skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The low impact version would be to use the existing application to communicate with the users. You can either tell them there's a new version coming (with a link to a landing page with a call to action) or you can ask them if they want to opt in to announcements regarding the new application.

Alternatively you could use a service such as mailchimp to send emails to all 65,000 users. If this is the only time in 4 years that you've emailed them, then I don't think many people would react badly as long as you introduce yourself, let them know why they're getting the email and give them the opportunity to opt out (which they'll get through a service like mailchimp). It also helps if you keep things completely on topic (i.e. "you're receiving this because you signed up to our app and we wanted to tell you about some of the new features we're rolling out in the next version").

If you're getting a 1-2% conversion rate from mail shots you're doing well, so you might want to consider both (I'd probably do the mailshot first, then the page rather than the other way around).
An option for browsers that don't support Quicktime is a Java to Javascript bridge that exposes portions of the MIDI framework (could be used as a fallback): http://mudcube7.blogspot.com/2010/08/dynamic-midi-generation...
I have a theory that the dot-com bust in 2000 and the outsourcing/offshoring hype in 2004ish basically wiped out two generations of computer science students. I graduated in 2004 and I remember the number of students in my major decreased dramatically between my freshman and sophomore year (some of that is the usual engineering major attrition, but I didn't see nearly the same decline as my friends in electrical/mechanical/etc). A coworker who graduated in 2007 told me his friends kept telling him to change his major "because all the jobs are going to India anyway." Meanwhile, the exact opposite thing happened. Growth on the web continues to explode and the demand for skill workers to support that growth continues to climb. Could this by why the shortage seems especially pronounced?
I almost thought I wrote that.

When you get to NYC, lemme buy you a beer.
For comparison purposes: using a Core 2 Duo @ 2.6GHz and the official bitcoin binary, it would take around 45 days before there's a 90% chance to get a block (50 coins).
Generally things tend to get more elastic at low energies, not less; so I think your 'minimum amount of energy the ball will absorb' hypothesis is wrong. However, in the real world, there are other factors which drain energy from bouncing balls -- air resistance, for example.

But this is all irrelevant, since the problem is explicitly in a non-physically-accurate world.
A decentralized, opt-in version of randomwalker's donottrack proposal (http://donottrack.us/) would allow users to balance privacy vs. benefits.

Opt-out sites would be more private, but would offer less in the way of features, functionality, and personalization (both directly and indirectly because of the massive hit to monetization).

In particular, I don't think many people realize just how many features on the modern web are enabled by anonymized analysis of large scale logs. A short list:

1. UI optimization via event logging
2. Features like priority inbox in Gmail
3. Bubble up in search rankings
4. A/B testing
5. Google Analytics (determining backlinks to your site)
6. Disqus login for blog commenting
7.

While the proposal is about opting out of "third party web tracking", it is not obvious what a third party is. Is a YUI, Google Analytics, or Facebook Connect plugin which I chose to integrate into my site "third party code"? What if I have a business account with something like Crazyegg.com -- can I put their JS heatmap tracking in my webpage to figure out what buttons my users are getting confused by?

If this is complex for hackers, do you trust the government that thinks the internet is a series of tubes to get this right?

Finally, there is one throwaway sentence in the article which deserves underlining:

It also wants to ensure that any restrictions do not impede law enforcement and national security efforts.

Translation: the government will want Google and others to track you anyway, so that they can find you. So this is sort of reversed: true privacy legislation would mean the guys with guns wouldn't be able to track you. I'm a lot more scared of them than the guys trying to sell you "one weird old belly trick".
Although I don't think there was a port of an actual stand-alone title (edit: I believe pong was one of them though) , the original System Shock had similar "gems".

I remember constantly loading the game just to play one of the mini-games, an arcade space fighting one.
up voted for the statement: "Time is now my bitch" :D

The idea itself sounds pretty awesome too... will definitely try it.
Was their product the 'inception' of database management? Seriously, databases in databases?
I'm more curious to know how many people have sent in incorrect answers. My immediate guess disagreed with my mathematics.
There is Chromodoro plugin for Chrome (not very useful unless doing web work)

Pomodoro Timer applet for Gnome (http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Pomodoro-Timer-5582...)

RsiBreak for KDE (http://www.rsibreak.org/)

Pomodoro Tasks for Android (currently using)
Amazon 2010 cloud revenues $500m, 50% growth rate
There is no air resistance in this world, hence no air. The little boy asphyxiated shortly after the first time he dropped the ball. :-)
Lego and NASA Build a Partnership for Education
Facebook and twitter are advertising companies too ;)
Wow thanks for the quick reply. I've had a look at some of the rules attached to CampaignMonitor and looks like I can only send to the last 2 years worth with them -

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/anti-spam/
I tend to build up sleep debt during the week and try to fix it on weekends. It's not healthy, but I get 6 - 8 hours during the week, occasionally less and 10 - 12 hours on the weekend.
As someone who has been an early engineer (sixth employee at two and ninth at most current) at a couple of startups, watching the current talent situation is interesting. Companies are definitely hiring with smaller or more agile companies being more proactive about the diversity of people the bring in. Some of the larger networking/software firms are continuing to stick to their laundry lists.

I enjoy seeing the plethora of dmaller startups and the ideas and enthusiasm they bring. Things definitely have a different feel than dotcom bubble one. I hope that this job recovery is longer and more sustained.

For me, it is an interesting crossroad - having a house and marital responsibilities, do I jump on someone else's startup bandwagon again, try and get an idea funded (knowing angels, etc) or go the big company route to give personal time to flesh out ideas.

There certainly are options out there.
My impression is that serial entrepreneurs do get such credit, c.f. Jim Clark in the Netscape days
The national unemployment rate is over 9% while Silicon Valley is fighting tooth-and-claw to hire. What's wrong with this picture?

Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard -- if some of the idiots I've worked with in the past could hold down jobs, then anyone can. Which dying industries should we be looking at to fill the gaps in the software industry?
And God said to Noah: Don't fret about global warming
Z-pinch!!!

See: http://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/KukushkinKartinovC...
Funnily, apart from the LoC as a bonus multiplier, my friends at Google complain about exactly those things -- especially code reviews and new hires.
DIY High Speed Photography Trigger with an Arduino
Heh. I know what SIP is. I've done a lot of telco programming. What I meant was, in what way do you want twilio to support sip? I'm sure it's what they're using on the backend, with a sip trunking provider (or multiple)...

Is there a reason to want them to send SIP rather than calls over the PSTN? If you want SIP, using a hosted solution may not be the answer...
Show HN: Review My Startup, PlusConf - Online conferences
Hello,

I'm organizing a online conference for entrepreneurs and people interested in building web apps. Check out www.plusconf.com

Speakers:

⚫ Dan Martell (Flowtown)

⚫ Allan Branch (LessAccounting)

⚫ Todd Garland (BuySellAds)

⚫ Noah Kagan (AppSumo)

⚫ Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics)

⚫ David Cancel (Performable)

P.S. Use coupon "hackernews" for 30%off, psst! :)

What do you think? Any feedback is appreciated.
I felt both amused and disturbed when I realized those people might some day be able to have their finger on a big red button..
This page is often cited, yet referes to Scala 1.4. Can anyone point me to documentation about running Scala 2.8 on .NET? Does it work?
Where's the spoiler?
Game-like Mechanics: The Tutorial
CLICKABLE LINK > http://www.plusconf.com
Darned noprocrast meant I can't edit this comment from my normal account. So here is a better formatted version:

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

A decentralized, opt-in version of randomwalker's well thought out donottrack proposal (http://donottrack.us/) would allow users to balance privacy vs. benefits. Including "X-Do-Not-Track" in an HTTP header is an excellent idea; including it in a piece of legislation is much less so.

Opt-out sites would be more private, but would offer less in the way of features, functionality, and personalization (both directly and indirectly because of the massive hit to monetization). Specifically, I don't think many people realize just how many features on the modern web are enabled by tracking of some kind or the other. A short list:

1. UI optimization via event logging

2. Features like priority inbox in Gmail

3. Bubble up in search rankings

4. A/B testing

5. Google Analytics (determining backlinks to your site)

6. Disqus login for blog commenting

7. Google Maps or location based service integration

While the proposal is about opting out of "third party web tracking", it is not obvious what a third party is. Is a Google Analytics or Facebook Connect plugin which I chose to integrate into my site "third party code"? What if I have a business account with something like Crazyegg.com -- can I put their JS heatmap tracking in my webpage to figure out what buttons my users are getting confused by?

And if this is complex for hackers, do you trust the government that thinks the internet is a series of tubes to get this right?

Moreover, there is one throwaway sentence in the article which deserves underlining:

It also wants to ensure that any restrictions do not impede law enforcement and national security efforts.

Translation: the government will want Google and others to track you anyway, so that they can find you when they want. So this is sort of reversed: true privacy legislation would mean the guys with guns wouldn't be able to track you. I'm a lot more scared of them than the guys trying to sell you "one weird old belly trick".

Remember that the government which is now talking about protecting your privacy is the same one which is making the very pilots themselves go through backscatter stations on the way to their planes, the same government that forced phone companies to tap your phones and forced Google to give them your email 9000 times per year.

In my humble opinion, the solution to this kind of thing is not to throw up our hands and pray for this latest batch of Congresscritters to deliver us from evil, but for someone to build a private browser, with something like a built-in accessible Tor, which provides a better experience for those people who value privacy over functionality.
I think having the dates on the homepage would work, including the time of day, and run time.
So I did some math starting with 100J of potential energy and summed a geometric series to see how long it would stay in the air if we had infinite time to sum the geometric series and it was some finite number. Then I assumed the initial velocity in the horizontal direction was 1 m/s so if we had infinite time the ball would travel some finite distance because it would bounce infinitely often and in every such bounce it would be in the air some amount of time and would travel at a speed of 1 m/s in that amount of time. But this assumes that the ball doesn't roll along the floor when it comes down and immediately bounces up as soon as it hits the floor which is unrealistic because it means I'm assuming infinite impulse on each bounce because the momentum of the ball changes and I'm assuming this takes 0 seconds. So the best I was able to do was give an upper bound on the total distance the ball would travel if the universe were to last forever. It's a lot like Zeno's arrow or is it Achilles and the tortoise.
I'm not saying to lie. I'm saying if someone with credentials comes out and says there may be health issues with these things we don't need to look any further. They shouldn't be in the airport whether they present a safety risk or not. Instead of wasting energy chasing something that doesn't change the over all outcome (finding out they're safe still doesn't mean they should be used), use that energy to research things that do matter. It's just about being efficient. :)
I personally set my time by album length. Depending on the work I need to do in the next block, I can range anywhere from 30min to 2hr. Typically it's in the range of 45-80min. I have a few key albums that I listen to often and when listening to those can now subconsciously pace my work to a certain extent.

Of course, you need to be the kind of personal that likes to listen to music while working in order for this to work.
I'd argue that in this case, he's not helping them (the 1000) to get a job, he's helping himself (the Chrome developer) to get an extra committer or two.
Date is 7th December and it is written above prices. Time of day will be added soon, just need few more confirmations.
In revenue or in units shipped?
Kicking Off iPhone Development
I've noticed a surge in contacts from recruiters, almost daily now from linkedin asking if I'm looking. Last year was a very different story.
The guy who started Funambol talks very highly of having the company HQ in silicon valley, and development elsewhere. In his case, Italy, which really does have a lot of bright people who tend not to have as many exciting options locally. So building a 'bridge' like that can get the SV company good talent at good prices, and give the 'locals' a better job, perhaps at better wages, and with more interesting work to do.
I have never met anyone who was not technical and then became a coder.

In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.
Am I -1 points of wrong here? I made two assertions:

1. People writing code in HLLs don't really use binary trees directly;

2. When people writing code in HLLs have a problem that would be best solved with a binary tree, and they can't find a wrapped native library that internally uses binary trees, then the generic solution that 90% of developers rely on (whether it helps or not) is to use SQLite, BDB, or another library which basically acts as a complex surrogate for a tree data structure.
Pardon me, your first couple of paragraphs are confusing -- are you sure you're not mixing up opt-in an opt-out?

"Opt-in" would mean that by default -- with no action on the user's part -- tracking would be prohibited. Clearly that is infeasible (for precisely the reasons you describe; it would kill the industry.)

While the proposal is about opting out of "third party web tracking", it is not obvious what a third party is. Is a YUI, Google Analytics, or Facebook Connect plugin which I chose to integrate into my site "third party code"? What if I have a business account with something like Crazyegg.com -- can I put their JS heatmap tracking in my webpage to figure out what buttons my users are getting confused by?

Yes, these are exactly the questions that me and my colleagues are working out. The goal is to avoid breaking the web as much as possible. For example, one way in which an exception to Do Not Track is triggered is if the user logs in to the 3rd party provider, so FB Connect will work smoothly regardless of DNT.

If this is complex for hackers, do you trust the government that thinks the internet is a series of tubes to get this right?

Great point, which is why things are structured the way they are -- the idea is for Congress to delegate authority to the FTC, which is a highly tech savvy organization (they just tapped Ed Felten, for example). They're also great at getting input from the technical community (I was myself on an FTC privacy panel earlier this year.) In short, hackers are quite involved with the process.
Really good software engineering is that hard. If you want to argue the point, compare mundane, "easy" software engineering with the average desk job that people can slide into without much training. Companies fight tooth-and-claw to hire good engineers because they don't want the idiots you worked with in the past. A good developer is 10x more productive than an average one, and a bad developer can be a net negative.
According to those estimates, the margins on AWS will actually increase from ~11% today to ~15% in 2014. It seems more likely that cloud computing will trend towards commoditization, and margins will collapse over time. Amazon is trying to preempt this with proprietary technologies like SimpleDB and SQS, but I question whether companies will opt in to that kind of vendor lock-in en masse.
Can't believe that no one on HN has figured this out yet. The missile was actually just one rather careless salvo in the US joint military campaign to halt "Operation Black Swan," the long-anticipated alien invasion that was expected to begin on November 8. Collen Thomas described the whole thing in excruciating detail on Youtube last month:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hvtOEHKJsI
It's probably a sign of them settling into their new IBM-like reality.
I'll answer "No one". Most numbers I can find place Apple in first place with around 75%.
Catholics and protestants are indistinguishable from one another.
OK, I see that by opt-in you mean something else entirely, i.e., a technological solution instead of a legislative one. I think the tracking vs. anti-tracking arms race is skewed hopelessly in favor of the advertisers, but I'm not going to get into that here.

ETA: However there is one thing you say that is easily refuted -- having a DNT header without legislation to back it up is useless, because nobody has the slightest incentive to respect it.
Google Wave open source project much closer to being useful
With the Wave Federation Summit going on right now in San Francisco, I thought it would be worth checking out the latest build of the Wave Federation server (or Wave in a Box).

Wave in a Box is an implementation of most of the same technology that went into wave.google.com, including all of the operational transform real-time sweetness, a web client, a command line client (that's right, a vim-inspired version of wave) and support for federation (ie. interoperability of multiple servers on different domains).

You can get all of this, open source, right now. Just head over to:

https://sites.google.com/a/waveprotocol.org/wave-protocol/code/installation

and get going. Building and running of all the components is very straightforward and can be done in about 5 commands. A copy of Jetty is included in the build.

The only missing piece is a persistance layer, which according the FAQ is an active priority for the team.
Yup. There are people with the logical mindset and problem solving ability to just naturally pick up coding. But most are not, and that's just an ability that's very hard to develop in later phases of life. In most cases it develops during teen age. Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though.
It's a nice concept, sharing the file directly. Sadly it's not working here past a basic stateful firewall. Is it capable of hole punching at all? I also wonder why it loads the entire file into memory. And a final nit, fixed whitespace on the left and bottom screw up the site in a small window, and it doesn't get working scrollbars either.
Ufone’s Tension Free Special Package
This is made even more evident by the fact that iFixit runs Make's http://makeprojects.com/
edit: I thought this over more, here is a new answer.

Spoiler: it bounces an infinite amount of time in a finite space.

Actually, the horizontal distance it travels is proportionately decreased with the decreased time in the air. If the ball is now in the air for k<1 times as much time, it goes to the right a factor of k times as much. I forget but I think these recursive series converge to a finite sum, they definitely do if k<0.5. So the height and length of each bounce decays exponentially, and it bounces an infinite amount of time in a finite space.

---

Old, wrong answer.

Spoiler: It keeps going to the right to infinity, just at a height that is vanishing and asymptotically approaching zero.

Each time the ball bounces, it loses 40% of its vertical kinetic energy. But the problem statement ("the ground is flat, and each part of the ball’s path is a parabolic arc. Don’t consider friction, atoms, relativity, quantum, etc!") indicates that the horizontal energy doesn't change, even though the figure would suggest otherwise. So it will keep going to the right at the same rate.
How to Convert WMV to MP4 for Playback on QuickTime
Some intractable problems always happen in our life. For examples, Some PC users have problem sharing WMV files with their friends who are Mac uers; I want to convert WMV to MP4, convert WMV to MOV, convert WMV to WAV on my MacBook etc, but can’t find an easy tool to do this. Now I recommend a Mac WMV Converter for you to solve all your WMV problems.
It properly takes 3 years of work before you can program well enough to be hired - looking at the calendar, it still hasn't been 3 years since the economy tanked.

Adding time for people to realize that there is actual jobs, coupled with the "we only hire the best" and not that many people become software engineers.
Most startups I know are more like the guys from Primer.
I agree. I have better things to do than to memorize the random prerequisites of header files. Not to mention cluttering my C source with junk that isn't important to the source in that particular file. My rule is that I should be able to make an empty C file and put a single #include "header.h" line. If it doesn't compile then there is a bug in that .h file.
But at Facebook and Twitter the chance to become very wealthy within the next few years is substantially greater than at Google.
I guess, since I didn't see it (and I'm sure a few others won't), maybe you should think about making it a tiny bit more prominent?
It's true that the horizontal energy doesn't change and it keeps going to the right but it stays in the air for less and less on each bounce and travels a shorter and shorter distance on each bounce assuming the ball only goes forward when it bounces but you still didn't answer the question because if you sum the total time the ball will spend in the air you will get a finite number so the ball will travel a finite distance which is a much better description of what happens to the ball than just saying it keeps going to the right.
I used the Pomodoro technique (25/5) when writing my Master's thesis. I had no problem settling in after my breaks. When the 25-minute work period ended, I would literally stop mid sentence, leave my text editor open, and walk outside. It was easy to get started again after my break, because I was in the middle of a sentence that needed finishing. That was usually enough to get me back up to speed, because after a 5-minute break, my mind hadn't wandered too far.
Could you explain why not Google Analytics and provide a few alternatives (and why they are better) ?
Spoiler: That was my first guess.