skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works.

No you don't. In fact, if your publisher asks you to assign your copyright to them, what you should do is walk away, very fast, and let the appropriate folks know that there's a scam artist on the loose. (Unless you're in a work-for-hire agreement, which is a whole different kettle of fish -- but not something you should stumble into by accident.)

As for self-publishing becoming the norm for new writers ... you may be right: but that doesn't mean self-publishing will become a successful career path for those who take it. There are some fundamental differences between the music biz and writing which weigh the dice heavily against authors going it alone. (For example: bands can make money off live gigs and merchandise while using CDs and MP3s for promotion -- but when was the last time you went to hear some middle-aged guy read from his latest novel? And paid for the privilege?)

The real rent-seeking middle-men in the publishing business aren't the publishers, but the distribution chains and customer-facing retail outlets -- of whom Amazon and Lulu are two. They chow down around 60-70% of the revenue in the retail book trade. My reading of the "why not publish it yourself?" propaganda is that it's promoted by POD imprints and folks like Amazon, who anticipate getting much more favourable terms from sole traders and clueless wannabes than they can currently obtain from the major publishers. Sure you can self-publish -- but you're still going to have to deal with the retail distribution supply chain. And there be dragons ...
Good implementation is much more than an idea and a developer to build out that idea.

That is my point, what if you get in this situation and it looks like you are hired as a "contractor" but the client is only bringing the idea to the table and the rest is up to you?
I've been meaning to read more of Alan Kay's work. This makes it easy.

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Detail.aspx?entitytype=2&searchtype=2&id=2276768
The prevailing wind, though, has somewhat shifted toward "geek" as a more acceptable collective term in the last few years (and "nerd" as having more negative qualities of social ineptitude). Only one survey of many but Wired's (2878 votes) swung very strongly to the favor of "geek": http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/great-geek-debates-geek... .. my own on Twitter was a 6:1 ratio pro-geek.

(A rather uncool admission, I've been doing some research and polling on this lately for non-disclosable reasons. An interesting and rather ambivalent discussion of nerd vs geek is given in the preface of Rands' "Being Geek" - for those who are interested. Given your significant audience, though, it'd be interesting if you could poll them on it too ;-))
A good place to start is http://html5boilerplate.com/. This provides a good starting point and includes the modernizr library by default, which makes it very easy to check for compatibility with HTML5 features like canvas, video/audio tags and websockets.

Dive into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim has also been a helpful reference for me.
Pass Plus course for car/bike learner drivers
As you pass your driving test you are permitted to drive on roads, but then also you are an inexperienced driver. As per the statistics roughly 20% new drivers are around 10 times more expected to be involved in an accident and unfortunately, two drivers under the age of 25 die each day in crashes in the UK.
> For example, Australia has quite strong financial regulation - much, much stronger than in the US and UK. This includes everything from higher ratios of capital-to-loans required by the banks, to stricter laws around mortgages.

You don't understand - the loose standards in the US for mortgages came from govt, not banks.

> Anyway, some evidence that regulation can align the interests of the financial sector with the economy as a whole:

You're assuming that govt is interested in the economy as a whole. I don't know about Australia, so I'll accept your assertion that the Australian govt is concerned about the economy as a whole, but the US govt isn't.

And no, the Repubs aren't the worst culprits here. They're largely useless to moderately clueless, but they're not actively hostile.
Facebook would be run by people who were not money-hungry
I like it! I wish I didn't find it cuz my 'noprocast' settings are gonna be hackable in a way :-) Guess what I'm saying is it's really quite good!
This is SWEEET. My requests 1) Leaderboard: show the top 10 players plus my rank. Much more incentive to keep playing. 2) Tag the leader with some kind of color. 3) Bring a little more structure. No idea how to do this.

If people call it Web 3.0 I'll shoot myself in the face, but I think there's really something about this whole realtime web.
This acquisition certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than the lame eBay purchase. Seriously, how did anyone convince the board at eBay that purchasing Skype would be a good thing?

At least Cisco is in the telecommunications business and could roll the Skype brand and tech into real products.
In addition to essentially input-output test driven development at the unit, subsystem and system levels, I am a huge fan of "design by contract" for identifying both design and implementation errors. In my personal experience no test suite has been fully comprehensive and rigorously placed assertions, invariants, etc. pick up all kinds of design and implementation flaws. I find they also help for debugging by taking the guesswork out of many intermediate possibilities.
> That's the real problem, and that is where proper regulation can help.

And where improper regulation can make things worse. Given recent history, what's more likely?

You don't get to assume that unicorns will appear this time when talking about a situation in which ogres have been the status quo.
Does it bother anyone else that this story is illustrated with pictures from a movie about the invasion of Normandy? What were they thinking?
This stuff is over my head, and I might be stating the obvious to you, or this might be useless for Haskell, but because you didn't mention it explicitly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom_Software_Engineering

http://www.amazon.com/Cleanroom-Software-Engineering-Technol...
Could you recommend some resources for learning BDD?
I think, after reading ALL of it and not just half of it, he regrets working too much but he is nonetheless happy that he accomplished so much by working. There is a clear distinction and he makes it clear he wishes he didn't work so much towards the end. I think his "work regrets" are more like feeling disappointed in letting others down at a critical time (he takes his working relationships very seriously, too).
Will it have the force, or the energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs? The article says both...

Is the sun going to shoot 100 million hydrogen bombs at us? That would conveniently solve for both force and energy.
thanks for all the career advice HN... but i'm finding this discussion really depressing and attitudes really off-putting.

i really really respect you guys but i for one am coding until my eyes fall out of my head... social constructs be damned.
All used to be freely connected and easy.
I would also imagine so much liquid dilutes the stomach juices and the food doesn't digest properly. I don't have any scientific basis for this btw, just a hunch.

I've never heard of that happening, or anything like it. There is such a thing, supposedly, as water intoxication though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

It's not a serious concern for anyone not running marathon distances or taking part in a water-drinking competition, though.
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Oh come on, that's bullshit. Microsoft Research is working on a whole bunch of stuff. Anyone in OS research knows how often MSR appears on the most influential papers.
Do you have any tangible metrics to prove this wide acclaim/adoption of Python relative to other languages? To me this screams of tunnel-vision; whatever language specific media and news-outlets you follow would impact your perception of the larger IT landscape.

"Allows to do virtually anything", "there is a set of good .." and "awesome .." are not facts or measurable quantities. I would like to see the underlying assumptions proven first, otherwise you're begging the question.
Nice. It's an FPGA board, the Verilog source code for the processor is available. 80 MHz, plenty of vector registers, fits inside one modern FPGA...

Downside: the author couldn't locate any software for Cray yet. Looks like he looked pretty hard and still came up empty. Anyone can help?
I think you are missing the point of this article.

He's saying that there are people who view the world differently from you, and that their type of ambition (shared with the company and/or team) is more useful to a corporation.

You are making a judgement that your world view is correct. I don't think he's judging the correctness of either view, only the usefulness of each kind.
Many of the replies strangely don't seem to debunk the myths. For example, the reply to #5, people's worry that "someone will know things about them that they may want to keep secret", is that "most information is used anonymously", and "to the extent that things are 'known' about consumers, they are known by computers". That isn't a rebuttal at all, though: the fact that "most" information is used anonymously, and much information "known" is only known by computers and used as part of aggregate analytics or ad-targeting algorithms, doesn't address the core worry, that "someone will know things about them that they may want to keep secret". I mean, this is basic logic: you can't debunk a worry that someone is doing X by arguing that some people aren't doing X.

For example, there are no assurances that Facebook isn't giving personally identifiable information about specific users to government agencies without warrants (they refuse to say either way). ChoicePoint's explicit purpose is to collect and sell such information (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22269-2005Jan...). Even at a small scale, I've personally looked at information on systems I sysadmin that I suspect users would "want to keep secret", and I could have legally shared that information; it was purely my discretion and ethical sense that I shouldn't be publishing the results of sysadmin snooping that kept me from doing so. So it seems at least exceedingly likely that companies are attempting to collect and connect information about people that those people would like to keep private, are not all (contrary to this op-ed) anonymizing the data or only allowing algorithms to use it, and at least some are probably sharing and/or selling it.

#7 also seems extremely dubious as a prediction. If indeed someone were given a printout of information collected on them by such firms, I think many people would be unpleasantly surprised. The reason they aren't irate is not the unfounded assertion that "there is no harm from the way it is used", but because they have never seen such a printout, have no way to get one, and have no idea how it's being used or shared/sold.

Much of the rest is simply pure opinion: "so-and-so says X is bad, but in fact I like it". I mean, I can see an argument that privacy regulations will cause more harm than good, but this doesn't really seem like that argument.
re: eurorail.

It's scenic but something like ryanair.com is cheaper and obviously faster!
I thought the big thing about Rails 3 was the merging of Merb and Rails. Would it have really hurt DHH to include a sentence of acknowledgement in his long post? I am disappointed.
I like Ryan's focus and explanation of the key metrics he uses:

To grow your sales, it is critical to calculate the lifetime value of an average customer, calculate what you’re currently paying to acquire an average customer (total monthly ad spend divided by customers acquired in that month), determine the maximum you’re willing to pay to acquire an average customer, and scale your marketing scientifically by testing relentlessly and finding the channels in which you can acquire customers for less than your maximum acceptable customer acquisition cost and then growing spend within those channels.

Never raise more equity capital than 1x your current annualized revenue (monthly revenue x 12). If you raise too much money too soon you’ll give up too much ownership and control of your company and be tempted to spend the money in ways that aren’t carefully controlled. Wait to raise a large round until you have proven mathematically than $X amount of additional spending with generate $Y amount of additional revenue. (once you figure out #2 this is easy).
Report claims that Maoist Azad was killed at point-blank
The energy leaving the sun, and the amount arriving on the surface are two different things.

And just to keep things in perspective, the earth absorbs the energy equivalent of 250,000 10-megaton hydrogen bombs per day!
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But says the reporter "FUD sells copy!".
You're not using FB for professional networking, are you?

If you're a professional you need to be visible. At the same time, you may not want random folks unknown to you to be seeing all your personal details, so you may lock those down so that only professional contacts -- "friends" -- can see them.

That's how you end up with (checks) 893 friends (like me). It's a business tool, not a reflection of your personal life.

(And that's before we get onto the jokers who select some random cartoon character as a userpic, but that's just another failure mode for FB's broken attempt to reinvent shared secret authentication.)
Won't somebody just say that such an identity verification system is stupid! I had the "verify" problem a few months ago and wasn't asked to ID faces. This must be new. Scrap and try again! It's ok to mess up facebook.
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Try contacting the Computer History Museum (http://www.computerhistory.org/). They have a fairly large collection of Crays.
I agree with everything except for one point (which was a painful process for me to learn): some people want and need to be told what to do and there's nothing wrong with that assuming that, once told what to do, the people can execute.

I just assumed that everyone on my team was like me -- didn't want to be told what to do at a micro-level. I had a couple of team members who were really good engineers and they were failing miserably. Once I realized that they needed to be give explicit instructions on what they should be doing, they coded like a house on fire. One attribute of great CEOs (IMHO) is the ability to get a careful read of everyone on your team and understand exactly how much or little to manage them. In an ideal world, one could hire an entire company of people who do not need to be micro-managed, but real life doesn't always allow for that luxury.
Sure. Now that I'm not on my phone, it's much easier to grab some links.

Here's the original work on the subject, by Dan North: http://blog.dannorth.net/introducing-bdd/

A little Rails specific, but this post by Sarah Mei is pretty awesome: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/05/29/outside-in-bdd/

These two Railscasts on Cucumber are good: http://railscasts.com/episodes/155-beginning-with-cucumber http://railscasts.com/episodes/159-more-on-cucumber

But really, conceptually, BDD isn't that complicated. The hardest bit is figuring out the tooling for whatever language you're using, getting comfortable with it, and practicing. I know the Ruby side of this well, but if you're using another language, I'm not sure I can be of much help.
You really should make it clearer that this is against other humans. When I saw the page, I thought the other pixels were just automatons. Even when I saw some forming letters in the corner, I just thought “interesting, some of them are programmed to not participate”. And I thought moving around was pointless because I couldn’t predict where the computer would move its pixels, so I had no idea how to get into position but to just stand there. It was only by reading these comments that I realized that the other pixels were other players, which increased my enjoyment of the game immensely because of the feeling of cooperation with others, and the understanding of why the other pixels act the way they do.
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The creator already tried this route, as detailed in the the original post that NYC Resistor linked to.
I think a chat would just add frustration and abuse.
Hmm...didn't follow the links far enough. I find it hard to believe that they don't even have contacts who would know where to find the original source (most likely for a price, but still...).

EDIT: Nevermind... I see:

They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed
Cray’s old software archives before spinning them
off again in the late 90’s

Well, that's rather...sad
Brokers advertising as "by owner" should be reported, and if fee apartments are advertised in "no fee," those should also be reported. (Honestly, management companies are allowed to split off and have their own brokerage, so that they collect fees by renting the apartments they already own, and in that case they would advertise in "by owner," but it sounds like you were speaking of something different.)

Not having pictures is directly related to how fast apartments are rented - sometimes it's simply not reasonable or possible to gain access and go take pictures of an apartment before it is rented.

Net effective is slimy, but not prohibited, as long as it's labeled properly.

For what it's worth, I never advertise without photos and have never used net effective prices, which is my personal decision, but it still bothers me when people extrapolate from a few bad ads or ads they think are misleading and then disparage the entire industry. The real CL scams are much worse than what people are typically paranoid about real estate agents doing behind the scenes.
I am a 50-something engineer who recently worked at a well known startup. I am planning a new startup now. I reviewed my contemporary connections on LinkedIn to see how many I'd consider for my startup. I did not find many.

Many of my contemporaries have climbed the management or technical ladders to the point where they have not practiced the skills needed in a startup for years. They are managing fifty or more people. They are architects at large corporations. They are not designing products and writing code.

A smaller group of my contemporaries are set for life financially. They are no longer working or are only pretending to work.

Of those that are still actively working, I know that some of them have ratcheted up their lifestyle to match their high compensation. It would be a major adjustment for them to live on a startup salary.

There might be ageism in the startup world, but I think it's definitely the case that the pool of eligible and interested 50-somethings is small.

I personally have not experienced ageism. I was 20 years older than everybody else at my last startup.
This article is trash.

There's a solar max every 11 years. There are flares and coronal mass ejections associated with near-max conditions, although they can happen at almost any point in the solar cycle; this has been the case for centuries.

But nobody can predict whether the flares and CMEs will be historically intense this cycle; known science does not support such predictions. We didn't predict the weird "double dip" in Cycle 23 (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/28...). And the SEC (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/) has predicted cycle 24 will be a dud.

It's a crap shoot anyway -- the significance of a particular flare or CME for Earth depends on lots of chancy factors, not least, whether the CME is pointed at the Earth or not. The rotational period of the Sun is 28 days; +/- 1 day means the CME misses Earth.
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And of course, it's usually the case that the people who say "all the right things" are usually the ones who tend to do what advances their own career at the expense of the team :)
Anyone on HN have any words/actual facts on this?
I agree that I used only my specific definition of meaningfulness and it is a subjective one. Fair point.

I assumed that making something of value for other people is what makes life meaningful. Making and shipping a product, supporting a family, writing poetry and producing music, doing research and participating in constructive discussions is meaningful for me. I assumed that some readers here share these values to some extent.

I didn't tell people what to do. I shared my view and am genuinely interested in your view on the subject. I tend to think that is why we are all here.
The installer is what is probably writing to the unpartitioned space.
> There must be an awful lot of things which are very hard to prove in a proper controlled study, but which are totally obvious to anyone who tries them.

The problem is lots of stuff that people think they know and is totally obvious is completely wrong and completely subjective. Science has a harder job, it has to prove things objectively.
They forgot sed.
It's such s shame software isn't available. The cray-1, like the colossus are important parts of world history.

I'm more than a little jelous that this guy made this and not me. Oh well, some day I'll own an old altix.

* HN should have more of this, less ify/.ly dotcoms.
Maybe I misunderstood.

I thought

One of the few gems in the dark Microsoft mine, I suppose.

meant that he didn't think Microsoft does anything notable anymore.
There is a little bit of communication. For instance, if you want to lead someone somewhere, you can try running circles around them and then running in a direction, and then running back to them. I don’t know if they would understand, but you could try.
How Jack Zerby Designed a New Layout System for Goodsie
Step one should be valid semantic HTML 4.01 (or equivalently, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html). That's still the current standard, and was carefully designed to be at least accessible on every browser we've ever had. Step two is adding CSS and JS to make the experience nicer for browsers on which it's switched on and known to work reliably. It seems to me that a lot of devs complaining about IE6 have a grudge because it reveals they routinely skip step one. They had every opportunity to build something that always works and always will and then make all the shiny variations they can handle, but they prefer the "this page optimized for arguing with customers" approach.
Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, Griefer.
Just so you know, civil engineers have known how to build bridges for over two millennia. Does 60 years still feel like a long time?
Anybody have more in depth details on how this was achieved? K thx bye!
Doesn't work with NoScript. What happened to graceful degradation/progressive enhancement?
I, too, was often confused by this message because you hear it preached often. After digging deeper via one-to-one conversations with people like Ryan, you realize that it is already implied that you make each individual's responsibility very clear.

I bet even at Ryan's company the programmers are given very explicit specs on what to code.
To the whole language. Then you can't tell what's evaluated when, easily.
I just learned about another one a couple of days ago: cut. Can't believe I never knew of its existence.

Also, for programmers, I'd recommend ack over grep.