skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working remote and love it. But I'm a very introvert guy.
I don't like smalltalk, I don't like talking to a group of people, it exhausts me. But I love to philosophize with one person, when one thought generates another one, when both appreciate the thoughts of the other and go together beyond their own border.

Most of the communication with my teammates is done by phone
and a request tracker. If someone develops a new feature or
a customer has a demand, everything goes over the rt. It works pretty well, you can always see what your teamates are working on, and how they solved a problem.
>Why does it have to take the people 1000x the effort to get a bill killed as it does to lobby it into existence?

Because 1000 x $0.32 stamps < 1 x $$$$ donation to the MP's party
Its a shame geo aware DNS hosting is always at a premium price point.

On a related note: dns.com sell packages based on number of dns queries per month. How would I work out how many I need? Obviously its not one per visitor. Does anyone know what the rough ratio is?
Unpaid Interns Are Exploited?
A lot of the new housing going up (and the reason for the NIMBYism) typically has these attributes (a close friend was in a similar building in BK):

* Extremely shoddy construction (2 years after being built, severe water damage from leaking windows)

* Blank concrete walls with giant leaky windows

* Extremely poor soundproofing

* Overpriced for their size and quality

* Thus, attracting more affluent, less intelligent, and typically more dickish yuppy types

The "simple solution" you propose would be terrible. It would ghettoize Jamaica even more than it already is - even if not done for racist reasons (I'm convinced that's not your reasoning), it would come across as this and get an immense amount of backlash from the council, the population, and community boards throughout the city.
When I was 19 just over a decade ago and the music industry was just catching onto CD burning and MP3s, I wrote directly to some Canadian lobbyists. At the time they were pushing for levies on recordable CDs. Considering CDs ran almost a $1 per disc and I was a university student, this hit home. I told them that they just didn't understand the situation, that the Internet changed everything, and that they wouldn't be growing their revenues with this CD levy because distribution would move away from physical media anyhow. I also called shenanigans on how they would actually distribute the proceeds to Canadian artists seeing as how most of the pirated material was from non-Canadian artists. The organization appeared to be a one man show for the most part, and that gentleman wrote back to me, disagreed, and suggested that I could meet him in Ottawa because they were going to lobby until they got their way.

Lobbying is frustrating because it works. A lot of legislation is essentially drafted behind closed doors by special interests, then revised within a particular ministry before getting a seal of approval vote by the legislature. In fact, that's probably how just about everything short of a private members' bill is done these days.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. There are businesses and individuals that have interests which will be harmed by these laws. What this group needs to do is hire its own lobbying group. Otherwise, the debate is being framed in terms of "Canadians are pirates" and "Canada needs to get with the program and adopt laws that other countries have". Michael Geist has probably single-handedly done more to thwart these laws than anyone else. But I'm sure that the other side has full time consultants on hand. The lobbyists have a lot more energy only because the opposition has not figured out that if they band together under an umbrella, their focussed energy is much greater.
they surely hoped it was a stolen nextgen iphone and not a knockoff.
Ramen Unprofitable (with apologies to Paul Graham)
There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer.

How is some random performance artist providing me value? And if they aren't, why should I "support" them? I they aren't providing value to me then why should I be obligated to pay them? I can understand paying for roads, schools, police--but this?

There's a mechanism in place for me to determine if I wish for an artist to provide me value. It's called "I pay them."

Oh, wait. I know--since you say that the contributions of these people cannot be measured by money, then clearly this "support" you mention is not money. Sure, I can do that. "Great Job, folks!"
Sony built the first portables for Apple.
Nvidia: Moore's Law is Dead, Multi-core Not Future
I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.

Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.
Oozie: A workflow management system for Hadoop job DAGS from Yahoo
Ask NH: Is euro going down with Greece?
What do you think of the current crisis in Europe? Is euro a stable currency? Will the EU/IWF bailout rescue Greece? Is the crisis going to spread to other countries?
All good arguments. Unfortunately, Apple will cause a large reduction in the use of Flash, unless it becomes available on the iPad. scribd, for example, already decided to make the move to HTML5 even before the Apple/Adobe clash. Flash might be able to do more, and browser makers might be implementing an unratified HTML5 spec, but that is how it's going to happen.

Bottom line: If a site wants to work on the iPad/iPhone, it needs to avoid using Flash.
I feel your pain! My university's tranfer to Live@Edu has been anything but easy and I just forward my email to GMail from the university's email. I long for the day when the backend of email is completely transparent.
The trillion-dollar fraud
When it comes to playing music and sync I still feel it works as expected, even though I wouldn't mind a speedier experience. Of course, I have been using it since version 3 sometime, so I'm used to it by now.

Where iTunes really feels inconsistent or non-intuitive for me is the video section, where playback definitely doesn't feel Apple-y (Why does it blank my primary screen when I do fullscreen video on my secondary, for instance?) I would much rather have the option to open video in Quicktime Player rather than having the sub-par experience within iTunes itself.
Actual question, not a jab: How long would it take to commute to midtown Manhattan from there?
Bot nets are a small but annoying problem for a small percentage of people in the world. A pay-as-you-go, "we'll charge you extra for downloading 1MB from youtube rather than some other site" internet such as the one ISPs would like to aim towards would be a huge problem for everyone.

Have a sense of proportions...
if we figure out how to cure diseases that kill us off around a median 90 years, why wouldn't we find cures for those conditions that kill us off at the "imaginary" boundary of 1,000 years?
Zed exaggerates wildly. If he was speaking with the manager of a $30 billion hedge fund, he was talking to one of three people: George Soros, John Paulson (yes, the guy on the short side of ABACUS), or Brevan Howard.

http://www.pionline.com/article/20100308/CHART2/100309910

J.P. Morgan asset management (i.e., nearly all the hedge funds J.P. Morgan owns) is only $53 billion.
Bill Gates: Microsoft is Working On 'a Lot of Tablets'
I think it may come down to the complexity of a project. For something non-trivial simply having someone to bounce ideas off of can make a big difference in one's overall efficiency, and thus probably happiness.
Best science story I have seen in months.

I bet this is keying off the exsanguination and Hydrogen Sulfide work we've read about before in places like Scientific American -- where cell damage happens in the transition to a low oxygen environment, not necessarily being in one.

Aside from the far-out dream of cryogenics, of which I'm a big fan, this has huge implications for surgery. If you can take a person into hibernation for a day, working at your leisure, you can do all sorts of things that we couldn't do before.

Huge, huge story.
Won't everybody using Flash be able to do the same thing with Flash CS5's <canvas> + FXG support?

Isn't the point of this move to support the iPad, the iPhone, and other non-Flash environments?
so you think our life expectancy will be well beyond 1,000 years by then? how will actuaries calculate life expectancy in 2130 (which is less than 1,000 years from now)?
I know I am late to this thread, but building development tools for closed source products (.NET, etc.) is an easy way to make a living. Developers are easy to reach, don't demand glossy marketing and have a good sense of the time they can save with your tool. Two of my early startups were both development tools companies and they were both quickly profitable.
I remember rummaging through the menus to find the menu item where one could do that to... To make matters worse, they had one "Options..." and one "Settings..." in the same menu, and I never remembered which one had those settings in it, so I pretty much always had to go through two dialog boxes before having the menus working properly again. Oh, the humanity!
Interesting how he integrated the price for all his WP themes into his brand -- everything is 75 bucks, hence press75.com. That seems great for now, but does it make it difficult to raise prices in the future?
Parts of NJ have similar prices. The commute would be 30 minutes to midtown.

If you live in a slightly different place, you get a 15 minute commute to lower manhattan.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=250...

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=1+J...
Naw, if the next one's bad I'll just switch to Android or whatever. :)
They don't have to be better. What is "better" anyway? More efficient algorithms? More normalized data? Fewer bugs?

For me, it's about experiences and perspectives. When I work with other programmers who have unique approaches to problems that help me work more efficiently, I enjoy working with them.

I also enjoy working with less experienced programmers who are willing to learn and practice new, more efficient methods.

I really dislike working with programmers who think they are awesome, but are really clueless. I try to help them, but their pride gets in the way. It's funny when they try to school me on stuff. I just don't have time for that. I feel bad for their clients.

But sometimes I run across people who know little tricks or constructs and I'm like, Wow, that's awesome, teach me more!
This contains nothing but content hijacked from the original piece (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1314227). It's surprising that people can get away with this. I thought tomshardware was a credible site.
Its terrible practice to catch an error and do nothing with it.
But talent, time, and energy aren't the products being sold. Those are capital expenditures, and are already sunk costs by the time there is any product to sell.

The product itself _is_ the set of copyable bits, and this _is_ scarcity-free, due to having zero marginal cost of production.

In a non-scarce market, people pirating your game is economically equivalent to e.g. people reading books instead, or spending their time writing their own games. Pirates are just another category of people who aren't your customer.

The best possible solution to piracy is to _ignore_ it, and focus on identifying your actual paying customers and developing products for them.

But if you absolutely must think of piracy as lost sales, then use piracy volume as an input into your demand curve and adjust your pricing model accordingly.

But don't waste your talent, time, and energy trying to fight a Quixotic battle against a macro-level phenomenon that you have no actual control over.
The biggest issue, as Edward Glaeser points out: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/taller-building... involves the many restrictions on new buildings. Until very recently, most buildings in the 1990s -- when real estate became not just expensive, but absurdly expensive -- were smaller than their predecessors: "Market forces pushed for taller structures, but structures got shorter, at least until the Bloomberg years, because of a regulatory environment that made construction increasingly more difficult."
LOL. Yes, I understand how the regulatory process works.

Apologies if I seemed to mislead anyone. There is nothing unconstitutional going on.

But that doesn't take away from the fact that the regulatory agencies have immense power in our society -- granted to them by Congress. For instance, the DEA can classify new drugs as dangerous, including setting what the jail time will be for possession -- and Congress has virtually no role[1]. Used to be it took an entire constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but now a commission does the same work and there's little publicity.

[1] Ok, so they have "oversight", but as somebody who has seen oversight behind the scenes, and watched a lot of it on C-SPAN, color me unimpressed.

EDIT: Another good one is the EPA classifying CO2 -- the air we breathe -- as being under it's regulatory guidance. Now they made provision so that it only covers large producers of CO2, but that was their decision as an agency. There was no public debate or vote in Congress. Just a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table.

Once again, I support the outcome in this case. I'm not trying to argue that it's a bad outcome. Just not crazy about the way we got here, or the implications for broadband 20 years from now.
...and most of the time the "resources" are aggregated into "full time equivalents." :-(
Given how many degrees of freedom (knowledge of language, operating system, data structures, IDE/git, testing, browsers/JS, database/network/web service dependencies etc) I think most experienced devs will have something to offer you, especially the ones your "equal"

And i think it's great to be able to dictate code out loud. And it's a lot easier on your wrists.
Thus, attracting more affluent, less intelligent, and typically more dickish yuppy types

Therein lies the real reason. "If we allow new construction, people who are different from us will move in!"

By the way, companies building rental buildings rarely construct them poorly. It's just bad business - once the building starts to leak, renters will move out, and it's the responsibility of the management company to fix it.

As for shipping projects out to jamaica, I didn't mean to single out Jamaica. You could spread it around all the cheapest areas in NYC. But yes, you are correct that it is unfeasible, since people will fight it for cultural reasons.
I sure hope it will go down a bit, but Greece will survive this. If you take the EU/US trade in to account and you're a net exporter (like I am) then a weaker Euro is great, after all, my income is in dollars, but most of my expenses are in Euros.

After years and years of steady decline of the dollar, from a high of about 1.06 iirc to .63 or so it really wouldn't hurt to see things go the other way again for a while.

The EU will bail out Greece only to the extent that they don't allow themselves to be pulled under (think of one swimmer trying to rescue another), and that's not very far. The Greek economy fortunately isn't a very large one in EU terms, but still large enough to do serious damage.

If it spreads (Spain, Italy and Portugal are mentioned with some regularity as candidates) it could have a huge impact.

Populist politicians (such as 'Wilders' in the Netherlands) are already using this as a way to gather votes with their 'drop the EUro' theme, but it is unlikely that will ever happen.

If it weren't for the Euro this credit crisis would have potentially been a lot worse than it is for Europe.

A big part of the problem here, both in Greece and Italy is that they have a huge corruption problem, hopefully this will give them the incentive to address that.
I was surprised at that omission from the article. Getting tools to ease remote pairing is one of the most challenging things about remote work. We ended up making Emacs a hiring requirement just because working from screen is such a crucial part of what we do.
One too many s's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_law
A Victory for the Future of the Internet
I agree, but I will also say that you can almost always find ways to get more done with more people. For example, it's easy to break up a project into code, css, html, javascript. That's four people right there. You could also have a graphics person drawing icons or cool backgrounds. You could have a database person. At some point you'll need a networking guru, marketer...

It's easy to get into the trap of thinking it's all about code, but there are lots of ways to add people. Sometimes, coders don't want to add people, because it's one more person asking them to code something. Coders often don't know how to push back and say, "This is what I'm working on, this is what I need you to do."

Every answer to an IT problem is "It Depends." In this case, the question of "Does adding more people make the project go faster or better?" is "It depends."

This question can't be answered with a general absolute.
Apple vs. the Web: The Case for Staying Out of Steve Jobs's Walled Garden
>No; The line has to be executed for the error to show up in a dynamic language.

This is a common misperception:

http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/
http://www.logilab.org/857 (pylint)
http://www.jslint.com/

And to head off the common "But but but it's not the compiler", I contend you're doing something wrong if you're not also running lint against a C program, as C compilers do not catch tons of things that people do wrong, but lint does.

Both types of languages have common type errors. Some can only be caught at runtime in both, but some sorts of errors (signature errors), static type checkers can catch them.

I work in both types of languages. In the amount of time I spend fiddling with type system stuff in objective C, I could write 2 test harness classes in python, and happily would.

Now if you're talking Erlang, et al, then we can talk about static type systems. But for the algol languages, I don't think they have all the benefits of a strong, static type system that outweigh the productivity of dynamism.

If you use docstrings, doctests, etc, you can find quite a nice enterprise coding language in there. Remember dynamic are more expressive (by definition almost)than static languages per line of code. So that 20k Line java/C# program is something like 3-13k lines of python or 2-9k lines of ruby.

The dominant reason to use static languages usually has little to do with their static nature with regards to errors: They are often faster at execution time. Also, they tend to have cheaper programmers. Both of these often dominate any code quality issues.

I personally advocate mixed language situations (like python weave) for most situations like that so inner loops can get the speed of C, and the rest gets the development speed of a dynamic language.
Ah, I see what you're getting at now. I'll now take the ostrich approach (stick your head in the ground & pretend it's okay) when it comes to dealing with specific government agencies. I don't want to know the details.
The trend seems to go the other way in Britain - I notice several former Loony's now represent the Conservative party.

Funnily enough, when Thatcher was Prie Minister, she tried to pass a law banning joke candidacies, but failed. Besides challenges from Screaming Lord Sutch and various campaigners for lighter drinking laws, she also faced challenges from the dread-but-obscure Darth Vader lookalike, Lord Buckethead (Gremloids).
The problem is not lack of new buildings. There are dozens, if not hundreds of mostly empty new buildings in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, LIC and downtown Brooklyn.

The expense of housing in NYC is not tied to any real "fundamental." The owners are charging what they think the market will bear. The smaller tenement style and brownstone buildings in the hot rental areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn were usually purchased and fully paid for back in the 1980s... My old landlord owned a block of avenue B that he bought for about $80K per building back in the 80s. Paid off decades ago. He's charging $2400/m per unit. Shit apartments, roaches, old appliances, noisy... The whole alphabet city experience from the 80s still available to BFFs from Maryland psyched to be at NYU!
How Digital Sky Technologies (DST) Became An Internet Giant
If you're an Android developer and looking for ideas, start here
Interesting. I've built a few PXE-/IPMI-based control and boot systems, but haven't run across the SMASH acronym before. Looks like it was a set of recommendations after IPMI 1.0 that eventually were incorporated into IPMI 2.0, important bits like secure shell (SSH) access to the console, virtual boot media and better power management.

I'd stick with the IPMI moniker, it's what people will know. :)

(Btw, your profile appears blank -- hn anomaly?)
I don't see why the reason for the money really matters. If you have founders that don't need salaries, but do need to buy $400k worth of equipment (or whatever) it's not much different than two guys who need $90k/year salaries for 2 years (because they're older and have mortgages/families/whatever).

If you can get enough money from angels you should probably always do that first. If you can only get a sufficient amount from VCs then you don't have a choice.
New Intel Atom: Significantly Lower Power
This is a great move. It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries.

The free market has failed the Internet. For some things, like utilities, government regulation works best. I think we all can agree that network access is a utility and should be treated as such.
If my neighbor is downloading a torrent for 3 hours, it hardly matters whether it arrives in 3:04 or 3:05. But if I'm browsing HN or email, the difference between 0.1 seconds and 1.0 seconds is quite perceptible.
Remember: You do not need postage to write your MP or the PMO a paper letter! It's free!
For Europeans it is actually quite hard to distinguish the two major US parties based on their policies, they would both be labelled right-of-center in most European countries.

The most visible differences (abortion, stance on war, gay rights) are relatively small, much smaller than the similarities.

To hear 'left wing' and 'right wing' thrown about and the Democrats labeled 'socialist' is really confusing.
Ask HN: Best methodology to create training videos?
I have to offer potential customers training videos for evaluation purposes, and this seems like a good idea to attract interest on our website, too.

How could I create informative videos about our product, and also technical tutorials? I searched the web for this but it is one of these things you need to get right, and I feel your experience would be valuable.