skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article:

"This is not exactly an unknown problem. Google constantly harps on optimizing images, but Tumblr blindly reuses images that its users hand it. This makes me sad."

There are tons of valid uses for the color profile and other metadata in PNG files. Generally, I don't want services dicking with this stuff (in some cases I don't care, but I don't want the service to decide when I do or don't because it is bound to decide wrong some of the time, so they should just leave my data alone).

Onus should be on the content developer to save the image in a proper format and strip all metadata that isn't required. I don't want services I use stripping this stuff willy-nilly. Perhaps I want accurate color profile data in my PNGs so my tumblr followers can make accurate prints. Perhaps I want geolocation EXIF data in there because my blog is read by people who want to see this data, etc.

tl;dr -- Don't listen to this guy, Tumblr (or anyone else). He makes the classic mistake of "because something isn't important to me, it has no use".
Aside from the API having no access restrictions (and therefore has to be internal), it's providing pure data, no html.

The template rendering would have to be done in JS, which means that the templates have to be delivered to the browser. Either you load every template when you need it or you have to transfer all templates on page load. The first case has no advantage over a simple application layer on the server and the second increases page load time.

Thought further, some older mobile phones might have a hard time rendering complex templates in JS, so that might be another factor.

He should just do what best fits his requirements, and that might require a simple application layer in front of the api.
The Family That Sells Gold to the Government
It's also shipped in Debian Stable which is what I'm using for my (almost entirely dedicated to server-side programming) office workstation.
Can you provide a couple of examples?
Is this it?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...
Luckily, the set of people affected is actually the intersection of people running Ruby trunk and people using Ruby's libraries to generate keys.
good answer. the music pivot is cool, but i think that ship has sailed
...and that they succeeded.
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Much of the time, I'd agree. But working on a large system in Java, I repeatedly see a few places where Java's boilerplate overwhelms the code I actually care about.

Operations on collections:

List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>();
for (String word : words) {
result.add(word.toUpperCase());
}
return result;

Accessor methods:

private String name;

public String getName() {
return name;
}

public void setName(String name) {
this.name = name;
}

And arithmetic on user-defined types:

new Dollars(15).plus(new Dollars(25)).times(new Percentage(80))

This bulky, uninformative, junk code is a real barrier to readability, and these are just simple examples. Sure, it's possible to work around it, and to keep the badness contained, but it still means time wasted for anyone who needs to maintain it.

We started writing some code in Groovy on our large Java project at work a few months back, and it's been a revelation. Groovy feels like a bit of a hack in all kinds of ways, but we're still delighted with it, because being able to say:

return words.collect { word -> word.toUpperCase() }

or:

String name

or:

(new Dollars(15) + new Dollars(25)) * new Percentage(80)

just makes it _so much easier_ to see what's going on at a glance. Maybe if I were on a different sort of project -- one where I spent less time maintaining old code, or working with collections of data -- reducing boilerplate would seem like less of a big deal. As it is, though, it has seriously improved my quality of life. If Xtend can bring that kind of improvement to more people, I'm all for it.
Abercrombie & Fitch abre en Madrid | estoyradiante.com
Kamyon oyunu
Thank god. Finally, a web startup that addresses real-world problems
I don't understand why they chose to kill it instead of improve it.
Just to be 100% clear -- so people don't misunderstand your explanation of Mongo's compaction: Mongo does have a free space map that it uses to attempt to fit new data or resized documents into "holes" left by deleted data. However, compaction will still eventually have to be ran as the data will continue to fragment and eventually things get bad.
Goldman is the great american bubble machine, and it's disgusting.

"From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again"

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american...
Why would a non-patent lawyer have any interest in preserving the "current Byzantine system"?
This doesn't exist already? I'd pay for a hardened AMI no question
Zeratul, you're obviously into ML. Would you mind if I asked what your application is? I'm just curious.

I work in computer vision. When I do a machine learning problem, I spend most of my time brainstorming and implementing good features. I'm getting deeper into ML (and loving it). I'm always curious what other people are doing with ML.
No they're not.

- a physics major
Pd-extended and random-data streams
Cash Register, Point of Sale, Office Automation and Security System
Cash Register, Point of Sale, Office Automation and Security System
awesome. this is great for Ann Arbor's tech scene
Palm and then HP has a very long history of giving cheap and heavily discounted devices to developers for development purposes. I've been registered as a developer since, 2003 or 4, and it was common practice with the Treos.
9 Equations True Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know
Why 36 hours? For the 24-hour hackathons I usually stay up the whole time but 36 plus the surrounding time might be pushing it. I'll try it though :)

I see that the tickets are limited in numbers based on what they bring to the table: dev, design, biz. What was the thinking behind doing it this way? The page mentions that it was to make sure to get enough devs, I don't recall that being a problem at the hackathons I've been to.

(On details page say typo: says that have over $2,00 worth of prizes.)
Sorry, I just don't see this as a big need. I mean looking for an apartment at the going rate is inconvenient, but I just don't see why the startup ecosystem should support yet another variant on this.

Here's my algorithm for looking for an apartment.

1) If I want to rent in a major, professionally managed building, just take one weekend and drive around the area I would like to live in. Honestly, it's old fashioned, but you're going to need to do this at some point.

2) If I am interested in renting from a small scale landlord or just renting a room then I use CL (and so apparently do all the startups in this space).

The apartment market is pretty darned efficient. If you think you've got a bargain, just wait. Maybe it will be mold, or noisy plumbing or bad neighbors, but whatever it is a problem will arise that will teach you just how efficient markets can be.

I just don't see the need for yet another apartment search site. Would it be nice? Sure. But would it solve a major pressing pain point? At least not for me and probably not for enough people that the business can get paid by users or advertisers and create a sustainable business model.

Now I do think the way we rent is fundamentally broken, but that's a business model problem that needs to address a broad set of pain points of renters and landlords.

For example, I think there are a lot of people in this economy who should be renting rooms out, but aren't (e.g. if you're unemployed and relying on my tax dollars to fund you AND you have a 4 bedroom house in a large MSA - maybe look into getting rid of some of your junk and monetizing your square footage).

Now if you're still reading this, you're probably coming up with a lot of reasons why someone just can't rent some of the excess square footage in their house. Now come up with a business model that honestly addresses all those reasons, then execute that model. Then get rich. Thanks.

some potential solutions: better screening of applicants, semi-co-housing like solutions, helping homeowners move out of unnecessarily large homes and downsizing to smaller residences while renting out their former residences (could be useful for retirees who aren't willing to sell in this market, but want to downsize), help families set up au pair arrangements where part of the rent is paid for in services (this could alleviate the concerns of families with children who want to rent out a room, but are worried because they have kids). Bottom line - Americans have WAY too much square footage plus there's an emerging trend toward more minimalistic downsized lifestyles both for economic and cultural reasons. I don't know of any business that is helping people monetize their square footage.

If you've got any ideas+skills contact me and maybe I can help you raise some money.
It's extremely peaceful and quiet there, so you'd probably be quite happy.
The Limoncelli Test (Joel test for Sysadmin Teams)
Well, in the case of tumblr, most users are not technically proficient enough to know what's going on there. Plus, they certainly don't care about tumblr's costs, unless their pictures load noticeably slowly. And even then... well, let's just say most tumblrs are not exactly carefully-maintained gardens. So tumblr is likely serving tons of wasted data, slower than necessary, harming most of their user's experiences by preserving that data. Consider mobile users with limited data plans - they likely don't feel much sympathy with your argument.

Compromise: tumblr receives the image, compresses it, and shows the result to the user saying "how does it look?", as well as a disclosure triangle to show the list of optimizations it made, noting that if the picture looks wrong, to click it. When that disclosure triangle opens, it also offers a button saying something to the effect of "use what I uploaded, damn it!"

The vast majority who don't care click right through, those who do have a simple interface to see exactly what's going on with their image, and X thousands of pages can load quicker and save millions of people's bandwidth (and tumblr a bunch of money). Mobile users don't waste money on useless data and their images load much faster.
There is no possible reason why you would need metadata for any kind of thumbnail, much less a user icon.

In any event, tumblr already resizes all large images to a maximum of 1280 pixels on either axis. If you were very concerned with maintaining images in their original state, this would be driving you up a wall. Good thing it's trivially easy to use alternative image hosting sites, like flickr or photobucket, on tumblr.
* There are memorable keyboard shortcuts for everything.
* It can generate comparatively more code for you.
* It's faster, though I fear it's working on losing this advantage.
* The autocomplete is smarter, and has a few different options.

I started using IntelliJ a few years ago, when I came onto a Java project after several years using vim and Python, and I'm convinced it made the transition a lot less painful.

The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse may be smaller than it feels to me now--IntelliJ is what I'm used to, after all, so using Eclipse involves adjusting to a subtly different interface--but I'd still say it's worth a try. There's a free version, so there's not really anything to lose.
Philosophy and mathematics are both liberal arts. Software is nothing but applied analytic philosophy, with some mathematics thrown in here and there in specialized domains.

My first degree was in pure mathematics. Now I wish I had done more philosophy, but thankfully it is not a difficult field for an autodidact.
Nest Thermostat: Keeping Tabs along with the Temp
I think $0.002 may be a tad high.

The rate is closer to $0.0016 and to even have your music on Spotify you need to go through an aggregator(think fees) or pay Spotify money.

Indie musicians would be lucky to get anywhere near $0.002 per play on Spotify.
> On the other hand if you abstract your interaction with data enough, you can change the whole backend later once it's stable and not care about it up-front.

have to disagree with this. By forcing yourself to work with a data layer so abstracted that you can't even reference whether you're dealing with a JSON document or a set of twelve joinable tables, you're going to write the most tortured and inefficient application. Non trivial applications require leaky abstractions.
For me, 24 hours felt like too little to get something very cool out. However, I had the same mindset as you in that I felt a 40 hour or 48 hour hackathon I would never be able to stay up for. So, I decided to meet in the middle: 36 hours :)

The idea behind the tickets was that, this was first and foremost about programming, meaning I wanted designers and developers to make up the majority of the attendees. I felt while Startup Weekend was building a startup from scratch, this was about building a great product — and not having to worry as much about the marketing, business profitability, etc. I had also been scorned after going to a "Engineer and Entrepreneur meet and greet" in Ann Arbor and realized that everyone there was looking for a programmer, and there were no engineers/programmers at the event. My number one worry was that people would come and would all have ideas, but no one to build those ideas.

Thanks for the typo as well, we fixed it right away!
Quarterly Earnings Lead Lenovo World’s Second-Largest PC Vendor
Great idea -- "add to dropbox" buttons, but 18 months--seriously?
Round and round the college and anti-college hordes go once again. It'd be nice if people used more common sense.

ROI is the proper consideration here. Two questions govern degrees:

1. What's the expected ROI of your degree?

2. Can you financially afford that?

A degree is an investment into your future. It pays off in various ways: financial, social, networking, mental, etc. It financially costs a lot at some schools, less at others. Some degrees pay more money than others. What can you afford? What are you going to college for?

It is indisputable that execution of the degree program is a big deal. Some students are in it for the party, others are in it for the knowledge, etc.

Cost of US college has risen faster than health care costs in the last thirty years. This is becoming an acute problem. I have no idea how I will support my children in college in any significant fashion at that rate of increase. I suspect the whole business will undergo a systemic collapse and reset by then.

Many engineering types are not in college for an education, they are in it for training. They have no desire or interest in underlying principles governing their work, or any other knowledge besides their degree. They want to get out and make money ASAP. I do not like that attitude, it's very short-term and narrow of thought.

Liberal arts types usually are in college for a broad education, having a wide understanding of things. That doesn't work out so good financially quite often. There's little call for a philosopher in the bottom-line lean style world of business. (editorial: That might be a reason why we have ethics problems in business too...) I think it's very important that liberal arts degrees exist. The ideal government policymaker, among their other skills, has a broad knowledge of the world and its cultures.

It is notable that the liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric) were considered in antiquity the proper study of a free person, and slaves were the technicians/manual laborers.
This is the thirty-second version of Intersectionality

Do you really think that's fair. Don't you think that a snarky "thirty second version" of anything can portray that area of study as a waste of time?
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> If you want to go to the moon you need a f'ing spaceship and not emacs and an open source notebook. Spaceships are big. They take a lot of people to run, and they have to be smart people. One mistake and you are smithereens at Cape Canaveral.

The moon is not that far away from orbital flight. These two guys might disagree with you: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
I think you raising "hackers" with this is the perfect way to describe the situation. Goldman are hackers in the same sense the main stream media refers to crackers as hackers, not hackers in the creative sense used by this community.

Futures markets have a purpose, in food and energy for example, but GS along with others has been manipulating them in dodgy ways. Ditto for this article and aluminum. They helped Greece cook the books to enter the eurozone, and then insured against Greek default knowing there would be bailouts. They recommended to various customers to invest in all sorts of CDOs while at the same time betting against them having internally decided they were going to fail. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there should be numerous prosecutions in relation to GS but incompetence in public officials with a generous sprinkling of corruption makes this unlikely.

I'm a big fan of America but I've never understood the romanticism around the mafia (the Godfather films and the Sopranos TV series for example). If I had friends in the mafia I would disown them, and I'd seriously rather die than join it. While GS is perhaps not as bad directly, indirectly the consequences of their actions have been and are enormously immoral. I recommend you challenge your friends on these issues firmly, send them a link to Salman Khan's story[1] and tell them to put their (no doubt considerable) talents to better use: doesn't have to be a non-profit either. Even if they decide not to leave they should be made aware that there is social sanction associated with being linked to, if not directly involved in, the vortex of corruption surrounding that company.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Khan_(educator)
PHP Quick Start - CEH - Saher Team
This is bad, but it's not in the same league as the Debian ssh bug.
The bug is pretty bad, but it's not as big of a deal because http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3201006
This is pretty awful, but it seems like one of these problems that could and should be solved by the free market.

Somebody should just start a new metals exchange that caters to the needs of its clients rather than trying to squeeze them. There is no reason why America has to do its metals trading in some ancient London exchange.
Expandrive works well for this.
It is indisputable that execution of the degree program is a big deal. Some students are in it for the party, others are in it for the knowledge, etc.

A lot seem to be in it for the sheepskin more than the knowledge per se. I took a college class where classmates explicitly advocated for the teacher to go easy on us and skip some stuff, it wouldn't matter, they just wanted their credits, did not want to have to work too hard for them (ie they wanted that class checked off their schedule, whether they learned anything or not). My reaction: What if you need to actually know that stuff (for a later class or your, oh, job)?

This did not make me popular. It just made me more of a nerdy social outcast.
depends if it's pretty printed or not (like the example above)
A similar thing is happening with generic chemotherapy drugs. Profit margins for generics are thin, so few companies manufacture them. When a supply issue arises, distributors stockpile the drug and charge hospitals one or two scales of magnitude of the generic price.
Investment banks do provide valuable services: market making (providing liquidity in many markets), capital raising, the creation of financial instruments so investors can hedge against certain kinds of risk and so on.

Unfortunately I think we're reaching the point of banks overstepping their bounds and creating far more problems than they really should.

This strategy seems similar to the "demand shock" approach they used in driving up wheat prices in recent years. And of course the subprime crisis was the result of lax regulation, arguably criminal negligence by Standard & Poor's and Moody's (who rated certain baskets of loans as AAA) and a lot of players who simply didn't have to bear any risk.

I'm really not sure what the solution is here but something really needs to bring this system into check. Such paper shenanigans are having real negative consequences.

In Australia we have a strict financial regulation regime, arguably too strict in some cases, but we didn't have the bubble in real estate prices that the US did. "No doc" and "low doc" lending never reached the point of collapsing the market.

One could argue that financial regulation is to blame and you're probably right but I have no faith in the US government's ability to correct this or pretty much anything else. Washington now seems to be nothing more than a battleground for special interest lobbying and ideologues devoid of rationality.

In the past ~30 years or so investment banks have generally undergone a change from being a partnership to being a corporation. The major difference between the two is partnerships have unlimited liability. Much like a law firm, the partners are personally liable for losses.

I've come to the conclusion that this change has been detrimental to the function of the financial industry as a whole. Combine this with Federal government bailouts and investment bankers seem to act with complete impunity with regards to risk.

Something needs to change.
Java has first class functions. They're just called something else and contain a few more characters to create them.

I don't understand why some people consider this to be a massive hurdle...
Here's a freebie for Spotify and Rdio: Allow artists to sell their merch from your app/website. It would engender a ton of good will from artists. It might even help your margins (which I imagine can't be too huge) too.

If they don't do that, there's a startup idea for someone.
In the 60s the dominant ideology was that symbolic manipulation was all there is to AI (Society of Mind)[1]. Lisp (List Processing language) was the obvious choice for this as it is very good for string manipulation (emacs and elisp are proof of this). Also the ability to express code as lists or s-expressions made it possible to write program-writing-programs or macros which turned out to be very effective for text crunching.

Today, statistical learning is considered to be a better approach to building an AI. Much of the techniques of ML are expressed easily and efficiently using linear algebra for which Matlab (Matrix Labaratory) or Octave is much better suited.

I think Lisp fell out of favor as it is terrible when it comes to number crunching.

[1] The dramatic collapse of this ideology is chronicled in this wired article (Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?): http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimyst...
Sorry, just noticed this. Okay - how about this: organising your screen with various different views of the same sports match. So imagine you're watching a game of Rugby and "sports broadcasts of the future", given they have access to digital TV channels that are far less restricted by physical bandwidth, broadcast continuous streams of the coach, the bench, the score board, the commentators, the crowd and different camera angles on different streams, as well as the main "professionally edited" stream. You drag windows around and resize them to organise the various channels you're interested in into a custom viewing configuration.
Spells and Magic - Their Role in Religion
It might be worth pointing out, for readers who missed it, that this article was written in 2003. So instead of asking whether it correctly describes the situation today, you might find it more useful to ask whether it correctly described the situation in 2003, and whether things have changed, and if so how.