skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Teachers indeed very often spend their own pocket money to buy things that they feel are useful for class. Paid Dropbox is quite popular among teachers these days.

Very few of the sites that I've seen tackle my key pain and time points. These are test correction, writing correction, and parent communication.

Why isn't there a cheap smartphone OMR program? Of course we all waiting for the Internet and fairies to take over testing, but until then I'd like to have a decent way to make, grade, and store data for paper quizzes. There's not really anything designed for teachers to buy out there.

Writing correction is a hard problem (since handwritten work is privileged in K-12) but perhaps not impossible with OCR advances. If I could unload some of the more mechanical aspects of this it'd be wonderful.

There is a cute and secretly useful free utility called Teacher's Report Assistant. This is the sort of thing that teachers will pay for, and for anyone who plays with things like chatbots its a natural extension. Huge masses of teachers all over Asia are churning out this sort of blather weekly. We could use help.

It's worth mentioning that there are masses of private schools in Asia and in the western world that have much more open policies about reimbursing for software and the like. It's not a bad path to bigger things.

Schools almost universally have overloaded and unreliable networks, so you have to have a reasonable offline path.
I've been reading through your blog, and it took me a while to get what you're doing. I'm still not sure I fully understand, but this sentence (last line from http://erichocean.com/fohr/story.html) looks like it captures what you're doing quite succinctly:

moving lighting into pre-production

To me, that sells it. It's concrete and it promises something that (I assume) directors would love to be able to do but can't (yet!) because it's pretty much impossible

Question - Which part of Pixar are you hoping to emulate? The studio part or the technology part? Will you concentrate on making films or on building a technology that you can licence?
I think the chances are quite good that they were indeed both stupid and evil.
This article reminds me of "Things You Should Never Do Part I" by Joel, and it certainly echo's the same kind of sentiment towards rewriting your application.

Link to the original article:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Dev problems/innovations w which a self-respecting geek should be aware in '11
That works just fine until a totalitarian government takes power. See my other comment for details...
On the plus side, that timeline will help you if you want to claim murdering the hooker wasn't premeditated. Claim you killed her because she pulled a knife or threatened you or it was an accident during agreed-upon rough sex, and you panicked and decided to hide the body, and plea bargain to something that won't get you too much jail time.

Without a record of when you purchased the roll of carpet and the shovel, you'd have a much harder time selling that story.

And thanks...now I'm getting a little paranoid wondering if that time I decided I needed an area rug at 2 AM and so went to an all-night Walmart is ever going to come back and hurt me.
I wonder what they'll do with customers who are already signed up for both...
Make Money Online; 6 Week Training Course
We Waste About 3 – 9 Hours a Year Because the Email Send Button is at the Top
No they sell the information but its anonymised I believe. They'd keep it what ever the legal requirement is per country, after they have sold it I doubt there much reason to hold it.
Top Devices Running Linux, Including No. 5 Electrolux refrigerator
From what I've read it seems like your mantra should be like Coca cola zero branding: Real CGI, zero cost. Well, 20% to be precise, but still. Mantra is a slogan that everybody should understand. You give it to a preschooler and he knows what to do. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If people haven't left when the prices went up, do you really think a name change and two sites will be the final straw?
I once worked on a "barely working" application - the original project (which I wasn't involved with) had clearly been a train wreck and it had delivered a tiny proportion of what had originally been promised.

It presented the user with a couple of fairly straightforward screens, did some integration with a couple of other systems but had over 6,000 (not a typo) classes and a dependency on just about every acronym in J2EE. This had apparently taken a dev team of 30 or so over a year.

It was totally replaced by a much smaller application written in a couple of months by a team of three that provided a sound basis for delivering much more functionality than was originally expected.

So sometimes, rarely, chucking away something that barely works is very much the right thing to do.
> ...robbing the people who have made the wealth wealth for themselves...

How about I flip that then, the wealthy robbed the people to generate their wealth, and then complain when they have to give (some of) it back.

It is very rare to find a company that isn't exploiting someone along the chain in order to generate that wealth. Of course capitalism renames it to "surplus value", but it is in fact exploitation (people being paid less than the value they add).

Do you really think an individual is responsible for all wealth they generate? So, if Steve Jobs was born in china, and lived through the cultural revolution, he would have still built Apple (or equivalent) and been the success he is today. Because society and the services around him had nothing to do with his success?

People don't generate wealth for themselves, they capitalise on opportunities provided to them. The U.S provided a lot of opportunities to a minority of people, who then capitalised on it. But their wealth wouldn't exist without the opportunities being available and thus they should pay tax (proportional to the amount of wealth they have generated) so that the U.S (government) can provide more opportunities to more people.
"Fohr can use the first feature ﬁlm we're making with "computer-photography" to build a new, publicly-owned ﬁlm studio – a repeat of what Pixar did with Toy Story and computer-animation in the 1990s – if we can raise the funds to continue our technology leadership over the next two years."

- "Computer-photography" doesn't sound all that compelling, to be honest. How is this better than computer animation (CGI), as used by Pixar, Lucasfilm, et al.? Assume that the layperson -- investors included -- will have no idea what this phrase means. Instead, substitute a brief description of what "computer-photography" can do that makes it so compelling. Is it massively cheaper than traditional CGI? Is it more publicly accessible? Easier to use? Does it produce superior results? Let's assume, for a second, that it's cheaper than CGI and produces comparable results. In this case, I'd use the phrase "advanced, radically inexpensive computer animation technology." Or something to that effect.

- Strike the word "new" from the first sentence, because obviously it doesn't exist yet, and hence, the creation of the studio will be the creation of a new studio. Ditto either "feature" or "film," as the phrase "feature film" is redundant. (Yes, I'm aware that there are technical differences within the industry between a "feature film" and other types of film. But the word "feature," used as a noun, will suffice on its own).

- Describing your goal as simply "a repeat of...Pixar" makes it seem as though you're simply building a Pixar knockoff, a few decades after the fact. I like how you reference Pixar, because it gives the reader a good sense of what this is. But how is this different from Pixar, if not better than Pixar? Looking back at your "publicly owned" statement, would it be fair to call your studio a "Pixar for the people"? "Pixar for the YouTube set"? Or something to that effect? Tell us why the world needs Fohr, not why the world needs Pixar Clone.
Amazing timelapse of ISS flying over earth. Try 1080p.
Information about Eukanuba and Frontline
Wouldn't the privacy issue be an issue only if it was forced on us? I assume you'd still have the option of hiding purchases from Google by not using the service.
That's not how it works. If that was how it worked you could go and buy a roll of carpet and a shovel just to help your case. It doesn't prove that you pre-meditated the murder but it also doesn't prove that you didn't. Premeditation goes for everything, also for ways to get you off the hook.
I was skeptical of this move at first, but I think the argument is fairly sound. I think a lot of commenters are focusimg on the technical aspect of the service and I agree, Hastings is being disingenuous when he says "they're two totally different businesses". What I think makes a sound argument is that they require a separate marketing approach.

Streaming is only a separate business model insofar as there are fewer degrees of freedom because of the studios; otherwise it's just a difference in how you deliver data. But that difference could be important from a marketing perspective. As Netflix pushes the streaming model, they risk damaging the DVD business by association. So it may be better to rebrand DVD business and carry it forward with a message concentrated around its (rather massive) benefits. That move is even more important if streaming becomes more competitive im the near future; war between cable companies, studios and streaming companies seems pretty likely, so the streaming space may become even more dangerous even while the conflict extends the life of DVD delivery.

So yeah, probably about as sound as a business decision can be. It may not work out but that's not guaranteed avoidable under the old setup either.
It is a bit sad to avoid the discussion with pg below (maybe it is in preparation?)

For me there is one (very excusable) "blind" point in pg's position, it's Eastern classic philosophy (hear Confucianism and a bit of Taoism). For some, it will not even be considered philosophy, because it do not ask questions about questions. It is closer to politics, because it tries to answer the one important question (in Eastern eyes), how to have human beings living together without too much blood. Answers are complex, and rely on ethics, self-cultivation, etc. Studying these Classics is not just for statisfying one's curiosity about past things, it will help understand the world, and what to be in the world, all of that without any "magic trick" (hear God, promise of the paradise).

I don't think the ommissions you are talking about are on these lines, so it would be nice to see where these ommission make pg's essay unfair.
Make predictions socially, say outloud your hunch./
Selling SaaS to Corporates in India
Yes, it's really frustrating that Netflix only allows streaming from the primary account and none of the sub accounts. Anything we stream shows up on the recently watched list for our kids to see.
First, thanks for taking the time to give your feedback. "Moving lighting into pre-production" is the key thing that allows all of the other good things to happen, and cannot be done today without our tech (AFAIK).

Question - Which part of Pixar are you hoping to emulate? The studio part or the technology part? Will you concentrate on making films or on building a technology that you can licence?

I'm a filmmaker, and started looking into how Pixar was getting such good results in 1998. I decided at that time that it was their ability to start rough, iterate and fix things, as they moved towards the final product. In live-action filmmaking, we basically are always shooting "final" footage and don't get to iterate much at all.

Anyway, long story short, I wanted to iterate on live-action stuff, and it turns out that in order to get imagery before production that is valid when you get to production, you need 100% physically-correct lighting (or what I now call computer-photography).

So, my goal is to emulate Pixar in the studio aspect -- how they develop and produce films. I'm not opposed to selling our technology, but I think that the core "tech" has very little to do with why Pixar is successful as an animation studio -- it's basically a legacy part of their business.

In fact, Pixar's Renderman division is in Seattle, and is run totally independently. (Most people think Pixar gets "first dibs" or whatever on new rendering features, but they don't. Pixar uses the latest version of Renderman like everyone else.)
Divide and conquer, Netflix style
People might prematurely judge you based on the incomplete snapshot of your activities.

That is probably the fundamental reason why it's bad. It's either everything open, and everyone understands everybody, or complete privacy and disclosure of information on your terms. The former is impossible to attain. If you have something in the middle where random snapshots of yourself leak out like that, the data should be useless since no one can form 100% certain conclusions from it. But people will no doubt try to form conclusions from that incomplete data anyways. This could be accusing you of a crime, or simply thinking less of you. The only right way is to ask you and for you to reply honestly. We probably can't achieve a totally honest world like that either, but we should strive for one where we depend less on privacy leaks and more on direct honest communication.
Wow. I have a 4 year old and a 5 year old, both love getting to pick stuff off Netflix and not once did I think about the fact that there are no ads... that's such an awesome point in Netflix's favour and I can't believe I never realised it before.

Plus, for me at least, it's good in that it forces them to compromise and work it out among themselves. They can watch whatever they want on it (obviously, within their genre) but they have to work it out between the two of them what they are going to watch. With the TV, it's closer to "on or off".
In case anybody's wondering why this particular tool is news worthy, Total Commander is one of the few remaining orthodox file managers¹, a sub-genre whose origins date back to the original Norton Commander for DOS, decades ago.

I stopped using orthodox file managers when I switched to Linux and discovered the pleasures of a half-decent command-line shell. I knew people had made more such tools for Win16 and later Win32, but it's staggering to think that the orthodox file manager has (at least vaguely) survived into the smartphone era.

¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_file_manager#Orthodox_...
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They first obtained that advantage through their infrastructure investment in DVDs though, not through steaming. Any Netflix competitor now has a much smaller hurdle to overcome to be as successful as they've been. From the customer's viewpoint they went from having a relationship with a single company that had two offerings to a relationship with a company with a single offering that is somewhat lacking.

If I were the new CEO of Quixster or Kwikstr or whatever the hell it is, I would immediately start looking around at who I can partner with to get streaming content. Actually, isn't Quixtar the name of a MLM scheme?

This move makes no sense. Seems like Wall St. pandering garbage.
Horse. Boat. A canoe built around a horse so you can go from riding to water travel without slowing down. (if Dwight Shrute had a notebook)
The AMD drivers on Linux are absolutely pathetic when used with Xinerama! I've had to give up on Linux on desktop due to this.

I've had nVidia cards in the past and they have worked much better on a multi-monitor environment than my current ATI ones.
Is that problem really caused by compulsory voting, or more Australian society in general?

Australia was sporting the White Australia policy up until about 30 years ago, and still requires citizen applicants to pass an 'English' test. It's rather primitive and discriminative processing of refugees (arriving by boat only!?) seems to fall in line with that as well.
High Tech: RIM Chiefs Lose Billionaire Status as Stock Drops on Lower Sales
AppHarbor is an alternative to Azure styled after Heroku. I use both and currently I would summarize the situation as:

- Azure is big and stable and ready for production use but it also comes with the Microsoft way of doing things which can be a bloated and cumbersome at times.

- AppHarbor is fast and agile but hard to take seriously as pricing is still "preliminary" and details around things like support are vague at best.
I don't know anything about the original posters product, but I have watched people with traditional lighting and photography experience trying to apply their knowledge to CGI lighting and photography. Any approach that make that transition smoother and more natural has potential to be a pretty big deal.
WLEZ-FM
Samsung planning legal offensive against Apple's unreleased iPhone 5
By default MySQL will use the merge algorithm. It will create a temp table if the result of the view is large. You can control what "large" means. That is the better method of controlling the behavior, than potentially telling MySQL that it jeeds to create a multi GB result set but must keep it all in RAM. Read the manual or the O'Reilly book for more info.

Anither option is to use materialized views, which are not natively supported in MySQL, but can easily be simulated.
Netflix in Danger of Ruining their User Experience
"It's real easy for me to spot folks who spoot-off about Wealth or Origen who have not actually read the books." What is sad is that I recall realizing at University that certain graduate students had not read some of the books they were teaching! I think the humanities are vitally important, but the academic humanities, unfortunately, sometimes breed a certain kind of person who wants to get a job in academia for impure reasons.
"The thing is that someone has to execute some code to change it, and if so then malicious code has already been run."

Wrong. You could have at least googled "LD_PRELOAD exploit" before writing this.

Setting LD_PRELOAD does not require running your own code. A real life exploit using LD_PRELOAD took advantage of a weakness in telnet server that let the connecting client export environment variables (yup, even before logging on - no local login required). Write access to a directory visible by telnetd was enough to plant own malicious *.so and then gain root access by exporting LD_PRELOAD via telnet.
Awesome service so far. I'm very impressed with the time it took them to have everything set up. I haven't rolled through any of their services, since I'm hand coding everything but it looks like they sure offer a bunch for $9 a month! Thank you for the code.
Look at the BMW, Porsche, Mercedes from the first one to the current one. Germans are incredibly good at refining and improving on top of a good idea. They do that with extremely rigorous scientific approach. So, the copycat is often better than the original, because they took the good idea and pushed it ahead.

This is what I understood from the German culture after living there the past 6 years.
As a once happy customer turned unhappy customer for a variety of reasons, I believe this signals the beginning of the end for Netflix.

By the way, thanks for destroying Blockbuster on the way down. I had more options 2 years ago than I do now.
Boeing chooses Android for 787 Dreamliner's entertainment system
You can do exactly that without rebranding the product. They're called divisions. Give each one a CEO, but to the customer they should all be Netflix.
If you use them for email then they already know much more about you than you think. What's the difference between Google and Master Card knowing your purchases? Unless you cash your paychecks every week and only spend cash then a company still knows everything you purchase.
More MIT grads turn to startups
I was a regular on PHPBuilder.com back in '99 when I was a rookie programmer; Tim answered more than a few questions for me and was always a supportive and encouraging guy. Very sad to hear this news.
I teach math at a high school (and have taught CS in the past, before budget cuts got rid of the program). This article is good advice, but a couple things from my own experience:

1. Anything to be used in-class is a much harder sell than out-of-class. The cost of a wasted lesson is much higher than the cost of your product.

2. As in #1, the most important thing to a teacher is time. We'll probably trade some of our own money to save time. We'll definitely try to convince our bosses that the department needs a subscription to "Bob's Keyboard Accelerators" if we think it is a good product. On the other hand, though, that means you have a daunting design challenge. What's fast and easy for a 25-year-old teacher isn't necessarily fast and easy for a 55-year-old teacher, although we do help each other out.

3. Do it out of altruism, do it to reduce stress in people's lives, and do it for the students, but please do it for the money also. If you make a good product, I'd like to keep using it.

I'll try to answer questions downthread when I have a few moments between tasks, if it helps people.
I would be interested too, some ideas:

Less appetite for risk, less imagination, lack of critical mass for innovation, less cultural diversity, smaller language sphere. Much harder to go without income because of prevalence of longer termination periods for contracts, compulsory health insurance etc.

I actually heard an American say at a conference here in Germany recently, "you all get free health care, so it should be easier for you to quit your jobs and start a startup".

That doesn't seem realistic. We have to pay for compulsory health insurance. Lots of people get public which means it comes out of your wages or benefits (at around 13%!), or they go private and pay a fixed fee. Not having health insurance is not an option.

I went without income or benefit for one month here and people flipped out. It was not something that they had seen before, and freaked out mostly about health insurance. Turns out I was covered under my wife, but if I was not married I would have been in some existential black hole according to the authorities.
JQuery PointPoint – A Plugin For Pointing To Things
is this again some "creative" Eric Ries book selling campaign?
Show HN: Feedback on our app to help Freelancers manage project/client leads?
http://www.jobbrew.com

Would love some feedback on the idea, landing page for an app we hope to launch early next month.

"
Jobbrew is an app that makes lead management for freelancers as easy as bookmarking on delicious. Most freelancers scour the web for new clients, they respond to some, bookmark others.
Quite often converting a lead to a client takes multiple rounds of discussion or a timely reminder. Still even for the most careful of people, it's easy for some of them to slip through the cracks.

Once you `bookmark` or add a lead on Jobbrew, we'll send you an email(on your chosen date), reminding you to follow up.
It also gives you a historical record of all client leads you've collected so far, giving you a vast reserve of people to reach out to during the 'great depression'.

We'll also send personalized list of new leads straight to your inbox(or your feed reader), along with you weekly indepth stats related to your freelance business on how you're doing, eg. conversion rates, best sources for leads etc.
"
Web designerss nightmare
http://www.jobbrew.com (clickable)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy0Hg1oMAkc