skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charging by the hour kills the incentive for productivity gains, which generally arise from building internal or external products that help you do things better. It kind of works in fields like law where the delivery has not changed much over the years, but delivering technical services like anything else in the technology business changes very rapidly.

Clients somehow need to be sold the idea that they will get better and cheaper delivery if they accept fixed costs, so that services can be productised, made profitable and improved, rather than buying one off non repeatable time for everything.

We are sort of seeing this as we get an increase in the number of product businesses being started, and so more types of activity are being productised.
questions:

1. Bias: I am ex military..any security clearance is forever not as access but as enforcement of secrets staying secret. Thus, why would someone already in an illegal act talk to ex military like Lamo? It does not add up.

2. why did Wired protect Lamo for a year? Obviously to protect a source rather than have it exposed as non-credible.

3. Who is working for the FBI here? Is it Lamo or Poulsen? It has to be asked given the manipulation by Lamo in the chat log. If the wired Knew the chat log was part of the FBI investigation than that explains its failure to publish. So it is reasonable to ask if Poulsen was involved currently with the FBI.
(ideas for startups) 6 Ideas to improve Online Shopping
I agree with dpark, the rage factor is definitely a lot higher for me if Apple adopt your idea.
I completely agree, that's why at 39, Inc. we try to split client work and internal projects 50-50. Of course that eats big time in the potential profits in the short turn but it also can also spin off in something good. SyncPad for example was first a 39's project before we made it into a separate company called Fifth Layer.
But you frequently need to store the original timezone, to be able to do date calculations after storing it.

For instance, a user added an appointment and her timezone is America/Los_Angeles. Then she moved to China and changed her timezone in your app to Asia/Shanghai. Then you run analytics to see how many users had had appointments on weekdays.

When storing date information in persistent stores (like databases), it's always advisable to store the time and the timezone.
Non paywall link: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/internet-use-affects-memor...
Swedish man gets sick benefits for heavy metal addiction
VeriSign Blames Domain Name Fee Increases on DDoS Attacks
Few words about CouchDB disk space consumption
The irony of this remark is that while it is literally correct, the truth of the matter is that Hurd is stuck in the early 90s and aims to re-implement a 20-year-old design.
Watch,Movie,Online Free
Watch,Movie,Online Free
Keeping Up with the Kardashians Kourtney season 6 seems like a robot and not really showing a lot of emotion. Kylie Kendall and not inside a lot, just a little, but they take the air when they are small.
I wonder if Google eventually wants Google Plus to be recognized as simply "Plus". Goes along with "Wave" and "Buzz".
Doesn't contemporary cognitive science pretty much go with the hypothesis that human brains are Turing-equivalent? Unless we go with magic, hypercomputing brains would require hypercomputing physics, and so far we know pretty much about physics and all of it seems to be Turing-computable (although slowly with quantum stuff), outside pathologies like time travel.

We don't know if Turing-equivalent formalisms are the Ultimate Representation of Everything, but they seem to be by far the best Representation of Everything anyone has found so far.
I think it will always remain a big thing because the underlying concept feeds into intrinsic desires of human beings for positive reinforcement. But the thing is it works more effectively in areas where there's a bigger context with meaning - not things like checking in... there's no sense of accomplishing for checking in.. it's just random noise. Same with this Google News thing.

It works better in things like Chore Wars where you get the sense of "DONE" and "WIN" when you get the chore done AND when you get the positive reinforcement.

For FourSquare, it just doesn't give you the same dopamine release. In fact, the concept of 4Square works more because it lets you see who else also checked in. They didnt have to do the badges concept.. could've saved it for others. greedy bastards
>Who is working for the FBI here? Is it Lamo or Poulsen?

I see no reason why it couldn't be both.
Robot Helps Quadriplegic Scratch an Itch for the First Time in a Decade
It's interesting to hear that. I believe it was Bill Gates' advice that led Ballmer and co. to negotiate a buyout of Skype and comments were made in the same vein then as well.
The Back Button Dilemma
>Clients were my bosses, and we were at the mercy of their whim.

Not sure how I see the difference between this and the phrase you get by substituting "Customers". It's all well and good deciding to be entrepreneurial, but if the shmoes with the $$ don't play along, it's not going to be fun. You're going to have to compromise your ideals to sell product.

To me, a better way of describing the shift from consulting to product development is that you can sell the same development effort multiple times when it's a product. Thus, no matter how well the consultants work, there's an upper limit on their income.
Is open source in the cloud still open source?
D feels to me the closest thing to a fixed C++. But without major additional momentum, I don't see how it can ever catch up to C++ in adoption.
Big C++ fan here. I came to C++ after learning Python. I simply love it and the Boost libraries only make it better.

If I could only have one programming language, it would definitely be C++. I can do anything with it on any operating system. No vendor or IDE or build environment lock in. It's a solid ISO standard with multiple compiler support.

I still use bash, Python and Ruby for quick test scripts and prototyping and I like them as well.
Hell yeah.

I'd never do that kind of stuff on a fixed price contract. I'd rather wash dishes or wait tables. Some of that work can be fun if you do it on a time & materials basis, but there's certainly less of that around.

I've seen a few companies try to move from 'contracting' to 'product sales' and it appears to be a difficult transition.

The problem is that web shops tend to be driven by success at sales and to be undisciplined about business. They find it impossible to make a "to not do" list and stick to it. There's always the old client who's got a crisis that you need take care of, or the new client who's got deep pockets which (you think) will pay for product development.

A few months later there's the inevitable meeting where it turns out that the product is terminally late -- if the software developers have a backbone, they'll point out that they've spent 60% of their time on "legacy" projects so no wonder it's late.
If anything, charging by the hour not only kills the incentive for productivity gains, but also lowers a designer's productivity.
CloudSigma joins the Open Virtualisation Alliance (OVA)-
DEFINITELY the top. Smooth, sleek, fast looking, simple.
Categorical variables : Solving the overfitting problem in decision trees.
A simple search on google delivers tons of articles on overfitting, combined with categorical (nominal) variables.
It is a fact that categorical variables with a lot of values (extreme examples are zip codes or customer ID’s) lead to severe overfitting.

In this post :

What is overfitting ?
Why do they lead to overfitting ?
What is the consequence for our model ?
What can we do about it ?
I think that indicates poor interviewing more than anything.
Get List of all Available Fonts in a PDF File & PDF to Image Conversion
The long awaited version of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java 3.9.0 has been released. This release includes a new feature to get a list of all the fonts available in the PDF file. PdfExtractor class now provides support for this feature. We have also improved the features related to PDF to JPEG and TIFF conversion, form filling, fonts and text rendering. Text overlapping issue is resolved when converting PDF to JPEG and when converting PDF to TIFF.
C++ is as complicated as you make it. Start with the basics and add on whatever works for you.

I think most people complain that C++ is overly complex because they try to learn it at the same time they try to learn a complex (typically GUI ex. MFC) framework. If you're learning C++ start with backends. Strip it down so that there aren't so many things to learn initially.

The same thing could be said for any language worth a darn. It stands out more for C++ because it's typically only used in heavy lifting situations. It's almost impossible to learn and produce something coherent in this case. Again though that would be true for any language suitable for such situations.
On the iPad now this is a four fingers swipe up, then a single press. Or a 4 finger swipe across to the next app.
Pretty typical of any multi-master asynchronous replication: you must make damn sure your application isn't going to generate conflict. If conflict does happen, you have to apply some external logic to resolve that issue. Some things like GoldenGate (oracles purchase of binlog snarfing multi-master replication) provide you some tools for that. Basically dumping conflicted records into a table for manual or automated clean up later.

At the end of the day, it's always going to require well thought out schemas and data layout if you want to take writes for both masters.

Multi-master is less difficult if you only write to a single node at a time (hot-standby style).
Well, I supposed I could write a Twitter client that checked links and marked tweets as spam before presenting them to the user.

Sorry, it's my nature to try and solve problems working around whatever obstacles are in the way. So when your post made me think, well.... I could... In no way mocking or disagreeing with your opinion which I do comprehend and for a large part agree with.

On the same token I also think a truly open system, while not impossible, is a difficult proposition for financial reasons.

Also from a security stand point. If the system was open enough for me to solve the spam problem, then it would also be open enough to make the spam problem, or even virus/malware delivery much easier.
I don't know much about replication but what happens when a master dies just after the database is updated. Will the changes not be replicated? If the user see that the second master does have the latest changes and he repeat his latest actions, what will happen when the first master goes back online? Will the data be duplicated or merged?
Even in that situation it's a terrible idea to store local time alone. In the calendar situation (which is the exception not the rule!) I personally would store the time in UTC, in local time and the name of the country separated. I would not store the local time alone because what do you show in the calendar if you are in a different country?

If the assumption is that the problem is a theoretical one because nobody has appointments in the middle of the night when DST changes come, I present you with sysadmins, rescue workers and other people that do have these things scheduled at odd times.

I know that around DST changes many people explicitly not work over night to avoid these issues. Same with year changes and other situations where computing and time does not work properly. For instance overnight trains in Europe just wait for an hour and do nothing.
Here's some more invites: ftmp68XgaXYwmBS7 bbbqsYPhWZ9Zrk4s fCnwmdMS9NRWDLHA aVJqbgCMMxR4LUgs cMusg9KWkeqzV7Fq
I am using adblock plus on firefox. I haven't seen an ads for a long time.
While it is true that understanding your customers and making things easier to use is important it does not mean that engineering is dead. He makes many mistakes in the article, for example Apple is less about the customer than it is about creating pretty objects that have a cult like status, how else do you explain people buying mobile phones that only work if you hold them a certain way? He obviously has no knowledge of the strides made in engineering that I see every single day. Also I took a look at IronPort that he seems to be so proud of, they are security products that don't seem that secure-

http://securitytracker.com/id/1023399

http://sebug.net/exploit/19117/

All that said, it's in Forbes, so hopefully the article will distract many CEOs of large companies from investing in engineering allowing other companies to eat their lunch, I look forward to shorting those CEOs companies and going long those that crush them.
> You can't maintain the same level of housing no matter where you are.

I realize that, and what you said. My point was, the numbers there had housing playing a major role in affecting your cost of living. Simply put, if I wanted the same 4 bedroom, 2500 sqft house between here and San Francisco, it's going to cost me a LOT more. However, if I ignore the housing, the rest of the estimates are still useful, and as a result, you can still find out how much more or less you need to make to maintain what you are used to.

> That's what that calculator does, and it's deceptive and wrong.

If you look at the numbers blindly, sure. But their is value in knowing the comparative values in things besides housing. After all, it's not just giving you one single number.

My argument isn't that the calculator is completely right, only that it's not completely useless as you make it out to be.

Finally, you also talk a lot about other factors. While it's true, it's also pointless. Of course people aren't going to just look at the calculator and base everything off that. However, for many people, it's a helpful indication of what to expect. A 20% increase across the board for all expenses could mean someone moving for a job for a small pay raise might need to plan accordingly.

Basically, knowing how much things cost relative to where you are now is important. Yes, the more money you make, the less it matters, but there are far fewer people in that situation.
Your example is a good one, but as others point out, the computer has been designed logically. Biology hasn't been. And even then, there's just really oddball crap that comes out of left field. I'll give you a good example (which admittedly may require a few trips to wikipedia depending on your biology background):

The codon used for translating DNA/RNA code to protein is well established. It's a three-base degenerate code, meaning that there are several three-base DNA sequences representing a given amino acid [1]. This code is very well understood. If your DNA/RNA sequence has any of the three bases combos for alanine, your protein gets an alanine in that position. It follows from this that different DNA sequences can code for exactly the same amino acid sequence in a protein. However, proteins with the same amino acid sequence are chemically and biologicalally identical (ignoring things like post-translational modification).

A few years ago, I read a paper [2] where the group hypothesized that in a specific case, a rare codon for for an amino acid in a specific protein caused the cellular machinery to stall at that position. They suggested that in the intervening time, the protein misfolded into a different 3D shape. The resulting protein therefore had different chemical properties despite having identical amino acid sequence. Basically shredding what is often known as the "central dogmal of molecular biology".

Now, this specific example probably needs to be confirmed, and might not be very frequent. But it makes total sense when you understand how all the pieces work. However this explanation would be very low on most biologist's lists of reasons why a certain protein isn't functioning properly. In fact, when people do genetic analysis looking for diseases, they routinely throw out all synonymous changes before doing the stats. It makes you wonder how often we miss this when looking for disease genes.

My larger point is that lots of biological science is a collection of edge cases. We know so little about the systems we're studying and have such crude tools to investigate them, that we get blindsided by things sitting in plain sight all the time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code
[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5811/525.abstract
With a product, you design the solution based on your vision and find customers who match that vision. With web design work, you are essentially taking direct orders and requirements from the client.
There are no english £100 notes. However, Alan Turing would make an excellent candidate for any new note design, not just a one off special one. It would be nice to have him alongside darwin on the money, his ideas are arguably as profound, but much less generally appreciated. Hopefully some of the events for his centenary will go some way towards teaching people that he did a lot more than just the enigma machine.

Shame they couldn't hold off the new batch of £5 notes they're currently putting into circulation until next year.
I just visited Bletchley Park last week. It was great to see, especially the Colossus MK2 reconstruction and the working rebuild of Turing's Bombe. The only thing that made me sad was the lack of discussion of the way the government treated Turing; it was glossed over on a sign next to the Turing statue, but other than that, not a word was said.

Here's a sad little video I took on my phone of the Colossus MK2 rebuild in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOEFIBZmBk.
Here's my collateral damage story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763272

There are definitely high quality sites that were hit by Panda.
Honest question here - does anyone actually still believe a single algorithm can solve general problems? Certainly the human mind doesn't work that way - we are fairly compartmentalized with a lot of communication between compartments.
it was inconceivable to me that complete strangers would ever fret over my child's welfare

Why are complete strangers on her Facebook? I honestly don't think her social network helped diagnose this at all. With every correct diagnoses, there are bound to be numerous incorrect ones. If you're just looking for a list of possible problems, you might as well open a med school text book.

Better yet, someone could organize all known medical conditions into a database by searchable symptoms and severity, and compose an algorithm to list possibilities by likelihood.
I hope some kind of Open VM comes in future so that languages can evolve independent of libraries. It will be awesome to run C# and Java on the same VM.
> Turing machines are not handed down to us by God; there is no reason to believe they are some kind of Ultimate Representation of Everything.

The claim that they are is called the Church-Turing thesis, and there are pretty strong arguments, though of course you can never be sure.
Google land grab hints at data center expansion
Having a single master is sometimes not viable in some situations. But yes, eventual consistency can be both a blessing and a curse.

But if you can design your system to take this into account, it's pretty easy to scale out and everything Just Works(tm).
Provided the axiom set is recursively enumerable. The second order Peano axioms for the natural numbers are complete.
Win 1/10 tickets to BBM workshop in NYC w/ free hotel
I think spydum's comment is what you're looking for.

These are things that can and do happen, and you have to plan for it. Designing your applications and infrastructure with eventual consistency in mind can do wonders for both performance and redundancy.
This is being rectified. There is a new Turing exhibit being planned and the official apology from Gordon Brown has been delivered to Bletchley Park and the people running Bletchley Park fully understand what's needed. I have been working with them on wording for the part talking about the apology.

I have posted a link to the actual apology document that will be displayed at Bletchley Park here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767301
> When average joes start piling in and blowing up the price, then gold may take leave of its fundamentals and we'll have a bubble.

> The genuinely unsophisticated have a negative net worth, and they're not holding gold.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but if I take both of these seriously then it sounds as if your criterion for a bubble is that most of the money sunk into something comes from people with negative net worth. By that criterion, I'm not sure that there has ever been a bubble in anything.

(Maaaaaaybe houses in the recent property bubble, but (1) I very much doubt it and (2) in any case mortgages are rather a special case, in that for a long time lots of people have had large investments in property that were mostly leverage; I don't think anything comparable has ever been true for gold, shares, Dutch tulips, or anything else.)
Although it is during the week so probably not good for people with jobs.
What's causing this forced switch? I can only assume it's the end of your 60 day trial period. And since you'd be on the $100 plan, that means you have 11-25 users. It's kind of shocking to me that you're not willing to pay the $4-9 per user that the tool would cost you. Surely you're getting at least that value out of the tool.
Have you ever debugged a class that used free instead of delete?

I can't help but think that people that suggest this stuff simply look at lists of features and see "lambda" and think C++ has somehow been modernized. Still fundamentally, it's producing machine code and fundamentally it has a fairly limited runtime and compared to what a LISP coder thinks of when he thinks of closures you might not want to call what C++ has 'closures.' Maybe the fact that the article referenced "lambdas and closures" is what throws me off... that's two features, right? haha The posts that mention C++'s cross platform nature also kind of make me laugh, it's sort of true, it's also remarkably easy to make it not true, just using "int" somewhere will break it some cases and if one of your platforms in Visual C++, then you'll probably have 2 code bases #ifdefed in to one, you can make it work but you have to do some work.

C++ probably won't die, not exactly that languages just die. Microsoft is all in with it, and many other organizations use it. It seems like we are in an era where there is more freedom to match the tool to the job than ever before and I can't imagine starting a medium or large scale project in C++ when Java and .NET are both still very viable. I can't imagine any serious C++ web app development, I can easily see some Ruby, Python or something other calling a chunk of C++ code, but I just can't see it rendering javascript and html in any serious way, it makes very little sense. Now VMs, runtimes, browsers, they'll likely continue to have some C++ in them for some time. It's a fine tool for some jobs. I also find is puzzling, the OpenJDK is GPL, simply Oracle's ownership somehow suggests Java is ending? If that's really what matters, then pretty clearly Go and Objective-C are what the future is, just looking at corporate ownership and momentum.

From a feature matrix? Sure C++ is the next big thing. From reality? I think and hope that it's future use shrinks and becomes more specialized.
With some of my clients, I negotiate dual-ownership of the end software in exchange for a lower price. That way, if it is something that looks like it could be monetized as a product, I have the ability to do that.
How iPhones move across Europe
مسلسل الارض الطيبة الجزء الثالث الحلقة 72 
مسلسل الارض الطيبة الجزء الثالث الحلقة 72
Does a post-only Twitter app defeat the purpose of Twitter?
This interview makes HP look depressingly uninspiring. Hundreds of words just talking about how Palm/webOS GBU (Global Business Unit?) fits into HP and who's got the most synergy mojo.

Who wants to hear this much about internal hand-wringing?