skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've thought about this a little. The 3 options I could think of, along with their issues:

1. Using an OS's comments/metadata field to store tags and include them in a desktop-search program -- the comments/metadata field is not compatible between operating systems and can be lost while copying files between filesystems or operating systems, so this is not a robust solution. And currently only OS X supports comments/metadata field for all file types.

2. Using a central database that does all the file-to-tag association -- this may be 'less universal' or robust than #1; to be cross-platform this requires someone to write a new program that plugs into a given OS and runs constantly monitoring files in case you move or rename them.

3. Storing the tags in the filename itself -- this will give you long, ugly filenames, but should be the most robust because all of the modern OS's and filesystems support 256 character filenames (usually including the path) which gives plenty of room for a number of tags separated by some kind of delimiter character e.g. filename###tag1#tag2#tag3.ext . This would need just a simple tag-management program to help you tag files (and can function as a nice file explorer as well, like http://www.nudgenudge.eu and its clone http://lunarfrog.com/taggedfrog) which does not need to be constantly running, and could use whatever desktop-search program to use the files.

Therefore at the moment I think #3 would be the most robust and versatile solution. Then someone just has to make a frontend for file renaming and tag-database storage/rebuilding from filenames/viewing...
Open Source is simply a modern 'try before you buy' for a majority of products. You cant sell me a sofa without letting me sit in it, you can't sell me a TV without me seeing it running. The assumption that people will buy before they try is almost exclusive to food products, which manage the majority of new customers by referral (or through marketing sugar-laced anything's to children).

Assuming people will buy a software product before they try it is absurd, even Microsoft gives 60-day trials of Office with all new computers. Open Source is no different than traditional ways to sell products. Open Source is simply a more genuine form of shareware, trial-ware and nag-ware.
regulators need paperwork, and Tarsnap doesn't have it.

Well, if this is a pain point for your customers, then perhaps you should consider paperwork? Would also provide additional peace of mind to those not needing paperwork.

Sometimes the customers you end up with aren't what you had in mind at the outset. Don't know if this is how you'll end up, but you may want to consider it if you end up switching your marketing message from "this is only for true geeks who like to compile their own code. Others need not apply."
In the old Command & Conquer games you'd get about 5 minutes of gameplay, and then all of your buildings will spontaneously self destruct. Googling for the problem would inform you of your guilt :)

That's a pretty decent way of doing it.
As a user I could as well contract a company to adapt, develop or/and support a free software to my needs. As an example there are all these companies providing services for nagios.
Companies could as well share the cost of a developer to build a software they need.
Best live performances of 2009?
Good work. For cheap stuff like this, you need to act right away to get data. Thinking doesn't really do anything. I hardly know anything about A/B testing (except what I read here), but I don't think you need to let this test stop you from other tests (just create different landing pages, I think.) You mentioned elsewhere that you were going to wait 'till this experiment ended to start another. Don't delay, do it now.
Me neither ... I never leave the keys to my account in the ignition.
(IANAL) In California, it's illegal to place (injuring) booby-traps, because it's effectively punishing somebody for a crime without a trial and that violates due process of law. However, refusing someone use of a stolen good isn't the same as punishing them for stealing it. I doubt this has come to trial yet, but a reasonable line to draw would be that bad side effects can castrate the stolen software as much as you want, but cannot extend any further than the intended use of the software itself. Having stolen software not work is totally fine; damaging the host computer in some way or leaking private information is probably a good way to get yourself sued.
They ripped it off from Louis C.K.

It's from his bit, "That nigger made the shit out of my coffee!" from Chewed Up.
That's a very limited way of looking at free software.
Free software gives you some very important freedom you wouldn't have otherwise. It also improves software quality ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.") and development.
Photovoltaic Retinal Implants Powered By The Images They See
Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, and emotional stability required to make it through an engineering, science, or even business degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?
Ask HN: Make Money From Home....?
I know this is somewhat off-topic here, but I think this is the best community to ask.

I know some people that need to earn a living. They're not picky, and anything over $8/hr full-time would be worth their time. They have no specialized skills, but are willing to spend the first few months learning (not making much, if any, money).

Are there good/consistent/reliable/simple ways they can trade their hard work and minds for a minimum of $8/hr? Is there too much competition from the third world driving down prices on human capital?

My guess is MTurk pays too little. Anything porn related or ethically questionable is out.

So, what ideas does the collective HN brain have?

Thanks in advance.
This is a silly problem for IE to have for sure (not that anyone's surprised), but really... if you are using more than 30 <style> tags, then you've likely got some fundamental design/architecture issues to begin with.
>Someone else can check the ToS and privacy notice, but if I remember correctly sex and religion went to world-viewable by default if they are specified on the profile at all.

I know some of the defaults changed, but that's not what I asked.
I can't agree more strongly here. I elsewhere argue for a website change; this is even a better idea because it'll even more clearly show the difference. And hey--maybe all of us are wrong and the academic minimalist look is more profitable? If this is true, please come back and report it--maybe we're all wrong!

But unless your customer demographics are vastly different than those of many of the people here who earn good money with proven UI techniques, I'd bet you could do better with different marketing (website, etc.). But you don't really have to bet. What'll it cost you, 10 bucks for a domain name and some time? The first rounds don't really even need a designer, though you'll save some time if you procure one now instead of later.

Test, test, test. There are a good number of qualified people (not me) that are giving good advice, but your test results are king. Start running variations, and you and HN can look at the data and start making progress.
It is entirely true, actually. Intel can sell a processor with over 1 billion transistors (Itanium) for less than $250 and break even, even though instead they sell it for thousands because it's appropriate to do so in Itanium's target market. IBM can't sell a CELL (no pun intended) for anywhere near that little without taking a loss.

Of course, a more appropriate comparison to Itanium is POWER since it's aimed at the same market -- IBM charges upwards of $10k per socket compared to $2500 per socket, and yet IBM's hardware sales aren't by themselves profitable; most of IBM's revenues are from consulting, service, and software sales. (That was 60% before IBM acquired PWC Consulting from Price Waterhouse Coopers, drastically growing their consulting arm.)

I realize that that is a somewhat extreme case, but it's illustrative of how much Intel's economy of scales impacts its prices relative to everyone else's.
using inline style tags directly after elements can have a noticeable speedup on a pages rendering, dynamically generated pages could quite easily have well over 30 with the only downside being this silly limit.

and that isnt mentioning the boundary situations for things like web page builders with the ability to user define styles in which having a "lot" of style tags is architecturally a good idea.

I am quite tired of this "your doing it wrong" meme when its used instead of "you arent doing the same thing I am doing"
It just so happens that individuals of a species have intelligences which tend to clump about the species mean fairly closely (low standard deviation).

How about babies? Anyway, would you advocate that outliers with low intelligence should be considered morally inferior?
It's pretty common for Verilog developers to think they're writing C code, but that's the first time I've heard the converse.
Does this mean I should write my future software in Whitespace ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_languag... )?
mixergy.com's usability needs work -- I can never find the link to the text transcript.
As a counterexample, take Nethack. Probably largely reserved for more of the hard-core gamer type, but I don't consider myself to be a hard-core gamer any more. In fact, difficult games that force me to repeat a failure over and over I will push to the side due to lack of time. Nethack, however, has continued to fascinate me over the years. Its randomly generated content and creative ways of killing you (usually) keep you from dying repeatedly in the same exact circumstances, and you come out of it feeling that you learned something and are developing a worthwhile skill in terms of the game. Dying in Nethack is practically positive reinforcement rather than pointless repetition.
It's not that unreasonable. Scenario: You download the Fugue icon set (http://www.pinvoke.com/). You're working on a template, and want to be able to quickly try out different icons in different places. If you generate two rules for each of the 2500 icons, you're over the limit.
hope it will work out for you!
Counterexample: http://www.notdoppler.com/theunfairplatformer.php

This is a game which is totally built around the concept of being impossibly hard, but still succeeds.
The readme states that this is a "weekend hack." And, there are other disclaimers in the source code: "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS'. USE ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK."

I successfully built the executable, but you are right about the example. On Mac OS X, test.l crashes with a Segmentation fault. I think this is because some assumptions are being made about the layout of memory.

bench.l seems to work.

lysp by itself seems to work okay. I didn't do to much with it. It's tiny: the executable is 42224 bytes!
This isn't a solid design (obviously), but I'd like to think the names of the days would be highlighted well. The week day names do line up in a column still. The weekends, especially, would be colored differently.

The weekends kind of count as an scheduled event on their own, but having "THE WEEKEND!!!!" typed out every 7 days might get distracting/annoying.

PS If you like this, follow http://twitter.com/ImSoOCD so I don't spam HN with every little thing I think up. It's only one update a week.
Salesforce.com Hit By Outage
MySpace accepting submissions for app contest
struct Element {
// Update: apparently 16 wasn't enough. Raised to 30 to pass test #452
StyleData styles[30]; // No one uses more than 16 style parameters anyway.
}
There are lots of trade jobs and civil service jobs that pay very well. "Many paths can lead to riches, few in sunlight, most in ditches."
Do you want to protect from customers buying less licenses than they really need?

That's exactly it. I know there are some people who are dead set against paying for software, and they'll break whatever we do. Those people weren't our customers anyway.

Another question is: how do you license your software? Do you give a serial file? Serial number? Is it available for download?

Serial number but not currently enforced. Fairly high-end (~$800/license), primarily enterprise users.

Can be downloaded online, but there is no 30 day trial (would very much like to change this).

Phone activation will make you lose sales. Don't annoy your customers. Just make it clear what they can do and what they can't do.

Definitely, we just need the vendor to provide phone activation as a fallback for customers who don't want to / can't activate online.

Thanks for giving this a look.
I never thought of revolving doors as a way to save energy through heating. I wonder if this is due to the fact that revolving doors have significantly larger 'footprint' that means the actual door mechanism doesn't interfere with the natural convection currents of a building.

Simply think about how convection works (in the winter) in a building it circles from 'warm' interior walls to 'cold' external walls (especially if they're glass), which at ground level causes cold air to move along the ground towards the interior of the building. Now what happens when you open a door to the frigid outside? The cold external air will hijack the convection current and be drawn inside. The opposite holds true in summer when the interior is colder than the exterior, however with the convection currents reversed the system is hijacked again and warm air rises from the door and up the interior wall, similarly cooled air from the buildings interior now flows through the open door, further enhancing the cycle.

I've seen these convection patterns many times inside buildings, especially with steam during cooking. For instance, boil a kettle in front of a window (especially a large, or poorly insulated window), if it's summer the steam will roll up the wall and billow across the roof, in winter the steam will get dragged down over any counter tops and to the floor (if you're lucky, you can sometimes see the steam rise in the middle of the room, or conversely in summer it may sink at the centre of the roof).

Incidentally, I never thought being an avid tea drinker would actually contribute to my scientific knowledge.
I think this is a great idea, but agreeing with other commenters minimum wage is likely far too low. My brother and I are fairly new to ruby on rails, and we often get stuck and left at the mercy of support forums and friendly programmers. Many times we'd gladly pay for an "office hours" type service, especially since one hangup can cost us a day or two... one model might be to try letting users post questions along with an ideal price range and let programmers bid to answer it, like a stack overflow for business users.
So, does it actually "fix" the hardware by say, oscillating the wheel in such a way as to clean or jiggle the sensor, or does it update the firmware to compensate for the wheel sensor's spotty readings?
Another reasonable option is to avoid making the player pick an inappropriate level by picking for them. Off the top of my head, one example is Quake Live, which puts every new player in a little test area; first, it challenges them to see if they can jump accurately; then, it challenges them to rocket jump; then, it challenges them to strafe jump. Finally, it puts them in an first-to-15 deathmatch against a bot opponent with adaptive difficulty (so if you start out pwning the bot, it will rapidly get better until it starts evening the score.) By doing so, it forms a good picture of the player's skills so that it can match them evenly against other players immediately. The process takes about 15 minutes, but it certainly saves people a lot of poorly-balanced games.

It would be hard to do the same thing in an RPG without a longer test period, but it would be really easy to do so in a more action-oriented game, or a platformer. Of course, one would want to be able to override the "autodetected" difficulty level, but it would simultaneously address the problem of casual gamers getting frustrated because the default is too hard, and the problem of tough-as-nails gamers getting frustrated because they picked one that turned out to be too easy.
This type of thing happens all the time with embedded platforms. Software fixes for hardware defects are common. When we were building robots invariably the electronics team would always wire some motor backwards. Since the motors had similar power in both directions they would always ask me to just write the code to run motors they wired the wrong way backwards.

It was simple enough to do, but it always feels a bit wrong.

Other types of software workarounds are possible though too. I once modified the acceleration curve of the robot (clamped down the jerk) so that there would be reduced stress on the poorly made drive train and under many failure modes this changed the robot from essentially dead in the water to workable.

It seems surprising how many issues you can solve with code if you aren't used to it. But these hacks are actually everywhere in a lot of embedded systems and allow teams to continue to quick, cheap and dirty work when needed that can get patched up later.
These tips are ok. Particularly the ones about profiling. I have a few more that I have found over time. First tho, as always a good algorithm improvement can help over any of these. Trick 0 is about that, the rest are more about performance.

0. Generator comprehensions and list comprehensions are you friends. Sometimes one will make things like woah fast -- generators are lazy evaluation at its finest (if you don't follow that find a Haskell fan and ask them), this can be a real boon to your app. Sometimes you need the list comprehension. If you can't reason out which would be better for you, or reasoning suggests it shouldn't matter, try both anyway, just to be sure :).

1. Function calls are expensive. Sometimes when you call a function a lot (on the order of 1000's of calls in a normal run) its better to bite the bullet and just unfactor it. I have seen improvements of 50% from just this.

2. Dictionaries are fast. Classes are great, objects make life easy on programmers, but when dealing with large datasets, sometimes nested list/dict combos is way better than Objects (which are just dicts, but the syntactic sugar of objectness can eat up quite a few method calls, see #1 above). Also, sets are extremely useful and based on dicts (therefore also fast), so if the semantics of a set are ok with your needs, use them.

3. Python regex is fast. It is usually frowned upon, but sometimes a complex regex is way better than pyparsing or python string methods. This saved my butt on one very memorable occasion -- #1 and #2 above didn't really do enough, so I replaced the core processing bits with a very complex regex and got the speedup.

4. The gc module can really do a LOT of good. Short running scripts with lots of data can really be sped up by turning off gc (if you have the memory capacity). Even tuning generational parameters can really affect performance -- almost shockingly so.

5. Any type of bit twiddling sucks. Take the time to do it in C and make the extension. This includes most IP ops -- if you are working with large lists of addresses look into dnet. Similar libs exist for a lot of other projects.

6. __slots__ prove very useful sometimes. So does the struct module. Learn about both, they can really do wonders for your code in both readability and performance if used carefully.

7. All of the above are wrong in some contexts -- they are not hard and fast rules, but guidelines, in some cases they work great, in others they don't help at all.
I think this idea is interesting and possibly great, but that the details will make or break it. If you fiddle around with an implementation, I'd like to see it.
The entry itself speculates that the new firmware simply compensates for the spotty sensor(s).
I have to admit, there have been a few times I've written comments like the following:

/* Just a quick static array to get it
* working. Should be enough for all the
* usual tests so we can work on core
* functionality.
*
* TODO: change it to a linked list or
* something to dynamically track style
* tags.
*
* Update: Changed from 16 to 30 because Alex
* tossed in a new test that breaks this
* build. This really ought to be updated
* next major release, but for now we just
* need to get it working.
*/
http://www.bluffton.edu/~gundyj/TreasonOfImagesShadow.jpg
This cannot be stated enough. Punishing your money-paying customers for actions perpetrated by people that aren't your customers will do one thing: leave you with fewer customers.

I have not watched a movie in at least a couple years now where I have not stripped out the protections and re-burned it.
No offense to these folks, but having been around the block a few times, it strikes me how the lists of people or companies to "watch out for" rarely result in people who become well known. Maybe I've just seen too many of these lists. These seem to be filled with people who've actively courted the media.

Would the most notable members of the tech community now have made similar lists 5-10 years ago? I'm thinking not, but perhaps there are some counterexamples I'll suddenly be provided with..? ;-)
I think with the market you would be aiming for you would want to make this as simple to use as possible. I'd ditch even really making much mention of CRON and make a solid and easy to use UI for setting up the tasks. Your really aiming for the crowd that uses basic shared hosting so the simpler the better with the web service taking a back seat.

As a business model possibly you could make viewing the results of jobs and stats visible on the website only for people that use the UI to create. People setting up through an API are less likely going to be able to be monetized anyway.
The video isn't on mixergy.com yet. When it gets posted there I would assume it will have a transcript as usual.
At a number of commerical buildings I frequently, I... frequently see people use the swinging doors located to the side of the revolving door (for ADA compliance, if nothing else). They do this even when there is no traffic at the revolving door.

Often, they will hit the button to automatically open the doors. This is even worse than using the door manually, as the timer that controls the door motion usually leaves the door open for many seconds -- presumably to accommodate a slower user or one with a wider configuration, e.g. a wheelchair -- before beginning to close. Mind you, these are people who appear to be fully mobile and not unduly hindered or handicapped.

Quite often, I'll see people use the swinging doors to exit, where they just hit the crash bar and proceed. Presumably, they find this quicker (by a matter of a second or three) and more convenient.

(The cynic in me says: And after all, if they are even aware of the difference in efficiency, they are not personally paying the heating bill and cooling bills.)

I wonder whether a brief, one page "flyer" version of the linked information could be effective in altering behavior. I wouldn't ask permission to post them; I'd just engage in a guerrilla campaign of slapping them up when and where I can get away with it. Preferably, the flyer would have a professional appearance and the salient information would be encapsulated in an easily scanned sentence or three in large font. There might be more detail below, and hopefully also an eye-catching graphic.

I'm no graphics artist, but maybe I'll give it a go.
Manipulation: A Matter of Intent
If you go to a top ten school in your field and have a prestigious advisor with some weight behind their recommendations then you'll be fine. The problem is that every school wants to hand out graduate degrees. If you're getting your phd in history from Northeastern Wichita State you're fucked.