skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. The reason that every first world country in the world has minimum wage is because they want to hurt business as much as possible.

>No one forced the employees of his company to apply.

Companies have been proven to be conspiring to keep wages down just recently. An employee is forced to work somewhere.

But I bet you think the insane amount of money CEOs get is their "market rate" too.
Github commits activity widget for open source projects site
Advantages of working at home:

1. Equipment I pick.
2. Furniture I pick.
3. Temperature I pick.
4. Lighting I pick.
5. Music I pick (without headphones!).
6. Clothing I pick (shorts in summer, sweatsuit in winter)
7. Food & drink I pick. (It's really good.)
8. Commute time = 1 minute per day.
9. No gas/car expense.
10. Almost no interruptions.
11. 6 people have my IP phone#.
12. 12 people have my cell phone#.
13. Everyone else --> email.
14. I check email when I'm ready, not them.
15. I set my task list (but still deliver as promised).
16. Can easily run errands any time.
17. Can easily do household tasks any time.
18. Much easier to schedule exercise.
19. See SO much more often.
20. 4 legged creatures make much better office mates.
21. People respect my time much more when I do visit the office.
22. Can more easily switch tasks.
23. Much easier to focus all the time.
24. I get twice as much done.
25. No need to alt-tab when reading Hacker News.
Programmer problem solving sequence: should it be like this?
Even more important: Windows uses _very_ aggressive hinting for its default fonts, especially the new set introduced with Office 2007 and Windows Vista (Calibri, Cambria, Consolas). Though I very much like the effect for my programming font (Consolas is great in that respect), it destroys the scalability of a font to a very high degree (this is the reason why zooming a Webpage in any Browser reflows your text, and why some fonts look different in shape and/or height/width ratio in different zoom-levels; beside that rendering-engines decision to round the font-sizes to the next full pixel).

IE9 promises to not do this anymore, and on high-density displays (the better smartphone ones) it is simply not needed.

So the problem is two-fold: a very distinctive look of Microsoft fonts, and a sub-optimal fallback for non-aggressively hinted fonts in Windows.

However, if one uses font-sizes that one can actually read (for instance, bigger then 12pt, thank you all very much) the pixel-per-character count gets big enough that the results start looking better -- especially as the user does not unconsciously move his nose to meet the display in person.
> If the p-value is less than .05

You meant greater than .05
Come to Massachusetts! Our health care reform means that the market for private insurance isn't insane. You can afford reasonable coverage for reasonable price through the MassConnector group plans, and they can't deny you because of pre-existing health conditions (they only ask age / number of dependents).

While far from perfect, it is a significant improvement for entrepreneurs who may be buying insurance for themselves and for early employees before funding/revenue to pay for traditional coverage. There are a lot of folks who cannot go without insurance but in many areas the cost of buying outside of an employer is prohibitively expensive or restrictive.
I think context is important. As a US citizen I agree with the general sentiment that the US government isn't competent to run healthcare. Comparisons with Canada and the UK are not helpful because they are different kinds of governments. The notion in the US that government should be as small as possible has yielded a government which cannot be trusted.

The proponents of a single payer system in the US don't address this sufficiently.

A solution for the US would be reform of the health insurance market. Require that health insurance providers be disallowed to refuse coverage to individuals for any reason. Disallow health care providers from charging lower rates to health insurance providers than they do to individual payers.

A free market would work. A single payer system would work. What we have now is in between and will always be bad.
MUMBLE - L'Italia e Internet: un quadro sconfortante
In questi ultimi tempi ho raccolto alcune notizie che mi hanno fatto molto riflettere sulla (scarsa) attenzione istituzionale nei confronti di Internet e della sua strategicità per la crescita del nostro sistema paese. La maggioranza degli altri paesi evoluti, europei e non, invece, stanno investendo moltissimo per creare le basi per la competizione dei prossimi anni...
That stereotype is inadequate. Maybe we ought to ask why Google is getting the finger?
I hate to be that person, especially as I an a nonnative English speaker myself, but have you considered getting somebody to copy-edit your blog posts?

After seeing the quality of the writing, I would be somewhat concerned about buying the ebook (in addition to the concern I already feel about its tiny size).

Other than that, keep up rocking.
Agreed. I am also an east coaster and I find Dave's style to be a brilliant balance of humor and content. He occassionally rubs me the wrong way, but I'm a big boy. I can take it.

I have a strong belief that any time you are offended, you should look within, not attack the offender.
Absolutely. Not all applications of Bayesian analysis are computationally-intensive. In some cases (an example: finding of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in next-gen sequencing data), Bayesian analysis comes down to multiplying prior probability of a SNP (for humans, 0.001 per genome position) by a few other numbers from the data itself to obtain posterior probability, which can be done in a linear time in a few minutes on tens of gigabytes of NGS data. And the best part is, no Bonferroni adjustment bullshit!
First day at college the lecturer says "As soon as you've finished editing your programmes, type 'rmcobol < a.txt > a.out'".

So, having finished first, I type "rm cobol < a.txt > a.out", and I spend a while wondering what "cobol not found" means before I realise what I've done.

[unix syntax from memory, may be wrong]
Time vs money as a freelancer
If climate scientists are in it for the money, they're doing it wrong
As a US citizen I agree with the general sentiment that the US government isn't competent to run healthcare.

The VA hospitals are actually very well run.
If the p-value is less than 0.05 you reject the null hypothesis, because it means there was very little chance of observing the data under the model. Then you end up with your alternative hypothesis, usually implying you can fit an extra parameter and go play.

For the sake of explanation, I have made as if one goes to fit the null hypothesis and can fail. Mine is certainly not a fine example of explication, but it entertained me writing it.
Ways to Play Nice With Google
You can check out Highcharts (which is mentioned in the article)

http://www.highcharts.com/

take a look at the chart demos here: http://www.highcharts.com/demo/?example=combo&theme=defa...

You can also take a look at:

http://www.fusioncharts.com/
and
http://www.amcharts.com
Good looking site and a sensible product idea. A few thoughts:

1. "GIFT CERTIFICATE TEMPLATES FOR YOUR BUSINESS" is not the best tagline, I think. "Template? What's a template?" Perhaps better is something like "Sell gift certificates for your business". The fact that you're actually selling 'templates' isn't really important to them. What they get is the ability to sell gift certificates.

2. Below the "sign up to the mailing list" on the front page the information is a bit messy, and there may just be too much of it. What's the difference between the "features" and "about product" tabs? (I don't want you to tell me the answer - I'm just saying it's unclear). Perhaps just grab the most important points and say them as clearly as possible, without requiring clicks onto tabs or anything. Things like "add the name of your company" are probably redundant - I would expect that I would be able to add the name of my company at the very least! I would probably just junk a lot of that stuff and fold it all into a "How it works" page. Then on the front page you just have "Start Printing Gift Certificates" [not 'templates'!] or "How it works"

Various other of your pages could do with cleaning up a bit like that, but overall I think the idea's probably a good one.

One final thought though: is there any fraud prevention involved? What's to stop somebody just making a really good colour photocopy of their gift certificate? You don't have any ID numbers or anything on the certificates, do you?
My experience at Amazon so far (since last June) is definitely better than pacifi30's. I've been writing a lot of software (for both existing and new projects), the dev infrastructure is great, dev tool teams are very responsive and always improving our workflow, and the end result (mobile in my case) is fulfilling.
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze
I think you have got it backwards. Why should companies have to provide health insurance for their employees? It makes it inefficient since people are beholden to their jobs and can't easily change jobs (or start new companies).
Which one are you? The guy on the ladder looks like he's about to Darwin himself.
Riding on top of the bubble for as long as they can I believe.
It looks I will need to get some English lessons. Thank you for being honest.
If you have a function foo() that takes a callback as an argument i.e. something like:

foo(..., function (n) {
// closure over q, r, s
});

Then what you can do is create a separate function, bar() that takes q, r, s as an argument, and returns a function:

function bar(q, r, s) {
return function(n) {
// still has dependency on q, r, s
}
}

Once you have bar(), the foo() call above can be written as:

foo(..., bar(q, r, s));

and you save one level of nesting. (This also makes the dependencies explicit, which is helpful.)

The main loop of

https://github.com/ithinkihaveacat/node-fishback/blob/ce5f9c...

does quite a lot of this, if you want a real example.
Published my first iOS app (ListMe) a week ago: http://bit.ly/hnNPOM
I interviewed with Palantir last fall. After failing to impress me (and honestly coming across as a bit too evil for my taste), I brought my job decision down to being between two other companies and told Palantir that I was appreciative of their time but I wasn't interested in any more interviews. A.G., a senior engineer there -- who I guess has some involvement with recruiting -- called me up to try and convince me to do an onsite interview. He told me that while I might have been the smartest person in groups at college and even at Facebook (where I have interned previously), and thus been on such a higher plane of thought that I had trouble explaining my ideas to the lesser peons, "that sort of thing doesn't happen here at Palantir". He also noted that if I needed more time to make a decision, I could always accept my Facebook offer and renege on it later if I decided to go to Palantir. Yeah... asking me to be dishonest while simultaneously insulting all of my friends and everyone I've ever worked with is not a good way to get me to join your company. After that and after the Palantir/Wikileaks thing recently, I'm quite glad with my decision to stay far, far away from Palantir, "next Facebook or Google" be damned.
Running your own mailserver is like your own mini-Vietnam war. Looks straight-forward, but you will soon be bogged down and stuck.

Trust me, use a 3rd party service.

Does not need to be mail chimp though. I am using these guys:

http://www.jangosmtp.com/

Crappy site, but good server. Just a well set up SMTP server, so with a few config lines from your app you can send mails through this instead of your own server.
That's a good point. I have no experience with VA hospitals. If it is true then I think it would be reasonable to endorse expanding the VA infrastructure to support everybody.
Just curious: what's the interest of registering your business in France? Isn't this the best way to choke on taxes?
I joined just a little after you and my experience has been very positive. Feel free to talk to me (danielsi@) anytime you want to talk about the dev process in the company or our teams.
This was working last night but now throws a 404, does anyone know if the post name changed and the link needs to be updated or if this was taken down on purpose?
Ask HN: good AMI for 1-click github deploy
I'm looking for a good basic community EC2 AMI that has PHP 5.3 and Git installed, so I can set up 1-click deploys. I want to avoid having to do sysadmin stuff on it (install packages and such), I just want an AMI that's ready to go.

Related: is there a place where you can search for/find AMI's that's better than the AWS console AMI picker?
We're a small startup local to the SF Bay Area looking primarily for developers right now and designers in the near term.

Ideal candidate would be a PHP dev with JS, jQuery, HTML, CSS, etc. C++, Python, Objective-C, etc are bonuses.

We're currently focused on solving an consumer ecommerce experience problem.
Kinh doanh theo kieu gia dinh
Đại văn hào người Nga Lev Tonstoi có nói một câu rất hay ngụ ý rằng hạnh phúc của con người ta có thể giống nhau, nhưng bất hạnh và khổ đau thì mỗi người một kiểu. Trong kinh doanh gia đình cũng vậy.
Reminds me of an oldie but goodie about getting away from my computer:

"How do you achieve laser focus and concentration?"

The single most important thing I do to "achieve laser focus and concentration" is to work in such a way that I don't need "laser focus and concentration" to get my work done.

This has to be done the night before.

I always quit all online work at least 2 hours before bedtime and print whatever I'm working on.

Then I go into any other room with program listings, blank paper, and pens (especially red!) and plan out all of tomorrow's work.

All analysis, design, and refactoring must be done at this time. I do not allow myself to sleep until the next day's work is laid out. I also do not allow myself to get back onto the computer. The idea is to have a clear "vision" of what I am going to accomplish the next day. The clearer the better.

This does 2 things. First, I think about it all night (maybe even dream about it). Second, I can't wait to get started the next day.

I always wake up and start programming immediately. Once I get going, it's easy to keep going. Any difficulties are probably because I didn't plan well enough the night before.

Not sure if that's the answer you're looking for, but whatever gets the work done...

Original thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191199
top tip: Adding text shadow (use the background color so it's invisible) makes fonts render a lot better in Webkit. No idea why, it just does.
Like robflynn said, this depends on each person, it can be positive or negative.

In my case I would go with a flat price ($1 or $2) or perhaps a flat price with a little more like $1.20 or $2.40. This seems like it isn't a random price.
You could make a deal with them. You work 3 days/week on that, for fulltime compensation, and the other 2 days you could start something yourself or learn some technologies you always wanted to spend time on. Or contribute to some OS thing that you always wanted to work on. In other words, improve your skills/knowledge/resume.
I disagree with the parent (I think health insurance should be mandatory), but I upvoted the post because I think it contains several arguments that add to the discussion (for example the part with minority health issues being less well researched is correct), and because I dislike the practice of downvoting a post based solely on whether one agrees with the expressed opinion or not.
It is about Student Art
Art refers to all creative activities which students take part in. This can be visual arts and performing arts etc. Students who are creative are able to attend to this type of coursework. However, they may find it difficult in some aspects.
I disagree. The above post does not add anything but propaganda to the discussion. The US has had decades to prove what the poster said was true and utterly failed. "Scammy socialist" health care has utterly won.
In what ways are you better than memcachedb? Since they're free and you're not?
Do you still manage to do this consistently?
20 years of innovative Windows malware
I think you can actually.

EDIT: What's with the downvotes? Companies do call them a contractor. It happens every day. They're are special concerns but they can certainly work 9-5, etc.
It's all PR. There may be solid potential for high revenues, but Google and Facebook have something that they don't, and that's a product that everyone on the planet can use and understand. That's what makes outlandish valuations.
This is completely terrible, but one of the reasons I've found it so difficult to quit smoking is that the nicotine urge acts as a timer to go outside to clear my head and get some fresh air (ironic, I know).

I've been freelancing for a couple of years now, but about half of the programmers were smokers at my last job. We would coordinate smoke breaks throughout the day, and that time was often spent chatting about whatever projects we were working on. It turned out that it was a good way to get feedback and throw ideas off the wall without interrupting people at their desks.
Eh, I don't think you need English lessons. You can run your posts through http://polishmywriting.com/ and make adjustments based on that.

Thank you for continuing to share your progress. It makes for interesting reading. I hope you don't stop because of language differences.
My mistake, swap in Wayland. Most of the moaning I've heard on the web about it is from Ubuntu - probably because I use debian and watch those crowds more.
Palantir presented during a DevHouse they hosted a year or so ago, some of their statistical trend analysis that implicated a certain cohort of mortgage lenders in/around Chicago. The results of their findings were pretty much proof of criminal activity and corruption in some very big names in the real estate market. The most fascinating thing was that they applied this theory to one specific geographic area (Chicago); applying it to other areas would almost certainly have revealed a larger trend.

I was impressed, and even applied there a number of months ago, mistakenly thinking they are on a mission to do good in the world. Was disappointed by the rejection email. Given this new information that they are likely using their findings as a sort of blackmail to sustain evil and corruption at the source, I'm actually not disappointed. The fact that they are in bed with entities like Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, et al is very disconcerting.

"Palantir signed a multi-year contract with the bank in December 2009 in the $5 million to $20 million range, and JPMorgan Chase Chief Information Officer Guy Chiarello gushes about the company, calling Palantir “the best bet I’ve made in quite a while.”"

Yeah, $5M is pennies in a hat for senior execs who risk decades of prison time when/if the realities of the sub-prime lending ever really get exposed.
What was it about their vibe that read "evil" during the interview process?
heh, sorry, I always unintentionally do that, and it always gets up the nose of the old guard :)
The sneakernet in git - trivial backup of personal repositories
> should it be like this?

Yes.

Assuing a professional attitude, why not?

By professional attitude, I mean thet the programmer in question gets a good understanding of the problem and the solution from his solution-source of choice.
It would be interesting to know what apps you have out there and some numbers. Maybe that's another post though (price, #installed, ad revenue, ad stats..).
If you have catastrophic you may as well be uninsured. Can you take a $10k hit? I'm guessing you can't.
I'm standing outside in socks, with a super-soaker in hand :) it was in August.
While it might not be ideal from a critical thinking standpoint, it's pretty efficient. My process usually goes like this:

1. Google

2. StackOverflow

3. RTFM/source code

4. Think

5. Instant messenger

6. RTFM/source code

7. Think

7a. Write a blog post about the solution or submit a patch
CherryPy 3.2 released - with Python 3 support
contrast this with emacs' syntax highlighting, that tends to break badly on any non-trivial use of backquotes. That actually shows the advantage of $() - it is simply easier to scan, both for highlighters and human readers.

That said, there are many shells, that don't support $() and other random POSIX shell features. In fact, assuming that POSIX = portable is asking for trouble, because most systems actually aren't entirely conforming to POSIX (even when they are certified as being so). Another problem with relying on POSIX for portability is that in some places, the specification is worded in way that suggest one meaning and actually means something else (see for example behavior of glibc when operating on already terminated threads, which is POSIX compliant, but that this is correct is not immediately obvious from the specification).
Exactly, simple and powerful. Beautiful is the icing on the cake. It is quite some work though.
Tech Start-Ups Jack Up Pay to Compete With Social-Networking Sites
offtopic, but thanks for the link
I think it may have been Google that found that random RAM errors are quite likely over the course of a year, so you really want ECC memory if you're running a server and need uptime.
Great link - thanks!
Don't forget settling a lawsuit with one of their principal competitors (i2), conducted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, yes the same law that Mob bosses are charged under, the judge in the case threw out all of their defenses not to be sued under RICO since what they did was so brazen) which would have resulted in triple damages -- they virtually had to settle or go out of business.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/16/palantirs-third-black-eye-...

The initial complaint reads like one of their sales/marketing demos.

Very sketchy company IMHO.
Looks nice - I'm personally interested in seeing a filtered frontpage based on my personal likes and dislikes.
When's the last time you were in a US hospital? I'd say the nightmare you fear is already here.
From the photo where the kids are hiding their face, I'd guess there's a better chance that they think it's the police or some other government department photographing them than it being an anti-Google sentiment.

I suppose though it may depend on how the car/vehicle itself is branded.
You've raised a good issue.

I recently redesigned my blog and that included updating the typography. I decided on DroidSerifRegular for the body text. It looks beautiful on a Mac but when I previewed it on IE/Windows, it looked absolutely horrible (the lowercase a, especially). So for IE I use Georgia.

My blog: http://techiferous.com
The last image looks like some distance mapping data (possibly from a laser sensor or stereo vision camera) that got mixed up with the actual image data.
Sweet. I've changed redo to try that as one of its possible shells.
Good question, but this is more a stack exchange question - I don't know which stack exchange though...
It is on the cards. But before that I will have to implement login (using OAuth: FB + Twitter).

Thanks for the feedback, though.
I'm a great fan of pen and paper "programming".

Each time I do this, I am amazed once more how powerful thoughts and observations can emerge by turning away from my laptop and rethinking the problem with most basic drawings and without the shakles of my IDE and other tools.

This is espescially important for problem solving and creativity, where your first reflex is almost never the best, or when you got stuck.

Paper gives you the freedom needed to express the problem your wrestling with, and as my old math teacher rightly said: Expressing the problem is halfway to the solution.
Seems like the main message of this post is "If you're majoring in Philosophy and Physics, don't expect college to teach you about business or computers."