skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much material/effort is wasted in our civilization on the entirely non-functional ones that continue to be used, like tiny little cargo cults to the past, each adding a little friction within the engine of modern life, progress, and bettering our world.
Developers are going out of business and don't have money to finish properties. Banks are saddled with large inventory of foreclosed properties and are getting rid of it very slowly, hoping not to show large losses, I think.

The asking prices are set high all over the island in the hope that foreigners will bite. You need an official appraisal by the bank before you get a mortgage and you may then get 80% of the amount.

Asking prices used to be exactly 80% of appraised value or less and people are still clinging to the high prices from the market top. Try negotiating, though, and you'll see prices come down rapidly.

I rented a house a few months ago and the owner wanted 330K or so. I insisted on renting and the owner said that if the price is the problem then he could go down to 290, 280, etc.

It's not even funny how prices in the US are more or less uniform, as if people are aware of property values around them and are trying to price them fairly. No such thing around here as people ask what they want and then negotiate down, down, down.
I've taken a couple 2-year breaks from programming - once to start a company, and another time for personal reasons. Like you, I didn't not know how the time gap itself and the reasons for it would affect my conversations with potential employers. Well, turns out it's a non-issue. I've never had a conversation about it one way or another - every employer that I've talked to only cared about my skills. In particular, I had thought that being a former startup founder would raise some red flags (would she fit in at a "desk" job etc) but like I said, it's never even come up. That's one of the perks of being a programmer I guess - if you have the skills, you have the skills.

Just out of curiosity - what is your book about?
Please elaborate on the "Hacker Vs. Cracker" debate, I seemed to have missed this one.
Peace and quiet; no screaming babies or giggling teenagers or laughing office workers on break. No espresso grinder in your ear or frappucino blender. No smell of an employee warming up a panini full of stuff you hate.

For $325/mo though I'd better get my own desk and a place to stash my things.
We should get in touch!
I don't think I have enough low-level knowledge to answer that intelligently at the moment. What I can say is that we're hitting these problems despite being on Isilon drives. (I think that is orthogonal to your solution, but again am not all too familiar with the subject.)
Surely the most logical thing to is invest the $50M now to get things started and wait to see what needed funding next..

This almost certainly will not represent the sum total of his donations.
that's right. but i haven't read it before. and most "arguments" don't change over time. it's just soooo wrong. hilarious :)
Samsung still has not enough capacity to supply its own lines and client lines with their Super AMOLED display. When looking in the future instead, in July 2011 they are supposedly opening a new 5.5 gen plant for AMOLED technology that will allow them an output of 30M 3" displays per month.

http://www.oled-display.net/new-55-gen-oled-line-from-samsun...

Apple couldn't use SuperAMOLED because of supply issues more than anything.
GWAS = Genome-wide association studies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study
One of my hats is being an analyst dealing with exome (all exons in the genome) sequencing for my lab. We do a lot of exomes.
That hubcap has a non-functional knockoff (aka spinner), too.
Super AMOLED =/= AMOLED

http://www.9to5mac.com/samsung-displays-ipad-3420963243
http://www.techeye.net/business/samsungs-apple-ipad-displays...
This all looks like good advice, even in tech, except for the bit about going around HR showing arrogance. I'm certain that HR people don't like attempts to bypass their inept and counterproductive processes. But HR people are almost never hiring influencers. Any place they are influencers, you don't want to work.
It could, but it is extremely rare. Check out http://cloudexchange.org to see historical pricing. A spot instance cannot be changed to standard pricing.
Interesting question: Can HTML5 localStorage be used to circumvent cookie controls in lieu of using Flash cookies?
I'm not talking about serifs vs. san-serifs; more like, whether the terminals are lachrymal or calligraphic. Calligraphic detail in typefaces, by the way, almost a perfect example of a skeoumorph.
Yeap, so they had to use the inferior IPS.
Does Google pay well? I'm under the impression that they are more about perks and cool projects than salary and benefits.
After every "cap deploy", I max out pushups and situps.

Works.
... I guess it's also because I'm using Rails, so I'm already generating links via a helper function. So I wrote another, one line helper that does the wrapping. So that initial 90 seconds is amortized over every new Like button I add, because I use like_url rather than link_to.

Also, often like buttons are used on something like stories, so you're only adding the code to one template, and now you have tons of like buttons all over.
That's what other browsers are for ;p
You're right, I meant 0.5-14GB, I hadn't noticed their new 16 and 20GB instances.
Good link. At the end of the day, they're doing association studies... So they're taking a phenotype (even survey answers are a "phenotype" in a manner of speaking) and correlating it with a genotype (whether SNPs, exome data, or genome data). I'm a believer in this approach to science and am in no way poo-pooing their effort; I merely wanted to comment that, from the article's description of their approach, they're doing nothing iconoclastic.
United Airlines Tries Hypermiling a Boeing
The Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Ga...
Yes, but … some of these can be seen as removing the cognitive friction of relearning unimportant things every time their implementations evolve. Rigorous situational efficiency would be inefficient overall, because everyone would lose time to codeswitching.
Well, it was just an example and

>If you make sensitive data public, it becomes public data, period; there's no going back.

this is true, but it sure would be nice to do damage control no ?
Why the downvote? A google search didn't turn up anything about a IE-only lack of conformance to the spec regarding semicolons.

If you've seen code that breaks only IE because of a missing semicolon, please share.
From Nigeria With Love: MailChimp’s Poetry Spam
"[F]inance" or "think tanks" is kind of broad. You probably mean small- to medium-sized hedge funds in finance (or their equivalent prop desks, as far as they still exist, in investment banks) because otherwise I can't think of finance as a place for creative natures. Most bank divisions and asset managers have set rules and procedures for everything and force you into using their software (environments), like Excel or Matlab or C# or Windows. I'm not saying those are bad in general, it's just I myself hate them and there's absolutely no way I could work for an operation that uses them, which precludes me from practically 98 percent of firms in the industry (ok, I pulled that one out of a hat). Also, although I generally agree with Merton's point that "first you have to show you can do it like them, then you can show you can do better", I think more and more this applies only outside of "paradigm shifts" in Thomas Kuhn's sense. During such shifts, or to propel them, one may do better by totally disregarding the viewpoint of the old guard and "just do".

EDIT: Of course, one would still need to have thought enough about the "old" way of doing or explaining things that one would know why the "old" way failed, in a fundamental way. For example, I think in economics and finance, the fundamental failure is not so much in the statistical assumptions (that is actually a pretty cheap shot to make, theory-wise, Herr Taleb!) but in aggregation.
Let's see, Amazon pulled back 1984 because they figured out they didn't have the license for it. They returned the money and fixed the problem without fuss (kinda).

If you were in a situation like you said to unknowingly include unlicensed 3rd party code it sure would be nice to just return the money and do a remote delete. Compared to, say, waiting to be sued and having the damages determined upon the numbers of copies sold.
Please Google, don't encourage them.
9-5 seems a bit rigid to me. I can spend all day at Borders or Starbucks, and it would only cost me zero dollars . Better yet, I can just stay home and avoid the hassles of having to pack up every night.
On top of that the Asbury Park location in itself is plenty of reason not to want to go in the first place.

If you are going to provide a co-working space, find some value for your clients.

One more thing..would you pay $20 per day to go use some space in Asbury Park? the answer would be a resounding NO for most people, so you simply have to come up with something other than just the space to attract people.

For people unfamiliar with NJ, Asbury Park has a reputation for being a "high crime area" , whether its deserved or not, I have no idea. The actual situation may also have changed, but for me and a lot of other people, Asbury Park would not be number one on the list of places I want to go and hang out.
Though I'm not discounting that it may in fact be dimmer:

Larger gaps alone implies dimmer, but this can be accounted for by having the pixels put out more light. Having larger gaps on a display doesn't mean it's dimmer, as the pixels have likely changed characteristics in the process of shrinking them.
It is still slightly better for viewing text and browsing.

According to digitimes (paywall) http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100526VL200.html

According to our sources, Apple had spoken with Samsung Mobile Display about the possibility for AMOLED panels since the development of the iPhone 3GS, but production capacity remains a big issue. SMD only has the capability to fulfill 50-60% of iPhone orders at the moment even it dedicated all AMOLED capacity to Apple.

Of course, cost is always a concern. AMOLED panels cost US$34-38. TN panels cost less than US$10 and IPS panels around US$20.

AMOLED also has display weaknesses. SMD uses PenTile technology developed by Clairvoyante to produce AMOLED, which is less suitable for displaying text. With Apple quite keen on pushing e-reading businesses, AMOLED may not be the best solution at the moment.
Self-Assembling Nanodevices That Move and Change Shape on Demand
Writing Effective Apologies
This isn't deeply relevant to the profiled product, but I found the following characterization of YC rather odd:

"Y Combinator is the early stage investment fund that uses a biannual, weekend-long pitch and demonstration competition to find investment-worthy companies."

Isn't it more or less the other way around? (Demo Day is a "result", not the source, of YC companies)
So that's what those tiny pockets are for, pocket watches.
That's certainly a fair point - proposed solutions aren't guaranteed to work. But given InnoCentive's long history of helping the government and some of the world's smartest companies solve really complex problems, surely it was worth at least an exploration. I'm certain the InnoCentive community would have helped - and still will - whittle the ideas down to those that make the most sense.

The simple truth is that BP isn't able to solve the problem. I hope they will. But for the moment, rejecting potential solutions seems short sighted.
When I interviewed with them and friends would ask what the company did, I would say "you know how in 24 Jack Bauer would call up CTU and say a name, then they'd find out everything about that person instantly, from their address to the last person they ate lunch with? Palantir does that for real.

Really impressive product, and they honed their demo to be pretty jaw-dropping.
<pedant>
2.91%
... (1-(100/103))*100
</pedant>
> And I wasn't implying it will change the filtering problem. Merely pointing out that it isn't easy, which you implied quite strongly

You're taking things out of context, and putting words in my mouth.

This is a discussion of the .xxx TLD. My contention is that .xxx won't improve porn blocking precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. There are already tools that do a lot of work to block it, and .xxx isn't going to change anything. The sites that would use .xxx are already blocked.

So, a porn sites are already blocked, and will use .xxx just to have it. It won't improve blocking. At the same time, .xxx won't block sites that don't play by the rules, and sites like RapidShare or Reddit, where you can find porn.

That's what I've been saying.
What about for people without SMS?
Can we not editorialize in the title please? Flagged.
Presumably the high frequency counter is driven off the cycle counter, and not the Intel High Precision HPET Timers.
That's the point. Single 0MQ socket is able to communicate with multiple peers.
Yes, lets all take a competitor's word at face value. And that clarity quote is complete bull, just look at a 3G and a 4G side by side. I like AMOLED screens, but the article is worthless.

How would one calculate clarity? It seems it would be a subjective measurement... maybe they're looking at the phones from 10 feet away?
Measure your social networking Klout
Ah, yeah I was assuming he meant this year (0% interest) plus 9 additional years of x% interest. I see now that I should have given him another year.

Okay, so he only has to return 10% annually. Still extremely difficult. :)
Here is a decent overview of the misuse of the term hacker: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=1400
If it gets published, you'll have no trouble at all. If not, say you were "traveling".
How You Can Actually Help With the Gulf Oil Spill (but probably won’t.)
Testing in the Data Center (Manufacturing No More)
On one hand, it doesn't appear that they are getting a pass at all. This seems like they've gotten far more bad press for it than is necessary.

On the other hand, other device makers should really step up their game. I don't like the idea of a new computing monopoly, but who is out there seriously competing with Apple right now? (If what the other device makers is doing currently is competing, Apple doesn't have anything to worry about for a while).
Work Break: The Rouge Network (New Kind of Video Player)
What's really interesting about this is that he doesn't actually have the disease. Due to genetic testing, he may have an increased probability of getting it.

>Many philanthropists have funded research into diseases they themselves have been diagnosed with. But Brin is likely the first who, based on a genetic test, began funding scientific research in the hope of escaping a disease in the first place.
Good customers are the ones who pay the minimum
Even with all the supposed deterioration of HN, comments like this keep me coming back for more. Thanks, Bret!
I am not using an API, I am writing to the driver
you'll be fine. the underlying skills and abilities that make you good at coding won't disappear with disuse.

just be honest to future employers about what happened during that time, and if you feel its necessary, start doing some personal projects to ramp up your skillset again and have some recent coding experience/examples before you interview.
How does rotating the screen affect text antialiasing?
The key to be a great programmer
Assume a solution of N messages exists. The N'th message may fail. Either N messages is not enough, or N-1 IS enough; then recurse on N-1.
Thanks, Nirmal! This is really slick. Can't wait to see your next hack :)
Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of developers
Vuvuzelas are barbaric.
Thanks for the links and info. Great stuff.

So basically, the heavy lifting palantir does is in the presentation and data abstraction. With a person still needed to define mappings across data sources. Is this a correct statement?

With (seemingly) limited off the shelf mapping abilities I'm surprised that they are looking to sell more as an appliance, and less as a turn key service with consulting engagements etc... Neat product.
It's not that he doesn't like buybacks as opposed to dividends. It's that he doesn't like growth companies returning capital to investors through any means.

All of his criticisms would apply equally to dividends, with the extra criticism that dividends are a gift to Uncle Sam because they are taxed higher in most tax brackets.
This page pretty much freezes my FF 3.5 solid, which is highly unusual.
Number 1 is actually a downside, to me. I don't really care whether a coder starts with ugly code (don't we all?) but I care what it looks like when he hits "submit". Also, do the rules specifically disallow writing the code in my IDE and then copy/pasting it in? I think that would be a silly rule. What about a good developer who writes a test first, and of course, codes against that test.

However, number 2 and 3 are nice.
Ex-Hacker Calls on Wikileaks Head to Step Down Following [...] Identity Breach
> hardware that frankly doesn't exist anymore

That is simply not true. Nokia still churns out tons of phones that don't even run Symbian, but S40, which is another step down. And they sell like hotcakes, too, even if the profit margins aren't huge. And they'll continue to sell well for the immediate future.

Clearly, Nokia has lost its grip on "the future" and isn't very competitive with things like Android and the iPhone, but to deny that the biggest chunk of the cell phone market exists is a bit absurd.
Mid-tier universities do this all the time too by rejecting students they know won't matriculate (or will matriculate and transfer in 2 years).
"If she can work as an account manager, she can probably become a great project manager."

I find that statement highly suspect. Yes they have some similar skillsets but still. And if they really are so similar, if she didn't enjoy being an account manager, why would she enjoy being a project manager anymore?
Yahoo and their development team in particular deserve kudos much more often than they seem to get. PR-wise, they get elbowed out by Google, FB, etc. when in fact their open-source tools like YUI are often very well made, well tested (if it's good enough for the Yahoo front page, it's probably pretty good), and most importantly for fellow developers, well documented. Thanks Yahoo!
Distributed transactions generally use 2 phase-commit (2PC). If message loss happens, the 2PC algorithm will block, i.e. the transaction can neither be committed nor aborted. When the network gets reliable again, the algorithm will finish. So strong consistency isn't really affected by this problem.

A special case would be if the network is broken only in one direction. In that case, the same command may be sent multiple times, but even this is not a problem, since the 2PC commands are idempotent (e.g. receiving the Commit-message multiple times won't hurt, since the receiving node knows that it has already committed the transaction).
That would be great at a party:

"What do you do for a living?"

"Exomes."

-spits drink out-
Of course, but the risk of misunderstanding is eliminated. Screenshots are great, but the misunderstanding is still possible.

The point is moot, really. Who cares? They took the time to illustrate a few points. There wasn't any jive, grandstanding or hyperbole.

For someone who learns through visuals better, I appreciate the extra effort.
It's not meant to be taken literally, obviously. Cool your jets, dude.
Read it again. He's talking about near-zero sleep calls, not one second sleep calls.
There is a company working on making an iPad enclosure that can be used in the tank with dolphins. I don't know what pressure depth it's supposed to be rated at, but it should be adequate for sailing.
Just use Winpcap instead of wasting time reinventing this wheel.
Steve Jobs email reply generator
My wife has incredible credit and pays her full bill every month. A few months ago her full payment was received 1 day after the due date, so she got pinged $15 for not paying the minimum. When she called to see if they would reverse the charge, the customer service rep rudely told her no and wouldn't budge. When my wife threatened to cancel the card, the rep happily obliged. She tearfully asked me why they would be so unforgiving to her after all her diligent payments. The truth is that by being one of their most responsible customers she became one of their least valuable customers. Very irritating.
Best And Worst Decisions – Paul Graham
POSIX sleep() doesn't take subsecond intervals. Maybe he's talking about usleep()?
Did you put it on textured walls? From their video, it looked like the material was very thin, so I wonder how well it works on any but the smoothest walls.
Look, more drama. You know what's something that "ideal wikileaks" wouldn't have that "real wikileaks" clearly does have? This much drama.
No, you do not. There are services out there that assist in this.

http://www.cybersitter.com/ http://www.netnanny.com/ http://www.cyberpatrol.com/ http://www.asacp.org/

Have you ever actually used any of these tools? They are horrible. They have a much worse cpu and network overhead than McAfee and aren't remote effective filters unless set to unreasonably restrictive settings.

Proxies working on pre-compiled blacklists and whitelists are a better solution and the new tld could only help with this. Even if only new pornographic site were ever given a "xxx" tld, then it would save the effort of having to explicitly blacklist them.
> sometimes constraints can be lenses for creativity, instead of shackles.

This seems to be the case in just about every field. People who aren't very familiar with classical music hear about musical forms and highly restrictive techniques like fugue and think "Oh, classical music must be so stuffy and formulaic" or a common geek response I've heard: "Wow, Bach's music is made up of algorithms!" (cringe).

But in reality those restrictions are where creativity is born, why composers are still writing fugues. Remove all restrictions from the process of composition (including self-imposed restrictions) and you have noise!

Another example I wanted to share: in the documentary "The Five Obstructions" (an epic film about the creative process) Lars von Trier tasks the Jørgen Leth to re-create his short film "The Perfect Human" in five different ways, with five different sets of rules and restrictions.

The one that Leth is most thrown off by at first is the task to re-make the film without any instructions from Lars. It's an awesome movie.
I thought they did this to stick it to the Man (i.e. FIFA). FIFA tends to send out nastygrams as soon as you so much as appear to refer to the World Cup without paying them [1].

But they seem to pay at least some money to FIFA. They say “2010 FIFA World Cup” [2] on their results page, that must cost them money.

[1] Hilarious subversion of FIFA’s despotic tendencies: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=154436&id=14597658...

[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=mesut+özil
If he starts showing symptoms he may suddenly increase his spending.
I think you are totally wrong about the reaction in the midwest. Have you actually had this experience?

I live in Nashville, TN. We just had a launch of an "entrepreneur center", the local business schools teach "entrepreneurism", job postings ask for employees who are "entrepreneurial" and there is a real caché attached to being an entrepreneur.

"Entrepreneur" is an incredibly trendy word right now. So trendy that I think it is loosing it's meaning.

Small business owner on the other hand seems to imply that there is a business that is actually running, bringing in revenue, and maybe even turning a profit.

As evidence of the trendiness of "entrepreneur", check out the Google search trend since 2004:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Entrepreneur&cm...
I'm embarrassed for RIM: Blackberry 6 sneak peak.