skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The basic value calculation is the opportunity cost of X, ie the sum of value from other things that could have been obtained instead. This must be compared to the opportunity cost of not building X. For us that answer is obvious (essentially: infinity because everyone will die), but the model people are forced to estimate the probability of Doom.

Of course, a single probability number is not much good because it is open to dispute in proportion to the opportunity cost of X (as we see all the time in debates about climate change). Bayesian inference is the practice of updating estimates of probability based on the accumulation of information...but as the process is counterintuitive for most people, asking a wide majority to follow some course involving certain sacrifice for uncertain result is still going to be a very hard sell.
Cl-bcrypt: A first attempt
I've never worked on the rigs, but I know many people who did. (Or equivalent jobs in the mining industry) It isn't completely unskilled labor, but the pay is very good for the skill required.

The reason everyone doesn't roughneck is that it's extremely physical, dangerous work that requires long hours and often living in company dorms away from friends and family in the literal middle of nowhere.
Thanks for your input!

No, I won't be storing card numbers. I'll just store a hash I can use to bill again. The PCI certification is cumbersome and costs money I don't have yet, and I'd really prefer if those numbers are on someone elses's server - just in case. (c:
Bummer for me too, wish I knew about the meetup sooner (or even the group! joined.), would have loved to meet up this weekend.

Thanks for the link to the Thursday lunches, never knew about them. Would be cool to drop by one day :)

A handful of Cocoa developers meet up every Tuesday evening for dinner in Santa Monica (see http://nscodernight.com for more info), fair warning: developers only, we're not a user group or a bunch of prime recruiting targets. We've had the occasional person stop by trying to recruit or whatever that get quickly ignored, so... :)
Ask HN: Tutorials to break free from PHP?
I'm wondering, as a fairly inexperience programmer with most of my time in PHP: is there any good reference for "How to start web development in ___ (insert other language) with previous experience only in PHP". There's a lot of PHP-bashing as a newbie language, so I'm wondering if there's any tutorials aimed at PHP-only developers. I would love a tutorial that explained how to accomplish in another language (namely Python for me) all the things that PHP makes simple for newbies. I'd also be totally willing to help an experience person develop such a tutorial.
Before discussion starts, I just want to emphasize that I recognize I'm not a crypto professional and I welcome corrections and contributions.
Very much so, as a matter of fact. Still, widely available piracy of major-label music has diminished record sales to a far greater degree than competition from independent artists.

If the major-label hegemony was truly broken, we wouldn't see these mass-market pop stars on major labels get the publicity and record sales (compared to indie artists) that they do, nor would the top touring bands by major revenue continue to be major-label acts. On the contrary, major labels continue to be successful at choosing and promoting which acts achieve popularity and success--they are just less able to share in that success themselves.
Perhaps you have a friend or family member in the US that would take the money and pay you ...
Bandcamp to launch their revenue share model
If I had to guess I'd say the demand is for "housing within N kilometers of point X" and there is nowhere left to build housing in that area, whether because of physical constraints or legal/regulatory constraints (e.g. can't get a permit to demolish that block and put up a dense high rise).

(Edit for non-USA-ian units, since we were talking about Geneva.)
Real-world flocking algorithms: Starlings over Rome
Indeed it does. Thanks a lot. I'll check out the names you mentioned. I don't have any volume yet, but I might find useful inspiration there. (c:
Essay Types to Choose From
The purpose of an admissions essay is for an evaluator to get a picture of the person applying. Through this essay, the evaluator understands why the applicant has applied to a particular course, college or university and makes a decision regarding whether the individual will benefit from it or contribute to it
Significance of Dissertation Plans
Prior to doing some sort of thing for the very first time, a proper plan has to be set up in order to give the guidelines and the right directions. It is in the format of an informal schedule. A Dissertation plan will helps to set up the outline of the tasks that one needs to do in order to get through dissertations.
If the question you end up wanting to ask, is "Can you make it easy to distribute writes to this store?", then SQL is a poor choice.

We have had a stagnant SQL monoculture as a default choice for data, for 20 years.

Given a project of with an uncertain future we are now starting to get other choices.

We know that using an SQL databases will create pain. Suffering that pain in the hope that later questions may be answered less painfully, is becoming a mindful decision. Especially in startups, not the default that it has been in the enterprise world.

Google seems to be a lot better at answering questions than Sybase is. Out of date, offline, full text indexing is not something SQL databases do well.

For content like movies, music and large documents, we simply don't (and should not) create a relational model, we use big blobs and dump them into whatever tools we have around.

We all would agree that if your data looks like source code you are better off with git than with MySQL. So where else does "if you don't know use SQL" breakdown.
To summarize, the answer is yes, if they are software developers and make a salary of $455 or above per week, unless they do mostly debugging. The answer, kiddies, is if you want overtime write buggy code.
Real world security issues
Probably the same reason why men don't like shopping - too much standing around and not enough movement.

I tried a self-made standing desk for a couple days but went back to sitting because I couldn't take the standing for long periods of time.
I can't help but feel very sympathetic to bandcamp itself and how they operate. Best of luck you guys, bandcamp's awesome!
These jobs are extremely hard to land.

My brother spent about ten years trying to become a firefighter. He went to firefighting school, got his B.Sc., and worked as a private firefighter on a military base - didn't help. I don't think a single person from his graduating class in firefighting school actually became a firefighter.
Gevent 0.13.0 released - coroutine network library for Python
So we are stuck with SQL forever because it currently has the broadest set of access tools?
What network are you on with the Desire?
3D TV destined to fall flat on its face
And if we don't restrict it to document stores, probably dozens or hundreds of production non-relational databases.
Finally, a way for me to automatically prank call my friends and record their bewildered responses in a database!
Non-rental frogs exhibit non-Gaussian jump length distribution
"If there's no fear, then she'll gain 20 pounds and he'll become a lazy, useless slob... and then it's all doomed."

If the only thing that keeps someone motivated in life is the fear of dying alone, I'd rather not be involved with that person. In fact, I'd much rather not even know that person.
I am tired of taking care of people who do not have the passion
This is absolutely tremendous, and I am already having a blast. Thank you!

Only one point of frustration: There should be an obvious way to get variables from the call row. You can update the call row with the "Update Call Row" module in the "Outbound Campaigns" section, but there should be a "Reserve Variable From Call Row" module, too. Otherwise, it seems the only way to do it is to "Reserve Variable" for every one you want to use, and manually set them as pre-filled every single time you create a campaign, which is a hassle.

Also, $0.05 cents per minute feels kind of steep. You have a very novel and wonderful service, though, so maybe it isn't such a big problem. It was so easy and intuitive to make a demo app, assign it to a number after I registered and watch things coming together. You guys are Doing It Right. Kudos, kudos!

One more thing... it'd be nice if there was an easy way to filter outbound calls on whether the person has already been called, according to whether the "outbound_result" field in their row is populated. There's a filter option "is..." that lets you select between "present" and "not present," but it's not clear whether that means "empty" or "is not even a hash key for that row," or if those two things are even different.

Oh, and for God's sake, make sure you block requests on your site that have "4chan" as a referrer... ;-)
I wonder how MN compares to Wisconsin, specifically Madison. I feel like the modern tech/startup community here is growing (besides bio science which is the big thing here), but it is really hard to find talented programmers who are willing to work for a startup (despite there being plenty at the university). I don't know what it is exactly, but established companies seem to draw the most talent, despite the jobs being pretty mundane. I think the biggest problem is a lot of people don't believe in the possibilities of starting a company. The biggest thing I've learned from starting a company here is just how much support there is, and people who want to see you succeed. You never realize it until you take the first step and venture out.

As for talent, I've learned to be patient. The right people do come along if you wait. I've posted jobs several times and I get new applicants each time that restore my faith in the local community.

Finding investors is pretty doable here from those around me that have received outside funding (my company is friends and family right now), and there is a noticeable interest from the government, the university, the community, and investors, in growing Madison to become a hub of innovation.

Finally, one big thing I've noticed is how under served the community is with the whole web 2.0 thing (non techies don't have time for another website). People here really value a personal touch. Couple that with less local competition and there is a lot of opportunity here.
I recommend Chapter 15, Emission Security, for a bit of interesting reading.
There's a guy in the office across from mine who will all of a sudden jump up from his chair and run to one of the labs a few hundred feet down the hall at a fast jogging speed. This happens several times an hour.

One day I asked him why he was doing this and he told me he was a kernel programmer working on some piece of gear that needed to live in the lab, sometimes the kernel panics and he has to go bounce the box.

I was about to ask him why he doesn't set up some kind of a watchdog to bounce the box for him, but then I realized he was probably the fittest guy in the building.

So just become a kernel hacker, and keep your test boxen a few hundred feet away.
Does anybody else announce outages with twitter and other public communications servers offsite? At darkmists.org, we learned a while back that we could not trust even our ISP to keep us accessible to the world. The iPhone allowed me to at least use twitter to update our players and attempt to set expectations. (Some of our administrators also try to keep tabs with players via IM programs, but that is not scalable.)
Thesis theme vs Wordpress and the GPL
It's unbelievable how broken online RTE's are. I'm building websites for quite some time now and I never figured out why browser makers are neglecting such a basic feature, it should not be that hard to implement a basic RTE.

It's nice to see Google is trying to do something about it and making it easier to implement an RTE with projects like this, but it would be nicer if they would push other browser builders to standardise.
this would be really handy for the "review my startup" style posts.
For those in the Minneapolis area that want to discuss Minnesota's startup potential or exchange tips on moving to Boulder or the Valley, or other HN-related topics, here's tonight's meetup details (6pm at the 5-8 Club):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514455
Matt Mullenweg comes on just after 27 minutes.

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23thesiswp
Having lived in the US, Europe and Japan and currently living China, I'd say that yes it's very difficult in the US, but in China it's rather difficult too... For example, I find it very hard to find good quality fish to cook (most of the fish you get here have a strange test I find)...

It's easy to find organic produce here but it's not that cheap (at least compared to Europe), and I'm not exactly sure if I trust it as much as I trust organic produce in Europe or Japan...

That said from my 6 month experience living in Rochester, US is much worse... (and don't talk to me about university "food" there)
That depends on whether the products they built are "add-ons" or complimentary products.

If they're building add-ons (i.e. apart from authenticated users, premium members can make groups or something like that) then yes, you're getting a conflict of interest. If they'll built a commercial GUI application, or an integrated graphical differ then it will only help develop the dvcs because the ecosystem around it will be larger.
oh, sorry, we're in the UK. Seems like Desire isn't out for AT&T in USA.

NexusOne, Evo 4g, Droid & Desire are the top 4 android phones fyi.
I created an outbound calling campaign to ask all of my friends if they want to hang out tonight, record their results in the database, and call them losers if they say no. It took me less than 20 minutes to do. This is Awesome, with a capital "A."
I had a friend in a similar situation. I gave him this:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/

And he had a site up and running about a month or two later.

Zed Shaw recently created a Python book as a sort of constructive rant against Dive Into Python. It's here, if you're interested

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index
That would quickly kill the value of the "zero click" box if it starts displaying info of wildly varying quality or stuff that seems spammy.
it seems worth noting that the block size of gzip/deflate (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1950) can be up to 32Kb, so i wonder if browsers are smart to enough to start rendering before a complete block has been received?

if not, compression could kill network latency... from the graph it seems maximum compression would require about 21 round trips minimum. i suppose this is why zlib's deflate has a flush argument:
http://www.zlib.net/manual.html#Basic
here is a recent on for ruby on rails:

http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/how-to-create-a-blog...

and for python's django:

http://www.djangorocks.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-basic-b...

here are two for seaside:

http://onsmalltalk.com/screencast-how-to-build-a-blog-in-15-...

http://smalltalk.gemstone.com/tutorial.html
Atlassian Takes A $60 Million First Round Of Funding From Accel
Also note a similar library named Eventlet: http://eventlet.net/
Greatest quotes
A Thought on Privacy...
Ooh! Versioning the data in databases!

That is a feature I'm looking forward to. Rails migrations alleviate some of the traditional pain here, but don't go very far on actual data. Having a database you can check out with real versioning could be a really, really compelling feature.
> Are you aware of anything that is 5-6 disks, GB, 5-6 SATA ports, or 2-3 multiplied, that is not huge, ugly, and massively expensive?

Nope but you might be able to find an eSATA card and enclosure. That would give you more choice over the server.

Another reason why I mentioned Core i5/i7 is because the newer models have AES instructions so you could do AES encrypted backups at gigabit wirespeed.

Maybe something like this on the low end:

- Supermicro Atom D510 - $360

- 4GB RAM - $40

- PCI-E Riser - $20

- eSATA card - $20

- Areca ARC-5020 - $450

- 5 x 1TB drives - $450

- Total: $1340 USD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815158...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136...
I plan on being there.
In my city, the average family income is about $60k but housing is expensive to buy. One-bedroom condo's start at $200k so a lot of people rent. Unfortunately, since developers can earn so much by selling units instead of renting them, they all veer towards that.

I'm sure rent control plays a factor too. Rent can only be increased by 3% per year or something like that.

End result, there hasn't been a new building built for rental apartments in my city for over 30 years.
Youtube really doesn't count (see johns's comment). Unisys comes from the merger of Sperry and Burroughs which both had their origins in Philadelphia[1] and is now headquartered in PA. Cray started as a MN company, but after a long and colorful history (some would say tragic) it is now headquartered in Seattle, WA.

Well, angels and VCs are needed by a lot of people and MN doesn't have the environment to support a startup community.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation
This is really an awesome idea. My most recent exchange with other tech guys were limited to IRC (cumbersome, with all the problems a text only medium brings if you don't know the other guy/cannot guess the subtext) or, rarely, Twitter.

Kent, I'd love to read about the results of your experiment and your side of the story after having answered a number of calls.
There isn't one, because the internet has grown too big.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone and follow the CAIDA link - their routing maps and other visualizations will put any objections to rest.

Incidentally, it's rather disturbing how far behind the US appears to be in terms of IPv6 deployment.

See also: http://www.caida.org/research/visualization/

Cuttlefish is probably most appropriate for inclusion in your son's project.

However, Walrus is IMHO the coolest thing ever that nobody talks about, despite having been open source for several years. I'm unaware of continued development, but this may be helpful if you have a dataset you'd like to view: http://www.soa-world.de/echelon/2008/10/convertig-csv-files-...
The great thing about QuickFuse is that the application does not require users to have programming experience. Similar services typically require programming knowledge, but with QuickFuse, it's sort of a you dream it, and the program will easily allow you to build it type of application. The program is user-friendly for everyone, from those with extensive programming knowledge, to those with just an application idea!
I got a static wrist strap which helps. (Every day, not just in winter!)

Here's my desk:
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/treadmill-desk-part-6-h...
I did a stint as a maintenance programmer. I was proud of it, then. I'd worked on code written by McArthur geniuses and the worst PHP monkeys -- no matter how complex the code was, no matter what language it was written in, no matter which backend database, I took pride in being able to figure it out, re-architect it if necessary, and fix it.

I didn't feel like I was going to seed; I was learning new (old) languages and systems all the time and I even got the chance to help on a few research projects, work with machine learning experts, etc.

I found, however, that I just got $h1t on by management. I wasn't perceived as being productive, they were always complaining I was too slow and too expensive. And I was slow and expensive because maintenance programming is slow and expensive, particularly if you're the guy who'll clean up any mess, no matter how bad.
I'm a happy customer. I use gevent for a small program that resolves every short link in the Twitter firehose. The code makes ~100-200 HTTP requests per second, waits on a few thousand outstanding connections, and streams out the results.
Austin is a great town with a lot of great people and it's a lot of fun, but...

I was absolutely miserable living here.

If you're young, you should head to one of the coasts. That's my opinion.

Austin would be great if I was older and in a position to buy a house/ start a family / etc
I think it's pretty common practice to host your status site separately from your site so that connectivity issues at your datacenter don't bring your status site down as well.

Engine Yard has a Wordpress.com blog (and they don't even have it as a subdomain of engineyard.com. I guess in case their DNS goes down). Not only does GitHub use twitter, but they also have status.github.com hosted on EC2. Heroku has a status site on Slicehost.

It just makes sense. Connectivity is a pretty common reason for downtime. Why would you want a point of failure that can bring down your site and your status site?
Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like...

Yes. And they'd be "niche" in the sense that Fox News is "niche." (Best comment on Fox ever: "They discovered a previously untapped market niche: half the country.")

Half the country, literally, is so far off the radar screen for most software companies it is embarrassing.

There are dating sites for every conceivable slice of the demographic pie. This applies to many other sites too, although I think a lot of folks don't realize it. (You guys know Demand Media because of their SEO strategy, not because they are dominating the Internet of interest to your demographic.)
Be where they are. Discuss with them. Exchange code with them. When you find the best, the ones you're interested in hiring, ask them to come work for you. I've hired a dozen excellent people to my department in the past couple of years. Only half of them have applied on their own without any prior interaction.
Windows 7 Phone Can Be Managed On The Network
Ask HN: How many of you post just to gain karma?
I'm wondering if people are becoming karma obsessed. Karma ratings forces you to think before posting but up mods and down mods are so opinionated. Often a snappy response to a good point gets up modded more than the good point. It goes back to my question are we posting just for karma?
Example of a facebook application developer license agreement
Hi all,

I am a web developer, I develop applications for facebook as a hobby. Lately I've received some proposals to develop facebook application for payment.

I wanted to know, what terms should I include in my developer license, does anybody have an example of such license agreement?

Thank you