skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never quite understood our culture's instinctual response to cover up or mask the infrastructure that surrounds us. There's something serene about a wind farm. It's function over form, not function or form. Compare this design proposal to the phone towers that litter the landscape (pathetically) disguised to look like trees.
If Rails is in the picture, this is actually good advice. Not that you can't work around Windows, but why would you want to?
Anything that inspects packets past the transport layers should be illegal unless a warrant has been served.

Just like in the good old post days you should be able to rely on all your packets arriving without 'inspection' by any carriers.

The obvious solution to the whole net neutrality problem is to encrypt everything and to run the various protocols on every port imaginable after some form of handshaking.

I think that would work.
How is it you actually have the non-gaming free time to make the reference?

Since they are variable, they should make ones modeled after Tricia Helfer and Grace Park. Cylon Pylons!
The code's all there: see https://code.launchpad.net/openstack. "nova" is the name of the compute component. As I said upthread I find Launchpad's UI confusing, but I think http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hudson-openstack/nova/trunk/fil... is the development trunk.

http://github.com/openstack/nova is a github mirror of the same code, I think.
>But given two applicants, one that has 20 years of experience during work time and none that he cares to report about during the interview outside of work time and one that has 10, 5 years working in his spare time and 5 years during employment which one would you pick ?

The one that has completed projects on his own. If neither one of them could demonstrate such a thing, the one that seemed more intelligent.

Also, the difference between 10 years and 20 years of experience, I think, is less than the difference between, say, 5 years and 10 years... I think the wage curve would imply most people agree with me here. In the case of someone with 2.5 years of personal experience and 2.5 years of professional experience, vs. 5 years of professional experience, if all else were equal (which is to say, either neither has completed a project they can show me, or they both have, and they seem about as smart, and they are willing to work for the same wage) it's pretty much a toss-up in my mind. If the guy with 5 years work seems more professional, I might go with him, just 'cause I lack professionalism, and it can be really useful sometimes.

But, the thing is, it's usually not equal. the guy with 2.5 years paid experience and 2.5 years hobby experience, in my experience, is likely to work for only slightly more than someone with only 2.5 years of professional experience.

So, given the choice between hiring the person with 5 years paid experience at market rate for a person with 5 years paid experience, and the person with 2.5 years paid experience and 2.5 years hobby experience at the market rate for someone with 2.5 years of experience, I'll easily take the latter. (at least in my experience, pay goes up /fast/ in the early parts of your career.)
Why Annie Sorensen Quit Her Corporate Job And Thinks You Could Too
Does anyone else feel like they're looking at baby pictures?
About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
Comparison of Internet Marketing Channels
Strange Loop speaker interview: Chris Houser
I think what sets this apart from sites like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare is that those sites are oriented towards the social networking aspect of geolocation. Those sites are community based where as this seems more like a nice little utility app for giving someone directions. The real time tracking and simplicity is what makes this unique I think. Not sure where these guys are going to take this but I would urge them to not turn it into a another geo-community to find new "friends" and "places".
Yes, temperature addition is garbage, but the addition of an interval to a temperature is not. Consider:

"It was 20 °C yesterday and someone told me it's 10 °C
hotter today. What temperature is it?"

The difficulty comes when you try to write that out using addition. This is OK

"10°C + 20°C"

because all of the units share the same null point so there is an implicit null point at 273.15 K.

This is not OK:

"293.15 K + 10 °C"

because the null point could be either 0 K or 273.15 K.

If I were google I'd just show two answers in this case:

"10 °C hotter than 293.15 K = 303.15 K
"293.15 K hotter than 10 °C = 303.15 °C"
> 'No, I Wouldn't Hire a Programmer That Has No Interest in Programming Outside of Business Hours', and framed like that it is illegal.

Why? I really don't believe that's true, at least in the US. This says nothing about requiring that they program outside of business hours. As long as they aren't putting any sort of demands on their non-work time, I don't see the problem in using someone's passion as a factor in hiring. There's only a problem if they place some demands on non-work time or fire you for it.

> [...] which one would you pick ?

Depends on the job. If constant learning of new tech is integral to the job, I might go for less experience. (Again, this doesn't imply not paying them for their time.)
"The modern assumption of retirement is a bi-product of the industrial revolution. Retirement was a brass ring that was held up for workers to see as a way to keep them productive and loyal for a long period of time."

I am not aware of any company that paid pensions during the industrial revolution, but then again I am not an expert on the subject, so maybe there were enlightened employers that did. Mostly, though, this was the time of 16-hour work days and child labor.

Retirement was not a "brass ring" but rather a necessity. How are you going to make a living when you're too old to work? In Europe, labor unions gradually forced companies to take care of this, and eventually it was set into law (in most countries anyway), with the government and employers cooperating to pay for people's retirement. In the US, not so much. Which system is preferable depends on one's outlook, I guess.
Yes, but that wouldn't be enough. The DNS system is also controlled by an oligopoly and ISPs. With DNS server data ISPs can easily deduce what is a packet doing. AFAIK, the DNSSEC system doesn't solve this, either.

The stakes are high, I'd love to see a change of paradigm. But it's very hard given the immense economic and political interests against anything fair.
That'd be a prank worthy of Loki himself :-D
Or if you're not in the US.
Painting by Numbers
My favorite bit:

So far, the vast majority of the programs I write have been single-threaded, refcounted (or manually memory managed), and deterministic. I think I'll continue to do it that way, thanks.

Well, gee, I'm so glad that's cleared that up for me - here I was, writing multi-threaded/non-deterministic code all over the place, just because I like it so much. Tracking down race conditions is a choice, we can choose not to get involved with any of it, and we'll be just fine! Some guy on the Internet says so, it must be true!
Flying Blind: A Case against Traditional Advertising
Uh, no. The pattern has trade offs, that doesn't make it useless, it most certainly solves problems.
I don't play a lot of SC now. Got it out of my system in college.
AoE2 was set in middle ages and IMO is a fantastic game. This however is set in Greece.
I get the feeling HN has more posts on becoming rich lately and frankly I find it not very relevant for Hackers News. Yes, it's great if your hack/project/application allows you to gain a nice income, but personally I'm more interested in your hack/project/application and the process around it than the possible outcome of being financially independent. If that's your definition of 'rich'.
I think the writer just described the singularity.
The internal uproar when FS got dropped was deafening. I'm on several "social" distribution lists and at least 3/4ths of them had some kind of long thread wanting to know whose head the sender could chew off for making this "happen."
The Terrorist Test. Would you pass?
But not everyone will be poor -- the rich will still be rich. Wage-earners who believed in social security and the stock market may be very surprised to find themselves in penury.

People who lived very nice lives in middle age and did everything "right" may find themselves very poor in their golden years. Our system leaves no margin for error. The millionaires down the road will be able to cope.

Lastly, equality with your elderly peers won't make you feel any better, if everyone is dying in equally rotten ways. Worrying about status is a sport for the young.
Online Database Application Platform
In my unqualified opinion retirement is one of the great lies of the 20th century. Politicians lying to appease the general population after WWII. Baby-boomers lying to their children if they still maintain the line today. And you lying to yourself if you're below 40 and expect to retire 'normally'. Retirement is the biggest pyramid scheme of them all. Madoff'd be proud.
I met someone who finished business school and applied for lots of jobs in the financial sector, but was rather frustrated after six months and several interviews but no job offer. (This was before the financial crisis.)

She complained that the interviewers were asking stupid and irrelevant questions, along the lines of "what is the current stock price for company X?"

When she told them she had been away on vacation in France they asked her to describe the French stock market instead. (She: "How am I supposed to know, I was on holiday!")

Programming is apparently not the only field where "interest beyond 9-5" is a job requirement...

Or more precisely: There are plenty of jobs in both programming and finance where 9-5 interest is enough, but in my experience the jobs that are considered "good" tend to ask more than that.
Yes, but SC2 came out!
I like the idea of this site, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

It reminds me of those catalogs in the seat-backs of airplanes that I end up reading when I get bored. Lots of stuff -- but nothing really struck me as being all that valuable or novel. Kitsch.
These strike me as delicate and not threatening. They are like Brokkr's ice figurines.
HN is somewhat topical in that a topic will get some attention for a while and then fades away again. I've seen this happen with a variety of subjects and it really doesn't mean much.

It'll happen with more hacking related subjects as well, and I think the fascination with the 'being rich' thing is that HN started out as more startup oriented and many people pursue the startup route out of a motivation for financial independence.
oh god, are you that guy who can't shut up about the football game last weekend? do you know how hard it is to keep smiling when you accost me every Monday morning with the news about your team? At least let me finish my coffee first.

(I'm mostly joking... but there really is a pretty big cultural divide here between people for whom this is a job and people for whom this is their identity.)
Thieves Will Steal Your Money Using Their Boobs Instead of ATM Skimmers
Grooveshark iPhone App Pulled from App Store
Need to construct more cylons... like this:

http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/maxim-bat...
Summarized: "I suggested they only invest in advertising and marketing that they could test, measure, and then scale what works. And that is Internet advertising."
Nowhere does it say that torrents are blocked because of illegal content. The AT&T terms of service that are quoted in the article mention "certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues" as a reason. Given that torrents are often huge, and that wireless networks usually are not as fast as wired ones yet, that does not seem completely unreasonable.

Of course, it does mean that I cannot download, say, a Linux ISO via torrent... now that is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

(That said, AT&T did stop offering Usenet last year, supposedly because there was too much illegal content.)
Isn't it possible their job is more than just 9-5? At a startup, it often consumes most of your free time.
I wonder if they'd have done better with that route, though, or if they'd have ended up just another UNIX vendor (i.e. getting their lunch absolutely eaten by Linux et al).
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SDRAM
It seems the theme is business ownership. Of course, Reddit might be populated more by tech-savvy folks, leading to the talk of startups there. But overall, those who seem to make big sums of money are those who have equity in successful businesses. That includes the people who run used tire shops, electrician companies and fast food franchises as well as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Buffet is smart enough to have built a business that buys equity in other businesses (not to mention having the brains to know what equity to buy).
I have actually heard the opposite during hiring. Basically because of the "no assholes" rule. If someone doesn't have interests other than work/programming, there's a good chance they fail that test.
This is a very complex question and there are no obviously correct answers. Here in Ontario, what you did outside of business hours is the business of a prospective employer in a certain sense. We have a law prohibiting certain forms of hiring discrimination, and as part of that it is illegal to ask a candidate questions pertaining to such things. So for example, I am not allowed to about your religious activities.

But I am allowed to ask questions that do not directly or indirectly adress illegal discrimination, and asking about profession-related activities is usually on-side.

That being said, it is perfectly legal for anyone to file a lawsuit suggesting that perfectly legal questions are being used to indirectly create illegal discriminatory practices. So if I never ask about religion but I only hire from my network which "happens to be" my church or my weekly Richard Dawkins Appreciation Society club...

What little I know about HR suggests that hiring out of a professional network that is agnostic about discriminatory matters is legal. HOWEVER, programming networks are on shaky ground. Not because of religion, but things like Ruby Conferences seem to under-represent certain protected classes of people like women.

Another example: If I put out a call for applicants on my own blog and that's the only source of applicants, am I discriminating against people who speak English competently for professional purposes but only read Hindi or Mandarin programming blogs? In ontario, that could be construed as illegal.

I can't give anyone legal advice, but if your network gives the appearance of discriminating against qualified candidates in protected classes, I suggest that it's good business sense to expand your network. It's a win-win: You'll get qualified people that other employers are ignoring, and your legal costs will go way down.

So... Good point about the title. And even though I am NOT saying that in an interview I refuse to hire someone who does not blog or go to conferences or tweet or whatever, my filtering mechanism could be breaking the law if it accidentally discriminates in a legal sense.
He had DotLisp, a Lisp on the CLR, before Clojure as well.

http://dotlisp.sourceforge.net/dotlisp.htm

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e31b38c8cc...
I'm picturing a lot of guys who sold everything they have to move to SF to become a start up founder / rock star. This is not unlike moving to LA and being a waitress to tread water whilst trying to make it big in Hollywood.

A portion of these guys are probably frustrated, burned out, and lost. The only way to reinvigorate in some eyes is to figure out how rich they need to get before they are happy.

Never chase money because it will outrun you. Money is like girls, it only comes in bounds once you stop giving a shit. Ever wonder why you only get hit on by hot girls when you actually have a girlfriend?

There are stories of teenagers making their first million and they're ideas are super-simple. I wonder if its possible some portion of the HN crowd is trying too hard to get rich by being smart.
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet
does jetblue have onboard wireless? you'd want a cellular modem for the time you are in the airports.
Yes. But ISPs are blocking or throttling to oblivion, not prioritizing packets. BitTorrent has a proposed protocol addressing this and it was not embraced by the telcos, in particular Comcast who said was going to be working on that.

This proposal if sponsored by FCC or US Congress would give carte blanche to the telcos to do whatever they want on wireless, in particular 3G/4G. Google is not representative of the users (present or future) of those services.
Servers That Generate Their Own Power
Dewitt Clinton mentioned some techniques for creating something on the order of an effective web crawler (internet indexing), but I'm not sure what it's limiting factors were (cpu, memory, number of threads/bots, asynchronous bots).

here's the link:
http://www.google.com/buzz/dclinton/KuXDg9P8Q8z/Jesse-Stay-A...

check Dewitt's first comment:

DeWitt Clinton - I'm not even sure how to respond, mostly because I can't even guess how you came up with the number 3, or how you can say anyone "owns" the web.

There are currently hundreds, no, thousands, of companies, universities, and individuals have indexed large portions of the web. Getting the basics isn't even that hard. No exaggeration, you could build a perfectly suitable crawl for a sgapi of your own in a few weeks.

The hardest bit is probably the node mapping, but fortunately, that's open source:

http://code.google.com/p/google-sgnodemapper/

Even high quality crawlers are available under open source licences. Nutch, for example:

http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/

And I highly recommend this book on the fundamentals of web crawl and indexing:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0136072240/

Storing the node graph can be done on any number of open source or commercial backends. If I wanted to do it myself, I'd probably host it all on EC2 at Amazon. The cost wouldn't even be prohibitive, depending on how deep and broad you want the crawl to go, and for sgapi stuff, you don't need to go that big to be useful.

No one ever has, or ever will, indexed the whole web
> Define 'rich'.

Not having to worry about money, and working by choice rather than out of necessity.
I was looking for reader macros for recognizing {} as hash tables and [] as vectors. To me, that is one of the biggest innovations in Clojure over Lisps that came before, the expansion of the concept of S-expressions.
And selective quoting is never deceptive or equivalent to editorializing, right? :)
JetBlue "All You Can Jet" pass is back
That perfectly sums it up.

The problems really only start when you get larger though.

If you were to go over roughly 20 employees and you put out calls for applicants. Ontario is pretty bad in this respect actually (I still have an Ontario corporation, I probably ought to shut it down) I remember all the cautioning from our corporate lawyer there regarding interview questions. For instance 'how old are you?' is an illegal question, but 'are you over 18?' is ok.

Under 20 employees and when using non-public ways of reaching potential hires the situation changes a bit, but someone could still have a case if they felt that they should have gotten a job and you refused them for some imaginary reason. Being an employer in a litigious climate is pretty tricky.
"arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets."

Well you can't argue with this statement. The soviets would have treated them far worse. However, according to the Japanese - it was the bomb that drove them to surrender. Additionally, though the Soviets were right next door, the U.S. had Japan essentially blockaded and completely surrounded. We would never had allowed the Soviets to close in and conquer Japan; nor did the Soviets have the ability to mount an invasion of mainland Japan. This blockade of Japan, and the fact that their forces in Asia were essentially cut-off, led to the weakening and thus capitulation of those Japanese forces when it came time for the Soviets to attack. The Soviets essentially attacked a weaken and already beaten Japanese army in Asia - a small feat, not a great decisive one.
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There are insurance policies that cover a lot of these situations. Depending on your coverage they can go from reasonable to ridiculously expensive but it's really a question of how much risk are you willing to take?

Edit: This assumes you will find work while capable of working. But, 6 months of savings does not have to be a ridiculously large number and six months of savings + low paying job can last you for a long time.
I don't get that from this article. The one time I met him (at StartupSchool), he seemed like a really pleasant person I'd like to invite over for dinner. He was not faux-humble, but he was also not boastful.

Now, from other publications like NKS, I do get the vibe you mentioned.
Nuclear fission MVP
Google thinks they can have lightning hit the same spot twice .i.e. crowd sourcing. It worked with Google Search but for the Android platform, Google will have to actually do some PR work.
As an android developer, I got pretty frustrated by the lack of clear documentation and their horrible API. Chances are, if you are used to the Sun Java API (or even C# API), trying to develop in Android will easily get your frustrated with the Android API. Method names sound alien or don't really mean what they imply.
Also, the whole XML resourced-based format prevents you from easily creating components dynamically (through java code) and referencing them in more than one project.

I could go on and on...

Even the Developer portal on the Android Market is just horrible. I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish.

- 2 screen shots???

- extremely limited description?

- No clear text box for "Update Reason"?

- You can't respond to user ridiculous comments?

- Sometimes my paid apps get cancelled after two days of purchase

P/S: I have more than 1/2 million combined downloads
Buxfer's (YC 07) founders work for Facebook. Who works for Buxfer?
If you take the absolute temperatures of 0 C in actual heat and add them together, you would have a cumulative heat of 273.15 C. Makes perfect sense.
I don't think OCaml "sucks hardcore", I just find it a bit frustrating, the same way that Common Lisp is not as good as my ideal Lisp (which doesn't exist, and therefore isn't burdened with any compromises). I'd still rather use it than several other languages. Everything has quirks.
Well, shoot, with enough ice cubes we can reverse global warming.
O RLY?

There are a lot of reasons to disagree with my post, but this isn't one of them. Your argument contains something called a straw man, namely the implication that I advocate hiring people who do nothing but program 24/7.

Yes, there is this thing called life. I have two kids. I Scuba dive, rock climb, bike, and do a bunch of other things that are not programming. I also enjoy programming. Not instead of life, but as part of a rich experience.
Hah, nice to know. :)
Facebook ‘Dislike’ Button Is a Scam
It's refreshing to read more of reality-based examination of last week's announcement.
The MIT course for Intro to Comp. Sci is pretty good too. There's a bunch of people working through it on my website, Curious Reef, if anyone is interested: http://curiousreef.com/class/mit-opencourseware-600-introduc...
Single page: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/computer-symbols-hist...
I heard an interview with him, and it wasn't very insightful. He says that everything will get smaller and faster with varying detail or on specific subjects. That's not very insightful.