skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've missed what this issue is about and in fact you have the situation back to front. HPHP, Hadoop and other code is technology which is what Facebook is 'caring' about. Google is concerned about data - making sure that our personal data is ours to move around as we want, not when/how Facebook, Google or any other company wants.

In Google's eyes, our personal data should be portable (but under our control) and hence why they advocate openness. Google already does by allowing sites like Facebook to connect via APIs to access your contacts list and find other friends to invite to Facebook. Facebook however doesn't allow any other company to do a similar arrangement.

Google open, Facebook not. Google should be absolutely supported in their position - it will lead to be a better Net for all of us.
just a smuggling idea: why don't they build an unmanned sub to shuttle the drugs around the border? it could go much deeper (no air needed), move real slowly, stay submerged for a very long time at one place, navigate completely automatically using GPS (except someone needs to pick up the cargo on the other end) and if caught it's hard to catch the smugglers.
In industry you often get to set the estimates yourself. Missing the deadline has less severe consequences because its unlikely you'll get fired for missing the deadline by a day. But on your course its a fixed date and a big fat 0 awaits those who miss it.

Its worth mentioning that estimates are not plans to deliver. Make sure that as you give them in units that represent the amount of confidence you have. Industry recognises things aren't perfect and so often deadlines are a bit more fluid.

If someone else is setting your deadlines and estimating on your behalf its best to treat those with the contempt they deserve and provide your own estimate. Its a sad fact of our industry that this happens so frequently, but its best to nip it in the bud.

In general things are a lot more fluid in industry, the requirements need detailed understanding and the estimates are never right. The pressure is normally less severe, but it really depends on your boss and your dynamic with him/her. In a startup its self imposed pressure so you get to choose how severe it is and how hard you end up working.

Its important as a young developer to make sure you learn the things you are working with well. You need to avoid spending too much time at work so you can get in the necessary reading and practice that makes a better craftsman.
Implement the crm114 discriminator

http://crm114.sourceforge.net/

Teach it the bad messages and off they go.
Maybe, but it is also exceptionally well-written.
Steve Ballmer saved $100 million in taxes selling $2B in MSFT stock
Ah, so it's a business! From the title I thought it was just a domain purchase, that would be the greatest (disclosed) ever by a significant amount if it was.
If there is, it'll just wipe out the half-tries and challenge this generation to evolve or die.

It's not that bad though. People are dependent on technology that keeps getting smarter, faster, and simpler. Who is stopping any of us from spotting large unsolved problems and presenting our solution in product form? JUST DO IT.

We really are living in the best of times and the worst of times...

It feels like Facebook is constricting the unwary masses into a black hole that consumes their time and data. How can we compete for marketshare? Apple has come from almost dead to number 1 in a decade. They used to be hard to hate, now the fanboys are being seduced by the magic of Big Google. Big Google is doing everything for everyone all for free or very cheap, who could resist? It's the same approach that made Bill Gates the world's richest man. It'll probably work and Larry and Sergey can be the founding fathers of the singularity along with that Ray dude.

So...that's leaves us students and hackers alike to try to either come up with a new paradigm of technological innovation or build in their ecosystems for a living. There is a middle path of course, and historically speaking that is the best approach.

If this is what you love and part of your life purpose. Stick to this and don't live in fear. Just keep walking...
I've been wondering much the same thing; so I asked this question on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/What-pitfalls-should-be-avoided-if-inve...

IANAL, but it seems any business so formed must be active in some ongoing non-services business. Still, I'm tempted to form a number of small corporations for each of my 'backburner' ideas, make a small investment, then hire occasional contractors to flesh out the ideas through R&D until they (or a closely-related idea) seems ripe -- perhaps years from now. Then, I'd devote myself full-time to it, and my founders' equity appreciation would remain subject to this one-time 2010 gain exclusion.
wow - no new features in the last 2 years. web2py seems to get a new feature every week even though they promise backwards compatibility.
I heard about it via this link, previously posted to HN:

http://www.goodwinprocter.com/Publications/Newsletters/Clien...
Servers Vs Heaters
I think that's like asking if you use salt when you cook. I can't imagine how you'd get things done any other way.

Here's a quick & dirty Java class file parser I have open in the other window, a representative sample of how I work. I can't imagine how such a thing could be written legibly liberal use of blank lines.

sub parse_class_file {
my($fn) = @_;

my ($name, $super);
# my $interfaces = []; # Not used yet

my $constant_pool = [];
my $fields = {}; # Referenced by name
my $methods = {}; # Referenced by name_description

open(C, "$fn") or die("Could not open '$fn': $!\n");

# Cafebabe
my $magic = read_field(\*C, "H*", 4);

# Class file format version
my $minor = read_field(\*C, "n");
my $major = read_field(\*C, "n");

# Load constant pool
load_constant_pool(\*C, $constant_pool);

# Class name, inheritance
my $access_flags = read_field(\*C, "n");
my $this_class_index = read_field(\*C, "n");
my $super_class_index = read_field(\*C, "n");

# Load interfaces -- just throw them away for right now
my $interface_count = read_field(\*C, "n");
for(my $i = 0; $i < $interface_count; $i++) { read_field(\*C, "n"); }

load_fields(\*C, $fields, $constant_pool);

load_methods(\*C, $methods, $constant_pool);

close(C);

return( { name => $constant_pool->[$this_class_index]->{name},
super => $constant_pool->[$super_class_index]->{name},
fields => $fields,
methods => $methods } );
}
What scale? How many concurrent users of your specific site break MySQL, and how many concurrent users do you have? Not answering or considering those questions is what leads to premature scaling.
Robot "Hand" Made of Coffee Grounds and a Balloon Picks Up Almost Anything
Thanks for sharing. This article inspired me to buy the newer model scanner (S1500) and hope to tame some of the paper sprawl in my life.

If it cuts down even 1/3 of it or makes information retrieval (by searching) at all easier, it's well worth $410 from Newegg!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501

For those of us who weren't around at that time or have forgotten. ktharavaad agrees to attempt it in a grandchild post.
Have either of them published subscriber numbers or growth rates?
Check out: http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/motherboard/colombian-narcosub... - looks like mini subs have already been in use for some time

Google Narcosubs for more
I have no trouble writing JavaScript that brings the mightiest of machines to its knees. I try not to ship that, of course.
>That's not a very good argument. Horse-drawn buggies worked for well over 30 years.

I can't see how this is a good counter-argument either. They still do work, they run on renewable fuel, growing the fuel can be enhanced by the waste products of the horse. They're relatively low maintenance, the motor can be interchanged and easily used to drive other machines. Certainly at city driving speeds the buggy is going to compete quite well.

Yes a car or other automobile is going to outperform a horse & buggy in many situations but there are other aspects that are wins for the horse & buggy.

I'd be interested to see a running cost and efficiency comparison, shoeing horses is probably quite expensive nowadays with the dearth of blacksmiths/farriers.
I don't care to have a login for nytimes.com, but I did notice that the word "Microsoft" gets a big, fat "TM" mark in the first sentence of the article. For an article about pirates, not bad. But maybe someone with the patience to read that monster can say if the NY Times stayed consistent and put "TM" on every instance of "Microsoft"? Did they put an "(R)" on other possible registered trademarks? Did they denote other uses of copyrighted material?
Celebrity or Entrepreneur?
What Marshmallows and Spaghetti Can Teach Your Design Team
That's just something I threw on the new tutor form.

I'm using a real captcha on the contact form for tutors' profiles (which is what is being abused):

Example:
http://berkeley.universitytutor.com/tutors/40157

(click "Send A Message To This Tutor")

There are humans filling them out.
Sure thing. I'll shoot you an email ;)
Yeah, but the point is it was still just an excuse. They could have fired any of dozens of white male incompetents and promoted Adams, but they didn't, because they were protecting the existing power structure. I wonder how many other people got told the same line? I haven't done a census of phone company executives ever but I'd be willing to bet there aren't more than a token handful of minorities in leadership positions (half of them with titles like diversity officer). So it was just a line.
The air is probably for the diesel engines, not the humans. Before nuclear subs, that was the value of the schnorkel: stay mostly-submerged while running the diesels to recharge the electric batteries.
> "Recently, a number of alarming trades have been made inside major software companies"

What makes the recent trades alarming?

Is the current pattern of trades different from those of the past?
Questioning the Authority
Sorry, but if you're comparing open source contributions, Google wins by any metric. Consider Chromium, V8, Android, WebM, GWT, Protocol buffers, the Closure Javascript library+compiler+linter, and jillions of other projects (http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google), not to mention the tremendous support they've given Mozilla over the years, their work in defining and promoting open standards like HTML5, plus indirect contributions via the Google Summer of Code program.
How much time do you have? :)

Great resources:

http://www.cocoontech.com (forum dedicated to exactly your question)

http://www.charmedquark.com (the software package I chose to buy, though there are many others)

There's also some coverage on AVScience, but cocoontech has largely taken over, IMO.
Wordpress automatically create custom fields
IMHO, depending on the situation, it might be even more valuable than rational thinking. Especially on situations where rational thinking fails or where you have to make instant decisions.

I suggest you read 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. The author gives many examples of situations where spontaneous decisions yield better results compared to rational thinking methods.
Yeah, I'm probably doing the same thing :)

Question is: should you just do stupid-cheap WY/NV/etc. formations and then redomicile, or do the real $5-10k corps with full paperwork, agreements, etc.? Or would a top-tier firm/lawyer be willing to discount one principal/owner and 10 corps formed on the same day, in exchange for future business when those corps get used more actively, take subsequent investment, etc.?
A bit of a background on diapers.com - referred to in the article - Recommended Read.

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_42/b41...
> Right-wing paramilitary death squads—which are on U.S. lists of international terrorist organizations.

Wait, did I read that right? From what I now most right-wing paramilitary death squads are on CIA's payroll.
Whatever happened to offering a good or service that people are willing to pay for? Is this really what makes a good business? Absorbing information from "all tech blogs everyday" so that you can regurgitate it on your blog, on your twitter, and at networking meetings?

This blog post reads more like a list of instructions on how to be the prettiest girl at the startup scene dance. These ideas are fine if the people writing the blogs and mingling at networking meetings are your potential customers, but I think most of us would be better served by getting away from all of that to talk to the people outside of the echo chamber. You know, the ones with wallets that MBAs like this guy only come in contact with when they're poring over a spreadsheet.
Huh? What are you talking about?

http://i.imgur.com/85d8G.png
Thanks... part II is actually better than part I.
The real numbers are certainly the most important, but there are confounding factors.
“Intellectual property is a critical engine of economic growth,” Mr. Finn says. “That’s not just for large companies, but also for small businesses and entire countries. We work with governments that are realizing this is in their best interests.”

Did you know that Americans were some of the largest pirate of British literature back in the 19th century? It was even 100% legal too. The public in America have cheaper access to British literature than the British themselves. You can imagine what it did to American literacy rate. ;)

We also benefited from American conducting industrial espionage and British immigrants that sneak out of the country so that we can jumpstart our own industrial revolution.

Now the Chinese are doing the same thing to us.
Logo and Icon designers 
hi, I am currently developing a website and I am not the most talented graphic designer out there. The theme of my page is playfulness - kind of like the 2005 Charlie and chocolate factory or Katy Perry's California Girl. I have the general template set up, but want to add in Logos and Icon/Badges to make the page more alive.

Does anyone have any freelancer to recommande or is a freelancer themselves looking for work, please pm me. Thank you!
I agree, I'm in the North Bay, and I'd be open to helping people work through pyramid, and discussing things in person. Would a meet-up next Thursday night (the 11th) work for some folks? Maybe around the South Bay or SF if someone can get some space?
I was sarcastic once.
Perhaps NYTime is conducting an A/B experiment to see which readers make more money.

So one guy get a registration link, the other guys get to read the article.
if he chooses to release the code
Radio communications for subs are very problematic because water is conductive and more or less shields all radio waves.

AFAIK there is a way to communicate through radio with an underwater sub but involves complex antennas very long radio waves and complex signal processing, etc. There is no way a sub would be able to get a GPS signal under water.

It is possible to have a sub that runs under water most of the time and only occasionally pops up to get its location via GPS, but that would require very complex autopilot software, which the narco trafficers do not have yet.
You'd think a CEO could afford a copyright attorney...
gcc -Wall does warn about comparison between signed and unsigned types, as well as comparisons that are always true/false due to limited type range.
Twitter is one of my favorite examples of this. Lots of people look at it and say, "it's so easy implement to build." I'd like to see them scale it to millions of users.
Previous reports:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836462 <- This one has several comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859831
"Also, contrary to the beliefs common among the more backward inhabitants of the Polluted Eastern Marshes, `NULL' does not have a pointer type, and must be cast to the correct type whenever it is used as a function argument."

Why? This seems like a waste of thought...
Thanks to HN for posting parts I and II. These are very good, very interesting articles with no shortage of science geek and business geek interest (and, of course, considerable political / social relevance).
I worked as an actual games reviewer a few years ago, before leaving to focus my spare time on becoming a novelist. Game reviewing was rather thankless work (but that is rather off topic for now).

Wii: The Wii Controller allows us great control whilst allowing us the full control of still having access to all our regular keys and analog sticks, giving us the familiarity and allowing a wide range of actions to be controlled.

Move: I'm a mature adult male and I would feel more comfortable waving an oversized dildo about in a downtown high street than playing a game with a luminescent ball on a stick. Beyond that, the Move limits the user immensely by requiring them to set aside their actual controller. The advantage is that you can use two controllers, which doesn't give any advantage over the Wii in motion control but allows both to be tracked by the Eye. The disadvantage is that a game requiring 2 controllers means only 2 players.

Kinect: This is the most technologically advanced of the three and also one-ups the other two by using voice recognition software. The processing is only partially on the 360. Furthermore it allows for the motion-control and voice recognition to be used in combination with a controller. Simply the voice recognition could be very useful in lots of games, especially in RPG's like Mass Effect or Dragon Age to allow switching of weapon sets without requiring menu access, and I'm sure developers will come up with my ingenious ideas than just that.

In 3rd place is Move mostly for the crappy design but also cause of the restricted playability; 2nd place is Wii, mostly because the potential has still yet to be tapped by developers, but the controller is rather cumbersome when games inevitably end up being your standard analog stick and trigger affair. 1st place is Kinect, because at worst you still have a usable controller whilst playing. At best you have motion tracking, voice recognition and a controller. Providing either the motion tracking or the voice recognition get well used, it's still going to be kicking the other two's asses in terms of changing the market.

However, as always time will tell. Kinect may not live up to any of its potential, but right now it stands to go much further than the other two in revolutionizing gameplay. Move right now shows me nothing new, but is far worse design and implementation than the Wii or Kinect.
yeah. I actually flagged the article because that headline is far too misleading (not themichael's fault).
I'd fire him. If Twitter doesn't fire him they are spoiling their pool of potential hires. Who would want to work with this guy? I bet the female employees at Twitter are already fairly creeped out by him now.
Is it really true you need four betas? That seems high from the betas I've seen.
LookBackMaps - Building a Location-Based Time Machine
The reason for this is that, like someone mentioned on a blog post on here, intuition is not transferable. If someone wants to convince me of anything at all, they're going to have to make reasoned arguments, not emotional ones.

Hmm, I'm not as sure on that one. Aren't there studies that show that convincing people via logical argument is just about the least effective possible means of persuasion? Politicians might be seen as something like professional intuition-transferrers: they want you to come around to their way of thinking, and they don't stick to only using rational arguments as the primary way of making that happen.

Even in philosophy, arguments by analogy often seem aimed at least partly aimed at transferring intuition, by mapping a situation to one where that you hope your reader has the intuition you want.
The title and tone do suggest he is making a general criticism of hacker news. Still, it says "A Hacker News Story", not "Any Hacker News Story" so the anatomy could be specific, but the main point more general.

It appears he is accusing us of groupthink.

I'm not sure how much merit that claim has---certainly he has presented no "actual research" himself, but it is an interesting criticism nonetheless.
I'm reminded of this post: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1562#comment-18623
When we had our child and found diapers.com, I was convinced it was already an amazon company. diapers.com has great customer service and an unreal shipping policy. I guess it was a matter of time but it makes complete sense to me just like Zappos. Amazon buys company cultures, not businesses.
Except that this story is about Google becoming less open in an attempt to coerce a competitor into changing their behavior.

Google has taken away freedom from it's users to do as they want with their data (i.e. transfer it unidirectionally to Facebook). This is a fact.

So we have a clear example of Google choosing to control users data when it suits them. They claim they are doing this to try to force Facebook to become more open and that they are doing it on behalf of the users, but does anyone seriously think that's the only reason behind this decision?

Google has stated that they want access to Facebook's social graph and that they'll find a way to get it even if it's not through being granted access by Facebook. They obviously want this for competitive reasons, and to pretend that this isn't part of their motivation seems disingenuous to me.

And that's why this isn't as clear-cut as it seems. I personally think it would be good for users if Facebook's API did expose the social graph, but isn't it hypocrisy of Google to claim they are different while at the very same time holding user-data hostage?

The ends do not justify the means, particularly if the means are compromising the very principles you claim to uphold.

If open truly always wins, they wouldn't need to try to force Facebook to open up under terms dictated by Google. Google opens up data at their own pace - why shouldn't Facebook do the same?
http://pauloflaherty.com/2010/11/06/what-about-the-other-sid...
Is there a "PM" feature? Well, in any case, I can highly recommend this lady: http://nadya.smolsky.net :) Please see her portfolio under "Web", "Academy of Arts" and "Identity" sections.
Once I outgrew QuickBasic in junior high, I started developing in C in DOS, using RHIDE (it came with DJGPP). RHIDE supported advanced VGA text modes like 128x43, so I've always used blank lines and wide lines when their use made code clearer.

I once had to do maintenance on a Visual Basic project with zero blank lines and minimal comments "to save screen space," even though the developers had decent-sized LCDs.
More funny than true. Sure, bad management makes lots of talented people leave lousy jobs and try starting a business. Which leads to more competition, innovation, etc.

Then again, bad management makes perfectly good companies run themselves into the ground, destroying economic value and making lives miserable in the process.

Also, "bad management" is somewhat a matter of opinion. Those talented people who go on to start companies (and don't forget that some of them will fail) may soon have their own employees who inwardly grumble about their incompetent leadership. News flash: sometimes the boss is right. Not always, but sometimes.

Adams' outlook on corporate America is extremely cynical; he views incompetence as the surest path to promotion. To some degree, that is part of his personality, and he's very funny when he expounds his view. But realistically: to some degree, we hate work because it's work. If it was all cotton candy and rainbows, you'd pay to do it, not the other way around. Some of us can find careers we mostly like, and for some of us, that involves being our own boss. But work is still work, and being your own boss may just mean that you LIKE the sociopath who tells you what to do.