skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it's less about the language you're coding in and more about the project. Find something engaging and interesting to work on and derive happiness from that.

Of course, liking the tool you're using can help, but it shouldn't be the defining factor.
Company Stock Certs Question
I'm a stockholder in my small private company. Management is asking for my stock certificates so that they have quick access to them in the event the company is acquired. Having not dealt with such things previously, and wanting to protect my rights as a stockholder, should I give them the stock certificates in exchange for a copy of them?
My experience is almost identical to yours. Taught myself BASIC from library books as a kid, then C++ as a teenager. When I started using Linux and discovered Perl, it was an amazing spike in productivity. I eventually switched to Python (and then a bunch of other languages), but Perl got me out of a C++ rut.

Nowadays I'd rather use C than C++ (typically with Lua), and have learned quite a bit from Lisp, Prolog, Forth, ML, etc. as well, but the sheer immediacy of Perl and vi was a revelation to a kid used to Borland Turbo C++ and its IDE.
True to a degree. Think of small local papers as having a 10-year buffer--they're like looking at large papers in 2001.

There are several groups trying to kill small papers (like patch.com). And they will succeed if newspapers do not rise to the challenge. Technology is becoming cheap and accessible enough that makes this scenario possible. But the difference between patch and a local paper is that Patch doesn't really care about the markets they server--if they stop making a enough revenue they could pull out and leave after they've killed the small paper serving that market.
A Solipsist's Guide to Comparative Advantage
The Real Cost of Your Debt
But you still can't delete the data they have about you right?
What promise? The point was that the managers won't promise anything.

The promise that you'd get time to do the fix. Which didn't happen. That was how I read:

> > we'll do the quick hack, but only if we're then allowed, in the very short term, to make the fix properly.

>What happens when you're not allowed to fix/improve/refactor the hack? Sometimes developers are assigned new tasks immediately.
I have never seen anybody hitting back for real where it didn't work.
I wrote a similar Python script[1] a couple of months ago that crawls the Graph API and downloads all your Facebook notes and photos. I recently started work on the script again, but after today's announcement, I will probably stop development. Oh well.

[1]: http://www.github.com/derferman/scrapebook
About 80% from ads.
This kind of reminds me of the beginning of the Ninth Gate, a rather under-appreciated Johnny Depp movie from about 10 years ago.

Without, of course, the hot woman who turns out to be Satan.
Local journalism is worth saving. Nothing he talks about is intrinsic to print.
This seems like kind of a weird arbitrage opportunity. Why don't bookshop owners use the exact same setup to price books when they buy them in the first place?
This is immoral and sick.
> Don't use a SSD without having backups on a daily basis!

That goes for hard disks just the same.
Just a couple of quick tips and things to point out after spending a few minutes chatting with everyone in the group.

At this time you either can't (or it's not apparent how to) opt out of chat for a given group. You have to sign out of chat all-together.

You can opt out of email notifcations by clicking the "Edit Notifcations" on the top right of the Group window.

If you comment on a post, you're automatically subscribed to that post and begin recieving notifcations when others comment. You can also opt out of these on a per-post basis by clicking the "unsubscribe" link under the title of each post.

Hope that helps alleviate some of the noise so the group stays useful to everyone.
That's what I mean, they have the data of 500 million people. But if those people want to move on having an easy export feature will make things much easier.

When everyone moved from MySpace to Facebook they had to re-do their profile in the new system. Hopefully when FooThingy replaces Facebook importing will be just a click away.
There have been 3-4 linkedin groups, they never go anywhere ;)
I switched from AT&T to Verizon for the original Droid back in November 2009. There probably aren't that many people like me, though.
http://www.github.com seems wildly profitable and was created by a team of 3 hackers, afaik.
The majority of MS windows users don't use Linux either, and the fact that Linux did not run MS apps did not keep a community from pushing forward what an OS and app ecosystem can do.

I'm not thinking 'OMG now I can convert users!', I'm saying, 'Cool, I can possibly evolve what a social network can do for me and a group of friends, while working with the FB ecosystem.'

Facebook will have to build features for the masses - we can build social networks for the subsets of users. We can convince users to download their piece of the social graph by offering a unique niche experience, and getting creative about what it means to interact socially online for the subsets of the masses.

Today's announcement was more than a 'high-road' PR stunt. To extend the linux analogy, FB just made it easy for each user to create a virtual machine where we can run a niche social network side by side with the gigantic ecosystem that is facebook.
Too bad a lot of people have already pointed out that it doesn't even work.
I'm scared to even read this. I hate carrying debt yet I've gotten myself (more than once) into a situation where I've carried bad debt. I am trying to only take on good debt now (debt that is used to make more money for me in the long run that I couldn't have otherwise made without the debt) but I still end up with bad debt because I'm foolish and overspend...sigh... I should probably read the article now.
Which was almost certainly price anchoring by Apple. If they leak to anyone, it's the WSJ.
Gaping holes remain in US cybersecurity plan
Third option: patent is not "owned" by anyone. Anyone can implement the feature without worrying about wasting time/money due to the threat of litigation.
People don't buy smart phones to spend all their time talking on them. I'm sure some people do, but that's not the core feature and not the reason why people buy them.
Question for you all.
A bit ago, I posted the following, which was in minutes at -5 and counting:

-----------------------------------

This is disturbing. Yes, Facebook was sharing your information before -- it was the source of all their ad revenue. But now, instead of individual pieces of data (location, specific interests, etc.), they have the potential to share (read:sell) an entire person's worth of data in a lump. Not saying it will happen immediately, or at all, but I see some serious possibility for harm here. (Cross-site behavior tracking just got a whole lot scarier, if you can link it to a FB profile...)
Of course, there could be some serious academic applications to this, too.
And it makes them look more open, and access to your own data is good.

-----------------------------------

I'm on HN to learn, but the downvotes told me nothing. (No child comments.) So in the interest of writing better comments (and hopefully improving my own analyses), what's wrong with this one?

Is it the cynical outlook? Is there something factually incorrect? Is mine just an unpopular opinion?
I'm looking for feedback, because I didn't expect my comment to bomb like it did.

Anything you can offer is appreciated!
"Your chat message wasn't sent because Hacker News is offline." nice
As I wrote on the wall, I think it might work better for things local (connecting with HN'ers in your area). But I am also thinking that this could actually be a place where I might go to ask for quick advice, stuff that's too small to make a post in here about.
Small local newspapers are in a better place than the big boys — mainly because they don't tend to have as much debt — but they're actually harder hit by things like Craigslist and Yelp murdering previously lucrative ad markets.

Incidentally, I blame the newspapers themselves for that. They could have been Craigslist, but instead they were too slow to adapt and got squashed by a better product.
At its height, how big was MySpace compared to where Facebook is at now?

Somebody has always said something like this about some predecessor.
This job description reads, at least to me, like the minimum requirements for any frontend developer position. It's not clear to me what makes this a lead position.

I started to go on a rant about what job descriptions are generally missing, but then I clicked through the day in the life link and that basically answered my questions. Incorporate some of that onto the job page.

As to what I liked: My personal primary factors in fit are the amount of autonomy (including hours), process overhead, and the fact that I care about user experience, tools, and code quality but not about making money. Put differently, I expect someone else to be worried about the what and when ($) but I generally want as much control over the how as I can get. That's not to say I want to be a cowboy coder, but autonomy is what makes coding a craft instead of just labor.

Edit: I'm not really looking to apply, just happened to hit HN in between things and got annoyed.
ads + affiliate referrals.
Sure, but isn't the purpose of critics to be quelled?
No, it's not; video is complicated, and it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side than to expect every client to be able to a) play back any arbitrary bitstream or b) transcode on the fly. In a ideal world, we'd all be serving up 10-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV and your computer would be able to handle it (to say nothing of your phone); but until that happy day of unlimited bandwidth and free cycles, multiple bitstreams is hardly an onerous cost to pay.
MIT proposes to Reinvent the 737 for 70% greater fuel efficiency
#startups irc.freenode.net
It really depends. Taking a hard black&white stance on other side is just silly.

Say you have an SSD that consists of 8x16GB chips. Internally it's implemented in something like a RAID0 array, which is why they're so fast. If the capacity doubles / size shrinks by a factor of 2 and someone decides to stick 16x16GB chips in the next gen SSD then you will see a speed increase. On the other hand if they go for 8x32GB you won't.
Your comment just didn't make any sense. They already have all of this information. How on earth does giving it to you in a zip file make it more likely for them to sell it to other people?
There was a lot of buzz about location based/aware services for years before this, see HP Cooltown, which dates back to 2001.

http://www.w3.org/Mobile/posdep/HPw3cwapref.html

Developers interested in creating location based services had to wait until carriers allowed the requisite devices and started offering reasonable data plans. It was only in the second half of 2008 that Apple's app store launched. As a Palm developer around 2002 I talked with fellow enthusiasts about leaving digital "graffiti" at various locations using GPS, for only friends or subsets thereof. I looked into developing for Verizon with J2ME and BREW, but there was no clear path to getting an app published, no public API to get location, and data plans were out of reach for most of the public.

Apple managed to pry its way in with the 2007 release of iPhone, allowing users to see what is possible when carriers relax their restrictions. Other competitors are still effectively locked out though, due to device "subsidies". Your monthly bill on AT&T remains the same whether you buy a $200-$300 subsidized smart phone or spend $300 more for an unsubsidized model not sold by the carrier. Most people don't seem to understand this and simply see unsubsidized phones as a rip off. There is a big penalty for choosing a phone outside the carrier's selections, and in the case of Verizon, outside choices aren't possible. This leaves little incentive for new players to enter the smart phone market, because after all the R&D, you are likely to be locked out.

It was only by around 2007 that there were indications that the carriers may offer a path to developing a location based services, with check ins and tracking friends being one of the most basic applications. Just about the time this patent was filed for. By that point though, a lot of location based service ideas had been floated around by enthusiasts for a couple years already.
Agreed. Newspapers aren't dying, they're slowly committing suicide.
There are plenty of non-profit news operations popping up around the country that you might find more valuable than the pageview-centric for-profits. Check out Voice of San Diego: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/
I'm always wary when articles refer (either positively or negatively) to "capitalism", more so when they ascribe actions to it. Depending on what one means by the term, and ones preconceptions, the response to the notion that the poor are helped by "capitalism" can range from "well, of course" to "how surprising." I'm not clear on exactly what the Times thinks capitalism is, but their tone falls towards the latter.

The following article does a good job of conveying the problems with labels such as "capitalism" and "socialism":

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2006/05/15/long-on-z...
It bugs me to see people using logic to predict how Libya will handle its registrar. I have zero sympathy for vb.ly, but, for what it's worth, I'm going to have zero sympathy for bit.ly if Libya shakes them down too. You're dealing with a company that has no rule of law. Caveat emptor.
I agree, but some people just want someone to tell their online friends that they died, I guess...
I've set up some blazingly fast SSD based servers, the first one in 2007, using 16GB MTron SSDs. SSDs are a game changer for databases.
To be fair, the MBP high resolution option isn't exactly low-DPI. It's lower than FHD on a T510, but not by much.

MBPs also have battery life I wish I could get out of my T400. Sitting through an afternoon of lectures, I would have to crank my screen all the way down to get through with my 6 cell, while my neighbours with their MBPs could happily cruise their with their screens nice and bright.

Still love my T400. (And I'll admit, sometimes I wish I didn't have those mouse buttons right under the space bar. Sometimes having a giant trackpad is sooo nice)
So basically entire report based on stuff some people heard from some other people. "Apple is also developing a new iPhone model, said people briefed on the matter"
It's fine and dandy to talk about the psychology of bullying and how there are different tools to deal with it and all that, but when you're a kid and don't know any better, I think it's a lot easier to just do what he suggested and get physical.

I've always been a small, calm and rational person, but when it came down to it, I would just bite whoever was trying to bully me. As it turns out, the jaw is one of the strongest muscles in the body and it certainly does not look cool to have your eyes tearing up while having your finger being chewed by a shrimp.
I bought the 2010 3.2 Quad for the following reasons:

* I can't stand glossy monitors they give me a headache.
* All-in-one equipment is like writing a huge multipurpose function, one part breaks the whole thing is junk or very expensive to repair.
* Expandability, I plan on having this machine for a while.
* Lower priced after market components versus notebook sized components.
Wow...that felt like the love child of Frogger and Tetris. Fun to watch, but not exactly a good use of time.
kbob was replying to a post about a "performance boost" and then claimed without qualification that HDs were "on the Moore's Law trajectory"... I didn't invent anything here.
"Please try again later"

As kt has already pointed out, it hasn't worked. To my knowledge it hasn't worked for weeks now. Facebook has made no mention of its status.
There's truth in this argument, but it doesn't disprove the concept.

As you say, there's one way to solve the grounding problem: if you've got a system that does a job successfully, you've solved the grounding problem in a particular context. For instance, the meaning of the word "red" can be linked to a certain area of RGB or HSV color space. This is sufficient to find photographs that have a lot of "red" in them or to direct a robot to find "red" blocks.

For a system like NELL to really work there needs to be a feedback loop that tests its knowledge base against reality, that is, it has to do something useful. I don't think this is ever quite going to happen in the academy, but I think commercial systems are generally get closer and closer to the capabilities that Cyc was aiming for.

And even though the "usefulness" of knowledge and ontologies is entirely contingent on a particular application, I think there's enough commonality in the human experience that someday there really is going to be a commonsense knowledge database underlying many sorts of applications.

Cyc is perceived as a failure precisely because it's been commercially successful as it exists. Doug Lenat has supported 50 or so developers for 15 years... From a commercial standpoint, that's a wonderful success. Had Lenat been backed in the corner where the only way to succeed would be to make something that changes the world, he might have changed the world -- however, he found a way to pay his way with a system that's good enough for government work.
Sony's Crackle movie and TV streaming service debuts on Android phone app market
Does your Business Apps have Open API?
Sometimes a cool feature is just a cool feature.
It's an interesting idea, but more typically the service generates a unique key and puts that in the URL. You can then bookmark that URL to "log in." Just pointing this out as most will find it easier to save a bookmark and "come up with a login phrase" could be a real "whoa.. what?" stumbling block for some potential users.
I have. I got beaten up, and once the bully had demonstrated his ability to beat me up at will, things got worse.

It is worth noting that one cause of bullying is a way for the bully to feel better about himself. In my case said bully had failed 2 grades, and so chose to pick on a smart kid who was not popular to make himself feel better.
I think my friend said it best during a conversation we were having a few weeks ago:

Him: "So, what was high school like for you?"
Me: "It was pretty shitty. I didn't really fit in anywhere."
Him: "That makes sense - this sense of being the outcast always seems to carry over to anyone's next endeavor."

And I can see that, too. I never really fit in anywhere, not even with the nerds nor the AP kids. While everyone was postering and bullying me around, I worked on Linux machines in the back area of an IT office in our school. Then after school, I would usually go home and hacked on Linux and played video games all day.

It was pretty soul crushing, though I'm better for it - now I work on UNIX systems all day, and I couldn't have asked for a better job than this. However, I still struggle with depression and feeling like an "outcast" no matter where I go. Maybe my friend is right - this sense of ennui was a bit of a carry over from my high school (and even college) days. (for those wondering, one of my old alma maters, Seattle University, was a hell hole. It was high school extended to another four years. I didn't want any more of that shit.)
It is quite possible that I'm just sour grapeing the industry because I have failed myself several times. my experience:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761329

In this case, I just don't understand why they'd not take the person when I suggested them (I think they had reason to respect and trust my opinion; I had been working for them for a while, giving good advice. In fact, all this was in preparation for me leaving; after I had been at the new job for a year or so they spent considerable effort and money getting me to come back.)

I was trying to get them to hire someone who worked for me for some time (which is to say someone who's work habits and skills I knew well) to fill the position I was leaving vacant.

The agency in question had a long history of sending us people for mid to senior sysadmin positions who I wouldn't hire for $15/hr.

So yeah, I am missing something about how the industry works, and middle management covering it's ass fits the symptoms perfectly.

Obviously there could be something else going on that I don't understand.
For ages I have dreamed about a service where shoppers could visit flea markets and do an immediate auction if they find something of value. There would be a live stream of "interesting" items on the site, and anybody who wants to buy could immediately connect to the shopper to make him buy the item.

I guess there were too many problems with this model, and I didn't expect high interest (I was more in love with it from a tech angle, doing stuff with phones...). But I just realized that this book scanning business is actually a viable subset of that idea. If image recognition was better, it could also work for other items besides books. (Perhaps image recognition technology is actually good enough by now).
It's because nerds don't like to talk on the phone. They prefer email and other asynchronous messaging methods.

Here are cases I've used:

1) Take a call while tethered (I think USians on AT&T underestimate this use case)

2) Send an email while on a call a discuss to discuss attachements. (PDF, image mockups, etc)

3) Send an iCal event and juggle schedules to meet

4) Take a call while running with RunKeeper in the background

5) Refer to Twitter DMs while on a call

6) Sync DropBox/iDisk while on a call to talk about documents

7) Look up directions on Google Maps for the caller

8) Look up movies on Flixster and decide which movie to go to.

9) Play games while on hold
...That... _does_ makes sense.
Color me embarassed.
"R is Hot" - new recurring series on Revolutions
It might just be an OS X issue as I rarely have a browser window open fullscreen. If the dock wasn't there, it would be above the fold.

Then again, I bet a fairly significant portion of the target audience for this newsletter uses a Mac.
I didn't downvote you, but here is what I think may have motivated the downvoters:

Assuming facebook is using some form of SQL doing that would be as simple as "SELECT INTO OUTFILE" with the appropriate clauses, so this doesn't add anything whatsoever to the threat from the direction of facebook.

If someone manages to hack in to your facebook account it's become marginally easier, but a well written bot would have a lesser problem digging out your profile than you as a user would, so facebook just made it a bit easier for users to get at their own data at 0 cost to them, and with a negligible security risk in the case of a compromised account.

That does not detract from the fact that I think that this is largely a PR move and that any real benefit is quite small, other than for those people that would like to have their data in several places.

In those cases facebook probably comes out ahead because you now only have to upload to facebook to be able to export it to another service (I don't think it will be long before the first 'import' utilities will be made).
Hi andrewtbham,

It is best to reserve this type of project to native developers only -- even if you do outsource it online. You simply cannot reinforce your country's laws in an area that doesn't or refuses to recognize them.
I'm surprised people haven't seen this before, considering how many times it's been posted on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/domain/erqqvg.com/top/?t=all

What's really interesting is how fast the votes come in now vs. when this released early last year before the 2009 giant uptick in popularity of Reddit.