skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I completely misjudged your taste in movies.

I took

>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious.

to mean, in the general sense "I personally found the warmed over archetype and cliche driven plot to be tiresome, repetitive and tedious."

But now I see by your infantile "I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion fingers in ears Nya nya nya nya I can't hear you" childishness (to wit)

>Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.

That I should have just linked you to Amazon's Disney Princess store instead of Netflix; and related "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" and "Little Mermaid" to you instead of "8 1/2" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" as that would have been much more at your level.
errr, Battleaxe.. not sword. obviously.
Once again, what part of it is unfair? Is it unfair to the children receiving it, or do YOU just think it's unfair that some kids are getting a bunch of cash from their rich parents??

If you have no say in what an individual does with his wealth while he is alive, why do you think you are entitled (through voting presumably) to have a say in where that money goes when he dies?

Also, it seems like you even want to go so far as to regulate what a parent does with his money when he is alive?? How about this: What if a parent decides to give every single dime of his wealth to a second rich person to further that person's business? Do you think the government should step in and say no, even if it's classed as an investment?

All you seem to be saying is that it's unfair because you don't have rich parents leaving you a bunch of cash. Am I right?
Sometimes I dread getting older for political reasons... I'm 30 now and have not had (or wanted) a "real" management position. I guess I'm doomed.
Sometimes I wonder about people who are born and bred as future "management material". Do these people have more experience in thinking than someone who writes programs all day, mentally modeling the potential effect of every new line of code? Or someone who works all day crafting a piece of machinery, or sculpting statues, transforming a blank block of material into something useful and beautiful?

Somehow I just don't have that much respect for people who've gotten where they are by duping professors and wowing everyone with some impressive degree or family pedigree. It's not the same.

For any manager to be worth their salt to me, they have to demonstrate that they've had a lot of good old-fashioned practice in thinking. And the management fast-track just doesn't portend that to me. And I think that's why most companies > 50 employees slowly crumble as their engineers and other thinkers are crowded out by MBAs.
ZSHARE - GP Hack.rar
Unless things have changed in the US in the last few years, the process is very simple here too. I simply asked UUNet for a /24, filled out a form, and that was it.
Too busy to volunteer? Not if you've got a spare couple minutes
I'm sorry about that. I've added a [via] tag at the bottom and expanded the link text to make sure credit is given where it is due.

- Ben (Co-Editor)
Small-business bankruptcies rise 81% in California
Comments are invisible until the moment you need them.

When you understand your code, you don't bother to read the comments. As soon as you forget how the code works, you look to the comments for direction.

But if you didn't revise your comments along with your code, the comments will trick and deceive you until you realize that they're out of date. So you must re-grok the code anyway.

Use comments to describe your code's purpose. Let your code self-document the implementation.If you are particularly clever in your implementation, add a quick comment to explain your cleverness. When you realize you shouldn't have been so clever, be sure to remove the implementation comment as well.
I think it's even more than just an institutional bias, but a byproduct of the typical corporate organization structure.

I worked for a company who specifically made it clear that "rising up in the ranks" was not the only way to progress. People could stay out of the managerial ranks and theoretically still advance. However, this is not how it worked out in practice. The sense that managers were somehow better than the non-managers still pervaded.

I think it's a result of it being the managers' job to tell non-managers what to do, schedule their time, etc. Managers, by definition, exert control over the time and lives of non-managers. I think this affects the interpersonal relationships between the groups.

It might also have been affected by the perception that people outside the organization had. Managers have titles that confer on them a leadership position, so outsiders automatically gravitate to them as persons in charge. Perhaps it was a failure in execution by our organization to control expectations of our clients and customers, but I don't think so.
That's somewhat subjective -- I've found Netflix's OD to be pretty good. At any rate, "weak" is less important than ubiquitous right now. Weak is easy to fix, you just encode more titles and perhaps upgrade your software. Netflix is on(in) almost every device that counts for home entertainment now. Not in the future, not waiting for some specialized device or deal... they are present and accounted for. All they need to do is start providing more recent content, and they are there.

Apple is essentially nowhere in this space.. AppleTV is it. And not many people bought into that (I did, and I was disappointed). Not only that, but apple offers no clear benefit -- netflix is at least cheaper than driving to blockbuster -- appletv has never been cheap to "rent" from and given the quality -- that's not really justifiable.
Nitpick: it's not increasing capacity, it's utilizing the existing capacity better.
Anyone interested in doing a startup which could help push thorium energy forward? I know and understand nothing about physics, but maybe there's room for programmers to carve out their niche in something useful here.

Energy is the biggest problem humans face today.
are you kidding me? it is a fricking $1. Even in a developing country is not much, especially with the dollar going down.

Don't be surprised when people don't take your requirement that seriously.
Staying hands-on is pretty difficult in other industries. A good friend of mine is a research scientist. She loves what she does and is good at it and wants to go on doing it. But now she as been offered two choices, she can go for a Fellowship and spend her time writing grant proposals and mentoring students or... Well, no-one really talks about option B. And no-one who's taken option B is around the lab to ask.

Same in banking, you might be able to stay a trader, if you're good. You couldn't stay an analyst, it's up or out. Or in engineering, you don't get to actually design machinery or chips or whatever for long, again, up or out, gotta make room for the fresh intake of graduates.

This might not be the best way to work, but it's the norm, and a programmer who really can stay hands-on their whole career is fortunate indeed. My own strategy in this area is to stay hands-on but do less work directly, spend my time automating common tasks and developing tools to make junior members of my team more productive. We'll have to see how that plays out...
So why are they pursuing an MBA rather than an economics degree, do you think?

I don't think the study of business administration lacks value, and I have room for the idea of management as a science. Much of the popular cynicism about MBAs stems from the fact that some who pursue that qualification do so in the belief that they can manage effectively a venture effectively without necessarily knowing or caring much about the underlying competency (whether that be making cars or publishing books). Such people are unpleasant to work for to the extent that they have no particular vocation in that field and treat junior employees as interchangeable components, no different from the machinery that they operate.

In the worst case, productivity improves but at the expense of depersonalization for customers and a feeling of dehumanization for employees. Take bookstores. I love small independent and used bookstores - it's not the most efficient way to buy a book, but it is good for discovering books I might not otherwise have read. If I know what I want (and don't want a social shopping experience), I'm more likely to buy at Amazon. I can't stand large stores like Borders etc. - they have lots of books, but none of the people who work there seem particularly knowledgeable about or even interested in books. Indeed, conversations with ex-employees of such stores suggest that a love of books is seen as a liability, because buying decisions are not made at the store level, so literary enthusiasm is seen by corporate as dangerously close to letting the cooks eat with the customers.
This makes me curious about Amazon's vetting process for requests.... taken one step further, I can imagine all sorts of ridiculous things to ask people to do.
Feature request: submit and vote on alternate URLs
Every so often, a user submits a great link, but for which there is a better URL. For example: the 3rd page of a multi-page article, a blog post with a reference to the original, and so on.

It would be nice if users could submit a URL as an alternative to that imperfect submission and vote on which is the best alternative, so that this will be the one shown initially to new users.
For those people that said it was pointless for google to enter the browser market, here's why.
Would you do that for a dollar? I might if I knew where I had a spare piece of paper and a Sharpie, but I don't.

The payment for most of the tasks on Mechanical Turk and other things like it is just not worth the time for almost any task I've seen. Which is really sad, because it'd be awesome if it were worth it.
>Is what I'm doing good for the company?

http://media.truckblog.com/ai/2008/3555.jpg
I've also seen people making 100k+ who can't follow simple instructions or be bothered to read requirements.
Exactly! It was so tough for me to change from Opera to chrome. But chrome is much more minimal and the faster load time was enough of a killer feature for me to switch. But this version is pretty impressive.
NCEP Global Forecast System in R
I think it also leads to people rising to their level of incompetence. You might be a brilliant coder, but really not be good at handling a managerial post at all. Heads-down coding and management are two very different things, yet one is often treated as a reward for doing the other well.
Great comment. My disagreement however is with my interpretation of Avatar's story.

I interpreted Avatar as a man vs nature story... with the humans against nature, and the Omaticaya on nature's (Pandora's) side. And nature won, for once.

When the marines destroyed Hometree, I was thinking of the Hetch-Hetchee Valley.
The realtime web is basically about breaking news. That's a significant proportion of search queries, perhaps 20-30% (you can quantify with the AOL query dataset).

I don't personally care so much about 5000 Tweets saying "Michael Jackson RIP". That's ultra-mainstream breaking news that you would hear about anyway.

Instead the interesting thing about Twitter is that it's gotten big enough to explore the tail of breaking news in areas I care about, e.g. conferences and events that I want to follow without being present. A lot of that stuff would never make a full news piece or journal article, but is important to gauge attitudes and trends.

Basically it reduces the threshold of a "least publishable unit", and in doing so unlocks a large amount of breaking news that would not otherwise get out there.
I know this has been asked before but are there other people that focus better at night? Have you modified your sleep schedule to do this more? If so, how?
How a leaky pipe cracked open a massive forgery ring
I don't like these kind of articles ... yes, such advices are good and doing incremental / exploratory development is something to reflect upon.

BUT ... personally I need clear examples / scenarios / studies. Maybe a school assignment where the progress of two or three students is tracked with a comparison ... which had the best solution, which did it in the least amount of time, which experimented and failed the most, etc ...

Otherwise it just feels like noise.
This is why api-level documentation is great: functions are used for a purpose, and they're supposed to be a black box. If you keep your functions small and focused, you can just describe what they do, and it all works out.
The payment for most of the tasks on Mechanical Turk and other things like it is just not worth the time for almost any task I've seen.

While that may be true for you, there are plenty of places across the globe where $1 (with a chance of $50) is not an insignificant amount.
Nah, it's a way of living vicariously. If you can't get the item yourself, at least you can see what it's like.
> Don't blame Microsoft so much. Blame the OEMs.

I'm not blaming Microsoft for anything. In general computers have more points of failure, which means more support calls.

While having a simpler line-up prevents you from overloading the customers with too much choice, you also end up in the boat where people will go elsewhere if one of your pre-built machines isn't exactly what they want. Apple has people griping about this stuff all the time, but people that want the 'Mac Experience' can't really go to Dell to get it. As far as a generic PC goes, they can just hop over to Dell to get it. Though I guess you could get around this by offering customization options that Apple doesn't have, but then you run into additional labor costs (which a larger competitor like Dell might be able to cut significantly).
That was a good article! I would not worry about how fast WebSockets catch on with the general public: even if in 6 months only a small percentage of web users have a browser that supports WS by default, that is still a lot of potential users. Really, a great looking technology.
We did some estimating at Pinch Media a few months back, based on our analytics data, and figured the mean (not median) revenue for a paid app was about $8K over the course of its entire lifetime. I won't claim this is anything but a rough guess.

Due to the top-heavy nature of application downloads the median is certainly much lower.
A Crash Course in web2py
Out of curiosity, why did you post a shortened link here instead of the canonical one? Does goo.gl give you some kind of clickthrough monitoring, or was there another reason?
Which is further evidence that CSS still should not be used for layout.

http://www.flownet.com/ron/css-rant.html

(How do you do links in HN comments? Markdown syntax doesn't seem to work.)
Uhm... ok.

BTW, the current 2Advanced website was a fluke. Their previous site (which won tons of awards and business) had been around for 5+ years. Eric Jordan, their founder and lead designer was doing a series of matte paintings just for fun. Someone on the team said they'd make great artwork for the website and thus v4.
Appellate Court Enforces Permanent Injunction against Microsoft Word
I would if I just happened to come across the posting and just happened to have paper and a sharpie and a digital camera next to me.

It's interesting to read all the comments that say "$1?!?! You're ripping off these people! Why would anyone ever do anything on Mechanical Turk?" How many hours do y'all spend on Hacker News? How long did it take you to write those comments? How much were you paid for it?

In strictly economic terms, Turkers are getting ripped off a lot less than news.YCers are. After all, $1 is infinitely more than $0. We labor for free so that Paul Graham can have a viable online community and pick of the top posters for his seed capital firm.
Luggage Locator: Might be a bad idea....
Brain Chips: Artificial Intelligence Is All in Your Head
Things only go faster if the design documentation matches the code. This is, in my experience, never.

In the best case, the design documentation is updated as the code is written and problems are found. However, even then, decisions made while coding will avoid problems, and ambiguities in the design documentation don't get updated when that happens.

I've had to do similar rewrites in the past, and I usually just skim the design documentation to get some idea of what the plan was. However, programming languages are in general the most concise and unambiguous way to represent what a program does.
MSFT loses patent appeal; Office to be barred from sale starting Jan. 11
This isn't really labor, first of all. For most of us it's both a leisure and educational activity that we participate in not for PG's benefit, but for our own benefit by learning and socialization. Making a sign that says "Hi Lili" and taking a picture of it is much less fruitful, even if it nets me $1 in money. The things I learn on HN net me much more money in the long run.
45RS to take a photo and post it online is a good deal. That buys you lunch (or food for your family).
I believe you mean "invariant with regard to future data in the time domain", i.e. f(x_1,..,x_t) == f(x_1,..,x_t,x_{t+1})

"Idempotent" means that f(f(x)) == f(x), which wouldn't apply unless the output of a given analysis had to be fed back into it. Most outputs are going to be tables of counts with the input being raw text data, so that wouldn't apply in this case.
You would probably require a ridiculous amount of VC funding to even make a plant. Also, you are competing with people with PhD's in the field doing research.
I met an iPhone developer a few weeks ago who was making a decent middle-class income off his portfolio of apps. To me, that is more realistic and inspiring than Tapulous' boasting.

He did say that you have to have a niche app. People who want your app will find your app (and its competitors) through searching keywords. He couldn't emphasize how important it was to have the name of the app be something specific to the niche.
Web2py: multiple database and distributed transactions
1$ is the salary for one hour work for a maid in Shanghai... And Shanghai is not exactly the cheapest part of China.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Chrome showcased multiple innovations in browser technology. Things like a single process per tab, a much tighter security model, and proof that javascript implementations could be much faster.

By doing this they have set trends in how browser technologies should progress and thus had an influence on their ability to implement "html 5" webapps in the future that work cross browser. It was much more than "check it out we put tabs in the title bar guys".
This article is a little bit silly in the way it portrays Thorium reactors as being pushed aside for only a few reasons. Even aside from the nuclear weapons angle (quite important during the cold war) in 1973 Uranium/Plutonium reactor technology was vastly more mature than Thorium reactor technology (that is still true today). When the choice is between funding a well-known nth generation commercial reactor design (using Uranium) and sinking unknown quantities of R&D dollars into a program to develop a commercial reactor design (using Thorium) the choice is obvious.

We should probably be investing considerably more money into Thorium reactor designs (though the same applies for Uranium reactor designs as well), but the picture this article portrays of a more worthy underdog being sidelined for petty reasons is very misleading.
Great use of webgl:in-browser REPL+1k shader demos w/ source
I really wish they had grandfathered me in to the old pricing.
Good point. I'm a real fan of a/b testing and customer development in general, but not sure that is appropriate in a pre-launch stage or in logo development.
This article is funny.

It seems like both candidates worked at an investment firm, but neither were promoted for anything related to doing what investment firms are supposed to do -- finding good opportunities to invest in.

The 'good' candidate merely figured out how to use excel better and become a manager. The other guy completed tasks and made friends with fellow analysts.

I have to say, I doubt this place was training their analysts to be good stock pickers and instead pumped out mediocre returns while gobbling up fees off of their clients/investors.
Semantic web(2py)
The new look and feel of the Mac version is very similar to Safari.
I really enjoyed 80legs and used them a lot, until they changed their pricing structure.

Crawling-as-a-service makes sense. Thousands upon thousands of people need crawling as a service.

Crawling on a subscription basis? Not so much. How many organizations are just crawling crawling crawling, and need to do so all the time?

Regardless, I wish that I had been grandfathered in to the old pricing structure. I've been using 80legs since the beginning, and have been an advocate for it from day one. It really sucks that, having helped promote the service, I am now forced to get a cut-back in affordable service.
Yes, you are correct. Thank you for your thoughts.
If we all took the advice of this article, we'd manage ourselves right out of business.

In my experience rewarding the top performing "hamsters" nets greater retention and gains for the organizations productivity than a sole focus on rising managers.
During the Lord of the Rings, they transitioned largely over to Linux for nearly the entire setup. That transition involved a lot of custom software, so it's probably still mostly Linux.
One of my co-workers decided to go the project management route. Our boss at the time was very supportive, letting him help with the project management tasks for the current release while still doing some coding duties. This was probably 5 years ago. He took on project management for another product for a year and half. And then, what really made his reputation, a high visibility, high risk project, etc. etc. Now managing 40 people. If I had to hazard a guess, he's making double what he did as a coder and happier because he was never happy coding/fixing bugs. If you're not happy coding, maybe management is a better fit for you. Beware that many of those who leap the chasm to management don't make it and those who do have to pull themselves up to the edge of the cliff with their fingernails.

In general, the people I know who were coders who have risen up in the ranks (probably 2,3 levels above me) in management had a game plan. They knew what they were trying to accomplish. They had a very good mentor. And they've done it.
Jupiter will start fusing Hydrogen, resulting in the warming of its moons and the melting of Europa's ice.
Hm. I'm dubious about "testing will find all the problems" as a solution here. Isn't that a little like saying "you need to check JavaScript in all browsers anyway, so why use a compatibility library?"
Here's one way of putting it that HN readers may identify with more: Treat every job as if it were your own startup.

If you're the founder of a company, you need to understand every nuance of the business, how it fits into its market niche, and the technology it uses. You have to convince other people to work for you; you have no implicit authority based on your title. Your effectiveness is based on how well you understand your mission as a company, and how well you can enable and motivate others to help you with that mission.

Those are all crucial skills in the corporate world as well.

They're also not necessarily mutually exclusive with being a coder/doer as well. All of the best managers I know come from a software engineering background. But it's about recognizing that other people can code & do just as well as you can, and leveraging what they're good at to help you and your organization achieve goals that neither one of you could do on your own.
I hope I'm not sounding offensive. But what is the author trying to prove here? It's a well known fact that majority of the people on mechanical turk come from developing / under developed countries.