skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you need a little more instruction. What does this do?

My first thought was that it would generate a QR code for any string you provide, through url hacking. (i.e anything after the domain name is used as the string to encode) - This doesn't seem to be the case.

Very little instruction on the website, nothing on twitter, and no info here… Could you shed a little light please?

EDIT: As tiwilliam informed me, it uses the HTTP referer to create a QR code that contains a link back to that same HTTP referer. If it is not present, the default is lilqr.com.

It's a nice idea, but I don't see the value in having a QR code that links to the page you are already on? A bit more explanation is still necessary :)
Great way to jump on QR trend. Amazingly simple implementation.

Would be nice to have some way to put in the URL on a page and have it generate PNGs of different sized codes, like for printing on a brochure or poster.
All really really good points. Thanks for the reality check.

I know I've been identified as a key senior person in the organization from seeing some documentation that is being used in the negotiation. I was also handed a second round of preferred stock right before the talks started. There was no explanation given, but I'm guessing it was meant to temporarily keep me happy.

I realize being the only software engineer isn't enough. It our company was a web-based concern, especially so. (We're in manufacturing). Like I said earlier, I know they can find a replacement but it would steal momentum which is something the acquirer wants.

What I'm most uncertain about is how the transition will take place. I know one day we'll just be told to show up at a new office and ohOneMoreThing here's your new comp package which has been decided for you kthxbye.

I'm pretty certain the acquirer won't be approaching me. To them we look like a turnkey operation. My current company knows what it will take to keep me around because I told them so. Whether or not it's communicated upward is my concern.
If you are an American citizen, you always have to file taxes on wages, no matter where you earn them or who you work for (even if you steal things, you pay taxes on them).
I don't think traveling workers do anything special with visas - if any visa is needed, they just use a tourist visa. For all business purposes, it looks like they never left their home country; billing is done as if it came from their home business address.

I once spent a few months in Spain, where I devoted 30% of my time to developing a C++ application, 30% of my time to learning Spanish, and 30% on touristy things. This was before the Internet era, and I sent in my work each month on a floppy disk, along with an invoice (just as I did from home). I think they never noticed the Spanish post stamps ;-)
Arrington is a lawyer.
---China:

Last Train Home http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/

Up The Yangtze http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1114277/

Discovery Channel - The People's Republic of Capitalism - 4 parts series

China Rises, 4 parts CBC series

---Megacities:

Megacities http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169024/

BBC Megacities, BBC 3 parts series

---War:

Fog of War: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/

Restrepo: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1559549/
The chances of such a file coming into existence accidentally

When sharing servers with less UNIX savvy developers you will observe A) a notoriously polluted home-directory and B) plenty of files with funny names such as -, * , user@server.com (from failed scp attempts) all over the place.

It's indeed relatively hard to create a file called '/' by accident. But I've seen files containing the '/' along with spaces, which can be just as deadly. Oh and the popular * -file is not to be taken lightly either.

As a rule of thumb: Learn the safe way to chain these commands (find/xargs in particular) once and stick to it. And always perform a dry-run before launching the real deal.
It looks windows-only. Not going to work for me.
I've noticed that the Roku box just doesn't have a power button (and doesn't deal all that transparently with being shut off; there's usually a few WiFi configuration screens where you have to hit "OK"). It doesn't draw very much power, thankfully, having no DVR functions.
> a location that’s far less expensive, and easier to immigrate to, than Silicon Valley.

4 years ago I travelled (mostly-) western Europe by train, staying in some of the big cities. Compared to the likes of Paris, Barcelona, Rome and Munich, I felt Amsterdam was a lot more expensive.

Of course times may have changed, and the comparison was to Silicon Valley, which I have no experience of, but it struck me as a strange point to pick out when I would have considered there to be more compelling arguments specifically about Amsterdam.
From Charles Karelis. This objection is treated in my book. I show that it would take only a small transfer from the richest people in the U.S. to the poorest to relieve their poverty entirely, which would have the greatest positive impact on aggregate well-being of all the options. The conventional wisdom, that the poorest people have the greatest marginal utility for a dollar, salves the conscience of the middle class by implying that small transfers can make a big positive impact on the well-being of the poorest people. The inconvenient truth is that only sizable transfers can make a significant difference to the well-being of the poorest people.
Yep. Currently in Montreal on an east-to-west tour across Canada. :)
see also: rainbow table
Thirded – remarkable, loving, yet fierce documentary. A real favorite.
I've been wishing for this for a long time. Actually, it was Google Reader's behavior that made me think of it- when you subscribe to a blog via RSS, Reader will show you all of the archived entries back as far as anyone else on Google has subscribed to it. Very nice.

I can only imagine that it's a content usage restriction, but you'd think they'd be able to lawyer their way out of it. The cable companies wouldn't even have to mimic Google's behavior- start by just allowing access to things you've personally recorded.

The future, of course, is to skip all of this nonsense and just let you stream what you want, whenever you want, and pay exactly for that. Ah, well.
Clever implementation! For anyone looking to do larger/smaller/different data, the Google Charts interface works well: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image/docs/gallery/qr_code...
Apple iOS 5 Features
After the super success of previous version of iOS,Apple is gearing up tp launch the newer version named iOS 5 in the third quarter of this year.
Few people translate to action anyway.
I dunno, they managed to crack "G7io5639*%V64ioT5h9" -- 19 characters including lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols. It doesn't seem to follow any pattern on a QWERTY layout -- maybe another layout?

I wasn't aware they could crack passwords that long though -- wasn't that supposed to take years, even with a GPU?
The kinds of things you need C++ for - high-performance webservers, database engines, 3D renderers, etc. - often require very close communication between team members to get right. They're deep, not broad - the software is structured as a series of layers, and if you don't get the interfaces between the layers just right, the software won't even compile. Typical webapps are much more horizontal - they consist of a series of screens, and once the basic webserver framework is in place, developers can pretty much parcel out portions of the UI and work on them independently.
IE has been doing the same thing for years.
It depends on what you call 'mass'. I think most people would agree Liberty ships were mass-produced (fairly large production run, assembly line, interchangeable 'parts' welded together)

Even today, you still get production runs of fairly large ships, such as http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/2011/01.... It has two companies each build a series of 10 ships.
Is this any different from xmonad? That's what I'm currently using with Gnome. Way better than this Gnome 3 rubbish.
> Just as you don't really understand how a CPU works until you've programmed in assembly, you don't really understand math if you haven't done hand-computation, at least up to a point.

Conrad Wolfram addresses this very point in the video (11:30). He says that the most valid point that hand-calculating helps understanding is that teaching processes themselves helps understanding, but that there's a better way to do that: programming. In other words, programming a math solution is better for teaching math understanding that hand solving it.

In the end, I think the idea he's trying to impart is that the core of math is not calculation at all, it just seems that way because they've been intertwined for so long. But now that we have computers to do the tedious calculations, we can work on defining and exploring what math really is: how different conceptual intuitions are related
Lol!

AIUI, Geohot is basically forbidden from working with anything Sony.

So to the extent he becomes an essential part of the security team at Facebook, I guess Sony just lawsuited their way out of deep partnership opportunities with the biggest social media platform to date.
Sorry, I just wanted to launch it as early as possible. Just put the img-tag on whatever page you would like to have a QR code for and it will create one to the URL of that page.
B.C To Use Driver's Licences Photos To Catch Rioters
Fun zone: Lenovo’s best ever ad.
Cool. You don't have an email address in your profile, but I do in mine - please drop me a line when you have any news, I'm curious about the idea. :)
* Generation Rx - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xehHwkPpevk

* Bigger Stronger Faster - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkL1T-CZPfs
+1 Herzog. His latest 'documentary', Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is wonderful.
Not sure if this is a zsh thing only, but I do this:

grep import **/*.py
Another vote for War Photographer.
Sure. The bottom line is that nobody is interested in any serious stuff being done remotely. So those type of stories you usually hear from someone like these folks who did "online communications" and "freelance web design/programming", which is not serious by definition. Projects involving something like C++ have significantly higher chances of having a bigger scope, impact and different set of responsibilities from all participants.

This lifestyle might be appealing for some very short period of life, under very specific circumstances. You have to be young to not worry about health insurance. You have to have the job that is simple enough to be outsourced and complicated enough to be at least reasonably paid. You have to not worry about "career" or "experience" (which are just different words for "future"). You have to be from the first-class country to take advantage of the visa requirements with your passport. It is also interesting to note that things they can afford in certain countries, like going to the beach every day, would definitely be prohibited for them in their home country given their occupation (note their remark on costs in Argentina, which, I assume, are lower than in Belgium).

I can elaborate much further as few of my friends live this sort of lifestyle in South-East Asia. From what I know about it, it's definitely (a) not for me, (b) doesn't make me think that the future knowledge workers will work that way. I work on my own projects in one of the most expensive cities on the planet and it's hard for me to see how can I relocate anywhere without losing the advantages I'm getting from the infrastructure and population here.

UPDATE: Though seeing the world is awesome, I'd personally prefer saving 10-20K and taking a year off work for that.
It has, but I bet this has trained a lot of Windows users to just click OK because it's another thing that gets in the way of loading a page…

At least Chrome's interface for this makes it less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog.
It's more efficient to use the pipe with xargs. If you're removing 10,000 files, the difference in time between -exec (and fork/exec of rm 10,000 times) and xargs rm is quite significant. (On my system getconf MAX_ARGS is 2180000.)
From Charles Karelis. Of possible interest, the "lumpy good" rebuttal of my hypothesis is treated in detail in my book. In essence, while there are obviously goods such that sub-threshold quantities have no utility whatever (fewer than four tires or two shoes, perhaps), most "reliever goods" are not examples of that. For instance, if I have six dents in my car, I prefer the hammering out of the last unfixed dent to the hammering out of the first unfixed dent, the one that leaves five more to go, BUT I prefer the hammering out of that first dent to the hammering out of none.There is more to it, and lots of examples in the book, but that's the heart of the matter, in my view.
This has been annoying to me, since Google Reader doesn't have a valid cert (sometimes) so I always get that message.
Ask HN: File operations on thousands of files on Win vs Mac/Linux file systems
This is something I've been curious about for years, but I've never found any good discussions on the topic. Of course, my Google-fu might just be failing me...

I often deal with projects involving thousands of relatively small files. This means that I'm frequently performing operations on all of those files or a large subset of them—copying the project folder elsewhere, deleting a bunch of temporary files, etc. Of all the machines I've worked on over the years, I've noticed that NTFS handles these tasks consistently slower than HFS on a Mac or ext3/ext4 on a Linux box. However, as far as I can tell, the raw throughput isn't actually slower on Windows (at least not significantly), but the delay between each individual file is just a tiny bit longer. That little delay really adds up for thousands of files.

(Side note: From what I've read, this is one of the reasons git is such a pain on Windows, since it relies so heavily on the file system for its object database.)

Granted, my evidence is merely anecdotal—I don't currently have any real performance numbers, but it's something that I'd love to test further (perhaps with a Mac dual-booting into Windows). Still, my geekiness insists that someone out there already has.

Can anyone explain this to me, or perhaps point me in the right direction to research it further myself?
Hello World execution time
Sometimes i wish xmonad had 3d transitions between layouts. That's probably the only appeal of a gnome shell extension
Having spent my share of time in the punk community. I have noticed a very interesting overlap of hacker and punk ethos.

Here is similar piece on punks with PHDS:

http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/punks-with-ph-ds/
Hmm this is quite weird. Maybe the new name made it feel more like a 'cool web app' which made more people sign up.
Can't make much of this without the actual name etc though.
three words: very very awesome

i wonder which other tools could be implemented that simple...
I'm working on some basic customization but first up is stats for number of scans, though that would require a redirect through the service (with URL shortening ofcourse). What do you think of that?
True. So the employee has to believe that those options will be worth more in the future if they stay. That seems like an entirely appropriate challenge for the company.
Speaking as someone who's primary problem with math in school was poor handwriting, I would have much preferred to learn via programming.
PrivateSky: Cloud Encryption for Cloud Sites
try http://miniqr.com/ (with API) qr codes with png, doc, pdf support
Couldnt find mine.. thats a comfort. =) Unfortunately most web based system ive encountered has 20char as most for key. My new passphrase model is based on 128 char key using two values piped through sha512. It works... but friendface probably wont accept it :)
Nobody remembers the various command line switches of find or grep. I use xargs quite often because it's a very simple concept and I know how to mix and merge any commands together with it and that's something I've only had to to go ahead and learn once.
Watch X-Men First Class Online Free
Watch X-Men First Class Online Free
MacTaggert looking for advice on Xavier's mutants and Raven convinces her to join him at the CIA which certifies that there are mutants Director McCone and Shaw is a threat Although he refuses to take McCone mutants argued the nameless Man in Black Suit
Harlan County, USA - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074605/
A Critique of Ayn Rand's Theory of Intellectual Property Rights
This is not true. You can just parcel out those kinds of projects as well (my personal experience) if you are a competent manager.

What you are comparing is complexity. Yes, it is easier to parcel out the typical web app than a database engine.
check out http://qr.linkstore.ru
Just copy/paste any text and get mobile landing page as well QR-code for it
I think people resent how Facebook is trying to become the web, in similar way to how AOL did (remember when some companies advertised AOL keywords). They are doing this on top of a platform that is closed, and is mostly a black box for your data. That doesn't mean they don't produce some cool open source technologies, it just means they use them on massive closed source platform.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662694
I failed to find it except as a VHS in a few university libraries, none of which are in my country. Where did you purchase your copy?
A great idea. Will you be making your own lectures or linking to the lectures from MIT OCW, Stanford etc.
Brilliant stuff there sisvash! Grab a proper short url and you're golden.

I see QR codes really taking off this year and next.
I was able to do freelance iPhone development. If you're already good in C++, it will give you a leg up in learning objective-c.

Also, I could not agree more with the points about "working needs discipline." If you're staying in hostels, I would basically say forget it. I found it INCREDIBLY difficult to sit down and code when I was traveling around in hostels (like a tourist) and surrounded by fun people and things to do. In BA, I an apartment like the OP, which made getting work done a bit more tolerable (but still very challenging given the surroundings...)
Bus 174: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=640542737328166572

imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340468/

Murder on a Sunday Morning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z2jtha8Oqg

imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307197/

both awe-inspiring
very nice point about exponential growth and diminishing returns. also, i didn't realise that 9 characters was the inflection point (are they overestimating slightly the rate?)
Any competent analysis which relies on the US system as the model for healthcare has to address the non-compliance of Google Health with HIPAA and the inability of healthcare providers to enter data into an insecure system.

That's not to say that reimbursement is not at the root of many of the unique problems of US healthcare. But nevertheless, Google Health was fatally flawed from inception.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipaa]
Yes I was thinking of the Apple study, but didn't recall it that clearly.
I've been doing the same for 9 months now. I've travelled round the whole world, had a fantastic time, and wrote a book for O'Reilly as I went. It's been the best year of my life. In fact, it turns out that writing books is one of the best ways to do this - as it's very flexible and a successful book will just about cover traveling costs. What most people don't realize, is how cheap it is to do this.

As always though, everything is best in moderation. I'm yearning to be back in the startup/technology scene - and I will be come September. I'm sure that'll I'll do another trip like this in my twenties though (I'm 21 now).
In domains with real time performance constraints it's difficult to use anything but C or C++. Many of those domains are at the forefront of current technological development, so I wouldn't lump C++ in with COBOL just yet.
I think a headend PVR ends up being more expensive because everything at the headend is built to server/telco standards, not consumer standards.
Everybody hates Ticketmaster's fees, but they are simply capitalism at work. The successful capitalist prices his goods and services not by his costs, but by what customers are willing to pay based on perceived value. (As any seller of software around here should inherently understand.)

Remember that you can, for the majority of venues, bypass Ticketmaster completely by simply going to the box office and buying the tickets in person. Don't want to? Then you're getting what you pay for in the convenience fee. $8 to not travel across the town or state, but instead do your ticket buying while sitting comfy at home, starts to look like a decently reasonable deal.

And that print-at-home fee? Market segmentation writ small. Obviously, print-at-home is more convenient for most customers than waiting for mail delivery. So the successful capitalist can charge more for print-at-home, capturing the revenue from whichever customers are willing to pay it. What costs the industry might incur or save simply don't enter into that question. It's revenue maximizing as all capitalists should strive to do.

Yes, Ticketmaster can do these things because it's a monopoly for any particular event. There is no alternative able to drive down those fees by competing. But this status does not originate with Ticketmaster. Whatever artist you want to see already inherently has a monopoly. Bruce Springsteen already has a monopoly on Bruce Springsteen concerts, because he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. Springsteen and his managers just choose to delegate some of that monopoly power to Ticketmaster.

So yes, everybody hates Ticketmaster, but its practices are really just capitalism and not so different than what companies and startups around here do or would like to.
Floored -- A documentary of the floor traders working on Chicago's floors and how the electronic business is changing their lives.
http://flooredthemovie.com/community/
In my experience it's the opposite. The C++ savant can write the high performance webserver from his basement in Estonia, but you need the webdevs around so they can collaborate with the design team, ops, and product management. When it's deep, work units can be split into days or weeks, which lends itself pretty well to disconnected, remote work. When it's broad, you need to constantly keep everyone on the same page, which equals daily stand-ups, 24x7 chatrooms and other agile forms of humiliation.
I think the hashes instead of objects paradigm contributed to my frustration.

I ended up turning parts of the hashes into objects and parts into parameters.

You and your sibling post provide some decent guidelines and approaches to default arguments. My experience with Ruby has lead me to believe that it's an awesome language, but a language which I'd be very careful about with whom I collaborated.
Garden designing : An unexplored orbit
Don't get me wrong; it's a perfectly good and useful tutorial. The meat comes at the end when you talk about parallelism and argument batching. That can make a world of difference when you're working on real-world problems, like moving millions of files (mv * won't work unless you're on a system without ARG_MAX, and even then there are performance implications).

I think a good intro to xargs starts with a list of things that you can't do without it. (Easy for me to say that, but of course I haven't written that piece...) It'd be great to know why to use it, not just how, you know what I mean?

Anyway, this is just off-the-cuff commentary, not criticism. Thanks for writing it up.
All well and good, if they made this clear to the employees who were fired when they were hired. "Oh, and I'd like to point out that if you're terminated before a liquidity event, we can purchase all your stock back, even the shares you purchased. You know, this isn't a startup. We're in this to flip this sucker over and make a ton. If you're with us at the end, then you'll benefit, otherwise you won't."