skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I've spent more than 30 years as a programmer, before that I spent 8 years as an art major so I know a little bit about how non-artist types steer away from this kind of thing. That said, there are a few things that might help. One of my favorites is 'I can't draw a straight line...' well, neither can I (nerve damage and age)---when I need one, I use a ruler. Another is the usual comparison to some great artist, Rembrandt or the like. If you actually look at them you usually find out that what they can (or could) do breaks down into two areas---that which can be learned and talent. Can't do a damn thing about talent, you have to be born with that, but learning (which amounts to a bit more than 80% of what most think of as good art), that is a matter of teaching and practice. Best way to get to the goal of decent artwork is to stop telling yourself you can't do it and pick up whatever tool happens to be handy and have a go at it.
I grow tired of Kurzweil's vague arguments against people who disagree with his vague predictions.

What I think Kurzweil doesn't understand is that in any argument about what's going to happen in the future, the onus of proof inevitably lies with the guy saying "This is what's going to happen", not the guy saying "Ehh, maybe not".

I don't know what's going to happen in the future, and I don't pretend to know what's going to happen in the future, but whatever happens either (a) I'll find out eventually or (b) it'll happen after I'm dead anyway. But john_b's point about Kurzweil's lack of a null hypothesis is a good one.

So my question for Kurzweil is this: what will the world look like if you're wrong? What possibilities are your predictions excluding? If I'm still alive in 2060, and I look around at the world around me, under precisely what conditions am I entitled to say "Well whaddya know, looks like Kurzweil was wrong about that Singularity thing after all"?
Just because it's dangerous doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. It's risk, not ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER.
Agree with this or not, this is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking members of Congress need to be doing.
How "Load-based workload balancing" is done in JDK?
You see more explicit use of http status codes in web service (data) API's particularly ones using REST.
Hi Roland,

Ordasity could certainly be used in building distributed JRuby applications. However, I'm not sure that pairing it with Rails would be the best use case.

Ordasity is designed for building stateful distributed services -- e.g., systems which can be described in terms of individual nodes serving a partition or shard of a cluster’s total load. Rails applications tend to follow a stateless model in which any application server could serve any request.

Ordasity is more appropriate for building services in which a specific node will be serving all [requests / queries / events] for a work unit in the cluster. In our case, that's our netflow aggregation systems (which pull data together from a network of edge nodes into a single Kafka stream), and our event stream processing system (which we shard by client). In this example, we have two Ordasity clusters -- one comprised of Kafka nodes, and a second containing our event stream processing tier. Ordasity handles work distribution across both tiers, ensures that both clusters are aware of each other and able to communicate, and helps us guarantee that everything is wired up properly (i.e., each node on each tier is communicating with the proper node on another tier) when data is passed between them.

In short -- yes, you could build a distributed service in JRuby (or Clojure, Mirah, Scala, Java, etc.) with Ordasity. Just wanted to offer that note to clarify use cases.
What about garage sales?
I'm not very familiar with building services on the JVM at the moment (though I'd love to be), so a quick, honest question:

What are the pros/cons of Ordasity[1] vs. something like Finagle[2]? Are they comparable and if so why would one be chosen over the other, what are the strengths of one vs the other, etc.

[1]: https://github.com/boundary/ordasity

[2]: https://github.com/twitter/finagle
If the boss deserves a negative assessment then he deserves to get one. The mistake that the OP made is believing that HR is there for low level employees and putting his true feelings on paper.

Always remember that HR is present to safeguard the company. They will look after the manager more than they look after you because he is, to the company, much more important.

OP: you need to learn what I learnt during my time in corporate America - focus on getting what u want instead of focussing on being right. When your a startup founder you can work on creating a better workplace. For now though focus on getting along with the boss. It's a way to make good money and it's a great skill to have - being able to work with difficult people.
Perl Twitter client scrapped and rewritten in Go due to concurrency issues
I'll second the article's contention that Athens, GA is a pleasant place to be if you work in tech. We even have some folks trying to nurture a startup scene - http://www.fourathens.com/
Depends on what process you are talking about. If you are trying to improve a process which will hurt the time to deliver of a major project costing a company money, then is it really right to call the company a failure?

Every company/division/organization has priorities and while there maybe inefficiencies in their processes, they maybe a minor cost in relation to the other priorities. (I can't believe I actually just played devils advocate/defended this).
This is pretty clearly targeted at meth heads, auto thief rings, and the mob (there's a mob in LA?). It basically says if you're running any kind of scrap metal yard, auto yard or dealer, pawn shop, or similar business where you buy high value items from anybody who walks in off the street, stop giving people cash so we can track them down.

The law's so poorly written and overbroad (i.e. the definition of "junk" is "junk"; a single garage sale would seem to subject you to liability) that, even if it's legal for a state to ban the use of cash (almost certainly not), this thing will get thrown out anyway.
Adobe Flash bug allow spying Webcam hole
I would hope that it applies to everyone or the law would be miss a portion of the illegal activity they are attempting to capture. Criminals will probably still operate in cash and those that are law-abiding now have to go through the hassle of documentation.
Your Customer Is Always Right
But how much did that 20 seconds delay cost you? It would have been nice to have the answer faster, but how much would you have been willing to shell out for it?

I'm talking about economics. I'm talking about what people are willing to pay for.
Yes, all RFC documents use this style. You can find more at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html
I think that might be off a bit. Merchants are allowed to refuse any coinage in excess of something ($20?).

Coins and paper money have different rules in general.
Ask HN: Where are all the awesome jobs?
I want an awesome job. Don't we all? I've been programming now for 11 years and have plenty of experience in many fields, languages and technologies.

Right now, I can also afford to be very picky when it comes to choosing my next job.

So I'm looking for work based anywhere in the US but obviously some places would be more preferable, such as those near to centres of entertainment, international airports, ski resorts etc.

I'd love a job which doesn't have the traditional American mentality of "more hours makes a better employee" or that taking vacation is some sort of weakness.

Where are these jobs? Do they even exist? Are you currently working at a job like this?
It's defined in §1861(A)(1) as "Anyone, other than a nonprofit entity, who buys, sells, trades in, or otherwise acquires or disposes of junk or used or secondhand property more frequently than once per month from any other person, other than a nonprofit entity, shall be deemed as being engaged in the business of a secondhand dealer."

The law seems targeted at pawn shops and the like, but is broadly worded enough to apply to some random person buying stuff off of Craigslist.
There are several programs that let you 'buy' a Visa and adding another one for the low low price of '$500,000 to buy a home in the U.S.' is not going to do much for immigration or home prices.
Here is a rough transcript of a Long Now Foundation talk by SF author Vernor Vinge (and coiner of the term "singularity") entitled "What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?". He sees:

* Scenario 1: A Return to MADness (nuclear war)
* Scenario 2: The Golden Age (peace and prosperity)
* Scenario 3: The Wheel of Time (catastrophic natural disaster)

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/
New from Vertical Response
U.S. Mobile Social Media Audience Grows 37 Percent in the Past Year
Http://marcocastenetto.com/
So, the criminal is going to be caught because they documented their illegal activities?

I think this is a case of a law that catches only the innocent.
Jordan Essentials Review - By an honest third party expert.
A debt is any financial obligation. Any partially executed contract (you receive a good you agreed to pay for), creates a financial obligation, and hence a debt.

So, article I should make the law invalid.
$500,000 to get a visa? Seems to me like Congress is still catering to the rich.
IPhone can be used as spy phone to get desktop Keystrokes
Since it takes only one counterexample: I participate (pseudonymously) in G+.

I follow a number of people who associate by their (so far as I can ascertain) birth / given / legal names, and a number with evident pseudonyms (having gone so far as to seek out same). Several of these have noted that the apparent pseudonyms are in fact birth / given / legal names, go figure.

I use circles to categorize both inbound and outbound posts by content and context (NB: this doesn't work very well, and recent improvements in search help).

There are people I do know IRL who are on G+. None AFAIK actually know the link between my pseudonym and my legal identity, though of course, some may have done the math.

I frankly don't trust Google (or by extension its successors and/or business/government "partners") with my personally identifiable data, to this degree.

I've had the batshit crazy conspiracy shibboleth thing thrown at me before. Sometimes it's a valid criticism. Surprisingly often, it's not.

As for the "use another service" shibboleth: network effects and social/commerce expectations currently all but require use of Facebook in some contexts, and similar effects would almost certainly arise for any closed, proprietary successor. So long as social networks are closed, there really isn't a viable alternative. It's the equivalent of trying to exist without a phone or postal service in the 1980s or 1990s. Yes, it's possible, but only in a highly marginal way, and you'll find you're excluded from many interactions and services.

The real solution, the one I've been considering for some time, is an open social networking framework that breaks the silos. If social networking is truly the cat's meow, and sufficiently valuable that people demand it, and systems such as Diaspora can gain traction, I see the third-tier networks and open solutions (Diaspora, etc.) developing an open model. Think very strong analogs to how the GNU project and Linux emerged to the point that no proprietary Unix vendor can credibly be called a market leader, though several do survive (Sun as an Oracle subsidiary, AIX within IBM, Mac OS X as a consumer product, etc.).
Merchants can refuse your business for any reason they want....
Why is dropbox suddenly getting a slew of coverage? Did this article get written because got a big feature in Fortune? Did they just hire someone to interact with the press?
Depends on your definition of close friends, and your definition of acquaintances. If acquaintances include the boyfriend of someone you somewhat knew in high school, then my use of a pseudonym that I had never used before worked for acquaintances while using facebook. What it didn't work for was people who simply had my name but didn't know any of my friends and/or were not specifically invited by me in facebook or real life to become my friend.

If you were looking for a guy who had my real name on facebook, you were out of luck. If you noticed one of your friends having a conversation with me, and asked who I was and knew me/recognized who I was due to the content of the conversation/recognized me as likely someone you might want to know based on your sampling of my adjacent nodes and my public content, you would have been able to find me.

>"There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by."

Not everybody wants to be discoverable in the same way. I may not want you to be able to find me just because you know my name. Maybe I want to avoid old one night stands/people I did drugs with/people I was in prison with/the obsessed schizophrenic who lives in my building and rely on my current network of friends and serendipity to populate my friend list.

I think the most important question is whether you are tolerant or intolerant towards that - noting that even if you do require real names, you won't be able to find mine anyway, because I won't be there. That question addressed to google or facebook is: "Are you still interested in me as a customer if you can't track me after I've left your system?"

If the answer if "No," you may not be evil, but you're certainly creepy.
IMHO, the future cannot be predicted. Period. I'm not talking impossible-as-in-hard. I am talking impossible-as-in-perpetual-motion.

Nice well-behaved linear Newtonian systems can be modeled and predicted. There are systems that are chaotic but that can be modeled in the aggregate very well too, like thermodynamic systems and certain kinds of fluid flow.

Life isn't like any of that. Life is complex, chaotic, computationally irreducible, and full of feedback loops on top of feedback loops. Even worse: predictions often create economic incentives to prove them wrong. Take a position on the stock market and you have created an incentive for your prediction to not come true.

People have always wanted to deny the fundamental unpredictability of history, and have always clung to woo-woo prophecy superstitions toward this end. The ancients had Tarot cards and pig entrails. We have graphs and computer models.
I hate that, personally. I don't always have to agree with whoever downvoted, or sometimes I'm just curious about what it said.

Especially the lowest contrast, after several downvotes, that's just stupid, because it's pretty much unreadable unless you select the text. So you know there's text, but you can't really read it, then why show it at all?
We were in that class of TechStars (ThinkNear). Not featured in the show -- though in retrospect it makes sense given what they were going for. They had a lot of footage they left on the cutting room floor, and I guess we were just too heads down to be very interesting. My cofounder and I also get along quite well, so we had very little drama to bring to the table.

I recommend the TechStars program to anyone, without any reservation whatsoever. It was really awesome for us. We started basically at zero, along with Lee (Veri), and another team not featured (who's now FourSquareAndSevenYearsAgo). We came out much stronger at the end than we could have been without TechStars with an awesome network, some great mentors, and were able to raise a bit over $1.6. Tisch and Cohen are awesome.

Seriously, don't let the show sour you at all on the program. Some companies will have drama early on, and the show really played it up.
The $500,000 floor seems to be a benefit for people who have $500,000 houses to sell. Doesn't do much for Joe Sixpack while he's deciding whether to stick or walk away.
Which other country does this? I think just lessens the appeal of an usa visa and the USA in general.
Good point about the fold and the name. I added the name to the menu and maybe I will make the logo smaller.

I also added a note about that the contacts-example could contain bugs. My purpose with the example is the show the possibilities with add(), values() and remove(). There fore I have tried to minimize the amount of code (and there by some functionalities). But I will of course fix real bugs if there are any.

The Documentation-link now leads to the readme!

Thanks for your input!
I don't think Kurzweil ignores economics at all. In fact, many of his arguments are largely based on economics, such as the cost to obtain a given amount of computation. It is undeniable that this has gone down steadily with time. Computation is so cheap that cloud computing (e.g., E2C, Azure) allows individual developers access to more computing than most know what to do with.

Your example of the MacBook Air is invalid because the MacBook Air of today isn't priced principally on performance -- it is priced mostly by build quality and performance/watt/kilogram. Never before have computers had a better performance/watt/kilogram profile. You have to consider the whole package.

The argument that there is less need for performance is also flawed. It is not that humans have less need for computation, it's that the distribution of computation is changing. As mentioned before, a lot of computation is moving to the cloud. In many cases, this is simply the most efficient place for it to be; instead of having an abundance of computation sitting mostly unused on a laptop or desktop, computation is becoming a service where it is used on demand. Think of the computation required for cloud services like speech to text processing or Google Goggles. Most of the computation is farmed out the servers in cloud and only minimal.

I'm not even sure I agree that the decrease in local computational needs is a long term trend. For one thing, migration to the cloud can only continue as long as network bandwidth keeps up with cloud data demands. If network bandwidth is not able to keep up then I predict we'll see local computational needs spike again.

Even with some computation siphoned off to the cloud, AI will create a whole new class of applications for even local computation because it is so data intensive. When the next crop of AI applications emerge and become more common, the early algorithms will probably be inefficient, which will itself cause a spike in computational needs. The applications are here yet but there are many (including myself) that are working hard to change that.
They already do that with the EB-5 visa. Invest at least $1,000,000 (or $500,000) and keep 10 jobs in the US and you can live here.
Yes camera calibration is a well known problem. You have some nice straight lines from the launch pad structure you should be able to do it with.
I don't understand - what problem is this supposed to solve?
Do I see a pattern emerge -- sitting on a large oil reserve and not "cooperating" with right people is detrimental to one's well-being.
This is great post! I would like to iterate on #5 though: HN as a community is an anomaly in that mostly everyone is likely to be much more tech-savvy than your target audience. The feedback you receive from highly intelligent, tech-savvy people is not always addressing the pain points your potential customers have. For instance, the latter can, and will pay for a wrapper service that takes a hacker 5 mins to deploy even though the product might get shot down at HN for its triviality.

This is ok and to be expected but keep in mind that a service that can be sold is usually judged not on its complexity but on the number of potential clients you can reach.

Edit: I now see that afdssfda mentioned something along the same lines below. I'll just leave this here though.
Because the industry norm for consumer gadgets is short product cycles, with the production of terrible quality code that doesn't see much maintenance after the release. Most users won't notice.

Even a "quality" product like the iPhone was shipped with everything running as root and a mess in the filesystem (and that's for a platform that has been maintained since).
No, it's a more fundamental issue: merchants are free to simply refuse your business. And if you're about to pay in pennies, they'll probably refuse your business.
Our Rationale for Purchasing a Smaller Home
Hey Mitchell,

Thanks for asking -- in short, the use cases are a bit different. Finagle is a framework for building asynchronous RPC systems (e.g., services or APIs with transports over HTTP or Thrift), and Ordasity is a library for cluster membership, load balancing, and distribution.

Twitter's put together a nice toolkit atop Netty for building reliable services and describing communication between them. These services are generally stateless and might be balanced by something like HAProxy (when using an HTTP transport), or via a round-robin approach in the case of Thrift clients. A closer comparator for Finagle would be something like Scalang, our library for building hybrid Erlang / Scala distributed systems (though it's also excellent for pure-Scala systems as well): https://github.com/boundary/scalang

Ordasity is designed for describing stateful clusters in which individual nodes are responsible for claiming longer-lived work units -- think of it in terms of "a processing shard" of the system's total load. The library's primary goals are to help you:

- Describe the cluster in simple terms such that when each node comes online, it joins the cluster and is aware of all other nodes (and vice versa)

- Distribute work across the cluster by directing each node to claim an even "count" of work units or "even distribution" of the total load imposed by those work units.

- Automatically rebalance work units across nodes in the cluster as the amount / intensity of work or cluster topology changes.

- And gracefully manage maintenance or downtime scenarios by draining work units to another node.

In the end, Ordasity and Finagle are both tools for building distributed systems on the JVM. However, the types of systems they're designed to describe are a bit different. Hope that helps; let me know if you'd like me to clarify something.
AJs Mobile Brakes
I never knew this, thanks for sharing!
Software knowledge shelf life
Ask HN: Fair buyout price for my partner?
I'm using a shadow account but I've been a member of HN for a while. My partner has asked me to buy him out of our business, and we're trying to come up with a fair buy out price.

Details:

- launched an app mid 2010 with a partner (50 / 50 split, not incorporated, no contract)
- this year, gross revenue is $21,948
- net revenue, after income taxes taken off for 2011 will be $17,558
- i'm the designer + idea guy
- he's the coder
- equal time contributions so far (we'd both agree)
- he'd like to keep 5% share and be an advisor

What do you think is a fair price? We're on good terms, no disagreements, everything's cool. What's fair?
you mentioned posting on a weekend is a gd strategy to get traffic. yet now you posted on a weekday morning. why did you switch your strategy? just curious.
"'Applicants can spend the entire amount on one house or spend as little as $250,000 on a residence and invest the rest in other residential real estate, which can be rented out,' the paper added."

$250k's not terrible.
Paul Reed Smith Single Cut
It's a VISA - not Permanent Residence. When people invest in a residence for a VISA, they generally do so to settle down. So I am not sure how safe the potential home buyers are going to feel investing $500K in a house with the risk that their VISA renewal or entry to the US can be denied 3 years down the road.

Current climate is just not very conducive to hope that something like this will fly.
Gaddafi Shows Why Google is Failing Its Mission in Search