skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> On one hand, expect to hear many people outside Microsoft to boo this move since J. Allard seemed to be one of those "young executives who Got It". On the other hand, Steve Ballmer is left with less choices seeing those red numbers in Excel Spreadsheet almost overflowing whatever the data type in cell G-14, H-15 and K-25.

I'm confused. Did you read the article?

"The Entertainment & Devices Division has posted operating profits in the company's most recent two fiscal years, and it's on track for another profitable year, rebounding from the billions of dollars in losses it posted as the Xbox business was getting up to speed."

Why on earth would "this shake-up" be needed?
Cute idea, but I'm not sure I'd take ideas about job-hunting strategies from someone who apparently hasn't managed to find one anywhere in the world for quite some time. :-)
This sort of thing is why I don't take the peak oil panic-mongers seriously. It starts getting harder to find, the price goes up a bit, and people find ways to use less (for water this is largely better irrigation and various kinds of recycling, for oil I guess it would largely be switching more to electric power with nuclear/renewable generation)... and a few years later some analyst drives their used electric car to work, looks over the numbers for a report they're working on, and sees that the peak went by unannounced.
If he had used 2 significant figures (tenths of a percent), his size would be off by less than a dot at 1200 DPI. If he had used 3 significant figures (hundredths of a percent), his size would be off by just about 1 dot at 4800 DPI. Since web browsers tend to round to the nearest pixel on ~100 DPI screens, yes, I’d say 19 signifiant figures is more than a little overkill.

Then again, you never know when you might need to print your web page at billboard size and maintain down-to-the-micron precision.
Come on, haily has a point. It’s not at all intuitive. It doesn’t look like a USB device to most people. It doesn’t even say “USB” on the device, unless I missed it.
It would be easier to use following cron syntax to run things at reboot :)

@reboot /run/a/program
The Scary Robots Are Coming
Yes as the article pointed out, water does not face the same constraints as coal,oil, and other resources that follow the 'peak' distribution. It is, for the most part, not fundamentally transformed when we consume it. The "water cycle" we all learned about in school is much quicker than waiting for dead plants and animals to decompose into hydrocarbons. It seems like this research has more to do with branding & marketing than actual scientific discovery.
After two ultra low end Brother laser printers in a row cratered on me, I went back to my trusty LaserJet 5MP/6MP class printers. Two years ago I picked up a 40K page LaserJet 6MP for $10.49, plus $26 flat rate shipping. It works flawlessly. Lately, I buy genuine HP toner cartridges from Image-Warehouse on eBay for $18 with free shipping. They come in plain brown boxes, but the cartridge itself is either a real HP C3903 or the best fake I have ever seen. Whatever, they work great and I've given up refilling at these prices. I print from Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X through an old, cheap JetDirect print server on my network.
Hopefully not. Multi-core should be seen as a stepping stone on the way to better technology.
Ask HN: Who keeps you accountable and on track with your startup?
Myself and a 2 other startup/entrepreneurially-minded folks have been keeping each other accountable with our startups and entrepreneurial endeavors. It started with a weekly Skype call and now we're keeping each other up to date and motivated online via software I'm working on (more on that later).

The basic structure of the group is to ask each other these questions: What have you accomplished? Did you accomplish what you planned to? If not, why not? What will you do next?

My group mates have kept me motivated, encouraged, and working on the important (rather than fun) tasks. They offer fresh perspective, feedback and new ideas. Hopefully, I do the same for them. It's been an incredible experience so far.

So, HN: who keeps you accountable and on track with your startup?

For my project, I want to start online accountability groups like these for entrepreneurs and startup founders. We'll provide the online tools, organization, direction, and means to keep yourself and group mates motivated, productive and (eventually) profitable. Right now, the web-based software we're using & developing is in alpha stage but usable.

If there's enough interest I'd love to take on some alpha testers and let them use the service for free until we launch. If you're interested in alpha testing and being placed in a group, being a coach/mentor, or just want more info, let me know: mike.nicholaides@gmail.com and/or leave a comment here. Also, you don't need to have a group formed already to participate (nor do I expect many people to).
Anybody else getting a redirect?

Mine goes to

http://custom404error.com/?keywords=citibank%2business%2loan...
The proper error message for this situation is "Feed me a stray cat."
I kinda like the typing, it's something we call code I think is fun.
It's only at the end that the value of x is 3. The puts x immediately after x = :foo does print :foo
Is the Branch Target Buffer synonymous with the instruction cache[1]? But yes, it certainly can matter. I thought the links that 'wendroid' offered above were interesting: a Scheme interpreter, presumably already fairly well optimized, saw about a 10% improvement through the hinting macros.

But I'd argue that if this level of optimization is required, the bigger gains are to be see through changing your algorithms to become more regular: for example, using fixed length blocks in a compression scheme rather than checking for null termination [2]. But if this is for some reason impossible, then use hinting!

[1] http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf

[2] http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p387-zhangA.pdf
Yes, people definitely blame the printer, not the ink. The printer is what is broken and has a big logo on the front of it. Anyone buying generic ink in the first place probably doesn't think it could harm their machine. If you think people are logical enough to know that generic ink could harm their machine, use generic ink anyway, have their machine harmed, and then blame it on the ink, you don't know very many people.

Print quality clearly improves annually. I'm assuming people who use ink do so for the quality. Anyone printing things in bulk where quality is not an issue (like businesses) is using toner, which is far cheaper. Other than photos, I'm not sure why anyone who printed enough that the extra price of brand name ink vs generic would amount to a dollar figure they cared about would use ink.

I wasn't claiming Apple products don't crash. Far from it. I was pointing out that Steve Jobs said he didn't want Flash on the iPad or iPhone because it causes crashes. He knows that the user will always assume responsibility lies with the company whose logo is on the device. How many snide remarks have you heard about the Blue Screen of Death, which was always caused by third party applications yet is used as evidence of Windows' suckiness.

If you don't understand that, don't take up a career in marketing.
Ask HN: Anyone at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC?
I'm wearing a green I <3 Emacs shirt. Anyone else here? Wanna meet up?
I find myself frustrated by Ubuntu's packaging system. I really like Arch Linux, because I can do pacman -S ruby, and I have everything I need. Including a working Ruby Gems that I can use to update itself. And a copy of the latest Ruby 1.9, without having to change symlinks, etc.

I find myself hating the fact that I have to configure everything manually though, I don't mind using Gnome, or KDE, I just really like pacman. Configuring fonts it's just not my idea of fun. Is there any chance that I would be more satisfied with Fedora's packaging? I'm going to throw it in a virtualbox to check it out, just wondering if anyone has had a similar experience?
I did that, too. Then I just grew a beard ;)
I start to understand more and more why cheap clean power is so important the future where population and industrialization is going to be off the charts.

Desalination can solve the water problem, if power is cheap enough, right now it's $2-3 per 1000 gallons.

Hurry up and invent a portable fusion generator!
BTW, my group members were the ones to convince me to post this on HN for feedback, rather than working on the fun stuff like coding.
I use Chrome on Linux every day, and I love it, but I'm skeptical. In fact, just yesterday it chewed up my profile and I have yet to be able to recover it. Right now I'm leaning toward a corrupt SQLite database.
You raise a good point, although there might be some difficulty with legislation requiring people to declare their income to investment vehicles.

The basic problem is that while something like Diaspora can attract goodwill funding by being in the right place at the right time - I kicked them $25 in exchange for a t-shirt and the vague hope that they can advance the state of distributed network services. But most people who want to invest in something are looking for an ownership stake, and as soon as you offer them that you've initiated a much more complex contractual relationship and are subject to a very different legal regime.

Rather than an income percentage cap, there might be some mileage in a small monetary amount. For example, commercial transactions of goods above and below $500 are treated differently. There are already provisions in Regulation D for companies that don't need to raise more than $1m or $5m in a single year, which might be great for startups, but those companies appear to have less of a legal 'safe harbor' than those which can raise an unlimited amount.

The 'safe harbor' provision is in SEC regulation D, rule 506: http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33ActRls/rule506.html in subclause (a), it's the exemption from rule 4(2) of the Securities Act of 1933 which gives firms the legal security blanket. Although rules 504 and 505 limit issuers to smaller amounts (but still quite sufficient for many new businesses), they don't have that specific exemption, and so the founders are implicitly subject to the prohibitions on selling or offering shares across state lines.
Probably what he means is that most "research scientist" or "research engineer" jobs out there require a PhD. Though there are a fair number at larger labs that only ask for a masters. But:

>I'm not sure what this means--no-one can stop you from doing research anywhere, regardless of your qualifications.

This may be true in CS, but in most physical or biological fields is not fully true. The permits you need for handling certain materials are more difficult to obtain without a PhD, and it's hard to get funded without it as well.
Contracts are a form of communication. Poor contract, poor communication; no contract, no communication.

When I first started at Microsoft (many years ago) I was the only one of my peers[1] to read the entire Employee Handbook. I believe this enhanced my relationship with the company during my time there.

[1]Based on many hallway conversations. I'm sure someone else somewhere actually read it.
The times is probably the paper most likely to succeed here - even so it is a very very slim chance.

In the uk the major problem such schemes face is that the BBC is extremely good for daily news and current events. Which means they have to sell the editorial content... Strikes me as much more difficult.
Beers With Brad in Dallas – May 28th
I have invented a new metal for locks. It is impervious to all attempts to cut or melt it... unless you wrap it in aluminum foil, in which case, it behaves just like butter.
Good point. I hadn't noticed that.
It seems to bounce on and off from the custom404error.com domain to T4F. I've gotten both the correct page and the custom404 one.
I don't think I would put Eric in that list. There were some stores about him in the press.
The author of the original post was saying that Facebook was failing to do exactly that.

Using the McDonald's example, it could be akin to McDonald's making all of their burgers out of ground turkey because they got a huge deal with a turkey meat distributor, the customers saying "no, give us hamburger!" and McDonald's saying "fuck you."

What happens to those customers wanting hamburgers? They go to Burger King.
Creative.
Actually, I'm quite confident the Times website and their cluster of associated web services could, in fact, run off of a Drupal install. Care to share your thoughts on why that wouldn't work? How much experience do you have with Drupal? With building newspaper websites?

Full disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of 8 contributed modules for Drupal and have 3.5 years experience building websites and associated services (with a variety of tools, including Drupal) for the 3rd largest newspaper conglomerate in North America.
> That's why nobody noticed. Oil runs out. Water sticks around (though it may need some cleaning).

Except it doesn't run out. Sure at some point you can't pump it out of wells any more (just like with water) and the tar sands will run out, but there's a zillion other options that are just not-quite-profitable right now. Water has sewage treatment plants and desalination, oil has various forms of biological-based sources and I'm pretty sure some straight chemical options.
Though his interest is in an electronic circuit board since thats his profession.
On a side note, does anyone think that given all this Facebook backlash, there will be greater user resistance to signing into a website using Facebook Connect?

At some point, I was starting to perceive FB connect as this holy grail that would finally bring some convergence and eliminate multiple logins and so forth. Of course, there are alternatives like OpenID, Google Friend Connect but they seem to be on the fringe still in terms of adoption and usage.

I run a site where the only way to sign up (as yet) is using FB connect, primarily to improve the authenticity of members (and it also reduces fake profiles by order of magnitude).

This backlash is definitely making me question if it's the right thing to do anymore.
Poor CMS/server died. It's Joomla, probably no page caching.

Missing images but mirrors:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...

http://www.t4f.org.nyud.net/projects/business-card

Schematic:
http://www.t4f.org.nyud.net/archives/Business%20Card/Busines...
I also dislike binary blobs, or obfuscated 'source', and hadn't tried the optimizer before (thanks for the link, btw), so I gave it a shot.

But this one is the 'real' source. The mangled version is being served over at the now permanent URL (http://www.google.com/pacman , http://www.google.com/pacman/pacman.2.js), doing its job of saving bytes/watts.
I'm genuinely confused as to why launchd isn't part of this conversation. It is definitely a replacement for cron (and init) and seems to be a pretty good one. I haven't done an extensive comparison between it and cron, but it has definitely been easy to use and worked well for me. It is very flexible and you use it by laying out exactly what you want it to do in XML.
badminton.mit.edu

Oh god no! Don't let it be true!
Oh, and I'm sure they're making a healthy profit selling me those cartridges, but the cartridge is still the high-value part, and not the "razor"/stick.

In my opinion the razor itself is deliberately marked up more than the cartridges are. Why don't they actually give the razor away for free? Why, because if Gillette did it then so would Schick. And if Schick started giving away free razors then I might be tempted to try switching to a Schick razor next time I bought blades because the Schick cartridges might be twenty cents cheaper. Pretty soon they'd be having a price war. Instead, they artificially inflate the price of the little plastic stick, so that I'm kept locked in to Gillette products since "well heck, I already bought the razor..."
I have all my /etc/hosts for Google Analytics pointing to localhost.
This is why all of those conditions need to be true. If you know that your employer will appreciate you doing this, then why not? Of course, it's highly unlikely that you know this to a reasonable certainty unless you ask.
Yum is pretty nice. You'd probably enjoy it.

yum install ruby

gives you everything you need.
Worse is better and in this case Clojure is even more so 'The zombie-reanimated corpse of Lisp'.

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-08-19-011225_clojure_...
Good for them. I have very few kind words for Comcast, RCN, AT&T, and their ilk, but I have to say that this was a surprisingly forward-thinking decision on their part.
We think so slowly because the mind is a meme garden
Except as an emulsion...
Yet for me, the developer console still won't show Ajax requests for inspection. This is on 64-bit Ubuntu Lucid. Anyone else have this problem?
Christian, your English is excellent. He is just being an ass. I enjoyed reading your blog, keep up the great work!
Making Money off of BP Disaster?
So I'm wondering how legal it is to buy a couple of skimmers and go collect oil yourself down in the affected region? Reading online it seems that you see skimmers doing X bbl/min or Y bbl/hour -- granted there's a lot more to this than that such a simple calculation but at $68/bbl as of today -- sounds like a ton of money is waiting to be made by anyone that wants to go down there and collect it. What are the legalties here? Does BP still own the mineral rights if it's floating halfway across the Gulf? Are there rogue cleanup crews doing this? Everyone sees it as a tragedy but surely there are some of us that see it as an opportunity?
American Express fails miserably at basic security
Ooh - hadn't seen that - looks interesting.
I stand corrected.
From a site owner's perspective, I don't like this.

It's always been possible for a site owner to track certain things via access logs, I think Google should still allow for those basic metrics to be tracked via Google Analytics.

While it's still possible to track site usage via logs, I don't think Google should give end users a way to bypass the wishes of a site owner. If someone is using my site, I believe I have the right to have access to certain usage information. (Insert bit about doing it ethically)

In the past, Google Analytics has been good enough, and I've not felt the need to analyze my server logs. Now I question how popular this plug-in will become, and how it might skew even the most basic and fundamental usage stats.

By providing an all-or-nothing plug-in, Google is hurting those using Google Analytics more than it's helping to ensure people's privacy.
Real World Haskell has a chapter about testing http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/testing-and-quality-as...
Why the future doesn't need us. By Bill Joy [2000]
I recently held a workshop on applying game mechanics, in this case to a calendaring system.

Details are here: http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/

My notes are here: http://vi.to/gmnotes

Between going through the exercise (especially with others doing it and then collaborating on additional iterations) and all of the reference material, coming up with compelling game mechanics and metagame mechanics should be doable for anyone.
There's another ex-Googler "local guide" startup at http://www.nextstop.com/. I wonder how they feel about this.
Notice that the linked google employee(http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent-not-messing-up-your-ra...) has no real solution. Everything is still in development. Though if your site layout is conducive Google's search results are a good alternative (They still don't use the alt property).

While the text-indent css is a hack. For now it is the best we have. The alt property will get you in the search index, it will not allow for good display when google returns a result. That little snippet of each site that google shows is hard to get right using just alt text.

We should be moving away from using it, however right now almost everyone uses it. Google won't penalize you for it yet.
Yep, cold hits are a pain. They're bad for low traffic apps because App Engine will deallocate all resources if your app hasn't been hit in a while. Interestingly, cold hits are bad for apps with spiking traffic, too: as your load spikes, App Engine tasks new machines each of which may experience a cold hit. (It depends on their caching internals, subject to change.)

As for use_library() vs App Engine Patch: for me, the perf issue is primary. On the other hand, AEP offers a lot of functionality out-of-box that you don't get with raw use_library() django.
(to further explain (1), in particular cash-scrapped governments and school districts would be all to happy to get to fire a bunch of older teachers who, because teaching was previously set up as a career, make more money than new recruits. This is precisely the kind of logic that meat packing plants or furniture factories also apply in firing veteran employees and replacing them with desperate undocumented immigrants or other similarly cheap new workers, and countering it, so that pay is predictable and stable for people being recruited to do extensive training and then work in what is frankly a quite low paid (compared to the responsibility and workload bestowed) career, is pretty much the entire point of labor organizing: it removes the tremendous power imbalance that otherwise exists between employee and employer.

I absolutely agree with you that our current methods of selecting, training, and critiquing teachers are deeply flawed. But they’re flawed for a whole host of reasons, and the teachers’ unions that fought against the often worse problems of the pre-union past are not by a long shot the biggest problem facing the education system.
It could be a success even if they don't sell any actual online newspapers. You'll notice that the price for one-day access to the Times online is one pound, exactly the same as the cover price of the printed version.

The idea, then, is not so much to sell subscriptions but to anchor in people's minds the idea that a newspaper like the Times is something worth paying a pound for. People will be more inclined to pick up a printed newspaper to read on the train if they're not thinking "gee, I could read exactly the same thing online for free, what's the point?"

Actually if you think of it as a way of driving people back to printed newspapers, rather than as a new revenue stream in itself, it starts to make a hell of a lot of sense.
not if you have a server on 127.0.0.1:{80,443}
Waaiitaminute.. if I want to opt out from your information-gathering program I have to install something on my computer and constantly run it in perpetuity?

<brain explodes>

I can't wait until mailing lists try this: "To unsubscribe from our list, please send email every 24 hours to keepunsubscribingme@___.com. Here's a webapp to join to simplify the process." or "Would you like Sears to stop sending these coupons to your house? Please send a postcard to ___ every 30 days." Lol.

(Not saying this is a bad idea. What do I know? I'm going to keep it on my radar.)
The difference is that with water, if the aquifers run out you can increase the output of your desalination and sewage treatment plants, or build more of them, or whatever--all it takes is more energy inputs. Oil is energy inputs; if the EROEI drops too low we can't replace it until we find more than the energy we're currently getting from it from non-petroleum-based sources. It's unfortunately quite difficult to build thousands of nuke plants overnight without using petroleum inputs.
I hate NULL and all its variants ... quick hack to alleviate the pain in Python
I've found Privoxy to be a good ad- and flash-blocking solution for browsers that can't block well enough themselves.
There are several Vim plugins. None of them have all of the features of Vimperator, but they are getting there.
Hopefully they do a better job than Apple. I had a number of issues with their init/cron replacement.