skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other things you never know about paper until you work at an office supply store:

1) There are over a dozen perceptually different shades of white, grouped mostly into blue whites and yellow whites. There is a difference in use cases but I can't remember it and don't want to just make up one.

2) There are over a dozen common weights for papers. This chiefly becomes an issue for "resume" paper, which is the king of papers. It's the stuff you reserve for wedding invitations and, well, resumes. It's for when writing the document on actual money would still be a totally valid use of funds if the document got a positive response as a result.

3) Some types of papers have a front and a back.

4) The microstructure of paper determines how it interacts with ink and office equipment. Don't put inkjet paper in a laser printer or vice versa: you're asking for jams, and the color won't stick the right way. (Inkjet paper is designed to have lots of surface area at the microstructure level, the better to trap ink. Laser paper is designed to be as flat as possible, the better to burn quickly and efficiently in a localized manner when struck with a laser.)

5) How much money paper costs is exquisitely sensitive to how much of it you buy at a time. Major American school districts, who quite literally buy it by the truckload (one truck carries approximately 8 pallets, 50 cartons to a pallot, 5 reams to a carton, 500 sheets to a ream), pay about a fifth what you would if you went over to Staples and picked up a ream.
If you skip the dialog for signed programs you may as well skip it for unsigned programs as well. Anyone can sign a program, it's only relevant for security if the user reads the signature and makes a decision based on what it says.

From that perspective, maybe the dialogs for signed and unsigned programs don't _need_ to be very different; most users don't care. The interesting distinction is between "this a program, which may take over your computer" and "this is a music file, which can do no harm".
We need an internet without ISPs. These attacks on our privacy are getting ridiculous.
Yea I figured, I just wanted to let you know for the future what the phrase actually means. Idioms can be tough.
Why are we ok with UX status quo?
that's actually a great question! we keep replicas in hot standby in case a node fails in the cluster. And to survive a datacenter/cluster failure, we employ continuous snapshotting.
There's actually a reason for this:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/08/technology/netflix_starz_con...

People can complain all they want, but the price increases are necessary.
At my old job every in the office had a TON of meetings, except me. That place got boring really fast.
My Aeron is the best investment I've ever made, bar none.
This sure sets the table for spinning off the DVD rental product. Prior to this arrangement the two were practically inseparable.
Unfortunately their streaming catalog has just decreased recently as a result of ongoing negotiations with sony. All of this is probably in preparation for the fact that streaming rights are set to increase dramatically over the next 2-3 years
It doesn't matter that they cut costs compared to "what was traditionally available". What matters is they RAISED costs compared to what they had before. For a long time now, I shared a plan with my parents - they used the DVD's, I used unlimited streaming, and we were happy. Now we have to get two separate plans, and pay more. Since there's no better option, we'll do this, but I think we're fully within our rights to complain.
I used to respond to book requests so much on hn that I created a website where you can review hacker books and share your list with other folks over here. hn-books.com

For web design, here's my list: http://hn-books.com/#BC=0&E0=2&EC=1&FC=0&Q0=...

Note that if you like, you can sort by knowledge level and book format.
Replicas are master-slave or something Paxos-esque?

So, continuous snapshotting means writing to disk asynchronously?
I never heard of a database that doesn't reside in memory if you have enough ram. Most of the time, it's the OS making this happen by maintaining a cache for disk reads, and flushing writes to disk asynchronously.

Does MemSQL just have more compact data structures that let more stuff fit in memory?
This sucks. The streaming collection sucks even more. Every time I login the only titles being added are bottom rated movies and "Mock busters". Complete crap honestly.

It also looks like the meat of the customers are in these lower end plans.

I have no intention of passing Netflix on as just another cable bill.

We need more innovation in this space.
The trick to being helpful and not getting torn apart is being an 'opportunistic' or 'predatory' helper. That is to say, don't broadcast an offer help- selectively give it when you see it's needed.

The second trick is to help people who are vulnerable. People know when they are vulnerable, and when you help them they are usually very grateful.

The best one I've found: helping people on the side of the road with flat tires. If they don't know what to do, guide them or even do it yourself.
Me too. Hats off guys, this is a great sales pitch.
Short answer: no

Long answer: They will keep the UI convergence moving in the same direction, but the underlying kernel will most definitely be Xbox specific.
I'm 20, and one thing I'd like to do at some point is to get a job as a management consultant so I can get a cross-section view of the economy and see what lots of industries look like from the inside. I'm hoping that this will give me enough domain knowledge in enough different industries to identify a boring but profitable business idea and then chase it.

Can anyone older and wiser give me feedback on my plan? Is there an easier way to gain a lot of domain knowledge about how different industries work? I like the idea of working as a management consultant because

(1) it pays well

(2) my vague impression is that the job consists of having people give you the lowdown on the problems their business is encountering

but I'm certainly open to trying something else if it seems like a better idea.

Maybe instead of being a consultant, I should identify a single industry that seems both corrupt and profitable and take aim at it more directly? Any tips on finding such an industry?
Users have valid criticisms here. Nothing in their post indicates that Netflix's costs have increased, so why would they hike prices by 60%? Why would you expect a positive response to such a move?
Microsoft warns of critical security hole in Bluetooth stack
For everyone complaining in this thread, I will remind them of the article from several days ago indicating studios have increased their streaming licensing costs from ~180 million to ~1.98 Billion.

If they think this price increase is enough to stay afloat, honestly, I'm impressed

http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/08/technology/netflix_starz_con...
I do this too, although I've never reached out to the developer to help because it usually is already a company. But it's a good idea, I will reach out in the future. Thanks!
I clicked Comments to say the exact same thing. They have access to thousands of films and whole seasons of TV shows and people are complaining because it's going to cost a little more. Unbelievable.

http://youtu.be/8r1CZTLk-Gk
My guess is if you design your database to reside in RAM, you can use pointers in the data structures. You also can drop all layout optimizations that are meant for linear access (optimize for random access instead).
"I’m going to keep digging until you look me in the eye"

Are you sure you want to do that to engineers? There's a joke that goes something like:

How do you tell an introverted engineer from an extroverted one?
The introverted engineer stares at his/her shoes when talking to you. The extroverted one stares at your shoes.

I don't think it's a good idea to "keep digging until you look me in the eye".
Disclaimer: The following is not related to the topic but is instead a rant inspired by reading the article.

A good article, but it is unfortunate that it starts by categorically slamming all authors who write about employee motivation and retention:

It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done.

Why is this necessary? I find it nauseating. In fact, when I read or hear someone who basically states “everyone is stupid but me, and all who have come before me have been doing it wrong” in their opening spiel, it’s a good sign to me that the speaker/author has some blind spots and may not be considering all perspectives.

Maybe one reason I find it so nauseating is because I have suffered from this myself, and I’m still tempted at times to point out where others have failed and where I’m so much smarter. (After all, “we judge most harshly in others that which we are most guilty of ourselves” – can’t remember who said that.) It wasn’t until a close mentor confronted me on it, and basically taught me that life goes a lot better when you don’t walk around thinking you are smarter than everyone else. Biggest reason? It shows. You may think you are hiding it, but your face may be wearing a subtle smirk while others are talking, and they can see in your eyes that you aren’t listening but instead are formulating a rebuttal.

Steve Blank teaches this same concept (i.e. don’t think you are smarter than everyone else) in some of his blogs, although more related to sales. And good articles like this on the importance of humility reinforce this for me:

http://blogs.hbr.org/tjan/2011/07/why-some-people-have-all-t...

In a Fortune article on “the best advice I ever got”, the CEO of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi said the best advice she ever received was from her father, who taught her to “always assume positive intent” which I have found gets you a lot further than “assume everyone is an idiot”, which has been the stance of many programmers I have met. (Fortune article link: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bes...),

I’ve heard it said that “people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their manager”. Maybe in IT we are boring people by ceasing every opportunity to show our underlings how smart we are…

*Edit: Typos
Some really beautiful, pixel-perfect design across the site and the app. Did they do it in-house or hire an outside contractor/agency?
As I get older, I've realized that my time is much more valuable than money to me. I've had a few jobs where I needed to work 12 or 14 hour days..but I won't do that anymore...unless it's for my own company.
Hacker sociopaths are one of the most disturbing varieties.
> Time delays are not a suitable solution to bugs.

"People trying to be evil" isn't really a bug. Is a safe with a timer not a suitable solution for a McDonald's or a bank?
Their costs have reportedly increased by ~11x

http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/08/technology/netflix_starz_con...
Kingfisher airline flight tickets
kingfisher airline flight tickets provides cheap airfares to people for almost all major locations of India such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Trivandrum.
Microsoft Redesigns Bing Maps Interface
In-house! My co-founder (Greg) is a UI designer and so his main task is making the site look beautiful :)
I suspect it isn't just Big Content. I suspect they are sending more DVDs than they expected, and they have to keep up with costs.

This ends up not affecting me at all, though. The hassle of waiting for the DVD, and then shipping it back, meant that I only ever watch the streaming stuff. (I obviously wasn't a fan of movie rental stores.) And I'm already paying $7.99.
Could I have a link to the M/P thing? I googled it but all I could find was stuff about M[agnocellular] and P[arvocellular] processing in dyslexics.
Great analysis. A couple of questions through.

So lets say their device can handle 60W when it is 38.7cm^2 (or a bit more than 1.5W per square cm. Now you want to cool a 150W processor. That means 100cm^2 of cooling surface. If I did the math right 100cm^2 is sqrt(100/pi) * 2 diameter circle. Or 12cm diameter circle. So lets call it a 4 3/4" diameter circle with one of these gizmos on it.

That isn't a huge stretch to imagine. I'm thinking a copper slug which sits on the processor and makes this 4.75" diameter 'landing pad' for their cooler. Doesn't work well if the processor isn't oriented horizontally though.

In data centers this might up reliability and density if the net solution was 'shorter' than the current passive sinks.
"probably 10-20 years old and they don't have enough disposable income"

Bullshit. Most 'casual' pirates (i.e jailbreak+installous, audio/video/books via P2P) I know are in the 30-50 range, with plenty of resources.
Sony... some part of me had really hoped that they would overreact to the hacking movement against them, and lock themselves down like Ft. Knox.

Instead, it would seem they're taking the "we'll get hacked anyway, so let's not waste our time" approach.
I'm pretty sure they're just passing along the licensing costs, but as little content as I consume, this is just pushing me towards iTunes where I can outright purchase what I want, with a little more 'ownership' rights and still spend roughly the same amount per month.

For heavier consumers though, $16 + a cheap Netflix streaming device is still a steal compared to satellite/cable and movie channels.
best of luck on your crusade.
If your DHCP server is handing out leased addresses to other clients you might have bigger problems to worry about. For example if you expect a lot of churn on the network you should be using much shorter leases times.
Pay $7.99 and have both by switching your plan during the month when you want streaming and when you want DVDs.
Round-Up: Autism and Agile Software Development
They don’t though. You currently explicitly have to sign up for it.

I’m not even sure whether you can currently just sign up, I think you still have to invited (and it’s not enough to just be invited to count as a user, the invited person needs to explicitly sign up).
I feel like this is a chicken and egg scenario between big media wanting more for their content and consumers wanting a better selection of first run movies via streaming. Netflix (at its current pricing structure I assume from the comments here) can't afford newer titles however people want a better selection in the streaming section. One's gotta give and I feel like they chose to go with letting the customer pay more in an attempt to secure better streaming titles. Unfortunately in the climate of hearing about monthly caps from ISPs I don't feel like it was the best choice. I am going to go back to physical medium, and somewhat debating if I even want to continue that. $12 is 3 decent titles from a console service or Amazon a month. A la carte will win the day.

edit: clarity of second sentence.
Ask HN: Please display subdomains of all submitted URLs on HN home page
I think it would be a big improvement if the subdomain of posts were included on the HN home/new pages instead of just the domain name. For example, Google+ posts would have "plus.google.com" instead of just "google.com" to the right of their titles.

HN already does this for some blog domains (e.g. wordpress.com).

Not having subdomains for some websites has bothered me for some time, but it's much worse now that there are lots of Google+ posts being submitted.
I really think they could have done a much better job of framing the discussion around this increase. Talking about why they're doing it (not some B.S. about how "they really want to show people that they are committed to DVDs by mail") would have been appreciated.

Customers are not stupid. They see right through PR speak, and you can clearly see that in the comments.
This may be one of the exact scenarios they are after. I share a Netflix plan with my parents as well - I stream, they get DVDs. By separating the plans, Netflix has the opportunity to cut away at the plan sharing and cater separately to me and my parents.
I wonder if this set off the voting-ring detector somehow. It seems weird that it's already near the bottom of page 2 when there are multiple submissions with similar point / age characteristics that are in the top 20.

I don't usually complain about the way weighting works here (I think this is the first time), but this is somewhat confusing since the submission is squarely in the scope of HN.

PG: If you happen to read this, could you please clarify what things we ought to avoid when submitting articles & essays so that they're not unfairly penalized?
"As soon as you let a general purpose OS run behind the scenes, you give up that control"

That's less true than it used to be. The PS3 certainly reserves resources for the top-level OS, I assume the XBox360 does too. The next generation could easily carve out resources dedicated at the hardware level for the top-level OS while exposing constant hardware resources for the games, and with the further progression of Moore's Law they could definitely have a usable top-level OS without starving the game level.

(Theoretically this reservation could be done by a software hypervisor, but I suspect that if you're actually designing this in from scratch, it's easier to "secure" the system with actual dedicated hardware.)
A slightly less clueless (but still clueless) approach to CAPTCHA design is to 1) make the CAPTCHA case-sensitive, 2) use letters for which the lower-case representation is very similar to upper-case, and/or use both zero and the letter O, 1 and the letter l, and so on, 3) use an image munging algorithm that makes it next to impossible to disambiguate the cases in 2).
Why not stick with the streaming service and get your DVDs locally? Perhaps, even from a local company?
Mozilla Firefox 6.0 Beta 1
Mozilla Firefox 6.0 Beta 1 faster, more secure, easier to use and sporting a new look, this latest Firefox release sets a new standard for web browser innovation. Firefox is small, fast and easy to use, and offers many advantages over other web browsers, such as the tabbed browsing and the ability to block pop-up windows.
> as Google was beat by a shadowy bidder
> calling itself "Rockstar Bidco".

Rockstar Bidco was competing against "Ranger". Can I now call "Ranger" (Google + Intel) shadowy too?
If it's a price increase because costs went up, then say so. We might not like it, but we'll understand. Don't spin it to pretend that they're doing something for our benefit.
Ask HN: What happened to videowatchr.com?
On previous weeks, got 5k-6k daily visits.. the last weekend, visitors dropped drastically.. The site no longer on top of search results (search: videowatchr) on Google..still on top on Bing and Yahoo. What happened?
No shit. I would much rather spend $10k in hardware than have a developer bored while waiting for something to finish.

Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.
Lex() returns a token. Examples of tokens might be identifiers, string constants, integers, floats or operators. In my compiler class we learned just returning the char value of operators from lex(). It saves you the trouble of defining a enum for all those values.
The individual in question may not have actually been under the sole control of the poster, for whatever reason. It doesn't necessarily mean that he needs to jump ship because he's being used as a pawn.
This just validates your idea. There are always better ways to market a product and make it unique enough to win over your competition. It sounds like they still have a small team, so if you want your own company, just keep working on your own project.

It just means there is more work ahead of you.

What do you expect to get if you join their team? They already have a product in place with a pretty big community, the only thing you can really expect at this point is to be an employee. Your "piece of the pie" will be your monthly salary. This will also destroy your chances of starting your own company (mostly because they will have an NDA/Non-compete)
It depends on what you mean by "better." I have never once watched a Netflix stream without the movie's video freezing while the audio continues on. Usually happens at least twice, and "threatens" multiple times during a movie by the video jagging for a bit.

Amazon's pay per view streaming rental has consistently been all but perfect play.

So Netflix is better on price. Amazon is better on getting absorbed in the movie and not being thrown back into your living room because the movie stopped.

Youtube/Google's streaming rental quality is good, even great, except three out of the four movies I tried suddenly stopped and reported elapsed time as that the entire movie had suddenly been watched. Movie had to be started over, virtually ruining the experience. They did refund the rental fee without question.
Awesome post, thanks for the info.
I am pretty sure you can. If you want to try making one, I'd be glad to assist with tips and advice.
as a result of my departure,
they would no longer hire graduates with A grades.
They would look for B or C grades from now on.

Wow! What an amazing... company. I am at a loss for words, really. They must be very -- what's the opposite of proud? -- of themselves.
Comments are coming; answers can already be edited
Correct, but Coffee House X, Y, and Z don't realize this. Which makes it the computer-owner's problem too.
If you had a patent that you felt others were infringing, would you just sit back and do nothing?

In addition, those handset makers (as well as the countless patent trolls) are busy filing their own infringement suits against Apple (and others...) As much as it sucks for innovation, this seems to be the norm rather than the exception these days...
Interesting. I have Arch Linux running on a Asus Eee pc and I was always happy that it was connected and ready to go as soon as I woke it up from sleep (including WiFi). I can access the internet within a second of waking it up. I'm using NetworkManager and I wonder if it isn't doing something similar? But then everyone else on Linux is claiming it takes much longer.
The problem with captchas is they have to be readable to humans.

Sure, a captcha of "lI0Ol1o" would would probably be unreadable to a computer ... but it would be to a human too.

We're quickly approaching the point that image recognition is getting as good at solving image captchas as humans are, and when we do, we'll need to find some other way to do it.
I think one of the problems is bad hiring. If you hire someone who wants to be a Ruby developer writing new code to maintain a PHP site, you're going to see boredom.

Marc Andreessen talks about using hiring and interviews as a filtering process e.g. "In this company we all do yoga for an hour at 2pm. Do you like Yoga? Are you going to have fun doing yoga for a hour every day?". [Real example of a yoga startup IIRC]

Here's the podcast, and it's probably ecorner's best ever if you haven't already heard it:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/andre...
Likely not, but if at all I would expect a stripped down version. It will more likely be an iteration on the current xbox OS.
Table 10 at The Palazzo Las Vegas
Yeah that's wrong. The 900m was a stalking horse bid (ie google made the first bid at 900m just to get the bidding started) it was not their final bid.
emphasizing the differences between letters reminded about the hand writing recognition on Palm.
Just to be clear, this affects ALL levels of membership, not just the low-end ones that are constantly being referenced. My (once standard) 3-at-a-time plan is going up to $24 in September.
StumbleUpon for iPad (review by RWW)
If Bitcoin Community Doesn’t Take Action, Trademark Lawyer Could “Box Them In”