skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess this is fair turn about. I've read plenty of stories/articles from managers and founders about how difficult employees are. Living most of my professional life in the role of manager has taught me a lot, but for my part, I'll never forget what is like to sit on the other side of the desk. I'm an advocate for the people who work for me. The sad thing is, this will probably hold me back. As happy as the ending of the story is, real life rarely lives up to the expectations of story plots.
And I'll vote you up too, because I'm that other guy that got downvoted.

I guess I'm just from a different era. The attitude seems to be "they cashed my check, I can do what I want". Can't say that's totally a wrong attitude, given how colleges in the US work these days. There's a big "don't care" attitude on both sides of the fence now.
> Terrorism is just hype, it's a small criminal matter, that's not worth the trillions the United States is spending to fight it

Yes, but think about the money that is being made by keeping the hype alive.
Hey, they won the last one...
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Watch Wal-Mart grow
I've simply refused... seems to be a dark path they are going down if you're a user... but at the same time I find myself stuck with it as it's an important part of how I manage my life. They know that and that's why they keep screwing us.
USPS jerking around GameFly one year later
Subtranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan. The anthem of my youthful rebellion, and the marching tune of my cynical advancing age.

The Soviet national anthem. Still nothing moves me like the Hymn. I will wake up to it on the 9th to celebrate Soviet victory over the Nazis :-)

Everything in Zeppelin I-IV. Best years of my life. I drank to them, woke up hungover to them, and made love to them.
Terrorism is just hype, it's a small criminal matter, that's not worth the trillions the United States

Counter argument to that is that it is because of the billions in spending that actual terrorism is such a rare occurance.
We've stopped manufacturing, but have we stopped designing? No.

The real money is made not by the people who make the stuff physically, but the people that design the stuff that is made. In that sense, we, too, are "making things out of nothing".
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/1/55760-what-should-we-te...

CS professor (about a student): "He accepted a job in industry."

Another CS professor: "Sad; he showed so much promise."

I don't know if the quote is true or untrue, but it would seem there are people in engineering who share the author's point of view.
Canvas is by all means a CPU hog and much slower than software-mode Flash.

http://vimeo.com/10553088

But hey, Flash is dying, etc
I stopped reading shortly after this sentence - the secret to speed-reading is to not waste time reading things that have been deduced from false facts.

But let me underline: this is no minor factual error. The whole piece appears to be built on falsehood. The author is trying to argue that the USA needs more innovation. But why can we produce more manufactured goods than ever with fewer workers? Increased productivity! And why has productivity increased? Innovation!
> If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack.

I'll counter by saying that if no terror group exists that is capable of obtaining:

* 10 people willing to kill for their beliefs
* 10 hand grenades
* 10 cell phones

Then we have been vastly oversold on the dangers presented by terrorism.

Forget the hand grenades. Just 10 suicidal guys with semi-automatic rifles. This seems stupidly simple to pull off and impossible to defend against.
How Do You Make a Pentaho?
Most of these points are reasonable for Facebook. They're just saying that if you don't like the idea of the "connections," then don't share any information. At least you've been told that that information will be publicly visible, period. The fact that they keep your data even after you delete it from your profile isn't unreasonable either. Did you really think they would destroy all traces of your data just because you have removed it from your profile? I bet Google keeps your emails after you delete them.

The only thing that bothers me is point 6.

> Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall. If you use the name of a Connection in a post on your wall, it may show up on the Connection Page, without you even knowing it.

This is a little sneaky. I wouldn't have a problem if the connections were just behind the scenes (ie: not visible). Then it would be no different from Google checking for keywords in your emails so that they can target ads at you.
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I can appreciate your strong desire to continue to create and build things in your spare time, I share that same passion, I just don't feel it as strongly when I'm building something for someone else. I love working on my little side project, and I try to slip in as much time working on it at home as I can, but I'm not a stay-late-at-work kind of guy, because the stuff I'm working on at work isn't as exciting to me as spending time with my family or working on my own projects. Than again I also enjoy several other hobbies, so it's all a balancing act :-)
That might be true for task completion, but the feeling of discovery when you figure out how a game world works is far more fun.
'Similar', but not the same - it's only changing the color and not actually displacing the bitmap. Big difference.
We decided to make and sell crap. Why? Because we could get away with it. The quote re: autos — “Detroit decided that they would rather make money than cars.”

I'm not an economist, but I wouldn't be surprised if this had something to do with it. All the excitement about startups isn't just about getting rich and changing the world. It's also because everyone knows it's the only way a technical worker is allowed to actually think about improving the product. If you're in a big business, you aren't allowed to just improve the product. You're going to be kept busy doing things that improve the bottom line (really or just notionally) and half the time they make the product worse. But nobody says that, so you're dispirited by hypocrisy as well.

Worst is when you actually use some of the products and services from your company, know that they're worse than the competitors, know that anybody paying the market price for them is getting ripped off, and have to listen to management talk about how hard everyone has to work to live up to MyMegaCorp standards of quality. That's how you take productive people and reprogram them not to care about their contribution to society anymore. I'm really enjoying the stability of MyMegaCorp for a change (the company I work for was acquired a year ago) but I don't think I'm going to last here much longer.

And it could actually be much worse. At MyMegaCorp at least we all feel like we're on the same team. (No fooling; people reflexively cooperate.) At some big corporations, your team might actually intentionally sabotage product releases in order to make another team look bad. I've heard specific stories about documentation being intentionally obfuscated, vital product information being buried in obscure places, verbal commitments given and then intentionally broken and denied, and the most dramatic case, where resentment was so high that three teams knew a fourth team was making a large mistake and kept their mouths shut for months so the project would go down in flames and take the fourth manager with it.
This was a pretty typical viewpoint of CS professors in the mid and early 90s. The job market was dismal and the jobs available were boring. Academia was more stable, arguably more interesting, and depending on the situation, possibly paid about the same as industry.
Finally a worthy debunking of the FUD spread by Mozilla, Thom Holwerda etc. regarding the license fees surrounding H.264.

I wonder if this article will finally be enough to make people understand that Mozilla et al. are either a) confused or b) deliberately spreading lies to instill fear of the H.264 format (while, oddly enough, in the past, they never made a sound about MPEG-1 Layer-III, MPEG-2 video, MPEG-4 ASP video, or AAC audio, all covered by the same licenses).

Really, get it into your heads already:

1) YOU ARE NOT SUBJECT TO LICENSING FEES AS AN END CONSUMER ENJOYING MPEG VIDEO/AUDIO

2) YOU ARE NOT SUBJECT TO LICENSING FEES WHEN DISTRIBUTING FREE MPEG VIDEO/AUDIO IN A NON-COMMERCIAL CONTEXT

3) YOU ARE NOT SUBJECT TO LICENSING FEES WHEN DEVELOPING A VIDEO/AUDIO CODEC THAT CREATES MPEG VIDEO/AUDIO WHEN THE SOFTWARE IS FREE AND NON-COMMERCIAL

4) YOU ARE NOT SUBJECT TO LICENSING FEES WHEN YOU, USING ANY SOFTWARE, CREATE MPEG VIDEO/AUDIO THAT WILL BE USED IN A FREE, NON-COMMERCIAL CONTEXT

addendum, 5) YOU ARE NOT SUBJECT TO LICENSING FEES WHEN YOU DEVELOP SOFTWARE THAT CONTAINS MPEG VIDEO/AUDIO DECODERS/ENCODERS, IF THE DECODERS/ENCODERS AND THE HOUSING SOFTWARE IS FREE AND NON-COMMERCIAL

The last point is aimed at developers of software like video players and web browsers, such as Firefox, which just happens to reside in a commercial context due to the massive, multi-million revenues generated by f.e. sponsored search, thus being subject to licensing fees for incorporating H.264 playback...which the Mozilla Foundation of course don't want to be subjected to, because that means less revenue. Remember: profit is the foundation of all industry, and maximizing that profit is the goal of all industry.

Sorry for the yelling; just had to get that out of my system. Stupid, greedy Mozilla keep pushing my buttons.
> while being able to discover that sonny-boy was only in class 25% of the time.

If that's the case the problem likely commenced at a much earlier date, and no RFID'ing is going to change it.
Sage Weil, the creator of Ceph, recently gave a talk at linux conf au. The slides [1] mostly stand on their own. The first two slides address your first question. The remainder of the slides are a deeper dive into the technical aspects of the system than TFA gives.

I am not using Ceph but my company makes a system built on an extremely similar architecture and I can vouch for the scalability (modulo implementation stupidities, natch). That being said, our system is difficult to administer due to all the moving parts and its distributed nature - I don't know if Ceph shares this drawback.

[1] https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://ceph.newdream.net/...

edit:speling
> You don't have to be a crackpot to entertain such ideas. You just have to be interested in philosophy (or religion, as the Hindus came up with the idea that the entire world is illusory... many thousands of years ago).

I agree, but you can't claim to be doing physics at the same time.
Here's another way to do this in Python.

lets = [chr(x) for x in range( ord('a'),ord('z')+1)]

def blankexpand( templates ):
expansion = []
for t in templates:
expansion = expansion + [t.replace('_',let,1) for let in lets]
return expansion

def expand( template ):
blanktiles = template.count('_')
if blanktiles == 0:
print 'nothing to expand'
elif blanktiles == 1:
print blankexpand( [template] )
elif blanktiles == 2:
print blankexpand( blankexpand( [template] ) )
else :
print 'too many blank tiles'
print

expand( 'abce' )
expand( 'a_')
expand( 'h_ll_')
expand( '___' )
Innovation is overrated. It's time to appreciate the power of the copycat.
> now it's 140/month.

And your rent is?

My point is that for the vast majority of people, healthcare isn't a huge obstacle. It's comparable to transportation and food, and behind shelter.

I don't see folks complaining that they can't do a startup because rent is too high.
given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants
coming across the Mexican border every day.

The words missing there are "poor Latin" (immigrants). Coyotes are not stupid and want to be left (more or less) alone and free to conduct their business. They "self-police" themselves by selecting who they carry across the border, choosing:

1. People they can trust not to create problems along the way

2. People that will try to stay out of trouble in the US (if you're successful, you're more likely to try to get your family in as well and recommend the same coyote. If you're caught (specially early on) you might turn them in.

3. People that don't look suspicious (that might be undercover law enforcement, for ex)

And above all, they KNOW that the day a terrorist attack within the US is traced back to them public outrage would make law enforcement come down on them with the heat of 1000 suns and the border would be closed tighter than Scrooges coin purse.

Smuggling in illegal aliens is illegal... but smuggling in terrorists is illegal, dangerous and extremely bad for business.

The same thing applies to drug smugglers as well. Collaborating with terrorism isn't in their best interest.
Even assuming they were incapable of finding their own way across, surely a copy of 'Rosetta Stone: Spanish' and a few thousand dollars would find them a guide.

Or why not Canada? Hundreds of miles of rural, unguarded border.
For Ph.Ds and other technologists looking to enter the business world
counter argument to that would be, if actual terrorism was being stopped, we'd hear all about it on the news. Terrorism is such a hot topic, that anything related to it, gets non-stop coverage for a week.
You do know that Engineers and Software Developers help build buses and airplanes too, right? Those guys are responsible for every single flight on that aircraft. Not only for all the people that fly on them, but also the airline investment.

If you think software developers (or bus drivers, or airline pilots) can get paranoid, you should see what happens before test flights on airplanes.
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
Orwell wasn't wrong, he was simply a little late.

The funny thing is that the countries best protected against this kind of bull-shit are the former sov-block countries. They have seen what all this can lead to in living memory, it seems to work like a vaccin.
Don't Be Afraid To Give Your VCs Assignments
The basic gist of the story is this: a year ago, GameFly filed a formal complaint against USPS for treating its game disks different from competitors like NetFlix and Blockbuster (a disproportionate number were broken, lost, etc). This was after already working with USPS to try to resolve the issue before the complain process. It's taken USPS a full year to respond to the complaint, and their response is in the form of a wild goose chase.
Your advice is in fact superior.

But, from the university's standpoint, which strategy is a better selling point? Tracking attendance "solves" the problem of, you know, actually having to parent your kids. I bet there's a lot of parents who want to pay for that.
That's why everyone is embracing GPU powered graphics.
Can we still be angry at incompetence?
You are correct in pointing this out. What people really mean when they say- 'We don't produce anything anymore." - is that it's hard for uneducated worked to find good paying jobs. This has contributed to the belief that one must get a college education in order to find good work.

My anecdotal experience is that this has caused an increase in college admissions and this leads to lower standards. Except in the top universities we have a good students being bored in college just like they are in high school. It's not a good long term prospect for the country.
And that was 1993. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8#t=4m40s
A bit of context: this is a demo showing parallax mapping, which was a soon-to-be-released feature of the Flash-based Alternativia engine at the time. It's was never supposed to be a state-of-the-art demonstration of Flash.

http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/01/04/character-...
Did Jeff Bezos answered this question?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ
I think the DC sniper is a bad example. Once they were caught, people stopped running around in zig zags, and only people in DC were worried at all. If a small terrorist attack needs to be running at all times, or at least once a week, then the terrorists will quickly run out of people. I don't think they're that effective.
If inflation is higher than economic growth you get wealth destruction.
It's akin to the lobster-in-a-boiling-pot scenario.

Put a lobster in already boiling water and it screams, stick it in room-temp water and heat to boiling and the lobster won't notice it's being cooked until it's too late...
Yeah, you spend a million trading two pieces of paper, and you have two pieces of paper.

You spend five bucks making a hat, sell it for ten, and someone has a hat to shade their head. Or a hammer. Or a car. Or a pencil. Or a computer. Or a defibrillator. Or a softball. Or a picture frame.
Only if that 2% growth curve is outpacing inflation, though, right?
One word: Indeed.. http://twitpic.com/1l9b7k
"Chat is down for maintenance at this time"
Ask HN: Is there a market for a "Facebook circa 2006" clone?
Since the recent F8 announcements I've been pondering the question of whether there's a market for a site which is basically what Facebook was back around 2005? This would be the point after it had photo sharing & the news feeds, but before all the blurring of public/private data and the whole "crapp" platform. It would have an incredibly straight-forward privacy model: if they're your friend they can see everything you post, if they're not they see nothing but your name (+ some other identifying detail).

I joined FB in the first wave in '04 and it had fantastic utility as an undergrad not to mention a crazy amount of mindshare on my campus (CMU). I can't help but wonder if this could be done again.

Anyway, just curious if anyone else has been thinking along these lines? Has the boat already sailed on social networks?

By the way, I have no intention of actually trying to build this.
CNN is a business. The BBC is not. CNN are welcome to spend their money however they see fit; BBC is not warranted to increase viewer numbers but to educate, entertain and inform. Now you might argue it's entertaining but it just seems an antisocial gimmick to me.
Well, it's possible for their to be distortion from the top x% garnering a disproportionate amount of the growth in wealth. So while a country grows 2% per year the concentration could be at the top. This causes variation in wealth distribution to increase and this is what leads to the perception of people getting poorer. Poverty is a relative measure. In the past 30 years in the U.S. wealth has dramatically shifted to the top 1%. That is, the top 1% have a much higher portion of the nation's overall wealth today than they did 30 years ago.
> they can always buy a few automatic weapons at any gun store

Actually, you can't, at least not in the US, and that's been true for decades.

Thinking that you can is like thinking that you can buy a race car at the local dealer because you see similar looking cars with the same name on TV.

> Take 2009..let's list all the terrorist attacks in the United States:

The Fort Hood shooting, which killed 13 should be on that list. So much for "all".
"poor Latin" immigrants have many disadvantages, which is why they depend on coyotes. Presumably, a terrorist organization could:

* pay well enough that the coyotes would forget their principles
* provision their agents well enough to cross on their own.

Or, leave Mexico aside. Why not Canada? Why not Cuba? via boat from Haiti, landing in some god-forsaken part of Louisiana? I can't accept the proposition that getting into the country presents any serious difficulty for someone with means and motive.
The most power is a combination: a killer idea you can stamp out of plastic for cents per unit. An unimplemented idea is worth a daydream or so.
You should be able to find the MIT opencourseware lectures for 6.004 (the introductory computer course) online somewhere.
Open Data Protocol (OData) - JSON and Atom-based standard for open data sharing
> If students are able to learn material on their own then I really can't understand why they should be forced to attend.

Attendance is part of how the school gets paid. (No, the students aren't paying much of its expenses.)
It's been going on for over 10 years already with barcode IDs in high schools. Now you don't even see the person doing it because they can hide 2 or more cards in a wallet and scan them all at once. The only tip would be a suspiciously close time stamp if anyone cares to look.

A school setting is the worst environment you can possibly imagine trying to secure anything, let alone attendance.
So, having found one or two glaring factual errors in the piece, I went looking for more.

I can't easily find a chart of real GDP growth since 1950 from an official source, but I did find the chart on this page - you have to scroll down.

http://www.valueinvest.org/27.html

Look for "GDP growth vs S&P 500 returns", the blue line. This should, I believe, correct for inflation - that's what the whole "corrected for CPI" thing is about.

Interesting things about this graph: national real GDP has been growing, and there is no obvious discontinuity in the 1970s - sure, there was a big recession then, but that's just a jog in the chart. Squinting at the data, it looks like the average rate of growth is about the same immediately before and after the 1970s; if anything the rate of growth is a tiny bit higher since then.

So, either this chart is bogus or the OP is bogus. Having already caught the OP citing false facts about domestic manufacturing output, I have my suspicions. But feel free to cite a better GDP chart; it will be nice to have in the files for when the next nonsense article comes along.
I don't know anything about the personalities involved, and, for all I know, the letter is quite justified; but "I think that I've done you a big favour by giving you 10 minutes of my time" seems to be one of those remarks to which there is [a canonical reply](http://modernarthur.com/blog/christwhatanasshole.html) (no pun intended).
I think it's funny and effective. I'd have paid attention during the commercial and would have been aware of the message (tax amnesty).

OP: I'm not sure what you mean by "this is not a spoof." Are you suggesting that you really find this ad threatening or just that it was a real ad?
Rarely, usually only when I'm stuck on a problem or before I begin long-term planning for a website. It's usually both work and fun. By myself. No techniques, just a fat sharpie marker and lots of blank scrap paper. Sometimes I tape up pages to the wall around my desk to help visualize ideas.
He doesn't argue that small attacks don't instill terror -- it doesn't serve the dual purposes of "inspiring" allies and donors while instilling fear in the target city/nation. Also, you must recall that you actually need people to blow up the bus, train, etc -- which is difficult to get in the US at least and they have to be able to continually do it.

I agree that terrorism is often over-hyped by the media, but that doesn't mean the threat is something to be ignored. The 4 pathetic attacks you bring up do show the current state of impotence, however we have to be vigilant. The opinions presented by many today would be quite different had Time Square been painted with blood.