skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's pretty much not related at all. VLC is a player UI client, it doesn't have codecs of its own. You should be wishing for better GPU acceleration in libavcodec if anything (but even that isn't implemented with CUDA).
I'm curious, and maybe a bit skeptical. Why does it bother you that your role is needed?
He sounds interested to me. To be fair nobody needs 8-10 tools for regexes alone. Except maybe Jeffrey Friedl. Recommending one or two would be plenty.
Racism in the Netherlands?
Actually I think it's the scale of it. Governments, charity/foundations, universities, and a lot of large companies are pumping billions of dollars into those fields. You can walk around blindfolded and you'll run into 5 universities building new 'green energy research' and 'biomedical research' labs. A single billionaire can't really make a dent in that. Bill Gates even makes that point when he talks about education - his entire wealth is a drop in that bucket.

But space is a market where a billionare can make a difference. Until now the only game in town was NASA and its contractors. And they are not very efficient. SpaceX in a nutshell is proving what modern managment techniques and modern engineering tools can do to the cost structure of NASA-like technology. That's not that far out there. The payoff is pretty likely to happen (contracts from NASA, contracts to launch private satellites). The payoff for nanotechnology is way way further out and far more nebulus.
I think your math here using different assumptions than he would.

"This was largely paid for by the tickets bought by the audiences at both shows."

Otherwise he would have been able to simply pocket 170,000 dollars worth of tickets, as if he had done a regular show.

So to him, that's a net loss of 170k, you don't get to add it back in at the beginning.

So, 550 - 170 - 30 = 350k

You've also got to assume that his time is worth something, he could probably be working on something else instead of arranging his own marketing blitz... Also have to assume he pays for his own travel expenses etc.

I can see that being an expensive proposition if he, for example, has to fly cross country, miss out on potential shows, etc. If he misses out on 2 shows, that's a couple hundred thousand right there (apparently).

The point being, if he had done this through a media conglomerate, he probably could have had time for other stuff that would have made him money.

Bandwidth costs money too. > 100,000 GB isn't particularly cheap.

"I only heard of Louis C.K. from watching one of his stand-up shows on TV on an airline, so even if he didn't get payed directly, there's still publicity value in them."

Same, except it was YouTube. There's even publicity value for him in piracy.
If he can afford to sell this thing for $5 and make a profit, he only needs something like 1/15th of people to become fans, buy a ticket and see him live.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/b1bpp/i_program_elevat...
Just throwing this out there, but if I can buy a Louis C.K. comedy special for $5 each year, I'm going to buy a Louis C.K. comedy special for $5 each year.

It's probably a self sustaining model. I only just heard about it now, and bought it just now. I don't think he's tapped 100% of his potential market in the 4 days it has been available.

I look forward to the next batch of statistics released. Hopefully in ~4 months?
"In our haste to cast out the old guard, we tend to lose sight of the fact that the old guard still fills what appears to be a necessary purpose: the breaking-out of artists. I'm confident and hopeful that their crucial role in that purpose will, eventually, weaken or fade. But for now, it's still a strong reality."

To be totally but somewhat apologetically blunt - that is a steaming pile of BS. That is the exact party line repeated by every single rank and file music industry do-nothing to justify their phony-baloney jobs.

In my own personal experience, affiliation with a record label as a young and growing artist is almost certainly more likely to handicap your chances at success than it is to actually help it. The reason is that when the young artist buys into the party line that "you need the major label machinery to grow your career", the artist then hands over a large amount of control and trust to a supposed "experienced, connected industry professional" to do a job that 99 times out of 100 would be better off done by the artist themselves.

Not only that, but the young artist has no idea that the supposed "experienced, connected industry professional" has zero interest in or understanding of what it is that the artist actually has going for them, either artistically via their music or commercially via their fanbase. At that point all they know is that for some reason, things aren't working out as everybody had hoped it would with the new label. They find out later that they are essentially paying a 100% interest rate on their advance for the privilege of believing this in the first place.

I and all of my buddies in other bands live our lives in the long-tail environment and we play for larger crowds and make more money than probably 98% of the suckers that take the advice to place their bets on "the traditional industry model". And we own our souls outright. You've probably never heard of any of us, but we're okay with that.

THE ONLY WAY FORWARD is to once and for all crush the notion that the "traditional industry model" is anything other than a parasite that eats hopeful and talented artists and excretes auto-tuned plastic dolls.

Rant over for this round.
AWS Simple Email Service now supports SMTP
I recently had an interview with a company that involved 6 people interviewing me serially. That sort of thing is grueling in the best of cases. But this one went south with the third interviewer. He seemed to me be someone with something like Aspergers syndrome. He talked in a monotone, fidgeted constantly and was rocking back and forth. While I have no problem working with anyone technically competent, this person was clearly not capable of running an interview.

He asked a technical question to which I answered a more or less standard response. He told me I was wrong. Being a bit stunned (it wasn't a hard question), I asked him what he meant. He gave me a reply that was quite incorrect.

Now, in a normal interview situation if this occurs, I see it as an opportunity to have a conversation. I can explain my point and the interviewer can respond. You can find out a lot about an organization with this kind of interaction.

But in this case, the interviewer just kept saying I was wrong and never responded to my questions or gave an explanation why his answer's were correct except to say that they were. It was very troubling.

I didn't get the job. This might have been because of this interview directly but it certainly was at least partially the cause since I really didn't have much enthusiasm for the next 3 interviews. A company that would allow someone with social interaction issues run an interview is very problematic. I can't imagine who could have done well in that series of interviews given the circumstances.
Global Market Finder
Ask HN: what is the name of the reverse proxy service?
Many moons ago, here on HN, I saw a story about a easy-to-use reverse proxy service in the cloud... you type a command and the SaaS sets up a unique hostname that proxies requests back to your local machine. Can someone tell me the name of it? (My Google-fu is failing me.)
Looks like this thread has been flagged and taken down. What a shame that there is someone out there that thinks oursourcing works 90% of the time (vs 10% of the time).
Why punish inefficient behavior? All of these seem slightly... inhumane ( :) I suspect that is the point). Really, though, what if the elevator were sped up if people started acting more efficiently (as determined by your multitude of sensors).

Instead of Jandy's suggestion:

>Am I crazy thinking it'd be a good idea to have an elevator which analyses its own usage patterns and adjusts its behaviour accordingly?

why not make the people adjust to the elevator's ideal behaviour?

EDIT: quote formatting
This is typical drivel from someone who refuses to learn the lesson: "The problem is unscrupulous developers, hired guns. It could not possibly be me."

I wager the real problem is lack of oversight, lack of understanding of the problem being handed off to someone else, and lack of acceptance of ultimate responsibility for the mess.

So the title should be "Don't outsource if your intention is to not retain ownership in your project (Ownership as in understanding your project, the development process, and accepting responsibility for oversight the project's progress)"

Anyway...
People have been living in space almost continually since 1988. Most of the issues involved in living off-world are well-understood, if not always practiced (such as artificial gravity and in-space agriculture.) Planets are nice but hardly mandatory.
And people wonder why women feel excluded from technical forums. Yikes.

(The edit makes it better, but the fact that this was written about "some women" in the abstract who need to be "punished" for doing it remains really disturbing. This was a complete tangent to the linked article, not a point that really needed to be made. How would you react if you pulled up a forum comment where the top post talked about how "Some geeks are so socially awkward that I can't understand them. So I punish them for it". See the point? What you did was deliberately exclusionary: it's just plain mean. Stop it.)
Does Mobile Advertising Live Up to the Hype?
The internet is not restricted to nerds anymore. Sure, your average musician isn't likely to get a mention on Slashdot, but there are about a zillion different forums/blogs/etc out there covering a zillion different topics, and if your music appeals to even a small subset of them you can get some pretty cheap advertising. And if your music is good, you can start to build off of that.
Gmelius, Towards a Better Gmail · New Chrome Version Released
The website seems quite empty. I struggled to find the source and examples.
Actually, no - I use Linux on the desktop at work, and Windows by choice elsewhere. However, after more than 10 years of pain I've had it with cross-platform code that isn't. I KNOW that this library isn't SUPPOSED to be cross-platform, that was my point - at least this is better than hardcoded ANSI escapes in strings!
Well, he says

>>Here are most of the contents of my C:\UTILS folder. These are all well loved and used. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them<<

So I think you're off base.
StumbleUpon giving away free traffic in Paid Discovery
Using the same key+nonce pair in a stream cipher has the effect of generating an identical keystream. It's a much, much worse problem than repeating IVs; it makes decrypting the resulting ciphertext stream almost a pencil/paper exercise.

Sorry for the pedantry.
Longtime Zynga Player Explains Why Loyalists are Leaving the Brand
I agree, through a recruiter and I have a job now :). Why the ads, why the questions if you can't take the time to let me know that you cant offer me a job. Would love to see more of that happening!
Ask HN: Open Source Hardware Kits for Children
Hi HN!

I'm looking out for a modular electronics kit for my 10year old brother that supports Open Source Hardware - http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW
I would love to see him building his own stuff 'n toys using non-proprietary electronic parts. I don't know a kit that can grow with him just by buying new electronic parts and learning from more sophisticated handbooks.

I'll order him a RasperryPi [when available] and I'm looking for something that builds on top of a RasperryPi board.

The ideal scenario is that he can use the modular electronics kit to build something. Connect with his RasperryPi board through USB and write a program in C to do something with the sensor data.

He learns fast from his K&R C Programming book and was fascinated when I told him that he now can program many devices in C. I think it would be a nice gift for Christmas to buy him a modular open source hardware kit instead of those toy-kits from Walmart and co.

Best Wishes :)

me
<sarcasm> 1998 called and they want their resume blasts back. </sarcasm>

I find work (contracts) by looking for interesting companies whose money I would like to take, then I look them up on LinkedIN to see how connected I am to them. Sometimes I ask my friends to connect me to them, sometimes I just google stalk them to find the appropriate hiring manager's twitter address or email address, then I email them, whether or not they're hiring, and whether or not they're open to contractors. I pitch my value proposition and tell (not ask, tell) them to meet me for coffee or lunch, my treat, and offer three dates that work for me. In 15 years, be it a VC, a VP of a bank, an unfunded founder, or an incredibly busy CTO at a high growth start-up, nobody has ever turned me down for a free lunch.

Then I close them.
The plural of API is APIs.

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

When hiring devs, I definitely look for language skill and attention to detail in syntax. A buggy cover letter or resume suggests buggy code.
Why make any exceptions at all? If it's too dangerous, it's too dangerous.

People who demand these laws just want to look down on others while not inconveniencing themselves.
Top Toys for Christmas 2011
Toys are the craze of children and the best item they can dream of as their Christmas gifts on any Christmas. Christmas season is near and Christmas shopping has already begun. Lists are written to Santa to request for their favorite toys. Cute, appealing, attractive, adorable, high-tech and educational toys have hit the markets to celebrate Christmas of 2011 at the fullest. Here’s a list of top 10 toys that are mostly in demand by children on Christmas of 2011.
>Also I did a fair amount of the interview on a rooftop, trying to quietly and safely get down without a ladder. Fun times.

Wait, what? Unless this is some figure of speech I'm not familiar with, this requires some explanation.
It's pretty well maintained. I run not only PowerShell and Cygwin but straight DOS and sometimes I like having, for example, baretail in the path, rather than messing with Cygwin. Also I keep the loose cmd line utils in dropbox and in the path for machines that don't have Cygwin.
I have always gotten replies from job applications, but where this hits home for me, is the delay. I've had recruiters take a month to reply, at which point I've probably already accepted an offer from another company.

The companies I ended up strongly considering are those which replied the day after, they are the ones actually interested.
Way to miss the point. He's talking about making drivers obsolete, not banning everybody who doesn't drive perfectly from getting behind the wheel. It's about using technology to improve our lives, not burdening ourselves with bureaucracy.
He is/was. However, Paul Allen was a partner when Rutan was going after (and won) the X-prize. So really, they're just getting back together to work on something new.
So ... what's the re-entry plan? Splash down? Call a Russian taxi?
Yeah, but it should be HR's job too.

I think the best recruiters play the role of a modern-day union at this point. When I'm job hunting they are someone the company cares about maintaining a relationship with. Five years from now when I'm next looking the company probably won't even exist, but the recruiter may still be around and wants me to point my friends at them in the meantime. By the transient property of respect, HR departments actually respond to their emails.
Cool! I love how universities are acknowledging that there is a fast-growing "long-tail" of programmers who are scientists and data analysts, and that they need different sorts of programming training than CS majors ...

Reminds me of Greg Wilson's http://software-carpentry.org/
A spiritual world is a fact, even if it's only a neuro-chemical phenomenon in people's brains.
People feel invested in the purchase when someone like Louis CK comes out and speaks directly to his fans. We all get to know what the deal is, and how it works. It's the same feeling you get when you support a Kickstarter project, even if (to be cynical) many Kickstarter projects are just a way to sell units directly from producer to consumer.
Hi dlf!

Please take a look at software developed by http://www.fogcreek.com/

Kiln, Trello and FogBugz are a good trio.
Checkout http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ for example.
I just downloaded WindowsPad and it seems pretty useful, esp if you have several monitors.
Agreed, at some point with some categories I admit in the post that I'm just collecting and reviewing tools, RegEx ones are a good example, for fun. Other times two or three tools exist because there is a specific gap in one filled by another.
In a normal job market that's good common sense, but in the current tech job market, where unemployment is somewhere around 3%, resume blasting ought to be more than enough. The problem is that companies -- particularly larger companies -- are still in Arrogance Mode and think that the job-seekers need them. They don't.
Then you and I have different definitions of "spiritual world."
From the very first & second paragraphs of the link:

Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here's mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, "util" means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb.

...

Here are most of the contents of my C:\UTILS folder. These are all well loved and used. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them. No one paid money to be on this list and no money is accepted to be on this list.
> You feel pictures and symbols, you feel the relationship.
> one !== two
> isSet || isDefault
>
> one isnt two
> isSet or isDefault

I agree, but it's important to note that pictures and symbols are only felt because the relationships have been so well defined in the past. I'm not a JS or CoffeeScript developer (I use python and C mostly), so "!==" is much less clear than "isn't".
Are you having trouble finding developers?
We used ASANA for several months and it turned out that it god better by the time, it's still not efficient collaboration and the emails send out, kill a lot of useful time.

-1 for ASANA from an early adopter.
Show HN: Grooovy (rediscovering iphone meetups)
Can you please give some details about your debugging workflow? I'd love to know what works well, as I've been a bit nervous about making the leap to CoffeeScript for more than just goofing around for this reason. I write a little Python, but I'm not great with JavaScript, and this seems like a barrier.
What's bizarre about it? Clearly this library isn't the problem. What'd be even better would be a sane console standard that isn't stuck with being backwards compatible with a 7 bit everything-is-a-character protocol. The acoustic coupler is dead people, get over it! Relegate termcap / terminfo / curses / getty to the same bin we dumped Gandalf serial line multiplexors in, and move forward!
Ugh. Please don't read this and think you know anything about "closing" a sale. Closing techniques work well for small, unimportant, everyday purchases.

They do not work at all on sophisticated buyers. They might in fact cost you the sale.

The rule of thumb is: If there is any chance that the prospective customer might have heard of such a thing as a closing technique - DON'T USE THEM.
I'm a student at MIT, and we would never see a course like this in the course catalog. I still haven't decided whether this is a good or bad thing, but I believe we need to find a middle ground: Do we take a theoretical approach or an implementation approach?

I've been unimpressed by MIT's ability to teach "coding." In fact, no classes actually teach you the art; you find out by experimentation in problem sets. However, as a result, you adopt a lot of bad habits that will make you less marketable to any company; you're code probably sucks.

I know this is a bit off-topic, but I applaud UNH for teaching such a class. It is important to teach the "tools" and the "technology" rather than the theory; at least to the point so you know what applications are out there to help.
I agree, it's not an optimal experience on all devices and having a standalone solution instead of an SaaS hosted one is a lot better, but FogCreek Software builds awesome products admittedly. That's why I also recommend trying it.
I was enjoying the sunset when the interviewer called me. I was on the roof of one of several buildings; climbing on and off is a feat of acrobatics involving two roof tops and these slippery metal vents. Both hands are useful.

tl;dr somersaulted.
Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain, Matrix-Style
GroupTalent’s Hiring Marketplace Now Automatically Matches People With Jobs
Hi All, we've just launched our iphone App! We're feeling good about this app from the responses that we've gotten from our beta testers so we hope everyone will love it. Thank you for any feedback!
Just don't be left-handed.
Rails only? That is a burn point at any time. God help you if a prod script fails mid-way. Your well-intentioned plans get thrown out the window as you are in an inconsistent state. In prod. Means basically an extra 3 hrs for us to clone prod run script as a smoke test, if it works, run on prod and hope.
"quietly worked in the trenches, perfecting their craft, sometimes for decades, before they hit their big breaks. But big breaks were necessary conditions of becoming superstars"

Right and I would add that the model also worked because the supply was constrained on talent by the those offering the break. It's possible that we will hit (and are already hitting) a talent saturation point there is only so much entertainment pie that an individual will pay for or needs to consume. I mean my time reading HN takes away from the time that I used to spend reading other sites.
MIT's trillion frames per second light-tracking camera
LiveOutput: A cloud based debug console
Scientists shrink a Stirling heat engine to single microscopic particle
SAP and Google Form Partnership Aligning Apps with Cloudy Business Software
Dishonesty is defined here as "1) saying that something that is untrue, and 2) saying it with the intent to mislead the other person.".

There's a third part "3) when the person expects you to be truthful". When you make a statement with the intent to mislead somebody but the person is fully aware that he is being mislead, there is no dishonesty. Magicians and illusionists deceive people who expect to be deceived, so that's OK. Same for CEOs and politicians: people are fully aware that words they use are chosen very carefully.

The first part, that a statement must be untrue in order to be dishonest is unneeded, I think. It's irrelevant whether you say something that's true or untrue, what matters is whether the audience is going to form a belief that is correct or not. For instance it's easy to lie to people by phrasing a statement with a triple negation. Few people parse triple negations properly.

The kindle single "Lying" (20 pages; $2 or so), by Sam Harris argues really well in favor of total and completely honesty (but not unnecessary rudeness). He defines lying as "to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication", which is the best definition I've come across.
Back in the days of Old Man Potter, the bank solved this problem by being local and the banker actually was your friend, so he already knew your social graph.