skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So there is a cultural problem there (hopefully confidence does not sway a scientific group)

Isn't this the norm though? Given all things equal, it's been my experience that people who make quick and strong judgement tend to have more control over a social situation.

Of course somebody who is wrong often will have less reputation. However, being wrong is not always bad, especially if it leads to further thought and exploration to find the truth and the person is willing to change one proven wrong.

> It is a great point that people don't qualify because it makes them sound less confident, and people that sound more confident end up being more convincing to most people.

Your qualification about reading the comparison instill confidence on the rest of the statement. Maybe it's the self-deprecating qualifications that should be avoided...

> You have to work at finding the middle road between qualifying and giving an impression of relative confidence.

True.

---

Some meta thoughts. I would have to expend lots of energy and time to be able to properly qualify some of my statements. I find the time/accuracy trade-off to skew toward time, here, with the hopes that a well educated and astute crowd (such as HN commenters), can point any flaws or provide validation to my statements.
There is a need then for a stackoverflow-based site for practical or less research-level math, for questions like, "How do I do this Laplace transform?" or "How do I do this difficult integral?"
In Japan, the phenomenon is called "ワープロ馬鹿" (roughly, "word-processor-induced idiocy". I have it bad, which is unfortunate because particularly for foreigners it is easy to confuse with illiteracy. Luckily, I'm very rarely required to handwrite anything more complicated than my name and address. (Work once gave me a surprise skills evaluation which included a (handwritten, timed) essay test, which very nearly reduced me to tears.)
Or,

"The device SHALL support IPv6. The device MAY support the Internet."

Pure grandstanding.
Maybe he watched his own interview and realized Matt might actually take him to court.
i contend that the audio quality on the live feed was degrading a few of matt's smart-assed sentence-ending chuckles. he also made one completely inflammatory comment that andrew condemned. sure, chris let his passion get the best of him, but matt trolled him more than once.
Those are good ways of bringing up the point.
I assume that the poor create resources when they have kids (more hands), but the rich divide resources when they have kids. IANAP.
...and decent legal counsel.
MozRepl: REPL for Firefox
Exactly. I would advocate not throwing any of it away, absent rare circumstances.

I implied, though foolishly didn't state outright, that I believe a custom DBMS is only very rarely the best answer.
Thanks coryl, great comment. Appreciate your time. I definitely will address those issues. The problem is the service is really for anybody. I think, based on your feedback and everyone else's, I just have to work to define the service more clearly through its presentation, interface, and marketing strategy (slogan and information on the site included). Thanks again!
Primarily about sniping bluetooth, but some basic discussion on reading RFID tags at a distance in the comments on this thread: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/bluetooth_snip...
I'm an Ops guy by trade, and I would sacrifice non-redundant organs to have worked for more companies that used Postgres.

Of course, my startup does.
Cool. Thanks for the answer!
Sexy Programmer Thursday: Linus Torvalds
"@keener You can view the split GPL license in the new DIYthemes Terms of Service: http://bit.ly/a4WozG http://twitter.com/pearsonified/status/19294129775
nyud.net link is not working for me, however the direct link is.

EDIT: I was jumping the gun. The nyud.net link is working now.
A friend of mine struck gold and found a pile of Model M's in hard rubbish. Its pretty easy to tell who now has them when using skype/vent/etc.

Personally, I use an ultra flat logitech illuminated keyboard, mostly for the shape and feel and not the illuminated keys which is a bit redundant unless one is hunting and pecking. Really don't like the way the wrist has to arch up for the more conventional keyboards, and i'd rather not have a wrist rest when I can just have a keyboard with a similar profile to my desk.
Rob Pike's OSCON 2010 keynote speech, "Public Static Void"
Microsoft reports $4.5b in profit, a record $16.04b in revenue
Naming names amounts to either hero-worship or gossip/slander. I plan to go into more real-world application of these principles for digital media journalists soon, though. I've already started posting in that series, called "Be a Better Journo."

Believe me, I would LOVE to call people out, and I can give a specific example for a good journo/blogger and a bad one for each of these 10 points.
I was really hoping it was a reference to Tad Williams's "Otherland". I'm disappointed. (EDIT: because the title was so ambiguous. It would be nice to have titles that described their content somewhat.)
> And when they get driven by it, they suck.

I don't agree with this. As Randian of me as this will sound, I do think that ego is one of the drivers of many remarkable people. An easy example to trot out would be Steve Jobs.
Ask HN: Payment processors and "escrow"
My girlfriend is an aspiring entrepreneur that is currently trying to bravely navigate the painful world of online payment gateways. Specifically, she's been having a series of conversations with Paypal regarding their ability and interest to process significant volume. She'll be putting $500k/month through it to start.

Where we've hit a wall is that Paypal doesn't want to do business with her because they suggest her business - collecting money from the parents of students who want to pay for lunch online - is in fact an escrow. That is, she'll take in a large sum and pay out to a large number of vendors.

And that's apparently against the rules!

If anyone can point me/us towards:
- plain english explanations of the gotchas/best practices in this space
- payment processors that aren't so stupid
- progressive banks that would work with us
- other sources of good advice

I figure that Etsy, 99designs and hundreds of other small companies are all "escrow" by Paypal standards. Different industry, but similar financial model.

I should also mention that we're based in Toronto, Canada in case that's a factor.
Emacs Lisp List
You are right. I think ALTER SCHEMA might not be in standard SQL.
Passively camping out. Lots of (questionable) RFID uses I've seen are to unlock doors, often external ones. And if it's in a business park, it could easily be closer to 50 feet or less between buildings.
The thing that annoys me about these types of smug articles is that they never adequately make their case for the superiority of the apple platforms they're defending. They just take it as a given and then go off on a tangent about how the spectacular results justify the megalomaniacal hubris laced tactics.
Factorial grows faster than exponential.
I was also really interested in Frink and how it could fit into the JVM ecosystem. Then I found out about the license--there isn't one. So much for that idea.
I think pg really regrets not funding smanek. :)
I understand NULL very well, and that's not the only use for a NULL.

NULL also means "value does not exist", not just "value is unknown". For example if a student is not in a class, put NULL in the class id.

NULL is perfectly valid data, and is not a replacement for a programming bug.

And with mysql if your salary field is defined as accepting NULL then you will get a NULL in there.

And to use your example if the field accepts NULL, you would also have no way of knowing if the salary was not negotiated vs a programming bug.

If you want to argue the insert should fail, then fine, no problem. (And MySQL can do that.)

But arguing that putting in NULL is better (in a field that does not accept NULL), is simply wrong. I'll say it again: NULL is not a replacement for a programming bug - NULL is valid data, and should not be used to find programming errors.
Thankfully with a community named 'HackerNews' hopefully somebody here will be inspired to look into it deeper and see if they can do the show that networks can't do.

What's required to figure out how to hack these chips which are clearly readily available?
Which is perfectly reasonable, according to what I know of the GPL and how it has been ruled to apply to software packages in the past.

Good on him for license compliance.
This is what I was thinking. Knuth's up arrow on Graham's number. I like the addition of the busy beaver function. A creative improvement for sure.

So far I think you win :)

for the lazy amongst us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuths_up-arrow_notation
from the site:

2. Intellectual Property License

Thesis General PHP License
The PHP code portions of Thesis are subject to the GNU General Public License, version 2. All images, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript elements are released under the Thesis Proprietary Use License below.

Thesis Proprietary Use License
The Thesis Proprietary Use License is a GPL compatible license that applies only to the images, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript files contained in Thesis. These elements are the copyrighted intellectual property of DIYthemes and cannot be redistributed or used in any fashion other than as provided in this Agreement.

NOTICE: Distribution of Thesis in its entirety inherently violates the Thesis Proprietary Use License. Further, use of the Thesis brand (trademark) to distribute the GPL portions of Thesis is a violation of trademark law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...

Whatever their merits, ORM layers and the problems they try to address existed long before and quite independently of the particulars and limitations MySQL.
Anyone that says sarcasm is the lowest form of wit really needs to read some Gruber.
How is one to know what external programs are available in PiCloud. They just state the FFMpeg is available in PiCloud, but I don't see any 'master list.'
In terms of price, the PiCloud rate for this particular video is also significantly cheaper than Zencoder (YC W10). PiCloud charges $0.585 for encoding with the worse locality (source/destination both NOT on s3). Zencoder charges $0.02 per minute of video at their highest tier. 0.0230 videos(3.5 min/video) = $2.1 total on Zencoder.

(The difference will lower for higher output resolutions. Nonetheless, PiCloud should always be cheaper than Zencoder's pay-as-you-go rate).
Good to know. Just trying to use the cache to avoid killing our servers.
The crossposting between HN and reddit gets mentioned over there sometimes. (as most of you know)

I do not know anything about Yahoo BOSS, but this was submitted to reddit a few years back and I happened to bookmark it if anyone is interested:

http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jul/12/stripping-reddit-from-h...

It at least seems a creative way to deal with what some see as a problem and others see as just the way things are.
This is my point, which I apparently failed at communicating.
(2001)

Still interesting, but it would be good to put in the title.
But how about the archetypal inventor of a gadget suitable only for licensing, e.g. the intermittent windshield wiper guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns)?
State Department plans to field its own force in Iraq
There can be only one because it exists solely to be the "last updated" field. There's no point in having more than one. In MySQL, it simply only updates the first -- so you get a sometimes magic field.
Then you should have read a sentence further where she says, "Whether in the hallowed halls of higher learning or in the less-hallowed halls of a professional newsroom, the journalist has been trained as such." She doesn't say that traditional education is the only way.

In my profession of software, there are many accomplished programmers who do not have a college degree. If you want to be a programmer, a CS program is a great way to get there. If you don't go to college, you'd better be learning through books, pair programming, or through other avenues. Just because you are writing code does not mean you're a programmer.
There doesn't seem to be any information about patent indemnification.

I've done video transcoding in the past. While I wasn't an expert on the legal/patent issues, I know that the product we used (helix mobile producer, from Real) indemnified us such that we could then use ffmpeg as long as it was on the same machine.

If you use this service, you might want to inquire into patent issues, and if you are covered.
Using dynamic programming, you can solve the TSP problem in O(n^2 2^n) time with O(n 2^n) space, n = #cities.
Good question. We're just starting to venture outside of Python, so we don't have a master list of executables just yet. We do have a list for Python packages http://www.picloud.com/pyapi/packages/weblist/python/ which includes pyffmpeg. But, that list isn't pretty :)
For me a HUGE feature is:

"Mirah code has no runtime dependency other than libraries accessed directly from Mirah code."

Wow - Charles has done an amazing job sticking true to that. In fact so much I thought it was a core aim.

I love scala, clojure - but there is significant runtime libraries to include. for most people this isn't an issue (and it isnt' for me most of the time) but Mirah doing what it does without runtime deps, is a refreshing alternative.
Great. Trolling in response to trolling. I can't think of a better use for the attention of everyone on hackernews than reading this. I'm sure we'll all be further toward our life goals and happy with how we spent the day.
If you had of kept reading you would have seen them say that it doesn't matter if they were trained in higher education or in the newsroom as long as they were trained.
There's a Core Team reelected each 2 years. Btw it just changed:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=11461+0+/usr/lo...

Btw, they have an excellent practice of quarter reports, here's the latest:
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2010-04-2010-06.ht...

I wish every opensource community had such clean summary of what they do.
You're being way, way too self centered and naive.

Let's assume you have no interest in local bands. A young cousin of yours starts a band, and gushes about it whenever he meets you. "You gotta come hear us!"

What are you going to say? "No, I'm not interested in your band"? Of course you say "Sure, I'd love to come sometimes."

But now it's a month later and he's hurt that you never came. Guess what? You're busy building your project and his band didn't meet an urgent need of yours.

I'm impressed that you got HALF of your acquaintances to sign on. Count yourself lucky. Yes, they really felt some measure of caring towards you when they were saying they would visit, and probably meant what they said.

No, your service did not meet an urgent enough need to compel them to visit when you're out of their face and they're dealing with their own problems.

I recommend you read the book "How To Win Friends and Influence People". Nevermind the crappy title, the contents are gold. Central message: stop thinking about your needs, and start thinking about theirs.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cski1/i_tried_the_uber...
Has any of the news.arc goodness trickled down into arc.arc? It'd be cool to see arc3.2.
Imagine how many you could collect on your way to and from work each day in heavy traffic?
I modestly propose that you're right.
AFAIK, it _was_ a core aim.
You're technically correct (the best kind of correct!) -- it's not inserting NULL. But it is inserting a value it pulled out of its ass, which I posit is actually worse. For text types it uses the empty string, for numbers it uses 0, etc. It seems to flag this as a "warning" but said warning does not appear in my terminal or in the mysqld logs, so I have no idea what it says.
Original and more honest headline: "GM Hybrid Technology: Good Enough To Steal For Chinese Makers?"

No indication that a Chinese institution instigated this as the HN headline implies, rather, an employee in the process of being let go copied a zillion pages of presumably useful stuff and then sold it to a firm in the home country.
Good point. At the end of the day, we're not a video encoding service, so our users should use us in the same they would their own Amazon EC2 instance with ffmpeg.

Here's ffmpeg's take: http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html
Here's Zencoder's take: http://zencoder.com/docs/codecs-and-formats/#licensing
I've historically found it more difficult to get people I know to take an interest in my sites than people I don't know.

Even sending out links, I see that they aren't being clicked on.

Then you meet somebody in a coffee shop, and they're interested, and all of a sudden, you see this random person you don't know checking out your stuff.

I've always wondered why it's like this. I think sometimes you don't 'stick' with the people you know because you aren't different. Your friends know you, they know you come up with ideas and build stuff, and only when you strike a nerve with something they want, will you get them to use it.

On the other hand, most people aren't expecting to meet or hear about new and interesting things from a random person they meet, so I think that sticks with them a bit more. It's more novel with a new acquiescence than a familiar one.

Plus, they're wondering what you're all about, if you're all talk, etc. So they take some action.

Just my thoughts.
I think that you might want to say picture or media message instead of mms. While most people on HN, and many techie users will know this-they are also the type to have the knowhow and time to set up their facebook privacy settings just right.
I agree that might be a better title. I thought it was interesting that she obviously considers herself a journalist but in that article, she was "ranting" with her blogger hat on.

You have to say she is a journalist and a blogger. But you can also make the distinction between when she is practicing journalism and when she is blogging. As she says, without an "op-ed" section, it is sometimes difficult to tell which is which!
The problem here is that one word ("timestamp") is used to mean two completely different things:

1) a datatype (date with time)

2) a pseudo-version number for concurrency control

Both are equally as valid, and depending on your background, when you see the word "timestamp" with zero context you may automatically refer in your head to one definition or another.

I don't see what the problem here is if you expect #1 but got #2 when you used MySQL. This seems like the type of problem that bites you the very first time you encounter it, and then you read the documentation and say "Oh I understand, 'timestamp' has a different definition here, what I really need is the 'foo' datatype. Isn't that it interesting that one word can have more than one meaning!"
I think you mean that there are (cities-1)! total routes. Only the shortest one(s) are solutions.
Two easy solutions come to mind:

1) Use pens and pads for computer character entry so the same characters can be used by both.
2) Switch to a new written form that can also be typed.

I'd personally love to see global adoption of a new language designed from the beginning to be simple, unambiguous, and easily written and typed. It'll never happen of course.
I should be able to read interesting posts without having to sign up. Many people lurk before getting engaged in a site, if they ever do so at all.

I'm sure many people read FMylife for the schadenfraude -- there will people who may just wnat to read, without contributing directly
I think you've found an interesting idea, though I'm concerned you may have overcomplicated it.

The 'green-yellow-red' was totally lost on me, and do users want to show their 'social availability'? or do they want to find what's going on when they are available. Why would I update that I'm not available.

Also your 'signal' button and even the concept is a bit to abstract. I didn't know what 'signal' meant. I don't think it is easy to understand.

A demo video would be really good. Some of the questions i'm wondering is if I say 'I'm free to hang out' how long is that status active? What are the next steps? How do my friends find out? You haven't made this apparent. The most I can gather from your site is that it's like a status update. Not that that is a bad thing, but I don't sign-up for these sorts of things until I know what it does. I'm sure i'm not the only one.
You could use (also on HN front page) http://speakertext.com for linking to that. Just thought it was a neat instance!
Gnome and KDE both use the freedesktop.org clipboard manager specification, not the X11 clipboard. After copying text A with ctrl-c, then selecting different text B, the X11 clipboard (xsel -b) is empty and the primary selection (xsel -p) is B.

The major advantage this has over the X11 clipboard, IMO, is that text persists after its source application is closed.
This statement is becoming incredibly cliche. Ideas are not sufficient but they are necessary. There are many well executed but fundamentally worthless products. I find most startups mentioned on hacker news well executed but I often just can't get excited by them because the underlying idea is so uninteresting and trivial. It's actually a sad waste of talent.
I think one of the first few things you learn about entrepreneurship is that friends and family aren't as supportive as you imagine they might be. They might not use your stuff, and they might even question why you're doing it. Just learn to ignore those and move on. Everyone encounters it. Don't feel too bad.
India unveils $30 Tablet PC
a1 = 10^10

a2 = a1^a1

...

a_n = a_(n-1)^a_(n-1)

My number is a_(a_(10^10))
I think it was heinlein who wrote that you can break intelligent people into two categories. One sort knows (s)he is better than average but is concerned with levels of intelligence, how smart they are and is susceptible to flattery. Another sort knows they are intelligent enough not to worry about it, knows that other things are the limiting factors in their life and perhaps even feels like a bit of a freak.

also I've seen enough from this username that I think, troll???????????????????????????
Way cool guys, and way to represent the Toronto startup scene!

BTW, loved the reference to HN karma in the screenshot!
Even though the problem is probably much worse in ideographic scripts, we alphabet users haven’t been immune. (We had a head start, after all.) About the only thing I can write reliably any more is my signature; every once in a blue moon when I need to write a check, it literally takes me over five minutes to write it out legibly.
So I write an iphone app that lets people record GPS tracks, it's been out for a year, and I've told everyone. A friend also writes iphone apps. When his launched, I bought it, wrote reviews, and gave him all of our app engine code to put up a quick website about the app. A few weeks ago, he emailed to ask if I knew of a good app to record GPS tracks. Argh.
Things Microsoft Could Learn From Steve Jobs
What words come to mind when asked to describe Microsoft today? Cool, stylish, revolutionary, and innovative are probably out of the question.
Facebook privacy settings don't make up for the lack of direct delivery to your friends. It's about always being in touch with the people you actually care about, not unlike text messaging or picture messaging.
API for TV Listings in the US
Anyone know of a free API for (US) TV listings or a way to use TV listings in an app without violating anyones copyright etc. From what I understand Tribune Media controls most of it and its pretty costly. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Is it just me or does it seem like this is a hammer looking for a nail?