skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like everyone is determined to give you a legal answer to what what I interpreted as a moral question. The overwhelming response has established that legally she still owns the copyright to the photo. The quesiton that's worth discussing, in my mind, is should she be able to go after people for damages for using her photo in ways other than attempting to plagarize it or just straight up sell copies?

When you post a picture to twitter you are essentially saying Hey everyone look at my photo!. In my view it is then impossible to justify later freaking out and saying Holy shit everyone is looking at my photo!

After reading the article, I think the "victim" here may even agree with me. Her quotes didn't give the impression that she felt particularly wronged in the whole affair.
And their managers are asking "how was this not fixed until 18 hours after it happened?"
While I somewhat agree with the whole "degrees aren't always a good idea" meme, this feels like something of a "stunt" by Thiel. Taking people who are so incredibly smart and giving them money is an interesting concept, but it sure won't prove much about whether Universities are a good idea for us "ordinary" people.
Entrepreneurship's Odd Future
There's only a few things I look for in a programming font:

Monospacing
And being able to see these as different glyphs easily: O0I1l

Other than that, I don't put too much though into it.
CEOs are often hired into the position, so there may be some educational bias. What would be interesting by this discussion is how many of those CEOs were founders of the company?
Airbnb About To Launch Sublets As Service Is Exploding With Activity
I find it funny how so many developers I talk to online have this aversion to... well prettiness.

As if form and function is a zero-sum game. Or there's something inefficient about caring about aesthetics. What's wrong with wanting something to be aesthetically pleasing?
That's how many of us started, I believe.
I've got myself stuck in a "fixed price" contract, and while the number of features the client's asked for haven't really increased all that much, the depth of interrelation between those features was not at all apparent up front. Throw in agreeing to migrate existing data in to a new data structure without really understanding the nature and complexity of the existing data, and you've got a recipe for a long-overdue project. No one's happy. :/
"Lies, damned lies, and software development estimates:"

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/06/which-theory-first-evide...
You definitely missed an opportunity. My first year, I volunteered without pay in a research lab just to see what was going on, and then by the second through fourth years I was contributing to actual research.

Of course, it's not entirely clear that I was more help than hindrance to the group until midway through my third year, but I certainly learned a lot and got a lot of mentoring you can't get via youtube and e-books :-)
Brightens up otherwise dull days. I think that's all it is. People work better when they occasionally give their computer a makeover, and everything feels fresh.
Personally I wouldn't do flat fee work unless the profit margin was astronomical or there was some other factor that made it heads-I-win, tails-I-win situation (this doesn't mean the client has to lose.)

Some kinds of work are eminently estimatable, if the requirements are stable. One time I was working at a job shop for a client who needed a PHP CRUD app. Because this was built within a framework, I was able to break the requirements down and estimate tasks to within 15 minutes and be able to schedule a week's work with about 10% accuracy.

The one trouble is I'd call up the client and show them what I was doing and she'd talk for 2 hours on the phone (which we'd bill $240 for at our rate) and have an endless list of small and medium-sized tweaks she wanted. Had I not put my foot down, she would have blown the budget and schedule completely. I did put my foot down and she fired our agency.

Fixed fee projects create moral hazard for the client: if you're really good in your sales process you might be able to get 4 out of 5 clients to be reasonable and make a profit on them. If you want to keep the 5th client you'll have them overrun the budget by a large enough factor that you lose what you made on the other 4.
Double whammy: Fedora 15, and first builds of Ubuntu 11.10 now available
They fixed it, btw www.paulphusion.de was still pointing to his old address at 81.169.145.158. I don't know what he did, but it seems that he didn't follow what posterous suggested (adding an A record to its domain pointing at posterous). Sadly i wasn't quick enough to collect more data about posterous.com...

Waiting for the official post, i'd say that Paul misconfigured something that they didn't test for that particular input.
Canvas2D API in WebGL
I believe that most open-source developers started by scratching one of their itches. Probably quite a few, too, by just open-sourcing academic work.

Now, I wonder: how many coders did start by being ordered by their boss to open-source their code and/or to contribute to an existing open-source project?
1) "Speaking of worlds," implies that he's talking about global climate change.

2) "climate change is real" refers to the idea of global climate change, you will be unable to convince me that he's referring to a common belief in "Boston climate change".
This will affect you differently depending on what language you use and whether you like to align things in columns. Think of how some people format C functions, with each parameter on a new line aligned at the open paren.

Personally I find that kind of alignment unnecessary and creates too much busywork. Proportional fonts prevent you from even trying. (Unless your editor supports elastic tabstops, but since very few do this is moot.)

FWIW, I program in Georgia, until I find a serif font I like better. EVERYONE comments on it.
Oh yeah, you can easily bill a month of full-time work for fixing an old app with a busted data model. After that you reach the place where you can sell a change that takes 30 minutes of work for $150 and really do it in 30 minutes, but getting there is expensive...
The Best Universal Remote: Your Phone
To be fair there definitely are people who get burned several times by eLancers and cut-rate web shops in their town and eventually realize that they get what they pay for.
Minor countries aside (like North Korea) the part of the map that looks really really wrong is Africa.
Montana Free Online Newspapers - Webmaster Forums in Directory Junction
I'm not sure this is exactly a source, but this article by Thiel tends to imply that he thinks the system is pretty broken : http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-educa.... And then Thiel has talked about the education bubble (links on HN previously, too) : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2431431.

Thiel is definitely pro "different" from the current system.

I think the idea of promoting more entrepreneurial activities earlier is great, but it seems very anti-university/higher ed in his vision rather than as an alternative path.
INSTANT access to Namesake, the conversation community with thought leaders.
An estimate should always be a range. And it should always cover the "cone of uncertainty".

If you don't know, reflect it in your estimate. Get the client prepared for falling within the range. And comfortable with the cost on the far end. Because while you hope it doesn't happen, it very well could.
When Angry Birds attack: Android edition
Yandex’s Surge on Debut Stirs More Talk of Tech Bubble
> The reason I point this out is because badly defined debates don't get us anywhere.

True that.

<irritated-with-all-that-AGW> Let's not forget how the Dinosaurs caused the Ice Age, by sequestering all the carbon from atmospheric CO₂ into coal and crude oil. Let's not follow in their footsteps, lest we perish in a new ice age just like them. /sarcasm/ </irritated-with-all-that-AGW>
On the old Twitter, if you had Javascript disabled, clicking "sign out" took you to the Twitter profile of @sign_out (or similar, can't remember).
A Beginner’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click: Quality Score
I went with Terminus ( http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/shots.html ), never looked back.

I wanted to add this as a comment below the article just like the author asked, but it doesn't appear for me (using Chrome dev).
Agreed. As well, the art in XKCD is not in the drawings, it's in the wit. Bet you guys the wit takes a lot of effort and doesn't just come bubbling out of his head. Look at what professional comedians say about how they make their jokes. Bet the process is pretty much the same.
I can see three ways of getting these in line. The obvious one is that if you do what you have to do in less time and with less expenditure of willpower, there is more time and energy left to challenge yourself.

The second one is what I do: Schedule challenges as a ritual. What I do is solve a projecteuler.net project every morning. Helps me stay sharp all day.

The third one is a bit meta: You can have a constant thought process going that examines your rituals and injects as much challenge as you can handle in the form of optimizations. This way you can keep improving your rituals, keep things interesting, and gradually free up more time for productivity. This is what I aspire to.
Uber CEO: I Think I’ve Got 20,000 Years Of Jail Time In Front Of Me
My building's snow removal costs alone were sufficient to demonstrate that this was a particularly bad winter. They were more than twice last year's (last year being pretty typical).
It's nice to see the banks trying to catch up with PayPal 12 years later.
Email transfers have been available in Canada since 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac_e-Transfer
How Jack Dorsey's Square Is Accidentally Disrupting The Entire Payments Industry
It is a great story, isn't it? But I think we're actually kind of agreeing on this, albiet from slightly different perspectives:

>Someone holding their ground when someone is shooting at them is ipso facto specifically choosing their place.

That's kind of the point I'm trying to make. It's not -necessairly - about the quality of equipment or technical training or 'meticulous' planning.

More than any other single factor, it's about the photographer's location. Photojournalists are trained and paid to actively seek out news and choose their locations so they -might- be there to capture that perfect moment, but if someone with an iPhone just happens to be in that ideal spot instead, it doesn't mean their photo is worth any less.

That said, I don't think there's anything wrong with giving away your photo, but I think people should be aware that, if they happen to find themselves in a newsworthy situation, they could choose to get paid for what they record, sometimes quite a bit.
Why? All this allows you to do is to initiate a transfer to someone using their phone or email, rather than making you know their routing number & checking number.
Several others here have suggested my favorite font already, the standard 6x13 "Fixed" bitmap font.

Pretty much every Linux machine has a version of this, but most modern Debians (and probably others) that ship with fontconfig have bitmapped fonts turned off by default for programs that use fontconfig for their font info (i.e., not xterm, but gnome-terminal, usually gvim, et cetera).

If you want to use Fixed and other bitmapped fonts and they're just not there, take a look in /etc/fonts/conf.d for a file named (something like) 70-no-bitmaps.conf, a symblink to the same filename in /etc/fonts/conf.avail. If you remove the symblink from /etc/fonts/conf.d and instead

ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf \
/etc/fonts/conf.d

fontconfig will cache bitmapped fonts for you. Then you'll just have to get it to update your cache with

fc-cache -f -r -v

and you should be able to use bitmapped fonts like Fixed.

You can look for other bitmapped fonts on your system with

fc-list ":scalable=false" family pixelsize

which prints out the family name and the sizes for which the bitmaps are available.

set guifont=Fixed\ Medium\ Semi-Condensed\ 10

makes gvim look precisely like a terminal for me.
The Unique Commerce System in Amazonia
Dwolla has been doing something similar for a year now. I wonder how all this shake out.
The service is a direct threat to PayPal, which dominates the market for online, electronic payments with nearly 100 million active users.

But all the money in Paypal is in facilitating C2B payments, not in C2C payments. Granted, many of their businesses are tiny compared to the typical credit card charging business, but it doesn't meaningfully compete with anything except, perhaps, the low-end of eBay sellers. (And it won't be allowed on eBay.)
Ah, but this is nothing like a population density map of Sydney. Sydney is huge, it stretches way off in the north and west directions. What you're looking at here is basically the areas immediately south of central Sydney -- probably only 10% of the population lives in that area (though admittedly the 10% demographically most likely to use flickr).

Besides, those major roads don't have that many people living on 'em.
"Thiel is quite open that his main motivation is that he thinks universities promote politics he dislikes, so he'd like to destroy them for that reason."

[citation needed]
In this article only fixed-width fonts are presented, while there are ever more and more developers using proportional fonts nowadays—because they're much easier to read.

On my unix system, for example, I use Vera Sans:
http://www.michielovertoom.com/pictures/luyt-desktop.png

On my windows system I use Comic Sans to code, but I haven't got a screenie ready ;-)
I've been there and I know how that sucks. In those cases I figured it was best to take my loss and get it done and over with as soon as possible (I'm sure that's what you're doing).

In my experience there's one thing you need to watch out for, and that's being a nice guy. You might start feeling sorry for your client because stuff is taking longer than planned, which makes it harder to say no to just minor changes to the scope. They will only take you 5 minutes each, and it keeps the client of your back. Those are the things that really get to you when it comes to staying motivated I think.
Yes, I agree - smart people like this are likely to succeed in any context. I suppose you could make the argument that their success will likely be heightened by the involvement in the program because of the connections they'll make - but the program doesn't really prove or disprove the idea that the system works or doesn't work. In my opinion, he'd be better off taking a group of kids that are perhaps borderline college material and training them.
Hmm, I went the other route. Instead of contributing to other projects I opensourced mine. Maybe someone might find them useful. :)
I think your analogy is wrong. Copyrights apply to creative processes, which the translation from English to Russian would surely involve, or a hand-written port from one language/API to another. A machine translation from computer language A to B would not apply, since it is the work of a tool, not a human.
Don't give bullshit advice
There seems to be a common misconception about the purpose of the Thiel Fellowship. Two things the Fellowship is not claiming to do:

1) Testing the hypothesis that university is bad

2) Testing the hypothesis that university is not worth the cost for the vast majority of people

What the Fellowship might plausibly be doing:

1) Testing the hypothesis that university is not worth the cost for people like the Thiel fellows

The actual motivation of the Fellowship, which is all over the press and has been related to me by Thiel Foundation workers, is that students with great potential accumulate tons of student loan debt in college and subsequently, instead of taking on projects that might actually help the world, are financially pressured into working at hedge funds and the like. The Fellowship is offered to these students as a two year break to attempt these projects supported by 100K for living expenses and, crucially, extensive mentorship.

Again, the point is not to discredit universities, but to keep talented kids away from hedge funds (ironic coming from Thiel but there you have it).

Edit: Also note that a failure of the Thiel Fellowship project does not disprove the education bubble in general, since it only applies to a very small group of people.
What’s a Sonic Boom?
See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584159
Sure, every issue is always more complicated than people think, and I'm not saying that just ignoring copyright is necessarily the "right" thing to do.

But just think about this: I am 23 years old, I barely remember a time when there was no internet. Kids today grow up taking their iPods for granted. They take for granted that music, movies, media of all kind is digital. The take for granted that is easily shared. That there is no fundamental restriction on the consumption of content. Technologically we are at the point where virtually all content is available to virtually everyone at virtually no cost.

Politics and law do not matter. This reality is neither a good nor a bad thing, it just is.
More simply stated: upvotes imply that it's worth discussing.
I'm interested to see what their fees are going to be. PayPal is ridiculously expensive (2-3%). Dwolla is a flat 25 cents per transaction (regardless of size).
I don't know if such bosses exist. Many of my programmer friends would like to make their stuff opensource but their bosses (companies) forbid it. Though it's mostly really useful but not "trade secret" stuff.
That's actually a good point. Certainly don't look for programmers who already enjoy coding their own ideas, look for programmers that are solely motivated by money and couldn't care less about your idea.
AMD brings FirePro cards into the VLIW4 era
Never seen [0] before, or heard about it.

The second is just one of my email addresses, and isn't my Google Profile.
Free Music Daily - Awesome new Music Site
A few large consulting companies in the 90's, Cambridge Technology Partners and Viant, for example, were very successful with this model. They were selling against the $100-200/hr Big 6 type consulting firm so there was plenty of room budget for the "risk" associated with going over the time estimate. The other key to their success was getting the client to agree to pay for an upfront 'spec'ing' phase before bidding on the development work. If you do the spec'ing phase correctly you can give a fairly good bid on development and truly assess what is in scope and what is a change order.
I am a physicist, and I'm afraid that the page on infra-red spectroscopy isn't really relevant due to (as you say) the very different length scales.

What I think is really going on is thermodynamics. Suppose I bury a big stone pyramid under the sand. Stone is (I assume) a much better conductor of heat than sand. When the sun comes up after a cold night, it heats the sand, but the sand on top of the pyramid has its heat conducted away more efficiently than the sand far from the pyramid, so it'll show up as slightly cooler when imaged with the infra-red satellite.
I saw it for a few minutes, but it seems to be fixed now. I can't wait to hear how this happened.
I work in healthcare IT; specifically I am the IT Security Officer and HIPAA Security Officer for a health system. In that role I deal with technology, operations and compliance issues frequently. It has been my experience that most physicians care about learning more, but are overwhelmed with the expectations around changing regulations, adopting technology and new demands outside of medical knowledge being placed on them.

Healthcare is in an odd state right now. Technology is being adopted rapidly, regulations are being passed that change how medicine is practiced, patients are getting more involved in their care and the clinical staff is expected to be involved with this while continuing to improve patient care. Eventually all of this change will be for the better, but not everyone handles change well.
I agree that the policy is odd, but I actually like the fairness of it. They have a working Financial Aid system that awards discounts/financial help based on -need- which (IMHO) is the right way to do it.
Knot Zoo
Yes I know my Google Profile is publicly available, however that doesn't sound like it is the interesting part. The interesting part is the data that he was able to get surrounding that. What does his data show regarding the 6 degrees of separation? Stuff like that.
Would you be willing to share your modified font?

Also, what color scheme is that?
I thought you could pay however you wanted on ebay (including check or cash) it was just up to you to work something out with the seller. From what I understand, Dwolla not only does C2B but also does a ton of B2B transactions per month.
"It’s the difference between a 'Save' and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a 'Save As': They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes."

Wouldn't that be save? If you save a file it permanently alters the original, whereas 'save as' leaves the original file untouched.
This is one great thing about the software engineering profession, there's really no excuse for not being "employed". Even if you are laid off from your job and can't find work...you can always start a side company or work on a project. Those look like perfectly valid employment from a resume perspective. I can't imagine a scenario in which there will ever be a gap like that in my resume.
Ugh, as the submitter, I officially apologize for the typo in the headline. Jeez.
Bostonian also. It felt significantly worse than usual. I chalked it up to those few bitterly cold days and then of course the weekly super storms.
Notes on Philadelphia: Most photos on the regional rail lines are by locals, even on the northeast corridor. Tourists in Fairmount park are not making it much further than the zoo and art museum, which is unfortunate because there are lots of great areas north of that. I would have expected more activity in both rivers due to the tours and rowing that take place. Penn/Drexel campuses are photographed much more than the Temple campus.

http://flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4671522359/sizes/o/in/pho...
If only GWT compiled any JVM bytecode code, and we would be able to use other languages like Scala, Mirah, Groovy, and so on (would be fun to run languages with thick runtimes as well, like Clojure and JRuby, but then the LLVM in Javascript seems more promising).
Am I the only one who programs in a proportional font? It's helpful for the same reason it's helpful in print: the letters are more distinguished from each other so the brain recognizes them more quickly, and you can fit more text into the same space.

I use a modified version of Georgia which adds a slash through the zero and changes the l (ell) to look less like the 1 (one).
This looks really good! Just released something similar for music :)
FaceCash, which I run, is free for peer-to-peer transfers. You can send up to $5,000 per day.
yeah, I've been doing this for ages, and now the TD iphone app lets me do from my phone. I have no use for square or any other P2P cashless transfer feature.