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[ { "score": 0, "text": "I have to say I agree.Sure, you might say, there are some geniuses in Open Source who are obnoxious, and we need them. But my question is this - how many geniuses who are quiet and confrontation averse have left Open Source, never to return, because of the way they were treated?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "The problem is that not everybody agrees on who is the asshole. Somebody who wishes to force professionalism (ie a suit whether he wears it or nor not) on me is a bigger asshole than one who writes good code but can start a good flame war." }, { "score": 2, "text": "After reading this thread https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599... (especially this comment), Friend of mine sent to me this article. Maybe it's coincident maybe not. But kind of good response." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One could argue that while assholes may write good code, for all we know they're putting off people that would write as good or even better code and not be assholes.This especially applies to women - sure there are misogynistic jerks that are great coders, but who's to say the women they are putting off wouldn't be better in the long run?I hear the argument that if someone is dedicated enough they'll overlook the abuse they get and do what they do anyway, but the entire premise of the overarching debate is that social skills don't really correlate with technical skills, which blows that argument out of the water - people might not have the social skills to deal with shitbags, but that doesn't mean they aren't fantastic amazing programmers." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The irony of the post is that he is one the most prolific trolls of competing libraries to his own in Python. Asshole hater, un-asshole yourself." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Are you sure you REQUIRE a cloud? Phrase \"Amazon is too expensive\" suggests that it might be not the solution you're looking for.Maybe you could be a little more clear on what you need, because it's hard to imagine what are your requirements that fall in-between of \"Google App engine is too limited\" and \"Amazon is too expensive\"?Also the phrase \"I'm not much of an admin\" makes it all sound really confusing... Rarely the cloud is the solution for one person's needs. Typically something like dedicated server or vps should be the answer. VPSes can be 6$/m including server's control panel so that you dont have to be \"an admin\"." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Broadly speaking, there are two sets of questions you want to answer:1. The \"really?\" set of questions: Is the cloud what you really need? If so, can you architect your system to exploit the advantages of the cloud?2. The \"how?\" set of questions: do you outsource the cloud to AWS et al or do you build your own? The details of this are probably worth half a book, but there are many databases to choose from (CouchDB, MemcacheDB, Tokyo Products and LightCloud, thrudb, Project Voldemort, redis, and others) and build-or-manage-your-own cloud computing datacenter (EUCALYPTUS, AppScale, Enomaly, ELASTRA, 3tera, etc).The answer to these questions starts with \"what are you trying to do?\" In many cases, the cheapest and fastest way to get going is to provision some virtual servers from Linode or Slicehost and have a go. If you grow too much, 1. congratulations and 2. look at the cloud options." }, { "score": 2, "text": "If all you want is VPS that is cheaper than AWS then Slicehost may be the thing for you - http://www.slicehost.comEDIT: I forgot about Linode since I haven't used them myself. Here's a comparison between the two from last November: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode" }, { "score": 3, "text": "If you're just looking for storage and have access to extra machines then Tahoe allows you to store your files reliably for little to no cost.You can learn more here: http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html\nYou can download it here: http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoeEDIT: How do I create proper hyperlinks?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Explain what you are doing. The cloud is very much over-hyped and can mean many different things. Are you looking for storage? For hosting? For dynamic hosting?Explain a bit what your app is and we can give your architecture advice." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Dislike of if confuses me. People claim to find conditions wordy or confusing. I don't find conditions particularly difficult to follow, but I have a question from the other side: when you use && and || as logic gates, don't you (in your mind) translate them back into conditions anyhow? Here's his first example without if: function getEventTarget(evt) {\n evt = evt || window.event;\n return evt && (evt.target || evt.srcElement);\n }\n\nSure, it's very short in this written form. But for me to understand it, I need to think, roughly: evt retains its value, if it's a truthy value; otherwise give evt the value of window.event; if evt is a true value (now), return it and the value of evt.target - if that's truthy, or, if not, add in the value of evt.srcElement; oh, and by the way, if evt was not truthy initially in the return statement, bail out early (and return no value) since && only continues on if the initial value is true.I'm not trying to be difficult, but I don't see that as miraculously more clear." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"That's very clever.\"The above quote comes from the smartest developer I've ever known, talking about a piece of code I had written that I was just as proud of as this guy is of his ifless branching. It took a minute to sink in that \"clever\" is not a term you want people using to describe your code.As a developer, the first time you're going to encounter any piece of code is when FireBug drops you into it with an exception. Personally, I'd prefer to look at a single line that does a single thing.For any non-trivial implementation of the author's chained implicit conditional logic, a null reference exception will leave you looking at a single line with a half dozen candidates for what might actually be throwing.Please please please don't make a habit of coding like this for anything but the most trivial cases." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Hi - I 'm the author of this post. A few comments:1) It wasn't my intention to create a holy war. There are good arguments on both sides. I use ifs and fors in my own code and will continue to do so.2) Over the years I have developed a distaste for the overuse of statement branching - I find it distracting and\nI feel it works against readability.3) I wanted to catalog a bunch of (mostly well known) alternatives to present as a coding strategy4) I realize that not everyone likes such terseness of style and what is clear syntax to one person can be undecipherable to the next.5) Use what ever works best for you and your team(Notice how procedural this comment was :-) )" }, { "score": 3, "text": "From the title, I was expecting something interesting like \"SubText\", or at least some kind of talk about dispatch :) Using &&, || etc gets you terse code, but the branching that you mentally work out is exactly the same... unless you use the && and || so much that you end up chunking out specific patterns of usage without having to explicitly think about the branching... which you can do with if as well." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Write readable code for your source files and then compile with Google's closure compiler." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The problem with posts like this, both pro- and anti-Facebook, is that they are just someone's experience and our experiences vary. If your personal use of Facebook had similar results to the author's, you nod your head, perhaps virtually applaud, and share the link. I know I'm tempted to do so here.But I also know that there are people who use Facebook in a way that strengthens, augments and reinforces real-life relationships. I've also read of studies that show a positive, not a negative, correlation between time spent on social media and how engaged people are with others in person. Some will say, \"well, duh\" to that, and will shake their heads at an article like this, which to them only shows that someone doesn't know how to use Facebook.Both experiences are valid. I follow a sociologist on Twitter who writes a lot of essays from the latter viewpoint. To him, it's a theoretical split. There is the \"digital dualist\" theory, that basically says online/offline is a zero sum game and social media makes friendships shallow and disposable, and there is the \"augmented reality\" theory that all is connected, that what we do online is real life and not something different. And he holds the latter theory to be correct while the former, he finds simplistic, sentimental and broken. (I'm thinking of @nathanjurgenson if anyone wants to follow along, have done my best to represent his views but obviously this summary is my own)I disagree with all of the above. It has become ever more clear to me that some people really do use and experience Facebook in a dualistic way while others do not. There is no one, unified, grand theory of Facebook that encompasses all experiences. Both camps would like to say, \"This is how it is, period\", but they are really saying, \"This is how it is for me\"." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I can't even debate this blog, because if he doesn't get utility from Facebook, socially, then he doesn't get utility form it. That's factual.But I, and most of my close friends, get HUGE social utility from the platform. Some just use it for Events, some for micro-blogging, some for passively keeping in touch, some for messaging, etc. etc. But I know lots of people much better because of Facebook.And that is also factual." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This article sounds silly. Most of us have grown up with our parents talking to their friends in \"real life\". I don't know about some of you, but I definitely talk to my friends face-to-face, whenever I can...To me, the Internet and social media, are simply a change. Just like the telephone was a \"change\". Before then, you'd talk to people face-to-face, (or using smoke signals) so I'd imagine if we looked through some newspapers when telephones first came in, we'd probably see this exact same post." }, { "score": 3, "text": "In my current life, communication that I have with my friends via Facebook is closer, faster and more reliable than anything other than in person communication.It happens very often, friend do not answer phone or text but will notice Facebook message right away.I can't even compare conversations in comments in a photo of me in hospital with anything else. My friends (who mostly didn't know each other) learned who is worried about me and arranged a visit to hospital together right under my photo in comments.People tend to abuse Facebook a lot. But if you use it as a tool it's fine." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Almost everything I ever want to say when people look at me in awe and say \"You aren't on Facebook?\".I just don't get any satisfaction from maintaining a list of acquaintances and classmates that I happen to know because we happened to go the same school and I have no interest in reading about their lives and stalking them and finding out who their girlfriend/boyfriends are and who their newest friend is.I like the traditional way of friendship and communication because it has a 'natural permission setting'. For example if you ask my close friends they can tell you a lot of stuff about me, but once you get a little further, they wont know that much.Facebook creates this artificial thing where you can get a lot of information about someone without them knowing and you can exchange a very small amount in return.In the traditional way, if you care enough about me to want to know if I'm single or not, you will have to ask me (explicit expression) but using Facebook you can just look it up (implicit)." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I wish you all the best, but I'm skeptical that this could become a viable business. Is this a problem that people struggle with enough that they'd pay for a service to help them with it?What would differentiate Splitterbug from, say, BillMonk? Or just an e-mail? What are you planning on for revenue? One-off App Store purchases, or something more?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I guess any entrepreneur already thought about building that application once in their life. I myself thought of it a lot of time.. but always dismissed it thinking that it wasn't a monetizable business and only a fun hack project over a weedkend.However, these guys seemed to have proved me wrong as they're in YC while my \"serious business ideas\" were rejected. Or, maybe YC decided to invest mainly for the team (Both founder were \"Product manager at Google\") ? Still, I'll follow their path and I hope they'll be successful :)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Interesting - it looks really similar to my app Splitsies which launched late last year: http://splitsies.net/ - it'll be interesting to see how their dependence on Facebook connect works out for you." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One note about your website:\nI recommend enabling the controls on that jQuery scroll widget for the iPhone. Having the screen scroll away while i'm checking out the UI is a little annoying (and then having to wait a full cycle to see the screen again).Other than that, I certainly remember keeping tabs on my roommate debts and loans during college, but it was never much of a chore and didn't bother writing it down. I guess some people may need this more than others, for example people with lots of outstanding buddy debt, but I can't see it being a huge number.What are your plans for expanding this? Simply keeping it as is and doing one thing well? It may serve to function better if it helped those key users manage their debt, using burn down charts for a game effect, or something. Maybe tying it into a mint account (is there an API?) so it can show up on top of their personal finances? Maybe just adding a tip calculator/bill splitter typical app functionality, so people can get rid of their old one and encourage them to download this?I'm not sure what the answer is, but at a glance it seems far too niche and not much room to grow." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This could enable a group of friends to build up fairly long-running tabs with no effort, then pay whenever the tab hits a convenient amount. Less friction, more fun. I hope you guys succeed.Currently, even in a group of friends where we basically always split everything down the middle to keep it simple, not even having to do a split at all until a later, convenient time would be fantastic." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Yay #1: a nice wrapper around NLTK. NLTK is great but its API is not very Pythonic or comfortable. Pleasant facades over it are a great help for Python NLP.Yay #2: an actually interesting programming-related article on HN. These get rarer every day, losing their place to gossips about what Snowden remarked following some or another NSA official's remarks about Snowden's even earlier remarks." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Just a quick word on Pattern[1].TextBlob is probably just using the en module, I would suggest everyone take a look at the other modules in particular the web module should you be doing any light data scraping. It has nice wrappers around BeautifulSoup and Scrapy among others, jumping into BeautifulSoup and Scrapy can be daunting for beginners.[1] http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pages/pattern" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I've had good fun playing around with this, it's certainly made NLP more approachable.One issue though is that it seems to choke with certain characters.For instance the character £ it seems to complain with this error message:>>> TextBlob("£")\nTraceback (most recent call last):\n File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>\n File "/home/eterm/nlp/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/text/blob.py", line 340, in __repr__\n return unicode("{cls}('{text}')".format(cls=class_name, text=self.raw))\nUnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "The NodeBox linguistics module is another nice wrapper around NLTK (and other natural language processing libraries). I used it for extracting actions and details from sentences, but it's also great for spelling correction, pluralization, part-of-speech tagging and other common NLP tasks.http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Linguistics" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Both for my study and side job I work on NLP with python.Sorry, but I think this thing is very much overrated by the HN crowd. There are many such libraries and this one adds exactly nothing. I also don't see how this is easier to use than, lets say, Pattern.Try and add new functionality. One new functionality could be to use an ontology to calculate the distance between two words. Then you can do other cool things with that and place it in your module." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm absolutely shocked that people are okay with this.One of the biggest problems I've found with recent graduates is that the programs they've come from have been nothing more than trade schools for Java and PHP developers, and most of them lack even the basic underlying knowledge of things like algorithms, paradigms and how to make efficient code. This is not Computer Science, this is basic programming and is no better than what you'd get from the numerous video lectures on the web.In short, employable skills are best left to employers, and academic subjects are best left to academia.If it were my choice I'd make Computer Science a purely theoretical course from the outset. If these kids don't have a background in Math give it to them so that they can read through the likes of Introduction to Algorithms and TAOCP with no issue. Don't even let them touch code unless it's to illustrate a theoretical aspect of CS.Once they've got a solid year of CS behind them and they're all of a sufficient standard in the theoretical aspects of CS then they can be introduced to programming. However, I'd steer clear of the employable languages and force them into Python, Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, R and co to reenforce the theoretical background.Of course, you need these graduates to be employable, so why not offer a course titled \"Internship\" during the second year? Let them spend a few days each week working in a real company with real developers that can teach them real skills? I graduated from a modest CS programme and thanks to my numerous internships I was offered interviews left right and centre. I learned more about programming in an eight week internship then I did in an entire year at university, despite most of my second year being about learning to program, and because I had real world experience in employable languages the university didn't cover like C# I walked into a job while others in my class with better grades struggled.You get the idea. Please stop turning academia into a trade school and teach these kids real CS. If you want them to be employable offer a mandatory course where students have to work in a real business and are forced to pick up programming from people that actually know what they are doing." }, { "score": 1, "text": "\"employable computing skills \"I think this is a very broad statement even though not trying to undermine your question. The problem however with this statement is that it varies. Some people have mentioned HTML/JS etc. which are surely good but not all tech. related jobs need that.Some things that I strongly feel should be part of every CS curriculum especially in the context of your question i.e. employability are following:- Understanding real world projects and the lifecycle. This should include practical experience delivering software and manging the entire phase. Some universities already have a \"software engineering\" class for this.- Related to #1, teach them the value of teamwork. No real world project can be done alone and the bigger the employer, more likely you will deal with cross matrixed teams (yea teach them what cross matrixed means :)- Teach them about distributed computing and how software is deployed/managed in a large scale environment.- Teach them that no one cares if you build cool stuff. People care about what problem it solves. It could mean anything from keeping your company/manager happy to solving real world client problems.- lastly, tell them that whatever you learn now, you will learn a heck of a lot more when you are actually out in the real world and that will make you realize that you did not know anything. This does not however mean that the learning is useless but it is just the tip of an iceberg." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think unless you're a computer scientist or engineer at google, fb, etc. most of the theory you run into at the university level you're never gonna use. Having said that some \"theory\" is important for me as a developer, but really it just boils down to 2 subjects Discreet Maths and algorithms, so I would try to emphasize those two areas in the program.As far as employability goes, I think having a strong understanding of networking (TCP/HTTP) and Data/Databases, is really the core ( ie Data & Application layers) of most development these days.Also I know its kind of experimental but if possible I would actually teach go as a programming language instead of the usual c/c++/java (for the systems level / networking stuff). Go in tandem with javascript (both server and browser) for web applications, allows you to deal with just about every programming concept there is at an abstracter level and both languages are not overly difficult to grasp.So to put these thoughts together. Maybe you could center the program around networked software development? This lets you teach things like webkit, browsers, js, networking, servers, and databases while all staying in one (though very broad) medium. I think this could be possible for 1 prof.\nSo for instance, in \"interface design\" you're in the browser and delve into webkit and user interaction, or for \"computer graphics\" you can go into \"webgl\". For \"databases\" you're still dealing with server / client architectures for which you can examine db structures different types of web applications.I'd love to have had an option to do a pure web engineering compsci program. Maybe some of my ideas will help, good luck!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I agree with several of the posts below, but I have to take it a step further. I'm not sure you can or should call it a major in the traditional sense. It cheapens the idea of a degree if we teach people trade school curriculum and give them degrees. I've encountered a lot of these people, and it's the reason a lot of people from private institutions (Baker, Davenport, Phoenix, etc) get passed over for jobs.If people really want a degree in MIS or CS, then the curriculum should reflect that. If they can't handle the material, then I think the college should look at the possibility of offering certificate programs in specific areas.A student who understands theory can generally go out into the world and adapt. A student who understands how to make a web page using specific languages and specific steps and can't go much beyond that hasn't learned the things necessary to be given an associates or bachelors label.Question: Are the students capable and don't have the prerequisite knowledge? Maybe the college needs to consider an entry exam and remedial classes on basic computer use, theory, and logic? If they aren't actually capable, then I stand by what I said above. I think the college should consider certificate programs like, \"Web Programming with .Net and Javascript\"." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I run a 13 person IT shop at a Big-10 university. If I were a single person shop, what would be different?\nI wouldn't write code. I would be all about integrating off the shelf software into my systems. I would very likely be stitching University databases and third party apps together. I would be a call center and a support shop. I would be doing a lot of reading logs, Googling errors, and generally trouble shooting. I would be more than functionally literate on MACs, PCs, Unix, and MF machines. I'd know a reasonable amount about networking, and even more about SQL.If you were going to roll this into a minor, I'd call it something like Applied Information Technology Management (or some mix of such buzz words). (Note: James K. badgered me into posting)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Rogers is actually pretty ridiculous. I was about to make a post about this, but:Rogers also sends text message spam every month. You can't opt out. I have called on 4 separate occasions and spoken to a manager, asking to be opted out of the spam. The first few times, they apologized and told me I'd be taken off the list. After I wasn't, I asked to speak to a manager, who called me back.He told me, \"Sir, that isn't spam. Those are Rogers marketing messages.\" After I told him that I, the customer, considered it spam and would no longer like to receive them, he told me, \"I will forward your request to our marketing department, and they will determine whether it is spam.\"Best company." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I had to talk to rogers about getting some money back after finally cutting all of my services with them.Because my old cellphone number was the account number, they started giving me information about the Department of National Defense employee who now owns my old cell phone number.Hows that for a security failure on Rogers' part?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Totally agree that this isn't a great idea on Rogers part. But it strikes me that there is a relatively easy way to detect social engineering in this case. Just give the caller ridiculous answers in response to their first few queries and see if they balk. Only someone who knows the correct answers will challenge you.It would be really nice if there was a better way to ensure the identity of parties on either end of a phone call. In my case, an inability to remember dates causes a headache every time I try to do telephone banking where it seems to be the only type of security questions they use." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Canadian cellphone companies are pretty much a oligopoly with 3 big players, Rogers, Telus, and Bell. All 3 of them are super expensive and locks people in on super long 3 year contracts. These companies are so shady they create multiple \"discount brands\" to make consumer feels like they have more choices. It's not till recently that Canadian government realized the need to create competition and auctioned off some AWS spectrum to a couple \"startups\", namely Wind and Mobilicity and couple other ones." }, { "score": 4, "text": " At work we had privacy training videos shown one was an employee who spoke about the mobile phone company he has service with, no names but he'll call it \"Mogers\".When he signed up for service with \"Mogers\" they messed up his name on his bill, instead of e.g. \"John Smith\" they put \"J ohnSmith\".Then a week or so later he starts getting junk mail addressed to a \"Mr J ohnSmith\"." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It's to develop a systematic way to combine contracts and conditions.Eg. One this is done, then pay in bitcoin, ... Some clear examples can be found here : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/codius/tOtcG9cZA-Y" }, { "score": 1, "text": "How is this different from Ethereum?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Interesting idea. Ripple Labs seems to be churning out a lot of interesting stuff lately." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Can someone please explain a use case for this 'framework'? The whitepaper explains many things, which are somewhat confusing as to their level of use/abstraction." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Slight off-topic, but I recommend never using the phrase of the pattern "simple {and,but,yet} powerful" in anything, ever. It doesn't convey anything meaningful, and it's very overused." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "My high school algebra/trig teacher was a real drone; every problem had to be done by rote and she cared more about your handwriting and placing the numbers the same way she did than whether you actually knew what you were doing. She had the imagination of a four-function calculator; to her it \"math\" meant \"mechanical\". I made C's and D's in her classes, because I'd see shortcuts that got the right answers faster but she'd mark right answers wrong if we didn't use her methods to get them.Meanwhile I was writing my own 3-d graphics engine at home, working all the math out from observation of the real world with yardsticks and using graph paper, because I didn't have internet at home to look up the answers or the math education to know . Every time I'd try to ask her if anything from algebra or trig connected in some way to what I was doing, or if she knew of some math tools that would help me, she'd shut my questioning down and belittle me. I actually worked out sine/cosine and rotation matrices out on my own before we covered them in class, because she wouldn't point anything out to me.To this day I still don't know if she was such an unimaginative rock that she really didn't make any cognitive connection between math and real world applications, or if she just hated me for being a nonconformist." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The bit about finding the area of a triangle was great -- a quick, simple example of what math is and why anyone would enjoy it.K-12 public school math education burned me so bad that I didn't realize how much I love math until my mid-20s. (These days I'm reading about abstract algebra for fun!)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "As a mathematics major and having gone through some seriously crappy math courses in highschool (and even freshman college courses) including AP Calculus classes, I just want to say that I truely recommend reading this article.It really cannot be stated any better than this, folks. Even as a math major, reading this reinspires me and refuels my passion for mathematics.Simply lovely. :)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm a graduate student in mathematics.This article made me cry. Really powerful." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I wish I could upmod this so many times... Amazing article, everyone should read the entire thing.I hated math throughout school, although I was told I was \"good at it\", even though I had no clue what was going on. Now I know why!What can we do about this?!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So... what about using Gitlab (https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ce/)? It's open source (MIT license), it's a (very polished) clone of Github's functionality and workflow, and it can be self-hosted.Someone saying "please use Github" doesn't (usually) mean they only want, specifically, Github. It means they want a tool with visual forking and merge trees, a code browser that can easily reference different branches and tags, basic issue tracking in a way that can be linked to specific commits and merges, and so on.Honestly, at the point that Mr. Wong mentioned "no need to\never touch a bloated web browser" it felt more like ranting against ~these goddamn stupid casuals who can't even bother to use the command line!!~, not about actually bothering to even try and understand what the person was requesting." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The danger of a proprietary centralized service is directly proportional to how irreplaceable it is and how difficult it is to get relevant data back out. By this measure, GitHub poses very little threat.Because it's DVCS, the code already exists on the author (and likely dozens of other users') machines. With the change of a remote GitHub as a source host can be effectively replaced.When it comes to the non-source-hosting capabilities of GitHub, sure they're proprietary but they too can be replaced. GitHub has gained dominance in the open source community because it's very good at what it does. If it ceases to be the best place to host open source projects, people will stop hosting open source projects there.That being said, the authors of awesome open source projects have zero obligation to put their stuff on GitHub if they don't like it. They just might miss out on contributions of members of the community who don't want to jump through extra hoops." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's fine if he doesn't like Github, but the condescending attitude towards people that don't mind leaving the terminal isn't doing him any favors." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Seems like a logical extreme. Github is largely compatible with normal git. For instance, I've use other git services, like Bit Bucket, and not noticed much of a difference. While it is certainly for profit, it also offers some really useful tools that make hosting open source software and communicating with developers really easy. Github is useful for web developers in particular (I'm one) but I imagine other developer communities would benefit.It seems like a hollow argument to malign Github just because it wrapped something useful in its own right (Git) with a set of tools that raise its usefulness enormously (Github). And if you end up having an issue with Git, if you've got a local checkout it's 100% Git compatible and you can migrate it anywhere you'd like." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The message here seems to be "No tooling is better than proprietary tooling".Hosting on Github wouldn't diminish the ability for people to contribute to Unicorn via the same channels they do now. It would just make it more convenient for the many people who already use it." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If this had been done correctly, it probably would have been a great boon for the average person. It would have allowed Cisco's tech support to more easily address problems users are having and allowed Cisco to keep software up to date.Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could \"monetize\" (gads, I hate that word!) it:- Create a \"marketplace\" for features built into many routers? Check!- Sell people's internet history to the highest bidder? Check!- Force the upgrade and provide no way for people to opt-out? Check!I'm really trying to image the product management meetings that created this travesty. Did the meetings happen after somebody came and said, \"You know, we could make administering these routers a lot easier by making it so users don't have to,\" or were the meetings more like, \"We have a lot of users. How could we package things so we can sell all their data\"? Did it start benign and turn malignant or was it malignant from the get-go?Regardless, I can't imagine being willing to screw my customers like that." }, { "score": 1, "text": ">\"The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the service for “obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights, or… to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.”\"So let me get this straight, Cisco feels that they have the right to shut off your Internet connectivity IF:1) They don't like what you say.2) You watch porn. (Or anything they consider pornographic, which may not agree with your definition of pornographic; see corporate Internet filters.)Well, that just proves to me that they have no idea what the hell they're doing, and have just permanently lost me as a customer." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm thankful Jeff Atwood posted another article about the commodity router + open source firmware one-two punch [1]. I finally took the plunge and installed Tomato (Toastman [2]) and have been thrilled with the features, but mostly excited about the fact I get to tinker with another device :) It is empowering to know that I can circumvent overarching and onerous policies such as this...innovation...by Cisco.[1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st...[2]: http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/" }, { "score": 3, "text": "The author seemed to gloss over the part that really stuck out to me: \"...we may keep track of certain information ... e.g Internet history ...\"So the router is tracking your online activity and they will terminate it if they find you've been using it to watch porn or content not deemed legal. I'm guessing not many people from Hacker News will be able to do much with their routers if they start enforcing this." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I suppose that Cisco's experience collaborating with the secret police of various nations has seeped into it's corporate culture." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I had this problem as well. A lot of people do. In a way, it's not a bad thing, if you're oversubscribed it makes prioritizing things a lot easier than if you feel like you have time to do everything but aren't sure what's the most important.I am not completely cured of the habit, but what helped me with this -- and more importantly, what helped me actually begin finishing things -- is simply being very careful to only talk about what I've done, not what I'm working on or what I'm planning.There's this thing called \"substitute for completion\" where if you talk about some project, even one with hundreds of hours of work remaining, your brain gets the same reward as actually completing it. A smaller dose, perhaps, but essentially the same thing. So your brain figures out that it can just keep coming up with new ideas and telling people about them and it will get an echo of the same feeling of accomplishment as actually doing it, without the hard work.So what seems to work for me is only talking about my projects in the past tense. When I want to say \"I started a new game last week and it's going to be the most awesome augmented reality zombie squirter ever\", instead I say, \"I wrote a new game event system last week and it turned out pretty good,\" because that's as far as I got. It's also motivating because I can't wait to tell people about all the cool stuff I have planned, but I have to wait until I actually do it.I put out a second beta of my current project on TestFlight yesterday. It was a good feeling. It's been a ton of hard work so far. But it's not in the app store yet, so I'm not going to post about it until it is." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I thought this was going to be about someone meticulously doing git commits after every tiny little change." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I have the same problem: 'yes' is so much easier to say than 'no,' but the quantity of my projects is affecting the quality, and I don't like it.Derek Sivers has a suggested approach for over-committers: \"Hell yeah, or no.\" It's helped me cut down on my projects (and leaves me with more awesome things to work on, on average). Give it a read: http://sivers.org/hellyeah" }, { "score": 3, "text": "\"I want to be that go-to person, that expert, that guy who Gets Shit Done.\"I have a few bad experiences with \"the guy who gets things done\".There's an old saying that the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.If you stop after the first 90% (or why not at 80%?) and jump to the next exciting project, you will be percieved as very productive. And because you don't put in the time to properly document things, you'll be the only one who knows it all and you'll be percieved to be a guru who knows everything.Sure, it might not work perfectly, but it's only minor flaws that someone else can fix. Right? You're too busy being productive in your new project, leaving a mess for people to maintain in there.And it works. Your managers see you as the go-to guy. You will get things done. And the fact that people then spend ages of time to patch your work just proves how much more efficient and better than them you are.Yeah, you probably guessed it: I spent the day yesterday cleaning up someone elses unmaintainable, undocumented mess. Someone who is now working on a new project." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Nothing undesirable happens immediately as a result - except that maybe your manager is a little bummed out. But maybe the next time one of these projects comes up, they’ll ask Bob first. Maybe that speculative project turns into a full fledged project and you missed your chance to work on it.And when the over-committer Bob ducks out of the project due to time constraints, the manager will come back to you, knowing you have a good track record of completing tasks." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This just happened to me with a parody video I created. I created all the music from scratch and obviously rewrote all the lyrics. And UMG review my video and said that it was indeed their property. So, I can not run ads against the video, which at this point has probably cost me $500-$1,000. There is nothing I can do right now but wait and hope YouTube changes its mind...The video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJQAnamKeLsHere is what I see:These content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content:\nEntity: UMPG Publishing Content Type: Musical CompositionThese content owners have reviewed your video and agreed with your dispute:\nEntity: Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society Content Type: Musical CompositionYour dispute is still awaiting a response from these content owners:\nEntity: Social Media Holdings Content Type: Musical CompositionWhat should I do?No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.What can I do about my video's status?\nPlease note that the video's status can change, if the policies chosen by the content owners change. You may want to check back periodically to see if you have new options available to you.Please take a few minutes to visit our Help Center section on Policy and Copyright Guidelines, where you can learn more about copyright law and our Content Identification Service." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I was so furious after reading this article, I wrote to Rumblefish demanding an explanation.Anyway, it's good news, I've just received this email.Kristian,Thank you for your note, just read your email and I share your concern.  The YouTube content ID system mis-ID'd birds singing as one of our artists songs.  We reviewed the video this evening and released the claim that YT assigned to us.  One of our content id representatives made a mistake in the identification process and we've worked diligently to correct the error once we were made aware of it earlier today.Thank you for voicing your concern.  Very much appreciated.  We're doing our best to improve the process as it's very challenging for our team to keep up with the massive amount of claims coming through which grow every day.All the best,Paul Anthony | Founder and CEO | Rumblefish" }, { "score": 2, "text": "What is truly appalling here is the claim that the video had been reviewed by humans, who had determined that birdsong was copyrighted music (although the birds ought to be flattered by that), and, as such, Rumblefish is either lying (about having looked at all), hoping to make a quick buck, or criminally incompetent. I wouldn't be surprised if Rumblefish was trying to make a buck or two off of ads here, but I'm guessing that that's their standard response, and they hope whoever made the video will give up." }, { "score": 3, "text": "During the SOPA mess, a lot of people on this site were saying that the DMCA is fine, we don't need a new law.However, it seems pretty clear that the DMCA is not fine. There need to be better protections against this sort of thing - no hiding behind \"it wasn't a DMCA takedown notice\" when your automated takedown bot fraudulently implicates someone.Also, and this almost goes without saying, we need to modify the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA to at least legalize jailbreaking, whether the device is an iPhone, a PS3, or whatever. Though ideally the anti-circumvention provisions should be repealed wholesale, since they're unreasonably broad and create huge damages for a wide class of perfectly valid uses." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am pretty sure this amounts to fraud on the part of Rumblefish." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I feel nearly certain that this is just lobbying by companies that have patents on certain aspects of the communication and would like to have a mandated market for some electronic modules on the car.Same thing happened with tire pressure monitoring. In-wheel systems were being developed, but there was really no market until they were mandated. Meanwhile, your ABS/traction-control system can passively detect low tire pressure with no additional hardware." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I really wish there were exceptions for low-volume production. Among other things, a car sold in the US today must have anti-lock brakes, airbags, tire pressure monitoring system, and electronic stability control. These are required even if you want to make a total of 10 cars. This kills the enthusiast market and makes it hard for car manufacturers to experiment with low-volume models.Meanwhile, anyone can buy a 1000cc superbike that can go from 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. (And it gets to use the carpool lane.)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This has great implications for emergency vehicles. The current methods of inter-vehicle communications used by emergency vehicles (loud ass sirens and flashy lights) are ridiculously error prone, and becoming less and less effective as manufacturers get better at insulating cars.Even when the driver does hear it, it's often hard for them to localize where the sound is coming from."An ambulance is approaching from the left" would be fantastic." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Digital inter-vehicle communication, what can possibly go wrong?! I hope, they get the security right." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Wouldn't surprise me if wireless hardware companies are involved in this. I'd be much more comfortable with passive sensors being used, but then you couldn't really do traffic optimization. If it's lives you're trying to save go passive. Animals cause accidents too. If traffic congestion is the goal, then we can start talking about this.> The information sent between vehicles does not identify those vehicles, but merely contains basic safety data. In fact, the system as contemplated contains several layers of security and privacy protection to ensure that vehicles can rely on messages sent from other vehicles.With all of the stuff talked about in the article I don't see how's that supposed to work." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I still don't understand why everyone has this misguided quest for a clean history. An accurate history is much more important.Rebasing destroys historical information. I can't really see any advantages of rebasing when a merge does the same thing but leaves two things rebasing does not: 1) a point to rollback to if things don't work out, and 2) an explicit entry of when your branch was brought up to date with master." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Interestingly enough, most folks working on GitHub.com don't use this model. We actually use a simpler model, and usually merge to our feature branches rather than rebase. I'm not sure if Zach's latest talk(s) goes into this level of detail.I think a big part of the reasoning is because we tend to push up branches really early to open PR's and get discussion going. And of course rebasing public branches generally leads to hell.I know some other .com devs will rebase privately before pushing a large branch, but I would say 80% of work is just done with merging." }, { "score": 2, "text": "We used a very similar model to this at my last job, and I'm struggling to get my current team on board with this type of process. I think the main problem is that people don't trust continuously deploying master because there aren't enough tests. In my ideal world, every commit is tested (with Jenkins, Travis, Buildbot, etc), and then if the PR includes tests for the code and the build passes, the reviewer says LGTM and the committer presses the merge button on GitHub. Once the button is pushed, a build of master is triggered. If the build passes, the code is automatically deployed." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Truly, "rebase vs. every-commit-is-precious" is the "vi vs. emacs" moot question of our time.EDIT: haha, I just reminded myself of the "Every Sperm is Sacred" song from Meaning of Life." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If you work with other people, this model doesn't work so well, IME.In particular, rebasing is very hazard-prone if someone else may have checked out your branch.If you're working on a feature that needs changes in multiple components and is broken without coordination, you may be working off the same branch, or have separate branches with inter-merges. Either way, rebasing will cause trouble." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Quick tip, if you find that you have just enough power to crank the motor but not enough to start it. Shift the transmision to neutral. The power needed is less and it might give you the edge to start right up." }, { "score": 1, "text": "For the price of one roadside jump you can pick up a portable jump starter, compressor and inverter at Amazon/Pep Boys. Something like this:http://www.amazon.com/Stanley-J5C09-500-Amp-Built-In-Compres...You'll never be stranded with a dead battery again, can inflate flat tires wherever you are, and can charge your cell phone if your battery can't be revived. I bought one years ago after dealing with a bad alternator and keep it in the trunk of my car; so much peace of mind. You even get to be a hero, jumping other peoples' stranded cars without needing cables or risking your own car." }, { "score": 2, "text": "If you have access to the battery and it is not a sealed type:Check the battery fluid level. If its low, you may use some bottled water to fill it up. Chances are the car will startup and allow you to get home. Note that you should replace the battery after doing this." }, { "score": 3, "text": "definitely faster and cheaper than a tow truck -- smart thinking." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Golden." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The actual information is less exciting:Laura Champine - CanaccordGood morning. Thanks for taking my question. Your close rate performance was impressive, how do you measure that?Bob Hull - Chief Financial OfficerLaura, so a couple of different ways, so of late, we have been using satellite imagery. So we take pictures of parking lots throughout the course of the year. We max that up with actual transaction counts in stores. Of late we have been actually using some technology that involves traffic counters in the stores, which gives us close rate by day, by hour, which is going to further allow Rick and the team to optimize labor going forward. We have tested both methodologies for the same stores and got similar results. We are pretty comfortable with the methodology. It allows us to forecast and see actual improvement in close ratesFrom the earnings call:http://seekingalpha.com/article/2051323-lowes-companies-ceo-..." }, { "score": 1, "text": ">> "A little creepy? Yeah. Smart? Definitely."Is it creepy? They're only looking at car park occupancy in aggregate. They're not tracking car number plates." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I'm puzzled why they would go to the expense of using real time satellite imagery for this, versus mounting a camera on a light pole in the parking lot." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Why not track how many times the entrance/exit doors open or close? Or add a laser(?) that cuts across the entrance that counts each time it's line is broken. Directional but also simple to do." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It doesn't sound like it would make sense to do this given that stores generally have counters on the readers that detect stolen tagged items on exit. Surely it would be easier to use this data to figure out when the busy periods fall?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Some feedback on the site (is it yours?): the home page is disappointing because the it doesn't say anything. I'm interested in this space (e.g. crossfilter/pourover) but this provides no information to contrast against those, so the call to action doesn't work on me even though I might be your target market.The first few examples given are displaying really small sets of data -- e.g. realty and showroom are each displaying ~500 data points, which is small enough that a straightforward JavaScript loop that filters by checking each datum would be "ridiculously fast"." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'm not sure your description is accurate. When I think visualization platform, I think of something like D3 or raphael." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I looked at this with interest, and it's just a showcase page with a "contact us" button. I don't click on showcases, I click on documentation, getting started, and pricing links." }, { "score": 3, "text": "When I think fast, I think being able to rendering hundreds of thousands of data points in real time, kind of like 'Google Maps' but for Time instead of Space, you should be able to fly over and analyze vast datasets.As a historical note, since this is an area near and dear to my heart, I shipped an open source library several years ago circa 2007 that attempted to do this by applying the 3D graphics concept of a "mip map" to time series, with several representations of the data at various LOD automatically computed by sampling and filtering. I demoed it at Google I/O 2008 rendering 1 million data points in real time. Location here: https://code.google.com/p/gwt-chronoscope/, it's written in Java using GWT, and also the same code runs on the server for Java2D rasterization, and on Android. It has a JS API and Microformat API as well.Here's a screencast of it in action, including things like animation, markers, synthetic datasets (technical analysis), styling, and history undo/redo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLYNHQVIeNgI eventually wanted to get to a point where people could collaborately analyze data and tell stories about it. This screencast shows "Timelord" which was a integrated with social networks and supported a concept called "Micro-presentations", using a markdown-like format to allow people to write animated two-way video/chart synchronized stories. In this video, Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" is synchronized to a Chart of CO2 and Temperature.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Y21t0u_Zw" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I don't mind links to cool commercial services, but not having a pricing page means I close the tab and move on.At the very least, some sort of comment on HN giving a pricing ballpark would be helpful." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views.Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views.We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel." }, { "score": 1, "text": "They're just counting views in a particularly unrealistic but technically not incorrect way.Seems to be pretty much par for the course, like when twitter announces a billion new users, most of which are probably bots and/or quora." }, { "score": 2, "text": "They indeed fibbed during their campaign about how posterous is better than blog brand x.Specifically, about tumblr not supporting an email posting option." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There are many things that trigger a \"view\" for a post and a site: viewing the blog triggers a view for all posts visible on that page. In addition, a view will be triggered by the blog post page itself, bots and crawlers, and http://posterous.com/explore.View counts are updated every five minutes.Google Analytics is better at measuring visitors and filtering out impressions triggered by search engine bots, crawlers, or indexers.See this page for how to set up Google Analytics on your Posterous site: http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-you..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I've noticed that as soon as I submit a new post to posterous, it gets about 24 views. I'm quite sure those aren't people." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So far, without having used either one extensively, I'm finding Mendeley's \"related papers\" approach, which seems to be based on a mixture of the social graph and NLP, a bit more useful.At least in my area, journals aren't things you \"browse\" anymore, because the big journals have very disparate sub-fields represented in them, most of which I don't regularly keep up on. They're closer to repositories where papers get filed away. The sub-field I care about publishes regularly in 5-6 journals/conferences, and somewhat less regularly in another 15-20 or so, so what I really want is the non-existent Journal of the Stuff I Research, whose centroid is my own research. In reality, that journal is scattered across a bunch of other publications, but Mendeley makes some effort to reconstruct it for me.Just following something super-broad like Science or Artificial Intelligence, though, isn't as useful to me, because the vast majority of papers just aren't going to be relevant to my research." }, { "score": 1, "text": "In today's age,where Google news aggregates and clusters similar news, and where blog articles with dubious content, but strong twitter-networks, can virally disseminate information, for how long can research publications take a maintain a -40-USD-per-paper approach? I ,for one, am totally for academia.edu breaks this barrier down in the future.Curious as to what other HN'ers feel." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think efforts like these are patches for a soon-to-be obsolete system.Science publishing needs to look less like Gutenberg and more like Quora - way faster turnaround and less susceptible to corruption amongst overly powerful editorial committees.Social graph APIs have solved the identity & attribution problems that prevented blogs from filling this niche (no tenure committee cares about your blog's pageviews because they are hard to assess), so we should be seeing meaningful competition soon.I'm working on an open-source project in this space with a focus on medicine - contact me if you're interested!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Publication lags -- sometimes 3-4 years in economics/finance -- make the news feed they built less useful. If instead they built the feed around http://ssrn.com or http://ideas.repec.org, it could have value for fields where publication occurs after a paper has its impact." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Seeing sites that aim to serve the research community (pubget comes also to mind) begin to pop up is very exciting. that said, I think the social graph component is useful as a way to inform what papers the site shows you, but should not be explicitly implemented in this Facebook-ish way. Seriously, I do not want to friend my PI." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> \"President Obama is committed to creating the most open and participatory government in our nation’s history\"I'll believe that when his administration stops being one of the most secretive and most aggressive prosecutors of whistleblowers in recent history.Sources:http://www.salon.com/2012/02/09/obamas_unprecedented_war_on_...\nhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/obamas-whistlebl...\nhttp://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/expert_con...\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/us/politics/new-rules-to-c...\nhttp://www.salon.com/2012/03/30/the_most_transparent_adminis...\nhttps://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/us/government-documents-i..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "And, in the spirit of the project, they'll reject all pull requests with a patronizing response about the way things are.[1][2]1. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/legalize-and-regul...2. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-us..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I am curious about GPL compatibility in this situation. According to [1], software developed by US federal government cannot be licensed under the GPL since it is automatically in the public domain. However, the github repo readme makes the following claim:\"The project utilizes code licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and therefore is licensed under GPL v2 or later.\"While I applaud this effort and wish to see more like it in the future, is there a possible issue with licensing here?[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GP..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Who cares? This is boring code. Save all the \"it portends an open government!\" handwaving for once the Obama admin does something _actually_ meaningful (in a positive way - starting a new war doesn't count).Seriously. Much ado about a Drupal module that is used for people to petition the government to be patronized and ignored." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It would be really cool if they let the devs use their public names and GitHub accounts to commit. As of right now it is WH-NewMedia, and there is no history. Makes me think this is a marketing excersize rather then a new leaf in federal software development." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I don't think you had a failed poker software business. You wrote, released, and announced some software. That's simply step one, and the very minimum. Next, you need to iterate, which may include adding features found in other software, creating a web version, and more. I see very few lessons here, and they are on how to fail." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think taking down the site was a bad idea, after reading your article, I would have bought it (my pain treshold for random purchases goes somewhere around $20 so if you decide to sell it for under that, please drop a notice).I'm an entrepreneur myself (We sold our company to a quite big company about 1,5 years ago), I think what really went wrong was not the product, niche or anything like that. It was the marketing/sales. You should never underestimate how hard selling even a good product is.also, this kind of a product will never \"get old\", the principles behind it will be the same forever so if it's good and you get enough people who purchase, you will get snowball effect by mouth to mouth marketing.I think the worst decision you made was to waste your work when you took the site down. I also think your name is awful, it's so generic that it's hard to even find using google so what I would do is to republish the program with catchy name and add a link from your blog.Also it's not a bad idea to hang in places like digitalpoint forums and hire some indian to submit your tool to X directories, that will cost you about $10-20 and you will get a lot of google goodness.edit: you are giving it free now? Okay suits me but I would have bought it. How about adding at least a donation button?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I note that on the website there seems to be no real screenshots of your application in action that give me a good idea of what it does and how it works. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake - I generally won't download /anything/ unless I've seen a screenshot first." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Thanks for sharing the insight. A few months of work in exchange for some valuable lessons learned - well done." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Good. This will hopefully force the matter and get all the patent claims out in the open. I doubt that actual holders of patents will play their cards close to their chests here because the upside of the cut of the bundle license for their patents through MPEG LA will be so large.While I wish you couldn't patent software or algorithms we cannot ignore the fact that you can by simply willful ignorance and wishing that the patents go away if we just not think about them.At the end of this process the thread from submarine patens will be vastly reduced and hardware manufacturers and companies like MS and Apple have a realistic road to supporting VP8." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is great. It will limit FUD. MPEGLA have called, and people need to show their cards. If we hear nothing, then that shows that the MPEGLA doesn't know of any patents that affect WebM/VP8, and they can stop all this \"don't use VP8 cause of patents!\" FUD.If however there are patents on WebM/VP8, we can get them out in the open and look at them and then see." }, { "score": 2, "text": "So is this being driven by people working on the VP8 codec or the WebM project? Or is MPEG LA just trying to show that VP8 really is just a patent encumbered at h.264(and protect/add to their revenue stream?)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I have a few questions.1. Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does? If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool? Or maybe even obviate the need for a new pool?2. Does Google have anything in its royalty free patent grant that says \"If you sue us or otherwise challenge our VP8 IP, you can't get a free license from us\"? If so, wouldn't that kill any possibility of a successful MPEG-LA pool? Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google.3. Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says \"I have essential patents\"?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "And now the true FUD campaign begins..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This project is very much challenging and fascinating too. And Google Summer of Code is an incredible program for university students to get seriously involved in such projects and open source in general. Last year I worked on porting NetBSD userland to MINIX 3 as part of GSoC and believe me it was an invaluable experience for me which isn't even remotely possible without such program. This year I will work on porting GNU Compiler Collection to HelenOS ( http://blog.vivekp.me/2012/04/25/port-gcc-to-helenos-gsoc-pr... ) as part of GSoC and I am already very excited. I wish this guy good luck and thanks Google for running such amazing program successfully!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I take my hat off to the guy undertaking this. I wish there had been a Google summer of code when I was at Uni. University was some of the best time for programming I ever had. There is so much hunger and energy, and now there are sponsored projects to match. I am very glad that these programs exist." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I really hope a \"first year computer science student\" can handle this kind of undertaking. Before having taken classes in assembly language programming, operating systems, computer architecture, programming languages, compiler construction and software project management, I could never have been able to make these kinds of commits. If this coder manages to make this port, he will really have earned my respect, before even having completed most of his undergraduate career!" }, { "score": 3, "text": "This guy is undertaking a very complicated task, I wish him good luck!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I hope http://etoileos.com/ gets a SoC too!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "7pm" }, { "score": 1, "text": "6pm." }, { "score": 2, "text": "5pm." }, { "score": 3, "text": "9pm" }, { "score": 4, "text": "8pm" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Nonsense. Your memories comprise much of who you are. Losing them is like losing parts of yourself, and it's extremely disconcerting.I'm only 29, but I've had a few points of memory loss (amongst other mental issues). You've done things, significant things even, but have zero recollection. I've had to go to my email and IM archives to verify events and convince myself that yes, they happened. It's shocking when you find out days or whole weeks have happened, yet they are just erased from your mind. Imagine if a family member asked you about your trip to X, a place you'd never gone, yet everyone acted as if you had. You'd laugh and think it a joke, until you realised it wasn't a joke - then how'd you feel?Coupled with dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer's (or another loss of mental function), it's no wonder some would want to kill themselves. Why would you want to live in a disjointed dream, perhaps with a constant sense that something is terribly wrong, but not understanding what's happening? Why would you want to destroy others' memories of you, by leaving them with years of \"not you\"?I probably have 2 or 3 decades before things are really bad (perhaps a lot more with advances in medicine and technology), but if I ever get too bad, I'm going out on the highest note possible. If not for me, for my family." }, { "score": 1, "text": "The fact that only 1 in 8 Americans older than 65 has Alzheimer’s fails to register.That's supposed to be comforting? Alzheimer's isn't the only way for your mind to fall apart, and a lower bound of 12.5% of that happening doesn't give me warm fuzzies. Aging really, really sucks and we need to fix it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Let me summarize the article: \"Forgetting stuff every now and then isn't that bad.\"Yes, that is indeed the entire content of the article. I apologize if the article is meant as a joke, I'm not entirely sure either way. This makes me wonder:\"[...]but she discovered an upside to forgetting. She had forgotten old rancors as well as President George W. Bush’s name.\"I also wonder why I keep reading newspapers." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I have a fear of forgetting insights i just had - it's not irrational, because if I don't grab them quickly enough they vanish (though sometimes come back)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "\"...she discovered an upside to forgetting. She had forgotten old rancors....\"This bears repeating, because it's both interesting and unexpected. I have a relative with Alzheimer's—diagnosed a year ago—and while the signs are unmistakable, she's also still perfectly conversational, reasonably independent, and most surprisingly, much more amiable towards people to whom she was formerly rather cool. Our best explanation is exactly as stated in the article: that she had basically forgotten the rancor.Anyway, I saw her so clearly in that line of the article I had to point it out, because it was (and still is) so surprising to us that this would be an effect of Alzheimer's." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "As you are most certainly already aware you never start a article with \"As you are most certainly already aware\" because it is looking down on your reader." }, { "score": 1, "text": "How fast do Heroku workers come up and start crunching? I'd consider porting my worker code to Ruby (right now it's in Clojure) if it meant I could bring it up in seconds.And they're billed per minute or per second?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Very cool. Though I don't see myself needing the hosted version for a while, I can see how it would be useful for people who need tight control over the scheduling of their job queue." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I might just have skipped something o heroku's docs, but is there any similsr service/app to allow spinning dynos automagically as needed (in traffic peaks)?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Sweet! Any plans to provide this as an add-on in Heroku?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "You need to figure out a few things.Who is going to use your data? Do they know the format? Do they know how it was collected or generated? Can they reproduce it? Can they understand why it's useful? Is there a paper or other document they can use to understand things?If someone has questions about the data, who do they contact? (I mention this because that's part of the broader sense of 'maintenance'.)How big is the data? If it's 1K then you can store it just about anywhere. If it's 1TB then you are much more limited.How long do you want the data to last? How important is it that it survives past your winning the $70 million jackpot tomorrow and deciding to retire on an internet-free atoll in the south Pacific?In most cases I deal with, the answers are: 1) almost no one cares about the data until it's been published, 2) it's maybe a few MB, and 3) 5-10 years is fine.If so, then github, bitbucket, etc. all work fine." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Figshare: http://figshare.com/DataDryad is another, but it's specifically for data associated with journal publications: http://datadryad.org/" }, { "score": 2, "text": "You might want to be more specific about the exact type of data that you're dealing with as there might be something relevant to the particular subfield.\nIn general though, I do not know of an all encompassing throw-your-huge-data-here-for-free website." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Check out http://opendata.stackexchange.com/ - a very similar question has been asked there." }, { "score": 4, "text": "How is the data formatted?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The clearest evidence: Pelosi voted against it.Lots of HN readers are in SF.If you want to make a difference on the NSA spying, find a credible candidate to run in the primary against her and put a little money behind it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think this is a good fodder for some really inquisitive investigative journalism as I doubt very much that defenders do not receive perks and kickbacks from establishment that disperses 550BILLION dollars to private contractors from taxpayers coffers to break laws, destroy constitution and make to orwellian state.Being more paranoid than less I have a inkling that this system is being installed and police is being armed because it is known that if economy collapses, these will be instruments to quell dissent and literally destroy (imprison and/or execute) opposition - of those who might well lead the revolution.Economy is doing good, but the external debt is mindboggling those who are in the place of power might know what we don't." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The fact that someone is using an argument that was also used at one point in time by someone who has a loose relationship with the truth (like Cheney) doesn't make that person today into an automatic liar.If the argument was wrong when used 7-8 years ago in a somewhat different context, it's not automatically also wrong in today's context.Peter King and Michelle Bachmann might be bozos, but on the rare occasions where they agree with you it doesn't mean you are also a bozo by some sort of associative property. This seems like the most illogical of smears, to say that because person A and B have the same opinion on a single topic they are similar in all natures (reminding me of the billboards touting the fact that the Unabomber believed in global warming)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Can we label these defenders of spying "Statists"? Surely all of their political beliefs fall flat when you consider that they will happily sacrifice any and all values for the advancement of the State.Fascists would also be appropriate." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Key point:"To say that there is a major sea change underway - not just in terms of surveillance policy but broader issues of secrecy, trust in national security institutions, and civil liberties - is to state the obvious. But perhaps the most significant and enduring change will be the erosion of the trite, tired prism of partisan simplicity through which American politics has been understood over the last decade. What one sees in this debate is not Democrat v. Republican or left v. right. One sees authoritarianism v. individualism, fealty to The National Security State v. a belief in the need to constrain and check it, insider Washington loyalty v. outsider independence.That's why the only defenders of the NSA at this point are the decaying establishment leadership of both political parties whose allegiance is to the sprawling permanent power faction in Washington and the private industry that owns and controls it. They're aligned against long-time liberals, the new breed of small government conservatives, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, many of their own members, and increasingly the American people, who have grown tired of, and immune to, the relentless fear-mongering."" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think one of the authors has an interesting point about the different expectations in different classes (etc.).As a physics undergrad and grad student we were always permitted and encouraged to work on our problem sets together. Most of my memories of classes revolve around sitting in a room full of sleep deprived classmates trying to finish our problems at about 2am.In contrast, a friend of mine teaches physics at a university in the UK and is prohibited by the university plagiarism code from letting his students collaborate on homework. He thinks it's insane, but he has no choice. Even if he explicitly allows his students to work together, they can still be found guilty of cheating...Different academic cultures I guess." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think a lot of it has to do with a disagreement between what academia thinks is acceptable and what students think is acceptable.I realize this isn't a very popular viewpoint. It's much more socially acceptable to say \"kids today are under all this pressure\" or \"kids today are lazy,\" depending on how much you want to blame them. The question is framed in terms of how much the students are wrong, not whether they are wrong.Academia has developed rules / guidelines for what is acceptable in their circles. Who is to say this arrangement is fair / equitable / maximally conducive to development of new ideas?Throughout 90% of civilized history, we've operated under a much more culturally lax attribution system than the one practiced by today's professors. Why is the new system good and the old system bad?And the workforce operates under a more lax set of attribution rules as well. You can ask for help on a mailing list or grab some BSD source code at your day job, but God help you if you do that in CS1 class.To be clear, I think there are a lot of other causes to \"cheating\", which is really an umbrella term. There are individuals who steal others work to the point of actually not knowing how to do it. That does happen, but I'm not convinced that kind of cheating happens any more than it ever has." }, { "score": 2, "text": "When professors/schools started getting lazy... so did the students.I did a BA in Political Science in the States, and every single teacher was very concerned about cheating... at the same time they were giving out multiple choice tests/quizzes and assigning small paper assignments which were similar for everyone.I then did a study abroad program in Holland, where nobody was truly concerned about cheating. Grades were based on group presentation of literature in class, class discussion, an a big final paper who's topic you developed with the teacher (and then presented). Final exams, if they even existed for the course, were long-essay format.You can't do that with every subject, but there's no reason why your students should be able to text quiz answers to each other or re-use another students paper... there shouldn't be any multi-choice quizzes and papers should be individually developed by students with the teacher.Needless to say I went back to NL for my next degree." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I cheated whenever it suited me in high school. It was a easy and I was lazy.Then I went to a college that had an honour code that they took seriously enough that we were allowed to take our tests in our dorm rooms or where and whenever (within a reasonable period) we wanted. They were often timed, and or had other specific rules, but it was up to us to follow them. No one checked.This respectful attitude was such a breath of fresh air that I stopped cheating immediately." }, { "score": 4, "text": "When professors started thinking of education as a secondary role to research. I'm positive if someone mapped the likelihood of cheating with a given professor against that professor's workload, there would be a correlation too heavy to miss.Think about it. In the business world, people are far more likely to zone out on presentations given by people who'd rather not be presenting - so why would the classroom be any different?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I guess I don't understand what this kickstarter is sellling. I'm pretty confused :-( Maybe someone can explain it like I'm 5?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "That graphic is also terribly wrong.The Walking Dead has had 51 episodes. Each episode is about 43 minutes. That's just over 36 1/2 hours of content; not 3 days and 15 hours as the infographic suggests.Rounding off to the hour when the information can be readily scraped from a number of websites would be a pretty big oversight if this was a service." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I guess I'd have to argue that you aren't wasting time at all if you are being entertained. At the end of the day everything is just going to be a series of memories. Whether you enjoyed yourself going outside and being active or watching a great show it all ends up pretty much the same." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Article should note its US bias - this looks like exclusively Hollywood stuff.Meanwhile, recently I've enjoyed Borgen, Bron, Akta Manniskor, Green Wing...Edit: correction taken, there are a few UK shows - maybe the criterion is English language." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I could never get into Sherlock. I've tried several times because others love it. And I like detective stories. I really can't figure out what it is, too slow?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I heard a rumor once, and I have no idea how true it may be. But the rumor goes something like this: parking lots, beyond being ridiculously lucrative and turn-key businesses, are also fantastic money-laundering or tax-dodging opportunities. And so many of them are owned by shady characters, or shady companies. These types don't necessarily want to deal with things like processing credit cards, or getting into paper trails (although some modern parking lots are using credit card readers, for convenience's sake).This sounds pretty fanciful, but it doesn't seem entirely implausible.Occam's Razor says that the garage managers weren't interested because they're doing just fine, and your service wasn't solving a greater problem than the inconvenience of manually dealing with bids would cause. But I wonder if there's another factor at play here. :)Anyhow, this is a great recap of your approach, and I'm sure it's been a fantastic learning experience for you both. Thanks for writing this, and for sharing it! On another level, it frustrates me to read your story: it seems like you guys had identified a real problem with users ready to try it out, and the other side of the market just didn't have the same degree of need. That sucks." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Funny how this old post resurfaced after my new published last night. This post is two years old. See my new insight on where we went wrong, where I slap myself in the face:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6340820" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is 2 years old. Here's a better version: http://chrishoog.com/the-helloparking-postmortem-a-look-back...The last part is spot on, and says what you were probably just about to try to tell him (self-righteously I'd bet!)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The AirBnB of Parking. The ZipCar of Parking. The Priceline.com of Parking. The Groupon of Parking.There's your problem. You kept imitating other businesses instead of doing what makes sense for your customers." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Where possible, avoid creating a two-sided market unless there is asubstantial want or need on both ends. This seems like an over-generalization.I think the idea was a good one - more plausible than many others, and with an actual revenue model. I suspect that someone with better luck and/or execution will pull it off.Interesting and insightful story - thanks." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Most of the people Andrew interviews will play ball--he pushes back on a short answer, asking for more, and they oblige (thinking specifically of Noah Everett... he wouldn't stop opening up!). Not so with Godin, he tells you what he wants you to know and no more in an attempt to lead you to find or stumble on the insights that will help you learn more about yourself and what you do well." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Finished watching it, another vote for \"well worth watching\". Given me a lot to think about personally." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The comments in this thread are one reason why it might not be so good for folks to ask their readers to vote them up on HN..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Good stuff. I watched this live and Seth delivers some really good points. The most profound and useful statement in the interview from Godin for me was \"Do the work.\"I'll report back with a full review once I've read through the book." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Enjoyed this interview a lot.Minor point: I don't think 37signals (despite they are making very interesting products) are kicking Microsoft's butt, far from it :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This would actually be a problem.... if the private key was good for anything. Certigna's response says it is not:\"Certigna has issued a response claiming that the file represented a 'test' certificate that had long since expired. \"The private key available on the server corresponds to a test certificate used on our website certigna.fr,\" the company claimed. \"It is impossible to generate new valid user certificates from this key. Moreover, it is encrypted and is an SSL certificate expired since July 2010. This key does not affect our infrastructure security. The Certigna SSL authority’s private key is stored in HSM (Hardware Security Module) and hence can never be recovered. This useless file has been removed.\"" }, { "score": 1, "text": "That level of blurring is almost certainly insufficient to actually redact the information, as discussed in http://dheera.net/projects/blur.php (discussed here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1939607)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Of course, \"just revoke\" doesn't actually work: serving a outdated certificate revocation list, or preventing a connection to the OCSP (\"is this cert revoked?\") server causes browsers to trust \"revoked\" certificates. Worse, lots of software doesn't even bother to do this check. This is why the browsers hardcoded a list of compromised certificates last time.This is even worse, though, because a lot of \"real\" certificates depend on this CA. Also, there are no logs to make a blacklist of \"bad\" certificates, so you can't just revoke a handful..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I don't think this leak has included their own certificate authority key to allow you to generate your own key signed by the CA (which thinq claims), just the private key for the website, but it's certainly embarrassing for them.They seem to have modified all the files in the directory overnight, and removed the offending www.certigna.fr files from http://www.certigna.fr/crl/ (unless the website has an archived directory that the thinq.co.uk writer was looking at)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "You can find the Certigna's explanations at http://www.certigna.fr/archives/2984" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Here is some perspective from Germany, the prime exporter of horrible history in Europe: Tom Perkins is now disqualified from any meaningful discourse. Comparing some hate-mail you recieve to what happened in 1938 amounts to a declaration of complete intellectual bancrupcy.There are some pocket-tricks of discourse which can be forgiven. This is not one of them.My house is next to a memorial commemorating the place where there used to be a Synagogue which was severely vanalized in 1938 and subsequently confiscated and destroyed. The Jews of my home town were later deported to death camps. I attended the memorial service at the site on the 75th anniversary, a few months back, with a reading of eyewittness accounts and all.Do you know why most of us only know a little bit about what happened that day? Because consuming too much of the (readily available) information existing about it will throw you into despair, which is something anybody who starts reading about it soon finds out. That is how bad that day was.Comparing himself to Pogromnacht! Fuck this guy. Not his "class", but him specifically." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Kleiner Perkins has taken pains to distance itself from Mr Perkins' words:https://twitter.com/kpcb/statuses/427185213261623297"Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years. We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree."Mike Godwin posted a while back that he was going to charge $5/violation. How big a bill should Mr Perkins get?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "The "kristallyacht" joke is improved by knowing that Tom Perkins killed a guy yachting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Perkins_%28businessman%..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "There is a literal parallel (broken crystal/broken glass from bus windows), but the true question is: is the power of the government on the side of the "1%/jews" or on the side of the "progressives/Nazis"? Outside of SF city government (which is so ineffective as to not really matter), most government seems solidly on the side of the elites. While many Jews in pre-WW2 Europe had economic power (and many didn't), they didn't generally have political or military power.Consequently, this seems more like (at the extreme) the rise of the communists in Russia, progressive movements in the US in the early-1900s which caused the income tax, massive increase in size of government, and alcohol prohibition, rather than the Nazis." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Tom Perkins is over 80 years old and it could be his age. He might also reveal the true sentiment in his social circle.Living in a bubble is interesting thing. Being on the News Corp. board, consuming News Corp. owned media and then writing an opinion in News Corp owned magazine." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Don't kill the messenger, but here is a real scenario.My \"friend\" used to use megaupload, filesonic, and other services to watch all his tv content every night, and even paying for a megaupload account (never putting any money back to the creators of content). It was really convenient and the price was right. Now without it, even in the last few days, the pain point has shifted enough that he started buying the seasons of shows he is interested in on itunes. (giving a cut to the creators)There was a point even a year ago that he could get the latest film on piratebay so easily that there was no point going to the theatre. Now it seems a little harder to find the releases, or at least more inconvenient, so my friend has gone to the movies a lot more.Now I personally get the whole internet freedom side of things, but at the same time I have seen my friend screw the content creators out of their cut because some middle man made it a lot more convenient to get the content.I get the idea that some people have used these services for personal content, but if the business model of a service is _primarily_ around the sharing of copyrighted content then something should be done. And especially if the service pays the uploader based on how popular the stolen content they upload is.At least in my friends case, he spent $100 on itunes in the last day, _only_ because megaupload was not there, and there was enough pain to look for another source.If there are millions of people out there like my friend, that is a lot more revenue for the creators/studios.And no, I'm not a troll from the film industry. This is just a real observation." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's not very convenient to go back to transferring files to clients via email. Now that files can be 4GB or more it's a real problem in fact. This culture of fear the US is creating is damaging business and work." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is exactly what they wanted to happen. MegaUpload was about causing fear.First they came for the communists,\nand I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.Then they came for the trade unionists,\nand I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews,\nand I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.Then they came for the Catholics,\nand I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.Then they came for me\nand there was no one left to speak out for me." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Again, Hollywood was founded by and on piracy:\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company#..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "For those wondering how dropbox is different...Dropbox exclusively monetizes the uploader of the file, not the downloader.Megaupload, filesonic etc. actually pay the uploaders who upload attractive pirated content that attracts downloaders who can then be monetized aggressively for faster or no-wait downloads.Very contrasting business models." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "That's a good approach, but not novel and not the first host doing that.Many hosts automatically scan and fix their clients sites and have been doing that for a while. Specially when you are talking about popular CMSs like WorPress, Joomla and drupal.thanks," }, { "score": 1, "text": "Do they automatically fixing themes to CMS'es? Updating the engine is one thing, WorPress, CME, and so on, but that only takes care of a tiny portion of the attack vectors. In my experience, if a wordpress or a phpbb forum was hacked, then its the user installed/programmed theme that was the cause and not the engine itself." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Thanks for taking a look! I will be available here to answer any questions you might have about this new technology." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I think this is lovely. From first-hand experience, I know how often something as trivial yet important as \"updating that horrible Joomla website to the latest bug-fixed version\" gets low on a company's priority list. It's really just a reason to host your site in a SaaS CMS instead of uploading a bunch of PHP files yourself, but in case it's too late for that, having the hosting provider take care of this is lovely.That said, I think the article is an odd mixture of business-speak and nerd-speak. As a coder, I'd like to know whether it fixes my handwritten SQL injection vulnerabilities too (probably not). My boss, however, probably will need a simpler version to get the point." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Can you you say which languages/platforms your system is able to analyze/patch and explain some basic technical details of how it understands arbitrary customer code well enough to find and patch vulnerabilities?Can it fix bugs and write a few new features for me too?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Hi, I like this.+ Kudos for entering a market that already has leaders (delicious & instapaper for example)+ I'd like to see some delicious integration, be it sending it to my delicious -- or the other way around (grabbing links tagged with \"markitforlater\"+ the UI is gorgeous, the name is good.- how do i remove links I accidently marked?- when you first register, make it do something other than redirect you to /links/ -- I make a new account and the first thing I get is a blank page? whoop ... :) I want to know some good reading sources, I want to b taken back to the homepage for more instructions.- the bookmarklet is a bit slow, the transparent thing takes a few seconds to appear causing me to think it didnt work." }, { "score": 1, "text": "How's this different/better than Instapaper?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think your tag line should read \"a naturally zesty enterprise\" as opposed to \"a natural zesty enterprise\". And what is it, exactly, that makes you \"zesty?\"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Good start. Have you looked at apps that do somewhat similar things? You might find improvements and/or inspiration to do something better or different.Also, your site is simple enough that you might consider doing progressive signup. Don't require an account to start marking things. If they like it, they can create one later and it will save things into a unique account for them specifically." }, { "score": 4, "text": "WoW .... dude you totally ripped off this http://readitlaterlist.com/ . ReadItLater has been around since august 2007 and featured on Digg here is an article from one of Om Malik's network sites http://tinyurl.com/5bsuf4Dude reconsider the name it screams of copycat and a lack of innovation!!!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "18.7 seconds for bzip2, and… wait for it… 3.5 seconds for pbzip2. That’s an increase of over 80%!Er, not really. How about...\"pbzip2 reduced running time by 80%.\"\"pbzip2 took only 20% as long as bzip2 did.\"\"pbzip2 is five times faster.\"" }, { "score": 1, "text": "BTW, bz2 is kinda over. Check out xz and the parallel version pxz." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Since our move to multicore over faster processors, I'm sure we'll see a lot of this sort of thing, that is, people suddenly realizing that their code will be some multiple faster if they can find a way to do operations in parallel. I imagine that the compression itself might be slightly less optimal however since similar blocks that could be compressed are on different threads? I didn't dig into how this might or might not be a concern with this project, however. Long of the short of it, however, parallel is the reality. In theory one could arbitrarily split the file, and then compress each of the splits and get a speed up that is roughly comparable?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "For parallel gzip there's pigz (pronounced pig-zee).http://www.zlib.net/pigz/" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Parallel gzip, in case anyone wanted it: http://zlib.net/pigz/I've used it to great effect during incident response when I needed to search through hundreds of gigs of logs at a time." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "If you want to confirm/disprove your hypothesis you can use a tool I built for just this usecase:http://rewindhn.comIt also has an API if you want to play with the raw data yourself." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Previous discussions:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574The simplified algorithm isScore = (P-1) / (T+2)^Gwhere,\nP = points of an item (and -1 is to negate submitters vote)\nT = time since submission (in hours)\nG = Gravity, defaults to 1.8 in news.arcThe updated algorithm posted by pg has other factors, but those are related to quality control. If the same algorithm is still deployed, stories decline with time. So, during quiet periods, the new stories with far lesser number of votes rank higher than old stories with high number of votes." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I suspect that what you are witnessing is nothing more than the Thanksgiving holiday effect." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Can't speak from inside knowledge, but it has been observed when this was asked in past that during slow period (middle of night, U.S. time; Sunday mornings) it takes surprisingly little activity to rise quickly to top (if only briefly)." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Right now from what I can see it takes 3 votes to get to the homepage (I checked using the Swequity link, it was at 2 and not on the homepage, after one more upvote it was), but those 3 upvotes have to be in a fairly limited timeframe to be effective. 3 points in 5 hours doesn't cut it, but 3 votes in a half hour or so is enough.How long it will stay there depends on how many votes and flags it gets after that.A flag counts as multiple downvotes." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I am a software developer at Yandex(russian search engine company) and I want to mentor someone(or even a group -- it is much more fun to learn in a group!).Ideally, a potential mentee:\n-- Wants to code her or his own small search engine. Obviously, it is difficult to recreate Yandex or Google, but it is relatively easy to make something on a smaller scale. \n-- Knows some C++, but wants to expand her or his knowledge \n-- Is in the beginning of the software development careerThis is just a description of someone who I can help the most. If you don't quite match this description, send me an email anyway -- I can still help you with your own project in C++ or help you code a search engine in a some other language than C++. Or maybe I can just help pairing you with someone more relevant. :)Email: in profile." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I could get some help with front end web development. In exchange, I could help in maths. The deal would be: you are available to answer my dumb questions in css, html or jquery, and I am available to answer your dumb questions about maths (linear algebra, bit of number theory, analysis, probability and statistics).I guess it would be a good fit for a competent web developer who for some reasons wants to learn maths (I am about the opposite). My email is in my profile if someone is interested." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Looking for: MentorLocation: Montreal, CanadaCurrent job: Mobile app developer (Windows Phone, Xamarin iOS and Xamarin Android). Mostly C#, Windows, Visual Studio, TFS, etc.Interests: semantic web, knowledge representation, linguistics and constructed languages, UI/UX (bleeding edge, wearable and mobile), product design, logic/declarative/functional/reactive programming, distributed systems, smart contracts, task/project/time management and GTD, quantified-self, life-hacking (nootropics, speed reading, psychology, polyphasic sleep, diets), political science (geolibertarianism), transparency (as opposed to privacy), crypto-currencies/Ethereum, minimalism.People that inspire me: Bret Victor, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, Albert Einstein, David Allen, Jacque Fresco, and of course Steve Jobs (haters gonna hate).Other: I type in Dvorak. I'm an INTP. I want to change the world. I challenge you to find someone more ambitious than me. I have trouble executing my grand visions. I seek an open-minded mentor that share my vision of the world and wish to share some wisdom." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Hi, \nI'm looking for a mentor for math (proofs, abstract algebra, real & complex analysis) and algorithms.I'm a software developer working in Node.js, and very solid with JavaScript, MySQL, Mongo, and other web technologies (jQuery, Angular, etc...). I also have experience with a number of other languages including PHP, Java, C/C++. I'd be happy to mentor folks in those things as well." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I´m a student of Computer Science in my second year. \nI know HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, a little Jquery, Java, a bit of C++, and have created a couple websites.If anyone would like mentoring of any of the above, i´d love to help!\nAnd if anyone knows about Node.js or databases, i´d certainly would be glad to learn. In return i´d teach or help in whatever i can." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Have been using a Surface as well as a Win8 desktop for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say this is pretty accurate.When WinPhone first came out with the Metro UI I was a fan - there's a visual simplicity to it that's very appealing. After you use it for a while though the weaknesses become pretty glaring and hard to accept. It is often very hard to tell what UI elements are interactive and what are purely informational because they are so plain. There's no way to visually discern a non-interactive icon vs. an icon that is also a button.The lack of shading and UI chrome also means that UIs frequently become jumbled. Sections of UI blur together where on any other platform they would've been separated by a visual line, shading, or something else.The simplicity in this case has gone too far.It's also very true that many of the first-party apps have ludicrously low information density, almost as if they expect these devices to be toys. This is in stark contrast to MS's stated goal of shipping something that is more serious, more productive than iPads and Android tablets, which up until now have been seen as leisure devices.People often accuse Apple of taking style over substance, but Win8 IMO is a far, far more egregious violator.There's another big issue: the first party apps suffer from some pretty serious performance problems. It doesn't bode well for your platform when your own internal teams can't ship best of breed apps. The People app, for example, takes literally 6 seconds to load your recent notifications on a Surface RT - all the while without displaying any loading indicator. You literally tap the button, wait, figure it's broken, and just as you're about to move on it pops into existence - and of course the performance is so poor that it just magically appears on screen without transition.The entire OS is littered with sloppiness of this variety - as well as apps where touchability has clearly never been comprehensively addressed. You will move from places with gloriously comfortable touch targets (like the home screen) to apps that have 9pt text links you're expected to hit.The \"search\" charm is also poorly thought out. Just take a look at Amazon, eBay, iTunes, and what have yous that have substantial search functionality - Windows expects everyone to cram their search needs into a single freeform text input. In fact, the eBay app on Win8 builds its own search page. Surprise, search is complex, context dependent, and not all apps can pigeon-hole it into your paradigm. Oops.[edit] Extra rant: I was able to get the Windows Store app completely stuck today on the Surface. I visited an app's detail page, and tapped the Back button to get back to the search results. Nope. Back button would visually indicate interaction but do nothing. Waited, nope. Sloppy bug.So here's where it gets good. On any other platform (and in old Windows land) I could just go kill it. Except I have no idea how to go about quitting an app on Windows 8. Apple at least has the courtesy of allowing you to kill an app very quickly - if someone knows how to do it in Win8 I'd love to know, because clearly their own first-party apps are not good enough to be trusted to take care of themselves." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This seems a little harsh, to say the least. Among other things, he seems to be criticising Microsoft for both the early efforts of third-party devs (live tiles) and because users take time to grasp some of the new UI fundamentals (charms bar). Both of those issues will disappear quickly as the OS picks up steam.As an iPad owner myself, I am nothing but intrigued and excited by 8's tablet interface. It seems like it would be a massive, massive jump in usability from iOS (dependent, of course, on how the App Store fills out). Furthermore, while he may not be wrong re: 8's desktop usability, I think this review is unnecessarily harsh towards what must be seen as a significant and complicated transition product. Just as web design is changing to a responsive model where content dynamically adapts to different devices and display areas, so are OSes changing to be dynamic and adaptive. In the future the idea of a user experience where your files and program's were locked onto the hard drive of a single computer, accessed through a static, unchanging desktop will be absurd. Computer interfaces are going to become incredibly smart, fluid and responsive, and W8 is the first step in that direction. I think it is silly to just focus on what Microsoft didn't get perfect first time around - I think they should be congratulated on their audacity. What they've done is certainly leagues more impressive than Apple's plodding, torturous attempts to wedge iOS concepts into its 20-year old WIMP model (seriously, go use Mountain Lion - its a complete mess - but no one attacks Apple as harshly as they do Microsoft... funny that.) Anyway in the end I share his sentiment, can't wait to see how Microsoft builds on its great work with W9! One thing is for sure: the old one desktop to rule them all model is finished.NB: just to clarify, I haven't used W8 myself. I am sure a lot of the complaints about it being too minimalist and apps being too limited are perfectly fair. But I think Microsoft was right to strip away the clutter of the WIMP legacy and start again from scratch. Adding progressively more complexity in carefully measured increments is the best way to build a mature, balanced product befitting a new generation of computing. Again, go take a look at the average Mountain Lion set-up if you want to see a ridiculously cluttered, complicated mash of UI concepts, windows, spaces, slide-away trays, menu-bars, etc etc (and try find a normal user instead of a HN-style power user for added effect.) The only argument is for me is not whether Microsoft is doing the right thing (I completely believe they are) but whether they are managing this transition well. As someone with no experience in developing major new OS versions I can only imagine the complexity, so I am inclined to go easy and try and praise what was done well and what is a good idea rather than what didn't quite pan out in the first attempt : )" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Most of the problems with Windows 8 are typical Microsoft errors. This may be the most radical example of them but basically it fits into the same patterns. The UI revamp on the desktop side was almost entirely unnecessary from a user's standpoint. It only exists to promote Microsoft's own self interests by promoting Windows phones/tablets and attracting developers to the new platform. It’s the type of move that would have worked quite well for Microsoft in the 1990s when users had very little choice. With more competition now any bit of friction you introduce can drive users away. Either by switching to a competitor’s product or not upgrading.The other big typical Microsoft error was rushing out buggy/slow software and betting they would have plenty of time to fix it later. This worked fine for decades but user expectation’s have increased as often happens. If someone re-released a 1950s era automobile consumers would be horrified at how unreliable it was. Totally acceptable in the 1950s. Totally unacceptable in 2012. For its size and complexity I don’t think Winodws 8/RT is unexpectidly buggy/slow it’s more that the competition had the luxury of a 5-6 year head start slowly evolving their operating systems. Microsoft had to do it in 2 years. So you get all the pain of bugs upfront instead of spread out over a more tolerable time table.Ironically the biggest mistake is very atypically the type of error Microsoft makes. They rushed people into this new platform quickly without doing much to soften the ground or ease users over. Retaining the classic desktop UI was a big hedge on the Metro bet but only offers an escape not a bridge. Generally Microsoft has to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming. This is a rare case where they actually moved too fast for user comfort. If they had made Windows 8 more of a bridge with the new UI features and other major changes taking a less in your face presence they could have moved forward quickly with Windows 9 as a bigger change.All that being said I don’t think it’s a total diaster. They just need to quickly walk back a few bad choices especailly for desktop users. They need to make a few concessions to usability in the Modern UI style. Mostly they just need to accept that business practices that worked when you were a giant monopoly don’t work when you are the new comeptitor challenging the big established players." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is anecdotal, but I walked into a Windows store not too long ago to try Windows 8 on a tablet, and I was blown away at how terribly unintuitive it was. There were absolutely zero visual cues to indicate where features were, how to move around the interface. None. Now I don't know if that's changed since then, but the experience left me with such a bad taste that I told myself I would never give it another 5 minutes' chance. Throughout the entire demo, I was asking the rep to show me again how he accessed certain menus, switched views, etc.My technologically-illiterate parents went from zero to road geeks with their iOS devices in a matter of days. Had they been given the Surface, I imagine my legs would be in constant spasm from all the frustrated and confused phone calls I'd be receiving." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Personally, I think \"Metro/Modern UI\" is a complete train wreck. While it initially received a great deal of praise from the tech press for being \"unique\" and \"fresh\", my suspicion is that a lot of the praise was incredibly shallow and based purely on aesthetic appearance and not usability.This suspicion has been confirmed repeatedly from my own experience using Windows 8 and watching others use it as well." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "When designing the OS, he \"took off the table the largest performance bottlenecks in the operating system: File I/O\" by moving the entire OS to RAM, so the new OS couldn't really run large (i.e., powerful) desktop applications, which in turn meant that the new OS would have to use \"webapps to replace any and all functionality normally found on a desktop.\" So, in the end, for powerful desktop applications that need a lot of I/O, he ended up replacing file I/O with... over-the-Web I/O that is slower by orders of magnitude.I like Chrome OS, and want it to be successful, but for powerful desktop functionality with heavy I/O, a traditional desktop OS is faster.There's always a trade-off." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I worked this way for years in the 80s, when my main platform was the Atari ST. I had a whopping 4MB of RAM and would load the OS from a floppy disk into RAM, after which it would create a decent sized RAM drive that I would periodically save my work to. Compiling and running programs was nearly instantaneous, and everything ran smoothly and silently (the ST didn't even have a fan). At the end of my session, I would save whatever I wanted to keep to disk before shutting down. I never even bothered to buy a hard drive, it was such a pleasant experience. Moving on to other operating systems was an abrupt shock when the time came, leaving me somewhat nostalgic for those days.I still prefer local storage, though, without a forced dependency on the cloud." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Tiny Core (distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/) is another Linux distro that runs from ram, and you can install general software easier than in Chrome OS. Worth a look if you're interested in speed but not web apps." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I looked at the patent referenced in the article (http://www.google.com/patents/US8239662) and was disappointed to see nothing that would appear non-obvious. It looks like it would be pretty easy to infringe on this patent if one were building a pre-boot configuration management system with existing free and open source tools." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Fascinating post, and very interesting, but I have to wonder... 45 seconds to restart Firefox? And just to clear the cache? Assuming he does that \"hundreds\" of times a day (say, 200), that's 2.5 hours a day just waiting for Firefox to spin up and down.What could possibly cause it to take that long? Was there no a to clear the cache without restarting the whole browser?Unless I'm missing something, this seems very strange to me." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": " But I expected to walk out of San Francisco’s Moscone\n Center yesterday longing for the next iPhone despite my\n current allegiance to Android. That didn’t happen.\n\nIt did not happen, because it simply couldn't. After reading the article I cannot imagine what could Apple offer to satisfy him it apart from shipping iPhone 4 with Android OS.Really, if you dismiss all the good points as not so important, what's left? Rainbows and ponies?He prefers Android, that's OK but Apple just cannot satisfy him then, no matter what they do. That's OK too, that's why we have a choice." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I think a big advantage that the iPhone has over Android is that Apple is able to synchronize hardware and software development since it exists within the same company. I imagine Google works with handset vendors but there must be inherent inefficiencies in communicating across multiple companies. Apple can maintain a yearly drumbeat of putting out a polished product where the software and hardware dovetail nicely." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I have to say that I'll be very disappointed if the iPhone 4 comes with only 256MB of RAM. You would think the iPad experience would have taught them that 256MB is not enough RAM to accommodate the significantly increased amount of RAM needed to back the higher resolution display. It's a world of difference between my 3GS and the iPad, where the iPad can't seem to keep more than one page in memory at a time. It's really annoying.I think the author is quite wrong in thinking that Android will have hardware parity in 4 months. For one, Apple has probably consumed all available supply for the display hardware. Not to mention the disconnect the author himself pointed out between software and hardware. Vendors are finalizing now the hardware that will be shipping in 4 months. It will be months before comparable hardware is spec'ed out, and 8-12 before it starts shipping. the 900 pixel OLED screens most Android handsets have is nowhere near comparable to the 900 pixel IPS LCD display." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This about sums up my opinion of iPhone 4. My N1 is still a wonderful phone and for the features I use, I still don't think I'd want to trade it (back) in for an iPhone just yet.I think the key phrase there is \"for the features I use,\" however. If I were younger and cared more about video chat, I might be wanting to seriously hop on this phone.I still think that since Android 2.1 was released the momentum in terms of software development is still in Android's favor, while Apple's last development cycle seems to be all about making a seriously slick looking piece of hardware." }, { "score": 4, "text": "One pretty disappointing thing from my perspective was no-iTunes related announcements. Using iTunes as your generalized device sync hub is terrible and Apple hasn't given any hints on what it plans to do about it.The cloud sync stuff Google showed off was impressive and that's their strength. Apple has a lot of catching up to do and they need to get to it pretty soon." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Why are you bothering me? Can't you see I'm checking my Blackberry?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "* How are you going to use my money (\"put it to work\")?* To what point will my money get you?* Who is your competition?* How are you better/different than your competition?(Paraphrased of course and pretty limited VC experience here. I'm not actually sure how common they are, but I've heard these questions.)" }, { "score": 2, "text": "One of my favorite VC questions was, \"This all sounds nice, but if it doesn't work out, what other levers do you have to pull?\"I like thinking about my company that way--there's a lot of opportunities out there so it's never the end of the world if the one you're looking at dries up." }, { "score": 3, "text": "What gives you a sustainable competitive advantage?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "What problem do you solve?\nHow do you scale this?\nHow big is the market?\nWhat do you want to do this the money?\nWhat key assumptions do you need to prove to make this a success?\nWHat metrics are you going to use to validate these assumptions?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> fat arrow: (a) => a * a is the same as\nfunction(a) { return a * a; }No, it's equivalent to the following: (function (a) { return a * a; }).bind(this);\n\nThe fat arrow has lexically scoped this.On an entirely different note, I never liked how generators are marked with an asterisk. A generator isn't special, it is just a function returning an iterator. A generator should be able to return normally as well as yield." }, { "score": 1, "text": "All those additions are welcome (and wayyyyyyyyy overdue to be honest) but something is striking me as quite old-fashioned : for (var [key, val] of items(x)) { alert(key + ',' + val); }\n\nThat syntax isn't really natural, I would think something like: items(x).forEach(function(key, value) {\n alert(key + ',' + val);\n });\n\nis more natural and readable. It also brings up the question of interpolation, why do we even have to use + in the first place?Also, can someone in the know care to tell me why that is that those additions for what is the end rather basic functionality is coming so late to the language?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "> array and generator comprehension: [a+b for (a in A) for (b in B)] (array comprehension), (x for (x of generateValues()) if (x.color === 'blue')) (generator expression).Bit of an error here. The array comprehension uses "in" which will iterate over the indexes of A and B. While this is technically valid, no one would look at that and expect it to return the string concatenation of all the indexes of A and B :)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Ok but when can we expect to start using that and have our web apps work in the real world? in 10 years? 20 years?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Awesome! Most of these things works under Firefox if you want to play." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Split this into metro areas please. Generalizing for the entire state makes no sense." }, { "score": 1, "text": "So there is no connection between the two." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It would be neat to see outside the USA. When I was just out of country for some conferences, my time spent in HK and mainland China were dominated by Android phones (especially that monsterous Samsung one). Literally, I saw more Windows Phones than iPhones.Then, I went to Tokyo, which is much more diverse, including not only Android and iPhones, but quite a few flip-style phones." }, { "score": 3, "text": "That's a very odd number for North Dakota given that AT&T didn't sell the iPhone for a long time while Verizon sold Android devices." }, { "score": 4, "text": "If someone wants to run this study again with some more normalization, I would be really interested in the correlation with the data and the extremity of the wealth inequality geni coefficient.My hunch, areas that have high wealth inequality will favor one platform more than the other. Areas that have more of a gradient will be more 50/50." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Eric was actually talking about this the Rick Emerson Show (rickemerson.com) some time last week. I don't recall which day it was, but he shared the experience with the whole internet reaction to the email snip he posted that AOL subsequently responded to by claiming \"oh no, we're not forcing anyone to work for free or be fired!\" and then laid off the person who originally sent the email that was snipped from.It was a sad and frustrating story to hear (though amusing and snarky as Eric tends to be, from my limited experience).I'm a big proponent of doing what you love because you love it (like running a forum or BBS or online service or writing) rather than trying to suck every last penny out of something that you can. But when someone else is making every last dime on something while expecting your contribution to be entirely uncompensated, save for \"but you'll see your name on a byline!\", it is almost downright sickening.Unfortunately, this is a trend on the internet. It seems that fewer places are willing to pay for writers or even photographers, anymore. You should be thankful that your work is going to be used at all and then you can use the fact that someone published your content as leverage to promote yourself into something that does pay, somewhere . . . unless those people want you to work for \"ego\", too.It's very difficult to justify not paying content creators when you've just made a few hundred million dollars off of the \"they should thank me for printing them!\" model. Or . . . maybe that's exactly why it's so easy to justify. Why pay when they're giving it to you for free?I'm grateful I never entered one of these industries. I grew up with dreams of being a writer. Then I had dreams of being a radio broadcaster. Then I had dreams of being a video game developer. I went into the world of enterprise software and unix and linux, instead. A world where there is competition, but people aren't practically throwing themselves at you to do the job for free, because it's \"fun\"." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is classic price anchoring at work.For years people would be very happy to produce work and get (somewhat) paid for it because it is about writing something they are passionate for. Then, this gets disrupted because the owner gets a big payout and doesn't share. Disgusted with how things have turned out, since they now perceive their work to be worth more, they leave. Suddenly the talent acquisition has turned into nothing.(The case of HuffPost is somewhat different, presumably the traffic would stay around longer. )But this business model is subject to disruption. I read that pirates operate on a fairness principle, because many of them suffered as sailors in government ships. May be someone here can start a HuffPost alternative that issues equity instead?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I didn't want to even read that, but it was so well written that I couldn't stop." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Money quote is - AOL: you've got fail.Just one of the many points where this guy made me chortle with schadenfreudige glee." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Holy crap, Eric Snider used to write for the BYU student newspaper and I loved reading his column! I even bought his compilation books: http://www.amazon.com/Snide-Remarks-Eric-D-Snider/dp/B000REH... and http://www.amazon.com/Snide-REmarks-II-Electric-Boogaloo/dp/...You won't be disappointed to read him." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is no joke: 21 clicks from Kevin Bacon to Philosophy. Welcome to the Internet equivalent of a child repeatedly asking, \"why?\"" }, { "score": 1, "text": "A few years ago at Railscamp in Australia, Andrew Grimm proved this exact outcome. His code is here: https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-dump-parser and https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-navigation." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Hah. The hypothesis is false, but the script already has that covered via loop detection... nice :)panhard Auverland\n Panhard\n\nuh oh... found a looppanhard -> auverland -> panhard.So far the longest trail I've found, at 25 steps, was from 'ED209' via pottery, through minerals, states of matter, knowledge, finite sets, mathematics... that's one heck of a wikitrail.[edit] Scratch that, 'Horst link' is longer via one step, going via transport, commerce, San Juan de Dios Market, Mexico, Romance languages, Precambrian, Chronology, etc..." }, { "score": 3, "text": " recursion\n\n 1. Recursive\n 2. Recursion\n\n uh oh... found a loop\n\n recursion -> recursive -> recursion." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Theres a Wikipedia page on it, it works on 93% of all articles.http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Shouldn't the title be \"WiFi strength visualized\" instead of invisible signals caught on Camera?Its a cool visualization nonetheless, but the title is a little misleading." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Supposedly at one point decades ago PARC had a wire in the ceiling that rotated and whose rotational speed was dependent on the amount of packets traveling in the internet cable strung above it.(apocryphal?) (what is the truth of this?) (is it still there?)I believe Facebook is supposed to have a restroom in which a white noise privacy background is generated from global friending/unfriending activity." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The full (and HD version) of the video can be found here:\nhttp://vimeo.com/20412632" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Anyone else remember this being posted this time last year?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "The artist in me wants to smile, but the RF guy inside says, \"Hey, they recreated the radio signal coverage map with fewer dimensions and less useful information!\" (chuckle...)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The linked answer is close, but not entirely correct. There isn't a specialized wire for buttons; it uses the microphone line.Play/pause will usually be connected directly to ground. The other functions connect to ground through different impedances. While each impedance level is roughly twice the last one (which makes the detection circuit simpler) having one level at 1 ohm and the next at 2 ohms is not practical due to noise. Also, due to the way that parallel impedances work, you do not get a binary encoding of the buttons pressed. (Do you ever really want to skip the track and increase the volume at the same time anyway?)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "But what I want to know is then how the microphone signal is implemented with the 4-wire system, in addition to playback controls." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Why does the title include \"on a single wire\"?The current stackexchange question does not use the phrase \"single wire\" and more importantly nothing about your headphones will work with a single wire." }, { "score": 3, "text": "A little off topic, but this not standard additional features reminds me about fictitious features of the Martian Headsets models in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html" }, { "score": 4, "text": "It's cool to know how this works, I've been trying to repair a couple of senhaisher plug headPhones+mic for the Iphone (they broke at the jack) and I couldn't make them work. I am courrently able to use them to listenimg only. The mic and the controls are not working. And I tried all the combinations at the jack...(well maybe not all or it would be working perfectly).I tried to find some diagrams but was unable. Maybe this will help me." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There have been several posts lately about \"stupid\" or \"unlikely\" ideas that make money. I could see this falling into that category. It's an interesting attempt, if not singularly creative." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I thought I was browsing Hacker News, but I guess reddit changed their layout today." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Paraphrased from Full Metal Jacket:Pvt. Joker: \"Is that you, reddit? Is this me?\"" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I'm sitting in SFO waiting on a four hour delay to JFK. That page made me laugh really, really hard." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It's like the guy that sold the page for $1 per pixel. At least it's tongue-in-cheek cyber-begging." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This happened to me many years ago. All of our sites (asp classic) on a single server went down at the same time. We had a library we shared across them all that handled some of the db interactions. We discovered that all of a sudden a sql query had the letter 'a' replaced with a 'q' (ie 01100001, vs 01110001).I like to think my afternoon was sidetracked by cosmic radiation from millions of years ago :)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "For more on this topic, see DRAM errors in the wild: A Large-Scale Field Study http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf and Cosmic rays don't strike twice: Understanding the characteristics of DRAM errors and the implications for system design http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/ASPLOS2012.pdfI think there's another one from MS based on Windows error reporting, but I can't find it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Common way to detect memory errors in practice (i.e. how it can easily beat you) is by compiling stuff, the bigger the better. When you see the famous Internal compiler error\n\nit may be caused by some memory problem.A few years ago I was doing lot of Linux kernel builds. My desktop computer, which is Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and 2x GeIL PC2-6400 DDR2-800 C4 ULTRA DUAL CHANNEL (2x1GB each; 4GB total), was doing make -j6 (or -j8, don't remember now) of kernel one after another. After many many hours some builds started to failing with mentioned error. Let's say 1 of 4. I had to do it, so I was repeating make (automatically) till it succeeded, but later I fiddled with memtest86+. It was running day and night on all 10 tests (I believe that was test count back then) and something popped up finally (I wasn't checking it constantly) [1]. But you know what? When I switched to showing badram patterns later and the problem reappeared, it was red line without any pattern! I used to see some addresses and such whenever error was detected by memtest (or experience computer halt, etc.), but that time I had seen nothing - it was quite enigmatic. I've checked memtest sources and test 5 was filtered out from showing badram patterns as apparently not being reliable. I changed it (I've just found the changed sources on the disk and diffed it to the original release [2]), recompiled the memtest and run it again. I got badram patterns this time [3].I needed BadRAM patterns to secure myself from being constantly hit by this memory problem, but I don't remember whether I used them in the end.I still use this computer. No big compiles, no big problems, but sometimes I get the iffy feeling. :) I had a few BSODs since then and I believe they were caused by this memory problem. Haven't seen its manifestation for a long long time. Maybe my computer was simply overheated back then? Since then I'm much more into checksums than I used to be... [1] http://i.imgur.com/RMhCOLM.jpg\n [2] https://gist.github.com/przemoc/5250861\n [3] http://i.imgur.com/jFHZkVA.jpg" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Lovely read and educationaly. Also an area most overlook and why reboot mentality whilst solving this issue would not make you any the wiser. Why I always enjoy bluescreens of death, though they become non exsitent once you spot the guilty driver or hadware firmware or bios update or card moved to another slot so does not share DMA, etc... But always worth it in the end for stability.I had a system once that would have memory errors after being run for 5 days, could thrash it for anything upto 5 days without any problem and after that would get memory errors. If restarted the memory errors would return. Basicly turned out this memory would overheat after 5 days of slowly building up the heat, though a hour turned off would resolve it. That was a fun RMA given most would soak test for 3 days :(. Cheaper memory won out in the end just fine and never had a problem with it.As for single bit errors, well had fun on many a ISDN line which would get the odd error, not on networking thats fine, error correction. On realtime video, you see it. Then if a line gets so many errors it shuts off, you call up the teclo, they run diagnostics and all is fine and its suddenly working again. As part of running the diagnostics it turned out the diagnostic software would reset the error count, run diagnostics and be within tollerance. Over time the errors would increase the counter until it hit a threshold and the line would go down.Moral being howeve hard you look into a problem you will still come across those magic moments and remember bit happens." }, { "score": 4, "text": "djb has been preaching this for a while. It's amazing to me how much computer hardware trusts itself:http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Saturday I bitch at Bezos about EC2 prices, Wednesday they announce a price cut. I'll let my ego think that it isn't a coincidence :-)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "umm, yes please. amazon actually sent us (justin.tv) an email showing how many dollars we'll save this month based on last month's usage." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It seems like Bezos wasn't joking when he said Amazon is actively looking to lower their costs and pass the savings to the consumers." }, { "score": 3, "text": "An amusing case where lowering your price raises the bar to entry for competitors. Well played Amazon, well played." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am half joking. I realize there are real costs, albeit very small [orders of magnitude lower than AWS], for data transfer. For my application, I would love to outsource storage, but the economics using AWS are not favorable. I will continue to host my own storage." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "See these useful posts by Daniel Tenner:http://swombat.com/2011/1/24/how-to-PR-firms-startupshttp://swombat.com/2011/2/4/attention-seeking-for-startups" }, { "score": 1, "text": "A technique that I think works very well for startups is to find an api in the area of your startup and slice and dice the data into some nice infographpic. Serve it up to smaller blogs that love the free information. You're just giving them what they want and building an initial relationship, if they don't actually post your data it's fine, but they'll always be happy you sent it to them.Then just do it again, slicing from a different angle and present it to the blogs again. Once you have data posted somewhere, it's time to move on to guest posts. Use the data that was posted to ask a different blog if for your next data slice you can exclusively present the data as a guest post. They'll love this, though you'll need to write the article first before they actually agree.Rinse and repeat the system farther up the blog, local news, online news entity, radio, TV totem pole." }, { "score": 2, "text": "See. This Q&A is useful to you.\nhttp://www.quora.com/Is-the-press-release-really-dead?q=pres..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "@VSerge, I think question #3 is meant to be interpreted as \"Are you doing either of the following?\"." }, { "score": 4, "text": "check your Q 3, seems like the answer shouldn't be a yes/no" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Catering your site to everyone rather than females only is certainly a better approach for what your trying to do. There are plenty of times where I ask female friends which shirt they like better on me or shoes etc. It inspires confidence before you go out on a date or a big job interview. WAYWN suggests that you want to be critiqued before you head out in public rather than after? The user should be able to apply options (2 different shirts) for the community to help make the decision. Interesting idea, I think your on to something. Goodluck." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Don't ask HN, most of us only wear things that we got free at trade fairs. Go ask the guys at Styleforum and AAAC." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Is there a way to sort by nationality of user, i.e. see what the Italian users are posting, etc?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Great design, great looking interface. I haven't signed up, but how does photo uploading work? Support for mobile?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Awesome site and even more amazing team ^^" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Google and Facebook have good app install ad formats:\nhttp://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/01/mobile-app-adve...\nhttps://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/10/17/drive-i..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "As others have said, make it free. If it's paid now try to approach appgratis and pay them back with cross promotion.While your game is free make sure they spread the word on any of the social sites and also get the players who like your game rate it in the AppStore.Also try to get in contact with other indie game devs and cross promote with them." }, { "score": 2, "text": "- Make it free. Seriously there is no other way to enter the market unless you have ton of money to burn.- Have in app purchases.- Facebook Ads. First test out multiple versions of ads for Facebook and see which one gives you best results and then spend more money on it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Facebook ads can get you great installs, and very targetted too...but can go upto $1.50 CPA. If you want lower costs look at Millenial Media or Tapjoy.I would put the $1000 purely into getting direct downloads as opposed to any brand/awareness building campaigns." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I don't think Marketers should work with a fixed budget like you have described. Check out some of the applications on octopus.org, most of them have free trials and free functionality. See what works before you spend any serious money." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "it's very very cool, but i'm gonna be honest, i just want to pick it apart. as a string musician of many years, it sounds to me like a shitty viola that can play more notes at once. no offense to ol' da vinci.. but i think it could be improved. i say this because a huge amount of the skill in playing a bowed instrument is controlling changes of bow direction and the beginnings of bowings. if you aren't skilled enough, your bow transitions and beginnings are jarring, rather than the liquid sound of a skilled string player.the reason this machine sounds so bad to me is that its design removes a lot of the variables that are important for nuanced tone quality. bowed instruments simply have a lot more variables involved than struck instruments such as pianos or harpsichords. in a violin, viola, or cello, the bow has uneven tension along its length, allowing for many different articulations - it also means that when you start the bowstroke at the top or bottom of the bow, the hair tension is higher at those points. so, given an even downward bow pressure, the start of the stroke at either end of the bow has less friction and therefore less volume than the higher-friction middle, creating a naturally smooth attack as you draw the bow. this says nothing of the ability of the musician to change the bow pressure along the bowstroke, another variable.the viola organista, on the other hand, presses a metal string to a rotating bow of even tension with constant force. since the string and bow are both evenly tense along their length in this design, there is no possibility of controlling the attack and release of a note, giving a binary, on/off, jerky sound with less continuity between notes.but theres even more to this. a traditional bowed instrument not only has uneven tension in the X-axis (the bow axis), but also has uneven tension in the string axis. violins, violas, and cellos all have a bridge. the bridge not only transmits the vibration to the soundboard, it creates a tension differential just like the bow. but the resonant property of the bridge means that the string tension corresponds to resonance. the closer you bow to the bridge, the louder, fuller, and more resonant the tone. but also, the closer you bow to the bridge, the less the tension of the string is affected by the downward bow pressure (since the string is higher tension). so, bowing closer to the bridge, the resonance is large and doesn't change very much with differing bow pressure, while bowing further away from the bridge, the resonance is relatively less but is also affected more by bow pressure (since the string is less tense, so increased downward pressure by the bow pushes the string down and raises its tension).the point of all this shit is to say that traditional bowed string instruments are incredibly complex dynamic systems and a lot of their dynamism has been thrown away in this design, yielding something that offers less tonal control with no tangible benefits beyond being able to bow more strings at once. sorry da vinci." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Direct link instead of 3rd-generation rewrite:http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/leonardo-da-vin..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "According to wikipedia it is not first reconstruction of "viola organista’’."Akio Obuchi built several instruments as early as 1993.[1] In 2004, a modern reconstruction of the viola organista by Akio Obuchi was used in a concert in Genoa, Italy .\nIn 2013, Sławomir Zubrzycki constructed and performed on his own viola organista[2] at the Academy of Music in Kraków."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_organista" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I guess you could say Da Vinci was a true resonance man." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Interesting sound, a bit of a cross between a oboe and harpsichord with an air of church organ about it.I do feel though this type of sound is more adapt towards lighter, slower tempo music and may not be played in its element in the video along with the article. I could very much imagine it being fantastic compliment music wise for stage shows and given the time and period this was conceieved, then too me that makes perfect sense. Perhaps if you got an electric guitar and went back 500 years and played music of the time and period then the aspect that certain instuments lend themselfs much easier too certain music types and styles and tempo would stand out more.I do though often wonder how Da Vinchi would of got on with a patent system of out times and the endless media distractions, still think of the fun he would have with a 3D printer and in part many great inventions of past time never came about thru cost, time and in most cases technology of the time. This on the other hand does not appear to be a tecnology based limitation and would appear to be something that may of been made and past into anominimity beyond the blueprints per say. Though we do not know beyond "The effect is a sound that da Vinci dreamt of, but never heard; there are no historical records suggesting he or anyone else of his time built the instrument he designed.". Certainly would appear to be a commision based design and something that would be less elaborate than most and completely viable for the time to construct and with that I'm inclined to believe he did hear it, even if it was only in his head." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Unfortunately, most of this is propaganda unbacked by facts; the correctness of these statements depends on the particular conditions (what machine is being used, under what conditions, etc.) Plus, it omits a whole slew of problems unique to Linux, such as the fragmentation caused by abundance of distributions." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've been a Gentoo user now for a good 7~8 years and every time I've tried playing with Windows again the one thing that I immediately notice and immediately get annoyed about is the lack of 'work spaces' ( http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/items/virtual_desktops/index... ). I know there are implementations of this idea for Windows (Heck I even built one when I was learn shudder VB6 back in the day) but not a one I've seen is worth the effort of finding it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is mostly the same vein of stupid as \"Macs can't get viruses\".\" The average period of time before a Windows PC (connected to the Internet and with a default \"Service Pack 2\" installation) gets infected is 40 minutes (and it sometimes takes as little time as 30 seconds).\"Ok, so let's plug a 10+ year old unpatched default Linux distro into the net and see how long that lasts?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Lately I have seen quite a few \"Linux is better than Windoze\" posts. Each and every one of those posts woefully miss the mark. I include whylinuxisbetter.net to this list.Especially the penguin at the bottom with the flyswatter makes me dismiss the whole post out of hand. Nobody in their right mind can take a site like that seriously.The problem is that these sorts of efforts have an exact opposite effect and are more likely to drive people to Macs or back to Windows.I have yet to see an article or video that explains the true virtues of Linux over other operating systems: A stable feature rich ecosystem developed by a diverse set of professional developers giving users free access to an incredible range of software.Instead we get these lame websites littered with crap ads and factually incorrect statements." }, { "score": 4, "text": "don't get me wrong, i love linux, but this is seriously dishonest, especially the \"Forget about drivers\" section http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/items/drivers/index.php?lang..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "> And while every mother could once identify measles in a heartbeat, now even the best hospitals have to call in their eldest staff members to ask: “Is this what we think it is?”The Wakefield con has started to deliver. At least one death and over 800 cases of measles in Wales.(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-22198749)(Population of Wales is just over 3 million people.)" }, { "score": 1, "text": ">>>In 1978, having found a better rubella vaccine than his own, Dr. Hilleman asked its developer if he could use it in the M.M.R. The developer, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, then of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was momentarily speechless. It was an expensive choice for Merck, and might have been a painful one for anyone other than Dr. Hilleman.>>>“It’s not that he didn’t have an ego. He certainly did,” Dr. Plotkin recalled in a recent interview. “But he valued excellence above that. Once he decided that this strain was better, he did what he had to do,” even if it meant sacrificing his own work.That is how the hell things used to work, not driven by damn accountants and MBAs and people who want to CYA or get all the credit." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Its a pity they didn't give him the Nobel for Medicine while he was alive. He certainly deserved it. (They can't grant it posthumously)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Complete double take when I realized the little girl in the photo ended up being the CFO of the company I used to work for, and also several other companies..." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Really its a pity." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm pretty involved with the tournament operation side of Magic - it hasn't died down, it's done pretty much nothing but grow. It's always bigger than it ever has been.Magic Online is actually quite worthwhile, especially if you don't have much access to physical Magic. You can redeem.Magic Workstation hasn't been actively developed in years, but you can get it to work on linux with Wine (and probably OSX too)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "http://mtgrares.blogspot.com/2007/09/mtg-forge-20.html is an mtg ai project, unfortunately it doesn't have fireball or ivory tower for some reason :( Firemox and incantus are the major projects i'm aware of. Personally, I like playing multiplayer." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I certainly played. I also played online (7 or 8 years ago?) with http://www.magic-league.com/.Looks like the programs to play online are http://www.magicworkstation.com/ or Apprentice: http://www.magic-league.com/download/apprentice.php" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Played a fair bit at highschool. That was before this Interweb business came to town so have never played online. Still have a box of cards in a storage container back home." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I used to play. I've got some good memories of playing on Monday nights after school, at the pub I shouldn't have been allowed into!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is a result of the inferior auto-complete implementation in Chrome. Firefox does not have this issue." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I'd note that it seems to be Chrome-specific problem. Firefox, for example, searches for any substring matches, not only prefixes (although they seem to reasonably prefer results that are matching on word boundaries)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "They should've picked guardian.io and used 4em Droid Sans everywhere with lots of coffee mug stock photos." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Handy tip: the Guardian own gu.com - so you can type gu.com to go straight to theguardian.com (they also use it for their URL shortener)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm sure the domain without the "the" was taken, so this isn't particularly useful advice for someone moving to the crowded .com TLD." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "To put those data plans in perspective, I was just looking to see if my prepaid account with Telia in Sweden still was active, and I learned:Data on prepaid accounts: 100MB/week at up to 6Mbit/s for ~$4.Data on subscription account:500MB/month at same speed, $10. (if you go over, you're throttled, but no extra charge)5GB/month at same speed including WiFi hotspot access, $30.So it looks like for heavy data use, it's about the same as the ipad plan. Prepaid, though, you can only get on AT&T in the US and then it's $20/100MB." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Apple is strong-arming AT&T, IMO. They've basically backed AT&T into a corner by being responsible for pretty much all of AT&Ts growth over the last few years and AT&T must be all too painfully aware of that. The iPhone continues to dominate in spite of AT&T and that has the other carriers' attention and they're trying hard to step up their game with non-iPhone options. That much is good for everyone else, at least." }, { "score": 2, "text": "$30 for 3G access and that's cheap? It's out right ridiculously expensive! It should be half of that, $15 or so and we're talking about a massive game changing for both the demand for iPhone and iPad running on AT&T network. Seriously, I don't want to pay another $30 to get my iPad on 3G, on top of the $30 for the data access plan for my iPhone." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Dammit. The iPhone is great, AT&T isn't. I was really hoping to pick up the new iPhone and switch to Verizon this summer" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I am really curious who has problems with AT&T coverage and who doesn't. In MN it is fine, ND is iffy but actually getting better (they don't offer the iPhone in ND), and SD seems to be good." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "In my opinion, Python is the best of those for.Python is the most minimalist without being cluttered by unnecessary features (Ruby) or too many functions in the default namespace (PHP). The syntax is very elegant and easy to read (unlike Perl).I recommend that you read Learn Python the Hard Way(http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index)." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Depends on your background / intended purpose:1. if you are making web apps then Google App Engine / Python is a good choice2. If you are developing Ipod/ipad/iphone touch apps then you should learn obj C3. If you are more scientifically inclined and working in bio / Chem field then again I would recommend python.4. If you are you young and have ample spare time at your hand then learn C.5. if you are just plain beginner with no clue then I would suggest Ptyhon again." }, { "score": 2, "text": "One of Python/Ruby. Just flip a coin and get started.http://diveintopython.org/toc/index.html or http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/\"what each language is specifically used for when developing\"They're used for all kinds of things. Not worth worrying about IMO." }, { "score": 3, "text": "You can build cool stuff in any language, so it depends what your goals are. If you want to get a job as a web-developer, PHP is your best bet. If you want to have fun coding, Ruby or or maybe Python is best. If you need to maintain servers, Perl is the best to learn. Clojure is worth learning and a lot of fun, but not yet as practical for getting jobs, if that's your goal" }, { "score": 4, "text": "python is def more signal to noisePython is structured, clean. Ruby is too freestyle for a beginner (imho), perl is a shipwreck.. and PHP is too limited in scope" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The thing that really struck me when I left full-time employment for consulting was sick days and holidays. One of the very first things you learn in independent consulting is the value of a billable day. At a salaried job, if you don't show up to work some day, all that happens is some abstract counter of "personal days" ticks down by one. But as a freelancer, you don't show up, you don't get paid.It sounds obvious, but if you haven't experienced it yet, try it some time. It feels like a high-wire act." }, { "score": 1, "text": "It's important to note that hardware (and other business related expenses) should come out of your pre-tax income. Make sure to expense those things!I also (personally) find it humorous that several of his downsides are extreme upsides for me. No conferences, no after hours schmoozing with my employer, no need for software that has expensive licenses :) and most importantly NO "team-building-moral-improving-bonding activities"!!" }, { "score": 2, "text": ""A lot of advice says to only accept jobs which are willing to pay the rate you're offering..."IMHO the rule is good, but you don't have to offer the same rate for each job. If there's a job that benefits you, work out what how much that benefits you and quote the appropriate rate. If there's a job that doesn't benefit you, double your normal rate.Clients insisting on negotiating the rate is a negative signal. It may be a signal that they don't value your work at the rate you're quoting, and this is often a signal that they won't value your work. It may be a signal that they are under financial pressure (i.e. it's high risk for you). Better clients might ask for a discount but normally will agree if you stick to the quoted rate." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Great post, Dan. You might not have hit your original goal on the head, but nothing you did sounds like failing.Small steps on a long road!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I quit my full-time job a month ago in order to pursue my Master's degree, which begins next month. To keep myself busy in the meantime I advertised myself for several short-term freelancing gigs.To my pleasant surprise, I actually managed to earn the same amount as I was before, while putting in about half the hours. Really opened my eyes to how underpaid I was before." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "The author has a fundamental misunderstanding of what laws mean, and how they change.In England, it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas day? Why? Because centuries ago England was governed by a despotic, fundamentalist Christian regime that did not approve of Christmas celebrations.Should I then refrain from eating the mince pie? No. I and millions of my fellow countrymen eat mince pies, and most are completely unaware of the existence of Cromwell's mean spirited law.Why is this crime tolerated by the authorities? Because they do not go about like Robocop, enforcing laws as though they are some kind of computer program. Instead they understand that laws are a crude human attempt to model current social norms. Those social norms change over time and often the written laws don't keep up with the pace of that change.The Internet has made copyright law outdated. Social norms are in the process of adjusting to the new situation. It's perfectly rational and normal for activists to hasten that process by defying the law, and encouraging others to do likewise. Obviously, the copyright lobby will react by trying to strengthen the laws, and step up enforcement. That's fair enough too.Which side will win? Well opinions vary, but to suggest that breaking the law is in itself an immoral and irredeemable act, is naive." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This article is interesting to read and think about from a theoretical perspective. Practically, though, it is completely and utterly useless.Fact 1: Pirating is possible and fairly easy across the board.Fact 2: Some content creators try to limit access to maintain \"exclusivity\" or to keep margins high. These guys get destroyed by piracy.Fact 3: Other services strive to make it as easy as possible to get their products legally - Steam, iTunes, the Louis CK experiment. Their stuff is pirated a lot less and they generate a bunch of goodwill on the side.These are facts, and no appeal to morality is going to change that. You can't just tell someone to suck it up and say it's not their \"decision\". Of course it's their decision - everyone decides whether or not to pirate! It is ABSOLUTELY their decision. The way to curb piracy is not to appeal to people's morality and tell people they SHOULD or SHOULDN'T do something. It's never going to work.Curb piracy by making it easier, safer, and more reliable to purchase legally rather than pirate. Articles like this do nothing but reinforce the author's sense of moral superiority." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I solved this problem the \"hard\" way a long time ago. I don't use windows, at all, but GNU/Linux (Yeah, I'm this sort of guy, too).And you know what, as time goes by it's actually less and less of an actual problem; heck, I was even able to buy games for my box this year, thank you Humble Bundle! OK, this isn't free software, but at least you don't feel like you've been anally raped with barbed wire.And music? Well, I still buy CDs, mostly; the time when CDs came with DRM apparently faded away, so I don't even need to screen for this anymore (yes, I've actively boycotted some artists because of this for a while). From time to time, for music I don't actually care about, I buy mp3s from Amazon.I don't write this to emphasize my moral superiority but to emphasize that it isn't that hard. You don't agree with their policy? don't buy the frigging stuff." }, { "score": 3, "text": "The only problem I have with this article is this line:\"since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them?\"Legally obliged to pay for? Yes.Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality." }, { "score": 4, "text": "On morality: given how widespread the piracy is, we probably shouldn't assert that the moral side of the things is obvious here.Regarding the law, that's one way to look at that. Another way is that the role of copyright is about to change, and disobeying the law en masse might be one way to help that change.(Disclaimer: I'm not much of a pirate myself, I have a US iTunes Store account despite living in Russia just to be able to buy music legally. Also I'm earning money by writing software. But being able to copyright music and software is not a given, it's just how things work today, and as the world changes, this concept will also evolve.)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Um, what the hell? \nIsn't Exchange the only way to get true \"Push\" email and events in the iPhone's Mail + Calendar clients?I've been using Exchange exclusively instead of IMAP for Calendar and Mail \"Push\" since I switched to iPhone....This is absolutely outrageous." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This is why I tend to prefer the android architecture over the iphone's. If I still had an android phone and a not-google 3rd party provider stopped offering ActiveSync, I'd just use whatever their new thing is.iPhone says I have to sync using the X Y or Z protocol. android can connect to Exchange and also lets me write a custom sync app. I can download an app that hooks whatever-the-hell directly into my contact list (or other android system bits). As long as a little bit of java is written for it, any and every API can be turned into a 1st class citizen.Its the same for sharing. I click the share button on android and I get a list of all the applications that can take my android.content.Intent.ACTION_SEND intent. On iPhone, I can pick any service I want as long as it's twitter." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Does anyone know if Google is paying royalties to Microsoft for use of the Exchange protocol? If so, this may be a sensible move, especially if Google is paying the royalties on a per-account basis.Also, I'm doubtful that this affects the majority of users: on both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS), Google has a push solution with nearly identical functionality to Exchange." }, { "score": 3, "text": "IMAP and CalDAV will still work, so non-Android users are not going to be left out in the cold. Contacts can be synced with CardDAV. I get occasional errors syncing with CalDAV but I haven't tried to debug them or anything so it could easily be my stupid." }, { "score": 4, "text": "1. Launch barebones, simplified product for free2. Iterate on user feedback, often for years3. Get tonnes of folks hooked4. Begin charging" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I don't mean to be pointlessly negative, but this is the kind of post that makes me chuckle a bit at the idea of Svbtle being 'the future of journalism', and a hallmark for posts of a superior quality. There's nothing particularly actionable or novel, which would be excusable if it were at least interesting.I don't mean to disparage Alex -- a lot of his posts have been incredible, such as how he implemented asynchronous image uploading (http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/svbtle-image-uploading) -- but this would benefit from showing it to an editor and asking for advice." }, { "score": 1, "text": "> were 33% more likely to achieve them than those that merely formulated goals.I've heard this before and I've also heard the exact opposite. That telling other people your goals reduces the chances of finishing them. The theory I remember (I google but was unable to find a good link) was that telling someone a goal feels 60% as good as actually doing the goal itself. So it is easier to just tell everyone your goals and then invent new goals.I'm not trying to contradict Alex Maccaw. I've just noticed this dichotomy before and been curious how people reconcile the two theories.Has anyone else noticed these two recommendations or know what I'm referring to?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is an interesting concept and I once tried to build a company around it. Productizing the concept led to me understand some of the problems inherent with goal setting, and what you can do to counter them.Most people share a similar set of vague goals. \"Eat healthier.\" \"Make more money.\" \"Do what I love.\" \"Fall in love.\" But very few want to take the time to break down how they would accomplish it. The more time you spend on this step, the closer you'll get to understanding challenges you might face and learning how to overcome them.The act of sharing your goal makes you put less effort into achieving it[0]. We get a kind of high from imagining ourselves completing it, and this partially satisfies the urge to complete it.How do you set a time limit for your harder goals? And what happens when you don't achieve them within your established timeframe? For many people, failure can be depressing. Know in advance that timelines are fluid and that missing a milestone is okay.It's hard to group daily life tasks under your broader, overarching goals. Take time out daily (ideally at the start of the day) to remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing. At the end of the day, review whether what you did helped or hindered your stated long-term goals.Just a few suggestions from a year's worth of seeing how 20,000 people try to accomplish their goals.[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This style of todo list quickly gets out of hand, leading to more time required for maintaining a spreadsheet than actually completing tasks, leading to eventual abandonment. Stick with a pad of sticky notes and or notepad. Nothing else comes close." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I have multiple todo-lists in the iOS Reminders-app. They are labeled after things like the app I am currently working on (where I use it like a poor man's ticketing system), private life, and even a shopping list.I write down things as they come up and check regularly. Some lists get checked each time it makes sense (when I go to the store or open up XCode for a few hours of coding), others get checked every day or every week.Things that are obsolete, done or no longer important, get checked off or deleted. I am ruthless about it. The fewer items, the better.I think the secret of success is to have ONE place where every task, idea or project goes. If you have that then putting things there becomes almost an automatic reflex.And I neither store things like big life goals in my todo-lists, nor do I write down all the steps required for each task. I can think of the steps when I start working on an item.Also, it is nice that the Reminders-app is simple and clean, but at the same time that it syncs between all my devices. If I was using different systems I might try a service like Catch or Evernote to share my lists.My recommendation for everyone is to come up with a system for themselves and stick to it. It becomes easy after a while.Most of all, it gives you peace of mind. Because if you write something down, you can forget about it. Until you check your list again that is." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Recent rabiolab episode on this subject: http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a genetic disease for mosquitoes, transmitted down male lines but killing only females of the same brood, with the intended result that a relatively small release of males can cause an extreme imbalance in the sex ratio and possibly the elimination of mosquitoes from an area.The different mechanisms of mosquito sex determination aside, I haven't been able to work out something that might be feasible. Wondering if anybody else had similar ruminations, and if you'd share some of your thoughts?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "I wish the GMO developers had initially focused on products which were end-user or publicly beneficial like this, vs. just raising yields or reducing pesticide use (which are end user and societally beneficial, but can be cast by opponents as economic arguments). Without the existing anti-GMO movement, GMO would have a much easier time getting adoption in cases where it's essentially unambiguously a win (like this one)." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One of the best new applications of GMOs. Interestingly, Rachel Carson mentioned this approach in Silent Spring: https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/457876443586760704...Oxitec is making the mosquitoes via GM rather than mutation but approach is the same." }, { "score": 4, "text": "A similar trial was done in the Florida Keys 2 years ago. The genetically modified mosquitos (same company I believe), were able to reduce the mosquito population immensely. Key West if they didn't carpet bomb it with insecticides from the sky would be miserable.[1]http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/9/genetically-..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "A new form of \"money\" that you can only spend at, or via, Amazon. It's a great idea... for Amazon!--PS. In response to comments below, this is not at all like gift cards (which Amazon has offered for many years), but truly a digital currency similar to those used in online multi-player games (e.g., Linden Dollars) -- the key difference being that Amazon Coins will be accepted by the world's largest online merchant from day one.rm999: Gift cards are not fungible (each gift card has its own unique ID that can be used only once) and cannot be subdivided into smaller units (e.g., one can't split a gift card in two and send half of it to someone else), so they cannot be used as a medium of exchange." }, { "score": 1, "text": "So this is pretty interesting to me. When I left Sun in '95 to do a startup (GolfWeb) one of the things we were planning on doing was a custom currency so that you could \"subscribe\" to the online magazine, and we'd deduct currency out of your subscription for each article you read, and tag it so that you could go back an re-read it whenever you wanted. Then when you currency got low you could 're-subscribe'. We felt it would be cool because you could make it the Golf Magazine you wanted to read rather than what an Editor-in-Chief decided to put in the issue that month. And by looking what articles were driving traffic we could get a feel for our subscriber base.I ran smack into a giant wall of patents from Digicash and others. I remember saying \"Wow, 20 years from now this is going to be something cool.\"And here we are. In 2011 a number of David Chaum's patents expired. Of course there are interesting new patents that Amazon just got like this one: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...But Amazon has been aggressive in their patent defense for years.Creating their system to be one coin == one cent is also interesting as it effectively kills off the remainder grab [1]. Especially true since the balance apparently combines in your account. Basically you 'top up' with coins when ever you want. So really it has utility of shifting the payment processing charges around. It also touches a grey area of taxation, which is when you buy something for \"points\" how much tax to do you pay and to whom?[1] Pre paid phone cards that can't be re-filled would not make a call if you had $1.00 or less on the card so they became worthless with up to a $1 of un-spent value on them. In the large, across all cards, this was hundreds of millions of dollars which accrued to the benefit of the card issuers." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Putting an intermediary currency in between purchaser and product is always worse for the consumers.1. There is the leftover phenomenon where you have currency leftover and you can't spend it anywhere else2. Or everytime you need to make a purchase, you switch the exact amount out for your purchase which adds additional step of useless process" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Hey \"visualcsharp\", for some reason your post is appearing dead.\nThis is not a real virtual currency, and nothing like Bitcoin. Think of this as store credits, similar to Xbox credits or whatever they use. Its not really a layer of inefficiency because customers will always have a little more Amazon coin than they spend, so this makes Amazon a little more money in the short term and also conditions its customers to use the coins and thus use Amazons services more.(What I mean about not spending all the coins: you buy $20 worth of coin, and something you buy is worth $18.75, that leftover $1.25 is useless until you top up more. And if your not allowed to combine Amazon coin and USD then it encourages you to purchase more coins)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm not familiar with the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. Are credit card fees taken out of the 30% Amazon cut or out of the 70% that the developers receive?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "“Because your crop and scale function ignores and drops the EXIF orientation tag.”" }, { "score": 1, "text": "During the holiday break I spent some time learning about EXIF data and subsequently released Exif.in[0], a simple HTTP API for viewing EXIF data inside images and requesting EXIF-stripped copies as well.If you're a developer who needs to occasionally inspect EXIF data from user uploads, please check it out. Contact me if you have additional questions, I'm happy to help.[0] http://exif.in" }, { "score": 2, "text": "What puzzles me is that Windows XP up to Windows 7 built-in picture viewer does not support proper orientation of iPhone photos with the original EXIF metadata in place. \nPicasa (on Windows) handles that perfectly, as well as (obviously) all apps in OS X.\nWhat the hell Microsoft? Is this a political thing or is there a valid technical reason?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "There are a lot of sites that throw away the EXIF orientation tag when resizing photos. It's very obvious now that you can upload directly from the iPhone." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There's a lot of discussion of what's behind this issue in the Mozilla feature request at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298619, and more at the corresponding webkit (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19688) and chromium (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=56845) bug trackers.The concern is essentially that there may be many images on the web that have EXIF tags that don't match how those images are being used, specifically because the sites were tested in browsers that ignore the tags. So changing browser behavior now could suddenly break lots of sites that previously looked fine. It sounds like nobody has come up with a good solution yet." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This feels a lot like scala implicit conversions/views made into idiomatic Ruby.In scala, you could write an \"implicit function\" that converts Foos to Bars. If and only if you imported the function, you could then (1) pass an instance of Foo to a function accepting Bars and (2) call methods of Bar on a Foo.For example, if you defined an implicit mapping from Int to IntWithTimeMethods, you could then call something like 1.seconds_from_now, and get a Time back. You can see something like this at work in https://github.com/robey/xrayspecs/blob/master/src/main/scal...In scala, it's not required that the class you convert to is a subclass of the original, but it's a really common use case. This \"refine\" behavior gives you this same ability, but just with an anonymous subclass.FWIW, I like Scala's implicit conversions. Usually, I see them with things like 1.seconds, or object.toJson, and then you just look among the imports for something referencing time or json. I guess people could think up absurd uses, but then, those people were writing bad code anyways." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Thanks for the summarized analysis Magnus. The syntax for defining and using refinements looks very clean. I'm looking forward for this feature to be included natively." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I think Classbox is the better way to go, but this is an improvement. The performance hit is currently very significant, but I suspect it can be optimised to a negligible level.As with the .append_features hack, I think it is only good that refinement in no way implies inclusion. It will probably be better to keep the two types of modules explicitly separate." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I have mixed feelings about this.It's good because you gain an ability to scope your monkey patches.It's bad because it incentivizes monkey-patches." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Just a poor idea" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I'm kind of suspicious whenever I hear the phrase \"work/life balance\". It strikes me as something that seeks to reinforce the industrial-revolution-era idea that my (week)days should be broken into thirds: working (not fun but pays bills), playing (fun but costs money), and sleeping.Sure, that's definitely better than working 12 hour days, but is that really the goal? It seems that most of the fun-loving and happy people I know, regardless of their financial situation, don't operate in such a world.A good friend and startup founder (who you might think would tend towards free-market/libertarianism, since he works very hard and surely wants to be compensated for it) asks me: we can feed and clothe and house everyone, so why don't we? Why isn't work optional? People who work hard to make a dent in the universe will anyway, and people who just mess around don't really get much done at work anyway, so why keep up the charade? How many great ideas (or works of art) are stuck in somebody's brain simply because they don't know how to make that idea pay the rent?I'm a programmer -- or at least, of all the things I've done in my life, that's the one I've been paid the most money for. But personally, I hate that it's always indoors and sedentary. It's unfortunate that society places so much value on an activity that is arguably bad for my physical and mental health. So why are virtually all programming jobs (ostensibly) full-time, i.e., 40 hours? A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary? Out of all the possible ways of dividing up my time, spending all daylight hours indoors writing code is perhaps the worst I can imagine.I know I don't have all the answers, but I think that after a decade of work, I'm starting to know what questions to ask. If I find myself asking about \"work/life balance\", I've already lost, because it means I'm admitting that the \"work\" is something I know I won't love doing. Certainly some people have no problem breaking their day up like this, but I can't, and I suspect I'm not alone." }, { "score": 1, "text": "This country rapidly needs to regain its sanity when it comes to work/life balance. While some of us employed in tech may have the luxury of giving the middle finger to stigma, many employees in other sectors are not able to do so.What do you do when a 11-12 hour workday is expected upon penalty of being marginalized and eventually let go? In particular, what do you do when you don't have extremely in-demand skills, and cannot readily take the gamble on being back in the market for a new job? This is a situation many of our peers are in, and it deserves attention - if for no other reason than it 1) applies to many tech jobs already and 2) will only become more of an issue if/when the current tech job market contracts.If this unfortunate workaholic-glamorization trend continues, we are setting ourselves up for very unpleasant professional careers down the line." }, { "score": 2, "text": "What's funny - to me - is that I'm sitting here asking myself \"why is this even a story?\" I do not work more than 8 hours a day, when working any sort of $DAYJOB. I just don't... there's no good reason to, and I'm not going to do it. My time belongs to me (or, more appropriately, to my startup) and the opportunity cost of spending extra hours at \"the office\" is just way too high.Now, if I were working for someone else's startup, or working on my startup full-time, and had significant equity and working long hours had a direct correlation between my chances of becoming independently wealthy, then sure. In fact, I already work 60 or 70 (or more) hours a week, since I'm spending almost all of my night and weekend hours on Fogbeam Labs as it is.But, yeah... unless there's a compelling reason to work long days at a job that is basically \"just a salary\", I refuse to do it. I don't really give a shit what my coworkers, boss, or anyone else thinks about it." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I believe strongly in a sustainable pace. Software development isn't like brick-laying - you can't work more hours, past the breaking point, and expect to get marginal returns. Sure, you'll get some sloppiness and \"bugs\" in bricklaying, but likely nothing that can fundamentally ruin the project.Software developers working too much lead to negative returns as they add more bugs than they fix (or add features). And sleep-deprived coding has lead to more architectural \"bite us in the ass\" problems than any slightly faster feature output.That's why I have a cap at ~40 hrs/week. Don't work any more or I'll get mad.And I believe in the \"Results Only Work Environment\" (http://www.gorowe.com) - there is no clock; folks \"working late\" or \"coming in early\" have nowhere to hide. Only the people working at a sustainable pace and consistently delivering high-quality, working software are rewarded.And we're hiring: http://fundinggates.com/jobs" }, { "score": 4, "text": "i used to be the one who would ask, \"where is everyone we're a startup and it's only 7:30pm?\" I used to freak out if I saw a line of code that was stupidly duplicated or just plain wrong.It's been 3 startups, and 2 kids later that I realize just how wrong I was... so far no great success - but moderate success, many lessons learned and certainly people i've pushed away for truly silly reasons like perceived hours spent behind the desk or strange lines of code written... reality is I now spend fewer hours behind the desk although admittedly probably still far too many to be sane... and definitely used to (and still do) write crazy lines of code... I think it's a matter of perspective, age, prospects and who knows probably other factors that'll influence our feelings about how many hours we need to put in... after all, is it one critical bug fixed or 100s of lines of new code written which matters more - is a mater of perspective, that one bug fixed could make the difference between winning the big client or losing'em... I think \"hours spent behind the desk\" is a silly measure of ones productivity... a well rested mind after all makes far better decisions - that's not to say we should be lazy, but that we need balance - plan and simple." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "At the risk of proving that I am immature (since these words can be read as me rejecting my mortality, which he mentions in the article) I wonder why so few of these posts acknowledge the possibility that new technology will allow life to be extended?A lot of people seem to have a mental block regarding the possibility that our biological clock, like almost everything else, may eventually be changed by technology.I am especially surprised by science fiction writers. Why are there old people in so much sci fi? Why are there old people on shows like Star Trek? Does anyone seriously think we will grow old and die 500 years from now? And isn't sci fi suppose to lead the way in this area? I mean, what is the point of sci fi, if it doesn't help people imagine how the future might be different? (Obviously, I'm talking about that branch of sci fi that avoids fantasies and dystopias)Virginia Postrel has sort of hit on this theme in her writing, where she wonders why sci fi tends to be less optimistic than it used to be. The future is no longer what it once was:http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/002834.htmlA lot of things that used to be sci fi are now real: space travel, global communication devices, computers that can fit in your pocket, medical treatments for once untreatable illnesses, etc.It would be interesting to have a poll on Hacker News and ask people how long they think they will live. Since Hacker News is a community of forward looking individuals (and pro-technology too), such a poll would give a sense of how much a forward thinking group thinks medical technology is going to change in the next 60 years." }, { "score": 1, "text": "An excellent example of how blinkered most people are by the world in which they grew up - people are indoctrinated to live the life their parents lived. But we don't live in that world, and the number of beads in the jar can be radically increased through the application of biotechnology over the decades to come.[Ob reference: http://www.sens.org ]If we choose to do that of course. But if everyone walks through life with blinkers, assuming that it can only be the same as that of their parents, then nothing will change.The future depends on people who break their indoctrination and work to make things different. Acceptance of what you saw as a child is death and stasis." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Putting a finite number of beads in a jar to represent your mortality seems like one of the most harmful psychological priming effects you could undertake. Short of hiring an assassin, I don't know of a better way to ensure that you'll die within a month of some specified date.If someone recommended that you prepare yourself for your failures by repeating to yourself 50 times a day \"I am certain to horrendously screw up everything that I undertake\", would that seem like sage advice? All I can say is \"don't be surprised when you're right\".Terrible idea." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This post brings up the connection between desire for achievement and mortality. The book \"The Denial of Death\" by Ernest Becker is an excellent perspective on this phenomenon. The central premise of the book is that, in order to feel comfortable about our own inevitable mortality, we seek achievements that make us feel \"heroic\" and offer the potential to outlive our physical bodies, thereby diminishing the impact of dying.I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone, Mr. Crawford in particular. What he describes in this post is clearly in line with Becker's concept of an \"immortality project.\"" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I know OP meant well, but I hated this. I hate the beads. I hate the jars. I hate the thinking behind all of this.For the record, I'm almost as old as OP and this is all the opposite of how I think. I cherish every day. I can't wait to get to work. And to play. And to eat good food, drink good beer, and hang out with good friends and family. Yesterday, I jogged through the woods, emailed 15 friends, had cake and ice cream with my mother, hung out on hacker news, and wrote some really cool code. Today will probably be even better.Moving a bead from one jar to the other is not only depressing, it's sick. Throw out those jars, OP, and get on doing what you love.I don't care how old I am or how old anyone else is. I don't even want to think about my death, I just want to keep on living my life.I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather did, not screaming and yelling like everyone else in the car." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "So in other words, Google are the bad guys for depreciating/axing a feature which they no longer use, and which was probably never intended to be used in the way which Scroogle are using it?That's right, it's all about Scroogle. I appreciate that Scroogle are upset that their service (which relies on hacks) will no longer work, however, it's ridiculous that even developers are acting irrational these days.Why Scroogle thinks that Google should pay developers to maintain an interface to support their service which strips the ads from results, is beyond me. I'd say this change shows scroogle's true colors..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Scroogle shall be sorely missed.I've now switched to using ixquick instead:https://us2.ixquick.com/Does anyone know of any other privacy-respecting search engines that can be used over SSL ?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "They should look at http://www.google.com/xhtml?q=blah" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1337039" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm amazed it was allowed to continue for so long. It's pretty clearly against Google's terms of service." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There are numerous paths for going back to school. A big question is cash - Will you have enough to pay for school and take care of other obligations in your life (do you have a family? Mortgage, etc)?Learning is always good - you just have to pick the method/path that works for you. You also must keep your expectations inline with your abilities and method of schooling you pick.Unless you go to a very good school or you want the full-time campus experience, you might be better off going part time. At 30, you will not be part of the regular social scene - so you can gain most of the experience in a part time program. If you live near a large city (New York, Boston, Washington DC, etc) there are very good schools that have programs aimed at you. The hours are arranged for people with full-time jobs.In your 10 years of work you have learned how to manage your time. You are also much more motivated than you were when you were 18. Studying and homework are easy compared to work.If your company will reimburse tuition, you can afford the better quality, higher cost university. Unless you have high hopes (move into research) just about any reputable school will be fine as you stated your goal is to learn and change the direction of your career. Not having a BS is a handicap.I highly recommend going back to school. Look at the programs close to your location and weigh the benefits/costs of part time vs fill time. Will the cash cost of going full-time be recouped by a much higher salary? If you are serious, you can finish in 4 years if you take classes in the summer, test out of everything you can and take distance learning classes. Maybe less than 4 years if your classes transfer.It will be a lifestyle change - can you handle going to class 2-3 nights a week? Read and study on the weekends?Get some information and get started. Even if you think there needs to be some changes in scheduling at work, I bet you could do one course a semester.BTW - I went back and got my BS in CS after 5 years - then an MS part time and finally a PhD. If you enjoy the material - it can be done.Good luck!" }, { "score": 1, "text": "Also don't try to go to a CC to save money first unless you know for a fact that you want to want to transfer to schools they articulate with. Many of the schools with the best CS programs take a ridiculously small percent of transfers.Are you on the East coast? How were your sat/act scores? I would try CMU, Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech, NC Chapel Hill, & maybe Berkeley if you're willing to move that far.Remember as a nontraditional student you will get increased financial aid availability for housing and other expenses that someone under 23 doesn't get.Also note that if you can get into a private school, they usually have incredibly high grant offerings. The hard part isn't paying for private, it's getting in.Lastly, your financial aid works of the previous tax year. While in school I was able to keep my income below 15k / year and got full aid the entire time. If yours is higher, then your expected contribution may match or outweigh the yearly cost of a public school, but you'll still have a shot at very high aid packages at private schools because of the cost difference.Check financial aid info at http://www.collegeboard.com\nYour next step, no matter what, is to fill out the fafsa at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov\nYou have to wait for a pin so start right now. Then when you get your pin, it shouldn't take you more than an hour with a W2 to estimate your EFC.Armed with that information, you can start asking the right questions about cost. And if you decide to wait another year, then all you have to do is update your account instead of redoing the whole thing." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Jeff Bezos's Regret Minimization Framework:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I went back to school at 27 and finally finished with a BA and MA at 32. I would totally do it again. However, I would do some things differently but at least I did it because that was one regret I had - not having that formal education. You could fulfill some of your longing formal edu by taking some courses online (and free) through the top unis. I'm taking an intro cs course through Stanford with 25 other women and we're connecting through a google group. You get the lectures, the books,the assignments just like a regular class. Doing this with others keeps you focused and you get study groups. The biggest benefit is that you don't incur a bunch of debt. Also, yes, there can be work experience credit but it is difficult to get. Talk to an admissions counselor and they can help you with that." }, { "score": 4, "text": "30 here and 1/2 way through my bachelors, I had no coding or tech experience and I've not looked back. I had a hunch I'd like it; I've always been good at maths and logic.Jump on in, it's lovely in here!" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It's great to see all these new ideas in the db arena. But one thing I\ndon't understand at all is why they diss the idea of having data integrity. Am I the only developer who actually likes working with relational data and do not think of a schema as a straight-jacket? Am I the only one getting burnt by MySQL and SQLite playing loose with types and silently coercing data almost randomly?Check constraints are also great and has saved my ass so many times. It's so much easier to debug a problem when the crash occurs when you are inserting the data than in a wrong calculation much further down the line. Postgres for example, allows you to create regular expression constraints which you could use to ensure that a text column only contains a valid variable name. Exclusion constraints are even better, if you have a table with allocations (date ranges, integer ranges, etc) you can check so that none of the allocations overlap. Plus about a million other ways you can constrain your data.That's the killer features for me. They have helped me debug problems so many times that I consider them almost essential to writing good web applications. So why does almost all new database projects seem to neglect them?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "I commend the RethinkDB folks for supporting Mac OS X explicitly. However, the .pkg installer, while handy for folks that prefer that installation method, installs to /usr/bin/ and /usr/share/ -- areas that are traditionally reserved for system tools provided by Apple. Sure, the DMG also contains an uninstall-rethinkdb.sh script, but I'm still left quite unwilling to kick the RethinkDB tires on my primary Mac workstation.A better method, in my opinion, would be for the RethinkDB devs to contribute a Homebrew formula. That way everything would be installed into /usr/local/ by default, and updates would be a quick \"brew upgrade rethinkdb\" away. Am I the only one who would prefer that?UPDATE: It seems they had originally planned on a Homebrew formula but thought the .pkg format was better. Clearly, I disagree with that. Want to offer both? Awesome. But if you're going to pick one or the other, I think Homebrew is the vastly superior method. More here: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/5" }, { "score": 2, "text": "This is an example of an excellent website for a developer tool. Even the blogpost contains a hello world example in the header. The front page contains everything you need to know in just a couple of sections." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Does this include the new wire format? \nThat was talked about here: http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-wire-protocol-call-f...I'm itching to write a toy client in clojure." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Is anyone over here using it? What is your impressions?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is awesome work. I've been following these commits on GitHub and it's great to see AR being optimized.Unfortunately there is not enough info in these benchmarks to tell whether for a large production app 3.0 might be 10 times slower than 2.3 for that particular find you are benchmarking. Or 10 times faster. Or the same.Here's why -- for MRI the time spent on each GC run is a function of total process size/# loaded objects, which is mainly a function of your code size. In a trivial test case you can run GC in a few milliseconds. In a production app it's 100ms+. Simply by loading more code into the benchmark it's possible that we can change results completely.When benchmarking ruby code it's better to keep runtime, # of memory allocations and size of memory allocation separate and report all 3. Meaning you run the test with GC off and patch the interpreter to get the memory allocation info.Different users will have different tradeoffs between runtime costs vs GC costs depending on the app size, ruby interpreter used, GC tuning parameters, available RAM, etc. It's certainly valuable to also come up with general \"5x\" number, but that should assume and state some reasonable values for the above." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Admit it: you just wanted to use an AST so that you could easily convert SQL to and from XML for an upcoming talk." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Are there tests in the ActiveRecord code base to prevent performance regressions?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "technical erratum: if each node in the list adds all the previous nodes as new objects, then with 4 nodes, the total number of objects is 10, not 24, and the overall order of the operation is O(n^2). It's still cool that he is faster, and cooler that it is using an AST, which seems to me like the right solution." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Great work. This is why the Rails community is so damn solid." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Proof that you don't need to have market dominance to make a lot of money." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Kinda interesting that Google's market cap is now higher than IBM's despite having 1/10th as many employees. I guess it sorta makes sense, since employees are costs and therefore should adversely affect the market cap.In a similar vein, Wal-Mart (with its 2 million employees, 100 times more than Google) has a market cap of only $206B. On a good day, Apple could pass that and become #3." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Slight error: Berkshire Hathaway is currently 4th at $206B." }, { "score": 3, "text": "So the \"wisdom of the crowds\" is that Apple is really onto something with the iPad? Or are people manipulating the market into excess optimism about Apple so they can cash in?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Yes, but how long can it hold there?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "My wife has incredible credit and pays her full bill every month. A few months ago her full payment was received 1 day after the due date, so she got pinged $15 for not paying the minimum. When she called to see if they would reverse the charge, the customer service rep rudely told her no and wouldn't budge. When my wife threatened to cancel the card, the rep happily obliged. She tearfully asked me why they would be so unforgiving to her after all her diligent payments. The truth is that by being one of their most responsible customers she became one of their least valuable customers. Very irritating." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Mid-tier universities do this all the time too by rejecting students they know won't matriculate (or will matriculate and transfer in 2 years)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I understand how credit card companies would prefer people who rack up fees and interest. What I do not understand is why one of these companies would get in bed with a retail operation to offer a store card.Logically people who finance items at a store like Gander Mountain are going to be a cross-section of American society. Not all of them will fit any one, perfect profile, not all will be particularly good or poor credit risks. Nevertheless, the store is going to want its credit partner to extend credit to as many of them as possible.Conflict is inevitable if one party goes into the deal with the wrong idea." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Am I accurate that the CC industry calls those who pay their bills off in full each month, \"deadbeats\"?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Good customers are the ones who pay the minimum" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Thats a proper skeuomorphic interface. I like how it discards the card if you use backspace." }, { "score": 1, "text": "How nostalgic for me, reminds me of my days as a junior Data General field engineer - Nova 3, Eclipse S/130, S/140, S/200'S + Phoenix and Gemini 10+10 and 5+5 toploaders.Admittedly this was their Dasher D200 (current loop) and LP2 era, but we did sometimes bootstrap DTOS (Diagnostic Tape Operating System) from paper tape if all else failed. We even had a couple of ancient punched card readers in stock for certain oddball customers, just in case.I used to have a rig that looked like this in my parents dining room:http://www.chookfest.net/nova3/ebay.htmlThey made me send it back after a couple of quarters of abnormal electricity bills." }, { "score": 2, "text": "What i love most about it is that's so annoyingly slow that it actually lets you feel how computing must have been back then." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I was expecting this: http://cl.ly/image/2g1Z3K143X34Quota exceeded :)" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Makes you realize in 1000 years there will be museums where people will go to see the early ipad and android devices and wonder how anyone got anything done with them, and stare at 3.5\" and 2.5\" hard drives with their ridiculously tiny 1TB capacities. Hmm, maybe even in just 100 years." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Serial entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Once you've put in nearly every waking hour of 5-10 years of your life into building a company, it is easy to see why doing that all over again may not be all that appealing. Especially once you've got a family and other competing commitments.However, many entrepreneurs still want to help create and bring new and exciting things into the world. Becoming a VC is one relatively low-stress way of doing this. It is also a way of "giving back to the community".The few ex-entrepreneur VCs I know have been amazingly helpful, and frankly I don't think any of them are in it for the money - they have quite enough already." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Respectfully...Investing seems like it is fun and easy to a lot of people who haven't done it. I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm only saying that there's a perception that it's a fun and easy job. That perception might be right or wrong, and might not be a simple binary yes/no.Sure, there are big plusses, and yes you can make a lot of money doing it. Starting a company is no cakewalk either, and investing is a nice way to get paid while enjoying the ability to talk to lots of smart folks who educate you about a broad array of subjects.It's also not easy. A lot of investment funds fail. Not everyone is enjoyable to deal with. There are many hard truths.FWIW I know a VC who left investing to start another company b/c he hated having to say "no" to so many folks, and to deal with some of the other pressures in the environment. There are negatives that aren't always obvious. http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-...As to your bigger point about the moral and social value of investing -- I think nearly everyone would agree that religious and community leaders are more deserving of high praise than a VC. In some cases, people who sweep their sidewalks might be adding more social value than some investors ;)That being said, I think it's unfair to paint every investor with the same brush.A good VC adds value and helps companies grow and succeed. The jobs created are good for society. A company like Tesla also serves a bigger good -- moving us from fossil fuels to renewables is a good thing for society, and capitalism is an effective tool for pushing that forward. The people who gave Elon Musk money to make that happen are (indirectly) helping.Not every company is quite so noble. There are certainly lots of terribly useless investments -- http://www.businessinsider.com/a-year-later-41-million-start...That being said, if we're going to point the finger at the investors, what should we make of the business people and engineers who work on these 'useless' apps? Are they also profiting from socially useless activities? Is there no room in human life for entertainment? Is there no value in an app that makes it easy for families to share special moments with one another?I think there's a certain amount of acceptance required that not everything in a society will/can be focused on directly moving that society forward in the most obvious way, and being ok with that." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Money breeds money. It's just a consequence of the right to private property that this will be the most profitable strategy. It's bad, but changing it would require a huge rethink of capitalism, and the powers that be wouldn't like that because they are a product of the current system. Even the cool ones, like Elon Musk, counts here.I've often thought about this. Why do we have the right to own land? The people who own the land rights to various parts of Manhattan, Bay area (and other popular places) might pay some taxes and handle some paperwork but other than that they just collect what's basically a tax on everyone who wants to be where the opportunities are. Same with operative systems APIs (like win32) and processor instruction sets. It's not really relevant how the specific individual/company/family got into the position as a gatekeeper. It could have happened hundreds of years ago. Now they're just a taxman you can't vote on. Constrained gatekeeper resources like land or frequency spectrum should be government property for all eternity and rented out to the highest bidder on, say, a fifty year basis. Non-constrained gatekeeper resources should become public domain.Money isn't nearly as bad, though. You can take investments from the lowest bidder after all, but you can hardly get around Manhattan/Windows/x86. Basically, the issue here is that it's easier to let your money work for you than working yourself. Maybe you could put into law that for each share sold or dividend given (basically, whenever an investor gains cash from his/her investment) a certain percentage also has to be equally distributed among employees. That might work, but I can imagine that investment targets would be vulnerable to investment competition from countries without such a law." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I don't really agree with your assessment. First of all, having a knowledgeable person with operational experience deploy capital in viable early stage companies is indeed useful for society. Companies need capital to grow.Also, it's harder than it sounds to invest in startups. It's not the case that any rich idiot can multiply his money by being an angel investor. It's very, very easy to lose your shirt that way." }, { "score": 4, "text": "It isn't "just investing". Especially with regards to angel investing, the entrepreneurs are able to use their knowledge and expertise to allow many other startups to exist and flourish.In my personal experience, I've worked with a pair of founders that have become amazingly successful at creating viral growth in companies. So by investing & advising, they've been able to multiply their impact on the world." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Seems to me they likely have the causality reversed. As your mental acuity decreases, your ability to properly care for your teeth decreases. You forget to brush as often as you should, and so you lose more teeth. Also your brushing effectiveness could be reduced, as evaluating whether further brushing is necessary is not an entirely trivial task." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Best thing I've found for oral hygiene is a Water Pik. It will really flush out your gums. Use lukewarm water, tap cold is painful at least for me. You can put some mouthwash it it too if you like.Since I've been using one my dentist has remarked on the noticeable improvement in my gum health.EDIT: This is in addition to regular brushing of course." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I wonder if high sugar intake could be the common cause for both problems." }, { "score": 3, "text": "How is this anything more than a correlation? I saw nothing at all in support of a causal link." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Dr. Weston A. Price was a big advocate of teeth leading to other health problems long ago.His book at PG-Australia is worth a look:\nhttp://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "There is a lot of evidence beginning to emerge on the value of fasting. This was once encoded in culture as almost every culture had some concept of fasting. We lost so much knowledge when we let nutrition "science"[1] completely overwhelm the wisdom of our ancestors.On a personal note, I found fasting became much easier after I changed my diet to be ketogenic. With a metabolism primed for burning fat for energy and not subject to a blood sugar roller coaster, going a couple days without food is more of a mental challenge than physical hunger.1. We've acted like nutrition can give the same cut and dry answers that physics has, and the health of our population shows how well that has worked. Worse, nutrition seems to be driven by egos and media in a way that is nothing short of frightening." }, { "score": 1, "text": "My humble summary based on superficial reading of the paper: * Prolonged fasting = Eating NOTHING for 48-120 hr.\n\n * BENEFICIAL effect started on cycle 4 (day 39).\n\n * 1 Cycle = 2-4d fasting&chemo; 8-10d recovery.\n\n * Prolonged fasting enhances cellular resistance to\n toxins in mice and humans.\n\n * Glycogen depletion required => switch to fat/ketone\n bodies-based catabolism (!!!).\n\n * They have no idea, what the effects on blood are\n in detail.\n\n * At the beginning WhiteBloodCell count went down.\n\n * After 6 cycles things stabilized.\n\n\nArticle related paper: http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(14)00...Interesting figures from the paper: http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2014950454/2036225024/gr1..." }, { "score": 2, "text": "One of the things I've been up to the last couple years is reducing the divergence between my life and the conditions I probably evolved for. E.g., much less processed food, reduced use of artificial light that diverges from the normal day/night cycle, more frequent modest physical exercise, very low sugar consumption, way less alcohol and caffeine. To me it feels a lot like when I'm debugging a system and am trying to get back to a baseline by eliminating complicating factors.Lately I've been wondering about fasting in that context. Not eating occasionally was presumably pretty normal for our ancestors. Have other self-hackers here experimented with this?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "I don't know that the biological benefits of fasting are associated directly with cultural fasting patterns in our ancestry.I suspect they're more linked with our ancestral hunter-gatherer traits. It seems logical that early humans would go periods of time without eating while hunting, then consume a large amount of protein and fat in a short period of time.Religious and cultural fasting, however, would likely have not occurred until the development of language which is estimated at 20k-50k years ago. That's not a particularly long time on an evolutionary scale." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Some similar intermittent fasting studies related to autophagy and mTOR (rather than PKA in top article):http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20534972http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7327/full/nature0..." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Wow, this thread seems so bizarre to me. Basically a collective sentiment of \"I can't believe how stupid they are for having tried this thing that didn't work out.\"\"Failing\" has become such a well-liked buzz word in the last couple years, unless you're a company people don't like, in which case it is awful." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I bet there's more to this than just a product failure. Why admit defeat so quickly and publicly? Even if the product itself was doomed to be a failure the timing is really suspicious. Why not just ignore the Kin for the next few months and quietly kill it only when WM7 is on the market? It's almost like they were looking for an excuse to kill the project and a few weeks of bad sales was a good enough reason." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I am really curious.They developed a family of phones, created marketing plans, made partnerships with carriers and it had to be the market to tell them it was a stupid idea?Nobody in the thousands involved would have noticed that?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Man, Microsoft seems desperate these days. It's getting sad, really, like watching someone grasp at straws as they sink into quicksand... albeit the quicksand is made of gold." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I was actually just at a Verizon store and got a chance to see both Kin devices in person. I wasn't expecting to be blown away by any means, but I was amazed at how bad they were.The physical construction seemed fine, but the interface was so choppy it was hardly usable, and the colors looked really washed out. Noticeably worse than the LG and Samsung dumbphones sitting next to it.With a browser and reasonably powerful components, it could have been a nice complement to the Zune lines. My guess was that it was just a field test for MS cloud services for mobile users, and for some reason they didn't want to do it with Windows Mobile." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "This is a good thing to know about, but bear in mind that these days it's often slower than just using whatever built in square root you have access to. Especially beware in languages where you need to do something more than a cast to get the raw bits out of the floating point number, oftentimes that alone is enough to kill any performance gains you might otherwise see. Profile your code before and after, and make sure you've got an easy way to switch back if you realize that you've gone and made things slower (or worse, too inaccurate for your use case).If this was a universally effective optimization with no potential downside, it would already be built in to your standard math library..." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Also see:\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_rootAnd for more analysis and improvements see those papers:http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2003/InvSqrt.pdfhttp://www.daxia.com/bibis/upload/406Fast_Inverse_Square_Roo...http://www.geometrictools.com/Documentation/FastInverseSqrt...." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Huh. The only really interesting part of the algorithm is the initial guess with the magic number, and he doesn't go into that part at all. Read Chris Lamont's paper if you care enough to want to understand it. The only downside to Lamont's paper is that it's a post mortem analysis rather than a pedagogical derivation. I worked out a step-by-step development of the algorithm last year, but I've never gotten around to writing it up in tutorial form." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Obligatory XKCD reference:http://xkcd.com/664/Image text: Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see." }, { "score": 4, "text": "This is the kind of article I come to Hacker News for. A clever hack for a real-world problem with an excellent explanation." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "To save anyone the trouble, this project is totally empty yet.It doesn't say anything about the ability of the owner to port F# to the JVM, but just know that it is just a readme, three almost empty java classes, and the beginning of an ANTLR parser.So to answer other questions here, you can't even compare it to F# on Mono. F# on Mono works perfectly. The F# compiler and runtime is huge, and getting to parity will probably take at least a year to a very dedicated team." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Very pleased to see this. F# is a really exciting language, hamstrung by being tied to the MS platform. Hoping we'll see more opensource F# projects as a result." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Since F# was derived from OCaml, I think readers may also be interested in taking a look at the OCaml-Java project:\nhttp://ocamljava.x9c.fr/(It's essentially what it says in the tin...)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "Has anyone tried running the F# through IKVM[1] (.Net <-> java)? That wouldn't solve this, but it should be possible to run F# on a JavaVM.[1] http://weblog.ikvm.net/" }, { "score": 4, "text": "How is this supposed to work given the JVM does not support tail calls?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Perhaps it is just late and I'm cynical but this screamed \"hey we're still cool, c'mon see?\" There were a series of articles about Microsoft's research projects that had the same vibe. Perhaps it is the BusinessWeek lens. Hard to say.I cringe though on that title, if its a \"secret\" lab then you wouldn't know about it, so it isn't secret, so what is it?" }, { "score": 1, "text": "The UAV or aerostat balloon broadband relay thing heavily hinted at in this article is one of the more amazing ideas. Totally feasible with current technology and highly beneficial; it seems like an obvious thing to do even now.I guess I'd care about it more for disaster or conflict zone operations vs. ongoing operations in poor countries (since vastly more money is available in the short term in the first case), but it would probably make sense everywhere. At 50k feet, you can cover a pretty large area with spot beams, and probably do aerostat to aerostat relays. Combined with undersea fiber, you could do a good job of providing high speed communications services to some underserved markets.I assume you'd use high altitude aerostats to provide low bandwidth coverage to large areas, and then local, lower altitude balloons or uavs, fed by the high altitude stuff, in areas of high user density." }, { "score": 2, "text": "I am reminded of my former company's CTO who once told me that true and disruptive R&D can only be done by a company with a monopoly power, so they can hide their true margins in blue-sky work. I for one hope they can do this as long as possible, since I love Google and I love Google X and I worked for two great R&D departments that were cut short on all long-term projects by controllers looking to post higher margins in competitive environments." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This sounds like something straight out of Wayne Enterprises. I wish more companies could do things like this and see what can be created and achieved. An area that I could see being able to do something like this without having to face Shareholders, management, etc. that most companies have to do is Universities. University students should be able to take advantage of the resources that universities have and universities should encourage this. They could essentially have a new flock of minds every year to help innovate projects. I believe Georgia Tech started something like this a few years ago." }, { "score": 4, "text": "The awesome things you can do when your key product masquerades as a mint." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Would I spam my friends for $2? No.Would I share something useful/cool with my friends for free? Yes.Would I bother to prove I had shared with my friends for $2? Probably not." }, { "score": 1, "text": "There are plenty of studies that show that people will do things for free that they'll never do for pay, and moreover it's pretty easy to come up with intuitive examples of this in real life. Lots of people would be more than willing to help their buddies move, doing many hours of manual labor for free because that's what friends do, with the only tangible reward being pizza and beer at the end of the day. But if your buddy went on Craigslist and offered the monetary equivalent of that pizza and beer to hire movers, nobody would take him on it, as it would be way below minimum wage; if he tried to offer you that money instead of the pizza, you'd be insulted." }, { "score": 2, "text": "This setup probably makes people feel like they're being bought. You can still buy their clicks, but you'll probably have to figure out a way to make them feel like it's all their idea." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Whenever I'm presented with stuff like this (another similar situation is being asked to apply for a loyalty card at most any store), I think of it this way - the reason you have to ask me to do something is because it's a task that you want to make sure doesn't stand in the way of the rest of the transaction, meaning it's probably going to be something that's going to irritate me or something I won't want to do. Offering to bribe me a trifling sum in return means it's probably a serious pain in the ass, so of course I'm not going to do it.When someone has their hard-earned money out and is about to pay, they are cautious. They have made sure that they have gathered exactly what it is they want to purchase. They know that virtually anything out of the cashier's mouth or anything appearing on the checkout page that isn't \"thanks, come again!\" is likely to be something that's going to take time to do, cost them money, cause them to lose some of their privacy, receive junk mail, spam their friends, etc.He'd probably be better off simply putting a message on the \"transaction completed\" screen simply asking them if they could do whatever it is he wants them to do." }, { "score": 4, "text": "That's not free money. That's a discount." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I was kind of disappointed in this article. He starts off with \"It's easy to write a loop which looks infinite but in fact completes quite quickly...\" which makes it sound like he's going to write a loop that looks finite but in fact spins forever (maybe because of some trick like the integer overflow he uses at the beginning). That would have been interesting.This is just trying to write a short program that'll run for a long time. Meh." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Here's a 43-character solution. for(int x[99]={1};!x[98];++*x)*x*=!++x[*x];" }, { "score": 2, "text": "As someone points out in the comments, isn't this true of any NP-complete problem with large enough inputs? This isn't all that surprising then." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I think you can save 2 characters. Here is the original char i,x[99];for(x[98]=i=1;x[98];i++)i*=!++x[i];\n\nHere is my improved version int i,x[99];for(x[98]=i=1;x[98];)i*=!++x[i++];" }, { "score": 4, "text": "Not very interesting post. I could think of teens of problems out of the top of my head that are theoretically finite but there's no enough mass/energy in the universe for them to complete (like generating a program that solves chess).His first example of \"for (int i = 1; i > 0; i++);\" Would be matched by some ugly trick like:int i = 0; while (!i);That's warranted to halt as the chances for a bit in i to be flipped by cosmic rays tends to be 1 over time." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Here's a great video that bryanl made showing off gist and what makes it interesting:http://www.vimeo.com/1381658" }, { "score": 1, "text": "http://gist.github.com/785Is that supposed to happen?" }, { "score": 2, "text": "Neat, except it doesn't always use the correct syntax highlighting. It seems like it uses filename extensions to determine the language, which can be ambiguous if two different languages use the same extension (I tried saving as Objective-C but it shows it as Matlab. Both use the .m extension)" }, { "score": 3, "text": "this thing is awesome... i was just hoping someone would build this exact app ... how many times have I had to paste back and forth between pastie and my editor when collaborating on something!Great job github guys." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I like clean and sparse web pages, but this is going too far. How about a \"what is this\" or \"tell me more\" link?" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "What is that makes the United States such an attractive place to immigrate to for people whose skill sets could take them almost anywhere in the world? (In other words, why is that successive sessions of Congress can basically count on lots of people desiring to live in the United States, thus setting up an environment in which immigration regulation is restrictive rather than open?)(I'm genuinely curious about this, as an American who has lived overseas--with the proper visas of course--for three years in the 1980s and for three years spanning the turn of the last century. I've only lived long-term in one other country, so I still could learn a lot more from all of you who participate here on HN about why people leave their country of birth, which is surely disruptive, to go to another country to live. What's the big deal about living in the United States?)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "They really should call them "indentured servant slave visas". The H1-B visa holder has to leave the country if he gets fired (and doesn't find a new employer quickly), and if he switches jobs the green card process has to start over.Because the H1-B visa employee is legally bound to the job, he becomes more attractive than hiring a US citizen, (assuming equal salary and qualification)." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Does anyone know why the number of visas isn't capped on a per-company basis?Last year, apparently 40,000 of the 85,000 available visas went to outsourcing companies, and one outsourcing company, Cognizant, got 9,000 visas!http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...At my last job, we tried to get an H1 for just one person, and failed in the lottery!I feel there would be much less abuse of the H1 if each company could receive only say 100 visas a year max, or a % of their US workforce size max, or something." }, { "score": 3, "text": "i recently saw a table of firms awarded these visas. it seemed nuts to me that a large proportion of the visas go to firms whose primary business line is outsourcing in one form or another.i typically think of visas as fulfilling unmet hiring needs for domestic US firms - like Facebook! - but instead see they are largely squirreled away by firms whose primary function is overseas labor cost arbitrage.I would be interested to hear informed opinions as to why so many visas go to these firms. i thought the stated objective is to help american firms meet their hiring needs where the local work force is deficient.instead, it seems like all the demand is corralled into a few firms which do the dirty work for everyone else. if your primary purpose is outsourcing, how can you plausibly claim to be searching for qualified workers inside the US, and thus deserving of access to these visas?" }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm going to be in this lottery and it's unnerving thinking about how different my life could turn out if I get this visa vs. don't. Young male, can't imagine I'd try again next year so it could be the difference of a much higher paying job plus living 5+ years in America vs. staying in my home country probably for life. Nothing wrong with my home country, but I'm excited of the prospect of living in America and the experiences that go with.For people in the same boat: I think it's easier to cope with this if you take the view that you have to be lucky to get the visa, not unlucky not to. No one complains of ill-luck when they buy a lottery ticket and don't win millions. Positivity folks! :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "TLDR: Docker is an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers.Version 0.4 introduces a remote HTTP api, a new Build functionality, and an experimental Openstack integration." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Many thanks to shykes, mdaniel, backjlack, and the many others that contributed to this terrific release. So much has been accomplished in just a few months, which augurs well for what Docker will look like by year's end. Bravo, everyone." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Feels like there is some wheel-reinventing going on here. Maybe someone could help me out on why the build scripts here would be preferable over something like Chef to manage the repeatable builds within a new container? Or maybe I've totally missed the point." }, { "score": 3, "text": "One of the reasons why I really enjoy while reading the notes is the fact that Docker does not shut itself into Linux world and promises working with alternative technologies, like BSD Jails. That's a great news and I am looking forward to see it happening!" }, { "score": 4, "text": "On my list of things to do: compare docker to zerovm to libvirt to ??? and figure out which one works will work best with rdma (infiniband) networks. Combined with nixos (maybe), this could work wonders for hpc data provenance." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "It took me > 60 seconds to figure out how to turn the page. My feedback is this: I hate it. When I'm using my ipad, every blog that has onswipe enabled leaves me frustrated. The UX feels slow, choppy, and unnecessary.I don't understand what problem is trying to be solved. Browsing web pages on the ipad is a pleasant experience. I can scroll with my finger. With onswipe, I can no longer scroll with my finger. Why was that a problem? that's not a problem. It doesn't need solving. Please tell us explicitly the value you are trying to add, because I cannot see it." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I have to say that I'm a little bit baffled by things like this or recent updates to Flipboard that introduce \"features\" that I can't imagine anybody asking for.Why show articles in a grid instead of a list? A list makes the hierarchy clear, and is easy to parse.Why have articles text on multiple columns instead of one? Multiple columns are a left-over from print newspaper who had to use them for practical reasons. I personally find them less readable than a single column (except maybe for very short articles).Why prevent me from zooming in or out to adjust the font size? This is actually one of the coolest thing about browsing the web on the iPad, and you break it.I think it's a shame, because I really like some of the other features, like the preloading of the content, and stripping away the ads and distractions." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Have you guys not noticed that every time someone posts a link to an onswiped article, half the comments are about how shitty onswipe is?" }, { "score": 3, "text": "If you look at my previous comments, you'll see that in all my years at HN have never written a negative rant on a product. Till today.Onswipe is so bad. It makes me want to throw my iPad against the wall.\nEven the \"Show original article \" link takes 30 taps to work. Arrrgh. \nSlowest, nastiest, crashing thing I have to encounter. \nIt hurts that magazines like slate use it because it means I can't read the article.One interesting thing is that swipe will increase pageviews but lowers the experience because people like me will repeatedly load the page after it crashes and hit the \"view original version\".Just writing this post has got me in hives. Please just destroy this software, it would make the world a better place." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Onswipe is horrible. Either use native scrolling or web-scrolling. Don't fake it. It doesn't work, fails in the most crappy ways. Just stop." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Pros: It's small and you can embed it, both into higher level languages, and it's footprint is small enough for embedded systems. It's used in a LOT of gaming related things (WoW, most games on portable with a scripting languages), and even desktop software (ex: Adobe Lightroom). It has a JIT for some CPU types, and gets great performance.Cons: There aren't that great of CLI tools or REPL's available (mainly to keep the system small). It's standard library is lacking in some parts (by intention to keep it small) compared to other scripting languages. Embedded tech isn't as sexy as frontend tech like javascript/etc. It doesn't come bundled by default with our OS's, unlike perl/python/ruby. The development team is somewhat closed, being a university project from the start.TL;DR: Lua tries to stay small, and as a result it isn't as much of a multi-tool like other scripting languages." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Number 1 reason: The standard library is tiny, so you need to pull in a lot of 3rd party modules (or write stuff yourself) for things that are just \"batteries included\" in Python or Ruby." }, { "score": 2, "text": "It's strange, I was actually looking for a freelance Lua developer last year and had a hard time finding one. Adobe Lightroom's SDK is in Lua and I need to create a couple plugins (and don't have time myself).You'd think Adobe would put more resources into promoting the language." }, { "score": 3, "text": "1) lua is not owned/marketed/pimped by any company2) lua has no primary app domain/killer app. games to web to embedded to.. ?3) lua is happy being itself. dosent try to \"be the solution\", its just a tool." }, { "score": 4, "text": "Its getting more use, judging from comments before 37 signals are using it embedded in Nginx, Redis has it embedded, people are discovering it." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Horse shit. There is nothing wrong with telephone system or the numbering scheme or the fact that we use numbers.It's simple, doesn't require lots of technology (a analogue phone handset only has a few components in it) and it is ubiquitous across the entire globe.The moment you add a DNS-type layer or indirection to it, it becomes more complex. Handsets become more complex, the network becomes more complex, usability declines.The problems of remembering or writing down a name versus a number are far greater.This is typical technophiles ignoring the minimal needs of about 90% of the populous of this rock." }, { "score": 1, "text": "Firstly, the comparison with DNS doesn't really make sense.DNS works because there is a one to one mapping between name and number. There is only one johnsmith.com anywhere on the web. OTOH, there are many thousands of John Smiths out in the real world, each with their own unique set of phone numbers (and other things that this guy seems to have overlooked from an \"address book\", like an actual address, or an email address, or relationships to other people).DNS doesn't solve the fact that many people called John Smith may have their own websites. They won't all be found at johnsmith.com. This is solved through a combination of search engines (equivalent of a phone book) and bookmarks (which is pretty much the equivalent of a person's address book - so DNS alone clearly hasn't removed the need for address books in the online world).Secondly, that's all totally irrelevant to the actual issue with Path - whether someone's got access to a complete list of your contacts with all of the details required to contact them, and got this without your permission." }, { "score": 2, "text": "\"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.\" -- Phil KarltonThere is not an easy solution to the \"problem\" that this article describes.The current situation allows us to look up numbers without letting some central authority know what numbers we are looking up and without letting them have our address book. Any solution to this \"problem\" is likely to reduce everyone's privacy by getting rid of one of these features.EDIT: You can contact me using the same \"username@domain\" style address for email, XMPP and SIP. I guess that's something. People still need to store my \"username@domain\" address in an address book though." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This is called a phonebook, and people don't always want their numbers to be published in it. Also, how do we uniquely identify people? This post is so badly thought through." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'm happy to see someone ranting about this, I couldn't agree more.This was solved years ago in the VoIP world by ENUM, but it didn't get enough traction because nobody can earn any money with it.Here is how it works: your phone \"number\" would be sip:[email protected] and you'd have a legacy alias which is a regular phone number, for example: +40317105163. Then someone which knows my legacy number may use DNS to get my SIP URI and call me for free: dig NAPTR 3.6.1.5.0.1.7.1.3.0.4.e164.arpa\n ; ANSWER SECTION:\n 3.6.1.5.0.1.7.1.3.0.4.e164.arpa. 3600 IN NAPTR 100 5 \"U\" \"E2U+web:http\" \"!^.*$!http://ag-projects.com!\" .\n 3.6.1.5.0.1.7.1.3.0.4.e164.arpa. 10 IN NAPTR 100 5 \"U\" \"E2U+sip\" \"!^.*$!sip:[email protected]!\" .\n 3.6.1.5.0.1.7.1.3.0.4.e164.arpa. 3600 IN NAPTR 100 5 \"U\" \"E2U+web:http\" \"!^.*$!http://saghul.net!\" .\n 3.6.1.5.0.1.7.1.3.0.4.e164.arpa. 3600 IN NAPTR 100 5 \"U\" \"E2U+loc:http\" \"!^.*$!http://bit.ly/d41V3X!\" .\n\nYou can put several things in DNS, the above example (real one) contains 2 websites, a SIP URI and a URL with location information (a link to Google Maps).There is an Android application called ENUMdroid which will do a ENUM query for each number you dial and it'll present a screen with it's findings: http://saghul.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/CAP2010021...Apple allows you to use FaceTime and iMessage with email-style addresses, lets see if they can push the model forward :-)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "Some thoughts on this article:- This guy clearly has a limited understanding of the field. This quote is laughable: \"There are only two computationally difficult problems in bioinformatics, sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction.\"- As a bioinformatician, I feel sorry for this guy. Just like any other field, there are shitty places to work. If I was stuck in a lab where a demanding PI with no computer skills kept throwing the results of poorly designed experiments at me and asking for miracles, I'd be a little bitter too.- Just like any other field, there are also lots of places that are great places to work and are churning out some pretty goddamn amazing code and science. I'm working in cancer genomics, and we've already done work where the results of our bioinformatic analyses have saved people's lives. Here's one high-profile example that got a lot of good press. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing-...)- I'm in the field of bioinformatics to improve human health and understand deep biological questions. I care about reproducibility and accuracy in my code, but 90% of the time, I could give a rat's ass about performance. I'm trying to find the answer to a question, and if I can get that answer in a reasonable amount of time, then the code is good enough. This is especially true when you consider that 3/4 of the things I do are one-off analyses with code that will never be used again. (largely because 3/4 of experiments fail - science is messy and hard like that). If given a choice between dicking around for two weeks to make my code perfect, or cranking out something that works in 2 hours, I'll pretty much always choose the latter. (\"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.\" --Donald Knuth)- That said, when we do come up with some useful and widely applicable code, we do our best to optimize it, put it into pipelines with robust testing, and open-source it, so that the community can use it. If his lab never did that, they're rapidly falling behind the rest of the field.- As for his assertion that bad code and obscure file formats are job security through obscurity, I'm going to call bullshit. For many years, the field lacked people with real CS training, so you got a lot of biologists reading a perl book in their spare time and hacking together some ugly, but functional solutions. Sure, in some ways that was less than optimal, but hell, it got us the human genome. The field is beginning to mature, and you're starting to see better code and standard formats as more computationally-savvy people move in. No one will argue that things couldn't be improved, but attributing it to unethical behavior or malice is just ridiculous.tl;dr: Bitter guy with some kind of bone to pick doesn't really understand or accurately depict the state of the field." }, { "score": 1, "text": "I have some experience working at a genomics research company and I'll broadly +1 Fred's experience about the industry, although in less negative terms. I got out before I got jaded, so my perspective is a bit more \"oh, that's a shame\" than his. I really like genetics, bioinformatics, hardware, deep-science, and all that but the timing and fit wasn't right.The tools are written by (in my experience) very smart bioinformaticians who aren't taught much computer science in school (you get a smattering, but mostly it's biology, math, chemistry, etc.). Ex:http://catalog.njit.edu/undergraduate/programs/bioinformatic...http://www.bme.ucsc.edu/bioinformatics/curriculum#LowerDivis...http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/biotechnology/ms-in-bioinfo...The tools themselves are written by smart non-programmers (a very dangerous combination) and so you get all sorts of unusual conventions that make sense only to the author or organization that wrote it, anti-patterns that would make a career programmer cringe, and a design that looks good to no one and is barely useable.Then, as he said, they get grants to spend millions of dollars on giant clusters of computers to manage the data that is stored and queried in a really inefficient way.There's really no incentive to make better software because that's not how the industry gets paid. You get a grant to sequence genome \"X\". After it's done? You publish your results and move on. Sure, you carve out a bit for overhead but most of it goes to new hardware (disk arrays, grid computing, oh my).I often remarked that if I had enough money, there would be a killing to be made writing genome software with a proper visual and user experience design, combined with a deep computer science background. My perfect team would be a CS person, a geneticist, a UX designer, and a visual designer. Could crank out a really brilliant full-stack product that would blow away anything else out there (from sequencing to assembly to annotation and then cataloging/subsequent search and comparison).Except, I realized that most folks using this software are in non-profits, research labs, and universities, so - no, there in fact is not a killing to be made. No one would buy it." }, { "score": 2, "text": "John Graham-Cumming (jgrahamc here) co-authored a piece on making scientific code open. It was received well-enough that Nature published it [0]. This approach has inspired others to do better work by describing a concrete problem, then outlining steps to fix it on an individual and institutional level.When someone finds fault with the way a field conducts itself, I would implore them to constructively influence that field. You might be surprised how many are actually sympathetic to your concerns.I'm not dismissing this author's concerns: to do that would really require knowing the molecular biology field (which is more than sequencing, it turns out). I do neuroscience right now, and programming can be a problem for some. But a constructive suggestion to change can have much more impact than a long rant.[0] http://www.runmycode.org/data/MetaSite/upload/nature10836.pd..." }, { "score": 3, "text": "This piece seems to have touched a nerve in the bioinformatics community, though I have no idea why. Much of what is said here is obvious to anyone working in academic research that requires programming expertise.Yes, industry typically pays more than academia. Yes, most molecular biologists cannot code and rely on bioinformatics support. Yes, biological data is often noisy. Yes, code in bionformatics is often research grade (poorly implemented, poorly documented, often not available). These are all good points that have been made many times more potently by others in the field like C. Titus Brown (http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/category/science.html). But they are not universal truths and exceptions to these trends abound. Show me an academic research software system in any field outside of biology that is functional and robust as the UCSC genome browser (serving >500,000 requests a day) or the NCBI's pubmed (serving ~200,000 requests a day). To conclude from common shortcomings of academic research programming that bioinformatics is \"computational shit heap\" is unjustified and far from an accurate assessment of the reality of the field.From looking into this guy a bit (who I've never heard of before today in my 10+ years in the field), my take on what is going is here is that this is the rant of a disgruntled physicist/mathematician is a self-proclaimed perfectionist (https://documents.epfl.ch/users/r/ro/ross/www/values.html), who moved into biology but did not establish himself in the field. From what I can tell contrasting his CV (https://documents.epfl.ch/users/r/ro/ross/www/cv.pdf) to his linkedin profile (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/frederick-ross/13/81a/47), it does not appear that he completed his PhD after several years of work, which is always a sign of something something going awry and that someone has had a bad personal experience in academic research. I think this is most important light to interpret this blog post in, rather than an indictment of the field.That said, I would also like to see bioinformatics die (or at least whither) and be replaced by computational biology (see differences in the two fields here: http://rbaltman.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/bioinformatics-comp...). Many of the problems that apparently Ross has experienced come from the fact that most biologists cannot code, and therefore two brains (the biologist's and the programmer's) are required to solve problems that require computing in biology. This leads to an abundance of technical and social problems, which as someone who can speak fluently to both communities pains me to see happen on a regular basis. Once the culture of biology shifts to see programming as an essential skill (like using a microscope or a pipette), biological problems can be solved by one brain and the problems that are created by miscommunication, differences in expectations, differences in background, etc. will be minimized and situations like this will become less common.I for one am very bullish that bioinformatics/computational biology is still the biggest growth area in biology, which is the biggest domain of academic research, and highly recommend students to move into this area (http://caseybergman.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/top-n-reasons-t...). Clearly, academic research is not for everyone. If you are unlucky, can't hack it, or greener pastures come your way, so be it. Such is life. But programming in biology ain't going away anytime soon, and with one less body taking up a job in this domain, it looks like prospects have just gotten that little bit better for the rest of us." }, { "score": 4, "text": "> the software is written to be inefficient, to use memory poorly, and the cry goes up for bigger, faster machines! When the machines are procured, even larger hunks of data are indiscriminately shoved through black box implementations of algorithms in hopes that meaning will emerge on the far side. It never does, but maybe with a bigger machine…I spent five years working in bioinformatics, and this is exactly the attitude of both the researchers and the other developers on the projects I worked on. It was very frustrating." } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "I think one of the big points that this article misses (I love these kinds of posts, though) is that the United States are crazy diverse. The post talks about it a little with regards to safety on the streets, but I mean in a broader context: Silicon Valley is hardly a microcosm of the entire country. States, regions, and cities have broadly differing cultures and atmospheres, sometimes even to the same extent as going from one country to the other (especially when it comes to climate.)Given that the author said he had spent time in a great number of states, I was quite surprised by a lot of his points being seemingly so specific. I think that's one of the US's biggest advantages: five years in one city will leave you a different person than five years in another.(Also, if you think people are friendly in SF, spend a weekend in South Carolina. You'll forget how not to smile.)" }, { "score": 1, "text": "So you are a straight European dude in your 20s-30s in one of the most lucrative and in-demand industries in the USA in SV/SF. This might give you a slight case of rose colored glasses. You might have seen in your travels to other parts of the country that many Americans do not have this standard of living. To be blunt, it is likely that minority women in the deep south would have a slightly different expierence.The realitiy of living in the USA is :\n1. Don't get sick. We don't want to pay for you to go see the doctor, even if it would save $millions in medical bills for diabetes/cancer/chronic disease. There is the legal obligation for any emergency room to stabilize you, but then they kick you out if you can't pay.2. Don't have kids. Kids cost a fuckton, and the governmnet doesn't really want to pay for it, but they partially do through a clusterfuck of programs (WIC/CHIP et al). There is no legally-mandated Parental leave or anything, that is for those lazy Frenchmen.3. Don't be a woman. People will make rape jokes about you all the time (hello microsoft, E3) and that would be just the start of it. Never mind access to affordible healthcare like cancer screening and abortion.4. Be christian, or if that isn't possible be Jewish. Just don't be Athiest/Muslim/Hindu/Bhuddist/....If you aren't Protestat Christian there is no chance you will be president, JFK excepted.5. Belive that USA = #1. Keep that flag flying and that coolaid flowing.Disclaimer: I'm just a white guy trying to get a PHD/marketable skills so I can leave this country and move 140 miles north to Vancouver. Yes I know Vancouver has a bit of a heroin/prostitution/housing problem, but it's better than the current situation." }, { "score": 2, "text": "The USA is so vast and so diverse that it's very hard to make general statements that apply to all of it. While the author of this post claims to have seen quite a bit of America, a lot of what he says doesn't mesh with my experience on the east coast. I have never paid half price for food if I'm kept waiting, for example, and the weather here is humid and hot in the summer and bitter cold in the winter. Most roads are OK in urban areas but I've seen some truly dreadful roads in more rural areas. Most houses (excluding condos) here aren't glued together, either.Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, but things aren't quite as rosy here as they are on the west coast, especially in the Valley." }, { "score": 3, "text": "Europeans often comment on flimsy US house construction. Perhaps it's because of the relative newness of most US housing stock. And also the propensity of Americans to tear it down and start over. There's less reason to build for forever in this case.Another factor is seismic conditions (the OP was clearly most influenced by the Bay Area). Masonry or stone construction is incompatible with earthquakes." }, { "score": 4, "text": "I'd like to add a few points from my own experience:Cars: In America/Golden Gate Park, people take their car into the park! They even park it right there, right next to where they have their picnic. Odd but understandable. In Europe cars are antithetical to nature and relaxation, something industrial you hide out of sight, while in the US they are (apparently) integral to it.Hours. In the US/SF people 'like' to be in the office. It is practically their home when they are not commuting or sleeping. While on the weekends they go on trips to be away from home/the office (I could not imagine raising, rather than merely producing, a family in the US).(all you say about the weather is true, unless you live in West SF. National parks are fabulous indeed!)Poverty. Without being a Republican who believes the poor / racial minorities are to blame for their own d*mned fate, it is not possible to enjoy central San Francisco. Never seen so many homeless people in such horrible states of existence (and I am not a Republican but a social democrat, so I was not comfortable with US society...).(the US is this odd mix between rich and modern and a 3rd world country... also with regard to infrastructure)Traffic lights (and a lot of traffic) at almost every corner in the city. Perhaps nice if you are driving, but very annoying when you want to enjoy an uninterrupted walk.Grid-pattern (mostly responsible for the former). Cities look like they were built on a chess-board. Nice if you want to go straight, but not good when you want to go diagonal (in Paris they solved this with diagonal avenues). And forget building diversity or atmosphere, especially in the suburbs (which are 97% of the city).Houses are indeed quite flimsy. But in East SF there are at least some lovely pre-war houses that have atmosphere (I lived in a room in one, loved it...).Business / startup opportunities; indeed, nothing beats California (never seen so many things bordering on the silly, fully funded...).On balance, after a year in the US, I chose to go back to the old world when a great opportunity came up there. I'm a European again :)" } ]

[ { "score": 0, "text": "http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253682http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237517" }, { "score": 1, "text": "From my anecdotal experience, hackers tend to have a distaste for organized religion. Atheism and Agnosticism seem to run strong among programmers." }, { "score": 2, "text": "Curiousity about systems makes you a hacker, be it religion or a machine or behaviour. If you don't question your beliefs, you are not a hacker." }, { "score": 3, "text": "I count a belief in \"the singularity\" as to some degree religious. Composed of equal parts millennialist eschatological zeal, denial of the lack of compelling evidence for the emergence of the requisite strong AI, and even its own Heaven (see \"Rapture of the Nerds\"), Singularitarianism is usually where your religiously inclined hacker ends up." }, { "score": 4, "text": "There is not a relationship, just because people do or don't believe in a god, many gods or what have you has little to do with their creativity. If there is a relationship it might be that some religions have an emphasis on reading and books. Some people also confuse the want for secularism with the absence of belief in something. Religious belief is culture as much as anything, often parents bring children up to believe or not." } ]