skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a slightly different note, if you're not sure about what to do, I'd recommend figuring out what skills you're weak at and improving them.

If I was in your situation right now I'd probably think about working as a consultant for someone like McKinsey or Deloitte which have strong NGO links (both through alumni and philanthropic consultancy work), where you could get exposed to a lot of companies and non-profits and develop your problem solving and people-handling skills at the same time.

Too many developers only see the "small picture" which prevents them from being able to make a major impact, being able to understand wider issues as well as pure tech will go a long way in making you better able to tackle your goal.
Benoit Mandelbrot best known for his fractels but a contributor in a number of other fields.
Google thinks so.

> adheresToDontBeEvil("incognito mode")
> true
JSON visualization tool
you _do_ know you can customize emacs with ruby, right?

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsLispForRuby
That would be a very bad move and very un-Apple.

I actually agree, but it would be better than forcing developers to adhere to a static memory quota.

Ultimately there isn't any simple answer for the iPhone multitasking issue. Maybe Apple should create tools that let developers create "background modes" of their apps, which would take up less memory and dynamically cede control to other apps with higher priority, like the Phone.
Record Labels: Change or Die
Perhaps I wasn't clear.

Why doesn't one of the smart, ambitious, young developers here at HN, who is probably looking for a side project develop an Omnigraffle or Soulver clone and start selling it? I can understand why the Omnigraffle people themselves are too busy driving expensive cars through the hills around Silicon Valley to do so themselves.

Considering how many time-waste-ish sites we see come through here in "Rate My Site" form, it's clear that there's plenty of dev-power getting squandered on a daily basis.

I've just given two concrete examples of applications that real people are paying real money to use. Personally, if I had the time I'd be spending it building WinSoulver rather than BigAssTextMessage.com.
Just wanted to add that we've updated three figures for average consumption of Americans based on errors you guys pointed out:

- average electricity and natural gas use were mistakenly per capita rather than per household

- beef consumption didn't include beef eaten outside of the home
You could implement this sort of tracking in a very non-intrusive way with RFID: put an RFID scanner in the supply room, which reads the employees' and equipments' RFID tags such that the monitoring system knows that employee X left room Y with equipment Z.

Hasn't this sort of thing been in production for years with UPS/WalMart/etc?
3 Tips for Enduring the Trials of Entrepreneurship
Evri Ties the Knot with Twine — Twine CEO Comments and Analysis
This is a great example of why libertarians are not to be confused with Objectivists.

Objectivism provides the essential philosophical basis for individualism and long-term rational selfishness required to properly support political conclusions in favor of freedom. Libertarians, on the other hand, don't know or understand the philosophy from which many of their political conclusions were copied, and are thus susceptible to reverting to political conclusions that appear momentarily practical, or consistent with altruism (which many libertarians implicitly embrace).

On top of that, "libertarian" has come to means so many things that it means nothing - there are libertarians in favor of and against abortion, in favor of and against anarchy, in favor of and against anti-trust regulation, to name a few random examples.

Objectivism isn't pervasive enough yet for political change based on it to occur, and libertarianism is a political dead end (because it's not consistent with the terrible mixed bag of present-day American values, or with itself.) So if you consider yourself a libertarian, and you don't like where Welch and his ilk are heading, I invite you to read Ayn Rand and new scholarly works that examine her philosophy deeply (Tara Smith's "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist".)
"It's not only linkbait, it's also offensive that anyone would suggest we have anything to learn from Wall St during the current financial crisis we find ourselves in b/c of Wall St."

Every failure has a lesson. We can learn what not to do in the future (so we don't get into the same mess again).
How do they have the rights to this video suddenly? How did they make it embeddable? Did they buy it from EMI?
Now submitted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184642

I was going to do so myself but thought it would be better HN etiquette to let the submitter (or someone) edit the URL here.
Ask a Noble Laureate
I concede this point until May.
How real? (Neven Mrgan's response to Marco Arment's Calculator critique)
No correlation has been found between exposure to porn and negative attitudes towards women.

As other commenters have stated, it is really difficult to conduct a good experiment given the difficulty controlling for other variables. However, I'm not even sure it is the right question. I'd be more interested in men's attitudes towards themselves given habitual exposure to porn.

The same experimental difficulty exists, but I think it is more "upstream" from negative attitudes towards women. That is, in the course of the hypothesized man turned sexual predator, there is probably a period of sexual frustration that may be exacerbated by the non-reality of porn. This then develops into the deviant.
See, it's easy to call big old businessmen stupid, but there's more to these decisions than consumers can see. Not to say you shouldn't put on pressure for them to change, but respect what they decide in the end, and move on if it's not worth it to you.
A great revelation of the internet was that exhibitionism is approximately as widespread as voyeurism. Who'd a thunk it?

As for Mr. Max, I'm not sure why he shouldn't play the field as thoroughly as, say, Mick Jagger. I assume he's at least no uglier, and I can't imagine he could sing much worse.

As for The Weekly Standard, shouldn't it stick to telling us who to invade? "Lifestyle" journalism never wears well.
Shareware is also alive today in the App Store ... many apps have a limited free version.

Because of the similarity I also think Apple's App Store isn't sustainable, because there will be so much crap that users will only go for established brands (it's already happening, even with Apple's strict control ... which serves more to ban competitors of Apple's own offerings).
because I'm so young
A couple of the image links are broken. Try

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/regexp-img/script_Greek.png
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/regexp-img/cat_Lu.png

for the trees used to match greek scripts and lower case letters respectively.

Another interesting article from the guy who wrote Google Code Search if I'm not mistaken.
Didn't read the article, but are they planning to start charging a more reasonable rate for their software and upgrades? Seems like the best way for MS to cut datacenter costs would be setup a more reasonable licensing model.
Right. Once you're used to the format, it's really easy to image how other functions will behave.
The mistake most people make, including this article, is thinking that Avatar was an "animated" movie. It was not animated, it was motion-captured. If you saw the making-of Avatar, which I think aired on HBO, you would see that Cameron did actually direct the movie. He was able to see a realtime 3-D representation of his actors and set using a special hand-held camera.
Feds: TSA Worker Tried to Sabotage Terror Database
Done after college (Computer science)? Think again.
This might be an argument against continuing the legacy of having the throttle operated by a pedal.
I've always felt uncomfortable continuously pressing the accelerator when driving. Is it just bad legacy UI or are there arguments in favor of operating the throttle with a foot?
The set of gay men isn't broken up into male and female subsets, and neither is the set of gay women. You don't have this cross-set matching which seems necessary for the stable marriage problem: you indeed have a single-set stable roommates problem, or perhaps two such single-set problems, one for gay men and one for lesbians.
If you're going to brag about your design skills you shouldn't blatantly rip off other artists.
http://www.woothemes.com/2009/11/digitalfarm/
http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...
"Need a prescription for muscle relaxers, an anti-fungal cream, or a steroid inhaler for temporary lung trouble? In the U.S. you have to fight to get on the appointment schedule of a doctor within your health insurance network ... then have him or her scrawl something unintelligible on a slip of paper, which you take to a drugstore to exchange for your medicine. ...In France, by contrast, you walk to the corner pharmacist, get either a prescription or over-the-counter medication right away, shell out a dozen or so euros, and you’re done."

Unless I'm confused, this is conflating two issues. Requiring patients to have a full doctor's visit in order to get a prescription for simple but non-OTC medicines is logically distinct from single-payer/non-single-payer. If you require more visits, you will of course spend more money.
For those of you who haven't seen it, the movie The Prestige (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/) deals with this topic of transient existence of people, albeit in the context of magicians and science. It's a very good movie, to boot.
I remember people being disappointed to OpenGL 3.0 not being large enough change. Is OpenGL 4.0 now that change that was missing from OpenGL 3.0?
Posing such a rhetorical question merely underlines the rationale as to why civilized society is not governed by young men in their twenties and thirties.
Reuters to Journalists: Don’t Break News on Twitter
I've looked at OVH, but I read so many horror stories about them on hosting review sites that I never dared to sign up with them, good to see they have satisfied customers as well.

They're huge from what I've seen about them, but as you say, support is a bit of an issue there, as well as strong opinions about oversold bandwidth.
I would love to respond to everyone but I think a follow up would be better. I never expected getting this much feedback! Just wanted to start off with a big thanks!

I've decided that the university route is the way to go. I was stressing over getting a job or doing a startup so much that I forgot about how much I want to learn. I think I will do whatever interests me and allow that to lead me, instead of having a pre-determined mndset of what I think I'm supposed to be. I won't stress out about grades or jobs and make the most of the next four years.

And just to clarify, I've been going to the community college for two years full time, not high school. I know the uni is a great place to meet girls but, and I REALLY don't want to sound cocky, I've never had problems with girls. I'm not lacking in social skills and I'm sure many here on HN aren't either.

I also never expected there to be so many people from UW here! The next four years should be exciting, and I'm really looking forward to them and also being more active in this community. Thanks again.
If your bootloader is not locked down, change the Linux command line and add: init=/bin/sh

That'll give you a root prompt. You may need to mount filesystems by hand, etc., since init scripts have not run.
RSA vs. ECC: This basically comes down to "ECC is complicated and you're going to screw it up".

AES-CTR-HMAC vs. AES-GCM: While GCM is better than some of the other combined authenticated-encryption algorithms, it's (a) rather complex (128-bit finite field math is messy), (b) exposes you slightly to a side channel attack on your block cipher, and (c) is no faster than AES-CTR-HMAC, so why bother?
Owl City – Fireflies music video
You also forgot that Ayn Rand repeatedly denounced libertarianism while alive and made it clear she was not for minimal government, non-interventionism, or pretty much any of the major concerns of libertarian movements.

Sadly, libertarians like me will be tarred with the Randroid label until the end of time, even the anarchists I've known who trace their ideas back to Lysander Spooner. Over the same timeframe, Objectivists will alternately denounce libertarianism and claim they invented it.

Just one of those eternal tempests in a very small teacup.
Oblique Strategies on Twitter
Or alternatively, most undergraduate degrees are so irrevelant to either research or industry that they are essentially make work.
I read way too much Ayn Rand myself when I was about 17. Seven years later, I've found that Rand contradicts herself in a number of places--chief among them, as cited by generations of anarchist libertarians, is the inherent contradiction between the non-aggression principle and government. Where she doesn't contradict herself, she makes handwavy arguments backed by vague assertions about human nature which, by and large, don't hold up to the actual evidence.

I've also found that treating social and political issues as axiomatic mathematical systems is the wrong way to go about things in the first place.

Finally, you may have misread the central point of the article. It wasn't an unreserved support of socialized medicine, but rather an acknowledgement that, whatever the problems socialized medicine has, the fucked-up, cronyist mixed system we have in this country is even worse.
The Right to Work
The stickybits value-add is providing the infrastructure for a social version of what you described. You can set it up with absolutely zero technical knowledge (a key factor that people on HN can easily forget about -- don't forgot about the normals)

Of course anyone could whip up a free QR code that encodes a URL to your website/webapp/wiki/whatever and get the same thing more or less, but YOU must get the code and put the it on a sticker, YOU must build the wiki, YOU must integrate twitter/foursquare/facebook/geocoding, etc). That sounds like a fun project actually, but a normal company wanting that will have to put up big bucks to a developer to make the system. With stickybits, you buy some (overpriced) stickers, and all the features I described above are available to users with a complexity equivalent to texting. So, this concept is anything BUT weak. Simplifying a process is really, really important. When the iPod first came out, there were a lot of technically better options, but the iPod/iTunes combo was so easy to use that it crushed the competition. The cool factor was there too, and I don't know if barcodes will ever be considered cool, but that's another thread.

As far as making money...of course they will try to make money. It's a company, not a non-profit. I presume the money is in the data, much like bit.ly. Stickybits will be able to see who is scanning what codes, and where that's all happening. That information is ultra-valuable to any company trying to sell or promote something. In fact, I would not be surprised one bit if the prices of those sticker packages approach zero, because the real value is in gathering data, not selling stickers, and free stickers will help the userbase grow faster so a competitor doesn't steal their lunch.

The biggest hurdle would be getting people to adopt the stickybits app, or more generally getting other apps to adopt the stickybits API. The advantage of QR codes is that the format is standardized and widely adopted (well, relatively speaking). The best use-case would be using a QR code when encodes your company's website or whatever (NOT a stickybit code), but then scan that code with stickybits to add the cool social features. Then you hit all audiences: stickybit app users get to see the social comments and check-ins, while the information degrades gracefully for standard QR readers still can understand the underlying URL.

(Billy, I think it would be great if the stickybits app was able to decode QR codes and show that data, instead of only showing comments and the title. I guess currently you'd make a QR code, scan it with stickbits and, from the app, set the title and first comment to the content encoded in the QR code.)
Amazon auctions computing power: Clouds under the hammer
It is funny, when injection molded plastics were first introduced, companies tried to make them replicate the look of knotty pine wood. Then some Italian designers got to them and showed off the intrinsic beauty of plastic (organic forms, translucence) paving the way for designs like the iMac. Seems like the same thing is happening with iPlatform apps.

I think the super literal interface metaphor is a symptom of people responding to polished aesthetics. For years designers have had to work in the handcuffs of cross browser compliance, small file sizes, and as a result most sites look boring.

Along comes the iPhone with these little app confections that are:

- single purpose: so they don't need cluttered nav and work really well

- replicating physical objects: so the metaphors generally make sense opposed to say a tag cloud

- Were made by Mac enthusiasts: Who tend to make really nice looking stuff

Now a lot of folks are thinking that the key to good apps is making it look like/replicate some real world object. While this is part of these apps appeal it is just one layer.

I think if the delicious monster/panic/icon factory teams got a hold of the calculator he was holding up as a great design it would be far more popular. It looks impressive functionally and he is right that we shouldn't be beholden to old technical constraints. It is just a boring from a UI/Eye candy POV which is important in a retail world.
This should be included by professors teaching, or programmers working through, the Dragon Book. It really does a great job reinforcing some ideas.
Yeh that is what I thought. From which I interpreted that the platform Agnostic group is the intersection of the Windows & Linux groups.

Which means the numbers dont add up.
Well, the author himself says, "Finally we are reaching something which is non-stupid and non-sexist enough that it might actually exist somewhere in reality" I think the male/female tables were meant to be a model of how people actually think, as is the whole of the article, not how any even incompetent data modeler would model the problem (except in the second half, where acceptable mental models and acceptable data models converge).
I own a MacBook Pro, but use Win 7 at work. I think it's great, and have considered switching back at home.
iPhone developer here.

> The first and most obvious way is just getting paid by a client for creating the app. Now that’s a payment model I can believe in...

At least 75% of the contract offers on my desk are people who want to sell an app direct to consumer (not an online ordering system or advertising; a game or a utility or calculator, etc.) So developers (albeit 1 step removed) are still very subject to the app store market pressures. If clients can't make money then there will be no contract work. Unlike other markets where there are other sales channels, in the iPhone world, Apple is the only sales channel.

As for the motivations of developers, I think the author's got it wrong, or at least he's got it wrong for me. I might write an app to scratch my own itch, but I wouldn't polish it, document it, pay an artist, or promote it without the nominal income that a niche app provides.

I'm not in it for the big million-dollar gambles. But if an app can pull in $5k year-on-year for about a week's worth of actual work, that's a very attractive investment for me.

You don't have to be EA to get rich on the app store, you just need to work hard and be patient and consistently churn out high-quality products.
Welch does hit it on the head. The current US system is nothing like a free market, and it sucks. France's system (and Germany's) sucks rather less than the UK's or Canada's - or the US's.

I'd advocate for a freer health care market, but that's not on the table. In lieu of that, I'd advocate a more French-style system, but that's not on the table. So, I generally just sit health care debates out, aside from talking side issues with people.
And a bunch of other things. See my article series on "Sed One-Liners Explained":

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/sed-one-liners-explained-part-o...
Since when do you have to respect another company's business decisions? In the end, there is content we want, and the company is making it harder for us to get it. Nothing respectable from a consumers point of view about that.
I'm not sure I buy the argument of '1.5 billion spent developing iPhone apps' vs '500 million in developer revenue'. Even if every hour of iPhone development only gets 30% payment in the macro sense, then I'd wager it's still wildly more lucrative then the startup world at large. Many startups never earn a cent before dying.
I actually thought it was that CE required more expensive chips to do the same thing.
Prolific over use of interfaces when all you have is a single implementor. In a word Yes.
How to selectively delete roaming profiles on remote machines
I noticed the same thing this morning. I like the amount of care they put into the interface, but a few things are wrong. First, when you click through to an article it doesn't go directly to the article. Second, the issue you mentioned. Its very distracting to have the interface fading in/out when trying to scroll.
The question in the article's title is "is porn good for us?" That's not the question they actually answer.

The question they actually attempt to answer is "does porn availability increase sex crimes or lead to unhealthy attitudes about women?" Their answer is that it actually improves both situations, though it's poorly supported by the data. (As others have noted, it's a mere statistical survey with no good control and many confounding factors.)

If they wanted to answer "is porn good for us", they'd have to investigate a number of situations -- porn use within a relationship, for example. I suspect they'd find it has some serious downsides.
Presumably MS doesn't pay themselves for licenses for their own software in their own datacenters, so that's not really relevant.
It's more that there is too much hand holding and babying of american students. European students (at the good universities) are expected to thoroughly and independently study for exams that will come two or more years later. American students are driven by weekly assignments and all sorts of midterms and quizzes. When it comes time to do independent research, the american student is thoroughly unprepared compared to the european.
Have you read anything I've said about Schneier? Sorry, I don't hang on his words quite the same way you seem to be.

You're also taking Schneier out of context. Schneier was talking about genuinely batshit products like VMA and TriStrata, products that claimed to have redefined encryption or to use 4 meg keys. He wasn't talking about people claiming that AES was military grade.

The terrible thing about OpenSSL for an attacker is that everyone has already attacked it. NUL characters broke it. CA's with MD5 broke it. Session resumption broke it. As an attacker, how I wish I had something other than OpenSSL to work with! I could break it with NUL characters! It'll rely on MD5 somewhere!

You wrote your post as a security guy. You have a conflict of interest. I think you stepped over the line. You clearly disagree. Let's agree to disagree.
Clash of the Titans
How about this: with every breath, you inhale a million billion billion atoms of oxygen. When you exhale, these atoms take a couple of years to be uniformly mixed in the atmosphere. Chances are you a breathing oxygen that was once in the lungs of, say, Shakespeare! (though, also, in dog farts).
Before that, this same oxygen was created by fusion in the inside of a star, which died so we could live.