skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Past performance is no indication of future performance. Looking back, buying Microsoft in 2000 with a P/E of 60 was a stupid thing to do. But, that says nothing about buying it today with a P/E of 10. IMO, Microsoft is a great value play and but nothing to write home about, however Apple (16x) is slightly over priced and Google (20x) is stupidly overpriced.
> Another problem I have is with capitalization on titles. You're supposed to capitalize only the larger words, but I have to go all initial caps.

The "rules" for titles are particularly stupid.

A title is almost invariably distinguished in some other way. If it's a heading, it is typically printed in bold if typeset and underlined if written by hand. Citations are normally printed in italics when typeset and written within quotation marks by hand.

Meanwhile, it has been shown beyond any doubt by now that Capitalising Every Word Except a Few in Some Arbitrary Fashion Hurts Readability, which is particularly damaging when you're talking about text that readers will often want to scan at speed.
Being in Northern CA, or possibly NY, may help, but hopefully it's not something any company would use as an excuse for not being successful.
As an example, here's a story working its way up on techmeme, about an entrepreneur in China making iPhone apps:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/201...

A good idea and great execution will work anywhere in the world. I wish Radbox well, hope they can pull it off in India.
It's called MacroSolve.

Edit: Never mind, they're a completely different patent troll feeding on indie iOS developers. Shameful.
I thought Mike was just some "TV guy" they hired to do that show. This puts a whole new perspective on things. Good for Mike, hopefully someone will listen and act.
>In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We've elevated the importance of "higher education" to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled "alternative." Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as "vocational consolation prizes," best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of "shovel ready" jobs for a society that doesn't encourage people to pick up a shovel.

The reason for that is because the huge manufacturing automation and outsourcing wave that swept the nation in the 70s, 80s and 90s destroyed the association between skilled labor and a "good job". Its hard to make a living building things when a robot or a Chinese peasant can build the same thing for a tenth of the cost. Its hard to make a living fixing things when its cheaper to order a replacement.
I really like the site, too. I noticed there's no ads at all, and no subscription. The About link explains the site adequately and briefly, but no mention of the owner. I'm curious of the ownership - it doesn't appear to be a business with any revenue for such a good idea.
Fantastic Insight Into The Closed Box Google Culture From A Recent Xoogler
Well one of those hit is James Thomson who is based in Glasgow, Scotland so from the p.o.v. of the suer the answer to your question is "no".

In terms of European s/w patents, sadly according to the FSF:

"In Europe the legislation has decided that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by people, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as "computer implemented inventions"

Source: http://fsfe.org/projects/swpat/swpat.en.html
Rotates perfectly on my nexus s with 2.3.4
He said, "parallel computing is the reason [he] chose Scala."

That help? ;-)
You mean like this?
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=itamarb

(In case you are interested, the comments feed is at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=itamarb)
People often reply something along these lines. I don't entirely disagree, but I have some big reservations. First, which rules? That is, does it still bother you if a writer uses 'will' where some very stuffy people would prefer (even insist on!) 'shall'? If not, why not? If so, why? Notice that no matter which way you jump on this, you're already making choices. What about 'nauseous' and 'nauseated'? Do you insist on that distinction in writing? How about in speech? Do you correct people who say 'can' instead of 'may'? How about 'less' and 'few'? Do you say 'your being here makes me happy' or 'you being here makes me happy'? There's always going to be room for some pedantic asshat to correct you. It's up to you, however, to pick the cases where you push back, or shrug, or accept the correction quietly (because you've had the fight too often). You also have to decide who you want to impress. If you carefully rearrange all sentences so that they don't end with a preposition, you may impress the grammar school teachers and the self-satisfied pedants of the world, but you will only look silly to the professors of Linguistics over at Language Log[1].

So it's not entirely good enough to say "Just follow the arbitrary rules in order to demonstrate that you are a thoughtful, well-educated, intelligent person." It's always a case of pick your rules and your battles.
Yeah, I thought the period-inside-quotes thing was stupid and only used it when I had to for school. Stupid stupid stupid.
Silicon Alley Talent Fair & After Party
Honestly, my PhD and ensuing postdoc probably cost me money, and they were worth every penny, and a whole lot more. Spending that number of years doing pure research, thinking 24 hours a day, with access to huge libraries of research materials, was fucking awesome.

I know the startup buzz is also 24 hours a day and fucking awesome too, but it's much more about the kaching than the enlightenment.
The Mature Entrepreneur
Canada has had a "Trades" ad campaign going for some years now, and as a result, a lot of trades jobs can be hard to find. I have a friend who recently decided to get in to trades as a welder, after a string of poor life decisions left him without a serious education or career.

The sad part is that he's having a bitch of a time finding a job up here... which I assume is due to revitalization of trades from the government ad campaign.

Definitely something to support. And hey, maybe my friend can go work in the US.
Put farmers in the same category.

Not sure what, but I sniff an opportunity for tech to get involved here.
It could be written as a UDF but I'm not sure performance would be up to production use.

If you ever find yourself in that situation again, write the UDF as a in-line table-valued function. You get multiple return values and avoid the scalar UDF hit, since the engine will execute it in-line (appropriately enough).

eg:

select t.date, d.date_as_string
from table1 t
cross apply dbo.format_date(t.date,'yyyy-mm-dd') d
Just a thought.

1. Is data copyrightable, patentable or a trade secret? If not, follow the next steps.

2. Contact as much open-minded licensees as possible and persuade them to leak the data.

3. Build a service to collect the leaked data, collide several samples from varying origins to remove any "watermarks" (and constantly monitor for them), and publish it.

4. If the condition (1) stands true, the leak service should be legal (IMNAL), and service provider can't be obliged to say who's leaking the data.

5. ...

6. PROFIT^W PROTEST!

Childish, and somehow risky (the (2) is tricky), but given enough power, the information could be made public.

If the departure times are copyrightable — there's something really wrong with copyright system.
That confuses me. When the company buys back shares they don't just disappear, do they? With 1 million outstanding shares owning 50% of a company and the company buys back 500k, then there are 500k shares owning 25%. Why would those shares' value increase?
Tracy Booth
Painting collection of artist Tracy Booth. Her themes include abstracts, nature, landscapes, tiny houses, habitat, and more. She paints acrylics and employs simple lines and tones to allow the contours to take the center stage.
He should've pulled out the "sheep's balls on my chin" story from his TED talk. That would've been way more convincing. ;-)
Tiny House Paintings
Tiny house, as one of Tracy Booth's artwork theme, symbolizes simplicity. Her paintings have been exhibited in several region and art galleries. All of her tiny house paintings can also be found in Etsy.
You like what site? He listed about 25.
What you are referring to is mostly unskilled labor. Mr. Rowe was specifically talking about work that cannot be outsourced - welders, plumbers, electricians, carpenters.
> Interesting. I would have guessed that they can potentially get more money out of Apple by suing them for providing the feature. On the other hand, the patent is probably on shaky ground

And even if it weren't, Apple has the legal manpower and the money vault to lawyer them into the ground.
What happens if a function is not bijective?
All I want to do is live in a future where robots do all the work, and I get to build and program the robots... But with that said, it's going to be a long time before robots can do all the things Mike's grandfather could do. (Installing electrical lines, replacing sewer lines, replacing roofs, etc.) Sure, manufacturing automation killed a lot of jobs, but there plenty of skilled labor jobs that robots can't do today.
No, that was debunked:
https://twitter.com/#!/jamesthomson/status/69028047730384896
I'm most interested this oblique reference: "...add our DuckDuckGo Jabber Conference, it will soon be linked to the IRC channel #duckduckgo on freenode".

Where's the technology for linking an XMPP conference to an IRC channel? I lurk in some IRC channels that would love to migrate to a more modern protocol, and that seems a good way to bridge the gap.
+ You should never end a sentence with a preposition. (Sheer bullshit: English uses countless phrasal verbs ('throw away') and in many other cases avoiding the final preposition produces stuffy nonsense.)

This is an ineffective counterexample. "Away" is an adverb, not a preposition.
Taliban website Shahamat.com works with Western tool, can be located in Malaysia
The government pays the train operating companies to operate trains, not to feed data to iPhone apps, just as they're not paid to sell crisps and sodas from a small cart. This creates value (otherwise there would be no profit to extract), so why not?
You mean like this: http://hackerfollow.com/

Or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941631
That's true, but he's also talking about the kind of skilled labor that robots don't, and probably won't, do for a very long time: handy man, around-the-house kind of work.

I just had a guy come over today and fix my sink. I was sitting down editing in another room the whole time. It brought home that difference between "higher education" and "vocation" pretty strongly.

I always try to ask what to do so he doesn't have to come over in the future, but this one was particularly gross. But, really, I should have learned how to deal with gross clogged sinks in high school, so I wouldn't be squeamish about it now. It's our responsibility to learn this stuff, because this stuff, and the people who work on it, is really makes society tick. (Google a great Long Now talk, "World Without Us," to see how the only people keeping nature from retaking everything are maintenance guys.)
I do hide the totals. However you gain vote power for difficult decisions.

So the most vote power is assigned to someone who votes early on a contentious story which later becomes popular.
If the data was open anyone could check for anomalies.
I very much doubt he has an European patent on "in-app purchases", so my bet is that they threaten to sue him in the US. I'm not sure if the outcome is enforceable in Europe though.
I could have written the bit about my grandfather.

He passed away 36 years ago this week and I was already thinking about him quite a bit.

He was the most amazing person I ever met. He came to the U.S. alone when he was 11 years old and lived with strangers until he met my grandmother at a picnic. They were married 3 weeks later. He spoke 5 languages fluently, played 6 musical instruments, never went to school a single day in his life, and he could fix anything.

Like OP, one of my most favorite days of my childhood was when I was 12 and my grandfather took me to work with him. I remember helping him carry his tools down the back steps and load them into the trunk of his Ford Galaxie 500. He taught me my all time favorite cuss word when he said, "Move all that shitcrap out of the way."

Just the other day, I drove right past that spot, stopped, and sat for a while, remembering the good old days. Today, just like OP, I just call someone to get something fixed. I've almost forgotten the joy of getting things done with my hands with the gentle guidance of a master.

Thanks for the memories, Mike Rowe and goldins.
SmartBird - science-fiction came true
My impression from academia is that generally speaking (and in the US), PhD programs are designed around turning out professors.

That's just my impression though.
Implementing Facebook into your App: invalid key with keytool
Excellent science blogs:

Bad Astronomy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy

Frontal Cortex (neuropsych type stuff): http://www.wired.com/wiredscience

Not Exactly Rocket Science (general science, mostly biology): http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience
ChristianMingle.com - UK
One of my most striking memories is groups of men sitting on kerbs in Cairo with a couple of battered stone chisels and a hammer. They just sat there every day with their tools, waiting for someone to give them work chipping concrete BY HAND for a day.

They were skilled guys (at bashing concrete and holding a hammer all day), and willing to work hard. But in a fucked economy they couldn't contribute anything except cheap labour. Non-manufacturing trades don't support an economy. It's nice to think about an army of new handimen rebuilding America, but the reality is that an army of Amazon drones is what will be coming.
First thoughts on Node.js
A few of the links use our new project, OilyApe. Click and enjoy ;)
Simply a lie.
WordPress redirect failed login attempts to any location
You don't know how to unclog a sink?

Seriously?

Where have all the hackers gone?

I code during the day, fix my jeep when it breaks, fix my lawnmower, remodeled my basement, take apart kids toys, etc, etc.

You should give it a try. Don't be afraid to make mistakes (you will) and you can always call in a guy to fix it if your really break something. Trying is learning. And, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing how things work in your home.
The first part of your post made sense until you said "The right way to look at it, imo, is to see RDBMS as specialized systems".

RDBMS have a lot more features and support many more usage scenarios out of the box than any NoSQL systems and SQL offers more features as a query language than any other NoSQL query languages.

Of course, NoSQL query languages are simpler than SQL by design because the programmer is expected to write a program or a script for complex queries instead of using the query language. But then, you have to write your own execution plan, and think about atomicity and consistency, etc.

NoSQL are clearly the specialized systems, not the general ones.
Mike Rowe has consistently shown that he's more than just a cable TV show's talking head. In almost every single speech I hear him give, he's eloquently stated our need for more skilled labor or given credit to the people who do these dirty jobs all day.

He made an extremely interesting video for Reddit's AMA. Sat down and spoke for, I believe, ~20 minutes, answering every question in great detail.
I think he's in it for the joy of it, just like how Alton Brown made "Good Eats." He's also the narrator for Ford truck commercials.
Try North Dakota (close to Canada) and desperately in need of skilled labor b/c of the oil boom.
Hah: I'm a dope. I originally wrote 'throw up' and changed it because I thought people would object that it was informal. I picked 'throw away' pretty much at random, starting with 'throw', and I didn't even stop to analyze 'away'.

I can no longer edit the original, but thanks for the correction.
(If you feel a bit like the author of this comment you might enjoy the Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/)
I'm using OTR, but only for conversations that are worth protecting. IMHO securing typical chat with friends (mostly consisting of funny/interesting link exchanges) is almost pointless.

But having the history is still useful ("remember that article I've sent you yesterday").
These making skills are going to come back over the next few years - they aren't 'taught', they're learnt. And people are having to learn them RIGHT NOW, because they can't afford to call someone out to change their fuse / fix their washer. If you aren't working, you've got time to fiddle around for a while and get something fixed. Do it a few times and you start to get good at it and more confident. I'm really hopeful that it will be a positive outcome from the recession.
Japan uses three different calendars, depending on context.

Imperial / kōki which counts from alleged founding of Japan in 660BC

Era / nengō which counts the years from the start of the Emperor's reign

European / seireki adopting the International standard date counting from the alleged birth date of Jesus Christ

Today is 平成23年5月13日 of Mikado Heisei, the 125th Emperor of Japan
As best I recall, the rule is based on pronunciation, not on spelling. So for words where the "h" is pronounced, you treat it as a consonant and lead with "a": "go for a hike." Whereas for words where "h" is silent, so pronunciation thus leads with a vowel, you lead with "an": "it would be an honor."

"Historic" is pronounced differently, mostly based on region. You can go to "a historic occasion," with hard H, or "an 'istoric occasion," with a soft one.

Or, for native speakers: type what you'd pronounce.
> Local news website

It is funny you mention that. I feel as though I have almost forgotten about my local news until recently. Now that I watch the majority of my TV through either Netflix or Hulu, I never catch the 11pm news. I don't subscribe to my local paper, and never went to their website.

I find it amazing on how disconnected I was with anything happening in my current area since all I read was national news or tech websites. I recommend everyone taking a look at their local news website at least once a day to keep up with what is happening around you!
HBR:Fixing the Problem that Business Travelers Hate Most [paying extra for wifi]
“Growing Up Buffett”
Robot Invader
If your public keys are properly named in the authorized_hosts file, then you would just use sed to remove the relevant keys.

If you don't want to do that, any centralised user management system would allow removal of the user from the allowed ssh group, and adding a VPN layer is good too.
in israel, there are schools for kids that arent the brightest and they teach them a trade. i personally think that this world shifted to much to the "you either own a large office, or your a failure" type mentality.
>It is absolutely amazing to me that terrorist organizations would not use encrypted email.

This is excellent observation, especially as so much of the justification for limiting, restricting, or circumventing encryption on the part of intelligence agencies has been that "terrorists" would employ it to communicate.
Since I've been an adult, I've never lived anywhere I'm really allowed to do anything home-repair-ish, because the apartment complexes I've lived in prefer to pay a professional to do maintenance, rather than take the chance that one of their tenants will break things. So my rental agreements have all had clauses explicitly banning me from even taking apart the sink. I suppose I could learn if I bought a house, but that takes a lot of money!
Here is the proper deobfuscated code:

http://pastebin.com/nkBx8GbH

reddit disusses it nicely:

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/h9ke3/facebook_being...
> code written against 1.5.2 will work 100% against 1.6.1

Nope. attr() returns a different value than it did before 1.6. Anything that relied on that value (eg $elem.attr('disabled') == true/false) is still going to break.
Visualyf : My first FB app 
Hi,
I launched my first FB app (for fun) a while back. I am trying to look for some advice on how to improve it. While I am working on the database, I really be a happy human if you could use the app and suggest some improvements. I am not mentioning the thought behind the app deliberately, as I would really like people to figure it out intuitively.
Farming is high tech. Tractors drive themselves (what google is only now doing with cars).

The tractor, the planter, everything is gps and sensor based. You can tell how much seed is coming out at each planter point (can't remember the term for this). Each one needs to be calibrated. Also they shut off if you cross over a planted area so you don't waste seed, fertilizer, etc.

Farmers aren't waiting for you to come along and "get tech involved". They've (the smart succesful ones) always have the latest tech. From satelite internet (way back when) to spreadsheets to highly sophisticated computerized machines.

Inputs (fuel, seed, fertilizer) are ridiculously expensive (b/c our dollar is worth less and less and the fed prints money like toilet paper) and at least fuel and fertilizer have many foreign components. So automation and gps, etc can be really cost savers (also better for the environment, incidentally)
No licensee is going to leak this data. If they're paying, they aren't going to expend any effort to push it back out to potential competitors for free. And yes, non-commercial is a potential competitor.
So some patent troll is shaking down developers using a legalized form of extortion.

Shouldn't the Department of Justice have powers to investigate this sort of abuse of the patent system?
Netflix Co-Founder: It isn't lying if you believe it
That doesn't really matter if they can just force Apple (a US company) to pull it from the app store.
> If you're asking if acts can be moral or immoral even if they have no consequences, then the answer is yes, they can.

If you are going to make a rule -- i.e. that restricts people in the real world -- yet it has no purpose in real-world effect, why on earth should anyone be interested in agreeing to it?

"We are not allowed to go out in the sun on wednesdays. Why? Because it has been unimpeachably objectively derived from the 'axioms of morality'!" Anyone with any sense will just go elsewhere.

Ultimately, one has to be sensible with philosophy.

> It's not because it violates the right to life of those people

And why is it wrong to violate right to life? Because it has a real harmful effect. This is the point: all these rules come down to actual effects. If it were possible to remove the harmful part (maybe like killing someone in Quake Live), such rules would lose their meaning or worth. What really counts in moral evaluation is the real-world effect.
Free Canuck Website Program Update: at gybo.ca
Then you need to see his ted talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Mike has some really deep insights into American culture and work, every time he's interviewed or speaks it's a treat.
This is something I've struggled with in my writing, especially as someone who's done blogging and AP style writing for a news outlet... Sometimes I write a sentence that might end in a question mark, which shouldn't be a part of a quote and rather placing the punctuation mark outside of the quotes (or inside for that matter) I end up completely re-working the sentence to avoid the problem. But I would have to agree that it doesn't always make sense to stick so firmly to that grammar rule. It's nice to see that I'm not alone in that thought.