpenter didn't care once the house passed inspection.

The code I've dealt with inside of organizations I've worked for is, if anything, worse than the code outside. But just looking at the end product wouldn't indicate anything is particularly wrong, excepting that maybe improvements to the site tend to occur only once every geologic era. Sometimes this can be indicative of quality of the developers; sometimes it is indicative of the quality of the management. Either way, it may not reflect on the developer you are talking to.

Depending, the developer may be able to think at many levels, and might be able to think lucidly about their work from a business strategy perspective. And depending on the organizational culture, this can either be a wonderful thing, or the most undesirable thing imaginable.

But this is all based on some amount of personal bias based on the kind of work I would want to be doing. I know there are places where programmers are expected to be nothing more than carpenters given specifications by the system analysts to turn into code. In these cases, I can see showing just an aptitude for building things to be enough. But I don't think these cases are common enough to warrant a single best practice.
Not just JSON and HTTP but specifically REST w/ JSON. There's a lot to be said for such a model.
There are two kinds of subsidiary in China for foreign companies:
- Representation Office
- WFOE: Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise

In the case of a representation office, employees are hired through a Human Ressource company (eg: FESCO) but not in the case of WFOE (which requires quite a bit more capital to open though: around 45 000$ minimum invested over a period of 2 years in Shanghai)
I'm just starting here, so I'm not exactly sure yet of the limitation of FESCO contracts in term of how much of the culture you can dictate in the chinese office...
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The first paragraph says it all: capitalism is a good system for handling sociopaths.

After all we know, it is probably the best. In every other system known to mankind psychopath cause incredibly more damage. Think Soviet Russia, North Korea, the Roman Empire, Nazy Germany, Cold War Romania, ...

The irony: Aaron Swartz probably had some idealistic system in mind when he wrote it (correct me if I'm wrong or if I am erecting a straw man), that would handle everything better if only the "right" people were in charge. The available data speaks otherwise.

"Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." Georges Clemencea
The Lisp dataset was really small - after eliminating projects with less than 3 watchers and duplicates, there were 19 projects left. Haskell - with 18 projects - was left out for the same reason.
That's pretty much what ZumoDrive is doing too. It's offline, but you set how much of a local cache for recent/frequently used files you want, which makes it feel local for cached files (because it is :).
I realize that this "Fourth Era" is mainly about sharing information, but I can't help enjoying the fact that I've started identifying trends before the media.

NY Times, 12/14/09

"Dr. Gray called the shift a “fourth paradigm.”...He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood...'The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,' -Edward Lazowska"

Me, 2/19/09

"The most significant shift brought about by modern technology: the transition from improving data interpolation to managing data complexity."

http://twitter.com/harpastum/status/1228981672
What you describe is possible, but I'd be surprised if the size of core committer groups was that stable as project size grows. Intuitively, I'd expect the size of the core committer group to grow more or less at the rate of the total active committer pool. At any rate, this can be tested quite easily, given an appropriate definition of what a "core committer" is... I released the dataset precisely to make it possible for other people to check this type of conjecture.
Ah. I don't have any decent reading suggestions. But as an unasked-for writing tip, I'd say you meant "like this," not "related to this."
Sometimes I have the feeling that some of his submissions are subtle experiments.
1. Plurk is blocked in China

3. MSN.cn outsourced the microblogging to an independent vendor.
The surprise isn't that Perl's commit rate declines at all - it's that the decline seems to be so much sharper than that of other languages. A number of dedicated Perl programmers have fixated on that one speculative aside in my post - in fact, this is the first blog post I've ever written that has garnered me some genuinely nasty email. Perhaps a sign of a wee bit of defensiveness in the Perl community at the moment?

A number of people have argued that Perl projects somehow approach completion more quickly than other projects, and that this explains the decline. I'm pondering ways to test this idea from the data, but I must say that it sounds pretty implausible to me.
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There is one sure-fire way to identify a good programmer: their work. In fact, it is by definition the way that we should evaluate programmers. It is the great equalizer, and with web technology, exposed for all to see.

Unless you are presuming a team of only a couple of developers doing their own thing, there is a real challenge in determining the extent of the programmer's responsibility for something that is exposed for all to see.

There are a number of other causes that might make a site a developer helped work on look or run like complete garbage. Organizational inertia might have forced the site into sucking, regardless of how good the programmers developing it were. The organization may have one or more bad programmers who were assigned to work on some critical component, screwing the whole site and all the good programmers.

We can wax on eternally about how the good programmers in this situation should've seen the writing on the wall and gotten out as soon as possible, but that's very easy to say seated in armchairs gazing from afar. Maybe they thought things were going better than they really were; maybe they saw things going bad, and thought they could motivate others to turn things around before things become a disaster -- and maybe they failed trying to do that[1]; maybe they have been trying to get out, but they are already tainted by the bad work of the organization that has become part of their image as well.

They could do work outside of their employer, for instance on an open source project, but these can succumb to the same sort of pressures that push profit-seeking organizations toward mediocrity. A single developer, even a really willful one, will have a hard time overcoming this inertia.

[1] At one of my prior employers, I was in this boat; I both tried and failed to get things turned around. I did quit, but probably not soon enough to convince people that the site was not a reflection of me and my standards. The site was absolutely shameful, and I'm sure anyone who used that site to infer things about my skill level would've sworn I had no skill or experience outside of a weekend PHP crash course. Granted, it would vet one organization I would probably not want to work at; but it would represent wasted potential based on presumption, which is a shame.

I really think the details matter, because they are a chance to determine if the work you are using to assess the programmer is spurious input, and reflect an influence largely made up of things other than that programmer.
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I think Aaron misses the point about sociopaths. Individual behavior has nothing to do with corporate behavior. Larry and Sergey's personal niceness or lack thereof is irrelevant.

Most people who work for giant tech corporations aren't sociopaths -- far from it. The top American tech firms are filled with people that are almost painfully conscientious, in an upper-middle-class way. Don't even think about cancelling the recycling program or face a general uprising at the next assembly. This is true whether you work for Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Oracle, or whatever. I don't know the telecom or media industry, but I bet it's about the same there.

The sociopath angle makes sense to describe the behavior of the corporation itself. (viz. "The Corporation" film). Even if there's an opportunity you have qualms about (subprime mortgages, expanding into China), the shareholders will insist you get into that market as long as competitors are making money.

Google's corporate behavior is pretty "evil". To their competitors. And sometimes even their partners. Consider how they are bootstrapping off TeleAtlas' mapping data product to basically make that entire industry obsolete, once people are carrying around iPhones that constantly map everything.

But as long as they are "evil" to competitors in the service of making a better product, they are "good" for everyone else.

The traditional media monopolies stopped really competing a generation ago, and after the consolidation of the 80s and 90s it's all been about denying entry to competitors, and controlling access to markets. That's what makes them "evil".

Google isn't in any position where they can do that yet, except maybe online advertising (sort of). So for the most part Google is focused on breaking open markets. That might change if they ever start "owning" a consumer, like say with a Chrome-powered netbook. Just you wait.
You've probably not heard of Orkut, but if you are Brazilian you have. While I was in college chatting with my friends on AIM or ICQ, a lot of the non-US work was moving from ICQ to MSN.

Lots of things can end up being popular on a mostly regional basis. I'm sure there are many sites that are only popular to a specific locale that you've never heard of.
I've been reading aaronsw's blog for years, and it surprises me how uniformly antagonistic the comments are -- both on the blog itself, and on HN and reddit -- compared to other blogs. He's either an incredibly skilled troll, or he's really on to something.
Yes, free will and purposeful intelligence. Essentially, if all intelligence boils down to algorithms of one sort or another, then per the no free lunch theorem, all we can expect is randomness. All appearances of order and meaning are merely illusory.

However, I think I've empirically established we (or at least I) have free will and purposeful intelligence. Thus, at least I can access meaning.

http://www.box.net/shared/u13u3agxqg
For comparison, after eliminating projects with 3 or fewer watchers and duplicate projects, my language breakdown looks like this:

Ruby 35.3%
Python 11.5%
Javscript 9.4%
PHP 7.6%
C 5.4%
None 5.3%
Java 5.3%
C++ 4.0%
Objective C 3.8%
Perl 3.6%
C# 1.7%
Erlang 1.4%
ActionScript 1.3%
Scala 1.0%
Lua 0.9%
Clojure 0.7%
Lisp 0.6%
Haskell 0.5%
Go 0.5%
Objective J 0.3%

Pretty close to the overall estimate by github. Some of the difference can probably be explained by the fact that Github tried to eliminate commonly included libraries when they did their file line counts, while I didn't.
Lack of determinism is not the same as free will. Being constrained to the past to include the future (i.e. some probability distribution over possible choice states) is still a mechanism embedding stochastic processes, and can be modelled algorithmically.

To really get to free will we also need teleological causation:

danielnolanphil.googlepages.com/TeleologyHawthorneNolan.pdf

Also, here are empirical results from my research showing we are capable of teleological causation and thus have free will:

http://www.box.net/shared/u13u3agxqg
How much weight would anyone here give to the "Started programming at university" criterion? It's one that is bugging me slightly because 1) it applies to me and 2) it's not something I can go back and change.
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A photo with your CV? That'd be totally weird. I've only ever needed one for security passes.

Even my CRB/security check (temp summer job in a civil service typing pool) didn't need one except as proof of ID.
I'm generally interested in other people's criteria for hiring people as it makes me think about what I'm not doing (and whether that's a concious decision or I've just got distracted / out of the habit), and what I could be doing better.
I also like this competitor: http://www.openpandora.org/

OpenPandora made many different choices, though, so it may fill a different market segment.

Does anyone know of yet another competitor? I would love to see a real growth free software friendly hand-held computing.
Senior Developer Dick Scroogey hasn't donated and his system got into a huge deadlock. Colonel Winston Brown only donated $30 and got hit by a nasty compiler bug, but then added the missing $70 and another compiler bug fixed his app!