skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Furlough + Overtime, is this legal?
My company has put us on two furlough weeks over the previous 6 months. Now I've heard we're going to have another one this quarter. The catch this time is that we've been asked to work 7 days a week this month to finish a release. It feels crazy to me that I'd have to work -significant- overtime one month and then be furloughed the next. Is this legal?

(Rant: Obviously this is a retarded business practice. Who wants employees that are only profitable 48 out of 52 weeks of the year?)
I don't disagree with you in general, but IRIX was a dog of an OS. They dominated in hardware, but the OS was always something you just had to live with.
I admire your cynicism. I was cynical as well, but went the other direction and assumed that this was AT&T trying to bilk $0.20 out of millions of people without text messaging plans.
If this adds legitimacy to the BitTorrent protocol, then the greater good is served.

As for the BitTorrent app ecosystem, that's a real chicken-and-egg situation. People are looking for Khan Academy videos and then use BitTorrent to facilitate that. Not the other way around.
Oh, you mean that patent on the stick as a dog toy? Yeah, that one sucked. I can't believe it took four years, a reexamination by the USPTO Director and referencing no less than two prior patents as prior art to invalidate all of its claims:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/49521/Worlds-Craziest-Patent
The Met's Virtual Expansion Plans
> large-scale corruption and incompetence are still a very real possibility

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

-- C. S. Lewis
Defer, panic and recover - Go's lack of exceptions
A good chunk of my career was based on SGI's until 2002ish.
I started on an iris professional if that helps. I still smile when I think of SGI's c++ compiler - it had real error messages unlike gcc up until a few years ago.

SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry.

With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on.
Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.
Unfortunately, they're not able to deliver that feature request immediately.
I'm very unhappy with gerrit. It doesn't support git style branches, and instead uses a made up "Change-Id" scheme where you embed some magic in commit messages. If you want to fix issues with a commit after a review, you can reuse this "Change-Id" to update the changeset for the review.

It get worse. If you have a nice branch with several commits, they must all be reviewed separately with little help to review the branch as a whole. This feels like a throwback to the old days with CVS and patch-sets. Branching and merging suddenly becomes expensive.

If you combine this with a policy of auto-merging upon successful review, you are basically screwed if you have multiple depending commits. You must use rebase and squash to make it livable.

Sorry for the bitterness :-) I just had to review a single commit with 4000+ lines in gerrit.
The BBC has stored at least some of if in an archive in cooperation with the British Library. I've posted a link to an earlier article; you can find it by browsing some of the "TLDs" they're removing.

(BTW, did anyone notice that the BBC calls these sites "TLDs", and that they took a beating for that by people who assumed they were incorrectly referring to "Top Level Domains"? But, TLD can mean "Top Level Directory" too, which is entirely accurate. Most amusing...)

Anyway, I think it's good that we're developing a culture where some people care, and make sure that things get archived, even if it's done sometimes unnecessarily, and almost always only gets a degraded copy (ie, a web rip without streaming videos, and without structured data). I only hope that these vigilante actions don't lead companies to not pre-announce massive data erasures.
Pac-12 Conference getting thug-blocked by Tupac Website
Interesting. A link to the talk somewhere?
I actually follow a number of blogs of some of the ladies in my city because they post interesting pictures that give me some inspiration because it's very foreign to the space my head is in all the time. I think they'll love this.

Visually I don't like how bold the boxes are when they show up, it detracts from the image. Would it be possible to either set CSS transparency on them or use a PNG-24 (Not IE6 friendly)? That way they're noticeable but not overpowering.

Otherwise, I like it.

EDIT: How would I promote it? Find some of the other fashion bloggers who have a decent following and try to get them to use it. After getting a few to use it there would be a bit of a network effect. If I were a fashion blogger and saw that on a photo I'd probably try to figure out how to do it. So maybe add a small watermark or something so other bloggers know how to get to you.
Pretty sure the studios, once Netflix is all/mostly streaming will simply change the licensing costs to pilfer most of the profit, why wouldn't they? Without their content Netflix has nothing. Before they were insulated from this via the First Sale Doctorine and distribution through the mail. If they go all streaming the content producers can change licensing costs (already happening) and there is almost no barrier to entry (anyone can stream videos, see Hulu, Amazon, etc...) As a consumer I love Netflix streaming, from a business perspective it seems like a bad idea. Let's hope I am wrong.
Aaron Quint: #-ish
Browse your PC/Mac/Linux computers from iPad
IMO it doesn't matter whether VP8 costs one cent or one dollar; if you've already paid for H.264 then even one cent for VP8 is a waste of money. And those who aren't willing to pay (Mozilla and Opera) are not even willing to pay one cent.

Historically every new codec has been cheaper (despite containing more technology), so I expect VP8 to be cheaper than H.264, but H.265 may be cheaper still.
It's the battle of two behemoths. College football and it's capitalistic ways vs. the rugged and raw 90's era hip-hop.
Rockstar programmers, eh? What about ninja programmers... they are pretty cool too. Oh well, either way I'm not a rockstar... more of a guitar tech, so... best of luck to them.
Thanks, I tend to use PowerPoint for fast mockups but that looks good for something between basic functionality and mockup code.
Has anyone else noticed a distinct dive in Netflix streaming quality over the past few weeks? I used to be able to watch their full HD videos nearly instantly, and now I'm lucky if I get the lowest quality-- about half the time videos won't even start.

I haven't changed anything on my end that I'm aware of. Still, I can't believe this is all on Netflix's end, can it?
Get Rid of Spam in Your Google Search Results
I think the most important part of the article is the quote at then end saying that just because they aren't interested in buying it doesn't make it a good short. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and all that.

75x trailing earnings in the current economic environments SEEMS expensive to me. I'd be willing to bet (but not with real money) that it will be cheaper in 12 months. Of course, as a Netflix subscriber, I'm glad the streaming side of things is going so well.
ccache only helps so much. On a pretty modern fast machine, typical web browser source takes 5-10 minutes to compile for me even with ccache (depending on what I changed).

Of that, 30-90 seconds is just linking (and no, gold doesn't help all that much).
IMF calls for dollar alternative
Presumably if you're referring to a specific individual, you already know the gender so using "they" in that situation would appear to be incorrect.

However, in the general sense I would argue that the conjugation of verbs follows a pattern but that pattern doesn't have to be singular vs. plural. Given "he has" or "she has" one might expect a singular "they" to follow the pattern "they has". However, "I" is singular yet it uses "I have", so it's not unexpected for the singular "they" to use "they have". In other words, the conjugation of "they" is the same regardless of whether it's singular or plural.
I think the reactions are split into camps:

1) "Windows Phone is cool":

Think of all the people that like the tech (.Net) or the visuals (Remember the recent "No chrome in the UI" thread). That want this platform to succeed. I guess if you're in this camp the news are great: WP7 gains a very experienced hardware vendor. You can expect a couple of good/decent handsets soonish, pushing WP7 (with a lot of marketing and money) and thereby solving the chicken and egg problem (platform <-> apps) with cash.

2) "I liked Nokias history", "I'm a QT/maemo/MeeGo fan"

In this case the news are bad: Nokia changes direction. How much only time will tell, but the company that over the last couple of years slowly started to adopt open source is now going for a closed platform. QT and MeeGo are more or less declassed in the press release (research..? N770, N800, N810.. They did that in the past, the devices were unusable for non-hackers. I know, I own one). In this case you don't care much about WP7, you basically moan about the loss of plans that YOU had for that company/platform. That's what I see alot around now.

I understand both points, but the latter seems both easier to understand (I've got a bunch of maemo shirts, the N810 hardware etc..) and at the same time completely irrelevant (Seriously.. While mom and dad might have heard about Windows Mobile and that a new version is coming, who around you cared about MeeGo to succeed?). I'm quite sure this is the death sentence for MeeGo handsets. But we haven't even seen one of those yet. How do we know that we lost something of value? Please - no ideology (while I'd probably be with you, that's not something a company of that size should care about in a self-crisis) based answers about being open etc..
Psp-store, new playstation portable store
How to Handle Employee Activism: Google Tiptoes Around Cairo's Hero
so microsoft just abandoned their initial WP7 launch partners?
Paying $133M to avoid paying $5M/year is indeed creative business on Google's part.
Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right?

Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things "working right".

And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.
If you'd design a declarative systems where you declare your datasets and how they transform into each other, then you could analyze the dependency chain and do the same thing as a library instead of a separate interpreter.

That sounds like a lot of effort on the part of the programmer. The author's approach - which I like - is to require as little intervention from the programmer as possible.

Don't confuse the author's research implementation with how it should look in practice. I imagine the author implemented a light-weight interpreter that does the memoization on top of CPython. That's far easier than hacking CPython itself, which gives him a faster path to proof-of-concept implementation and publishing evaluations of the idea. If the research gives good results, then maybe this approach could get implemented as a VM optimization - you wouldn't know it's happening, your programs just run faster.
The accused has to led the accuser inspect his data? Scary!

I sure hope they use forensic standards such as not the actual hard drive but an image of it. Otherwise the chances to plant some evidence are truly disturbing.
This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.

Are you sure about that? I'm sure a lot do, but I think a lot use WMA on Windows and XBox. I believe the encoder and decoder are free for use when developing games for those platforms. I think a different codec is then used for PS3 and Wii. I've certainly seen Vorbis used, but I think WMA is still used a fair bit more. I'd love to see evidence either way though.
I would be interested in a set of tutorials on buttons, drop shadows, torn paper effects, header design, logo design text effects - all of the stuff that I use or need to use Photoshop for.
Your Startup Needs Employee Benefits
They have it working on ARM internally already. And the current WP7 OS kernel is Windows CE, one of the most widely ported OS of all time, running on SH4, MIPS, x86, ARM i.e. almost any little-endian architecture.
Didn't get the message but the number does match previous notifications from AT&T.

Gave it a try... will update if I get a response.

[edit]
Correction, it's actually not quite the same as the number for previous notifications. Previous was 11113000 so my phone 'corrected' the new number (11113020) to the previous one without me noticing.

However, yes it seemed to work with the 11113020 #.
Late row lookups: InnoDB | EXPLAIN EXTENDED
I'd not expect any of these sites to be heavily trafficed going forward, so my guess: $5/month.

Note that large portions of geocities are being hosted on the web by various parties, most of whom are apparently using pizza money to do it. Geocities was still in the top-100 websites or so when it closed, and they're probably getting decent amounts of traffic from people trying to find old sites.

Even if there is heavy traffic, you're hosting a archival copy, not a production site, so you can just degrade performance as needed. See often slooow web.archive.org :)
Anyone have a link to a demo?
I've heard many of the "fathers of the Internet" say that security is the biggest flaw with the architecture of the modern IPv4 Internet, but not a lot of detail on why they think that is, or how it is they think that the network is going to mitigate the effect of billions of lines of code written without regard for security, much of it inherently exposed to attackers.

Ten years ago, one could reasonably argue that traceability was a key Internet security problem. A modern Internet would prevent people from launching anonymous attacks. When I was at Arbor networks, our most interesting competitor was a company called Asta, led in part by Stefan Savage, which had in their intellectual heritage a thesis on stochastic traceback of DoS attacks. Great stuff. But, as it turned out, not 3 years later the majority of non-trivial DDoS attacks were being carried out by organized armies of compromised machines. What's a secure Internet going to do about that problem?

I don't care about this as a practical matter. In reality, Vint Cerf's reimagining of the Internet has little force. The market (rightfully) determines what will be deployed. But it's a little sad to me if part of Cerf's logic is that the End to End Argument In Systems Design has outlived its usefulness --- that is, if he really believes we should concentrate more security intelligence into the network, instead of keeping the Internet dumb and insecure so people can innovate security from the edges.
Once you discover other programming languages -- like Python or Scheme -- you will understand why PHP is better kept as a 9-to-5 thing at most.
thanks god. now we can use this great content.
FYI, Google do not let us in Iran use khanacademy
Albert Einstein: How I See the World
It worked for me even without an iPhone. Though I wonder if this credit will actually go through.
Offshoring is an economic phenomenon involving organizations that only know how to measure their IT effectiveness using cost.

Personal experience is that I've never seen it work, but that's only from my own sample set.

Have also seen a lot of "in-shoring" activity, where consultants are brought in to try and rebuild after a disastrous outsourcing scenario where agreed to service levels could not be maintained.

I've been horrified at the skill level of outsourced resources, not just technically, but chronic deficits in communication, planning and analysis skills.

It feels to me like a big Ponzi scheme that in the end costs clients more, but wish I had more data to back up this assertion.

I have seen some offshore people that are skilled let down but unskilled managers that have been brought into manage IT from other industries, such as manufacturing. Or, offshoring teams put into a skapegoat role by clients that couldn't fix their own problems.
These strategies seem to be over-thought.
Handset manufacturers should have one goal, selling the most and best handset they can make.

The android vs. windows arguments are only valid (I think) to people who live and breath tech. I don't think the average consumer cares. The capabilities of all the OSs are so similar that branding, marketing, etc. likely win over other factors.

As far as Maps goes, Apple has google powering their maps, so why would LG care if Windows maps are powered my Nokia? The handset manufacturer is getting the service for free.

At the same time, Bing Maps is a great service, so I hope that Nokia maps is equally as good.
You are correct on consoles, as those are generally restricted by the manufacturer to using codecs that are burned into the hardware. But almost all of the latest PC games that I have played are using Ogg Vorbis for the audio.
I wonder if, for situations like this, you could have a neutral third party image your drive, keep one for themselves and push the image over to Sony.
You haven't answered my question. How is 30 billion different from 60 billion? Why would investors be okay with 30 billion cash in hand but not 60 billion? Whats the magic threshold? 31 billion?

From the Back to the Mac event, Apple sold 13.7 million Mac's in 2010 fiscal year, for a 27% growth year-over-year . In comparison, there are "only" 600,000 iOS developers. I don't think its accurate to write off the Mac's resurgence as "Oh, people want to make iOS apps, nothing more." http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/20/apple-mac-numbers/
Now that you say it, I think I remember my co-founder evaluating it at the time and deciding not to bother. I forget why.
I can't wait until the finance industry is subject to risk. I mean, yeah, you can lose your job... but you'll always retire on piles and piles of money as a finance exec.
This is discovery for a trial, right? What's newsworthy about this? You don't have a right to be free from search and seizure period, only to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, which is to say: (1) demands to compromise your privacy and security have to be mitigate by due process, and (2) Congress can't in the long run be allowed to enact laws that unduly compromise that due process.

It isn't the DMCA per se that's allowing Sony to search the guy's drive, is it? It's civil law procedure. Companies routinely have to fork over years and years worth of mail spools for similar reasons.
Generally not, no.

Khan's fairly good at explaining stuff, but I have to view all of his material at double speed -- otherwise the repetitions and "uhm"s would be too bothersome. Same content could be delivered in half the time if written and read.
What a f* initiative from The Master of Rootkits Company.

Never ever again I'm going to purchase a Sony product.
Though I agree with HTML5 over native for many applications, and particularly for content such as TheDaily, the article completely ignores the fact that it would be a very simple update to the app to check for new articles upon start rather than just checking once per day as the article says.

I'm not sure which the app does, as I don't have an ipad.
Not Apache? shocked.
It's not really broken down by industry group, since there's only one trend line for all the data points, not a trend line for each industry group. So it's hard to see which industries match his hypothesis and which don't.
> - CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering

And it's even better when you factor in that in each case there is a viable and much better suited free and open option available. Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.

It's nepotism on the corporate level & just like nepotism will destroy the morale of a department, this kind of nepotism will destroy the morale of an entire company.
App Engine 1.4.2 SDK - API Updates and Additions Edition
ROOT: The software that runs high energy physics (and other things) from CERN
Your ISP likely is throttling Netflix data.
Sony won't be involved directly with any part of the forensics.

Their attorneys will contract with a forensics firm who will make an image of the drives (using a write-blocked device like the ones made by Wiebetech or an Encase Fastbloc).

Analysis will not be performed on the actual drive, but on the image.

The defendant's attorney will also receive a copy of this image, ensuring that chain of custody was followed (or else they can sure to try and argue that the evidence has been tampered with).

The images will be checksummed, and I would argue that the odds of evidence being tampered are pretty slim in this instance.
We use gerrit at my company, and what you say is true. Developers are told to do one feature or bug fix per commit/gerrit change. It really does help with the review process and things move much faster.
We built Receivd to solve the exact problem you are describing.

The landing page allows us to gather numbers on how many folks are actually interested. We're planning to send out builds early next week to the first round of early-access users :)
DARPA's new memristor-based approach to AI
No, stagnant would imply things were stable and they're clearly not. You can make an argument that Symbian OS was successful in the past, but the trend in the GigaOM chart you linked is pretty clear: rapid decline. In 2007, Symbian was around 2/3 of the total smartphone market, and two years later it had fallen below 50%. During the same period, RIM almost tripled its market share and the iPhone and Android numbers were showing even stronger growth.
Every geek in the world thinks and says this whenever any legal proceeding involves inspecting hard drives. In the real world, it's just not that big a deal. There are chain-of-custody rules that apply any time digital evidence is handled in court. The reality is that the penalty for deliberately planting evidence would be so severe, the likelihood of success so uncertain, that no major corporation (or their zillion-dollar law firm) would risk it over a small-ball case like this.

(Like 'm0nastic points out, Sony can also pay a pittance relative to their legal fees to contract this out to Mandiant).
I think it's actually the other way around, moving to Android would be the bigger gamble. What would differentiate Nokia from any other company that develops phones for Android?
link to press release about it:
http://www.lsbf.org.uk/globalmba/globalmba.html

They're pushing a try before you buy model. Interesting idea and I certainly won't complain about gaining access to high quality MBA lectures for free.
You won't likely find such a party in cases like this.

What is more likely is that each side will hire a forensics firm to image the drive, and as long as both their checksums match, than there isn't much disagreement.
If, by "end well", you mean "the judge readily conceded that there was no practical way for this to happen and apologized for the ill-thought-out demand", then know (by reading just a few sentences further) that this already happened.