skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is my last week at my first programming job, my new one starts next Monday. My boss has other businesses in other states, so he was away from this office most of the time, meaning I was able to do pretty much whatever I wanted with my time here. Usually, the office consisted of just my non-technical supervisor and myself. Of course, small projects beyond my control would be requested of me would and I would do them, but this couldn't sustain my interest.

I definitely got bored. But unlike most of you, I had the choice of being bored. Once I realized this I made every effort I could to work on interesting projects. First, I had to start spending about half of my time researching the industry before I would even know what needed to be done. I was then able to identify what was wrong with our systems here and exactly how to improve them. Given lots of time to play around on projects and little supervision, some people might have wasted their time or just did the bare minimum, but I identified areas that could be greatly improved, then replaced/refactored projects as necessary. I took on new projects to address problems I had wanted to fix for a long time regularly.

Being the only programmer here, I didn't get to all of them (I was not working full time). The website was a mess of outsourced crap and it didn't even use objects - I avoided working on it in favor of other projects as much as possible. Back in 2009 I made a prototype replacement website in my favorite language, earlier this year I started work on two code libraries. I'm currently refactoring the website to use a new code library I created, which is going very smoothly. I also spent countless hours (though I logged everything I did) happily working towards PCI DSS compliance, coming from a background with no security expertise. I came up and completed many more projects like these while I've been here. When I was bored it was because I wasn't working on something interesting.

Those are the days where I can work until close and be completely happy. Well, until someone tells me it's time to leave.
Well, the context was smartphones. And "biggest" isn't necessarily a sign of health, as quite a few Finnish software developers recently found out.

Given the huge lead that Nokia had in smartphone tech and their current trendline in the smartphone market, I don't think it's premature to at least reserve a burial plot.
No, they don't protect ideas, they protect products or processes. According to WIPO:

"What is a Patent?

A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. In order to be patentable, the invention must fulfill certain conditions "

http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/en/patents_faq.html#patent

On your second point, I am in favor of government enforcement of contracts (as a last resort, hopefully), and copyright as well (though it should be amended or limited).

On your scheduling idea, yes, if the implementation is easy, then your only recourse is obscurity (trade secrets).

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/peertopatentblog/?tag=mathematical-met...

Scientific theory or discovery and mathematical methods are NOT patentable.

At Business School you learn that all sources of competitive advantage are temporary. BigCo will catch up with you eventually if you don't use your temporary advantage to build up.
Just once, I'd like to see someone making "Apple is doomed" prognostications actually put their money where their mouth is and short the stock. That would be fun to see.

People will just say anything when it comes to Apple. It's crazy.
Ding ding ding ... we have a winner.
Frequency of use.

I have to think about and use circles multiple times per day.

I've participated in exactly one hangout. Video chat is really cool, but not so practical when you're grabbing 2 minutes of downtime, or when you're trying to be quiet because kids are asleep.
Patrick isn't joking about paper, by the way. Choice of paper stock can make a huge difference either consciously or subconsciously to how the message printed on it is perceived. Ask somebody at a paper company to show you sometime if you don't believe it.
I assume the smaller data rate is for after the data is filtered.
Ardist, Advertising Crowdsourcing site, seeks technical cofounder
Ardist, a site that lets businesses crowdsource their advertising, is looking for a technical cofounder.

The current site is built on Django in a cloud environment, so we really need someone with that experience. Check it out at Ardist.com

We used local consultants to build the site, but we're currently seeking funding and really want someone on board fulltime. You would receive equity equal to that of myself, the CEO.

For more information, please email eric@ardist.com
Pretty cool idea. In the future I'd suggest linking to the about page first, the welcome page linked here just confused me.
> I don't think you can confine the energy you're talking about in the space of a USB stick

It is very much possible to incinerate a chip die within a compact, hermetically-sealed container without releasing smoke or other tell-tale signs. The US and other wealthy nations' armies use self-contained modules like this in their encrypted radio equipment.

Plus, if you need more room, you can mimic an external USB hard drive rather than a keychain drive.

> I'm just trying to explain to you the seriousness of what you're proposing

It is true that if your handiwork produces smoke, flame, noise, etc. I do not envy your fate. If it happens during arrest, the police might even shoot you. But if, on the other hand, nothing suspicious is seen when your equipment is seized, and weeks later detectives discover a few grams of molten slag where an EEPROM chip should be, I doubt you will be tried for having set off an illicit bomb.

You will still go to jail. A reason will be found to put you there - it isn't hard. "Give me six lines written by the most honest man..."

Perhaps it only makes sense to rehearse and plan for this data-destruction scenario if you possess secrets that remain important apart from any criminal case against you.

> If you wanted to productize such a device would you be able to get Underwriters' Laboratories to (UL) to safety certify it for use in the home?

This is very much the wrong question to ask.

Something like this can never become a consumer product. The government would never permit it to be openly sold, regardless of any safety considerations.

If you view law enforcement officials as your enemy, using unmodified off-the-shelf equipment, regardless of its rarity and expense, is simply stupid. Back doors are a near-certainty. And the only way I know of to securely and unambiguously wipe large amounts of data on short notice is combustion.
put up a screencast or some type of video - or even just some screenshots.
Uruguay vs Mexico en vivo
Ver online Uruguay vs Mexico en vivo por Internet.
Fun times. When I was in high school, a friend of mine ran a BBS from his Commodore 128.
That was a great article. Does anyone know how difficult it is to get the projects mentioned up and running on a Mac?
The difference in specific heat is only a factor of 2. The big difference is in the density, which is about a factor of 1000 larger for liquids over air at atmospheric pressure.

(However, mineral oil has much higher viscosity than water, which I'm not sure is what you want as it suppresses convection. I guess it's a question of whether you take that over the non-conductivity.)
I imported my Facebook friends and have a few hundred people mutually in my circles because of it. If you do that your feed will look very similar to Facebook :) Now if it weren't for event planning / events I'd probably have removed my Facebook account already...
RMS was trying to dominate others by telling them how to talk. People find that kind of pedantry annoying.

On one hand, you are correct that people found it annoying. In late 2000, I got flamed one of the FSF people for using the wrong language. (Referring to them as "Open Source".) That sort of pedantry can be very off-putting. On the other hand, it also says something interesting about our culture that factual correctness in our language and terminology is considered annoying.

If the civilizations of India and China can foster a greater respect for facts, precision, and knowledge than what we have here in the US, then they will surpass us in ways that go beyond even the economic potential of their urbanizing populations. Yes, reread that sentence and think about how tall an order that isn't. The mainstream attitude about knowledge in the US can be summed up by the word, "whatever."
I've sat in many a meeting where the Macs "steal" all of the DHCP connections and I'm stuck watching the speaker instead of following TweetDeck.
I purchased a HM Embody a while ago and don't regret it. I grew tired of constantly replacing the $200 chairs from the office stores.

Find some where local that will let you sit in the chairs... figure out what is best for you.
It would have to be gas tight, and resist a pressure differential. (HSF heatpipes contain water in a partial vacuum)

It must also not leak at all over the course of several years at elevated temperature, while spinning at several thousand RPM, or else the heat pipe will stop working.

It also must be cheap enough to compete commercially with a solid piece of metal.

The design constraints are... loosely possible. But it sure as hell won't be cheap.
Can anyone say how this looks on the iPad?
The reason why they don't go full <audio> and whatever is not because of compatibility. It's about security and copyright infringement. It would be free downloads for all and that would make all the RIAA execs they have deals with very mad.

See Froiveshark's cowpewter comment here which goes into better detail about why they did what they did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968668
Interstate (YC S11) Plots Your Development Progress On The Map
I used to be the sysadmin for a high energy physics lab as we prepared for the ATLAS experiment to come online. (It was a long wait, following helium explosions and such.) The reason you see so many different numbers is that they cannot possibly record the full flow of information. CERN has a very large buffer that the collision sensor data is fed into initially, which is analyzed in realtime to determine which chunks of data are likely to contain significant information. Those chunks are kept, and the rest are discarded. This bothered a lot of people, since they are probably throwing away interesting scientific data, but they are limited by current storage technology.

Further preliminary analysis is performed on the retained data, broadly categorizing the energy and other characteristics of the collision. That allows individual physics groups around the world to download only the data that is likely to pertain to their specific research, e.g. the Higgs boson, multiple dimensions, etc.

There was some talk of transferring data via Bittorrent or perhaps a custom protocol involving fountain codes. That never got off the ground. Instead, the Russians were working on a custom peer-to-peer system with a monolithic centralized set of indices, a system which is hopefully working better than it used to.

P.S. - Here's a hummingbird-speed video of building our prototype fileserver node for local physics analysis of ATLAS data [before I learned about electric screwdrivers]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y6MpPNqxmw
in case it wasn't obvious: virtary is presumably Rieni Santoso, who is responsible for gameized's media relations.
What do we do with the Internet when we're old?
One question really strikes me: what do we do with the internet when we're old? (I rather mean needs and habits than HTML9 or wetware.)
Water may be better at transferring heat, but there is the slightly undesirable effect that it shorts out your electronics and causes corrosion.

Don't try this using water: http://youtu.be/PtufuXLvOok?t=2m10s
Amazon Backs End to Online Sales Tax in California
I have some of them created here http://www.mockuptiger.com/category/video-demostration

Am working on the samples and screenshots, should be up in two days
Effort per interaction will only be zero when interactions require no cognitive overhead. In which case, why are we bothering with them?
Why should I pick you over webex?
Great article. I'm bored, and I surprisingly I found myself doing almost everything described in the article: later arrivals, earlier departures, increased snark or even skipping lunch. I'm in the category of "I'm bored and nobody did anything about it" (perhaps my boss know, because I told my co-worker out loud that I'm BORED) and not I'm not sure what I should do next.
My dyslexia becomes more noticeable when reading large paragraphs. I love to read, even though I have to re-read paragraphs (sometimes more than 3 times). Some font types, of course, do help so this is something that I look for every time I have to read something.

I've been reading like this since I can remember. I feel my brain is working double-time TRYING to decipher whats in a text, and while making sense of it... it's a bit annoying if you think about it, but you learn to live with it.

Now, the experience in reading is the same experience I get when I go to watch a movie in 3D, which I hate! (with a passion)
An iPhone, with the required data plan, is an everyday purchase.

You need to rethink and reword this.
People don't care about privacy. I'll gladly tell Google about youporn.com in exchange for its great user experience.

Also, people who know or care about sync keys also know how to use private browsing.
some people (such as myself) have a really hard time with eye contact. it doesn't mean i'm not earnest in what i'm saying, it just means that eye contact makes me very uncomfortable.

i've learned that a lot of people see it as important, so i do an exercise when i walk to work, making eye contact with as many people as i can. it's helping but it's still hard for me - i feel like i'm being intrusive and slightly aggressive by making eye contact with someone.
Can Mathematics Cure Cancer?
Are there alternatives for Neo4j? Looking to implement some type of tagging system and want to explore all the options...
I used to maintain some fb social plugins for a site, and every Wednesday they would break.
IT Security on SE
Product people are always preaching this. Every interaction should be judged based on the return of that investment (the investment being the interaction). If the product improves and can deliver that much better of an experience (matching and exceeding user expectations), then that interaction is worth it. Each interaction should be prioritized according to this ROI and then chosen based on achieving product-market fit (PMF).
Effective Link Building Methods
I'll throw in my endorsement for the Steelcase Leap. I've had mine for three years and I'm very happy with it. Well worth the price.
As a non-dyslexic, I was surprised how much easier this font was to read. Do you see a link to the typeface?
quit immediately.

if you have a job where you have a "lead" or "manager" title but have to ask someone else before making personnel/project decisions, you are not a lead or manager of anything, just a scapegoat.
I also want my photos. Everytime I try to use facebook2picasa it says it's down still... :( Either way, a lot of my now-nerd friends are starting to sign up for G+, so I think it won't be long until I drop Facebook entirely.
Whoa, didn't realize WebGL used canvas. Cool.
I've started seeing that from non-geeks that are entering G+. I think my two largest circles are Developers and New Media (journalists).

We will have to see what happens when everyone else gets on.
Yeah, I bet it will take me a month or two to phase out FB.
Also, this appears to suffer from what I like to call the "Razor-blade Singularity" fallacy: http://www.economist.com/node/5624861?story_id=5624861
When we released memcached 1.4.0, we gave out the source on floppy disks at OSCON. The majority didn't get it. "I don't even have anything that can read this" was a common response. It was surreal how many people thought we were serious about using floppy disks as a medium for distributing software in the late 2,000s.

I still have a box of these on my desk.
App allows Facebook viewing on Google+
If anyone likes this kind of stuff, you might find my weekend project to be interesting: https://zetabee.com/weave/

You can make pretty 2D designs using CSS:

https://zetabee.com/weave/share/5e6a5811

https://zetabee.com/weave/share/c6593101

It is similar in concept to Structure Synth ( http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/ ) but in 2D and using CSS. I was thinking of making a browser-based 3D Structure Synth but not many people seem to like making art with code.
Wish someone would add the Ruby ones.
I really want a fixed-width version of this font.
Know Without Thinking: Instinct in UX
You have a couple options there:

* Require simple registration and validate against app purchasers

* Make the app free and charge for premium features that work with the web-based back end

If something is priced reasonably and provides good value, users will pay for it. iOS buyer statistics are a great case study.
I guess people 'round here don't enjoy Zoolander. A shame.
if you want an invite, msg me: j dot schrittwieser at gmail dot com
Do away with the air bearing. Just put the whole computer in the base of the rotating heatsink/fan. Get power and data on/off of the thing using brushes. Implement an emergency mode where the CPU slows the clock if the motor fails, so that the heatsink still provides enough cooling without rotating.
Lots of things can run faster than they are supposed to, but that doesn't mean they should or that people are going to like the solution. Often times the bleeding edge processors are clocked according to MTTF based on a reference implementation (which would include some standard of heat dissipation and a processor's TDP and probably not exotic copper heatsinks and high speed fans. If this fan can more efficiently transfer heat out of the processor and dissipate it with a lower total energy consumption, then it could be very useful, especially when you are talking about things like datacenters where total energy consumption and MTTF are things that really matter.
Samsung to Apple: We Don’t Like Your Lawyers
I've always wondered why my Mac jumps right on the network, while other devices such as my Xbox 360 take a few seconds before the connection is there.

I'd be interested to see how the Google Chrome CR-48 handles DHCP since it seems like it takes a bit of time before getting online and allowing me to log in to it.
Getting code into the Linux kernel requires patience and a lot of work to conform to the standards set by the developers. I saw a great talk at ELC 2010 [1] from Greg Kroah-Hartman on the problems they faced when trying to get the Android changes into the kernel. He also did a short write-up of the problems[2].

[1] Video: http://free-electrons.com/blog/elc-2010-videos/
[2] http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html
So, it's a proxy that mutes the system whenever it detects 'adload' in the URL, and unmutes when it detects 'resume'. It's a clever trick, but unfortunately it's rather easy to ruin, and if you leave it up during other browsing you will probably get false positives.

Still, nicely done.
There already exists a minimal DHCP client implementation in the Linux kernel, but it lacks certain features such as configuring the DNS nameservers.

I wonder if it is possible to use the kernel-level DHCP client to instantly request the IP address while asynchronously initiating the more functional user-mode dhclient?

Once dhclient is up, and the kernel DHCP client has obtained an IP address it could just pass that to the DHClient to make another DHCP request with the same IP but the additional DNS nameservers, etc. The DHCP server would just see this as a re-request for the same IP address from the same MAC address and would just re-ACK.

This would save the time it takes to initiate dhclient to then perform the initial IP address check + request.

EDIT: in fact, I don't get (from the OP's link) why dhclient couldn't just be forced to accept the IP address passed to it by the kernel DHCP client, and bind it with the nameservers/any other info locally without needing to make another round-trip to the DHCP server.
I feel like G+'s success is related to Facebook's past success. Ever since G+ came out, I've seen many posts on my FB feed for people giving out and wanting G+ invites. The me-too mentality inherent in FB (and other social networking sites) means that people will want to join whatever site their friends are on. That being said, it will be interesting to see if G+ can keep these people around or if it is going to just be a passing fad.
One thing about those old windows 95 floppies is that they have surprisingly better quality than other floppies. I had to use some floppies in 2001, and had massive failure rates with newly bought ones, and near-zero with rewritten Windows 95 installation disks.
So where do I buy them?
Especially if you're questioning them with very short direct questions that are relevant to their job (that may be important to them...) and then not letting it slide by dogging them until they answer. Not saying that's what the blog post recommends but it could certainly come off that way if people tried repeating his tactic just based on what he wrote.
Up until about 3 or 4 years ago it was fairly easy to pick an affiliate product and then make a website and get traffic for it that converted with a positive ROI.

It was basically an arbitrage opportunity in an unbalanced market.

Now that the market is more balanced, it is necessary to have the traffic first (usually by providing engaging content) and then find affiliate marketing programs to successfully monetize that existing traffic. More often than not, selling advertising on a website pays better than affiliate programs.
Obviously, and if I don't like Windows, I can install a BSD or anything from http://gnu.org/ and run a fully free computer (or Kolibri or Haiku). That is relevant to the success of the open-source movement on the desktop, but it's not the end-game.
Fascinating! I always assumed (as did everyone else, I think) that the countdown, coupled with the stern warning in bold text, was to make you think twice about downloading extensions, not to thwart malicious websites.

So why's it gone in Firefox 4?
Apple's Patent Portfolio Manager Exiting as HTC and Samsung Disputes Simmer
This is completely true, I work in med devices/pharma and there are relatively small companies that generate more revenue that the entire music/video game industries.

Pharma companies will lose $50B in revenue this year due to expiring patents. To put that in perspective imagine if every game and music company in the world went out of business simultaneously. Then double it. That is the scale of revenue loss in pharma and the industry will still be worth $720B. It is a "boring" industry from a software perspective, but its magnitude is amazing.

Also, "Boring" is as much a perspective as a category.

MailChimp has built a massive business in email marketing and are one of the cheekiest companies around.

AirBNB helps people book hotel rooms.

37 Signals makes a close cousin of meeting software.

At least that's what their SW does. I'm sure if you asked the owners of those co's they'd say they help organizations communicate with their members, people form real social networks, and entrepreneurs build their businesses.

There is a Disney saying "Magic doesn't make it work, the way we work makes it Magic" Having the right perspective can add 80 IQ points!
The air gap is 0.001 inches? Those are pretty huge for dust particles. Preventing those very large particles from fouling the air bearing will be easier than preventing much smaller particles from fouling a lubricated one.