skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The law isn't there to tell you what you can or can't do, it's there so that if you piss off the wrong people they can come down on you like a ton of bricks "legally".

Ahh, then it's like the US tax code.
I got quoted 200$/mo with 7U and 2Amps (100Mb bandwidth) directly from HE.net which I found strange since the next power jump goes up to 600$/mo. This seems like a pretty good deal.
I have evaluated a few of the these for PHP deployments recently, here are my thoughts (from comment on the article):

Cloudfront:
Pros: Best "Heroku" for PHP. Fair pricing. Deployment process is sort of similar to Heroku
Cons: Documentation is lacking, and in some cases flat out wrong. Lacking "heroku-y" polish. Customer support needs improvement (replies to questions/bug reports were a bit gruff).
Other: Have to use Mercurial (ability to use Git is documented, but wrong [see documentation in Cons])

Kodigen:
Pros: Lots of options. Good pricing.
Cons: Lots of options. Very complicated/busy UI. Have to use in-browser code editor. Hard to find relevant documentation.
Other: Probably more for hobbyists.

All in all - for intermediate or advanced developers - there isn't really much of an advantage to using one of the mentioned PaaS vs. FTP or scripted deployments (capistrano, etc.) to regular hosting.
I can ssh to my squeezebox remote
I seem to recall reading somewhere that at the time, it was mostly women who could touch type. This was the days of secretarial pools, most of those women were probably at around 100 wpm.
They forget how to actually program because their work involves very little development, and becomes all about knowing how the specific piece of software works (and the company's admin procedures) so that they can fight fires and make minor changes.

Great point.

Perceived value of a programmer at a start-up: Quality & quantity of software built and shipped.

Perceived value of a programmer in a legacy enterprise IT department: Knowledge of existing code base and ability to get things done with it.
Here's Why You Shouldn't Lie To Your Kids About Santa
Oh and to answer your question about an investment memo, it is essentially a very brief business plan (1-2 pages) detailing what the investment is for, how it would be structured, etc... I have seen banks ask for them, but never heard of a VC or angel asking for one.

As I said above, focus on the product not on the investment, as you work with angels and VCs they will tell you what they want as far as documentation. The lawyer can then help you formulate those documents. Don't over prepare you are just wasting your time.
thanks. Steve, my trainer, motivator guy, is getting me to eat more protein as well now. Really getting into the nutritional aspect of things now.
Sure, but it's less than a thousandth the size, and MS still needs you to restart the whole userspace, kernel, and machine firmware when you install software for some bizarre reason.

Upgrading MongoDB is a five second job. Upgrading SQL server is nightmarish and scary.
A wider look at similar ground is "The Gervais Principle." [1]

1. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
>Because I do know what I'm talking about.

What makes you more qualified to comment on them than anybody else? Do you work in patent law?

If so, how does that qualify you to speak to their implications in the software world (since that is where people have a problem with them; not the wording, or the format, or the location of the building, just the effect on the community).
G’Five tops Samsung in India: What does this mean for your favorite mobile OS?
Making Too Much of TDD
Just for Friends
The Doctor vs. Char Limits
If you work for BigCo, you learn to do things The BigCo way.

Apologies for going off on a tangent, but this sort of jumped out at me. Is this consistent? Shouldn't it be either

a) ... do things the BigCo way.

or

b) ... do things The BigCo Way.

Native is not my English tongue, so I just want to make sure. :p
Piano Staircase
New York's Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process -- and pad overtime checks -- which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in com bating a fierce, fast-moving bliz zard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/sanit_filthy_snow_slow_mo...

Not sure why the NY Times is burying this part of the story.
I guess the title can't be fixed. I read it and thought "Cool a new company called peggermegger is offering colo for $150/mo", then I saw the actual link.
Kid Launches Social Networking Site, Gets 227K Views in 1 hour
I wanted to do the same thing, but with the camera mounted over a heavily-trafficked underpass.

I never got around to it due to a shortage of time, plus I wasn't sure how long the battery would last, and rigging up a box with a big battery, wires, and a camera in a public place seems like a fun way to spend an evening or seventeen being interrogated by three-letter agencies.
> Banning skype is simply an ineffective attempt to protect the propaganda misinformation machines in the people's republic of China.

It's also very probably economic protectionism.
Wait, China allowed Skype? Where has their protectionism gone?
The legacy of pen-and-ink classification schemes comes with some flaws. In the military, if it's that important to be stamped, you shouldn't be reading it in a public square at all. But the "confidential" stamp is what made it seem juicy. Without that stamp, the journalist wouldn't have been interested.

But, like most classified documents, I think this also bears out just how much we over-secretize. I like Assange's view on this: we seem to use secrets to maintain our own positions within certain networks more than we use them for anything like "the greater good".
Audio Sprites: Just like CSS image sprites, but for audio
HP is trying to break into it, with the acquisition of Palm.
Have you seen this? - http://business.twitter.com/
sorry, it seemed to cover most of the conferences I knew about. where would one start looking for something like older best paper awards? it seems like ICML only started giving out best paper awards since 2005

I guess it's the old truism of not being able to prove something does not exist
Why spoil their fun? More importantly, why deny them the opportunity to learn to question authority? I saw lots of words, but not much in the way of an answer.
Stop voting in the same turncoats to office all the time. Do whatever it takes to take back our nation. Our government is not representative of our interests, here or abroad.

That is clear enough.
Most compilers already do this. For the theory behind it, see Hank Warren's *Hacker's Delight", a book that ought to be in everyone's library.
Quoting you:

> You can in theory, build Google on it, make $50B over 20 years, and never pay MS a dime, all while using MS software.

> That's like saying Apple gave me a 16GB iPhone, but I want a 32GB version, therefore its not free.

I agree, it would seem bizarro logic does indeed apply.
The same might be said for grad school...
My conclusion about all of this is that the government wants people to be afraid. These are not real attempts to detect threats to flights. If anything, they're most interested in finding drugs and smuggled valuables. And this is not 'security theater'. The intent is to get everyone used to invasive, police-state style behavior.
Thanks for the post.

Anybody know if there is a good place on the Web where people can be honest about what it's like to work at specific companies?
Would you mind sending some my way too? My specialization is more in applications; in libraries/domain specific languages, particularly ones for AI/statistics applications and functional logic programming.

Email's in my profile.
How George Bailey can save Delicious
The most interesting part of this story to me is that Jason Fried is on the board of Groupon.
An unforgettable lesson
You just restated the previous threads and added some notation, but provided no new evidence to support the argument that Linux is more secure than WinAPI by design. What do you want me to do with that, restate all my arguments again? That seems like a waste of time.

We're talking about the security of single-user machines --- of which most servers are a special case thereof. The perceived significant difference between the two platforms simply isn't there.
Good-looking mazes are not necessarily fun to wander in. The important bit in a maze is the topology, imho, with navigation coming in second (turns can be painful, thin walls can be misleading, corridors can be trivial, etc) and appearance third.
Defensive surveillance for cyclists
Apparently all they have to do is go after Chinese supernodes.
I find this is really the best way. It also finds papers authors post on their websites which has been becoming extremely common (kind of like self-publishing)
Bullies aged 13-15 are not, in general, bad people deep down. Especially not the ones who go to chess tournaments. It is, in general, not really their fault. Children this age have little control over their lives, so even if they had some good ideas to fix their situation they might well be prevented from doing anything. You can't really blame people for stuff they aren't in control of. So have a bit more sympathy and stop being actively mean to them.
I was rejected for Bizspark. As part of a wider product, I develop an Open Source OpenXML module for Python.

This requires testing on Office 2007 and 2010, as these apps don't implement the OpenXML spec exactly so there are quirks.

Not sure if the rejection was because it was whether the component that touched the MS stack was OSS, whether MS don't realize that Python runs on Windows, whether they don't want people to use OpenXML on other platforms, or some other reason.

Weirdly enough, I actually started in IT as a Windows NT 4 MCSE when I was 17. I had a very different view of Microsoft then.
And as usual, people outside of the United States get a sub-par experience.

"At this time, Kindle book lending can only be initiated by customers residing in the United States. If a loan is initiated to a customer outside the United States, the borrower may not be able to accept the loan if the title is not available in their country due to publisher geographical rights."

I'm confident ebooks will become DRM-free in the near future, and when that happens we won't have to worry about all of these nonsensical limitations.
Customized Car Stickers Can Be Designed Creatively
Talking about customized car stickers, they can be designed by means of professional graphic design tools and methods. That is why company offers you cheap car stickers printing.
Like some here, I recently escaped a company which pulled off these four condition on every employee in every dept. Am not ashamed to name and shame them either. ComXo, a Slough UK, based umbrella company with call2.com, buttontel.com and multivoice.com brands under them. Here's the deal....

"We run a tight ship, everyone has to be in at 9am" ... The employer had one person he believed is the cream for the week and their given top spot...everyone else is treated like dead wood for the next week or two. Percieved threat of getting fired if you were the dead wood, and some did...to our amazement..this kept the rest quiet, head down, trying utmost not to get noticed!

Small Kindness...This was amazingly executed. The employer introduced an great bonus scheme and got you to agree to it and the job/project delivery based on it. The scheme is known as "MBO"

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_objectives).

The objectives were set, one/two meetings take place and then you got a nice tidy sum, around 8% of the total bonus...then the scheme was shutdown, your locked in to the project, otherwise...see perceived threat above!

Isolation from other perspectives - provided you met the project deadline, did the utmost to killoff the competition to be the "cream" mentioned about, you were in with a chance to be IT / Sales / product (you name the dept) manager.....keep waiting.....the perception was..."we dont need an manager, we do a great job without one". The employer is the manager for all depts, have you heard such tosh!

Perceived inability to escape - Majority was told, they could never get paid as well as they do there, the jobs easy and "you" make it difficult, all you have to do is A, B and C, we have to do D, E and F-Z..your lucky! They even went as far saying how would they cope without you...praise that were simply words to keep some staff working till 9PM when they would refuse to pay a penny over the 9-5 allocated!

Myself and other ex-employees all feel extremely grateful, we all get together on a regular basis and feel so lucky to have gotten out when we did too! We were only lauging last week when we found they were using their own employees to advertise their services on youtube (try serching for "comxo"), amazing what they got their employee to do in the name of the company!

Sorry for the long rant.
So, to summarise, S.S. type of jobs can be ones that provide:

- occasional bonuses

- competitive salary

- great tech to play with

- high status within the company that you might lose if not keep up

Now, the question is, does that really sound like a terrible job environment to you? Where one is supposed to go from there? Entrepreneurship? Consulting? Cause actual salaried jobs don't get any much better than that.
US patent law (as well as copyright law) derives from Article I section 8 of the Constitution which grants Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The question is do patents actually promote the progress of science and technology ? I suspect that they do not because while they create additional monetary incentives to pursue innovation at the same time they restrict the free flow of ideas which is the driving force behind scientific and technical progress.

The free exchange and use of information is probably the source of the exponential progress in "information technologies" that Ray Kurzweil has discovered. It seems likely that impediments to the exchange and use of information, such as patents, can only reduce the rate of exponential growth.

Perhaps if patents had never existed our technology would be far more advanced than it currently is.

If it were ever possible to prove conclusively that patents impede rather than promote progress, they would become unconstitutional in the US.
Forking Etiquette
I wonder what happened to change the demographics so heavily.

Fran Allen says in her interview for Coders at Work that IBM's gender balance slowly shifted in the 60s as a side-effect of new IT hiring standards. Recruiting preference was given to candidates with advanced degrees in engineering, and most of these new graduates were male [1].

Through this lens the gender shift can be seen as an artifact of the higher education system: Fewer women were getting into these schools and finishing with advanced degrees in math and computing. Even today women can have a tougher road putting together the 7-10 consecutive years of full-time academics required for a terminal degree given that the 20s are also prime child-bearing years.

pg explains the corporate hiring mindset better than I can with a "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" analogy in News from the Front:

A recruiter at a big company is in much the same position as someone buying technology for one. If someone went to Stanford and is not obviously insane, they're probably a safe bet. And a safe bet is enough. No one ever measures recruiters by the later performance of people they turn down [2].

[1] http://www.codersatwork.com

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html
Salaries are low in the Netherlands for IT people. I'm a Windows admin and also moved and went from pretax 34K euros in Amsterdam to $110K in California in 2006.Then add on top of that a sales tax and an income tax that are each roughly 10% lower in the US. Even if you compensate for lower benefits, cost of living differences and a possible increase of my value due to additional skills learned, there is a massive difference. I practically went from rags to riches just by moving (and also went from about 8 weeks vacation a year to... nothing :).
How would one assume that? Does one know how much education costs?
You're mixing up property rights (what you already have) with income tax brackets (what you're getting).
"I can't believe how smooth your propaganda is here in the US. In China it is crude and everyone can see through it, but here you almost miss it."

Having grown up the States, and having lived in China for many years, I'd agree with this statement wholeheartedly.
Third sentence on the page:

Compilers usually do this, but only when the divisor is known at compile time. libdivide allows you to take advantage of it at runtime.
No, blogs (Wordpress) are for getting Google traffic to you so you can get clicks through to your offers. ;)

Basic overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization

Where I generally find products to promote (they usually come with banners, pre-made landing pages, etc.):

http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

Recommended forums:

http://blackhatworld.com
http://www.warriorforum.com
http://forums.digitalpoint.com

99.99% of the stuff people are trying to sell on those forums is crap, but there's lots of general information there that's very good. BHW's "Making Money" section has a tonne of stickied topics under each subsection with good info.

The advantage of having web dev/sysadmin skills is that you can take a method people are running manually (and probably even example code that's floating around) and scale it easily to 100x what they're doing. You don't have to innovate, you just have to automate and scale.

Be careful if you use shady methods. If the product owner realises what you're doing, they'll kill your account and refuse to pay the middleman who will refuse to pay you. :)

If you meet/befriend other people in IM and establish that you're not a noob, doors will be opened to better offers/products and better terms for payment e.g., being paid three days after the end of the week ("net 3") instead of seven days ("net 7").

You can get $75 USD free credit when you register on Adwords (http://adwords.google.com). After a few days, you'll be able to decrease your bids on keywords to $0.01, so $75 = 7,500 people clicking through to your landing page/offer. Unless your conversion rate is atrocious, you'll make back far more than $75. This isn't a bad place to start experimenting. SEO works, too, but it's more of a "long haul" thing. PPC advertising gets you traffic right now, but you have to be careful that it doesn't annihilate your profit margins.
Having 2 or 3 best paper awards I can understand, but having a dozen is cheating. Many of the other top conferences like WWW, AAAI, and SIGIR have nearly 1,000 submissions also and they only have a single best paper award.
"* Fear of failure is a great motivator. When you quit without having another opportunity already lined up, you have a lot of obvious motivation to find a new job since your income is $0. I've found it easier than lulling myself into complacency by continuing to get my income from the source I hate."

This is true - but this has to mean that you also manage your finances properly on the side.
People who are one late paycheck away from a cascade of payment failures and personal financial chaos can't operate this way. (So they should fix their financial management first, then follow your advice!)
Whatever happened to the American Dream? These scenarios certainly don't sound like it. A lot of Americans (if not a majority) are in a similar situation.
Hand Painting Wallpapers,Hand Painting images,Hand Painting photos collection
I often hear people making statements like the one in the title (I'd kill to...), but usually the first response that jumps into my head is "No, you wouldn't."

If you really wanted a four day work week, you would have one. You'd make it a priority and either negotiate it into your current job or go find an employer who was flexible enough to allow it.

The fact that you're working 5 days a week can be taken as a statement that you are in fact content to work 5 days per week.

I used to get this a lot when I'd come back from a long trip. "I wish I could just drop everything and go traveling for a whole year..." But you can. You just haven't. And if you thought about it, you'd probably realize that you really just prefer to lead the life you're leading.

The key is to understand yourself and what you really want. Then do that.
Now that's what I'm talking about!

Patents were originally intended to encourage investors in a time when bringing a product to market could take years.

In the software industry, that assumption is, to put it mildly, totally off. Therefore, in the software industry, granting someone a 17 year monopoly on an idea just encourages another, destructive type of strategy that hurts the entire industry: PATENT TROLLING.

Seriously, it is a legal strategy to describe something to the government, wait a few years and then go after the people who actually BUILT IT (even if they came up with it independently, as long as they can't prove they came up with it before you described it in a patent application).

That's BULL CRAP. You didn't do anything except write some paper. If you're good at it, you don't even need a lawyer. And you get to collect money from the hard work of others.

On the other hand, I feel that if you DID write a patent, AND you tried to make it work, AND you are succeeding, you SHOULD be able to prevent your competitors from just copying what you did. But not for 17 years. For two years at most!

It is in this latter sense that the patent system is great. I'd get a provisional patent over an NDA anyday. Because it's more legally enforceable. Say a company meets with me and I tell them the idea. First of all I don't have to require them to sign any NDA. Secondly, suppose they say, "nice idea, we are going to do it ourselves". I can tell them, "I have a provisional patent, and I will sue your ass in 2 years." Or I can tell them NOTHING, go ahead and convert it to a real patent (probably $5k out of my pocket) and go sue them 2 years later. Not 17 years later.

This, I don't mind. They wanted to screw me by stealing my idea, they got burned. This will encourage companies to NOT screw individual investors and actually decide if they want to wait 3 years before making this, or work with the inventor.

With NDAs, there is no way to prove anything. I spoke to Bobby, and they signed an NDA. Then, Charlie Inc. comes out with my product. I didn't make Charlie, Inc. sign anything, and Bobby doesn't have the $5 million dollars to pay me, and I can't prove he told anything to Charlie, Inc. OOPS.

That's what software patents should protect against. That's it. They currently do, but we don't need 17 years of that kind of protection!
Periodic tablet etched on a single hair as birthday gift
Good question. There are a handful of employer review sites out there that have real review content, but on the ones I've seen it is often hard to discern the angry rants from the legitimate grievances.
Civil War Message in a Bottle Opened, Decoded
Too many flaws for this idea to take off. I've been in the colo business for years and can certainly tell this is going no where.

Here's the killer flaw in the idea:

"he.net support and remote hands(I need to check on the details here, but I /believe/ it's free and unlimited.)"

There's no free lunch folks.

Regards

Joe
You should contact jf http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jf