skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I worry about statements like "Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism."

I found the end of the article very honest and open, except the two last paragraphs, which are indeed a little sensationalist and relativist (the sentence you quote is the first of the last paragraph).

The article should have stopped at "the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion" (perfect conclusion).
On the Daily use of a Proper Fountain Pen
good! now i can start filtering #4sq and random twitter quizzes.
Hardly surprising. Have you seen Microsoft's "to the cloud" ads? They always feature people claiming to use the "cloud" to do some mundane task like editing a photo, and leave me wondering, "what part of that was 'the cloud?'"
the choice for a new name is Jenkins, which we think evokes the same sort of English butler feel as Hudson

Sadly, for me all it evokes is Leeroy Jenkins. Surely there are better English butler names such as Wadsworth, or you know, just Butler. :)
Yes, Amazon is capable of PoD. But most books are not printed by Amazon, they come from big name publishers. And big bookstores even charge a "stock" fee. All these quickly drive up the price of a paperbacks (or hardcovers). None of these apply for ebooks though.

I don't know how much "book layouts" cost, but I doubt they are such a big factor to drive up the ebooks cost.
It's indeed comparable. I've used IPython for quite a while, and though it's great, I somehow fall back to using bash every time.

Conceptually, I like Python much more than shell script, but it seems I end up having to type and think more when simply using it as a shell.

When I get to the point where I actually need a real programming language such as Python to express what I want to do, I generally make a script and don't type it in the shell.
Folks, not everyone here is trapped in the yelling-chamber that's U.S. political media. Can we please leave this useless, parochial "news" out of HN?

Thanks
Askalo
askalo is a city-focused question and answer web community that lets everyone ask questions about any local topic, and share answers tailored to individual needs.
I can only think that way for so long. Because eventually, your boss or manager will push the company in a direction you don't agree with..and then it will make you realize why you want to have your own company.
Free or very cheap CRM
Hi,

Does anyone have any recommendations for CRM software that is either free or just a couple hundred bucks. We have very basic needs. For the most part, we're just looking for contact management more than process flow, so that we can get off of excel and shared google docs. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Avi
It's pretty hilarious that the big record labels also dabble in "piracy", releasing stuff without permission from the artists.
Hm, its not a large jump to anybody but a lawyer to have protection for my documents NO MATTER WHERE I STORE THEM. A constitutional amendment for that would muddy up the constitution endlessly "and for electronic documents, and those in the cloud, and those stored temporarily while being transmitted to the cloud...".

Or lawyers could stop being semantic nitpickers. Since that will never happen, I wonder what other options exist?
Is there a way for dowloading videos from this site?
Really, Yahoo Finance writer? I can't reveal my pet's name on the internet, or my birthdate, because my bank has bad security?

I would say that the real problem is using stupid questions like that as "security questions". Sarah Palin's account was cracked this way. Anyone who has ever seen my house or tries a brute force attack with common pet names will be able to enter.

And then there's this: http://xkcd.com/792/

Do yourself a favor -- when you see a security question like "What is your favorite pet's name", pretend they asked something else, like "What do you like to have for breakfast" and answer that instead, for every security question!
Insanely Savvy
You make a good point, I would just substitute "choose not to" for "probably can't." The person chose that nicer house and an expensive lifestyle. As a counterpoint, I went to Virginia Beach for a week on a whim at a time when I had no real income to speak of.
The trick is not to answer the question they're asking you.

Think of something permanent like "who was your favorite teacher in high school" and stick to that for EVERY question.
Matt Haughey on learning customer service from Craig Newmark
SugarCRM has a community version that is free to download and install.
What shocks me is the lack of competition in this field in the year 2011. Why are we still talking about choosing between GIMP or Photoshop? I know there are other programs out there that some people will claim they prefer over GIMP or PS, but for most of the planet it's GIMP or PS.

Is the lack of competition due to the magnitude of such a programming endeavor or is it something else like patents? Any idea?
AT&T CEO Trash Talks Verizon
Canadian Cloud-Storage Provider in search of funding
I am impressed and reminded of this quote:

"He showed those men of will what will really was."

Overly dramatic? Perhaps, but it's not easy to give up a name to retain the freedom for a project.
The MakerBot Is Best At CES
That's simply a cover. No way he quit because of a salary issue. On top of that, no way he would have felt ashamed or poor at a cocktail party. I mean, he is directly speaking to the POTUS - likely daily. Many very rich people don't even have that luxury.
The Trustmark—some kind of image, logo, badge, or seal that authenticates participation in the Identity Ecosystem. "To maintain trustmark integrity," the report explains, "the trustmark itself must be resistant to tampering and forgery; participants should be able to both visually and electronically validate its authenticity."

Maybe we don't need to worry about this. It will never succeed.
I think ultimately they want to make it a distro, but for now it only seems to exist as a theme.
Q&A with the new CEO at PARC, Xerox insider Steve Hoover
thanks for your feedback.

so far we're going with couch and haven't experienced this. the best part of course is that we can add items to documents on the fly whilst keeping the existing test data! this is major for us. we can go back to testing right away. with MySQL the changes were so major that it was better just dumping and recreating from scratch (we are using django) and this wasn't exactly fast. django has a project "south" that would help with this, but we're eventually deploying to oracle and cannot rely on it or have the time to extend it to properly work with oracle.
> I would like to see them be a bit more focused and present themselves more coherently.

Same here. I'm happy using the theme, eGTK and the Nautilus mod, but I absolutely agree that they need to find their direction.
The Internet already has a Jenkins...

Leeeerrroooyyyy Jennnnkiiinnnsssss
Anyone who defines satisfaction that way is fooling themselves; probably in more ways than one.
Great talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
I'll tackle the Firemen.

You could do, "10 Things Your City Doesn't want you to know about funding" to score political points. You could also do "10 Products That Will Save your Life" to sell products.

What I've seen on Facebook is that when one firefighter posts something relevant it either gets liked or copied by others. This is hugely powerful. So I'd try to get some firefighter to post it on Facebook.

The other thing is that there are a ton of firefighter forums on the internet that you can register for and build a reputation up there. It all depends on what your goals are.
Overview: German Entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley
I think it's just the old type of SEO ...
WikiLeaks Cables Cited in Tale of Sunken Treasure
My adult life began with several years at a non-profit making $18k/yr. I've worked to avoid dramatic changes to my standard of living since then and it's helped me put money in the bank regardless of where I fell on the income scale. I also find that I need to "reset" my spending every 6 months or so, because it's trivially easy to start spending more than you realize, for no practical gain.

Sometimes I get jealous of people at work who seem to have nicer things. Then a few days later they start to complain about not having money, and I'm reminded that I don't really need a TV, much less a 52-inch what-have-you. Nor do I need to replace my nearly 20 year old car with something newer just because I can. Or more realistically: I don't need to get a new car because someone else I know bought a Z3.
I'm a Swayer and I just Swayed
I agree with your comment about structured data. Parsing everything from (unstructured) text is pretty backwards, it's more work and very error-prone.

But calling bash slow is kind of strange. What are you trying to do in a shell, that you can call it slow? A shell simply parses commands and dispatches them. For example, if you grep a 100GB file and it takes a long time the shell is not the bottleneck.
Choose the Right Bike | Bike shopping guide
> Citation please? Where has communism seriously been tried?

Actually communism works well on a small scale and even in the US it is practiced widely: the family. No one presents their kids with a bill at breakfast. There have been attempts of various success to scale this up in communities / kibuts / etc especially in the sixties. But everywhere it was tried on a nation wide level it failed, which was my point exactly.

> Again, if you're talking about US levels of inequality I'm going to need another citation.

I'm not claiming the US has the "right" level of inequality. They do have one of the highest inequalities and also one of the highest per capita incomes (discounting a countries with natural wealth like Norway). The OECD.org web site has all the numbers you are looking for. I'm not claiming that this is fair, I'm claiming the US has more wealth, albeit not equally divided. If you make things more equal there is a good chance you destroy wealth, and there is also a good chance less wealth hurts those at the bottom, although it can take a few years for the effects to show.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 148
I read about him in Talent is Overrated. Great book by the way, for any parents out there who want their child to be the next Tiger Woods or Mozart. Just make them do it from as young as age as possible.

http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class...
Ditto, I use DAViCal. It's opensource and works well:

http://davical.org/
"You can do so much in 10 minutes' time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity."

Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of IKEA
What specifically are you referring to? I've forced myself to listen to what he says (I listen to one show a week) and I've never once heard him advocate violence in any way.

Beck is paranoid. He believes the government is becoming more powerful and will eventually come to get him. But he's never endorsed preemptive action and in fact regularly scolds his audience for not being "Christian enough" and loving their persecutors. Beyond that he regularly says violence isn't justified until "they're breaking down our doors"

This is basically Beck's perspective: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/18/732681/-Glenn-Be...

Not the most mentally healthy perspective in the world but entirely a defensive one. Finally he at least invites criticism. If you listen to his show you'll see his co-host thinks he's crazy paranoid and says so regularly.
Custom Control Flow Activities in Windows Workflow Foundation
I am sorry, the WSJ article seemed like a lot of trolling to me. It never touched on the subject of why Chinese mothers are allegedly "superior" at bringing up "better" or "more successful" children (whatever that may be). Instead it took a long and round-about way of justifying why indeed Chinese mothers are "a superior" to their kids whom they seem to constantly boss around - with the best intentions.

I think Jean Hsu was spot on in her article, however: all this commanding and strict parenting just has to REALLY numb down the kid's initiative and will to "play" and "explore", try new things and learn on their own.

This may sound very harsh but for me, this bossing around just creates busy drones at best and at worst those kids will be very, very much lacking any orientation, motivation, initiative and a unique personality of sorts.

How can you find happiness on your own when the close bond with the person who has been controlling your life for 20, 25 years is suddenly gone?
Piano has assorted benefits, sure. But I'm not convinced that it's worth making a major investment into unless you're focused on being a professional musician.
I've noticed a few interesting book sites recently -

http://7bks.com

http://www.hn-books.com/

http://anynewbooks.com/

http://bookflavor.com

Maybe you could partner up with one of them?
Please give me a hint if you know other Germans, Austrian or Swiss Founders in the Valley. No womans out there? ;)
List of YC companies, ordered by response time from EC2
His management style isn't what something I would call liberal either. The success that he's achieved is based on control and demanding the best.
i have switched to org-mode for some of the same reasons. i use gcal as an appointment planner, but when it comes to the wishy washy deadlines of real life and work, i use the task and project management facilities of org-mode daily.
Have you scrolled down the page a bit? There are commented source code samples and links to the generated outputs, source code and instructions to run it yourself if you wish.
This would be nice an format with short functions that could be upvoted (like hacker news comments). Three shortcuts is a rather limited start.
Matrix Puzzle From Hell: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Patterns
Animals deaths around the world.
I learned JavaScript but as soon as I understood the capabilities (but before I mastered usage) I decided to do all of my work in CoffeeScript.

I find it much cleaner / easier to write and I don't really see a downside to using it instead.
Kindle Comes to the Mac App Store (But How's the Readability?)
I have used self-hosted Darwin Calendar Server & more recently, Google Apps for a client that needs iCal syncing. Somehow we seem to have more problems with CalDAV syncing (e.g. timeouts during sync, unavailability) with Google Calendar than we ever did on DCS. It seems like, and probably is, an afterthought for Google.

[edit: ActiveSync, now supported in iCal, seems to work pretty well]
makes me want to say "and a partridge in a pear tree"
As an Engineer with a crazy controlling Chinese father. I know parents make a big difference in the early years. I've experienced not having attend sleep overs, any extracurricular/sports, friends over, or phone calls. Most prisoners have more freedom. My dad being a teacher back in China, ended up giving me hours of extra homework on top of the regular easy stuff from school.

Sure your kids may get into med school or become that lawyer, but I'm almost certain at some point they are going to hate you for ruining their childhood. Also they are just going to develop bingeing personalities and have overloads the moment you take your eyes off them.
The reality of this phenomenon is that people who have done everything "perfectly" in their life and academic career feel a bit cheated when their income tops out in between 100k and 200k. They might be senior engineers or doctors or lawyers but they've hit this brick wall as far as income, sometimes in their 30s and yet there are all these people out there that make more than 10x or even 100x their annual income.

Now there are four ways that I am aware of to make more than about 200k/year.

1. Be an investor/entrepreneur in your own company.

2. Have stock in a company that IPOs or get bought.

3. Work in high finance at a well performing hedge fund or a maor wall street firm.

4. Be a senior partner in a major law firm or an experienced surgeon in an in-demand specialty. Though you'll still top out at about 500k, at least according to glassdoor.com.

Did I miss any?
Being Poor Can Suppress Children's mental abilities, study finds
Clearly more a comment for an R forum, but why the hell does anybody bother using '<-' instead of '='? Are you trying to obfuscate?
This reminds me of an HN comment from a few months ago. It was something like... "Need more money can usually be replaced with need less stuff"

Edit: I found the comment: 'I bet that 9 times out of 10, "I need more money" should really be rephrased as "I need less stuff"'. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025234
I get a lot of email
- Python is better than MATLAB for numerics now.

- Mathematica is better than the other stuff for symbolics still and it has a really nice interface. For basic stuff the Python libraries work fine. Check out Maple and its clones too.

- C is for when you need speed above all else (check out Weave, a Python package for executing C code from within your Python scripts, though)

I only know a few Haskell people in the scientific computing world. I'm not sure what the draw is, but if you do a lot of algorithms and don't mind the unpredictable performance, Haskell is a good tool too I'm sure. Ocaml also gets some use in scientific computing if functional programming is your thing.
On a more serious note, this seems to be the likely explanation to me:

"With birds and fish relying on it to travel to breeding grounds and warmed climes, there are fears that the shifting pole could be confusing the animals which means they do not migrate in time to avoid cold weather."
We now have mathematical evidence that minimizing your "flaws" is the opposite of what you should do. If you're a little chubby, play it up. If you have a big nose, play it up. If you have a weird snaggletooth, play it up: statistically, the guys who don't like it can only help you, and the ones who do like it will be all the more excited.

This should be followed by an asterisk:

*As long as it doesn't bring your average rating down.

There's a big difference between playing up polarizing features and drawing attention to flaws in general.
Google's Website Optimizer is simple and free and works nicely. Perhaps that works for you?
How to get a preview of Elementary OS without preordering
DIY: Set up a Treadmill Desk
I think it's important to note that david brussin's thoughts are primarily geared towards secondary markets. As an entrepreneur who runs a startup out of a quarternary market (athens, ga), i can assure you that we would be benefitting a lot more from having the valley resources at our disposal.

i tend to make a trip to atlanta (secondary?) every week, but the resources only stretch so far. atlanta may have a VC presence, but the angels are few & far between.

i'd also say that the biggest problem with most secondary markets is they don't cover the entire gamut of industries. talking from my own experience, atlanta is a B2B town with a heavy emphasis on areas like security. if you're running a B2C startup (like we are at http://gorankem.com), i'd almost encourage the entrepreneur to not waste any time seeking money in GA.

overall, the biggest advantage the valley has over all the other markets is the connections. personally, i could deal with the competition for talent because i like to think that we have a stronger product. i shake my head at some of the ideas getting funded.

the wisdom in the tech community that is being transferred in SF on a daily basis cannot be touched.

for that reason & many more, if anybody has a couch to sleep on come this summer, i may be looking for one...
That is awful, and I'd never defend that implementation, but you can compress http

(sorry if by "gzip would have helped" you meant that)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression
Paper, ink, the compass, most of the food you eat is from china,and clothes you wear.
Wait wait wait. Where the *&#$ do I go to get free beer?!?!
Apache Cassandra 0.7 Released
Yeah, eat your own dogfood but don't drink your own koolaid :-)
Offtopic, but I hate this trend of articles titled 'How to..." where the article don't actually tell you how to do anything. It seems like there have been a lot of these articles lately. Is it an SEO thing?

Another noiseword title I've learned to avoid is, "What we learned from..."
Change List:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0....
Downturn Forcing Biggest Drop In Wages In Decades
Isn't this a bit of an unfair comparison?

Java the language is at least 8 years older than Scala the language. Scala had the benefit of learning from previous language's mistakes.
Yes. Anything you can use from within Java, you can use from within Scala. I'm quite happily using JGroups and Netty from within Scala. The code actually looks a hell of a lot better than the equivalent Java versions.
That was a really really good read.
My first impression was how disturbed I was to see the enormous ad "sidebar" coyly nestled on the right.

Then again, I think that's a fair observation.
How do you rate your own writing? What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?
I've used web services several times, but in the "serialized objects" style, and it worked.

The alternatives were either that or a custom pipe-separated format.

I'll take serialized objects over XML all day.

Prior to this discussion, I wasn't aware of JSON on REST, I guess I should catch up a bit- I live in an awful legacy-app development world, which we need to expose on a crumbling tower of VB6 and .NET apps that interact with it externally - VB6 is the "new" part btw, the old part is an old SUN technology called FORTE 4GL UDS.
8. Cybercrime
congrats Arthur.
Well expressed - had a similar experience growing up...

When you grow up learning to coast along it is hard to transition when you cant coast any more.

"Chinese mom" style helps with this. And this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_gratification
I've been using Pixelmator for a few months now (GIMP works great in Linux but I've found it's performance in OS X to be rather poor). It's still closed source software like PS (even if it does use open source libraries), but it's fast enough and gets the job done (my needs are really meager).

The reason why GIMP doesn't have more developers is easy: Programmers don't have any itch to scratch at this point and there isn't currently a big market for prosumer image tools (most folks use PS one way or the other, paid or pirated).

If Adobe managed to somehow magically make piracy of their software impossible I think it's likely that you'd see a number of free and non-free products in strong competition with Photoshop Elements.
Sounds like the respective sides reached agreement on all of the really substantive issues, but flopped on the most trivial yet most symbolic one. Oracle could gain a fair bit of goodwill (or perhaps reclaim some of what they've lost due to this charade) by just granting the trademark to the core devs (for free use by anyone, presumably). They could still sell Oracle Hudson Enterprise Continuous Integration Server or whatever.

Beyond that, I'd think their partners (e.g. Sonatype, which has its own commercial hudson-based product) would prefer to not be faced with a choice between Oracle Hudson and OSS Jenkins (where the latter would surely have the majority of heat and light).
No, that doesn't actually do anything to solve the underlying problem. Stacking five adjustment layers has the same accuracy problems as doing the same five operations sequentially. It may let you tweak them without roundtripping through further loss but the loss is already significant by that point.
I argue that living in Cambridge indicates that you value living in Cambridge, or at least moreso than you would living in Hudson, give or take the cost of moving.
A Family of Algorithms for Scalable Decentralized Data Distribution