skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is the stupidest comment I've ever read anywhere. Mahatma Gandhi did a lot for people in both South Africa and India. By glibly calling him a racist you're insulting an entire country and a great man.
Ask HN: Are there tools to schedule tasks to execute at specific times?
"cron" and "at" seem like too much of a (bad) hack for anything more than a couple thousand tasks that need to be scheduled. I am writing a web app that has to close auctions and send out emails, transfer money/tokens around, etc.

The PHP programmers tell me to just do a lazy check on each page load for auctions that are closed- if I do that, I'd probably throw it on to an SQS queue and have some server instance processing the closing auctions in bulk. But what if it's a cold day in hell and nobody is triggering these page loads? etc.

What other solutions are out there for time-sensitive scheduling for arbitrarily large numbers of tasks?
I always find it funny when people consider Lisp a functional language. Lisp is really multiparadigm: it's as easy to write imperative code as it is to write functional code.

I worked at ITA in their Lisp code for two years. It's mostly imperative, and only uses a functional style where you would in other languages, e.g. using recursion to walk a tree.
Faced with this problem my first reaction would have been to simply make the battery diagram more legible and high contrast but this is a bit more elegant. Maybe there's a language barrier here too. Is the classic -/+ diagram widely understood around the world?
Check out a Google Pacman Level Editor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jj3-NGO7xo
This will cause greater confusion than Apple's one-way both-batteries style, or even how most devices are now (through conditioning). I hope they have a good way of explaining "any direction is fine". I would stare at it in disbelief for a few moments.
Old people. People not into computers, or afraid of them, or who do not have a computer period.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of an ad hominem attack? Why not dissect the argument he's making instead?
A single network has lots of people who are friends and would use something like this. Family talk plans are popular sales strategies for the networks. "Family talk with FourSquare!" Imagine that commercial. The game features that require everyone to be on the PS3 or xbox are also successful, so there are plenty of examples that support my idea.
You can not make labor in the US as cheap as it is in China because if you did they would not be able to afford food.

I wonder if that's really true. Food's pretty cheap nowadays.
I'm sure the guys working on Microsoft hardware are a brilliant bunch. I have no doubt that they possess the ability to come up with this type of innovation. The part that amazes me is that with all the other engineers that have worked hard to design battery enclosures no one had thought of this yet. It's so simple. Brilliant, but simple.
any recommended VPNs? How much should one expect to pay for the service?
I don't find cron anywhere bad for it.
Some hits, some misses. It's hard for anybody to say with authority just how many should have been hits but were not. I think it's unrealistic to expect ALL of them to be a net win. Nobody can predict the future, not even Google.

NOTE TO SELF: start a web-based service that successfully predicts the future. Sell out to Google.
Maybe they are optimistic because they know they are healthier.
And, there's a reason they're called raiders. They don't usually "improve" anything except for their wallet.

Yes, because populist journalists and working folks who lose their jobs because a poorly-performing company gets shut down and sold off piecemeal are great, unbiased sources of truth in such matters.

Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a company is for it to die. If we'd had the balls to let some of our airlines and auto companies and banks die the painful death they deserve, we probably wouldn't have to face the prospect of repeatedly bailing out underperforming companies in those (now heavily-regulated) industries.
Don't use cron for each individual task. Use cron to start a process that runs through your task queue every x minutes.
it seems like to much of a risk, in terms of the controversies that might get raised every time the recognition software screws up.. imagine the system tagging somebody's ex girlfriend on their current partner's face, or interpreting a picture of Saddam as some random friend of the poster
Almost everyone I know just uses cron or various proprietary replacements for cron that work basically the same way. If you want to go the proprietary way, you write a persistent daemon server that keeps a priority queue of tasks to execute, wakes up and executes the next one on the heap, figures out what time it is, and then sleeps until the next task is due. If it receives notifications of new tasks, it wakes up, adds them to the heap, and then recomputes the amount of time it must sleep.
Apple has a program called launchd that's used in Mac OS X to replace cron and friends. It's Apache licensed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
They will only be setup to be more efficient because of our capital investment though. We have lost these assets because their only justification was based on the predicate of suppressed wages, which are temporary. This is a fools game.
I hate to break it to you, but I don't know of any image-based CAPTCHAs which haven't been broken/automated.
24-pin ethernet plugs, 12" disks, and the first networked FPS: Xerox ALTO, 1979
That's the most accurate, concise description of comments like this I've ever seen.
From what you've described, it's not really a thousand tasks, it's one task: close out auctions. What the PHP programmers suggest is a horrible idea. For two reasons, first, the reason you describe: nobody loading the page, and second because it may close out auctions way more often than necessary. Imagine if you get 1,000 people a second calling the close out auctions task.

So if it really is just one close out auctions task, why not build a cron job to find all the closed auctions and do what you gotta do in a loop?
Nice hack, but come on, do they really have to license it?
What´s next Instaload toilet paper, egg pans, swimming goggles, socks?
Also I'd assume cron would be more stable and well-tested than any proprietary solution that could be whipped up in a rush.
The sin of Onan wasn't masturbation, but rather "pulling out".
What does OTA stand for?
A link posted last month does not explain a 37 signals post from 2007. (Though I must say that it does seem very similar, and that email did get wide circulation.)
Ask HN: How to turn $1,000 into $10,000 in a relatively short period of time?
I want to hear your ideas. Short as in less than 6 months, which I think is appropriate.
The CAPTCHA's they use have been put through the ringer
and are proven to work against spammers who are focused
and resourceful.

Not really:

- http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Blogs/2919.aspx

- http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/

- http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2004/05/06/s...

- http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/PWNtcha

etc. Most of those articles are from several years ago. The state of the art has improved since then.
Nice share, biafra. You should start a telephone company in Cambodia.

The story is they had this at burning man a few years ago.
Great technology for setting up little "communal" nodes in different parts of the world.

Could easily be abused. Would probably drive the cost up.

If shared between a small group though, could be a cost effective way to bridge small&remote communities across the world.

Could diversify our internets.
> Grove is basically saying we need to start more companies that "scale up" to require factories where people sit doing stuff like what's seen in that video. He's wrong.

You have to give Grove more credit than that. Obviously, he does not want to create clock-punching jobs just for the sake of having clock-punching jobs. Grove is known to run a tight ship. His example of the alternative energy space is a perfect one demonstrating the inability of even new industries invented in the US to remain here. All the "scaling" happens in China, leaving little secondary benefits to the innovating nation. Why can't your oscilloscope be made here? Sure, they have the know-how, but so do we. They have assembly lines, so can we. In theory there shouldn't be a problem. But in the real world, we know the playing field isn't level. Like how China allows externalities to develop by quashing labor/worker conditions and the environment to create the perfect arbitrage situation for offshoring US entrepreneurs. Can't forget their dollar/yuan "managed" exchange rate. Again, they are subsidizing the offshoring startup. China has clearly stacked the deck hence the inevitability of your oscilloscope being made overseas. This is by design and its all policy-driven. Should the US sit idly by as a de facto trade war is staring at them in the face? Or should they follow through with the offshore tariff that Andy suggested? Controversial, no doubt, but one must do whatever it takes to win a war.

CB, you make good business argument for the current microeconomic behavior of firms but you must put on a political-economic hat and think decades down the road to really get at his thinking (and he's as sharp as they come). I believe Andy is being long term greedy. He's fighting the next war.
This kind of Ask HN is waaaay better suited for a site like Stack Overflow, imo. I for one don't want to see HN turn into a site "overflowing" with common/basic programming design questions every day. No ill will to the author of this question, of course, just speaking up.
John Ralston Saul's book Unconscious Civilization (a kind of primer on his theories I think, which one would read before they tackle Voltaire's Bastards) does a wonderful job of elaborating this point, anyone interested in an article such as this would do well to read the book,

Capitalism - real capitalism, not the cowardice we see masquarading as capitalism a lot of the time - is fine, corporatism and the power we give corps. by surrendring to them is what is dismantling democracy and individual liberty. (And Ralston Saul posits that this is an age-old battle, whether it be corps. in their modern form, or as in the Catholic Church).
Well, to be fair, Jason does advise developers to just solve small, easy problems and let "someone else" tackle the big, hard problems.

I wonder if Jason has ever worked with real enterprise software, either as a user or a developer. The reality that he seems to miss is that the enterprise software arena is full of big, hard problems that have huge dollar figures attached to them. But I suppose that's why Oracle is worth more than $100 billion; they're that "someone else".
Excellent comment. I also try to put myself in groups where I genuinely am below average, and I think it accelerates my learning curve. But it's also good to be Top Dog from time to time; the teacher often can learn more than the student.
This is an extremist point of view. Realistically they have a lot of purposes that should be kept in mind.
BrainGig: Free webinar on Pharmacogenetics
oh, sweet, it's a safari plugin now. The one thing I didn't like is the difficulty in turning it off.

/me tries

NOOOooooo! It doesn't work on that site! >.< Thanks anyway though, I intend to get use out of it :)
Elevation Partners acquires $ 120 million in Facebook shares
I told Mario, he'll take care of it ;)
Context had a lot to do with this. Science students expect to be presented with a counterintuitive occurrence coupled with an enlightened explanation from the teacher.

Imagine a more natural, everyday scenario. A student gets into a friend's car and notices that the seats on the sunny side of the car are cool and the seats on the shady side of the car are warm. They would easily conclude that the car had not been parked there long. They may even consider that the car had recently been parked on the other side of the street.
Yep. You can't chose which corner cases you're going to support. The answer is: "All of them." The difference is how gracefully you handle that, and the support that you provide for the end-user of your application.

Further, enterprise software sucks for casual users, but is often superior for expert users than consumer software that is less featureful and robust. I think that depth vs learning curve is a bit of a false dichotomy, but complexity geometrically increases difficulty in making "intuitive" software.
Facebook is awesome. They have some of the most brilliant minds working there. Pretty soon, they'll be able to tell whose face it is! I can't wait until they partner with restaurants and banks and other places with security cameras, so I don't have to update my location or status. They can just tell all my friends where I am and what food I ate for lunch.
It took several years, but eventually someone posted a sensible comment below the article - "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer."

The lecturer, a person in a position of trust, starts with a query coming from a place of deception. The students trusted the teacher to be asking them something relevant and they gave it their best shot. Sure, it's great to always keep a sharp mind and not make assumptions, but it's also a waste of time to question each and every pre-supposition, which is what's required to get to the correct answer of "because you rigged it."
Shutup has greatly reduced the amount of time I spend getting sucked into reading what are generally bad comments. I also suspect that my general angst level is down, as a bonus.
Cool idea, but what practical use does this have?
The apps (except Pandora, etc) in the taskbar aren't running.
But the government cannot, by fiat, deem that people should make "Modern Western Wage" because some people's work is not worth that much. Forcing wages to be at that level causes more problems than it solves (i.e. massive offshoring). Minimum wage laws, workplace safety laws, environmental standards, etc, all raise the cost of doing business and make it so only people whose work is worth "Modern Western Wage" can be employed.

The whole point is that "Current trade and industrial policies" favor the former ("Modern Western Wage"), not the latter, which is what is causing the problems in the US. Did you read the article?
Insight, "Hulu: We'll Be Right Back"
after reading his piece I did the obvious thing next:

checked android-guru.com

Yep, somebody's running there! Getting a 404 though.
Also, there's been a lot of concerns over privacy with Facebook, and Facebook being able to "recognize you" has a pretty high creepiness factor.
If it is just one task, why do you even need cron? Just use a simple daemon process that sleeps for a bit and then checks for work?
This article reminded me of something I've always wanted to do before I grow old; make an automated farm. What drives me crazy is the idea of an integrated system that gives me high quality produce at the maximum possible efficiency.

If we use something like hydroponics then we can precisely control the nutrients the plants get. Further, since they grow inside a greenhouse we don't need to use any pesticides at all. Further, we can control the amount of light they receive to optimize for maximum growth, and by stacking such units one on top of the other than we don't have to worry space at all. So a massive 500 acre farm can be theoretically reduced to a one acre farm with 500 decks of plants in an efficient arrangement.

In fact, someone else way smarter than me has already though of this and developed the idea to quite a long extent (see: http://www.verticalfarm.com/). Has anyone over here ever tried something like this? Are there more awesome people like Mr. Howard?
Be really good at something that people care about.
What? That's not an electric car...how is this related? Why not compare it to all sports cars ever built, which would definitely turn up some better cars than either the Tesla Roadster or the Smart Roadster?
If you read the article,

"...the system will automatically detect faces in the photos and prompt you to select the friend who’s face it is."

It seems that the software is (so far) only recognising the presence of a face, not identity.
To me, it's obvious what the future of mass production will look like, but it's not at all clear how to stave off a future where 10% of us are shouldering the entire productivity burden for the rest of the country.

Extrapolating your logic, that 10% will probably shrink to 1%.

And chances are, you or your descendants probably won't be part of that 1%.

Grove isn't saying that we should have more mundane manufacturing jobs. He is saying there is a problem with stratification when 1% of people make all the money while the other 99% are left unemployed because they couldn't patent X technology 1 day faster, or didn't beat the other 99% of applicants for the rare number of jobs left.

Whether or not the only solution to this is to artificially preserve mundane manufacturing jobs is another matter.
Amazon and Acquisitions: An Interview With Woot CEO Matt Rutledge
While it's cool that you're getting the help you need, I wonder if something like StackOverflow isn't a better place for these kinds of specific technical implementation questions? Just a thought...
"I've got to stop somewhere, and leave you something to imagine <giggle>."

A humbling exhortation, if ever there was one.

I loved reading his lectures (as opposed to the classes I was in) because he was interested in getting to the 'what's going on', not the 'here's the equation to know.' One of his autobiographies talks about his frustration in this area when he was talking about polarized light at a university outside the US. They had spent all day talking about polarized light in the classroom, but nobody could predict or explain what was going on when he took two polarized filters and stacked & rotated them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

That's a phenomenal video of him explaining how to ask questions. And does a great job explaining that, "Why?" questions aren't very good questions, without a context. And goes from there to 'everyday QED' with elegance and grace.
"The lecturer, a person in a position of trust, starts with a query coming from a place of deception."

I used to be a middle school science teacher. One year, near the beginning of the school year, I taught an entire lesson on why the Earth was flat. The point of the lesson, of course, was to encourage them not to simply take my word for things but to base their beliefs on evidence and reason.
This is definitely one of those usability things that Microsoft is oh-so-famous for like this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059....

Basically by trying to make it simpler, they're making it harder. Not only do you have one more part to break, but the first question people immediately ask when opening up a battery compartment is "which way do I insert the batteries?"

Now, there is going to need to be a disclaimer stating clearly that they don't need to put them in any particular way. Next, the user is going to be forced to digest this message. Then, with some unease, put the batteries in without regard to their direction, despite the fact that the hundreds of other times they've used batteries they've had to do this.

Microsoft has introduced another branch in the decision tree: "does this device require I insert batteries in a certain direction?" To answer this, I still will probably have to rely upon information printed on the device, since remembering which device fits this criteria will likely not be memory I can trust since I change batteries rarely. (And, if I mis-remember it, I could break an expensive device, so I will have to check to be sure.)

So, what Microsoft in the end is saving here is not the need to check the indicator on the device. It's still necessary for me to check until the entire world uses this in every device. All they've done is make it so I don't have to physically rotate the battery in my hand (50% of the time :)) after doing so.

Additionally, troubleshooting now becomes harder if the device does not turn on. If it doesn't turn on, are the batteries dead, the device broken, or did the magical asymmetric battery compartment break?
> it totally failed to address the question of wealth received through means other than entrepreneurship

These people receive wealth. They do not necessarily generate it. Athletes and movie stars are certainly talented, but entertainment is a place to push excess wealth and not necessarily a source of it.

> it claims that the rich got that way by doing work other people don't want to do, by which logic the average garbage man should be rich since he is doing work no one wants to do either.

No, doing disdainful work is not sufficient for being wealthy. Nor is it necessary. He is saying that it is common, though.

> Fourth, it lumps short sellers in with various other parasites trying to feast on the wealthy. But if good entrepreneurs will always (always!) grow the value of their companies, why should they fear short sellers?

Hm, I missed this part in the essay. Most businessmen recognize the value of short sellers in the marketplace, even if it makes their job harder. It's kind of like competition in that way.
I've worked in large corporate environments for many years and one of the things I've learned is this: if they call a big company meeting and a guy in a suit gets up and tells you they're going to do X but DON'T WORRY ABOUT Y HAPPENING WE HAVE NO PLANS OF DOING Y, you need to immediately begin assuming that Y is going to happen.

Because it will.

Maybe not the next day or the next week or even the next month. But it will happen, and it is because the suits have already started knocking the dominoes over in just the right way, behind the scenes, in the back offices and off-site conversations that you will never be privy to. I'd say this prediction method has worked successfully for me say 90% of the time. It's just something about corporate culture and the types of people who get into those positions, or at least, the pressures put on them to say certain things and not say other things, in order to manipulate employees and maximize their own personal benefit.

It's a bit Orwellian.
This isn't all that, because the genetics of longevity will have next to no impact on the future of your own personal longevity.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/there-will-be-ten...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/another-illustrat...

We should expect to see subtle associations with human longevity in genes associated with processes known to be important in long-term health - such as the inflammatory response, or indeed anything else associated with the operation of the immune system. But what can be done with this information? As things stand, probably little of consequence. All new knowledge in the biology of human aging will prove useful eventually, but in the near term it seems very unlikely that as much benefit can be derived from such exploration and analysis as from, say, effort put into developing repair technologies for the known forms of age-related damage.

We humans have a lot of genes, which means there is a very, very large number of potential interactions between gene variants - even within a subset of genes associated with a specific biological system. Discovery and understanding in the face of this complexity represents an enormous amount of work, which is one of the reasons that researchers who favor the metabolic manipulation approach to aging believe that we are a long way from any significant slowing of aging or extension of the healthy human life span.
While there's nothing significantly ground-breaking about it in today's time, but Riya sort of pioneered mainstream facial recognition back in 2005 (deadpooled in August 2009) - http://www.crunchbase.com/product/riya
http://www.playframework.org/ is a good one, but the discussion isn't just about public projects, but overall usage. Java is still hugely used in the enterprise space for projects old and new (and for better for for worse...).