skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was specifically commenting on the practice of buying the console with no intention to buy games. You could make the same argument about purchasing razors with no intention of buying the blades. Copyright law has nothing to do with razors and blades why should it have anything to do with consoles and games assuming no piracy is involved? Does the moral equation change if we're not talking about game consoles? Is morality a factor when purchasing heavily discounted razors at the asking price?
In my opinion, the most difficult part of this kind of endeavor is to continuously update the site with insightful summaries of the articles/books.
If you're interested in customer development / lean startups as applied to web products, also checkout the book roughcut: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1977124
Some years ago people joked SAP was an acronym for "Sammlung arbeitsloser Physiker" (Some Unemployed Physicists).
Flash is fading away, and should be kept for legacy reasons for a while. But not dropping h.264 now would make for another proprietary decade on the web.
The year before that was much better. The S&P 500 was up over 25% in 2009 and the Nasdaq was up almost 50%.
Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort. Personally, I think the "shortage" has something to do with increases in job-hopping. If there were some guarantee that an engineer were going to stick around for a few years after training, perhaps training new recruits wouldn't seem so unreasonable.
well....no matter how large T is, you'll still won't be guaranteed to get Hamlet, so long as T is finite.
Here is the link to the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...
Most Affordable and Complete Website Seo Services Worldwide
We are one of the only top organic seo companies in U.S.and worldwide that offers creative website design, branding, marketing campaigns, and ongoing consulting. We specialize in organic seo for small and medium size businesses.
Even if it's not, Sony could have sold unlocked* units at a non-lossmaking value, which would have instantly discouraged a large proportion of the hacking movement. This is what OtherOS provided: a valve for homebrew enthusiasts, why there were no serious efforts for the duration.

*By unlocked I mean "homebrew unlocked" and without the ability to play games.
2011 SxSW Nerd Bird flights (SFOAUS)
The "funniest" part is that there really was a a scandal recently in Sweden about an upper class guy using his position for e.g. raping and abusing women.

He was a police chief which, despite police union criticism, got reinstated by the social democrat minister - because he was so politically correct...

Quite fun, considering the political leanings of Larsson.
So the article says the shortage is of "highly trained" workers only.

And a big problem is you can't lure them away since their current employer might give them a counter offer, and there's apparently no way to deal with that, it's the end of the world.

And the solution to all this is "a six-month retraining program for displaced workers. Participants, who must be unemployed, will come away with skills in one of eight tech-training areas" which trains people with no programming skills how to become "highly skilled" in only six months. So highly skilled that they will kick the butts of the guy with the 15 years useless C, C++, Perl and PHP experience because what we really need is Ruby on Rails.
I think a proprietary video codec is significantly less open-threatening than a proprietary runtime. For one thing, the codec will eventually lose its patent protections. The runtime will continue to evolve at the platform owner's discretion.

Regardless of how you feel about h.264 in general though, the decision to not support h.264 video in the browser through the video tag means that Flash is going to be sticking around just so we can watch videos.

An incredible victory for openness!
Finding talented engineers as "mere employees" are hard enough; finding talented engineers suitable to be your co-founder(s) for a startup are even harder.

It took me over a month of searching, interviewing, and painstaking gut instinct checking before I finally found two great guys to build my team.

As losarime said, it's true, it's very hard to find those with passion for the job. My filtering statement/question that I came up with for the interviews:

"I'm not looking for someone to work for this startup -- I'm looking for someone to work with this startup, someone who wants this to be our startup together."

It was always very easy to see who genuinely wanted this to be our company together as opposed to those who just wanted a new employer.
If your pay is not high enough, or your standards are not low enough, you will find yourself lacking "software engineers". There is no shortage, however, just an unwillingness to pay the right price (either in money or lack of skill).
I've kept a regular journal for most of my adult life.

I don't think it means much either way as far as whether I'm "great", whatever that means anyway.

I think keeping a journal has been vaguely useful.

That might be a better argument for it.
Well... Python is a little bit better, e.g.:

>>> class Person:
... x = "lol"
... y = "right?"
...
>>> "{0.x} {0.y}".format(Person())
'lol right?'

Also this function: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/610406/javascript-printf-... adding it to the String objects would be cool too.
EULA's have nothing to do with copyright, it's plain contract law.

If you and I are neighbors and we agree that you I will pay you 250$ a month to not park you car in front of my house (while you legally have a right to do so), should that not be allowed?

If I am a shoe manufacturer with local retail outlets you and I agree that I will sell you my shoes for reselling overseas, but part of the agreement is that you won't sell them locally; should that be allowed?

If you and I agree that I will sell you a device but you will only use it under certain circumstances, should that be allowed?

I think the government has no business in private contracts in any of the above situations. Let people make their own agreements and then let the market decide. The only role the government has herein is to enforce contracts - what good are contracts when one party can decide retroactively that they don't like the terms anymore, and oh I don't want to cancel the contract, no I want to have my pie and eat it, too?
Does PHP still have this bug?
From the court order:

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Defendant Hotz and his officers, employees,
attorneys and representatives, and all other persons or entities in privity or acting in
concert or participation with Defendant Hotz, be immediately temporarily restrained from:

...Offering to the public, posting online, marketing, advertising, promoting,
installing, distributing, providing, or otherwise trafficking in any circumvention technology,
products, services, methods, codes, software tools, devices, component or part thereof...

...Providing links from any website to any other website selling, offering for
sale, marketing, advertising, promoting, installing, importing, exporting, offering to the
public, distributing, providing, posting, or otherwise trafficking in any Circumvention
Devices...

And a whole lot more. Aside fromt the fact that it seems the corporate world still hasn't heard of the Streisand Effect, the language of this document is worrying. Clearly, the laws were written with commercial theft of IP and industrial espionage/reverse engineering in mind. The linguistic contortions seem to make it clear that the DMCA and CFAA were never meant to be used against hackers, but rather against counterfeiters. It's pretty disturbing that even the courts march lockstep with corporations in stretching the law to serve corporate ends.

edit: As pointed out below, this is a proposed order, not one issued by a judge. Thus, please disregard the last bit about the courts marching in lockstep with corporate interests. I'm appending rather than editing so that the responses make sense.
Pretty sure Google open-sourced vp8 (the video codec in webm), which means they don't own it or exclusively control it. I don't know how much more open you can get.
> (And that welfare state may soon be disabled by the recently elected conservative government.)

Uhuh. They've been in power since 2006 and the welfare state has not been "disabled".
That was one of the things that really surprised me about the real world: that big advancement only comes from big lateral jumps. Different companies, different projects, different markets, or different customers.

There's this model of the world we're taught as schoolkids - at least where I grew up - where you work hard at something, do as your told, and slowly but surely you rise up. And maybe at one level it's true, but it's very slow, and you'll never become the sort of success you read about in the paper that way.

Instead, I've found that what usually happens is that you join an organization because you meet some minimum skill baseline that they're looking for. And then as you practice and learn from the people around you, you end up picking up a bunch of other skills and getting better at your job. But the people around you generally won't notice. First impressions usually pigeonhole you into a general category, and then people are blind to gradual changes.

So to reap the rewards of everything you've learned, you have to expose yourself to new people. Jump ship, and suddenly you seem really valuable to them, because all those skills you've picked up which your current organization takes for granted are new and useful.

There's a leverage effect as well: people try to work with others of roughly the same level. If you're diligent about practicing, you'll go from being (hopefully) near the bottom of your team to the top of it. If you then repeat the process, your new teammates better be higher skilled still, and so your team as a whole can tackle more ambitious problems.
Here is a quite easy way to add journal entries via Emacs org-mode: http://phunculist.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/adding-a-journal-...

I'm currently looking at syncing org-mode files through a private GitHub repo.
If anyone in HR had the capabilities to tell the difference between a qualified candidate and one who is lying, then that HR person is also qualified to transfer to engineering and start coding.
You generally can't train attitude. Many of those candidates who don't have the skills or passion lack it because there are other things in their life that they value more, like family.
But the runtime will fade away. This is Google making a fresh start for the years to come. Shouldn't that start be with a open codec instead of a closed one?

The de facto standard for serving <video> today is making a h.246, WebM, a OGG and a FLV (for fallback). Look at videoJS.

So it doesn't mean Flash for video is sticking around.
I like your style but your definition doesn't hold — there's plenty of implicit downcasts that are still 'strong', like boolean tests on data bigger than 1 bit or gt/lt comparisons between different numeric types — a type system that allows those is totally sound.

It's not your fault though, the problem is really just that 'strong' and 'weak' are just fundamentally unsound nomenclature.
Your nose is trained by generations upon generations to recognize shit as something bad.

I also know a dog perfectly happy to eat his own shit, but that would refuse to eat a Big Mac or other fast-food. It's a 12 year old Rottweiler in perfect health with beautifully looking hair without special care.

So I'm not sure our nose is doing a good job :)
Yea. Seriously, don't know why sony is making fools out of themselves - seems like act of desperation. Just move on to innovating a newer version with more security. I guess lot of game developers are not happy with this.
I've refrained from saying that the bubble is really starting to get scary, until I saw this.
The point he was making with a 4 hr programming test is that it is a complete waste of time. It doesn't take a 4 hr test to separate the wheat from the chaff unless the interviewer knows nothing at all.
Hmm source? I assume you mean Goran Lindberg, but there is nothing out there about him being reinstated to anything after being convicted. In fact wikipedia says he is in prison right now. How has he been reinstated?

I don't know what this has to do with Larsson at all.
There's a beautiful coffee table book "The Pixar Story" that talks about the cash Jobs put into Pixar.

The book claims Jobs purchased Pixar for $5M and immediately invested another $5M. When he purchased the company he was also running NeXT. Pixar, like NeXT, was a computer company selling computer hardware. Both companies we're struggling and taking up a lot of Job's cash.

The story goes that Pixar started to produce more 3D animated shorts, these impressed Katzenberg at Disney who agreed to part fund Toy Story. Only to even get to that point, 6 years after Jobs purchased the company, he'd had to invest a total of $60M into Pixar. He was investing close to $1M a month.

Between Pixar and NeXT jobs was nearly broke. Although I suspect his "nearly broke" is a much bigger bank account thank my "nearly broke".

Not sure how true the story is. But that's how "The Pixar Story" tells it.
I would add a convenient way for this to interact with already existing hashed links that are used for navigation.

Rather than the #p[...],h[...] how about #p=...&h=...?

EDIT: Or even #deeplink=p[...],h[...]
I know a bunch of people at Google who started programming in college. I also knew a few people in college who started there and are now getting CS Ph.Ds.

Curiously, it seems to be mostly women who are good devs and yet didn't start until college. I'm not really sure what to make of that. Could be selection bias - since boys are encouraged to play with computers, most of the ones who will be any good at it started in grade school, while since girls have no such encouragement, even ones that are good at it may never have discovered that until college. Or it could be that all boys who are good at computers let it take over their life, and girls have many competing interests. Or it could that only girls have the discipline to become good at something without it becoming their life.
The comparison is of some interest, but the title of the article does not do justice to the content.
Of the twenty-three books I read in 2010, these seven really stand out:

- Predictably Irrational. Everyone here knows this book, right? It had been on my reading list for too long, and I'm glad I eventually managed to read it. Much more enjoyable that I expected it to be, even given the fact that much of the material is well-known already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational

- Longitude follows John Harrison's fascinating, painful and lengthy quest to win the Longitude Prize by creating a clock that was accurate enough to determine longitude at sea. Dava Sobel is a great writer and makes this topic totally engaging (aside: Sobel started her writing career as a technical writer at IBM). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

- Bad Science is Ben Goldacre's essential and extensive criticism of the media's health care reportage and of various health-related issues (vaccinations, placebos, etc.). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(book)

- Sum has had a fair bit of press over the last few months. It's a collection of forty stories on the afterlife, by David Eagleman. It's a novel exercise in philosophy, and I thoroughly enjoyed five or six of the stories. It's a very creative and original book (and short, too) and is a good lesson in constrained thinking.

- The PayPal Wars is the story of PayPal's early years from the viewpoint of former PayPal marketing executive, Eric Jackson. I found it a riveting read on the trials and tribulations of a startup in a difficult market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars

- Made to Stick is interesting in many ways (such as marketing, psychology and rhetoric, to name a few) and is extremely well-written. Chip and Dan Heath really know their subject and explain how to make ideas or concepts memorable in this captivating book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_to_Stick Tip: Read the extensive excerpts on the official website — http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/ — and, if you enjoy them, read the full book.

- Lolita is one of those books everyone knows about, even if they haven't read it. I decided to sit down with this beast of a book and am glad I did. It's a great story and will really get your moral cogs ticking over. As well as that, Nabokov has an amazing way with the English language, and from very near the beginning I become a lifelong fan of his style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita
To me, strongly typed means something entirely different: a strongly typed language does not allow you to do unsafe conversions. In C for instance, you can cast any integer value to a pointer, creating references to things that may not even exist. That would be weak typing.

There's a dozen more definitions, though.
There was some flash flooding in my city of Toowoomba (close to Brisbane QLD) earlier this week. I was supposed to meet a client that afternoon in the CBD, I'm sure glad I cancelled!

I collected some footage and images if anyone is interested:
http://phillipsdesign.com.au/notebook/toowoomba-floods/

Good luck to the people in Brisbane and surrounds, stay safe.
Really glad for this. I use Verizon, but keep buying Samsung SCH-a650's off of Ebay because it was made before Verizon installed their crappy software on every one of its phones.
Explaining Record High Food Prices
"Short-term thinking" can easily mean five or ten years on the web. Should I be happy as a user when Google makes my situation worse to make it better five years later?
Yes you will, re-read the law of large numbers. It's not the law of the infinite.

An infinite monkeys would produce every finite thing in zero time. The "finite things" including: the full works of Shakespeare, every single other book written or that will be written, all computer memory at any one time. In fact, you could encode the visible universe in a simulation and run it in an instant for any large but finite number of years.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "infinity is big, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is".
Dunno about the OP, but I'm worried about burnout. The road to being "world class" anything is longer than you can imagine, and it'd suck to get 10 years in and suddenly reach the point where I can't do this any more, no matter how much I used to like it, right when I would otherwise be a big success.

It is apparently possible to care about your work and yet still leave it at work - I know a few people that have managed it. I haven't had a whole lot of success myself.
>Looking at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haupert.mlb the average price of baseball tickets has, after adjustment for inflation, not changed very much.

>What has changed is the value of the income from TV.

And as mentioned by another commenter, merchandise and so on. Even if what you're saying were true that players have a larger percentage of the overall pie that their team makes (I don't believe this for a second without a lot more analysis) that could indicate that they were under-compensated before and are now getting a fairer share. Perhaps because of unions, perhaps because of (as you mention) free agents.
That's deontological, i.e. certain events have inherent value, instead of being judged by their effects. Deontological morality means the effects chain is terminated. Otherwise there is no termination and no value ascribed to an action.
There is a very big difference between what clothes someone is wearing and what their physical location is.

In half a generation, perhaps, when all the kids have grown up with zero distinction between online and offline life and VC equipment is so good that it's just like you're there, large-scale remote working might work. But right now, there is so much high-bandwidth communication that you're missing out on.
>Bitterness, Anger And Betrayal At MySpace

Sometimes you can just tell a Michael Arrington headline before you even click.
Well, that's bizarre then because the place I was in was a very depressed salary zone and a company with a (well deserved) reputation for underpaying even for their salary zone. And with any managers I've discussed this with, while never disclosing their salaries to me, have never been surprised.
I think v2 is trying to solve a problem it shouldn't have to solve. If the NYT made available previous (published!) revisions of their content, there would be no need to assign paragraphs with special IDs or the like. You'd simply say, "get me p2 for the story as it was on Jan 11 15:33". When you link to a specific piece of content, it's in the hopes that people will read or see the same thing you saw when you made the link. You don't want to be talking about different things, so revision-awareness would actually make more sense overall.
Buying an unlocked iPhone in Canada is probably easier.
If I'm right though, that's only a proposed restraining order? Or do I have the wrong end of the stick?
Direct Proof from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem#Direct_...
C++ templates are great. It's the almost-templates that cause so much trouble.

The late 90s was not a good decade for C++. Regardless, today I can write a general, reference-counting pointer off the cuff in about 50 lines of code and it will work for any type. I had to do exactly that for a school project where we couldn't use boost, actually :)
Accidental Inventions and Discoveries - Newsweek
This is a proposed court order, written by Sony's lawyers. Even the PDF file name has "proposed" in it. The court can approve, amend or deny it.
Why should they move to a newer version? Can't they just drop the `security'?
He briefly mentions the next book in the speech (quoted below) and I'm sure more will come, but the concept of mastery which is a theme in all Robert's books is the common thread between the people he interviewed

In the book that I'm writing now, I can talk about it later, if you'd like, I'm interviewing eight of the most eminent people in the world today in different fields -- In neuroscience, in architecture, in music. All of them are inherently non-conformists. All of them are inherently bucking the trend and taking their field in a completely novel direction by bringing out more of that uniqueness that I was talking about."
Technically yes, except with a PS3 your purchase amounts to agreement with the EULA; it's tucked away in a manual that no one reads, or at best is shown to the user on a screen during setup which is simply clicked through. Most people don't realize that they aren't buying the physical machine, they're buying the right to use the physical machine in approved ways only (this may be technically untrue, but it's certainly what it amounts to).

I find the fact that a contract can be agreed to in these ways unethical, especially when they are hidden under the guise of buying a physical product.
I think you're right. There's no signature from a judge at the bottom, which suggests this is something they're submitting to the court in the hopes of having it approved. IANAL, so I don't know how that would work.
I wouldn't say Apple ignores jailbreakers; while they haven't tried to sue anyone making the software (as far as I know), they did try to block the DMCA exemption for jailbreaking: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...
"[...] many geeks don't believe intellectual property should be protected."

And also, toilet paper is used to wipe asses. Many geeks indeed do even believe that intellectual "property" is a propaganda term which was coined to make the false impression that a temporary monopoly on information is somehow similar to physical property.
That and the fact that the current government hardly classifies and 'conservative' in any meaningful international comparison. At best they're a "slightly less socialist" government.