skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends a lot on which team you're working on, how tightly they're colocated, and what your role on the team is. When I was working on the effort to move all the different search properties into google.com - which involved teams in 5 different offices scattered all across the U.S. and China - there were quite a few meetings, several at odd times to accommodate the time zones. (My tech lead took the brunt of that herself, though.) When I was working on the visual redesign, which mostly involved a tight team colocated in a single cube - I came in when I felt like, because if I needed to talk to someone, I could just turn around and ask them something.

Also, oftentimes interns don't have a firm grasp on which meetings they can skip and which they really should show up for. There are at least 4 weekly or bi-weekly meetings on my calendar that I rarely go to unless the particular week's topic is relevant to what I'm doing. I always go to meetings that are specifically scheduled with me, and usually go to the daily standups. It takes a while to develop the organizational awareness to make the distinction, though a usually good rule of thumb is that meetings that someone specifically sets up with you should be attended, while meetings that you're invited to simply by virtue of being a member of some group can safely be skipped.
Trada CEO responds to my criticism of their slow sales process
Bernanke is a sly fox.
He talked a lot of richness,
richer-country->more services->better wealth and so on,
but he refused to speak about inequality.
USA is as unequal as many african countries,
have very high incarceration rate and so on (and it is not the richest country in per capita terms - Norway is richer).
Well, inequality creates concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people, creates feeling of unfairness in society ("the rigged towards rich fat cats"), increase overall stress on people. Did mr Bernanke ask regular folks - bus drivers, sales clerks, janitors - are they happy? or happier that 40 years ago?
Do you know that people of former GDR, well 56 % of them say that they want wall back??? Even though it was a quite poor country compared to West Germany???
Video Interview: Cameron Moll At LessConf
jacquesm,

I was unemployed a total of 6 months in the Bay Area last year.

If I chose to stick with .Net, I could. I got a job offer from a company I used to work for in San Diego and also a company in DC.
To clarify: This is why I'd prefer to start a startup. You might not succeed, but at least you're working on the project you want to work on.
An Inside Look At Facebook Questions: The Next “Killer App” Of Facebook
Facebook’s ‘Like’ button makes me lonely
DHH on Rails 3 from Railsconf 2009 [flash]
Not in Australia! It's Monday morning! Still taking the time off though......
1.6 million dollar loss is equivalent to 15% of Zappos' profit for the last year (cf. SEC filing http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol...). We shall see how this "materially important event" finds its way into Amazon's next 8-K SEC filing - investors have the right to know...
Hey everyone, sorry for the problems with your orders and the delay in responding. We're working through the list of people who are missing ebooks and fixing them.

Our servers were really overloaded on Friday, so some ebooks didn't get added to accounts. We're working on an automated solution to fix this and in the meantime are adding missing ebooks manually.

If you're still missing ebooks, email accounts@oreilly.com, and we will add them for you. You can also try DMing @oreillymedia with your order# and your oreilly.com username.
I don't know too many specifics, but it looks like their PD example was controlling the joint position. That means that if the ground isn't where the robot expects it to be, the leg will still assume the same position and cause the robot to fall over.

The dynamic force control system is, instead of controlling the leg position, controlling the amount of force that the leg is exerting on the ground. This means that the leg may end up in a different position than the walking controller intended, but the overall effect on the main body should be similar to what was expected.
Two methods that I have read, that writers use to great effect.

Create a big calendar, above your workspace, or somewhere you see all the time. Every day you do work, put a cross on it. Try to get as many crosses in a row as you can. Hemmingway used this method apparently.

The other that actually works great, the first task you do in the morning should be the one you least likely want to do. The one that is easiest to put off. Surprising how good this makes you feel.
Choosing The Right Words | Daily Blog World
Microsofts cumulative revenues since their start is roughly 390 billion dollars, the vast majority of that was software.

http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.h... (crappy, but convenient page and the numbers seem to be ok, it only goes to 2005, so I've added another 150 billion)

IBM has a much larger total revenue but the vast majority of that was hardware leases during the mainframe years (and it probably still is), as well as consultancy.

Software was a huge component compared to other manufacturers but I doubt it comes close to what microsoft has made.

I can't find a good breakdown of IBM revenues that splits it out by category though, if someone else has access to that it would be nice to know.
Scribd also has pyscho dancing scrollbars now, at least on Firefox.
Actually: you're, that
Dijkstra's opinion on Lisp appears to have eventually changed though:

http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03x...

"The third project I would not like to leave unmentioned is LISP, a fascinating enterprise of a completely different nature. With a few very basic principles at its foundation, it has shown a remarkable stability. Besides that, LISP has been the carrier for a considerable number of in a sense our most sophisticated computer applications. LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."

http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x...

"I must confess that I was very slow on appreciating LISP's merits. My first introduction was via a paper that defined the semantics of LISP in terms of LISP, I did not see how that could make sense, I rejected the paper and LISP with it. My second effort was a study of the LISP 1.5 Manual from MIT which I could not read because it was an incomplete language definition supplemented by equally incomplete description of a possible implementation; that manual was so poorly written that I could not take the authors seriously, and rejected the manual and LISP with it. (I am afraid that tolerance of inadequate texts was not my leading characteristic)."
Dijkstra had some fairly strong opinions on a lot of things in CS.
I can't say that I love the sheer number of parentheses required by the language.

However, the code is data idea seems genius to me.

Most of the criticisms seem subjective, perhaps McCarthy and Dijkstra had different problems to solve and thus chose different tools.

(Mea culpa: every now and then when I use a goto)

I wonder what Dijkstra would have thought about this:
grep -R goto linux-2.6.34
In that case, how does he have the time to filter the quality emails from the junk? What indicators were there in the sent messages we've seen that make them not junk in the first place? The published emails can't be the only ones that get asked.
HTML Parsing: Simple HTML DOM Library
Touristiness heatmap by number of public photos
I think it came as a surprise to everyone back then. Given limited storage, the opening dictionaries were probably restricted to the most likely opening sequences, especially when playing against other programs with opening dictionaries. Today you could probably just expand the dictionaries to include many of the unlikely opening sequences and couple that with a fine-tuning the investment in each move taking the clock into account.
Yes, so it worked for you. Great. It worked for me too, 23 years ago, one idle day in July. But that does not mean it will work for everyone.

Now realize that you are telling someone to quit their job without a backup plan and without a lot of insight in to their personal situation.

I think that is somewhat irresponsible, just because it worked for you is not exactly a guarantee, and I highly doubt you'll be able to catch him if he follows your advice and it turns out that he can't find a replacement, for whatever reason.

Then there are the details such as unemployment not kicking in if you voluntarily leave your job and a whole pile of other, circumstantial factors.
I've been teaching Lisp to a friend and one of the things he likes best is the syntax. He likes that there is only one kind of punctuation, the parenthesis.
On the other hand, a lot of people are saying that Microsoft should focus more on its core, not keep expanding into so many markets, that it is not winning.

XBox overall is yet to make a return for Microsoft. Sure, over the last year or so it has started to turn a profit, but when you look at all the money MS has invested in this, they are heavily in the red.

Zune is yet to turn a profit.

Why would courier be any different to these?
There are various Delicious apps. The beelicious app works pretty well, but it lacks the ability to view bundles (which is only a problem if you depend on them).
When my wife and I decided to get married we wanted to both change our names to something new. For each idea we came up with, I did some web searches just to see if the name had any existing meaning or associations. The name we settled on (Moorier - a portmanteau of two family names) is almost unique on the web.
So, how about this for an answer:

I'm the founder of http://Newsley.com, and we're pivoting away from being a financial social news site. We're doing a lot of semantic web using OpenCalais, and we're building the engine to process a bazillion financial news articles in real time and use semantic meta data as a basis for a search and recommendation service.

If you want to see some of the semantic stuff we're doing click on the discuss link for any article: http://newsley.com/articles/one-tenth-of-all-us-banks-on-the.... Those entities are all automatically extracted. It's pretty basic, but there's a lot more cool stuff we're planning.

We're waiting to pursue funding until we apply to YC this fall. I'm sure we'll be hiring early engineers within the next 9 months or so...

ping me: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamelgringo
I am +1'ing you just because you Googled before making a commimtment with your wife!
The post probably wants to show that there's now a definite place for it, /pacman/, even if the homepage doodle changes.
Just because it's not plastic wrapped in a box doesn't mean it's not software.
Agh, syntax!
Thanks! The link looks interesting. Will have a look. Now just have to find some time for programming.
Ya. That would probably be the best bet. Can you suggest which would be better-Ruby or Python? I have some experience with Perl.
booksintobeer.com
Aah, Churchill's old insult: "Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?"

"Umm, well, I suppose so."

"Her's a tenner, lift your skirt."

"What do you take me for?"

"We have already settled the question of what you are, now we are haggling over the price."

Makes for a humorous story, but it's a terrible reduction ad absurdum argument. The fact that I am prepared to give up x percent of my income in exchange for a given set of benefits that have value to me says nothing about how I would feel giving up 2x or 3x percent of my income for some possibly different set of benefits.

Speaking as an Ontarian, I'd be horrified if a political offered to cut my taxes in half and give me the "freedom" to choose my own health care in the "free market."

That doesn't make me a slave, it makes me someone who pools certain funds in a coöperative manner. If you want the same argument back at you, try dismantling your army and giving every citizen the right to defend themselves from foreign aggression, buying their weaponry and training on the free market.

Choosing to voluntarily pool some portion of your income with other citizens to fund a common defense is not slavery either. It's another kind of freedom.
There are plenty of successful non-technical founders but almost all of them have a technical co-founder or partner. If you don't have one today, the sooner you can find a good technical partner with a vested interest in your company the better off you will be.
Yes, all of those things affect your ability to move and where you can move to. Whenever you make a major change to your life, some parts will get better and others worse. It's important to recognize what's actually important to you, and act to make the things you actually care about as good as possible.

Given the question, I assume that the thing he most cares about is getting a more enjoyable job,
$300,000/year treadmill? Is that a joke?

One year at 300K and i'd never need to be on a treadmill again -- 30k to build a house, 50k for land, probably still 70-100k left over after taxes to start my next business.

So I'm gonna assume that was a joke... I'm equally lost on how to read the comment by the next clause, which seems to imply that the only way to make an impact on the world is through your job. Maybe hanging out on HN skews your perspective about living-the-dream, but i'd wager it's only one in a hundred who ever are lucky enough to work for a job that isn't life-sucking or anonymous -- if that many! As near as i can tell, for the rest of the world "compensation" is exactly what it sounds like, and satisfaction & contentment about your purpose & work in life have to come from other things.

So anyway, sorry if this reads like a flame, but the last sentence really threw me for a loop and made me re-evaluate the rest of the comment. From where i stand 300k/year would completely change every aspect of my life -- but then again, i took a huge cut to work at a green energy startup, living the dream atm & working for peanuts :)

I guess i'm saying "it'll only ruin you for startups if you let it!"
Marc Feeley of Gambit Scheme wrote Jss, which might be similar:

Jss: JavaScriptScheme: a multithreaded Scheme to JavaScript compiler

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Dumpin...
There is a big difference between shipping software and deploying software on your own servers.

Of course it is software, but it is not shipped to anybody in a sense that I understand the term 'to ship product'.

Whether by download for installation on end-users computers, cd, dvd or papertape is not the issue, the issue is whether or not the software remains installed on the users machine when they are not using it.

Key difference between a web application (even one with a bunch of client side scripting such as scribd) and a product that actually ships is that you can't modify it as easily (even with auto-update) as you can with server side deployments. If you mess up with a web app, no big deal, fixes are minutes away, hours at worst. When you've shipped product to a few hundred million installations all over the globe and you find a problem, you have a problem.

If you're lucky it isn't going to end up as a 0 day exploit, and it won't nuke your customers machines.

So Q&A in that situation is a lot more involved than it is for most webapps, and the penalties are significantly larger.

For the OP to compare scribd with microsoft in this way and to claim that 'microsoft has no clue how to ship software' is downright silly.
Yeah, I always thought Dijkstra liked LISP because of the "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer"-quotation. When I read that text, I was completely confused.

Thanks for the heads up!
I haven't heard of Hemmingway using the calendar method but I believe Jerry Seinfeld used/uses it to help motivate him to sit down and do some writing every day.
A (type)face for every city
It's not even only blacks now, for example:
http://jonathanturley.org/2010/05/03/baltimore-police-arrest...

While you're there, check out some of the related posts. "Many" police in North America (more so in the USA I hope) have started to turn dangerous to the citizens they are supposed to be protecting.

If you read reddit on an a regular basis, you'd know there are numerous stories of totally innocent citizens being assaulted, jailed, framed, and sometimes literally killed in cold blood (no, this is not hyperbole, many have been captured on video) by this new strain of police officer.

This kind of makes this particular subject interesting...considering some of the cops on the beat these days, it might not be a particularly good idea to exercise your constitutional rights with an officer, as you might not make it out alive. (I haven't ever read of an example of this though thankfully).
Is open source biology the solution to bioterrorism?
First time I ever hear of that and I'm very impressed with it, that was a really smart thing.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll put it in to practice.
The Valley Mullet
You could work for me. I'm attempting to found a tech startup this summer dealing with aggregating local music shows and gigs. Having a brilliant programmer would be awesome. I know more design than I know coding. email me: bensima[at]gmail[dot]com
Ahh, so it's not just me who can't figure out how to delete those Sprint apps. Is there really no way to do that?
This reminded me of a woman I went to university with. During the study break before final exams when you're meant to be studying she was known to resort to activities like scrubbing her car's wheels with a toothbrush and using scissors to remove all the weeds between the paving outside her house to avoid studying. She always did well enough in her exams and her house was VERY clean.
disappointed that there was no mention of Eve in this one...or Charlie
Cool idea, but I think the data is skewed by population density, for example, the map shows Juarez as being more touristy than the Grand Canyon. A better approach might be to map the ratio of photos to population density.
Great idea.

Wouldn't have expected the USA to be that much less touristy than Europe, though. And within Europe, western France seems to attract fewer photographs than even rurual Turkey.
The big deal here is that you can launch intents from your browser. This is really similar to what we used to do back-in-the-day with SMS interception. It was a really useful technique.

This gives us something really similar on Android phones. It's not really just about getting something to open in your browser. You'll eventually see this deeply integrated into actual apps, and that's really cool.
i'd assume that we could build something smarter than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms, which would be the important thing.
Experts Continue Quest for Accurate Leak Rate Figure
Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits
Well, von Neumann was John McCarthy's menthor, and McCarthy made LISP. There's no wonder why programming code (e.g. functions) in LISP is data, and why LISP is heavily used in AI.
I know the term "hacker" has been brutally misused for years, but damn.
I'd suggest that aside from Perl you look pick up a language at something like Python or Ruby. Ruby would probably be a bit easier because it pulls some of its influences from perl, although Python has a fairly gradual learning curve as well. There is always PHP. I know a number of companies looking for decent developers that know PHP.

I think that brushing up on MySQL is a good idea. I'd also know startups are doing some pretty cool things with Postgres. I'm again guessing that going from Oracle to Postgres would be less of a jump than going from Oracle to MySQL.

Also, I know a lot of founders, myself included would love to pick a DBA's brain. I'm in the middle of deciding how to model a complex data store right now. I'm toying with the idea of going to a NoSQL database, but that's primarily because I don't really know anyone that has a bunch of experience with this type of problem. All we hear as founder is "RDBMs's don't scale".

I know a bunch of really smart guys from HackersandFounders meetups, but there aren't tons of them that have a huge amount of experience managing a lot of data with a lot of complex relationships. Or, the guys that do have tons of experience managing that kind of data work for Google and they can't talk about it. :P

So, I'd suggest coming to the next http://HackersandFounders .com meetup and letting me pick your brain. :)

It's not that hard to get into the startup scene. Go to meetups like SV New Tech, Hackers and Founders or any number of technology specific meetups like the MySQL, Postgres javascript, Python, Rails, iPhone, etc... Hang out at the Hacker Dojo or NoiseBridge. Hand out business cards. Build a couple of simple web apps in your spare time and get people's opinions on them.
Hmm, the freedom to hack the phone without jumping through hoops was, for me, one of the major attractions of Android over the iPhone. An effective vendor OS lock-in makes Android a lot less appealing to me, especially when the usability of the vendor OS is markedly worse than iPhone OS.
Also, who the hell actually sees the Google homepage anymore?
I worked as an early employee (< 10) at 3 startups that were going to change the world and hit it big. I now have tens of thousands of worthless stock options.

Where do I apply for the $300K/yr life sucking anonymous treadmill job?
Yeah, it's hard to deduce what the resolution of this heatmap is. I imagine the Alps are popular. But every square km like that? Seems rather unlikely... (very cool idea as mentioned though)

ETA. Based on http://www.panoramio.com/ -- I think a little bit of the skew in the Alps may have to do with panoramas counting for larger area (you can cover a lot more area from peaks in the Alps than say...at lower altitudes). The rest seems very legit. Very nice...
Same here. I use django though so it's basically just typing up some quick models. If not, I'll write them in notepad in the form of:

@Table:
- fieldname char
- field2 int
Show me some cool list comprehensions
Huh?

What is the overlay of the testers face good for without any eyetracking capabilities?

Also there don't seem to be any facilities to correlate tests to one another, to setup goals, perform any kind of timings, heck there isn't even a mouse cursor heatmap.

Calling this "usability testing software" is a bit of a stretch imho. Glorified Desktop Recorder perhaps...

PS: But the gorilla is cute!
To blame teachers’ unions as singularly responsible though is what I object to. I’m not going to argue that our current education system is tremendously effective compared to what it could be.
Would you use a NX/VNC/RemoteDesktop solution for day-to-day stuff?
my computer has decayed to the point where i need to reinstall windows, but it's too much of a hassle. this got me thinking it would be nice if someone maintained a computer somewhere in a datacenter and charged me a low monthly fee to just log in and use it like my desktop, via a thin-client (like a low-powered netbook). something like onlive (http://www.onlive.com) but for normal desktop computing rather than videogames

would you use something like that? does it already exist? do you know if this is something companies do internally, and do they do it with success?

p.s. no windows-bashing please--my ubuntu install on the same machine pooped out halfway through a dist upgrade is now a mix of koala and lynx...