skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to jump to a conclusion here. Something that krmmalik's dad could do, that most of us couldn't, would be say "Why don't you take it home with you" since he sells TVs for income. Passively making everyone a salesperson is an interesting concept, but it doesn't satisfy the "here and now" of buying and taking something home.
This post already submitted. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049571
Yes, I'd like to know as well. I was unable to find any references so far. I am truly interested.
Also if a "glastnost" comes to China it probably won't do anything, same as in the USSR.
But assuming at some point that you do have to sign an NDA, remember that there is no such thing as a "standard NDA". Be prepared to cross things out that you don't agree with, or add extra terms.
Quick link to demo:

http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/raw/master/demos/tiger....

Wish people made github pages a bit more friendly. It's like being thrown into a pit of 1s and 0s.
At the very least, this would result in quite a lot more spacecraft going to Mars.

This could also have a rather negative effect on religion.
Agreed, I'd love to read about any later interesting microprocessors which I may not have heard of.

And yes, the T9000 is interesting indeed. Section 7 is definitely my favourite :-D
Google Faces The Slickest Click Fraud Yet
http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/demos
The demos are basically graphics tests: vector drawing, frame-by-frame animation, tweens.

http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/swf-tag-support-ta...
The tag support table shows just how much is missing: everything from SWF 2 onwards! Many of those tags aren't feasible in pure JS right now, anyway.
A temporary stopgap, at best, especially in a world where so few people use it. Encryption is maximally useful when people don't see -- or it doesn't matter that people see -- that you're using it.

My guess is that people who really, really want to protect what they saying and that they're saying it use nonsense spam as a steganographic medium.
I think this is all fantastic advice, except this one:

A language is a language is a language

Perhaps I am simply not yet experienced enough, but I find which language I am working with makes a great deal of difference.

I know that some of it is personal preference and knowledge of the languages, but at the same time some of it seems to be that some languages are better suited for some tasks than others, and yes it at least looks like some languages are all around better than others.

Personally, I generally choose Python as my general purpose programming language and prefer it for most projects, and I get a lot more done in than I do in Java. I use C# for many types of projects on Windows, but I use VB.Net only if forced. If I ever decided to write an OS as an exercise I would probably start with C and if I needed to do something heavily statistical I would seriously look at learning R.
No, it was a different, much older comment. I think by pg.

I see this about once/day (and I spend WAY too much time refreshing HN). Slightly surprised that you see it frequently enough to comment/inquire, guess it's just random luck :)
Which direction would you bet? I assume by your phrasing you mean against, but I'm moderately surprised you'd put "money" in that direction. I'm curious about your reasoning?
Cool technology to pursue but considering how Flash content's CPU requirements are often a problem on C-based interpreters, this doesn't seem like a practical thing.
I've experienced this before -- a project designed by database coders to process data not naturally represented by a database metaphor.
Fruits and vegetables for Healthy skin
> and I spend WAY too much time refreshing HN

Errm, yes. I think I do too.

> Slightly surprised that you see it frequently enough to comment/inquire, guess it's just random luck :)

At least once per hour sometimes many more, at least 10 times per day.
Also worth noting about working in non-profits, if you play your cards right, you can get an awful lot of stuff for free or at a steep discount. Google has been known to give away search appliances (even the big ones) to non-profits, for example. My company gives away free licenses to non-profits (and it's not like we're made of money, it's just how we roll). Most companies have a formal discount process for non-profits.

I'm not familiar with a lot of non-profit IT departments, but the one I am familiar with is very well-equipped, though moderately under-staffed.
I hope you are right. I suppose no political regime has lasted forever yet.
Interesting. Those work nicely using Safari on my iPhone. Looks promising.

But on Chrome 4.0.288.1 dev moving the mouse over any of the animations crashes the tab.
For those of us that have not... I'm guessing this post counts as a recommendation?
It's all in the details
If you saw them at CES last week, Netflix is on pretty much any device that will take them. TV's, roku, boxee (more I'm sure).

Pandora and Skype seem to be following in the same vein.
According to the Netflix blog entry I mentioned already, DVDs are a minority when it comes to video sources.
"My interviewers were non-technical, and so after some prying I decided to save it for our next meeting."

Separate from the question of whether you should talk to your predecessor, I'd think you'd want to talk to some of the current technical staff as well before accepting an offer.
If I ran an oppressive, evil regime, one of the first things I'd arrange would be traffic analysis of encrypted or otherwise suspicious email.
In my opinion, if we discover some life on Mars, but biochemical analysis says that it is compatible with Earth life (uses DNA, same chirality on the molecules, clear analogs with Earth life in the design, probably could even find an ancestor), we have to stick with the theory that Mars did not originate life. If Mars did independently originate life, it should be clearly obvious.

"Mars is able to natively host small amounts of Earth-derived life" is still interesting and still says some things about the prospect of life in the universe, but I don't think that would really add much to what we already know, the way a truly independent branch of life would.

Good cases have been made that RNA and DNA may be the only suitable bases for life, which would imply that finding those wouldn't be absolute proof, but there's enough other stuff in Earth's base DNA catalog that should be different that sequencing should immediately reveal a different origin. (Not to mention the different starting conditions should result in other choices for basic functioning.)

(It is not necessary that RNA/DNA be the only choices for life; it simply means that if the arguments are even partially true it tweaks the probability that truly foreign life might still be RNA/DNA based up. But above that level I'd expect significant differences; "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" may be false at the macro level, but billion-year-old decisions of life are still written into our DNA at deep levels. Truly independent life should have made at least some different decisions.)
"Mile" also means a thousand, coincidentally. In ancient Rome, it was the distance of one thousand paces. Note that a "pace" was two steps, i.e. one stride with each leg.
Nice overview.

Disadvantages of web app dev was kind of glossed over though.

I would add that web app development becomes exponentially more difficult than programming desktop apps when it comes to UX/UI. It's clear that CSS was devised for websites, not web apps.

To some degree this seems to have influenced how web apps look and feel. The exception would be Google which makes web apps that feel like desktop apps. 280North also comes to mind.
I'm curious about your workflow on HN. Are you mostly refreshing /newest and /newcomments?
Adventures of the Wolverine Leaker
Doomsday Clock Reset: When And How To See Atomic Scientists Move The Clock
How do you know that's true?
"When all's said and done, / at the end of the day / you've got to take the bull by the horns."

(My father actually heard someone say exactly that in a meeting once.)
No worries. Any time.
This was my 2009 new-years prediction... damn it, just out!
The best demo is http://jancona.com/gordon/demos/blue.html
The two kinds of software hierarchies
Interesting. Works fine on 4.0.249.49.
The Case Of The Algo Typo
Zed Shaw and Thomas Ptacek go at it.
Seems like it's just a coincidence. According to The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/637/whats-the-origi...) the length of a mile is based on the length of a Roman pace (or stride).
It doesn't look like it supports sound or video.
If everyone was sending encrypted emails it would be unpratical, though.
In addition to SwellJoe's point, which I endorse, I'd also add that this is a non-profit. You think profit-making companies treat IT as a cost center? Just wait until you've seen a nonprofit. Consider a non-profit meant to help the homeless; it is a trivial exercise to compute how many meals for the homeless the IT budget is costing you. How do you expect to compete against that? Convincing them that spending a bit more could reduce net costs is going to be an even larger uphill battle, no matter how rationally right you are. (Assuming you are at all right anyhow.)
We didn't bring an NDA to a meeting with potential partners a few years back.

We found out a few months later after not hearing back from them that they were developing a competitive product.

It didn't work out for them as it turns out so everything turned out alright for us but we definitely bring NDAs to the table now.
mostly newest, and 'threads'.
How to turn your skills into services that people will pay for
The discovery of distinct plumes of methane that peak in Martian spring and Summer are to me strong evidence that something biological is going on:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/marsmethane.html

The more seasons we see this pattern happen the less likely it is some volcanic/geological source.
"None could accept the idea that their state had a spending problem rather than a revenue problem"

"For roughly 60 years, Berkeley has offered more services to its residents than virtually any other city in the U.S."

This should point out to him his mistake, I would think. He is assuming that the correct answer is to lower taxes (or keep them the same) and spend less. But this isn't a correct (or wrong) answer, it is one option. Maybe people in California would rather pay higher taxes and get more services. It works pretty well for a lot of European countries.
I remember that definition from high school. It's funny how useless that definition is, in that, knowing it doesn't help you figure out what it really is.

The newer definition: "In 1983, the metre was redefined as the distance travelled by light in free space in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second." always kind of bothered me because it sounds like it went like this:

"Ok, so we defined the speed of light as 299,792,458m/s and it's all over textbooks and formulas, but the thing is that our current definition of a meter sounds a little bit like a guess. So let's just reverse the speed of light and we're good!" It feels like a backronym to me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym)
Yes indeed. Very good book.

What's amusing is that it was intended to be set a decade or two in the future, but most of the "futuristic" plot twists have already happened.
There is some question as to whether the attack originated from within Google's offices in China. If so, or if there was some inside knowledge used to facilitate the attacks, closing operations in China was significantly strengthen Google's defenses, since they will no longer be exposing internal information to Chinese citizens (apparently) willing to help Chinese government hacking attacks.
Funny! In dutch it is possible to talk for 20 minutes in proverbs/sayings, make perfect sense and not repeat a single one.

They're also all untranslatable.

For instance:

He must have been hit by a windmill.

Or:

He has been pulled out of the clay.

In English they make no sense at all.
"I'd say emergent, especially intelligent life would make the stats pages. Given the age of the universe and how long it has taken for Earth to evolve an intelligent lifeform I'd say it's even possible we are one of the first, if not THE first, intelligent lifeform"

a) That's one hell of a sampling bias.

b) The universe is roughly 14 billion years old, though stars only started forming about 12 billion years ago. The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. I don't see how you are able to draw that conclusion. Other factors that we are unable measure might allow us to make the conjecture if they take certain values.

Edit: formatting
It's because GCs are starting to take a long time now that there is so much stuff to keep in memory. Items are lazily loaded, but they never get unloaded. Eventually (after a day or so) crawlers drag everything into memory, and GCs take excessively long. I plan to fix the problem by starting to dump stuff back out of memory. In the meantime I just restart HN when it's starting to spend too much time GCing, which in effect dumps everything out of memory except the most recent 15k items.
Is it time to quit your day job? (by Ali Davar)
The secret of making money online: David Heinemeier Hansson
Excellent article, a good read for anyone who is thinking of starting. My own experience is that succeeding in startups took more than just quiting my day job, I also need to change my mindset as well. For example, if you are a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer, you can quit and become an entrepreneur. But you cannot succeed if you continue to have the mindset of a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. First of all, there are always more than two sides to an issue and often the right place is to be is in the middle - an option that a lawyer does not have. Also, in startups, there is not always an answer to every question; or if there is an answer, it might not be unique. So waiting for perfect data to arrive at a perfect solution is a luxury that I don’t have as an entrepreneur. If that bothers you, then you should go back to being an engineer. Finally, as an entrepreneur, I often have to shoot my patient (and I have).
Moreover, Page and Brin met with Obama once or twice during the campaign for some pretty in-depth meetings. More than the government "knowing", this response could very well be deniably calibrated with the US government's knowledge and advice.
> If Mars did independently originate life, it should be clearly obvious.

Why?
Michelle is on the right track (ex guitar teacher here.) The SRS advice above is nice, but a lot of guitar playing is simply well-developed muscle memory. I got good because the guitar was always on the couch by the TV. I'd pick it up every time I sat down and just play scales or random chords. I watched a LOT of TV at the time and I had a teacher to keep me from developing bad habits.

My students who watched a lot of TV and were allowed to play in the living room got better, faster than those who didn't.
I think there is a substantial difference between saying a loud and clear 'No!' to the largest growth market on the planet before entering or saying it after several years of mapping that market.

For sure the calculation today is a lot more refined than it was several years ago, and probably the figures in the spreadsheets are smaller than they were back then.
You've now tied yourself in the curious knot of claiming that there are some paintings created after 1500 that are exactly as good as the best works of the earlier era, but no better, and that that's what you meant to say all along.

What's particularly weird about this argument is that is would not affect your essay at all to concede that, say, the period called the 'Golden Age of Dutch Painting', or the Golden Age of Spanish Painting, or one of the several other periods that art historians (inconveniently for you) commonly refer to as Golden ages of painting produced better work that the somewhat fussy and stylized paintings of the Renaissance, and that you just got excited because you really like Leonardo.

But you seem unwilling to back down from any claim once you've made it in print, no matter how silly ("Cezanne couldn't draw!"), and so we get this peculiar kind of weaseling.

Western art, like Western music or mathematics, is a cumulative enterprise, but you've done the equivalent of claiming Pythagoras was the best mathematician ever, and as evidence pointing to the fact that no serious historian of mathematics has ever said in print that Pythagoras was a worse mathematician than Euler or Gauss, when it would not occur to anyone else to think in those terms.

Apart from the fact that this is just blatant argument from authority ("no art historian would disagree with me! Not even this one, who just disagreed!"), it also a disservice to your readers, who are taking it on faith that you know what you are talking about. As Aaron's correspondence demonstrates, when someone finally does corner an art historian, and bends the poor guy's mind into thinking of the history of Western painting in the same weird categories you do, he'll politely say that you're completely full of it.

Not being an expert in philosophy, or economic history, or the trade union movement, but being a longtime student of your writing style, I suspect the same thing would happen in those fields. I just happen to know art history, so when you write about that I can poke the holes myself.

You've been coasting on the fact that most of your readers are technical people who will take the analogies you strip-mine from the humanities at face value because of their respect for you as a clever guy. You can probably continue coasting on it for the remainder of your career.

But I think you'll find that a little more humility, intellectual honesty and the confidence to abandon the occasional overeager metaphor, rather than trying at all costs to defend it, would make you an even better writer than you think you are now. Maybe not a better writer than EB White, but possibly exactly as good.
This could also have a rather negative effect on religion.

I only ever hear non-religious people say that. Very few religious people will say "If you proved that, my faith would be shaken."
McKinnon wins review of extradition for hacking
I really worry that people get the wrong impression from these articles. Yes, don't ask VCs and journalists to sign NDAs. Yes, don't sign an NDA if you're unsure of whether there's an opportunity.

But in the real world, refusing to sign an NDA to move a business transaction forward will very often kill the transaction and sour the prospect on you. Most businesses that have been operating for awhile have very valid reasons to get NDA cover for everyone they work with.

A really common case where NDAs are almost unavoidable is when you're working with companies that have in-house general counsel. This, by the way, is one reason not to have in-house general counsel.
This book:

http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Revised-Princip...

is written by the Who Framed Roger Rabbit animation director and references that production frequently, including a discussion of eye level in a scene where Eddie Valiant's actor was mistakenly filmed with too high a gaze. They worked around the problem by animating Roger Rabbit to stretch his back up against the wall in mock terror, which fortunately worked for the scene's dialogue.
It might help you feel better, but unilateral modifications don't hold up in court. Of course, if the other guy agrees to your changes, it's fine. But I think this is why my company has the NDA for visitors on computer screens.
http://enlavalla.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/brueghel_prover...
I got upvoted because I was the first comment. I extracted the important part of a long blog post.
I don't think he's saying that any language is the best tool for the job.

More (and I've found this to be true) that once you learn most basic programming concepts in one language, moving to another becomes easier. The more you learn the easier it is to switch to another language.
Trademarks might be expected to get a few seconds of attention at a given moment, much of it subconscious visual processing. In the 5-10 minutes it takes to read an Onion article, almost all people will observe something not right and be motivated to decide whether it's a fake story or not. In the 1 second it takes to observe a trademark on a piece of clothing, most people will not have the motivation to decide whether it's a fake or not.

And even then, the trademarks are still very similar. Even a person looking at them side-by-side can reasonably suggest that the South Butt logo is a humorous sub-brand that comes from The North Face. Often, with Onion articles, you can point to some fact that contradicts fundamental scientific laws and therefore cannot possibly be a true story. Spinal Tap is technically a real band, and while the story told in the movie is fake it is still plausible. I would not be surprised at all if someone saw out-of-context clips of This Is Spinal Tap without knowing what it was, and assumed it was a real documentary.
Here is a related HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986990) centered around a piece entitled "Reasons to Drop NDAs."

Because the theme is the same in the post here, I repost below my response to the prior piece:

"It all depends on what one means by 'NDA.'

If it means the piece of paper people ask you to sign before giving you a pitch, the author's points are largely well taken.

On the other hand:

1. If a company fails to have its employees sign NDAs, it potentially jeopardizes its trade secrets (to protect something as a trade secret, an employer must show that it took reasonable steps to treat the proprietary information as trade secret information and having employees sign NDAs is a key component of this).

2. If a supposed suitor approaches you about buying your business, and you fail to sign an NDA, then the information disclosed in the buying process - which can include your most intimate and valuable business techniques and plans - can potentially be lifted by the would-be suitor and used competitively against you after the suitor abandons the deal.

3. If you attempt to negotiate a potential strategic partnership, and you trade proprietary information relating to what would be a valuable joint venture, and do so without an NDA, then, again, the prospective partner can betray you and use your valuable information against you.

4. If you let your sales people develop all of a company's leads in their own name and using their own resources, without confidentiality agreements (i.e., NDAs) acknowledging that the customer information is valuable proprietary and confidential information belonging to the company, you leave your company exposed to having its customers raided without any legal recourse. Are sales people prone to do this? Absolutely. They tend to think of customers as belonging to them and not to the company. Without the basic legal protections afforded by NDAs, a company runs serious risks of losing its customer base to those who might chose to raid it.

5. Other examples could be multiplied, almost ad infinitem, depending on the particular business context, of how it is positively naive and, indeed, stupid, to proceed in various business dealings without benefit of the legal protections needed to protect confidential and proprietary information, that is, without an NDA.

While I think the author's basic points make perfect sense in the fast and loose world of 'pitches,' they are not generally applicable in the world of startups. As long as there are business dealings in which any party has valuable information that it wants to keep secret, NDAs will continue to serve valuable purposes and are necessary and, indeed, indispensable to the transactions involved. This is from the perspective of one who has specialized in business startup law in Silicon Valley for the past quarter century."
Except in 1982 the rates would have been 8% and 12%.
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