skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook's number of active users served per employee is very impressive. The ridiculous number of photos uploaded every second.

I've long ago figured out that I'd never be able to pass the screens for Facebook, Apple (and at one time, Microsoft). I do still dream of Apple, even after reading the $0.99 Fortune Kindle single on how 'it's not about getting hired at Apple, it's about being able to stay'

What makes me happy however is creating apps that people use (and sometimes even enjoy using).
I had asked a related question on Quora some months ago. There is a need in many scientific fields, especially life sciences, for experts in scalable infrastructure, statistical learning, visualization, graph analysis, and good software engineering, but since hard science doesn't pay well enough, the majority of these people are going to the Facebook's of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but we have some challenges in figuring out what "value" means, how we measure it, and perhaps most importantly, how we reward it.

There has to be some way of getting some fraction of the really smart computational people into other fields to figure out very hard problems. Unfortunately, the future of the internet is not the only future out there.
I don't know why you are getting voted down. That's actually a pretty good summary.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write a transcript with unprecedented detail!
Or they think it's interesting enough to be worth an upvote. I find it strange, the idea that you only upvote stories that make you happy.
How to choose the best task size for parallel programming
You know what would have been better leadership? Not making the wrong decision in the first place. Yeah, obviously, backing down gracefully when proved wrong is quite important, but so is not betting the product on being able to make a new component...
I don't know, I think you have it the other way around. Content and apps are a means for generating ad revenue- the advertiser is the customer.

Lots of technical value gets created in the process, but as companies like Facebook and Google have grown up, they've realized who their real masters are (not the user). See the recent $400m Admeld acquisition rumor to see this in action with Google.

OTOH Apple gets paid by the consumer. They're a real product company.
maybe it's all relative, but for all its problems Ubuntu's flash support is infinitely better now than it was even a couple years ago.

I think it's probably true that if you're not somewhat 'nix-aware, there are still gotchas here and there -- but I've found a quick google search almost always comes up with some good suggestions, one of which usually fixes up whatever I'm complaining about.

Compared to the downtime I've had with viruses and malware on Windows, the constant need to be vigilant and to teach (or fail to teach) my less technically inclined friends and family how to protect their machine, Ubuntu is clearly the winner.
On what rational basis are these two questions pertinent to managing the executive branch of the United States government?
With TrueCrypt you can actually unmount it and make it inaccessible even to people who have physical access to the machine. I don't see any instructions on how to do this with SecretSync, even in their FAQ, but from their documentation it appears this would need to be done:

1) Open the app and click Stop sync

2) Delete the SecretSync folder (make sure it's really deleted and isn't in the Trash or Recycle Bin)

http://getsecretsync.com/ss/getstarted/#stopstart
I've been doing this for a fair while. Biggest benefit for me is it keeps me awake better.
Well if Google is any example, some portion will create opportunities as angel investors for the next round of entrepreneurs.

Its interesting to see how the various 'waves' in the valley seem to suck in everyone briefly. Farchild/Intel/Tandem/PARC/Apple/Sun/Netscape/AOL/Apple(again:-)/HP/Google/Facebook/...

It would be interesting to know if its similar in other places.
The most important question is if you want to find a job utilizing those skills. If you just want to work on your own projects then by all means learn on-the-fly.

There's so many different things you can purse with programming skills so the advice you get will be very diversified too.
In the end it's all about reaching your goal, so identify that and look at how you can get there.

The definition of "learning" a language varies a lot too.
I'd rather focus on particular functional areas. Generic knowledge of languages won't get you too far unless you want to be a teacher.

I've done this and that in many languages but if somebody asks me which I know I never know what to answer. I tend to say I know none and that I just know a little about programming.

Actually I don't find it that much different from learning spoken languages. When I know what I want to express/understand I find it very very easy to learn quickly. When I am in the "let's look for some new stuff I don't know mode" I tend to learn very little.
I'm pretty sure this link was posted in response to this earlier link on HN:

http://batsov.com/Linux/Windows/Rant/2011/06/11/linux-deskto...

Which covers most/all of those things. Reasonably new and innovative hardware (like GPU switching in laptops) just doesn't work, period. There are plenty more examples. The browser makes Linux worse since the only thing you need from your underlying platform is really good driver and power management support.
PowerPC used to be pretty popular. So was SPARC.
> This would have people pricing shares not based on what they think their fundamental value is, but rather on what they think everyone else thinks their value is, or what everybody else would predict the average assessment of value is.

This is true for people who are buying as speculative investors and focused on short term movements in stock price.

However, that's not everyone by a longshot. There are plenty of people who buy for underlying asset value and dividends.

See, for instance -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Investor

Warren Buffet has said that The Intelligent Investor is the best book on investing ever written.

A fundamental tenet of value investing is that you're buying a small part of a business, not something separate from the business. Keynes is talking about buying stocks to speculative on short term price movements, which is risky and probably a bad strategy for the vast majority of people. But buying a share of a business that's fundamentally solid and priced attractively is rational, even if the business isn't currently popular.
Which one of those isn't furthered by the internet? It's not hard to argue the fundamental merit in people working on advancing communication across the globe.
You can also play all 10 notes at once: hold down keys 1-0. You'll notice a nice 'bug' if you hold.

Here's a common progression. Hold down all the notes then move to the next chord in whatever rhythm you like:

qeti ryi tuo qeti

If you start off using your left hand for 'qe' and your right for 'ti' you'll find you can move through the progression easily.

A messy example (I just started playing around):
http://goo.gl/doodle/e4PVd

(Oh, and turn off quickfind in Firefox or use another browser, annoying as hell).
The biggest problems preventing Linux from gaining mainstream market share have nothing do with the actual software.

1. MS and Apple are both fantastic marketers (although Apple has been doing better than MS as of late) and throw massive amounts of cash at promoting their OS's. Nobody is doing this for Linux.

2. The average customer is more inclined to trust something they saw plastic people hawking on TV than something that's free. People generally don't trust free stuff. If you're walking down the street and some random stranger offers you a sandwich, do you eat it? Most people wouldn't.

3. Inertia. Almost all computers come pre-loaded with an OS other than Linux. Most users will never install an OS on their computers themselves.

Most of the stereotypes about Linux are totally false these days. The above problems need solutions that probably aren't coming anytime soon. I find it interesting that a loose amalgamation of volunteer open-source programmers can build such a professional-grade OS and then completely fail to market it. What Linux needs is for open-source marketing to catch up to open-source software.
The site seems down for me, so here's a mirror (courtesy of the Coral Content Distribution Network).

http://hueniverse.com.nyud.net/2010/11/all-these-brilliant-p...
Yep, I saw that when it was posted earlier.

The only issue on the driver list I've ever encountered is wireless failing after suspending. Oddly, that issue only showed up after my latest kernel upgrade (and is a reason that I'm not using my netbook much until I figure out a fix). I suppose that I've just been very lucky with the hardware I've installed Linux on.

(I've also removed the FUD comment from my earlier post).
I'm well aware of latency. I chose the example I did specfically because high bandwidth trumps locality when emailing a picture across the room..
Trade secrets.
Dum Maaro Dum – Review ~ TOP BOLLYWOOD STAR
I think its just your style of writing. Also I think you are writing from a political perspective rather than an entrepreneurial one. Nothing wrong with that. Most people here are neither Indian politicians or entrepreneurs, it's just that this forum is biased to one perspective.
Maker Faire is coming to Phoenix, AZ
Start with the MIT linear algebra course (18.06) by Gilbert Strang and Stanford course on linear dynamical systems (EE263) by Stephen Boyd. Then move on to Boyd's course on convex optimization (EE364). Lectures for all of these are on youtube.

Do not try to read any books on "machine learning" (most of which are a total mess) before you have this background or you will just end up hopelessly confused.
The quants on Wilmott & NuclearPhynance don't seem to think they're the linchpin. Maybe traders taunt them so much they know their place.
Exactly, they are bending they are pushing the rules just enough to get away with it and have something that's not unconstitutional (at least according to them) It's in a way ingenious what they are doing. Law making is a form of hacking in my view.
Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Reviewed In Depth
Guess what, people are wrong all the time. Only in the hindsights, it is easy enough to tell which decisions/risks worked out, and which did not.
My mother, who was disabled by a stroke some years ago, relies on no non-medical technology as much as she relies on Facebook. It is how she keeps up with the family, who are scattered across the country (and, er, world), without which she would never get to talk to aunts/uncles/cousins since they see each other only at events/reunions and she often isn't well enough to travel.

I respect that folks don't find a lot of value in FB. It isn't quite my cup of tea either. But don't make the engineer's mistake of assuming "Since I don't use it, nobody uses it" or "Nobody's use of this is important to them."

Also, one shouldn't let one's position in the tech echo chamber cause one to overestimate how much resources Facebook really gets from society. Their annual operating budget is, what, the size of the school districts in one midsize US city or the IT department of a single large bank? Don't worry, we will still have brains to spare after someone does an A/B test on poking.
Twitter and Facebook Seek Big Ad Dollars Using Opposing Strategies
Oh, very much so.

http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secr...
Works fine for me. Just uploaded the Quantum Entanglement PDF from the front page of HN onto my Google docs. I can see this being big.
Yeah but once the secret is reverse engineered, he has no legal defense. With a public disclosure, someone might be able to say "ah, so if I make this little twiddle here, it jumps up to 14%!" and they both benefit.
I think that there are shorter ways to accomplish it beyond Internet communication.
Fitbot lets you try clothes before you buy
Just shut up. Please. Your elitism is making me ill. You probably didn't even like Transformers 3.
So, when do we all finally agree that tossing in "fuck" or some variant ("fucking", "motherfucking") is no longer witty or cute? I think we can stick a fork in this one now; it's done.
First wood-digesting enzyme found in bacteria could boost biofuel production
Awesome! And hey, the dissertation references John Backus' Turing Award Lecture. :) That's the only reference my 3-week project shares though. (I was trying to build a formal functional programming machine on an FPGA that shared a lot of similarities with Lisp.) Here's a link for Backus: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72....
Oops, I didn't mean it to sound that way. I agree with dctoedt. Only an egotist couldn't see dctoedt's point.
When I read pieces like this I think 'young and inexperienced.' Not in a negative way, just in a haven't learned enough about stuff to put the various pieces in perspective yet.

People always start out at implementors (or at least they should in my opinion) and as they implement they develop a 'style' and an aesthetic for how things should be done. Sometimes that comes from learning the hard way, sometimes it come from re-implementing or re-working the same code for several different uses, sometimes from reading an insightful paper on a similar problem. After a while, they will have more ideas than they can meaningfully implement in a lifetime, but with the help of other implementors they can make wonderful things.

So they begin teaming up with other implementors, some not as experienced as they and perhaps others with different histories. The build bigger things faster, and begin to appreciate that working in parallel is faster but not more efficient if at integration time everyone has to rewrite what they wrote. So they start spending time thinking about how the pieces of this bigger project should fit together, they keep this complex inter-relationship in their head as they work with various team members who are working on other bits. At some point the part of the implementation they own is falling behind because they are constantly on the move, talking, listening, advising, questioning, deciding, on various bits about the project. As they weave and integrate more and more bits they begin to discover the subtleties of a thousand different things about how stuff is put together and recognize the benefit of finding people for whom that particular part of the implementation space has fascinated them for years and they know inside and out.

They will find themselves giving advice on how something should be done to an implementer who is doing the work and wondering why it should be done that way when they could do it more easily some other way. They may find themselves recounting trying it different ways, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and the outside influences that perhaps this particular implementer isn't aware of which have guided the opinion of how it should be done. They may find that the implementer dismisses them as 'out of touch' because they aren't doing the implementation themselves. They might chuckle at that, or if they have had a long day and they aren't looking forward to the unsatisfying 'when you've done this longer you'll understand' conversation they might be a bit short with them.
> I am in no way suggesting that almost 600 million people are wrong. The massive and highly engaged Facebook user base clearly gets value and satisfaction from the product. I am also in no way critical or judgmental about those who find value there. Good for them! But for me, there are so many other unsolved problems in the world, and they have little to do with social.

Hot tip: whenever anybody writes "I am in no way suggesting <X>", the chance that they are suggesting <X> approaches 100%.
Then I guess you know what your next project is going to be.
Why I am an Apple Fanboy
A family friend of mine has been hospital-bound for quite some time. He just got an iPad and the two things he asked to be set up were email and Facebook.

I asked if he wanted any apps or movies. He said those would be nice, but he needed email and Facebook.
The title is not true.

I watched the press conference the police gave and they didn't mention Sony at all until a journalist asked about the Sony hack and the police officer answered the arrested could be related to it, maybe, but that they didn't know if they were, and that they weren't going to charge them with anything related to it unless they found out they were involved. So no, they didn't get "arrested over Sony Hack".

This three guys were arrested because they were the administrators of a chat Anonymous used for their online meetings. They could be related to some DDoS attacks in Spain, though it's not clear how, and that's why they got arrested. They're not being charged with data stealing so far, just regular DDoS attacks against banks, political parties, foreign governments and similar organizations. Not confirmed relation with the Sony hack so far.
Wow, thanks for all the feedback.

I'm happy there are others who have dealt with this before. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but it is really sad that any troll can effectively axe an open-sourced project like this. I really hope that it won't come to litigation.
I live in Redmond, and was comparing prices to Florida, where I used to live, actually.
5. ScreenFlow is awesome

Indeed. I generally avoid using my Mac if I can, but Screenflow is amazingly feature-rich. Lots of options for editing audio & video, mixing, effects.

That it also happens to do a good job capturing your screen almost seems incidental. I've used to re-design and edit video created with other tools.
Ubuntu Editions
Ubuntu is released in several editions, each designed for a distinct group of users or functions. Editions install different collections of software such as the GNOME desktop, the KDE desktop, servers, educational software, and multimedia applications
I agree - it sounds like a performance nightmare across the board, even with those aggressive specs.

Wonder how it handles OpenGL applications and games.
LoseThos is not Linux :-) http://www.losethos.com
yummyfajitas, I think by "more capitalist" jbooth means "more competitive". You are obviously right that forcing companies to use higher-cost inputs is inefficient, but taxes are not an input -- they're a necessary burden meant to be shared.

To take an extreme example, using a tax shelter could lower the cost of a company's services while decreasing the efficiency of the economy.
You ar missing the point. Facts are not objective because interpretations are not. Man hit by train is not the only interpretation of two clusters of atoms hitting each other.

Death is not the only interpretation of the carbon based structure that is now smeared on to the front of the steel construction
Yeah, Screenflow is great. I typically record sound and video, but split them and redo the audio once the video is in shape.
"Never make mistakes" isn't exactly a workable business plan.
Worked fine for me. Tested with that same PDF, and with a random JPG, both with gdocs as the target. This extension will be absolutely awesome on my CR-48.
> Facebook doesn’t provide me with anything useful.

If the site owner is reading this, here's how you can hide the "Share on Facebook" link that appears on the Apture bar at the top. Add this as a custom CSS rule:

.aptureTMMShare a:first-child {
visibility: hidden;
}

You're welcome.
Happy + Whimsical Art {Just in time for summer}
Maybe because it sounded like I was disagreeing with dctoedt, who is obviously right. See Poeisis' comment below.
Yes he used the scientific method, so by definition is a scientist. However, I'm sure the title is using the popular definition of scientist (a professional researcher) in contrast to an amateur hobbyist.
What makes you think that you'd not make it in? I'm a community college dropout. Research the company, check out some of the "easy" puzzles, etc. And send me an email if you are interested.
No, because no reference was ever provided in the original email
Please enlighten me.
I don't think I have the talent from that.

That's why the article is important, a lot of minds are spending time in lower priority items from a humanistic point of view.
Browser Shootout: The Best For HTML5
Computer Forensics: Investigating Data & Image Files
The Computer Forensic Series by EC-Council provides the knowledge and skills to identify, track, and prosecute the cyber-criminal. The series is comprised of five books covering a broad base of topics in Computer Hacking Forensic Investigation, designed
See who came next in the government...
Do I take it that you work for Apple?
Tabs on the same domain can communicate synchronously.
I still don't know how the American Revolution occured without Twitter.
facebook engineer as per his HN profile
There is a lot of assumption going on in this article.

When you're talking about movements in currency crosses, as the article does in focusing on the BTC/USD rate, there are a bunch of different reasons that can move it. At the core though, there are two sides to a large drop in the value of a Bitcoin vs. the USD. You can have a large number of people wanting to dump BTC, OR you can have a large number of people wanting to acquire USD.

Note that the article itself talks about the turmoil in the US equity markets on the same day. This usually creates a demand for USD as people require it to meet margin calls or pay off debt which is denominated in USD. I'd bet on this being the primary cause. In fact, if you look at the USD vs. any other currency (EUR, JPY, etc) it rose in value against just about everything today.

The other reason, which I consider less likely, is that people decided to drop BTC en masse for some other reason which is as yet unknown. This appears to be much less likely, although it can't be completely counted out.

In short, the USD rose against just about everything today, and the BTC market seems to have been affected more than most--primarily, I'm assuming, due to the relative illiquidity of that specific market in general.
A key result of this analysis is that there's an element of feedback. If you're the only investor in the world who's using this strategy, it may work. But the larger the proportion of investors who do this, the more locally unstable the market will become. It's a far cry from the "perfect, self-correcting market", which we can think of as the zeroth order long-term behaviour. But feedback effects are not sufficiently local that they cannot have destructive effects over a multi-year timescale.
no, mostly government sites that no one has bothered making cross-platform
To answer your question; because any federal law passed by congress in an effort to improve consumer choice in the ISP market would require the signature of the president without a supermajority. However, my call for answers to these questions applies equally to candidates for congressional, state and local offices too.

Unless you feel the current regulatory structure has no responsibility for getting us in this situation, how are they not pertinent?
The pleasure was mine :).
I always heard how hard the interviews were tough at Google, Facebook, et al. So never seriously considered applying.

Last year I was invited to interview at Facebook based on some work I'd posted online. I was quite flattered but never expected to get through more than a one or two rounds. Long story short, I've now moved to the US and am in my third week at Facebook.
Great to see that the Chrome Web Store's URLs aren't any more usable than when it launched.

"Oh, my app? It's at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/omiekjeapoonbhieme...
how about a mirror of the mirror?
Yeah, he might as well put "Google.com" as the source link for the article if he's gonna cite his images like that.
The poor guy's name couldn't really be Hide Kamoto?
I am inclined to think that the fundamentals of bitcoin are very good, it'll be interesting to see how the price rebounds after this correction, I tend to think with all the trolls happening in the forum that some big players want in big time.