skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, now we get the to heart of it:

You don't care about the clarity of the license, or the availability of clear information about what it means, or the fact that the FSF recommends every project that is under the GPL include a complete copy of the GPL in every distributed copy of the code so that it is not inadvertently used by someone that might not know the license. You only care that it's not the license you prefer.

"The more likely scenario is that you start an open source project. Put it under the BSD. Great. Two years later someone comes and says, remember dev X, Y, and Z. They were using some GPL code in your project. We've found at least 50 instances of it."

I've been an Open Source developer for more than a dozen years, on projects in use by millions of people, and under more than a dozen different licenses including BSD and GPL. Some of those projects span hundreds of thousands of lines of code and hundreds of contributors, in both purely commercial and purely non-profit organizations and everything in between. I've never once seen an incident of GPL code being accidentally used in a situation where it caused a license problem. I have seen people try to get away with not following the license, but that's not the same thing, and it was not a misunderstanding or inadvertent.

In short: He (or she) who writes the code, determines the license. Deal with it. If you're using the code it's your responsibility to understand the terms under which it is made available to you. You can't make it the author's responsibility to choose a license that meets your desires. The author of the code presumably has their own desires, and they supercede yours.
65% Reduction in Emissions by 2050
There are tons of bad managers, but there are also a few excellent managers. I think it mostly depends on their focus.

Most middle managers (and most people in general) are focused on what they need to get done--the reports that need to be filed or the next status meeting to be scheduled. What good managers realize is that their work contributes absolutely nothing to the company (directly.) They are overhead in the purest sense of the word. All those i's to dot and t's to cross don't add a single cent to revenue. The only way they can make any contribution to the company is by making their people more effective. A great manager should be a hacker focused on her people's time rather than on code. She should be anticipating problems and annoyances and dealing with them before they blow up. If there's a fire hose of distractions, she should be the valve that slows the flow down to a trickle and routes the real issues to the appropriate people. Her goal should always be, "How can I make my people 1% more efficient?"

Too bad that most managers appear to be little more than a secretary with a checklist. (Actually, most secretaries I know are more useful than most managers.)
Questions to ask when someone pitches product
i am planning to meet with a guy.... he has a background in sales and before that, design. he is trying to pitch me on the idea of being a partner in a business he has planned. generally i just plan to listen to the pitch and think it over... any ideas on questions to ask?
On a related note, I feel like the iPhone is less "eager" to rotate after being held in the same orientation for a while. E.g. I browse Safari in landscape mode for ten minutes, rotate the phone to portrait, and it takes a few extra seconds for the transition to register.

Anybody else noticed this?
Anecdote from a SysAdmin: I remember during the early 2000s there was a trend for a little while to scale down the IT department, and rely on corporate support, or use outside consulting firms, or other methods that involved keeping the payroll mostly free of such "backroom" types. I've heard a lot of horror stories from people who would go into a company to fix a small problem or perform an upgrade, and would find virus ridden computers barely running, people doing ridiculous things like burning cds to move a couple of files (remember, early 2000s here), people losing their product license or support information, or other terrible things, simply because there was no on-site sysadmin to keep all of their computers in good functional order.

This article presents much the same scenario, but updated for 2011. And make no mistake, it will probably work for small, well managed, web-based companies, full of people that already know plenty about computers and technology. For pretty much every other type of major company though, there needs to be at least one person who's responsibility is making sure that the technology in the workplace can be worked with and not just worked around, and who can be responsible for dealing with the new technologies that come around, and until the cloud can provide such a service, the sysadmin will be alive and well.
Python makes the same read and write syscalls everyone else does

Except, when python's pants are on, it makes gold records.

I haven't looked to see if there are any explicit optimizations, but your statement is ridiculous; an effective IO strategy can have an enormous effect on performance.
I

LOVE

GRID
We do the same thing for the Notifo iPhone app, except our "magic number" is 1. If you are the top of the list, new notifications slide in and push the list down. If you are scrolled down past the first notification, new notifications load in, but the list stays still (a non-trivial thing to do with UITableViews). I never knew the mail app did the same thing (I have mine set to refresh manually); it just seemed like the reasonable thing to do.
Ask HN: Is $1.86 billion in revenue enough to keep Facebook viable?
This seems like a really low number considering they have 500M "customers". I assume they're making a bit more than $2/person on the site (profit)...how can they possibly be worth $50 Billion?!
From the 90’s, Steve Jobs has done a lot of good things for Apple. He plans and thinks through everything he does. I don’t think it’s likely that he hasn’t thought of a plan for Apple for when he’s gone.
So is a company car if you're a sole trader... But I can't write off my normal car.

It's relatively consistent.
A couple things here...

1. I think there's a distinction between Sys Admin and a more management position like Director of IT or CIO. In some companies there's only one person who fills both roles but they are two distinct roles and I think this article refers to the actual System Administration role rather than the management role that selects software and vendors.

2. While I don't think the System Administrator role will disappear completely I do think the focus will switch from one that is more hardware driven to one that's more software/programming driven. I think businesses will expect System Administrators to handle integrating their cloud based services into a comprehensive whole in the future rather than just making sure there's a network to carry data. That's important because it will mean a dramatic shift in the required skill set.
Regarding training/interviewing, I just think about this awesome Steve Yegge post: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practicing-programm...

"It's a bit easier to tell if someone's in great shape physically than if they're in great shape mentally. You can't just stare at their brain and hope to find a six-pack in all those folds. It's easy to tell how physically fit someone is. You can make people run laps, lift things, take their physical measurements, etc.

But for determining someone's mental fitness, you pretty much have to interview them. It it's hard to do a good job of it, since it's like running backwards in front of the person, egging them to go faster. You have to be in pretty good shape yourself to be a good interviewer."
but I can't help but think after reading the following that the post is just fantastically subtle PR.

That would apply to about a third of the posts that make it to the HN front page nowadays, I'd say ;-)
You need to ask yourself whether you are happy with your current standard of life.

If you are, then well done! You have found a job that pays for you to have the amount of free time that you want, at a level of effort that you are happy with.

If you want to earn more money then you will presumably have to find another job that pays more but which requires a few more hours of your time to do well.

I guess you just need to decide whether you want to be making more money through your salaried job (and having fewer hours to do with as you want) or whether you are happy being paid in your current position.
- what problem or gap in the market are you addressing?

- who are your competitors, how are you different?

- whats the business model, path to profitable, and when?

- what's the biggest hurdle the venture faces - in your opinion?

- show me the analysis/numbers? (to see that due diligence has been attempted)
Mozilla & Google Announce Browser “Do Not Track” Features
What Can I Sell My Business For? | Noobpreneur Business Blog
I should make clear that I think you still have a "job" if you work for yourself. Otherwise my response doesn't make a lot of sense :-)
Yes and no. System admins aren't disappearing - they're specializing into 2 distinct professions:

* Those working for infrastructure providers (IBM, Amazon, Rackspace) focus on the bottom half of the stack: everything from the datacenter's floor plan to switching and VM allocation.

* Those working for infrastructure consumers (everybody else) focus on the upper half: the business's software stack, how to glue it together, and where to run it.

Conclusion: system admin, as a profession, is gradually disappearing. But it's being replaced by 2 better professions: more challenging work, higher perceived value within the organization, and higher demand.
Official App Store account on Twitter
Satarii Star: Make your camera follow your every move
RepRap Blog: Filling in with the fillings
"Qwiki is little more than a toy." upvote

(and compare to AirBnB, which has a function in the real economy outside the web)

The author does not explain, though, how this is emblematic of a general trend.
What to do About Storage - Stack Overflow
There are many in-lining opportunities that depend on knowing what branches are followed in the program at run time. A JIT has better access to this information, and so can be more aggressive in leveraging it.

I'm not familiar with how common these techniques are in production JVM's, but as they're becoming common in javascript implementations I'd assume it's equally common.
"Then everything promptly went to shit. We ran out of allocated budget on the AppEngine, our scraping architecture melted and just about everything that can possibly go wrong server-side did go wrong."

heh, it's always fun launching.
I like to start my day with a healthy dose of confirmation bias.
Researchers Weigh Benefits of a New Kilogram Standard
HeyTell, The Social Walkie-Talkie App With 3 Million Users
The significance of the meta-circular interpreter
Why, because trying to do anything gives everybody else the right to criticize you?

He's got a point. Taunts cost little and yield nothing.
This is a great breakdown, thanks. Now can you explain why so often I receive an email on the iPhone and one of two things happens:

1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.

2. If I'm in MobileMail.app a new email arrives and I see it up top for a few seconds, and instantly it disappears. Again, I have to tap refresh to re-download the message.

Why does this happen?
Precorder for iPhone. Never miss a great video moment again
The job is crushing your soul. Quit and go do something you give a damn about.
Subtle nothing. It's a corporate blog, champ. In what way does that make the premise invalid?
Well it's not always that simple. Sadly technology isn't 1-to-1 and a lot of Enterprise solutions have become stagnant.

To give one example. We've recently started moving our users to Box.Net because the hassle of having a VPN connection for each user just to have them connect to a server with ShadowCopy was becoming too much. Box.Net requires no such VPN connection and its syncing is superior to ShadowCopy bandwidth wise.
How much "must read" articles, books, blogs do we've to read in order to be successful?. I don't think it's bad to read an article or so once in a while, but there is no "must read" list.
Twitter’s Mac app does this, too, it also only scrolls if you are not farther down than one tweet. (Automatic scrolling, which is off by default, has to be enabled.)
Thanks for clearing that up. I was beginning to wonder if we had done something tasteful. We're the polar opposite of search engine spam. We believe passionately in great, original content!
Close Tab Behaviour in Google Chrome
Training: a series introduction
RIP Jack LeLanne
Thanks -- this is our side-project which we posted on HN a while back during launch: http://bjk5.com/post/2768063563/great-white-sharks-are-the-b...
This is one point over which there is some controversy. I would argue that a copyright owner merely distributing software gives one the right to use that software as it was intended, just as distributing a book gives a recipient the right to read it. A license can only restrict that right, or grant additional rights one would not have under copyright.

The GPLv3 preemptively deals with potential counterarguments to this point of view by explicitly affirming the right to use the software, but using reductio ad absurdum, it seems ridiculous to be able to distribute a work under the protection of copyright law without implicitly giving the lawful recipients of the work the ability to use it as intended.
I believe if anybody feels Nigerians deserve a chance, they should start an online payment insurance company, to cover for the risk exposure :), so the likes of paypal etc can buy the insurance and everybody is happy.

You can then develop an API (that does the verifications and flags orders)etc for merchants to use together with the payment gateways to be covered by the policy.
JIT has strictly more information than an ahead-of-time compiler running without good profiling data (that should be based on the real workload, not a dev test). JITs can notice things like paths never taken and compile the code into a set of sanity checks and a single completely inlined tight codepath for the common case, and when sanity checks fail, fall back to normal code.

JIT does, however, use cycles at runtime to do the actual compile. While I have seen benchmarks where JIT wins over AoT, I'd still bet that the balance favors traditional compilers.
Neutral and impartial are synonyms, and any differences between the two are inferred from context. In other words, you're creating distinctions where none exist.

I could continue to rebut your argument, but I suspect that I'm wasting my breath.
Pirates By The Numbers
They do say it in text if one looks....

https://www.dropbox.com/help/45
Come on man. What does this have to do with the article? In any case, I have had no such problems with my iphones, so I'd say you either got a faulty unit or maybe it's a service provider issue.
Great article Elad, great insight and perspective on the various factors to consider when building/growing a startup.
Without getting into any specifics, I am one of the many, many crumb-snatching, niche-players in the App store. All I can say is, thank God the high selling apps in the marketplace get so much attention because if developers just did a bit of research and built products focused on traditional market segmentation (and combined that with good seasonal macroeconomic policies) then I would have ALOT more competition where I am.
We do four day work weeks from May - October. Five day work weeks the rest of the year. We've found that's the right balance.
How to get 85,000,000 pageviews even if you are ugly
Sketch in 3D With Animating Lines on HTML5 Canvas
> the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs

When I preach this, I modify it to "always eliminate your role". Your job won't go anywhere, but what you're doing for that job should always be changing.
Maybe my brain is going (long day), but that makes no sense.

First paragraph: you send them a time ("me proposing a vague timeframe"), they say yes or no.

Second paragraph: you send them a time ("I just lead and send them a time"), they say yes or no.

I can see how picking a specific time could work better, as then they're more likely to bend to your time than if you're vague. Being vague implies you have other open times too, so they're freer to say no while still getting the meeting. But how is the first about letting them choose a time-frame?
In Camcorder Megapixels, Can Less Be More?
The State of the Platform and its Increasing Diversity
Not really. The implied point is that DHH has an obligation to explain not only why a company should consider his radical changes. But also, because of the magnitude of the changes he proposes, he has an obligation to explain seriously why a company shouldn't. Otherwise, it's just cheerleading.

I was calling out that he failed to do the latter, and my obligation is to explain why a company might not want to, or be able to, implement those changes.

The fact is that I'm not wrong about him glancing over an important part of his proposal. If you write an article advocating companies undergo radical shifts in their organizational structures, then as someone who is regarded as an informed commenter, you have an obligation to tell people the pitfalls of such a large change. Again, when you don't do that, it's called cheerleading.

He didn't include any discussion of the downsides, or the upsides of hierarchical organization, so I'm not wrong. I should have used a more tactful phrase than "lip-service," however: it's more loaded -- perhaps even derogatory -- than I intended.
I don't think so -- I saw it only because I was curious how the 3D effects were. I would not have seen it if it were only available in 2D. Same goes for the people I was with and many I've talked to.

You can't show the 3D in marketing, but you can (and they did) highlight the concept of it. It's like all those ads on TV about fancy TV screens with superior image quality -- they obviously don't show you the screen itself.
I am more concerned with some of its categorization of my interests!

Reference - Humanities - Philosophy
What happened to philosophy being the queen of sciences?

Science - Mathematics
Mathematics is a subtopic of science? Science is impossible without math.
With HTML5, what opportunities do you see open up?

I suppose the idea in creating wealth is about catalyzing a number of similar and different new technologies first and best to meet an unmet or latent human need. Rather than catching a single wave, it's about sitting atop a standing wave generated by many.

Like in the Civilization game, new wonders have prerequisite technologies, and then new opportunities open up.
I'd be interested in hearing more about how the author is using the resulting data set. Doing extractions at event generation time can be very useful if you know what you are after in advance, but not so good for adhoc analysis.

Any reason why you didn't use Hadoop for this, then run batch jobs to extract summaries?
Is it an array that models your problem efficiently, or is it "an n-dimensional data structure with O(1) lookups by index", of which an array is merely one implementation?
I hear ya, but the agenda (mostly) doesn't matter to me. I assume corporate blog posts are published for commercial reasons, even when it's about the author's personal life.

And I've gotten so much value out of HN discussions that benefit the site linkee (lots of awesome threads start out "Show HN: My new site/business").

I guess my main point is: I'm all for the business linked to getting PR, as long as we, the HN members get some cool value out of it. In this case, i thought the post was very topical because talent/skill shortage is a frequently talked about issue here, as are work cultural norms in general.

But I totally respect the opinion that some posts may not have an interesting enough ideas to make PR interesting. That said, I always wait for the other shoe to drop: the HN thread it spawns often ends up being incredible.
I was working as a Senior Project Manager / Designer at Contempo Design (Architecture and Design) in San Francisco. One of my project was goto.com in Pasadena, California. It was beautiful, 4 floors of pure modern. Goto.com went belly up not long after (under Disney). Large projects with Bank of America and Charles Schwab kept me busy for 3 years.
The title is pompously superlative, but the content raises specific points which merit discussion.
Harvard grads turn gym business model on its head
Yeah if it's specifically from KCK, depending on where in KCK that high buy dollar could make sense. But for a lot of parts of KCK, and the Missouri side, 200-300k is ridiculously high compared to what I would expect. Most suburbs in general have much lower prices.
It seems like the co-working movement is picking up steam. General Assembly, SunshineCo and a bunch of other spots.

The best thing about co-working is that it gets you away from the isolation some people feel when they are working from home. Also, meeting with other "smart" people is a great way to get and stay motivated. Northern NJ has a great spot I use called ConvergeNJ. http://convergenj.com.

What do you think of the long term prospects?
I guess that's basically my plan; I am saving like 40% of my bring-home pay every month. My plan is to travel with it until I am broke. But I am in a lease until the end of May; and have only recently gotten in the black after dealing with debt and outstanding legal issues (~4k in cash). I estimate I will have ~10k at the end of May for that purpose. (no family or significant ohter)
Perceptive or not, it's not an issue with the GPL. Someone can come back to you with proprietary code inside the same BSD licensed project. Or proprietary inside a GPL. Or AGPL inside GPL. GPLv2 inside GPLv3.

You make assumptions when you use code you didn't write. It's as simple as that. You assume that the distribution of the code is proper, and that the license is as described, and that everyone who contributed did so honestly.

Proprietary or open, it's a problem everywhere, and not limited to just the GPL.
Good question, I guess its open for debate
look at something on line and derive some code from it

Thankfully, copyright does not protect ideas, only the expression thereof. In this context I take the word "derive" in an informal rather than legal sense (i.e. "derivative work"). If there's only one way to, say, clear the non-blocking flag of a file descriptor, save a couple of variable names, then a developer finding that one way in some example code online and using that method in their own code can't reasonably be considered in violation of copyright law or any license.

NB: IANAL.
Google Summer of Code 2011 announced at LCA
Twilio Contest Finalist Translates Languages via SMS to Voice
Two things.

1. The 3.5 mile figure is for resolving the stripes on the flag, not for seeing the flag. If you just want to see the flag, an aperture diameter of around 400 m is required.

2. The "Dawes Limit" is just presented with no explanation. It ultimately comes from the fact that the achievable angular resolution of an aperture of size D, using light with wavelength lambda is lambda/D. So if you were willing to work at 10 nm, then the aperture size goes down by a factor of 50 (of course working at 10 nm has it's own set of problems).
My thoughts exactly. I was expecting some revolutionary design with the size of the article and the number of images involved.

Note that I am not saying this is a negative at all. I just found it out of the ordinary and not expected. Although, if the target audience was HN, then there was definitely a lot of wasted effort. :)
The seminal feminist work in the US is probably Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.