skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a fan, huh? :) I can appreciate that, but I'm curious to know what kinds of things you'd prefer to see. It doesn't look like you've submitted much to HN, so it's hard to get a sense of what kinds of content you'd like to see here.

I haven't been writing for that long, and I'm sure I suck in many ways, so rather than just complain, tell me what I can do to improve.
> "500 USD for 6 months and also 2 - 4 hrs commitment everyday"

> "My co-founder paid for 2 months"

> "10-15 days avg 1-2 hrs on advicing"

Not a lawyer, but based on the post I would suspect that there is a straight forward argument under common law that the ex-cofounder was in breech of contract.
The gross throughput factor is hugely oversold for the vast majority of uses: In most scenarios IOPS is Godzilla to throughput's mouse. IOPS is reality, and throughput is something that only generally comes up in benchmarks.
Russian Flying Fortresses
I was working on a Django app a few months ago that required a lot of chart features. I was impressed with how easy sparklines is to use but for some larger charts I used flot.
dan·ger·ous
[deyn-jer-uhs, deynj-ruhs]
–adjective
1. full of danger or risk; causing danger; perilous; risky; hazardous; unsafe.
2. able or likely to cause physical injury

Who's out of touch here? We're all making such a huge deal about this with very little reason. The websites that truly need SSL (banking, purchasing, etc.) use it. People have real dangers to worry about; why should they care if someone can pretend to be them on a couple social websites that they just joined in the last year or two?
> There is no distinction between you and an "actual" attacker. You seem to have labored within a nimbus of self-righteous nerd egotism that someone more criminally minded might not have...

That sounds exactly like a distinction to me. A fireman would break into a house to save a child. A burglar would break into a house to steal valuables. One intends harm, the other doesn't.

> did so not by the means most efficient or effective, but the means readily available and most likely to satisfy your urge to feel superior to your fellow man.

There's no such thing as true altruism. Why he did it isn't relevant. People feel good about doing good deeds. Sure, they say "I want to help people," but they really mean something more along the lines of "I want to feel good about myself."

Further, why would it be necessary for him to choose the most effective or efficient means? He owes these people nothing.

> There is no security problem for which "exploit the problem to harass strangers in coffee shops" is the solution.

Maybe not the best or even a good solution, but it's certainly still one. ;)
I'll return to these comments and come back to you if anything comes of it.

ADDED IN EDIT: I've now associatively filed your email address as well.
Cupcake LLC owner can be personally liable for company's trademark infringement
There's no way that would be at all productive. It's not like the only thing that the artist is doing is typing characters on a screen. There's also a lot more going on than just echoing pixels like in an IDE.

For a character animator, there's an IK rig which, depending on the character, can be quite complicated, and IK involves a lot of math. Then there's the mesh deformation and blended IK/FK. And then things like hair and cloth simulation. And texture rendering. Doing that on a cloud would have latencies that would make it excruciating to work with.

Compositing would be just as bad; the amount of data involved is larger, and as you add layers and masks, filters that affect those layers and masks, you can pretty much throw any hope of interactivity out the window. Now imagine trying to paint out safety wires over a cloud...

Digital art requires a LOT more computing power than creating software.

Try playing a first person shooter on a laggy network, you'll get a sense for how frustrating and counter-productive what you're suggesting would end up being, though I suspect that it's because you're vastly underestimating how much goes on in digital artists' tools more than anything else.
That's a great library but I'll have to pay u$s360 if I want to use it. In my country it'll be ~u$s1300.
And they only really remember the issue after it bites them in the ass. Most CS majors, for that matter, probably don't really think about or remember the issue until after it bites them. I would expect a really good programming course (if one exists), to present exercises that actively cause the students to run into these types of problems, but from what I have seen there has been a progressive de-emphasis on "trick" questions and really confusing problems, at least in some schools, in favor of self-esteem and "empowerment".
yeah, and if each fake personality lead to a rick roll or worse...
Actually you are talking about a specific implementation of Scheme. Probably PLT Scheme? An standard compliant implementation can just stick to floating point for everything as the bare miminum. PLT Scheme is the Scheme to go for, though.
We have discussed it, and even considered just building an HTTP layer on top of it, but haven't done anything with it yet. As for supporting the memcached protocol, we considered that, too, and at this point, we're not targeting that use case. Personally, I've been planning on using this for entirely client-side JavaScript apps, where a memcache layer wouldn't be useful at all.

(That being said, the code is up on github, and patches are welcome. :)
> However, if you had pulled your money out of the market on the 10 best single days of those 20 years, your return would drop to 4.5%. If you took out the best 30 days from the past 20 years, you'd have a 0% return! Imagine that, 30 days out of 20 years, and it would cost you all your gains.

I suspect that the 10 and 30 worst days had comparable effect, albeit in the other direction.

You can't win if you don't play, but neither that nor the dominance of "big win days" implies that you should play every day.
The "contest" is on my to-do list, from which things are slowly getting excised. The "Spikey Spheres" article was one, the 1800 dimensional optimisation is the next.
Some day.

Look, aw3c2 wasn't saying there weren't ever going to be custom phones, but this company's been doing an awful lot of press work, only having a Photoshop mockup and website to show for it.

The picture of the circuit board isn't even a mobile phone circuit. The company's makes no mention of prototypes or any hardware engineering. I would expect to see this stuff for a company shipping Q1 2011.
The overhead of running your webserver itself of SSL isn't that huge a deal. But it usually means you also need to load all images and static assets off a HTTPS server, which makes things a bit more complicated than just throwing them on a cheap CDN. And, of course, using HTTPS means you skip any caching proxies that are between you and the user.
I do. And my neighbors are hard-working, decent people, despite not having large salaries and getting dirty at work.

I did however, grow up in an affluent neighborhood, and I seem to recall that some people there neither angels nor saints. Maybe about as many as in my current locale.
Veritcal split has been integrated into GNU screen for a while now: CTRL-A |
In addition to talking about the good and bad of elite educations, Deresiewicz's piece also strongly praises the traditional liberal arts degree. He seems to think it far more valuable than more practical degrees. But, I'm not convinced.

First, shying away from practical studies reminds me of exactly the fallacy that drove me to leave philosophy after I finished in undergrad. My experience was very similar to what pg writes about in http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html. Asking the 'big questions' devolved into quibbling over split hairs and avoiding useful, testable hypotheses that could really make the world a better place (not that 'big questions' are bad, but we should try solving them in useful ways, not randomly)

Also, the author seems to think that a glorified form of vocational training is a bad thing. But, could it be possible to create an educational system where vocational training creates the thinking man Deresiewicz wants? That is, could an interest in say, programming, motivate studying history by examining the development of mathematics and computing machines over time? Could it lead to a study of economics through questions about the Pareto Principle or the right way to offer our programs to the public (free, product, service, and so on)? Could it lead to philosophy and psychology by asking if man is potentially programmable and why certain types of programs can't be written with our current model of computation?

In short, could vocational training take a singular interest and use it to create the sort of individuals Deresiewicz decries elite schools for failing to produce?
I am a (committed christian / zombie) and I strongly object to you using (this dangerous evil / our proud heritage ) in your advertising campaign.

Won't someone please think of the ( children / brains )!
>Debate me by all means, don't silence me. I tried to be honest and keep an even town. I was on topic. Just because you believe that my opinion is wrong doesn't mean that you have to down-vote me for it.

I think your post was downvoted for being dogmatic (e.g. "Open source is the way, the truth and the light!"), not for being wrong. On a side note, don't fret getting down voted so much. Who cares. Once you get 200 karma you can downvote people but other than that I don't know of anything that more karma buys.

>It appears to me from looking at the software landscape that open source is becoming more and more pervasive all the time.

This is because you're seeing it as some kind of ideology. It isn't. It's a loss leader. You see people doing loss leader all over the place (e.g. milk sold below cost, gaming consoles, television for free but with commercials, etc., etc.), do you think there is a growing trend of people who want to pay you for using their product? Of course not, it's part of a larger strategy. Just like open source.

>That's unfair and unkind on your part to equate what I feel as pretty rational beliefs with religious thinking.

When you see the same thing as everyone else but ascribe it to some "higher power" when there is no evidence of such what should I call it?

>Look at the valuation* of Redhat (the champion free software company) vs Microsoft (the champion proprietary company over the last two years for instance ... What does that stock movement tell you?

And bizarre examples like this further point to irrational thinking on your part. Microsoft dwarfs Redhat in every meaningful way. Are you comparing stock prices between the two [1]? And if you want to talk about the champion of proprietary software I think Apple has a better stake on that claim. They just recently blew past Microsoft in market cap (the metric you should be looking at if you're trying to judge valuation of a company).

>You can't say that Redhat are making a better fist of the console market or a better cloud play or thin client play because Redhat outcompetes Microsoft on their own turf (server software and support) and this is all due to open source software.

Redhat isn't remotely relevant to Microsoft. MS is worried about Google and Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if Ballmer didn't even know Redhat was still around as a company.

>It seems to me that all the big IT companies get this - HP gets it, IBM get it, Oracle now get it through SUN, Yahoo gets it, Google definitely get it ... Microsoft are conspicuous by their absence to the party.

No idea what you're talking about here. Frankly this sentence sounds absolutely delusional. Oracle "gets it" via Sun? Do you read the news? Every single one of those companies you mentioned rely on proprietary software. Sure, they use free software. Some even do some loss leader with it (e.g. Google). So what? Microsoft also gives away software btw. Out of that list it is beyond bizarre that you would give Oracle a pass but single out Microsoft. I feel like I'm having a conversation on slashdot in the late '90s.

[1] http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/10/22/red-hat-vs-microsoft-the...
Funny thing is that Disneyland does have a death penalty...last time I checked...
When I let my kids play this game I usually hear a "Daaaaad" after two minutes because they are in the App Store after clicking the ad on accident and don't know what to do.

Same happens on the Fart apps.

I have a feeling that if you have a game simple enough that kids like it, and it has ads, you're getting a lot of "kid clicks".
1] This is easily fixed in .screenrc:

startup_message off

defscrollback 10000
The point of my comment was that the parent is no more qualified to make this statement than James Cameron was to make the original. It's like doing statistics by eyeball: you possibly say something's "pure nonsense" except for effect without understanding what you're talking about, and I'm sure James Cameron has some context for making these statements.
Thanks for your suggestion, I had previously checked Flot but didn't use it because I didn't see a pie chart in the examples. Now I looked again and the pie chart is in the trunk version.
Just be careful to not use BigDecimal when you really should be using an int (e.g. currency).
We use Flot successfully, but have also looked at jqplot.
There was a good discussion about it on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548029/how-much-overhead-...

The bottom line is that with keep-alive connections, the overhead should be less of a problem, since the only expensive part is the initial RSA key generation.
I'm pretty sure the L syntax has gone away in Python3, with numbers being auto-promoted to Long if they're going to overflow. I'm a bit hazy about this, but I think I talked to the maintainer over lunch at PyCon two years ago.
> For instance, anything 1k or up must be in writing in Georgia.

IANAL, but chat or email probably count as "in writing."
Apple Now Larger than RIM
Lol. I've been in retail and market research for 15 years. Trust me. They aren't that smart. And they don't look at as much data as they could. You would assume so, because you think that as a consumer, who is as impressed with the company for being Apple, that it must be doing something to make themselves the Apple that they are, but retail companies look at a shockingly basic amount of trends, and the rest they hire professionals to shuffle numbers around with. It's alot of luck and guess work. Yes, this includes Apple. it's just a company, that you like.
37signals is flattered [said with a SMILE : ), everyone!]
The Nook Color Might Be a Better Android Tablet Than We Thought
But this is what the Vegas analogy means: if you follow the optimal strategy while gambling and stop when you've gambled enough to be comped a room, you'll be +EV compared to the normal cost of the room. It's just as easy as paying off your credit card bill every month, assuming similar levels of financial discipline.
The efficient market theory doesn't say that the market predicts winners. It says that the market reflects all known (or knowable, depending on version) information. Actually, it doesn't say exactly that either, it says that prices reflect valuation (which is affected by knowledge) and resources.

Sometimes "we" don't know, or the people who do know don't have enough resources to push the rest of us to the appropriate conclusion.
I'm not sure any type system can even notice that I returned True instead of False, had a 'not' where I shouldn't, that I forgot about operator precedence in some spot, that the string I return indeed has the format asked by in a specification, that I validated all input correctly, etc.

Unit tests are useful for all these ugly things that come from developers not paying attention to something. I've found them extremely useful as a sanity check when I get a particular specification (might it be a design document, an API or a specific RFC).

Then again, the testing I usually found the most useful had to be integration testing. I would just sit with the testers, see what they expect the program to be and basically translate the test cases they would do (or that I would do in a REPL) into a module and run it. Lots of time saved for everyone in the process.
The Future of 3rd Party Library Documentation
Just posted my thoughts on how I see 3rd party library documentation someday being tied to your executable acceptance tests. Would love to get others' thoughts on this! http://bit.ly/dp-docs
Kent Beck: Minimum Viable Product revisited
In case you've gotten used to just using screen on your local machine as I have, as a handy way to manage multiple "ascii desktops":

A useful trick is to ssh to a remote machine and start a screen session on the remote machine. Then you can start long-running jobs on the remote machine, detach, turn your local machine off, come back later, and ssh and re-attach to check on progress.

I assume tmux and similar screen-like programs can all do this.
An interesting view of the future and a persuasive argument, though I think your timeline in unrealistic. 20 years ago computers were PCs powered by Windows and they still are; expecting a wholesale paradigm shift and migration in 10 years seems too fast. But then, computing often moves faster than we expect, so I'll met you here in 2020 and we can see who was right :-)
What? Unless he is still bound by some Amazon NDA or something, what difference does it make if he violates the policies of someone he no longer works for?
I hope that chart and visualization makers will get the memo. It's insane to try to distinguish some nearly identical (to me) colors in a legend of some silly line chart. And that's simply way too common.
Intel opens $1 billion chip factory in Vietnam
That's a great idea; I'll see what I can do towards that end. Will need a way for those users to claim their entries..
A new approach to the resume skills section
I don't think that is the point being made at all. I think the writer is pointing out that there are multiple ways of experiencing "Freedom". My experience has been that in the US freedom is often viewed as the sum of permitted personal decisions that can occur without (Or with minimal) government restraint or influence, so typically we focus on things like freedom of speech, the freedom to ride motorcycles without a helmet, the freedom to own guns, the freedom to start a business, the freedom to vote, etc.(And these are just kind of randomly selected from various examples that popped to mind and not meant to be exhaustive). A "rugged individualist" approach to freedom if you will.

Singapore seems to take a "pragmatic collectivist" approach to freedom. Meaning that anti-social behaviour is strongly limited, and those limits are enforced by the power of the government, but the resulting society has a substantial "Freedom from fear" both from a personal safety perspective, and from a "social security" perspective. Now admittedly these tradeoffs are very different from the tradeoffs in the US, but there is certainly a certain freedom from worry that comes along with it.
USENIX Legacies of Computing
http://0.30000000000000004.com/

Because why not? I've populated it with some languages that I can convenient access to an interpreter for. If you post/send me .1 + .2 in any other languages, I'll try and put them up.
When did they do that? I first saw it in Opera, and that was years before the other browsers had it.
Of course this data is presented in hindsight. If expected value of a return on a company is the probability it's the next G times the percent you own:

E[Return] ~= E[Company] X %Owned

And

E[Company] = P(Company=NextGoogle) X Value(NextGoogle)

If you invest in a portfolio of companies, then you'd try to control the things you can:

1) P(NextGoogle): Impossible to estimate, look for good founders

2) Value(NextGoogle): maximize this (look for big markets)

3) %Owned: maximize this

Note that YC does (1) and (3). I would argue they don't do (2) at all. Noone thought AirBnb would be as big as it is, but they're crushing it.
One in four stars may have earth like planets orbiting around them
We use the Google Charts API - it's free and very good. But I haven't seen many others comment about it. Is there a problem with using that?
Singapore is no longer a Disneyland as there are now two casinos, one is by Sands.
I think the only time it becomes more than just inconvenient is in games and data. I love thinking the monster is green so it should be easy when instead it's yellow and I suffer a quick death.

Also cool to have to interpret data that all looks to be colored the same. Recently I argued at work that I couldn't see the color difference between nodes with problems and healthy ones, they never changed it...
> you don’t let the really good ones get away because they are asking twice as much as you were expecting

The problem is that to actually apply this strategy you have to overpay for everything, because you don't know which ones are the really good ones until after the fact.
"For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes."

I recall reading an article, IIRC in CineFX, about the Godzilla model in Gozilla 2000 (the Devlin and Emmerich film). The textures for their Godzilla model alone were something like 900 MB.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Pixar introduced a renderfarm hosted in Azure.

Although the amount of data is very large, you don't general end up taking the bandwidth hit all at once. If you have your renderfarm set up on Azure, you could set up a plugin for your animation software, e.g. Maya, that uploads the assets for the scene you're working on and renders it on an Azure virtual machine configured with multiple processors, then download the rendered image data. One you upload the assets once, you will rarely if ever have to upload the whole lot of them again if the render management software is smart enough to keep track of which files you've modified since the last time you rendered. So you've modified a mesh but none of its textures, it only needs to upload the mesh in order to re-render.

It's hardly trivial, and for the larger shops like WETA Digital that are creating massive, virtual sets with massive, virtual armies modeled and rendered with Massive (couldn't resist :)), they can afford an in-house renderfarm -- and the costs will favor it.

For a smaller shop, that might not be so easy, BUT there are shops that are pulling off some pretty amazing animations without buying the pricey software... outfitting a renderfarm with Photorealistic RenderMan or Mental Ray or Final Render licenses can get quite expensive -- when last I checked, it was something like $2000 or $2500 per machine for a Mental Ray rendernode license. PhotoRealistic RenderMan was in the same price range.
Microsoft's Azure cloud plan favors Java
Google's visualization apis are amazing, cant recommend it enough. The chart ones are nice but you then also have to wrap it yourself to generate the GET request appropriately to the data.
Most CMS Sites Use Wordpress, Largest Budgets Goes to Drupal
This behavior not only seems sensible to me but appropriate. If one uses pixels then one wants a pixel-perfect layout so therefore doesn't want fonts to scale.
The problem is that "elite" doesn't just mean "best", and never did. Look at the etymology [1]: it just means "chosen", which is exactly what it means when referring to the Ivy League.

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=elite
Android Development with Maven
Yeah, we tested it on our WPA encrypted wireless and didn't get anything. It was seen when I logged into facebook but my coworker wasn't able to login as me. At least not with Firesheep.
Reminds me of the the success of Tap Defense on the iPhone, which was (is?) a really successful, free, ad supported game. Its success funded tapjoy.com, which went on to even greater success and an exit.
If only IEEE 754-2008 would gain traction...
Travellers to Mount Everest are well off and in a spending mood.