skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this statement is actually true:
"Ever since Facebook pioneered the concept of the News Feed, a constantly updating stream of communications to keep you in the loop..."

(Twitter, and possibly even RSS feeds before that)
> I think that's an awfully pedantic interpretation of the original question

Nevertheless, that's the question. It's a simple question, and a better one then what you imply it is. "Can you give some examples of companies that have successfully smeared a market leader with FUD and ended up ahead as a direct result of that smear campaign" is a loaded question.

Rather, the question as asked is simple: Despite having a smear campaign, have companies succeeded? Are their success stories? Yes, yes there is. There are countless success stories of companies and organizations directly attacking their competitor and being successful, if not market leaders.

Apple is just one example.
I don't see why it's totally impossible. Outsourcing of archive management has been going on for decades at this point.
DuckDuckGo vs. Standard Search Company vs. Bing
I like that rule. Two months is definitely an absolute minimum. That's when you pull your pockets inside out and say you're broke.
What's ironic is that you're doing the same thing. You pay lip service (using phrases like "I wouldn't consider" and "It seems") to the fact that you might be wrong about DHH paying lip service to the fact that he might be wrong. And then when you actually change over to the main topic, you do the same thing. The majority of this comment explains how DHH is undeniably and completely missing the point.

If you want to criticize DHH, be my guest. I might agree with what you're saying. Just don't criticize him and then turn around and do the exact same thing as you accuse him of doing.
TCHunt Source Code
This data seems extremely unreliable. For example, it claims that in KC you might be better renting, then lists a buying price range of $200-$300k. Then hop over to Denver and it says buying might be better, with a price range of $100-$200k. I've lived in both cities and looked at houses in each, and it is much, much more expensive to purchase a house in Denver than in the Kansas City metro.
Some people do the Australian investment trade quite well. It used to be done mostly by Japanese investors, who borrowed money in Japan at low Japanese interest rates (~0.5%) and then bought US or Australian bonds at ~5%.

Here's a 2006 article that touches on it: http://www.theglobalguru.com/article.php?id=104&offer=GU...

The biggest problem is that you are at the mercy of foreign exchange rate variations, and picking them makes picking the stock market seem simple.
> It had neither story nor acting talent worth speaking of

Oh come on. Avatar may not have been the greatest story ever conceived by the minds of men but it was entertaining, thought provoking and the whole imagined world was a kind of story in itself.

Now if we were talking about Transformers 2, then I would agree ..
Hmm,

It is interesting to think that perhaps we're technologically approaching something like a _boundary_, a point past-which the synthetic simulation of sensory experiences cannot be taken-in merely as entertainment but rather has strong physiological effects.

Consider the effects of effects of Ultra-High Resolution Video: "The footage was later projected on a 4 x 7 metre screen for public demonstration and the public were astonished. As the visual effect of the footage travelling down a road was so realistic, some viewers even experienced nausea as a side effect of seeing ultra realistic motion, but not physically feeling the motion. It's like the opposite of seasickness where you can feel movement, but cannot see it while in an enclosed section."

http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-62376.html

I think that implies that at the very least, the producers of the most advanced sensory-simulations are going to be somewhat constrained in what they can produce, the opposite of what one thinks of in considering the freedom of film...
From Buzz Aldrin's bio on wiki:

"In March 1972, Aldrin retired from active duty after 21 years of service, and returned to the Air Force in a managerial role, but his career was blighted by personal problems. His autobiographies Return To Earth, published in 1973, and Magnificent Desolation, published in June 2009, both provide accounts of his struggles with clinical depression and alcoholism in the years following his NASA career."
Mythbusting: Why Firefox 4 won’t score 100 on Acid3
Thanks for asking this, I had the same question about high density CCDs, space telescopes, and signal processing. I think it is a reasonable question to bring up.
It sounds like a great idea to me! You can also get a look at prospective employees and see how well they learn/deal with the unknown.
This guy was ripped well into his late 80's. Haven't seen a photo of him in his 90's though - has anyone got any links of him in his final years?
Its a premiere brand, and its on a stick. Also comes prepackaged, so I have to see if the flavors thing will work
This may be a dumb question, but what do I do with this? I imagine this is to give your web designer some ideas of what you want, but is there a way to export this into an HTML/CSS format?
> You can't take the outward symbols of that culture and pin them on a company which doesn't approach employee trust and management in the same way.

My first reaction is that you are very much correct. In fact, it's clear that the article's advice applies moreso to smaller companies than larger. I don't think that anyone would question that it doesn't scale.

> What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000 employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees through the management roles?

Divisional consistency is a concern for a large company. However, it is simultaneously possible to maintain a "skunkworks". It comes down to (unsurprisingly) the overall culture / mandate.
IIRC, they don't do that anymore. Something about the weather in Chicago. No, really.
TBPP2010: Giff Constable on "Getting to Here"
480k? That seems a little excessive. Where are these numbers from?
Session hijacking attack with Firesheep, a Firefox extension (1M+ downloads)
I think you are correct - there will always be a need for a (or at least one) sysadmin.

But what cloud services allow us to do these days is scale services without the friction of requisitioning new hardware that used to happen in the past.

Of course, your sysadmin needs to be familiar with tools to help them manage large numbers of servers before this really begins to matter.
"Not nearly as big as the dot.com one"

Give it time man. Give it time.
You are not an investor who has to invest $20M.

Most home buyers are looking for a home into which they'll be dumping the majority of their wealth. They have an incredible amount on the line.

For a 200K non-repeatable investment for someone willing to do the legwork, yes.

Why should we assume that many people know how to correctly do "the legwork"? Is real estate market assessment and pricing covered in school now?

I mean, most people lack the mathematical sophistication needed to understand their mortgages -- let alone whether buying is a good decision.
Yes. If you are on the moon, you can see the flag with a telescope.
This reminds me of a sentence I heard somewhere before... Paraphrased: You can make any statements -- so long as you end it with a question mark.

I think it was The Daily Show, when John commented on media headlines.
It's an interesting idea, but I can't help but think after reading the following that the post is just fantastically subtle PR.

"Today I had an epiphany. Maybe the right thing to do is to enroll prospective job applicants in some kind of low-impact training as part of the interview process. If the training were given in a part-time, online format (like we do at CodeLesson)..."
For more info: http://codebutler.com/firesheep
I think you nailed it in the last paragraph. Saving it for use later (with proper credits, ofcourse).
Here's a nice pic of a wide-baseline optical interferometry setup:

http://pti.jpl.nasa.gov/

The telescopes are in the two shed-like white buildings (one in the foreground, the other in shadows in the background).

The collected light is bounced through the white pipes into the large building in the middle, where it is combined and interference fringes are collected. (It has to be combined optically to preserve phase.)

To work, the distances between the two collectors must be maintained very precisely. Besides the obvious optical issues, the technical challenge becomes to measure the separation of the collectors very precisely ("metrology").

For more:

http://olbin.jpl.nasa.gov/
Web 2.0 : bubble bubble go away
Underwater fillet welding
There is an interresting development (but haven't checked it lately) for using Cocotron (Cocoa clone) for Windows for ClozureCL.

What's really cool, is that while Objective-C Win32 applications written with Cocotron must be compiled under OSX (using gcc-mingw tools), this allows you to write them under Win32, because it uses the produced DLLS (AppKit.dll, Foundation.dll) and you communicate with lisp with them.

There is one thing to note - ClozureCL has 32-bit and 64-bit executables, but for some reason the 32-bit produced ones do not work on 64-bit.

That might be fixed already, I have to check again.
Tomorrow is 15000 days of UNIX era 
I just noticed it from my log. Time flies. Post your UNIX-time related thoughts here. 2038 problem etc.
You are right on - Sys Admins are the glue between business and technology operations. Ok - so gone may be the days when your companies IT department manages colocated servers and/or leased servers - now they will need to evolve and manage a suite of services in the Cloud including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
We are serving the content ourselves, but we fully attribute it to the source and provide a link to the original website. We aren't doing anything much worse than for example the browser cache does when loading up a cached website.
Yes, cloud will remove the need for systems administrators/operations much like the power grid has removed the need for electrical engineers.
How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail
Obama Nominates RIAA Lawyer for Solicitor General
Hey, instead of paying a person to keep our data on our own systems, we can pay a bunch of companies to keep it on their systems.

They'll never fail, get obsolete, lose our data, get bought out by someone who ruins them, have availability problems, or lock us into using just their service, right? Guys?
To the commenters here who notice there may be an upper limit on the number of employees David's approach is valid for, keep in mind that the subtitle of the article identifies "small business" as the scope. Thus the counterexample of Google seems unfair. That said, the legal definition of "small" in the U.S. for most nonmanufacturing businesses is that the business must have less than $7 million in annual receipts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_business#Size_definitions). It would be interesting to know if David feels there exists an upper limit on the number of employees in order for a flat structure to work, and if so, what that number might be. Since large organizations, if they are designed well, are just a latticework of small organizations maybe it's possible there is no upper limit.

Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent. This creates an unhealthy work environment compared to the ideal in which all employees are truly on equal footing as regards power. One of the tragedies of working for a manager is that nervous feeling you get when you ponder how much control this one person wields over your career. A superior organizational design is one that takes care to hire people who are great at managing themselves and entrusts them with the power to do so.
This is just some guy's speculation. So you read The Black Swan. Do you know how financial professionals refer to NT? "The Emperor of Platitudistan."
> Haskell is compiled to native code and has a much faster startup time, but the optimizer doesn't have as good information because it runs when the code is compiled rather than at runtime.

I'm not that familiar with JIT, but wouldn't compiling everything to native code ahead of time be at least as good as compiling parts that turn out to be slow, just in time? Is it about what sorts of optimizations to use, which you don't know until runtime?

Also, would this situation change given the fact that they're switching to LLVM?
And you think all of the engineers at BMW would never consider that particular possibility?

What the fuck.
What's The Difference Between Gamification of Work and Good Management?
Maybe it will be end of the BOFH or the eternal deployer (the guy that does not everyday, just deploy software, I saw some of them in my life). Small web companies maybe does not need a sysadmin, since they are focused on one application generally this will not be a major problem for them if they know some best practices.

The majority of sysadmins that I know works in the financial market, telecommunications industry and ISPs, mainly in data centers, helping developers who does not know about the infrastructure or as network operators.
Agreed. But lets also agree that given the ever-growing tidal forces of SMS and Twitter that we try to retain some legibility in our language and communications.

For example: Everyone one of you reading this has probably encountered someone using "U" instead of "you" in non-SMS business or technical correspondence. Is that laziness or extreme efficiency? Maybe they're still a Prince fan. Does it even matter to most people anymore?
If I wanted to buy a car, I might go to 20 different dealers and say "I want to buy a car and I'm considering car X", but I wouldn't phone up 20 dealers and say "I want to buy car X" for 20 different values of X.
Try http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/
been there, done that - still working my way out of it.

One thing I have learned, though - this all started because I forgot WHY I was doing what I was doing, and work was EXTREMELY unrewarding (no challenge). My wife handles the bills, so I never see the money. We have kids, so most of our free time is devoted to them, the house, the cars, etc. What I realized was that I had forgotten what I enjoy (beyond video games, which were an incredible time sink). I sat down and started making a list of all the things that I like to do - no matter how small, or how obvious. That's given me something to work for (like saving money to scuba dive, or fix up my bicycle).

I also started back running and weight-training, which helps improve my mood too (more energy). I've started new job responsibilities at work, which has helped get me out of my funk there - it's incredible was hard-working people will do (meaning, they forget that they can automate), so automating most of my new responsibilities is my new mountain to climb.
Zuckerberg, Doerr and More on How the iPad Has Changed Everything (TCTV)
Try structuring yourself to a schedule, start off easy with things you can manage and move to a stricter and stricter schedule.

The best way to develop a habit is to practice that habit, it won't happen right away but if you can dedicate yourself it will happen.
(was referring to hiding cookies via flash etc)
Like blaming Microsoft for all viruses targeting it.

Just because you didn't create the problem doesn't mean you can't be part of the solution.
Ask them if you can make an app for the brand as a whole instead of just one type of ice pop. You might have a shot with a game people run their own ice cream truck business, or build their own boardwalk/amusement park.

If you make a fun social game then you can passively advertise the brand as a whole, and ideally have a longer lasting impact on consumers. If I love playing "Popsicle Challenge" and Popsicle brand ice pops are integral to my success in the game, I'm certainly more likely to buy a Popsicle brand ice pop.
Here's what I got out of this: employees are extremely obedient when you don't tell them the rules. Because they have to guess what's expected of them, they come up even more restrictive rules just to be on the safe side. Example: if you don't count vacation days, people take less time off. That's your employees putting money in your pocket!

Bonus: you can tell them you're giving them "autonomy", and also fire some managers.
Yea I kind of agree. From my perspective it only makes sense to buy if you really plan on living in the place for many years. And I'm too young for that kind of commitment so renting makes the most sense for me.
It sounds from this like you aren't being challenged enough. For some people that is a good thing, as they like the idea of sitting around doing nothing 90% of the day. But it sounds like you want something more, and I expect you will not find it unless you are working in a much more challenging environment. Bluff yourself into a place where you have little idea what to do. Once you're scrambling around trying to keep your head above water, you'll lose your laziness. Or realize that's what you prefer.
that whole piece was great. kudos to him for the tumblr 503 error.
Ask HN: How can I make outsourcing easier/better? 
I strongly believe the classic bidding system we see in outsourcing websites is WRONG both for the provider and the buyer.

Two years ago, I started a website called TaskArmy (http://taskarmy.com) that aims to simplify outsourcing and produce better results.

I originally envisioned an all-email based outsourcing system, then it evolved into a fixed price service marketplace a la fiverr.

Today TaskArmy has slowly matured to the point that I want to start exploring new ways to make outsourcing better / easier.

I am reaching out to HN to ask the following:

1. What annoys you when you outsource stuff?

2. If you don't outsource stuff, why? what are the resistance factors?

3. I am considering bringing back my idea of a email-based posting system (you send an email with the task you want to outsource and the system deals with it), what do you think of this?

4. What kind of things do you outsource?

Thank you for your help,

Aymeric
3-D printing
Oh yes, I agree with that. It is a lot of money for a lot of people. A house is probably the single biggest purchase that people will ever make in their lifetime. Unless they don't buy a house, in which case, it wouldn't be the single biggest purchase in their lifetime. :)

There is nothing extremely sophisticated about borrowing money. But I heard that some extremely sophisticated lenders have lost their shirt recently, so one cannot be too careful.
Very interesting findings. But, can you imagine the author explaining something more complicated?
I think the problem isn't their specific styles, but rather that their styles are different from the successful founder. What happens when you have an organization that's organically grown all of its internal processes, decision-making, and even hiring/promotions to work well with a particular individual at the top and then that individual is replaced by somebody with a completely different style?
This post is talking about monads in the context of programming languages (specifically the Haskell programming language), NOT in the context of philosophy. The programming-monad concept in turn is derived from the concept of monad in category theory. For more information, google "monad Haskell" or "monad category theory".
If you're interested in developing OS X applications with a lisp, you should check out Nu — http://programming.nu — It's a Cocoa-native language built on the Objective-C runtime, that's flavored somewhat like Common Lisp.

Additional info:

● A talk by the gentleman who created Nu, Tim Burks, talking about why he did so: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/13

● The Google Group for Nu: http://groups.google.com/group/programming-nu

● The source (Apache License) on Github: https://github.com/timburks/nu
They're Made out of Meat by Terry Bisson
This reminded me of a story about a course in MIT were the prof taught about visual perception. Maybe other HN'ers will be able to fill in the details. What was striking to me was how quickly the brain adapts to distortion in our visual field.

The prof would make students catch a ball with prisms before their eyes which shifted the image laterally. They would initially miss. But soon the students would adapt, and find nothing wrong with what they saw. These chages persisted. So when the prisms were removed, real world seemed shifted for a few minutes and they had difficulty navigating. Same with inverting lenses.

But what struck me most was that near the beginning of the course he demonstrated a curious case of visual adaptation and never mentioned it again till the end of the semester. At the end of the semester he showed the class that the student's brain had still not unlearned the distortion. Something related to seeing colors. I do not remember clearly.

It will be great if some one can fills in the details. Particularly about the semester long, persistent adaptation.
Note also that this is "Hacker News", so a computer science orientation shouldn't be surprising.
Try Googling "$COMPANY Investor Relations"

http://www.google.com/search?q=sharp+investor+relations
Paying a sysadmin is, sadly, not a guarantee that one will have-future proof redundant systems with seven nines of availability that are meticulously documented enough to seemlessly hand over to anybody with a sufficiently wizened countenance.

OK, dueling strawmen out of the way, let me try to add some value to this discussion. Just like the lower rungs of the value chain are getting eaten up in programming, the lower runs of the value chain in sysadminning are also getting eaten away. Back when I was in middle school I was, I kid you not, routinely told that the comparables to my labor at HTML editing all charged $100+ an hour for making websites in Notepad. (Complete with under construction signs.)

Thankfully, the state of the art has improved such that there are a variety of options for e.g. a church school to have a web page listing upcoming Christmas pageants without having to pay $10k a month on an ongoing basis for maintenance.

You know the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs? Well, don't look now, but in a lot of areas they are winning. My old day job called me a Systems Engineer, which includes basic sysadminning, and over my very short career standard deployment practices for e.g. Rails apps have improved radically in a direction which requires me to spend far, far less work at this aspect of m job. There are "real companies" on similar stacks who have server-to-admin ratios which just 10 years would have been unthinkable. (100 to 1? No problem. It's really just 3-to-1 with heavy automation in play, anyhow.)

Sysadmen in the audience worried about their career prospects should probably try pushing themselves up the value chain. There was once lots of value in babysitting cranky programs which blew up frequently in unpredictable ways. That looks like it is changing. Look at Exchange versus I-can't-believe-its-not-Gmail from the perspective of a firm with less than a thousand employees: heads you have someone whose full time job is to fight outages, tails you do not. Don't be the John Henry in that scenario: remember, he dies at the end of the story.
There's very little to learn, totally worth it if you ask me.

I'm also a fan of Notepad++, seems like it would be easy to integrate less.js as a plugin.
I know...the main differences though are that Gmail doesn't charge per attachment. Whereas Dropbox does.
Scala – A Scalable Language (Video Talk)
describes the design principles of the Scala programming language, which has scalability as its primary design objective.