skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I upvoted you, but I wholly disagree with the idea. I mean, for many shows, I'm sure it would work. Most sit-coms, or reality shows, things of that ilk, I can't imagine being too much different for having more ads. They tend to have LOTS of ads on television, and I honestly don't think that their appeal is lessened on Hulu if their ad content approaches that of television.

For many other shows though, I'm reminded of an interview with Joss Whedon (I couldn't find it in a quick Google search) in which he argues against the commercial break, and I agree. For dramas and serial episodes, it really sucks to break the flow of a story for an arbitrary break. ANY break, even for just a few seconds, sucks horribly. Having to write your stories in a way where you plan out where the commercial breaks are is an art form. Making sure that the breaks are carefully planned takes skill. Networks like TBS (I think they still do it) which put arbitrary breaks in that were not intended screws this all up.

The first season of Alias made this work, in that they were able to work in the commercial break, along with old-fashioned cliff-hangers at the end of each episode, but they eventually gave that up.

I would gladly pay Hulu for commercial-less shows. What I've been doing lately, however oddball that it is, is finding shows I never watched before that are highly regarded, and watch those shows in serial form.

I've been buying the DVDs for the shows (small cost, really) and then ripping it to disk. I've recently gone through a slew of shows this way, and without commercial interruption, it's SO much easier to get into.
Here's the license text from the README of the source code:

JACK CLAW SOURCE CODE LICENSE

THE COMPUTER CODE ("SOURCE CODE") CONTAINED HEREIN IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF FROZENBYTE LTD. ("FROZENBYTE").
FROZENBYTE GRANTS TO END-USERS A ROYALTY-FREE, PERPETUAL LICENSE TO USE, DISPLAY, MODIFY, DISTRIBUTE AND
CREATE DERIVATIVE WORKS OF THE SOURCE CODE, SO LONG AS SUCH ACTION IS FOR NON-COMMERCIAL, ROYALTY-FREE
AND REVENUE-FREE PURPOSES. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE END-USER TAKE ANY ACTION WHEREBY THE SOURCE CODE CONTAINED
HEREIN WOULD BE USED FOR REVENUE-BEARING PURPOSES. THE END-USER UNDERSTANDS AND AGREES TO THE TERMS HEREIN
AND ACCEPTS THE SAME BY USING THE SOURCE CODE IN ANY WAY.

THE SOURCE CODE IS PROVIDED AS-IS AND FROZENBYTE MAKES NO WARRANTY AS TO THE USABILITY OR CORRECTNESS
OF THE SOURCE CODE. ANY USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

FROZENBYTE RETAINS THE RIGHT TO ALTER THESE LICENSE TERMS AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASON.

SOURCE CODE README AND FURTHER LICENSE NOTES
--------------------------------------------
Last update to this file: 12th of April 2011

Jack Claw was a project in development at Frozenbyte during the years 2006-2008. It was a big-budget multiplatform game for next-gen consoles and PC. The project was canned in 2008 and the team set to work on Trine ( http://www.trine-thegame.com ) instead. More history on the project can be found at Frozenbyte's website or on the Jack Claw website, and more info on the transition from Jack Claw to Trine can be found in the Gamasutra postmortem:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5826/postmortem_frozenbytes_trine.php

This source code package allows you to compile the game and develop it further if you wish (for non-commercial purposes). All other Jack Claw files, including the art assets and the level editor, remain the sole property and copyright of Frozenbyte. You may not distribute any of the files not included in the source code package. Should the source code include any 3rd party files or software, the copyright remains with the original owner and you are not allowed to distribute or modify such files or software. It is also forbidden to distribute Jack Claw or any direct derivative, in any way (e.g. not even for free), in any "app stores" such as the Mac App Store or similar, or in any distribution channel that has authorization control by a third party.

If you have a question about the license or a specific file, please don't hesitate to contact us. We're mostly just covering our legal base with this stuff.

Please note that we cannot provide any official support for this source code release, although we will try to help where we can.

If you are interested in developing Jack Claw, please get in touch with us or join the community - we are not actively developing the game on our own anymore but we are generally open to ideas, and our main interest is to just get the game out there and see what happens, and support the community with their ideas.
Mobile Site vs. Mobile App: WHat
As an agency executive, marketer or business decision maker, you’re probably considering your mobile marketing strategy and how much time and attention you’re devoting to mobile products and initiatives. The debate is no longer “should we” create a mobile site or optimize for mobile users, it’s now “how should we?”

Let’s start by looking at the options when it comes to mobile marketing, and clearly define the differences between each. (You may be surprised how often people confuse them.) I sat down with Chuck Sacco, VP of Client Strategy at Movitas to help shed some light on mobile technology and what you need to know.
I've made basic webapps with Scalatra and Scala by keeping all the complexity in the Scala, which I know quite well
This site is probably the best place to start: http://highscalability.com/

I learned most of what I know from working for http://www.gemstone.com
Reading all the replies on HN reminds me why companies like to outsource. Americans are expensive and have a strong sense of entitlement. This race to make more money for the sake of money just leads to accelerating inflation across the board. As far as I am concerned, salary is just a number and people can live just fine on $50,000 if they we weren't such a consumerist society.
I have a standing desk, and like it. Be sure to try it for a few days, and also try it barefooted.
I looked into this once, and to watch all the various TV shows we get on Hulu or satellite would cost us somewhere around 3x the cost of satellite. $2-3 an episode is just too much if you follow more than a handful of shows.
There is nothing informal about the following and it does seem unscrupulous:

* You give me $1000 asking me to develop a site for you, in addition to the $1000 you want to split ownership 50/50.

* I agree. We sign a contract. I cash your check and start working.

* I need more money so you send me another $1000 with no strings attached.

* You whine that things are taking longer than expected. Things get a bit heated. Eventually you agree to waive a 30% ownership penalty we had agreed to for slow performance.

* When the site is done, I see it is successful.

* Wishing to cut you out I lie to you and tell you the site is not living up to expectations and offer to mail you your money back.

Certainly whether or not Mr. Zuckerberg did the above is open for debate. Can't we agree that if he did do the above, he wasn't acting honestly?
Are You Following a Bot?
Yeah, I'm happy to pay $30 a season for Mad Men, since that's the only show I'd be watching on cable anyway.

Well, that plus Doctor Who. Is there any legal way I can legally get Doctor Who without shelling out a thousand bucks a year to Comcast for a million hours of other shite I don't want?
That's a good start, I may dive into database driven apps now. I know its a swarm of technologies. Don't worry about JavaScript or jQuery right now since those are front-end tools that add icing to the cake (unless it's node.js, but let's keep it simple).
It's fair to observe that there is a whole lot to learn. I'm not sure the extent to which you're disagreeing with me, but I'll submit that if it's not possible to learn it all in 4 years, adding a SE major won't magically make it possible.

I doubt any engineer or scientist with a remotely interesting job is in a position where they knew everything they'd ever need coming out of college. In the end, the most important experience you should get out of college is how to teach yourself more stuff later.
I might illustrate this as a flow chart. Would anyone be interested in that?
Really? Where's the huge revolution on getting us off of fossil fuels? Where are the fuel cell cars? Big oil has largely single handedly stopped a revolution over the past 30 years and I see no signs of change.

Never underestimate the power of money in stopping revolutions -- especially when it comes to leisure activity.
I'd like to typeset the document for you. I'm planning on printing this out for a paperback myself and will be doing it anyways.

If you can send me an editable document (ajai@ajaimk.com - I've already bought a copy too on scribd), that would make it a lot easier. I'm a college student who ran the layout and design department for a magazine, so I have some experience in this.

Also, find it amusing that 1 of the first questions in this book was a comment for a question I had asked on HN ;-)
How to Use a RadioButtonList to Redirect to URL's using Visual Basic
This tutorial shows how to create a radio button list and redirect to a URL selected in the list by the user
I don't doubt it. I'm just saying that for your average person, college isn't cheap. It's cool that you made it work, but for the majority of the population, college isn't an affordable option.
Amen brother. That said, since Flock was build on Webkit I don't know if there's any less fragmentation caused by Flock flying the coop.
I'm glad I did too—I've had one since 2009, and it's been one of those delightful and unexpected gadgets. The video quality is still far higher than my iPhone.

This is particularly distressing because, even though phones might make Flip cameras irrelevant in the future, they haven't yet. Buying Flip only to shut it down seems cruel and stupid.
The analogy you mention is not very good because the hole discovered in their security model is related to duplicate content identified via the same hash value. If you have unique content that's different than anything else, even by 1 bit, then you're secure until someone uploads exactly the same content (this is due to the way in which hash functions work); meanwhile, a key under the doormat would imply a totally different security threat model.
Completely agree with you. I've been using a standup for about a year now, details here:
http://www.localconspiracy.com/2010/08/get-up-stand-up.html

Regarding the feet, barefoot (on a gel mat) is about as good as it gets. But I've been running barefoot for two years now, so my opinion is biased.

Since switching to standup, I've almost ZERO back problems. Prior to this, I used to have serious back pain for two or three days at a time, several times a year.
Live Convo with Jonathan Abrams, Friendster Founder on Scaling, Company-Building
I just want to say that I think that most of the replies to this question are silly. Just hire the guy, small variances in salary shouldn't be a problem and you don't want to have people who are so petty about compensation. You don't have to "ask the team"; just don't hire people whose feelings get hurt over 10k.

The point of transparent salary is to provide a general gauge of salary fairness, not to allow people to obsess about equality, money, and why someone does or doesn't deserve a little bit more than someone (or everyone) else.

Personally, I don't think a "posted salary" policy is a great idea; it would just cause a feeling of pettiness and entitlement and divert the employees' focus. I think you should just hire people at fair rates, and then it's no skin off your back if the numbers get out. If the person undervalues himself, you should offer a rate commensurate with the value and income he'll generate on behalf of the company instead of doing the immoral thing and leveraging his ignorance for financial or political benefit.
Also, if you relocate from Mountain View, I suspect you'd be able to keep more of your salary than the cost-of-living decrease would strictly dictate.
There are some missing comma commonalities between the two that I find compelling.
The Ordeal of Immigrating Legally
I've seen animators go from rank beginner to pretty awesome in the hands of John Krickfalusi. And trust me, there are a lot of mental skills involved in animating. As well as a lot of pressure.

How long did this take? About five years.

He bitches now and then that he's the unpaid master class of the Hollywood TV industry. Not everyone (me, for instance) who's done time at Spümcø is working in the animation industry. But everyone who spent much time doing John's directed practice can draw rings around most people with their eyes closed.

The hard part, IMHO, was putting in the time to practice and keep practicing. Even on a shitty day. This guy seems to have that down; he's been able to structure his life so that he doesn't have much to distract him from golf. If he keeps at it and doesn't get run over by a truck, I'm pretty sure he will either become a pro or burn out.
This might be another incarnation of the "Nobody ever gets fired for using IBM" phenomenon. HR are more likely aiming at avoiding errors, and not necessarily hiring the best people possible, if those come at a risk. So you can always say "but he had x years experience with Rails" if the hire doesn't pan out.
I love being told that RSS is dead, and then I visit twitter for a few moments and I am overwhelmed by the retweet/tweet ratio.
This guy is hilarious and has some great stories to tell.
Startup Lessons In The First Year of Operation
Are these emails from those HDD's?

If not, where are they from?

Have they been subjected to forensic investigation?

Has the source been substantiated?

Was the due diligence done on these emails, specifically?

I'm a cynic about such things though :)
I'm at a company as a senior developer. I know the other senior developer is on more money than me but it doesn't bother me. He is more experienced than me and brings a lot to the table. I have been at the company longer and got the development team going, I even hired the guy. I will continue to be "above" him in a respect as I am part of the decision making team about which routes to go down.

I value the development work more than the decision making though so I stand by the fact that it doesn't bother me he is on more.

You wouldn't accept a job if you were not happy with the conditions, its a two way street. If they offer you a job then you decide whether you want to take it or not, they don't force your hand.

I know I could get 10k more than I am on now if I moved to another company but I'm not in my MD's office telling him I'm leaving because I know this fact. I believe in company values, I am helping a company grow. We are relatively small and I have a chance to make a big difference.

When your work is your life (If you are a dev then your work IS your life), then it's more about the experience than the cash.

But if someone came along and offered me £100k to do my job, I would take it. I'm loyal enough to stay but I'm not stupid enough not to go.

I once worked for a company where I bragged about a massive pay rise, I was young and stupid. It led to a lot of hard feelings. I had been promoted to manager and given some great responsibilities. I ended up losing a lot of friends short term (they got over it) but I learnt a valuable lesson, even if they money you were offered comes from a position above you, you are condemed for taking it.

A lot of people hate to see other people do well for themselves, all the people who say that they should openly discuss their wages are either on a decent package or they genuinely do not care what other people are on. All the people that want to keep it private understand that it only leads to upset and arguments.

If you can be close enough to a work colleague for them not to take it personally then go for it, I would not say an open forum of discussing wages is a good idea though.
I think the networks are missing the point, the alternative to Hulu and other online offerings isn't cable or satellite it's P2P. Hulu allows them to get _some_ money from people who otherwise would be worthless to them.

Paying $2 per episode on amazon or iTunes for a show you are only going to watch once makes very little sense as does paying $60+ for a cable subscription (assuming the content you want to watch is not HBO etc.) if you only want to watch a couple of shows.
chattin' up Founder's Den founder!
1) Not reading articles about 'x most important traits of an entrepreneur'.

2) Not giving up.
Without knowing the internals of how Dropbox operates, my empirical observations are that they employ block-level deduplication, i.e. when you change bits in the middle of the file, the whole thing doesn't get re-uploaded. Which means they keep pointers and have an algorithm that's similar to LBFS (and Rabin fingerprints)

This means it's theoretically possible for parts of the file to come from different sources, which means contraband files are 'built' from parts of otherwise legal files.
Cool, thanks. Any particular thing I should look out for? "MongoDB" - is that anything to do with this? SQL-lite?
> Thus, as a social experiment Peter Thiel's dropout scholarships are worthless. They do not show anything unless Mr. Thiel creates a control group by investing in kids that do stay in school or investing in kids that just graduated college.

There already exists a control group: the class of students starting elite schools in 2011. The question Thiel is asking is: What would happen to an exceptional kid who, instead of attending a top-tier college, entered a entrepreneurship program instead?

If it turns out that Thiel's kids are more successful than the average Harvard grad, then Thiel will have demonstrated that, at least for exceptional kids, going to an elite college may not be the best option.
I can't imagine sitting in a chair for 14 hours without even a few 15 minute breaks. You are setting yourself up for neck injury and long term back pain. (Speaking from experience, as someone who used to sit in a chair for similarly long stretches and thought it made him tough. No, it made me stupid.)
Tip: When asked about my salary expectations for my first job, I said "£20-24k". I got £22k. Many of the other people who started alongside said lower figures - and that's what they got.

Don't quote something way out of the range of the company you want to work for, but don't undersell yourself either. You'll probably get what you asked for... £15-25k is dirt cheap anyway, for any large corporation, but that £10k makes a whole lot of difference to your life.
I don't think you'll find many people who'd say that college is right for everyone, or affordable for everyone. (I would say that, for any given person, if they're driven and dedicated, it's probably affordable. But that excludes a lot of the population.)

I would, however, say that the majority of people in the startup world who seem to have a clue have had some college at the least, and that it's very valuable in and of itself for those people--which makes me think Thiel very misguided.
I use this, but cycling through all of my windows drives me crazy. I've found Witch (http://manytricks.com/witch/) useful for switching between windows, but it can be a bit slow to load -- I wish OS X had an inbuilt system like it.
Databases generally fall into 2 classes: NoSQL and SQL. I'd stick with SQL based databases such as MySQL, Postgre, and SQLite. For the most part, they can be interchangeable. MongoDB falls into the former and is an entirely different way of thinking about databases.
> So the company is a bit screwed in this situation.

Yes, and the problem is the company is passing on (externalizing) that screwedness onto their employees.
People are willing to pay a premium for a high-end single-purpose device (eg: a Nikon camera or a Sony professional camcorder).

But they don't need a cheap single-purpose device. Especially since their smartphone (which they are carrying anyway) is good enough.

I bought a Flip camera back in 2008, but it was the first and last one I ever bought. Flip and Cisco's mistake was thinking that the brand would carry the day.
It's impossible that I'm the only one that is pissed to always hear that someone "invented facebook".

Bullshit. They came up with ideas that were around for a long time and then went through the actual process of putting it together, then launched it, and through sweat and tears (mostly tears), they succeeded, braving all the challenges.

Inventing my ass.
Too bad they don't have a link to an mailing list for the How to Make Cool Things with Microcontrollers (For People Who Know Nothing), I definitely would like to be notified when that is available.
I thought this was going to be something interesting, it's like an SEO guide for 3 year olds. How do I mark down??
$175/hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year = $350,000/year, for anyone else (like me) who can't immediately estimate equivalent yearly rates.
He's no better than the other 9 people you have already hired.

Except, for the purpose of salary, he is better than the other 9 people you have already hired, in that he has a competing offer and the others didn't. Unfortunately, it's not just about programming skill, it's about marketability.
I'm also getting {"error":"not_found","reason":"no_db_file"} from
http://hosting.iriscouch.com/hosting_public/_design/hosting_...
when trying to create an account.
Why does Slate care enough to editorialize on one side or another? There's going to have to be a big PR push if the law is going to go the W's way, so I suppose we're seeing the beginning seeds of it here. However, this does not mean that they invented PR seeding.
In this instance we are talking about data that is already encrypted. Now tell me why anyone would worry about their encrypted data being identifiable unless it's not their data. Not something I have to worry about and suspect majority of users don't need to worry about this either.
The best practice for CSS is to continuously rewrite it. Don't be lazy, just do it.
But what if it had already cost $10k in resources to recruit him and get him this far? What if it costs $10k to find the next person who will accept $100k? Then it's a wash, and all you've done is lost time.
There is a control group: the classes that are now beginning at elite schools. Presumably Thiel's kids would be among them if they were not selected for Thiel's program. To make a proper study, all that needs to be done is to track Thiel's kids and their counterparts, the control, who went to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. How do Thiel's kids compare to Harvard's class at 1 year, 2 years, ...?
In the US, there's a Social Security payroll tax (previously 12.4%, now 10.4%) that's split between employer and employee. Self-employed people pay it themselves; their clients don't.
Flock had deeper integration and less uselessness than rockmelt in my opinion.
But cost of living can mean you save none of the $100,000 and lots of the lower salary.
Well, there's Netflix: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Doctor_Who/70142441

Do you mean brand-new episodes? I suppose you could go to the BBC site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/dw) and fake a UK HTTP header.