skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An Innovative and Cheap ‘Solar Bottle Bulb’ Solution Lights Homes in Manila
Granted I can only give you a sample size of one, but during the downturn, things got pretty bad in a number of ways, mostly in that staffing was severely restricted and pressure was put on production to produce a lot with only a few people. That also leads to having to work at an unsustainable pace.

High turnover and having lots of temps to try and make things work, even semi-permanent temps, is generally the norm as far as I can tell. And yes, it can really screw with production. Lots of people who don't know what they're doing is always hard to deal with.

So yeah, I think it was the downturn that led to people getting treated like crap, but maybe Amazon really is worse than most. I've never been there, so I don't know. I can tell you that when you have lots of temps, you will see people getting fired all the time for screwing up or slacking off. Some of them even deserve it.
Being the #1 desktop platform, and probably the #1 (non-web) server platform? If Microsoft isn't "very successful", I'd love to see who is.
If Apple began building cars, would you "consider" buying one? Comparing the Microsoft brand with the Kia brand is not leveled. Microsoft is a top brand in Enterprise software. It is just getting into a different industry.

Now the most interesting thing, is that Microsoft was a worthy competitor years back with their Window Mobile brand. So it is not so far fetched to think they can regain the market share they lost, and maybe even more.
I rarely see many people take into account the opportunity cost of letting a really close A/B test reach 99.99% confidence when the benefit is by definition very marginal (that's why its taking so long, right?). I mean, is it really that bad to go on "close enough" results and move on to bigger and better tests?
In my 3 or so years as a Netflix subscriber I have noticed an extremely disturbing trend of Netflix killing useful features simply because they aren't good for the business.

I can think of 2 off the top of my head:

- You used to be able to easily access a page of latest release DVDs. They killed this page because "too many people were using it" - and they had a pretty audacious blog post assuring that now it is a better customer experience claiming "it caused contention to ship" - although I never had a problem and sorely missed the feature when it was gone

- You used to be able to see the top 50 streaming movies. It almost always had the top new hollywood blockbusters which I really wanted to see. This feature vanished one day with no explanation that I could find.

The new site redesign is also a good example, making it harder and harder to find the movies you actually want to watch.

For these reasons alone I was a relatively happy customer but I would never have invested in them as a company due to their lack of customer focus. This latest price fiasco was the nail in the coffin. I cancelled my membership.

For the price of the streaming plan, I will just watch one or two movies a month on Amazon Instant Video with a much bigger selection and much stronger customer focus. All the nice features which Netflix killed for no reason are featured prominently on the Amazon web page for starters.
But in the hypothetical future where 3D printers are ubiquitous, if you sell a script to build the lower receiver, then does that count as selling one?

Reminds me of the case where Phil Zimmerman noticed that exporting crypto was a form of arms export, but exporting books was protected by the First Amendment. So he published the source code to PGP and shipped it.
Looks like there has been significant research on chronotype (A person's preference for daytime vs. nighttime activities). One study showed "About 1/10 people are actually hard-wired... to be early risers" and "2/10 people are what are known as night owls". So there maybe some proof to your genetics theory. People maybe hardwired to reach peak functionality at different times.

http://www.kwollity.com/2010/03/are-you-a-late-or-early-chro...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype
http://www.roundtheclocksystems.com/methods5_ctest.html
Show HN: I made a Pingdom clone while learning Go
I decided to learn Go[lang] and made a little Pingdom-like clone as a practise ground.

Use it if you like, it's working and I'll be using it to monitor our own servers so it will stay alive for the foreseeable future, and will be adding the ability to collect arbitrary JSON data rather than just response-times soon.

Really impressed with go so far, looking forward to trying it out on a "real" project.
The main problem is that MS won't state what patents it believes are being violated, so the community can't evaluate that for itself. We just have to take their word for it.

"No, really. It's for your own good."
The Easy Way to Get Debt Help
If you hear about debt help you would be focus on the third actor which will help you to negotiate the settlement of your debt, so it might give you easiness to pursue, and have no problem with bad report of your credit card. But it is too narrow. Because in debt help you even could find another easiness even great consultation about financial steps that you might take. We know, not all people are seeking debt help for their debt because not all of them take any owe.
The Familiarity Rule
Telerik JustCode Q2 2011 SP1 Released
I think per-capita GDP is much more interesting than total GDP. Japan: 34k/yr, India: 3k/yr (source: wikipedia).
We open sourced something similar called StatGrabber awhile back, including Perl and Python client libraries. We tend to avoid threads, and so it instead uses non blocking UDP (guaranteed delivery on localhost) to a collector daemon, which aggregates and then delivers the info to Ganglia for graphing. https://spideroak.com/code if anyone is curious.

The client modules simply emit non-blocking UDP packets and get on with their business, avoiding slowing down their response time. You can graph 4 types of stats: counters (ex: transactions) averages (ex: size of transactions), accumulators (ex: bandwidth used) and elapsed time (ex: time per transaction)

It's pretty nice to see Ganglia graphing system metrics along side of all the stats we have the backend emit. For example, one of the stats graphed are revenue events. There's clear relationship between network health issues and revenue.
I badgered one guy into wearing one. I noticed a big improvement in his condition, whether he did or not.

You're right that they help a LOT. I think we were able to get a bunch at a dollar store for some ridiculously cheap price. I can't believe that more places don't use them.
The first paragraph is golden, but this:

> Also, whatever tech they are licensing could reduce costs for the consumer. (eg. it's cheaper to license tech from MSFT than to re-implement major portions of the linux kernel)

Makes no sense. "license" from MS does not reduce the cost of implementation. The cases discussed in the article refer to paying MS to use Linux. There is NO WAY that this reduces costs for the consumer. They did not get anything from Microsoft except the promise not to sue.
Codes are just randomly generated then stored in a postresql db for later reference. If there is a collision, it adds a digit.
you're right about the duty to rescue, however having been involved with OnStar's systems sometime ago I will tell you what they will say. "While we still collect data on your driving habits, information is not monitored it is collected and stored and analyzed later. We are not currently equipped to monitor the millions of vehicles that are currently equipped OnStar that are not subscribers." But I'm sure everyone on this forum knows it would not take much modification to have accidents set off an alarm in their monitoring system. This way only when an accident happens would you be notified. But the liability reasons I'm sure they will not want to open up that can of worms.
I've worked at warehouses over summers in high schools and it was tough but I don't regret it. This place sounds like a third world shithole.

Everything else aside, the "terrible" working conditions at Foxconn that people get so riled up about sound better then this Amazon warehouse in the US.
It's the job of the operating system to control what applications have access to. The firmware does not need to override anything. The OS should either implement a phone component or delegate to a phone app that has been configured to have phone permission.

Binary blob completley-isolated firmware is possible and simple to implement. It's also safe.
The other other difference is that iPad, iPod, iPhone, etc. actually describe their eponymous products ...

iPhone? Sure. iPad? Maybe. iPod? Definitely not.

It only seems that way because the iPod dominated the product category so strongly as to become synonymous with "portable digital music player."
New Web App for freelancers
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مسلسل بائعة الورد الحلقة 15
The company I work for, R Systems (http://www.rsystemsinc.com/), basically does this. We own and admin several medium-sized compute clusters (200-500 node clusters) which are rented out to customers who need a lot of compute on a temporary basis.

A lot of what we do is heavily custom, and we provide a lot of support for our customers, but we still typically beat Amazon on both price and performance. EC2 might work nicely for embarrassingly parallel workloads, but they don't have Infiniband available if you're latency-bound... :)
It isn't really clear cut. Is there a difference in selling a firearm and selling a printer that can print firearms?
When I was 14 I worked a warehouse gig assembling sunday-morning newspapers (the news printed that morning is combined with a larger pre-printed section of want-ads, etc). The hours were 3am-6am, it was poorly ventilated, the pay was bad, and the work tiring. The lesson I took away from that job is that if I wanted something better I had better improve myself and get some marketable skills. Skills that'd add value to what I do for an employer, and that'd cause the employer a loss of value if they were to let me go.

I'd hope current warehouse workers would walk away with a similar lesson - but apparently not in this case since the employee at the opening of the article is 34.

Basically, if you are an unskilled worker don't show surprise at the fact that your employer can and will easily replace you with someone else who'll do more work at a cheaper price.

If not, I'll provide different advice that I learned in the Army. Drink more water if it is hot.
Very inspiring!!!!! I love it!
This is not 'printing a gun', this is printing two passive parts that you could just as well have whittled from wood or cast or put together in a hundred different ways. The 'load bearing parts' of a gun are the barrel, the breech and the trigger mechanism. For the sake of the argument let's pretend that the title is right and that you can 'print a gun'.

You could always make a gun, all you needed was a lathe, some tooling, a hacksaw a file, some steel stock and a bunch of patience.

Printing a gun is just another way to get to the goal, possibly an easier one but one with its own unique challenges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvised_firearm

The differentiating factor for a gun from printed ABS is not that you've made it at home, but that it is very hard to detect the gun itself (you'd have a hard time not using metal at all, especially for the parts mentioned above and then there is the ammo).

You can bet that if you get caught with one trying to board an airplane that there will be very serious repercussions, you won't be able to say you left it in your carry-on luggage by accident. Well, you can say that but good luck to get anybody to believe you.

So, printing a gun is not the same as buying a gun, it is the same as making a fire-arm at home through conventional means.

On another note, the design of a working firearm, especially from unproven materials, is not something you muck around with unless you know your materials science. A gun that explodes when fired could have some pretty nasty effects on you and bystanders.
If you feel that friends shouldn't upvote a post, fine. That's your opinion of how the community should work and you are entitled to it.

But don't accuse people of "sock puppeting" unless you have all the facts. Sock puppeting implies creating faking accounts, which is not the case and this should be easy for the admins to verify. Also, stating that they used employees to upvote is pathetic, because they have no employees!

The truth is much simpler: OP wrote a blog post about his experience, posted it on HN and shared the link with his network of friends/acquaintances (myself included). I enjoyed the post, upvoted and wrote a positive comment. Period.

What is wrong with that?? I am a real user (746 days old account) and legitimately thought the post was well written and very helpful for other starting entrepreneurs. It seems many other people also found this to be the case, as there were several links to the post in the local media, not to mention dozens of comments on the original blog. (Sock puppets too??)

In the future, I will disclose even a remote relation to an OP when I write a comment, just to be safe. But, please, don't go around making accusations based on loose facts and general suspicions. Witch-hunting is just as harmful to HN.
""As part of our hiring process at Mixer Labs, we would often give people a half day coding exercise. "

I'm just letting you know, I'm not working with you. Luckily, after years of experience I have been able to arrange lines of clients wanting me to get stuff done for them so I'm capable of screening companies like you on simple cues like this.

Have fun finding a slave who'll just do what you ask, no questions asked, no creativity involved.

Of course, I'm lazy but only about things that don't really matter. Only stupid people laboriously move huge tons of mass by dragging them; smart people invent a wheel and an internal combustion engine.
The gave their future competitor a pretty crappy name!
EA has the same problem.

It's a US legal system thing. I don't know the law by name, but a contractor can only be kept on for a period of 6 months to a year. After that, they must be made full-time or removed. After a cool-down period, they can be rehired.

Some companies are getting around this legally but hiring companies to outsource, and yet embed, contractors into the client's office under a managed service agreement.
Sounds like to me they're getting into what TomTom does with their Traffic HD service (think that's what it's called). Cellular modems report location and speed, based on which traffic reports are shared with other navigation units.
I think the larger issue here, that legislation is not caught up with the digital world. And I don't suspect it will for some time. There is little incentive for companies and governmental agencies from restrictions on what they can or cannot track without a warrant. Law enforcement agencies want easy access to your entire digital footprint and companies want to continue to pilfer that information for profit. Unless sweeping legislation is introduced or broad enough case is brought before the Supreme Court your digital life will remain an open book to anyone with enough money, technology or know-how.
A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day
Git in 5 minutes
You can't just print a metal part without some serious post processing to reach the desired strength, and even then you'll be hard pressed to come up with a part that is the same size and just as strong.

Printing full metal parts is possible but there are some penalties, relatively low tensile strength is one of those.
There are a lot of real-world examples which makes the whole thing worth reading and not just the summary. I took my own notes, but it would have been nice to have a summary of key points at the end of each chapter.
Italy Proposes Internet Access Ban on Single Accusation Of Infringement
Note: the link above is dead.

I'm not sure there is much point in debating whether or not DF belongs on the front page.

The voting system and community determine that.
As a Netflix user for 5+ years, I for one can't wait until a viable competitor with equivalent selection emerges.

Not trying to single you out, but let me get this straight... You liked the service enough to keep it for 5 years, the service has not changed substantially to the point where competitors have suddenly become attractive and you still want to ditch them?

It's just the company's new strategy. Do I think it was a good idea? Not really. But it's not like they're killing people. Is this really a good reason to go all nerd rage on a company and start cancelling subscriptions?
Microsoft to offer cheap hardware, software to students from low-income families
They still ship Windows CE on multiple architectures.
The posted link is a PerfectMarket page. First time on HackerNews, I think.
I sent it to directly to pg, so he must have killed it. I suppose you're right though.
the main reason why you'd be able to overturn a speeding ticket in the first scenario you mentioned, is because the burden is on law enforcement to prove you are breaking the law. It's one of the last few bastions where the intangible burden of proof remains high and squarely placed on law enforcement.
There should be some legacy apps that will run. Especially if non-phone ARM devices get the full .net framework.
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A cornucopia machine will create a few social problems as well as some legal issues.
I have seen this happen. People moved from USA/Can to Sweden because of software patents.

pypy
Another advantage to keeping a significant part of your work force transitional, is that knowledge has to reside in the documentation and processes, as you can't plan on the same employee being present for more than a year. Management likes this, because it gives them more leverage in replacing employees.
I have to believe this is true. Netflix has made no small bones about the fact that its recommendation / collaborative filtering algorithm is its strongest competitive advantage. To your point, they even sponsored that contest awhile back.

No way in hell they'd weaken, much less throw away, their golden goose.
In-App Purchase Revenue Growing as Developers Adopt “Freemium” Model
The problem for them is that their core markets, the desktop and the non-web server, are becoming less and less relevant in comparison to mobile and web-based technologies. When people say the PC is dead, it's not that the desktop computer is dead - the form factor will continue to be popular - it's the local OS + applications + data model that was made popular with the 8-bit computers of the late 70's is losing space to a model where your apps and data reside on servers accessible through the internet using a wide assortment of different devices.

If Windows 8 becomes a big hit, then, perhaps, Microsoft will survive long enough to completely switch its own model of selling software licenses to selling hosted services and the attention of its users through their app store model. In any case, it will be a very different Microsoft than the one that sold me the FORTRAN/77 compiler I used in college.
This. Ultimately, the splitting of the queues between two sites will be what drives me away from Netflix. As long as the streaming choices are only sporadically decent and intermittently available, having the DVD option as a backup is important.

Currently, if I come across anything I'd like to see at some point in the future, I add it to my Netflix queue and forget about it. I may watch it via streaming if and when available, or get it on DVD, or buy it...it doesn't really matter. The queue itself has value because it's a one stop shop for anything I may want to see (well, aside from things currently showing on television, which get added to Tivo in similar fashion).

Splitting the queues kills that convenience. Now I'll have to add it to multiple queues on different sites, and think about which list(s) something needs to be on, and maybe keep things in sync...it takes Netflix's single best feature to me and just kills it.
That is the main reason why I want a unified queue: inconsistent availability. I put "Scarface" on my queue, but being a low priority it's pretty far down; I was content that someday it would reach the top of the DVD queue and show up, or that on a whim I could hit "Play Now" and stream it. One day I noticed it was tagged for removal from streaming a few days hence, and didn't have time to watch it in the meantime. Streaming option disappeared. [shrug] Well, it's still available by DVD, I'll get to it. Then I get the "we're going to split the service" notice, note that I only watch 2-3 discs a month (lots of streaming instead) so the separate fee wasn't worth it and I canceled. Even if I want to pay a one-time rental to watch it, not available as an option and alternatives (sign up, get disc, cancel) are too much hassle now.

Huh, maybe I'll check Amazon, where I can buy "Scarface" new, buy it used, no-strings streaming rental, or maybe even Prime "free" streaming...and all from a single search...[clickety clickety]...ah, it's $3 to stream it once, and there's 53 purchasing/renting options from $0.01+shipping used VHS to $3 streaming rental to $700 including humidor. Pity it's not in the "free Prime streaming" option, but at least I know the options with one search.
How To Select Top Network Marketing Companies
Wouldn't it also be a tax thing? Here in the Netherlands we have tax laws to prevent this kind of things, where if you can't choose your own hours/days/work and are essentially employed, but pretend to be a contractor, for all tax purposes the company is your employer, even in hindsight. Makes hiring people as contractors pretty tricky for startups sometimes.
The law is not applied equally in court. By design, defense faces a much lower bar than prosecution. It is perfectly reasonable to require certified calibration to determine guilt, but accept data from an uncalibrated consumer device to overturn a ticket.

(As an aside, I don't think GPS would require any calibration anyway. If I understand it correctly, it'll pretty much either work or not work, with the accuracy of the output determined largely by atmospheric conditions and satellite geometry. The worry here would be deliberate tampering rather than calibration.)
Damn, son! Thirty dollars?! That's a serious chunk of payola.
+1 for melatonin. I actually like the vivid dreams. I also dream in brighter colors while on it.

I have noticed that it doesn't mix well with alcohol though. It still puts me to sleep, but then I'm up at 4am and definitely not refreshed.
What Steve Jobs Is Like In A Meeting
I agree. It's almost the exact reverse of what they tried to do with Tablet PCs before the iPad: wedge a fundamentally inappropriate UI into a place that demands something else.

Apple also seems to be headed in the same direction with its introduction iOS features into Lion: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/3556631202/touch-ui-is-not-th...
This may be one of the greatest things I've ever seen. It's both productive and hilarious. That being said I would be horrified to either send or receive anything with this in it.
That's pretty cool. I'll have to start using it.
2 Links to Explain Netflix's Changes