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There was a thread on HN some time ago and I saved this link, which has some instructions on where to find the data and a description of the format.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt

I wanted to start a little project to process it but never got around to it.

Hope this helps.

I always thought that the Strunk and White was about style - it's up to the reader to decide whether it's good advice or not - but to call it clueless is just wrong. My English improved a lot after reading that book.

It should be in the vicinity of

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=-77.733333,162.166667&...

There is a book that has some of the same questions, and a lot more. It's "How would you move Mount Fuji" by William Poundstone (http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts-Puzzle/dp/...). As stated in some of the comments already posted, asking this kind of questions in interviews is by now "deprecated" (or even "considered harmful"), because they are in the public domain.

The layout is neat, but the purpose of the site is not obvious at first. Is it a review site? A shopping site? It's only after clicking around a bit that one can understand what the site does (present a selection of products in a cleanly organized manner, and provide links for purchase on Amazon.com). The name of the site is a bit misleading (bebefore? I thought it was something about how things were "before").

It is a derivative of oCaml and Haskell, but it's also a multi-paradigm language that borrows from C# and Python. It has elements of imperative and OO.

I don't know if it really is "the most original new face", and could be critized for trying to bring too many things into one, but it's not just a clone of Haskell or OCaml.

[edited typo]

Accoring to this article, the income/home price ratio has gone

  1950 -> 2.21

  1960 -> 2.11

  1975 -> 3.15

  2008 -> 4.40

With housing bubble and all, it seems that this is part of a long-term trend. Choosing 1975 as the hypothetical standard of where the ratio might return seems completely arbitrary.

He has corrected it to "infinite loop" now.

There is a vast difference between Windows 95 and Windows 7.

As an amateur photographer, I have often noticed how the best nature images are often of curves, or other geometrical shapes with some amount of symmetry. Lines that converge to the corners or lead the eye towards the intended focal point are another good example. Seeing function curves overimposed on natural curves tells the observer explicitly of the underlying harmony in nature and in math, which we all perceive, consciously or not.

They complain about lack of video, but I have to imagine that holding up this object to take pictures or record video would be quite awkward. It is a large object. It would look kind of funny - in the way that large cellphones from 1998 look kind of funny today.

  it’s not hard to imagine Apple doing their best to phase 
  out the Macintosh in the next decade, just as they phased
  out OS 9

I completely disagree. There's a need for high end machines for image, sound, and other professionals who use these machines because they are really good. Sure, some people who would have bought a iMac will end up buying an iPad instead because really all they need to do is surf the web and check their mail. But from there to discontinuing Mac OS X altogether it's a big leap of the imagination which I find unfounded.

Depends on what you mean by "normal"...

However, now that the me-too effect is wearing off, it does seem like its use has become more esoteric and "exclusionary", as the author writes. I myself don't see any use for it but I can see how other can find it entertaining, or maybe even useful.

There are also dead links on the other images. I really wanted to know more. Pity.

Cool. It looks like it would be a big strain on the neck, having to hold your head up like that, but on the other hand, it's only for short flights...

But the real questions is: how do you see the ground while you're landing, if you're facing up?

In IE7, the CSS is being completely ignored and the page does not work (Note: I am behind a proxy, it might have something to do with it). It works with Firefox.

Also, I know of a domain, seventypercentwater.com, but it doesn't show up in the list when I search for "seventy". What am I missing?

The website probably needs a redesign for various reasons, but in the meantime you should know that in IE7, the text in the features page is partially hidden by the blocks on the right. It's a serious flaw that severely impairs the respectability of your website (makes it look cheap).

My sentiments exactly. Thank you for expressing it so well. If I could upvote your comment more than once I would.

There's another article on Repubblica that describes the proposed decree in more detail.

http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/01/14/news/decreto_...

In the last paragraph, it says that the rules for tv broadcasting would be applied to websites that provide video (meaning they would be subject to governmental approval).

True. Until Google decides to code and release their client app, at which point Google will be in direct competition with Dropbox, and any third-party client to Google doc storage would be at a great disadvantage. I would guess that based on the adoption rate, a Google client app is not far into the future.

It's true that these security directives don't seem to make much sense, but what is the alternative? I think what they are tring to accomplish is to simply reduce the risk of a repeat "accident" along the same line of the one that happened on Dec 25. After an incident like that, the TSA just cannot afford to have someone else pull a similar stunt, it would only further ruin their already low credibility.

The challenge is about striking a balance between having passengers bring whatever they want on a plane and having them fly naked and anesthetized, just like if they were cargo.

F#. I work in a primarily Microsoft-based environment, and I wanted to learn a functional language, so F# is a good choice for me - I can actually put it to use at my "day job".

jQuery. A great javascript library.

To find out what it's made of, they are thinking of using spectroscopy.

To find out the density, it's mass over volume. They infer the mass by the planet's distance from its star and by its orbiting speed, and they get the volume by the amount of light it takes away from the star when it pases in front of it.

As an Italian speaker, I do recognize some of the words, and they seem to make sense. The spelling is in line with my scarce knowledge of 15th century Italian.

We're used to a very rational way of thinking, whereby one would devise a system and apply consistently throughout the whole text, but from what little I have seen and read of this manuscript, it seems that whoever wrote used lots of artistic license and was intentionally trying to conceal the content. So it could be possible that the writer(s) decided to do away with all manners of grammatical rules, and parts of the language, like article, propositions, and the letters F and Z (if that seems weird, imagine that there was no U in Latin). All the other missing letters are not in the Italian alphabet.

Though, it would be interesting to see how this theory works with the non-herbal sections of the manuscript.

Finally, I totally agree with muddylemon that attributing to Da Vinci is silly. Like he was the only literate Italian alive in 15th century.

Predictions of the future are always,necessarily, extrapolations of the present. Back in the 1930's, when airplanes and cars were the hot techonology of the day, it was obvious to imagine a future with flying cars. Now, we're still going through the information revolution (at least in some countries) and it's easy to imagine a future with more pervasive computational technologies.

But I wonder what the next paradigm change will be. Some (Thomas Friedman among them) say it's going to be energy revolution: cheap, clean, available energy for everyone. I think that's a pretty good bet.

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.

You could try selling software. If you're a developer now, you should be able to understand it and explain it to people. There are other skills involved in sales (it's best to be extroverted and to enjoy talking to people).

But you'd be spending your time traveling and talking to people.

Really nice explaination! Now I'm trying to resist shopping for a home coffee roaster, right this second...

I once went to a management seminar (I know, I know, please forgive me) and the only valuable thing I remember from it is: "People don't quit jobs, they quit their boss".

Sounds like you're more experienced than me, but FWIW, in your place, I would start by looking for another job, closer to home.

I am the same age, and I had a very similar experience, especially with regards to the BASIC manual. I would just go through the list of keywords, A to Z, skipping the ones that didn't make sense at first, and then circling back and starting all over until I had them all. In a way, a limited manual made it easier to circumscribe the problem, and gave my little nerdy self a "goal": Finish The Book.

I guess the same could be done with the information available on the Internet. If someone wants to learn javascript they have all the info they could possibly ever want. There are so many options now. But learning to program is a question of interest and determination, not availability of information.