skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Joel, ex stock analyst here. What you say re minority trades is correct in so far as that is the way market valuations are calculated. However, what David says is also correct: just because someone pays X for a tiny fraction of the company doesn't mean someone else will pay the same for all of it.

Wily investors always look for meaningful volumes before taking big jumps/declines in share prices seriously.

One of the easiest ways to ramp a stock (apart from getting your journalist buddy to write a puff piece) is to continually lift the offer for small volumes.
Looking for talented programmer in Atlanta...
Alright, I realize this may not be the best city for an internet startup, but if you happen to be a genius at programming, please let me know. I'm an entrepreneur and basically need someone(s) who knows hacking inside and out to be an equal member in a new venture. I'll of course let you see a business plan and you can decide based on that. It will be a ton of work but we will do the bulk of the work after some funding comes through (but to even get that funding, I need more talent attached to this).

I hope this doesn't sound like a scam. It's not. Even if you aren't interested, I'm always looking for advice.

Thanks!
possibleselves (at) gmail.com
Mobile in Mainz
Force upstream to fix a bug and release a new version? And what if they don't? Quite a few packages in Debian have somewhat dormant upstream authors - the packages work, perhaps needing a few patches to compile with the latest versions of common libraries, but the original author has essentially moved on.

Consider:

libfoobar has a bug in at least one version seen in the wild. Is my system safe?

If your distro packages just one or two stable versions of libfoobar, any package that depends on libfoobar is either OK or not OK, and if it's not OK, you can patch the bug in one place and you're safe again. If upstream is dormant, perhaps the current package maintainer can fix it.

If there are various versions of libfoobar being linked by individual apps, you need to check every app for the flaw and work with both the app author and libfoobar's author to determine whether the flaw exists and how to fix it. Upstream libfoobar might say the bug has been fixed in the latest release, so just upgrade to that. Upstream app then has more work to do, and may be in denial about the importance of the bug. And if the source isn't available for the precise libfoobar bundled with the app, the package maintainer would have to either (a) rework the app to work with a stable system version of libfoobar, (b) package the odd version of libfoobar separately, and link that, or (c) delete the package from the distribution.
Then again if a library is patched who will test if all applications using it still work? I never had updates messing up my system as bad on Windows as it happened a few times already on several of my Linux systems (with different distributions). To stay with Java - the reason I gave up on Eclipse was when it got broken the second time after an Java-VM update and I just didn't want to fight the package system anymore.

I trust application developers usually to do better tests than distributors. And certainly distributors don't even care about 3rd party packages. I would prefer a system where application developers are responsible for which libraries link against their applications. And a complete different mechanism for security. For example a list of libraries+versions with known security-problems against which shared libs can be tested on start.

And I'm sure there are other solutions, for example searching my system for all versions of a certain library and asking me which to replace (and maybe keep me informed about not-updated versions). Preferably while keeping the old version around for a while to make it easy for me to switch back for the applications which do break now.

It's not like having a single version of a library is the only way security can be handled - it's just the current way of doing things. And one can discuss what is preferably - a secure system which occasionally breaks working applications or insecure applications which at least do work.

edit: Btw., this might even be in the interest of free software. Ever had a problem with a certain library which won't be patched in the official sources for whatever reason? Right now - basically you're fucked. Because even if you patch it yourself, the chances you will get distributors to add a second nearly identical library with 1-2 simply patches is basically zero. So although you have those free libraries with source, it doesn't really matter because you can't change those sources yourself if you still want to be in official distributions. A real free system would be one where changing sources is made easy.
Three (two-and-a-half) symmetric ARM cores seem to be easier to program than a PPC and an entourage of SPUs.

One of the things that always made me wonder about Cell's future is that it looks devilishly hard to program.

Wouldn't things like OpenCL sort of ease that pain? IIRC, IBM is one of the companies behind it.
It all depends on who's programming the PS3. ;-)
This ad works on several different levels:

1) It shows a revenue generating, easily understandable action being done hundreds of times in different locations
2)It serves as a sendup of subliminal advertising while also standing as a textbook example.
3) The easter eggs and length encourage people to forward it, making it viral
4) Any reenactments will be yet
This has long been recognized as a problem:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter X, Part II

And therefore it's long been a part of US Federal anti-trust law and case law. Modern Republican administrations in particular have tended to focus their attention on these type of price fixing cases.
On the other hand, when I had to give a hiring recommendation on a key lead technical architect position for a multi-billion dollar organization, I searched usenet for old posts from this person (perfectly legal - I cleared it with general council first).

Matching up name+date+e-mail domain wasn't hard, so I knew I had the right person. The search taught me that the person was thoughtful, articulate, analytical; had a very good grasp of the complexity of the domain and the technology underlying the domain, did not rush to judgment, etc.

Had her posts been filled with OMG-WTF snarky crap, or if her posts had lots of dumb questions that could have been answered with a bit of self-directed study, she would not have been hired.
Pick up an Arduino, or one of it's derivatives (like Netduino). Then span out. Once you've gotten 'in', you'll soon find other interesting platforms to develop on.
It's when people write solutions like this that I realize that PHP is very undervalued as a general purpose language. Sure, as a web language there is a ton of bad code out there because it's easy to learn. But for writing more advanced CLI systems it actually has a lot of nice functionality. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/refs.fileprocess.process.php
I stand corrected. Sorry.

Still... Marvell is not in that business, but neither was MOS in the personal computer business when they launched the 6502 ;-)

Accidents happen and the wildest things become real. Besides that, this level of performance will be quite mundane two years from now. In a decade, low-end smartphones will have this kind of capability. Not because they need it, but because nobody makes a simpler part anymore.
In other words, you have a ton of stuff permanently in your car? It's not stuff that you need to transport from A to B.

Lights and locks are mounted on a bike, and minor repair tools can be as well (it's not necessary; the last time I got a flat tire is 4 years ago using a bike every day). I do nearly all trips on a bike, some with a bag of books & laptop or with a bag of groceries. The number of times I need to carry items that are too large or heavy to transport on a bike is very small. You can carry more with a bike than without a bike...

> I could certainly do without, but, having done so in the past, it's not worth it. Similarly, carrying a large enough subset on a bike, bus, or both, as I've done when I bike commuted, was a constant annoyance.

I don't understand what you were carrying. Can you elaborate on this?
BollyHolly News: Trisha Krishnan looking like Red Chilli
Damn, that square with seven edges is no "square" at all. He/she slept with half your friends of the opposite sex!
I wrote my first program in 1965 (FORTRAN). I was hooked and haven't had a dull moment ever since. Then it was Assembler, COBOL, C++, PHP, C#, there's more left for me to learn than when I started.

We have been blessed with an exceptionally rewarding craft. Only actors and jet pilots can match the thrill we get from our jobs. The former are few, and the latter have a short career span. There are always new projects, new worlds to explore. Knowledge is the greatest wealth.
Re: "Not as Described" - You will still get those customers that have buyers remorse or just simply don't want to be charged for the item they received. You will find the customer service reps that make the decision on these cases spend a few minutes on each. Unless you have an awesome case the buyer will win.

The fact that this item is part of a service should hugely reduce fraud.

In all honesty you should be fine. I would start out with some pretty solid rules; only ship to the US, Canada & Western Europe, only ship to paypal verified addresses and IP location should match the billing address (< 150 miles). Once you find your feet I'd start relaxing these rules and plug any holes in the system if they appear.

If a paypal dispute arises, call the customer.
I'm glad Twitter doesn't keep a record of my tweets. Perhaps for what you want, they could make it an opt-in service, but for invasion of my privacy, I'd just as soon not. And for their service load (media needed to store your tweets and server bandwidth time needed to make them accessible to you) I can well see how it might be a payable service.
Demi Lovato rejected Joe Jonas for Kim Kardashians brother
Back when aggressive fluxes were used in manufacturing, washing the circuit board was a normal part of the process, so it's not an entirely crazy idea. I wouldn't use a hair dryer, though. Besides possible heat damage, moving air can generate a static charge.
"OpenCL was initially developed by Apple Inc., which holds trademark rights, and refined into an initial proposal in collaboration with technical teams at AMD, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia. Apple submitted this initial proposal to the Khronos Group. On June 16, 2008 the Khronos Compute Working Group was formed with representatives from CPU, GPU, embedded-processor, and software companies. This group worked for five months to finish the technical details of the specification for OpenCL 1.0 by November 18, 2008. This technical specification was reviewed by the Khronos members and approved for public release on December 8, 2008"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
PayPal might be very quick and easy to get going just like Google Checkout or Amazon Payments but you need to think about what is best for actually serving your customers and making it easier for them to pay.

- Standard PayPal
Your customer must have a PayPal account which could lower your conversion and for sure does not give a professional image. You can schedule a payment to happening each month but it is an amount not a product/plan, making managing customers very difficult and reporting almost impossible. Similar issues apply with Google Checkout and Amazon Payments

- PayPal Website Payments Pro
This is a gateway and merchant account combination that they offer as a package to try and attract merchants. There are some simple recurring payment options but nothing really. The bigger problem here is errors and support. Try calling PayPal when something does not work, good luck. We have a senior level account manager and direct contact with the Director of Support for this product and this bug has been open for 3 weeks and they still cannot fix. http://support.chargify.com/discussions/support/3296-decline...

- Real gateway and merchant account
Your best option and not a lot of effort if you are in the US or have a US bank account. Overseas it is a little more effort but nothing crazy. If you are concerned with getting the best rate and quickly, we have a few partners for this at http://chargify.com/merchant-accounts/. And you can use this and not use Chargify, so it is just there to help you.

While there are many reasons you might want to use Chargify or a similar type of service rather than doing this directly you can of course build it yourself. Just think about what you would prefer to spend your time on. I encourage you to talk to actual customers of any product you pick, look at the community around the company and who participates and then make a decision.

As a founder at Chargify, I would love to see you working with us, but more important I want you to make the right choice for your business so I would say almost anything is better than PayPal.
If you have some coders or innovators in the IT team give them a 20% project to get a Dispora instance up and running.

You might want to hold off on that.
Orkut Bom Sabado Virus and How to prevent it
Code that focuses on being short is often pretty unreadable though, using really short variable names, lots of unnecessary tricks, no comments and other uglyness.
must know about it ,your you can be hacked quite easily
There's a difference between discipline and subjugation. Many kids have the mentality of slaves - disgruntled, fearful, and angry.
What a pity they didn't add the question 'do you practice safe sex' and colored the dots accordingly.

It would be of far more educational value to the group that was studied and all their peers.

Side note: In the US there are about 750,000 teen pregnancies annually.
Would you let it dry naturally? Or do you have any tips for accelerating the drying process?
Haven't used it, so I have no idea if it's been implemented in hardware beyond the concept, but there's always python-on-a-chip:
http://code.google.com/p/python-on-a-chip/

That being said, programing on an Arduino is very simple and non-intimidating to the point of it being a running ironic joke on many hacking boards whenever a project doesn't involve an Arduino. (eg "Oh, nice logic analyzer you made from scratch with $3 worth of parts, too bad it doesn't involve an Arduino though...")
thanks for the correction.
I've tried a few over the years, and I've yet to find one that can actually deliver on a service level agreement, would you mind sharing which companies you have good experiences with?
Micropayment wallet system, with a spread between buying and selling points.
Yes, Blaschek has a book on it, _Object-Oriented Programming with Prototypes_.
My aversion to using the mouse comes from the main reason I stay proficient in Vim, to allow me to edit files remotely (yeah, sorry, I know that's clique).
They already did, and 6 hours before you posted this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726444
Pursue it as a learning project and resume booster, not as a consumer oriented startup (ie. don't try to get a lot of users and make money from them somehow). You might also be able to sell the tech to some content company, as in: "NYT, buy this from me and I'll put all your archives in it and you can add it as a way to browse your content". Or with a license. Good luck.
Yes. That's why it's a game, and not a serious programming practice.
I think the "loop" is indeed moving on. The last real mini-revolution this side of the line probably were torrents. The whole social web is just wrong. It's centralized. It's not the web - it is a corruption of it. It is like the great minds who could design truly de-centralized, robust, reliable and truly social structures have all just vanished. There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ??? before the profit step. It is indeed a bit sad.

But there is some real fascinating stuff happening in hardware. We have freaking humanoid robots and private rockets. And nothing excites me more about the future than 3d printers. And there is a real and true to the soul open source like effort going on in there. Reprap, makerbot and that awesome 75k inr 3d printer from china... printers that can print themselves! Hardware specs that are shared and re-shared. Ideas and insights shared with gay abandon. No major patent threats anywhere in sight so far. It is the free world.
> What happened to elegance, efficiency, and modular, maintainable design?

Each app having it's own copy of the libraries it needs is actually MORE maintainable.

It's not uncommon for a newer version of a library to introduce a change which breaks something in your app. One example from my work: we tried building with a newer version of Qt and all our text was suddenly getting rendered upside-down due to changes in how Qt uses OpenGL. If we had been using the system copy of Qt, it would have been our customers seeing this problem instead of our dev team.

There are other advantages too, but to my mind this alone is enough reason to bundle libraries with your app.
Not necessarily the best example:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286,00....

(Building a Media Empire Around I Can Has Cheezburger)
Strangely enough, this happened to me 4 years ago. I think they called it middle age crisis? Anyways, what I did then was switched from being in IT field to aquaculture. I built a fish farm, raised some fish, learn all about aquaculture, built a profitable little business.

And yet... something techies deep inside me keeps stirring. The need to create something shiny and new and the feeling I get when I say "I made this" is just indescribable. Thats why early this year I sold my fish farm and started an IT company... again. :P
Dave McClure writes that way deliberately? Then he Wants me to think he's an idiot I guess. What other conclusion?
"You should shut up if you have nothing to say" ...that goes with the herd

look at this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722384 as an example.

If someone says interesting things occasionally, and never says pointless things, they add to the signal (rather than noise).

not in all cases.

Do you think anyone can successfully argue in favour of communism without being voted into oblivion?
True, but the point of the article is that both now have this level of know-how. So all bets are again off once physical security is compromised - regardless of whether its a farmboy from Langley or Nebraska.
The actual article mentioned in the link: http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/stovel/Chains.pdf

See also: "The web of human sexual contacts" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6840/full/411907a...

(Non pay-wall version: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0106507 )
"Then he Wants me to think he's an idiot"

Because you do not appreciate his art?

I am only guessing that it is because he was to be looked as someone who does not give two. And want to also stand out. I admire that. Maybe it can be toned down a little bit because society forces it.
> You're making an implicit assumption; something exists, therefore it was created by an intelligent being.

On a certain level, this is true. It depends on how you define 'god' as a concept.
This problem is different from the Python issue Zed Shaw wrote about.

In Java, developers will bundle dozens of random .jar files with their application. Other versions of these libraries may exist in a Linux distribution already, but specific Java apps aren't linking to those and carefully documenting how to install all the dependencies (or which ones are optional). Instead, from the distro's point of view, these Java apps are being released with a bunch of binary blobs that may or may not contain bugs that need patching later. Which partly defeats the purpose of package management.

Python programmers don't do this. Distros love Python, which is why so many of their system administration/automation scripts depend on it. This puts some tension between packagers, who use it as a bash/perl replacement, and developers like Zed, who want to treat it like an up-to-date library -- but realize that the Java solution of just bundling the whole thing with the main app is ugly. That tension exists because Python developers haven't run amok the way Java developers have.
My sister recently posted an old photo with herself, some friends and me on it. For a few hours all those people who often haven’t seen each other in years met in the comments.

It seems obvious to me that a service like Facebook is useful and desirable. The specific implementation has much I don’t like but the concept is great.
This is kind of a useful sign actually. When things look bleak like this, it usually means you're on the verge of something radically new ... and that's exciting to think about. Its like the guy who said "lets close the patent office 'cos everything that can be invented has already been invented."

This might be useful too -

A long time ago, someone on HN wrote about a similar give up point he came to in his life (sorry can't locate that post, but I recall it quite well). He decided to take a year off the industry - completely cut off. Just doing stuff like rock climbing, traveling, etc. .. until one day he had an epiphany that he'd taken up software in the first place because he loved it. He then got back in, full of enthusiasm.

So looks like taking a total break for a while can make things clear.
and http://golf.shinh.org/ accepts even more languages (80) but it is 'less refined'
I don't see a better way to do it, but what would make them think that results based on asking teenagers who they are having sex with would be reliable/actionable? This isn't even addressed in the article?
The Market War Between Traders and Investors
These are the PayPal dev challenge entries
Diaspora? might be another security nightmare: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...
This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

Enterprises don't need social solutions. They need good management and good application software. Everything else is a band-aid on the wrong wound.

It seems like every enterprise I work at has almost every gadget imaginable on their intranet: policies and procedures in a wiki, tips and tricks in another wiki, special domain knowledge in yet another wiki, an HR portal, project management apps, help desk apps, integration with email, integration with Office, integration with smart phones, etc., etc., etc. And how much difference does it make? Not much, I would guess.

People need access to exactly the information they need served up exactly as the need it to solve the problem at hand. This is called "good application software". And the need the resources, guidance, and direction to do the right thing. This is called "good management". Without these two, it's hard to get anything done. With them, those gadgets aren't really necessary.
That's probably because this is a press release/internal news item, not the research paper itself.

That said, I have no idea if they discuss that in the paper either.
Was Leonardo DaVinci a Hacker?
Was Leonardo a hacker? Obviously there as no code back then. And today the term hacker is connected to code/programmers. So I guess the questions is really "Can a non-programmer can be a hacker?"

To me it seems to be more about the spirit of invention, willingness to work at something when your not sure of the outcome. Perhaps a hacker is just an inventor in the digital age.

If that's true then I am definitely a hacker. If not, and if hacker must write code then... sadly, I am not a hacker, at least not a very good one. But if being hacker is about invention then I am a super hacker! While I am able to code html/css/js at a novice level my abilities are really about invention. So I wonder and ask everyone: Can a non programmer be a hacker?