skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why can’t you pickle generators in Python? A pattern for saving training state
For a second I thought maybe Steve had made a new blog entry :(
And then all you need is one failing to pay to bring down the whole castle of cards.
$1 seems to be pretty great for this task.
I just read some HIT descriptions, and there were A WHOLE LOT of "write 200 words for $0.03" jobs. Which really sucks if you ask me.
Sunlight glints off liquid lake on Titan
I think the last sentence says it all:

He is an expert on the subject, and the reason I called him for the piece was that I had noticed the praise for his book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them.”

So... he has no interest in "banning" these words, he wants attention and for more people to buy copies of his book.
What I did was to have up to five person work on a hit. Many simple hits are done at 0.05$ so it's still not too expansive.

For text submissions, you can enforce validation rules (simple and regex). So you don't have to manually reject non-conforming work. You can also have the Turker fill in their work on a webpage that you control, so validation can be much more advanced. I never went all the way but sometimes I think about it.
1. "Skill-building" is suspect in many MBA programs. The fact that one-third of your MBA class has advanced degrees doesn't say anything about the content of the MBA itself, just that you're at a top program attracting other smart people with skills.

2. If "most degrees" focus on skill-building, and those skills are suspect, it's then pretty fair to say that "most degrees" are of questionable value.

3. That leaves us with Networking and Career Switching. Career Switching is more a personal endeavor that an MBA can help with but doesn't necessarily guarantee a successful switch.

4. I would conclude then that the most important part of the MBA is the networking, and this value is proportional to the quality of the program's alumni.
Failure 101 : Founder's Myopia
I didn't think there was any commentary on where the people are from. Did I miss something?
Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/
It's generally a good attitude to try to see what problems need to be solved instead of just doing your best at what you're told to do. If you identify problems and suggest solutions, you will have more influence on the content of your job regardless if you want to move up the hierarchy or code cool applications. And if you get to implement a solution that you suggested, it will be much more fun than realizing other people's ideas.

Being in a job makes it relatively easy to see processes which always need some improvement. I wish it would be as easy to see how to improve things on the level of the society or the country. I can see many things that are wrong, but I have no idea how to fix anything.
absolutely. tho the rejection was actually for a different project.
Does the author say anything at all about race or country? Besides most of them seem to be from USA.
Why would Amazon vet the requests? People can choose whether to take part in any particular project.
Bump Shares Its Phone Tapping, Data Swapping Technology With A New API
competing with people with PhDs

Yes. This is the tragedy of programming and computer "science": you know everything about making tools and writing code to other people's specs — and nearly nothing about solving actual real-world problems. That's why I mentioned carving out a niche. I didn't intend to build a whole plant, but a company which comes up with software which helps people building plants might have a fighting chance.
-Personal income tax rates in the US will be increased.

-Google will strike some sort of a deal with Hulu or Boxee.

-The price of oil will hit $100+ again.

-Chrome OS will be a huge hit.
Kubuntu
"a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth" is not a scenario that is reasonably interpreted by viewing of the film. In what "text" is this reading supported?

In the film, the humans are there on behalf of a corporation interested in mining natural resources for profit. That position is made clear. There is no indication at all that Earth is in need of this resource for any other reason than corporate greed. As mentioned elsewhere, the story is pretty black & white that way.
Talking about reducing waste.
Here is probably how I'd break it down (based on what I've seen my friends in the finance industry do):
Analyst = excel grunt work
VP = budget grunt work
Senior VP = investment work
Mechanical Turk is a fascinating tool, maybe this is not the most interesting use, but it still make hacker drool. When you can't have AI, you use AAI (Artificial AI).

You can use it to train pattern recognition. It sure beats doing the work myself.
But we have no way of knowing if Mechanical Turk participants think of their turking the same way...
21,000 line changeset... does that sound right? I mean, we live in the era of distributed version control, in times when merging is cheap, shouldn't there have been regular 2-way synchronizations?
I support the author. I might get things done faster than you while I manage to chill out. There is no blueprint on how to be productive. We just have to try different things and adapt it to ourselves. He posted his thoughts, and he didn't ask anyone to follow it.
Best & Worst Big Brand Changes of 2009
Would it be possible (and IANAL so I've got no idea) to simply not make your products available in this whacked out district of east Texas?

Just refuse to ship by mail or retail to any address in the district in order to make sure the trolls can't force you into this venue?

It would be no small measure of poetic justice if in return for making themselves an enormous public nuisance and doing irreparable harm to the patent system, all of their residents had to drive a hundred miles every time they wanted an ipod.
Or you might manage yourself into a highly efficient team structure with managers who are actively enabling their people instead of jealously guarding a fiefdom.
YSE #22 : cap.it.all/off on Vimeo
Or it's been changed since the original post.
Mozilla Hacks Newsletter launches
Aweber Victim of Email Address Mining Attack
Google's chrome faster than mozilla Firefox 3.5.6 on ubuntu
I didn't mean to be on the offensive side or to start an argument. I was just asking a question. Refer the author's reply. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010388
What if somebody asked people to write something profane? Or political? Or perhaps deface the image of an icon or religious leader? Once you move past written messages, you open up all sorts of avenues. Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn? Crowd-sourced violence? Etc. At what point does Amazon need to filter these requests?
Considering the post is on eu.techcrunch.com (And HN, for the love of all that is holy, please start displaying subdomains for the source URL already) that seems to naturally limit the conversation.
Eradicate your Obesity problems with Didrex
My best hours are between 12am and 4am. It seems that I have unfortunately fallen into a rhythm where my brain is ready to tackle programming around that time. All other times I find it hard to concentrate when I have opportunities to watch tv or walk around outside.

So my sleep schedule has adjusted to this. I sleep at 4am and wake up around 11am. You just have to be working late enough for so many nights for this to happen. I think my biggest problem is working from home.
Thanks for this. I was about to write a comment dissing Mashable for this.

Also, please consider doing it more often. Mashable rarely links to the original source (if at all), many times I have to Google to get more information; an extra step that can be easily avoided. Its in good form to link the original source.
What he proved is that with $100 and some imagination he could learn a lot about Mechanical Turk.

As a bonus, he got some nice smiles out of the process ^_^.
After learning HTML and CSS, a good followup book to recommend is Designing with Web Standards by J. Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/). Even though it's written for individuals who are designers or are serious about web design, it has many helpful tips and information such as the box model that the OP discussed.
This part resonates:
"having a known resolution mechanism in place encourages everyone to resolve disputes informally"
This is the risk you take with using contractors. When you hire someone to do the work, you are the legal owner. This includes the good and the bad. The good being you can make money from it. The bad being that you now have a potential legal liability. When something is done work-for-hire, it is legally just like you produced the work in-house. So from the outside world, Microsoft is the entity that is legally responsible. The contractor is responsible to only Microsoft (and I'm sure their contract includes a provision to deal with this).

What you're describing is a legal nightmare. In this case, imagine that Microsoft didn't pull the plug. What would happen then? Would Microsoft say "Oops, sorry, it was the contractor's fault. But we paid him, and got our code, so we're going to keep using it." They didn't pull the plug out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because they are legally liable for it, and the longer it was in the wild, the worse their liability.

The rest of this is PR. Plurk maybe pushing this a bit far, but that is a PR decision, not a legal one. From a legal perspective, they might have been injured enough for a lawsuit.
Perhaps Amazon could crowd source this?

After all, for someone to get anywhere doing ill with MTurk the request must be seen by people.
You write a url with a http:// and it will turn it in to a link for you. See the formatting document[1] for all the formatting available to you.

[1]:http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Bump Technologies (YC S09) Launches API
The one bit of CSS I wish I had learned early on:

html {

overflow-y: scroll;

}

This puts the scroll bar on the right of the page regardless of whether or not the page needs to scroll.

I hate watching my page bump 20px to the left just because I went from a page that didn't scroll to a page that did.
Or when engineers think they are the best qualified managers...only because they are engineers.
When it's illegal? There's a huge difference between crowd sourcing violence and writing something political (which a lot of people already get payed to do), ones organized crime the other is not.
I don't see any problem as long as they're not asking them to break any laws. Ultimately it's up to the parties involved to obey the law though. If someone puts an ad for a hitman in the help wanted section of the newspaper, should the newspaper be held responsible?
Google’s ‘Meaning of Open’
On demand viral marketing or protests...

I do think it is very interesting to see the faces behind Mechanical Turk.
He began ordering lunch for the investment group's weekly meeting and making sure office supplies were ordered on time and in the right quantities. It was obvious he didn't mind pitching in where help was needed, and his supervisors began to notice his work ethic.

That's surprising. I would think that if someone did that at an investment bank, they'd get fired and replaced with an administrative assistant. Same work, less pay.

It also sounds like Ted made himself a real pest.
What to eat at a business breakfast
Excel is the most dangerous weapon available to an aspiring carierist, I have accidentally used it myself to a great advantage. To understand this phenomenon you have to look at the world though the eyes of a manager: they have tons of smart people coming up with tons of interesting but not well-articulated or substantiated ideas - heavy on opinion light on tangibles. How can a manager pick good ideas out of endless stream? If he understood what you do he wouldn't need you to be there. So if you show up with actual data in Excel they love you right away.
Obviously if you only hold a piffling number of shares, you have little control over the company. So it'd make sens to restrict this to major and/or controlling shareholders.
PayPal Checkout Class 1.0
$1 - $0 = $1
A touch off topic:

For people in a management role: what do you use to demonstrate that you're good at your job? If you're interviewing for another company, is it a steady record of promotion? Successful projects (but is that due to you or a good team)?

If you're a coder and your job sucks you can at least build something to show at interviews or learn new languages on the side, but how can you do the same in management?
But if Apple gets the TV deal and Netflix does not, then all of these points are moot. My point is that Netflix's drive to ubiquity over content is great for getting new customers, but it doesn't offer much to someone who already has a way to consume the content they offer. If Apple offers me a better deal, I'll be dropping Netflix quickly.
PHPpaypal 0.5.2
There were. The work was carried out in a svn branch (with actual development in Git, but the branch was updated so svn users could still see what was going on). The svn branch was frequently updated to trunk using git-svn. Once the feature was ready, an svn merge was performed resulting in the monster changeset.

Django uses svn for the core repository, but the majority of the actual work takes place in git or mercurial. Django has committers using both.
> Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn?

So?
I think this is a really cool idea. I think of it every time I use IrDA to beam small files back and forth. But IrDA is so 10 years ago...

How does it work? Ad-hoc wifi connection between the phones, or does it actually send the data through the cloud?
Unreal 3D game engine demonstrated on Apple's iPhone
Ambitious South Korean Parents See Tall as All
I submitted a direct link to the documentation over here, which is more interesting than my blog post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010373
"It's no different from "real" conservatives distancing themselves from the Bush administration because the implementation of their political system ended up violating most of its ostensible core values."

To define American-style conservative and liberal philosophy as what the Republican and Democratic parties and their politicians do is ridiculously simplistic. The parties are just coalitions of interests and voter demographics, not philosophies - you might as well talk about what direction a plate of spaghetti points at.

And as for conservatives' "political system" - whose? Do you mean evangelicals and other theocrats, PNAC neocons, populist teabaggers, or Lew Rockwell/Ron Paul fans? We're not talking remotely the degree of unity imposed by the Politburo and Comintern upon the global communist movement when it comes to either US party. In a bipolar system, both parties must be big tents or be crushed by the bigger tent. Elected officials are not (and Bush was not) advancing a single "conservative" or "liberal" ideology; they're trying to please various power blocs who agree or disagree with them on different issues.

Bush's failures highlight the failure of particular policies and ideas, but they don't say much about the ideas of self-described "real conservatives" who thought Bush was a ridiculously free-spending, anti-federal, protectionist, power-consolidating, Big Government guy long before Iraq. (No more than Obama's decisions indict the ideas of supporters who disagree with him on those decisions, certainly.)
The one fascinating angle I could think of is crowdsourcing something that is harmless and legal if done once in isolation but becomes harmful and dangerous when done on a huge scale. My brain is totally failing me here on a coming up with a good example but it seems conceivable (and diabolical!)

One papercut is a nuisance 100 million is another thing altogether.
Try soliciting suggestions for birthday or holiday presents.

Or, try soliciting feedback from 100 people on the clarity/ease of your company's sign-up process, introductory video, etc.

Many of the comments will be worthless, but you'd be surprised at the quality you get from some people, even at rates as low as $0.05-0.10.
Get cash for gold scrap on Gold Price Busters
Sell your gold scrap online for the best gold prices. No mess – no fuss – just the absolute best gold price for the real value of gold anywhere. Get cash for gold scrap and scrap gold jewelry now. Best gold prices from Gold Price Busters - gold buyer.
Here is more information on the dispute from the register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/22/microsoft_loses_word...
I'm an open source advocate (even for search algorithms in general), but ranking algo/model is inherently adversarial and gameable until true search AI (always correctly identify good and original content without false positives) is feasible.

I think it would be a good revenue strategy, if they charge $dollars to display top 10 positive features and top 10 negative features of any given query-document pair without any real weights/scores (maybe re-squashed with some logistic function). The $dollars amount is computed dynamically to offset the negative impact of the partial reveal of the ranking algo/model. This can be a tremendously useful tool for troubleshooting search results by site owners.
Anyone know the specifics on what patent violation entails?
If $1 = Rs. 40
Then $50 = Rs. 2000

Yes. Neither amount is insignificant. But I still wonder, why only India?
People from Pakistan, China and even Sri Lanka , Singapore are in +/- 3 hrs. timezones.

The timing of the post would be crucial to understand this.
The problem is that you're not a sysadmin. I'm going to assume that you are a programmer since you are assuming this is simply a programming problem.

I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts.

Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme.

So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...
Further info for those interested: My developer machine was infected with the Kryptik trojan. Using WireShark I could see that I had become the proud member of a botnet, it probably found a saved password for FTP on my machine and compromised my server that way. Makes me feel all dirty inside watching my computer send viagra emails and receive "sorry, you are blacklisted" responses.

All the passwords have been changed and the relevant computer quarantined. I'm still working on removing the virus, seems to be using drivers to mask its presence from the virus checkers I am using. I've got some ideas based on using a scanner on a live-cd.

What is really fun is that the virus definition for the trojan was added to NOD32 after I was infected, so I don't know how much help a virus checker would have been, if it was installed.

That will learn me for leaving saved passwords on an otherwise secure machine.
All the big name studios now use Linux for the farm, this is one market where Linux has come to utterly dominate.

Ironic then that the final product is so heavily DRM'ed that you can't easily view it without breaking some laws if you're a free Linux user :)
I'm surprised that this made it to the top of HN. I did something similar for my friend's birthday last year, but I never considered it particularly newsworthy. Another fun project was proving to our product manager that he was completely wrong (about listing overdue timesheet dates in reverse chronological order) by submitting the question to Mechanical Turk and getting instant user feedback.

Does the popularity of this link mean that there is enough interest in Mechanical Turk to justify the creation of web apps around it?
Actually the merge wasn't done using SVN. Russ didn't want to deal with svnmerge, so he just took the diff from git and applied and committed it.
Something with stock manipulation could work. Buy a ton of options in some company, like Palm for instance. Then on the release of some hot new gadget, like the Pre, pay a ton of people to wait outside the doors of the vendors. Initial buzz will be that Palm is going to strike it big. Cash in.
The "former executive of a large famous company in the computer industry" made some interesting points about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9t05i/i_am_a_former_ex...

(HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875714 )
The HN front page has been defying all logic as of late...
The best times to tweet if you want to be noticed
An MBA would still teach them about the subject they care about, while also (supposedly) making them better equipped to actually get hired.
Uh,

Perhaps considerations of aiding and abetting prostitution, kidnapping and drug-dealing would enter if the job requests were entirely unvetted?

Uh, and I think India has labor laws too.
Being online: Your identity to advertisers--it's not all about you
Oh, sorry, that's not what I meant. What I meant was how do I make a link with some text other than the URL. (Apparently it's not possible in HN comments.)
There is a request up now looking for someone to take a picture of themselves dressed as a terrorist. Many others ask people to fill out a quick survey or enter in an email for lead generation/reward websites.
To answer your opening question, maybe because they're more interested in exploring the practice of economic theory than studying it as an academic.
Or the Call of Duty games- 1 and 2 were both heavily modified Quake 3, even CoD 3 was still a Quake 3 base with a brand new rendering engine.
The following guy made me smile. =]

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=27
State and Future of JavaScript by Douglas Crockford
Do something to coordinate a voluntary organisation. Fundraise for your local dog protection society, and then when it's discussed at interview smile in a way that communicates you know it's a bit trivial, but show how you thought about the problem and how you were enthusiastic for the process of solving the problem.
as i understand it, it uses the timing of the bump and location data to match the phones, then the transfer of data is done through the cloud
Nice! I haven't needed to pickle generators, but that should come in handy when I do.
This is a great article. Concise, with good advice and straight to the point.
It's odd. The UI of Chrome is precisely one of the reasons I don't use it - in particular, the lack of a menu bar and especially the Bookmarks menu.
The problem with Python namespaces
One intermediate solution is to ask people to code everything out in pseudo-code. Think about what it would do. Then when they are happy about it comment it all out, and below each line of pseudo-code write real code doing the same thing.

This lets you do exploratory programming, and also generates verbose comments for the TA to look at.

(This strategy is discussed in Code Complete.)
If the default browser in OS X was as crappy as the default on Windows, I'd now be using Opera, with Chrome in a really close second.

Firefox has a million extensions, but speed matters more to me.