skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He still could've been mismanaged. I take it that Google's hierarchy is pretty shallow, though.
It also depends on your definition of sysadmin books. I recently purchased Windows Powershell 2.0 TFM. Could I have found most of this information on the web? Most definitely, but buying the book allows me to have it all in one place. In addition to that I get it in a limited amount of voices.

I'm not even an admin. Powershell is just too much frakkin fun. If you haven't checked it out yet you should. Maybe you will find it is not for you, but maybe you will enjoy it as much as I do.
Thanks, I appreciate hearing that. I had thought of putting an ad in the email, or even adding one to the bottom of the image itself - though I felt like that would be too intrusive and decided against it (adding to the image itself). Thanks for the feedback.
Oracle is paving the way to turn MySQL into (essentially) SQL Server Express: a free hobbled version of an otherwise commercial database, designed to do one thing and one thing only: pressure existing MySQL developers into moving to (and paying for) a commercial Oracle license. MySQL is nothing more than an onramp to Oracle. This was obvious when Sun was acquired. It's obvious now. Every word I've heard from Oracle regarding MySQL confirms this.

This is what Oracle means by "integration".

You think the number one commercial database provider in the world is going to help build and improve a free, robust, industrial strength database for the good of the open source community? Like they could care less whether you use a free DB or shell out for an Oracle license? Please. Oracle sees MySQL as a huge potential market, nothing more. And this is how the evisceration begins.
Why not. They seem to accept equity in over-priced homes.
Tell you what: have at it if you'd like. But if you build a business around it and make millions of dollars, do send me one of these :).
I could, but the whole point of this is that it's no cables. Adding a powered hub means having to plug it in. It's the kind of thing that is not a limitation until you try to use the device in a tight space with only one outlet.
Well, it can help you, but it's not "self-help." Just a lot of information on how persuasion works and how to influence people. It's considered one of the classics in that area and is - IMO - definitely worth a read.
It's called at-will employment.

Actually, I think he may have a legal case to be paid the original offer from the time he started working up until he got notice of the lower pay (a week or two tops) but that's a very small amount of money for a very big deal court case. His time would be better spent getting out, which he did.
Mahalo.com screws all their writers
Liquibase:

http://www.liquibase.org/

The contents of our personal development databases are not synchronized, just the schema. Each developer has enough mock data to run our app for development purposes.

At a previous job, all developers shared a single development database. It was a huge pain, and I don't recommend that practice.
Already rejected.
Google X10.
a plan based on your last paragraph: to truly influence a company's behavior, crowd-buy a lot of stock and then ask for what you want.
The usual contract is at-will employment - you can quit anytime, they can fire you or cut your pay anytime.

So as long as they told him they were lowering his pay before he actually did any work for them, I don't think they broke a contract.
I would personally probably have quit on the spot. Partly, that's because I know my financial situation allows me to do that sort of. And partly because I would rather scrape the gunk off of someone else's kitchen counters than work for a slimey person who did that to me. I don't think you can judge someone else harshly (especially someone with an infant) for working until he had something else lined up. 2 months was probably an eternity for him but short in the grand scheme of things.
I was hoping that this would be an effort to transition the content from video to smart html5 markup. The lessons themselves are obviously valuable, but it would be nice to have it done w/ text, JS animation and optional audio.
Is that actually true? They retain the full value of all PayPal account balances as 100% cash reserves? I always assumed they were playing the float, at least by rolling it into short-term instruments.
Yeah, I heard of that at the time but didn't want to go back and edit.

The worst thing that can happen is the Context Trap:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_being_sane_in_insane_places

1) Humans want to look for X
2) Design software to look for X
3) Software finds X
4) Humans believe software but software is incorrect
5) X is screwed
JavaScript: The Good Parts http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748
That's usually considered a good thing...
Apple vs Adobe: Are Apple’s MacOS/X Graphics Drivers to Blame
I don't know what you folks are on about. My ddate clearly tells me

<pre>Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 33rd day of Confusion in the YOLD 3176</pre>
Did you have a particular example you want to discuss?
Also, for the record, I'd like to note my hours are 9-9 not 9-5.
Hi Vignesh,

Great response. Admitting you were wrong on an issue (hours) is a great step and that puts you amongst the small minority of people who can admit they're wrong.

That being said, there are several things to keep in mind:

* Your co-founder is an introvert.

* As others pointed out, if you want him to manage interns, you have to make it clear to him. Some (e.g., me) would never agree to take on a management role, no matter the money or equity involved, so you have to be prepared for him to say "no".

* As for deadlines, keep in mind that you know how to sell or (presumably) you'd have little to contribute to the company. Make sure you are not selling the engineer on unrealistic deadlines.
Me too. I had a creative friend, a borderline poverty case with a lot of energy and interesting business ideas, but lack of capital, so I purchased startup equipment to get something going, and immediately my would-be business partner seized the opportunity with full enthusiasm by learning the equipment, then using that equipment, and countless hours of time and energy all to attain level 80 in World of Warcraft. I could only shake my head in disbelief.
White House Pauses $3B In IT Spending
A tale of 3 financings
Ask HN: Cheap / free vector image editing software?
Hey HN, I'm looking to make some mockups of a couple pages. I currently don't have Fireworks installed on my computer and I don't feel like paying a ridiculous amount of money for it.

Are there any decent free image editing programs that will allow me to do mockups? I don't need the complex tooling of Photoshop, just the ability to create vector images.

I am running Win 7.
Check this out, it's a commercial version of that: http://www.nasuni.com/
It's entirely possible I'm wrong, but I'm hinging my decision largely on the location (hn, where invasive user tracking is synonymous with evil with nearly everyone) and the "sigh".
Unless you could find a solid impression based advertising provider or are willing to spend the time finding advertisers I wouldn't add anything to the image itself except (maybe) the URL to your homepage. For the email bit you'd still have to be careful with the TOS that most pay-per-click ad agencies have regarding email.
So, why is it that even after all the long -hours, all the trash talk about us being "resources" and after all other issues, we "programmers" (I would like to call ourselves "hackers", but whatever) still continue to serve others while taking all this BS.
I know why I do it, is because I am an immigrant here, hoping to make my dream project work while working on the side.
I am one of the mere 1% or so of american population. (An excuse, but a valid one. I tried making the company work for almost a year, before I realized I would be kicked out if I don't get employed and get a H1B )
But what stops US citizens from putting an end to this BS??
Is that because we "programmers" tend to be people who are always optimistic and hope that things will get better as we go? Are we really that naive to keep working on something, hoping for better conditions, happier days, a bonus or a raise?

Or is it that we are not united enough?
Is that it?
Are we not networking enough?? (I am guilty, I know).

I mean, I hear of all these stories about inhuman treatments (I'm looking at you EA).
And I somehow always go back to work, almost always being thankful it wasn't me.
Are we selfish to think that?
Why are we thinking it's ok until it happens to us?

How can we make this better, without making a traditional Trade union?
I am serious.

I wanna know.

There must be some way we can unite ourselves to get better work conditions for everyone, AND still not hurt our bosses and companies in the process??

Suggestions?
I agree. You can see it here in text with links and all that: http://bettween.com/mpjamesmoore/doctorow/desc (Note: you have to keep clicking "More" at the bottom to see the whole exchange.)
Exactly. Speaking as someone who does not have them around any more, you cannot possibly imagine what it's like unless you've experienced it.

It's incorrect to assume that poor people don't want to work, as well. Most of them want to work so badly that they'll work for less than minimum wage. Think Hispanic illegals here working for < min wage. This really just ends up hurting everybody in the poverty range. But employers don't care; a body is just a body to them, menial workers for minimum pay equals more profits in their pockets and just enough dangled hope to keep them enslaved.
That's it. Except, the model I had in mind was more of a device + software thing. Also, it looks like the product is cool but $300/mo for this? Yikes.
It doesn't currently work with Safari.
Until recently the 500 Mhz was tied up in Analog TV area. Now with digital TV we have extra wavelengths to use.
"While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard drive or printer on the network, they are costly and rather limited in their functionality."

My router cost $92 and supports 2 usb attached devices that it will share via SMB. And I run DD-WRT which deals with the limited functionality issue.

Not that this thing doesn't look cool or useful, but that one sentence seemed inaccurate.
I don't think so... If it was sarcastic, it wouldn't really be worth mentioning, like saying <sarcasm>Oh great. Another car with airbags!</sarcasm>
I got some good responses when I asked a similar question on SO a long time ago:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6371/how-do-you-manage-da...

Bottom line: script all your changes to the DB schema, and check the scripts into version control. If you need mock data, write a script that loads it into the DB, and check that into version control.
Check out the GuruPlug [1].

[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...
10 Tips for Powerful Emacs on Windows
Cape is not used to irritate, the bull attacks you. The cape makes the bull think that you're moving in a direction while in fact you're not. The bulls can't see well in short distances. Anyway, when the bullfighter is using the muleta (the small cape), special care must be taken to put it so it hides the feet.
my dev!

No, you're a prick.
Appealing to Emotions..
They basically act as a "browser console". From within your browser, they allow you to type out a command and have it performed in real time. For example, you can type 'd', tab complete it to "define", and then type any word you'd like to define. The definition will be shown as you type. You can even highlight words in the text of the page and then start ubiquity/taskfox and type "define". Ubiquity/Taskfox will understand that you mean to define the highlighted word and perform accordingly. Of course, a feature to define words is only one of many. With Ubiquity you can search Google or Wikipedia, translate between languages, send the current page as a email, post to your twitter, get maps and driving directions, and perform tons of useful tasks, all from typing a simple pseudo-english phrase of what you want.

EDIT: You might find this useful: http://vimeo.com/4062903
I'll pretend to be surprised here. GASP
It wasn't obvious to me how to start chatting with someone without creating an account.
I think the problem is that "music" is too broad of a category to operate in a similar manner to HN. You'd need to do a reddit-style sub-category system, which not only increases the complexity but also diverges from a HN-like setup.

What's the cruft and nonsense that Pandora has? I'm pretty happy with it -- even upgraded to the pro version to get higher quality audio.
Inkscape is what springs to mind. Scribus might also be worth a look.
So what? This guy probably won 500 bucks in the lottery.
Good point, people never post useless comments.

</sarcasm>
After a particularly frustrating day I reminded myself that at least I don't work at Mahalo.
Then draw a separator or something, don't make me click
Google Me to challenge Facebook?
In the past I have used PersistJS (http://pablotron.org/?cid=1557) for this. Are there reasons to prefer one or the other of these libraries?
Usually 5MB
Just in case you didn't know, Oracle already has an Express version of the Oracle db. It has several limitations (mainly memory and a 5gb storage limit), but it is completely free.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index....

It's currently 10g, but from rumors I've heard, the 11gR2 Express version isn't too far away.
I think Safari defaults to 10MB, though I may have changed it and forgotten doing so.
I do not. I'm generalizing, I'm not pointing any names but I'm sure everyone already had this feeling.
What's the hook? This seems to be in the fmylife style of sites. But FML capitalizes on the very basic human experience of schaudenfreude versus sympathy. When I read those, I get a reaction of "ha! they deserved it" or "oh crap, that sucks!" On insane stories, I think "wow. pretty crazy. so what?"

You also seem to overlap a bit, between FML and TFLN. Those stories offer a teaser of a story, which is often higher quality than the full story (and more easily digestable). How are you planning on overcoming the network effect? Your site seems to be just slightly different, but without a catch, I don't think it's different enough to overcome the competition.

Also, I'm pretty sure FML uses an editor to make the posts sensible. You might want to think about that as well.
That looks exactly like what I'm looking for, I'll take it for a spin tomorrow.
Radically Modern Introductory Physics (has anyone gone through this?)
Apple sells 1.7 million iPhone 4 handsets in opening weekend
I think it is fair to say that this statement still stands true for all other non DD-WRT capable routers. I have used some horribly crappy routers that touted their USB expansion as a huge feature.

edit: pre-caffeine typo fix
This is a good point. If the intern is showing up at 9 AM but the dev partner is showing up at noon, the intern should have tasks he can do for three hours until the tech shows up. Ideally, those should be his hours of 'uninterrupted work' or research. Once the dev shows up, that's your collaboration time, and the intern leaves at 5 with a task list for the next morning.
I'll be doing cartwheels once someone gets ZFS working on this, so I can plug in a bunch of USB hard drives through a USB hub and share a pool over the network.

(In the mean time, I have a Dell box doing this for me, though it was hard to set up. It took hours of debugging to figure out that OpenSolaris would crash until I disabled the second core/SMP. Then, it took hours to find out that the network crashed randomly due to a driver bug, and to find the right hotpatch off a random forum thread.)
I was thinking steganography too initially, but that's strictly information hiding. This "encrypts" it by XOR-ing it with random data. Without the "key" image, there is no information in the actual "data" image because it's literally just random data. In steganography the data is "discoverable", it's just hard to find; in this, it's impossible to derive the data without the key.
Then he is even more easily replaceable? I have no idea how extensive the role of an engineering director is.
i bet the rise of cloud hosting providers and SaaS has decreased the demand for sysadmins and self-hosting. Also the state of free online tech info is much better than say in the 90's, plus there's all the pirated and copylefted ebooks and PDF's available through mechanisms like BitTorrent.
Nope.

You can buy it outright in most of the world.

Lots of places have 12 month contracts (Optus in Australia).

And lots of companies are letting you get out early (ATT).

There seems to be lots of lies in this thread, something I don't expect to see on hacker news.
I guess some projects need more money than can be feasibly obtained from other projects organic profits, and are too risky for banks to touch, and co-founders credit cards are already maxed out, so they need investors to 'give' money.

Maybe they do nothing today, but are in a closed beta with a small circle of users, and will be more public beta tomorrow...?
While I think this may be a bit harshly phrased, I agree with every sentiment expressed here.

To add my own anecdote to it, for the past several years, I have worked odd hours. I have a family and I am going to grad school. I come in early most days, but then I leave for a long time in the middle of the day and come back and work late into the evening. If I fall behind in the week (or just have a lot going on), I come in on the weekend.

This flexibility means I do not conform to most people's ideas of a normal work schedule, but it means I get to achieve my goals of taking care of my family properly and getting my masters, and this means I am more motivated to actually work for the ocmpany.

Personally, if I were in a situation where I did not have flexibility to achieve those things, I would consider finding a different job.
potentially off-topic, but i'm SO glad that the title of this post wasn't "Check out our new start-up: cleaning up whiteboard pics via email!!!" the pitch is honest and straight-forward, and not overselling. excellent work
While I agree with all of that, what about his obligation to help the interns? Working 5pm-1am isn't going to help the interns much.

It sounds like the OP might have been raised with a certain style of work ethic. Measure your partner's success based on what he adds to the product and the success of your technical employees, and how well he enables you to go out and handle your side of the equation.
What I would do if I was in charge of Windows 8 - Miguel de Icaza
Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks
The Trailer for ‘The Social Network’
The Overworked American
1% dna different. The point he makes is that 1% dna difference produces a vast difference (by our measures) in intelligence, so that any Alien life (which we'd expect to be vastly different in dna) is likely to be either vastly superior or inferior to us in intelligence, meaning either way someone is going to look awfully stupid.
I don't remember noticing during my (mostly pure) maths degree that most of the time I was using pi that I was actually using 2 * pi. So there must have been a lot of problems where I would have been writing tau/2 using the proposed system, which I find less nice than simply writing pi. If it's a choice between splitting my writing between [pi and 2 * pi] and [tau and tau/2] I'd prefer the former, multiplication is nicer to look at than division (in my opinion).
Cisco Intern Poised to Become Viral Rap Star [video]
Analyze Twitter Data using R
Game Mechanics at Work and Play
We're running a project on it right now. I'm not sure why my comment was downvoted-- shoot the messenger, I suppose-- but how is this relevant to the disposition of MySql as a payramp into commercial Oracle licenses? Or are you saying MySQL users have nothing to fear because Oracle already has a free "express" DB?
An HTTP post & response could be an option. It would just open the possibility for other services to integrate with yours, there making it more flexible and open to a larger audience. A freemium approach could then be a possibility (where one starts paying after a certain amount of daily API usage)
Interesting. The author does have a point, to wit that a lot of the things most students would find exciting are in the "later" parts of physics in more traditional courses.

But I am not completely convinced with this approach. My personal bugbear is not so much the teaching of physics, but the teaching of physics and mathematics as if they are two completely separate subjects. One advantage of teaching physics in the "traditional" sense, is that the kind of math that you need to properly teach the fundamentals of classical mechanics comes before the kind of mathematics you need to teach quantum mechanics.
Ask HN: What is the consensus on Objective-C and Cocoa?
On HN, I see lots of discussions on Apple and the iPhone and lots of discussions on languages such as Lisp, Ruby, Python, Haskell, etc, but I don't recall seeing much discussion on Objective-C and Cocoa.

Some languages seem to be widely praised (e.g. Lisp) while others are widely derided (e.g. Javascript).

In your opinion, where do the Objective-C language and the Cocoa programming environment fit in the spectrum of good-vs-bad computer languages or programming environments?

Personally, I'm new to both, and I find the combination to be too verbose, and too manual-labor-intensive. Also, there's too many classes and objects and delegates and view controllers to do simple things, e.g. just to get a simple table view up and running. And, it forces you to repeat yourself a lot, for example, to declare a member of a class for which you need an accessor method, e.g. NSString *str, you need to add it in three (!) places: add it to the class declaration, add a @property statement, and add a @synthesize statement. Not a fan so far.

Since I'm new to these, I wanted to see what veteran programmers have to say. Is there a consensus about how good/bad they are versus other programming languages and programming environments?
I was looking at the terms of service here:
http://www.MusicTrainer.com/lgl/tos/

"ALL PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF 18 ARE DENIED ACCESS TO THIS WEBSITE. IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE, IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR YOU TO VISIT, READ, OR INTERACT WITH THIS WEBSITE OR ITS CONTENTS IN ANY MANNER. THIS WEBSITE SPECIFICALLY DENIES ACCESS TO ANY INDIVIDUAL THAT IS COVERED BY THE CHILD ONLINE PRIVACY ACT (COPA) OF 1998."
There must be something wrong with my brain in that the design of the page and the framework make me finally want to really give node.js a try.

I find this happens to me a lot. Anyone else find themselves picking their 'meats' based on the available 'spices'?
It is a great keyboard, but I like using the wider Apple Keyboard. When I purchase an iMac, I'll make the switch.
Ask HN: Which E-mail address do you use and when?
As I've gotten older I've accumulated more e-mail addresses.

Then it comes time to sign up for a new service and I never really know which email address to use.

Like when do you use a personal email addy, when do you use a school one, a work one?

Do you have a "spam" address? Do you ever use it?
Most of Sun's open source strategy didn't make them a lot of money, but letting Java languish was not a smart move then and is not a smart move now. (I dislike the language, but it fits well with Oracle's enterprisey business.)
hypem.com
So........anything new from team diapora?
A Gay Google Search Box
a word..

HuffingtonPost
TechCrunch
Gawker
Mahalo

what do these have in common?

They all change writers contracts whenever the business favor winds blow in a different direction..ie whether we like it or not Jason is using a standard industry practice.