skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hopefully you're not suggesting that it actually be worth money. That's ridiculous. If you mean what if it worked like money that might be interesting but I doubt it would be helpful.

What problem would that solve? How would that even be realistic the way you describe? This doesn't make any sense at all and here's why:

If karma is worth money then where does the initial money come from? Does PG give everyone 1500 to start like it's Monopoly? Do you put up the money yourself?

Assuming you put up your own money it just isn't fair. The richest of us get more influence and the poor get none. It'll actually work a lot like the real US economy.

Then, if karma is worth money then wouldnt it make sense to be able to withdraw it and use it in places other than HN? So what if you get people hoarding karma then they withdraw it all and end up with one. Imagine some of the very well respected people here suddenly having no karma at all because they withdrew it and spend it on a new computer.

It's just not realistic and it defeats the whole purpose of karma. If it's only good on HN then it isn't worth money. The way it works now is probably the fairest way possible. If karma is one measure of the quality of a user's contributions and how much respect they have earned then making karma work like money would totally undermine its value. Right now, karma is earned. In a money scenario there are more chances to game the system and skew it both positively and negatively for a user.

If you want to give someone money then check out their profile and see if you can either donate to one of their projects through PayPal or Flattr or something or you can just send an email and ask.
This is a nice listing to explore but I have to object to the OP's optimistic tone of "the government is listening to us, so let's make some apps"

Look deeper and you'll see that many of these APIs are junk, particularly the crime reports (week-period aggregates are useless). The reason why developers don't make apps is because the data is incomplete and non-normalized and redacted in unknown ways. Making apps out of the data is a poor use of time and helps to obscure the failure of government to modernize their data collection and publishing systems.
I don't get the appeal of a stick shift. I've had one for four years and, if I could, I would go back and get an automatic instead.

To me, a stick shift doesn't give a feeling of control. It gives a feeling of subservience. I have to do more busy work to accomplish the same tasks. I must appease the car gods by choosing the appropriate gears and releasing the clutch properly, lest they stall me.

As an analogy, I would not code in assembly unless I needed its performance or flexibility. But some people, such as one of the hosts of 'Security Now!', like to do everything in assembly.
I guess that's 1 way to look at it.. sort of like deluding oneself that the girl you can't have has bad breath or something shrugs
A good demonstration of how stack architectures can produce stunningly concise code. I'm definitely going to poke around with the documentation and examples.

I have a Forth VM of my own[1] that also has graphical capabilities, but it's designed for creating NES/SNES style games from tiles and sprites- interesting to compare some of the design decisions. I notice that IBNIZ has support for handling keyboard and mouse input- I wonder how hard it would be to write some simple games for this VM?

[1]https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako
thank you for this. i don't understand why 10gen didn't put something out like this in the first place, it would definitely helpfully frame a lot of the more annoying discussions i've had.
Don't Hire Remote Workers
Be careful when comparing population density between Montana and Canada. Out of all the Canadian provinces and territories, only Ontario, Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick have higher density than Montana. Alberta /is/ next highest on the list, but has around a full person less per km than Montana. Next-door Saskatchewan has barely more than a person per km.

If you already marvel at there being an interstate into Alberta, marvel even more at the Transcanada Highway :D.
Impress.js - the creative javascript presentation library.
I also did something similar to this recently, but in PHP. I did grouping similar colors (although I rendered mine as tiled squares), as well as a few other things like grouping by brightness. Some neat results, for sure. I can put the code up for it if anyone is interested.

Here was the quick k-means implementation I threw together if anyone wants to play with it (my whole library licensed GPL).

https://github.com/gburtini/Learning-Library-for-PHP/blob/ma...

It could definitely use some serious cleaning up (and I will probably OO-ize it when I get a chance -- or I'll take pull requests), but it definitely works.
As a blogger, I can tell you it already is. When one of my links gets karma, it gets attention, and attention can be transmuted into revenue through the magic of advertisements.

But for me, blogging has nowt to do with making points nor money—I’ve only made a total of like $50 this year from the many hours I’ve spent writing. If I cared about money, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on my blog and vlog. What I do care about is having fun, making my ideas heard, and talking with new and interesting people.

Upvotes tell me how relevant my ideas are to the real world and other people’s interests, which in turn helps me become a better writer and a better thinker.
Location-based App with Play Framework, Scala, Google Maps, PostgreSQL and Anorm
I'm a fan of the idea of public transit, but, like tptacek, I don't end up using it much. Mainly the trouble is this:

- In many situations, even with good public transit available, you're going to want to own a car.

- If you do own a car, it's a sunk cost.

- The cost is substantial.

- Due to a substantial sunk cost, you might as well get your money's worth, and drive. (i.e., Loss aversion)

So basically, I am stuck driving because I can't "not have a car" and if I'm going to pay into having a car, I might as well realize the benefits of owning one.

Taking it a step further, unless I can live in an area with good enough transit sufficient to not own a car at all, I'm better off economically in the suburbs, where rent is cheaper.
I think technology has allowed people at the bottom of the pyramid to "own" larger pieces of responsibility within a company, thus allowing them to operate much more independently.

In the past this really wasn't the case. An entire discipline called "Scientific Management" sprung up to explain why workers should be treated almost like animals by management:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Taylor.27...
It's awfully arrogant and myopic for anyone in a position of power in the finance industry to utter a phrase like "no victims there."
"I'm just giving people what they want" is decent for establishing legal justification, but it's pretty lousy for personal morals. The OP wants to make a real, positive difference in the world, and instead he felt like he was hurting people. Fine, maybe they asked for it, but you don't have to help them.
Home page of Sagmeister Inc. (Stare at the page for a few seconds)
Makes (a small amount of) sense -- the only high-quality tubes I've ever seen were either manufactured in the U.S., Europe, or in various parts of the former USSR; Chinese tubes have a very poor reputation at least in audio circles.

Perhaps this is because nobody ever bothered to put a serious effort into outsourcing vacuum-tube production, in the same way ICs and microprocessors have been outsourced, leaving the remaining production still domestic?

Or maybe it's just that there are huge stockpiles of the things sitting around in the U.S. and they're slowly being sold off, both for domestic consumption and export, but the net result is an export of tubes? That wouldn't be hard to believe either.
Yes, this isn't the first and won't be the last time a News Corp backed venture sucks up a load of cash and closes down before launch. About a year ago a News Corp project running in London that had about $40 million odd sucked into it was shut down before launch. For a company that size, it's not a huge investment.
Copyright is supposed to cover the actual code written

True

if the original code base and images where not used... then there should be no infringement.

Not so true anymore. Copying a work doesn't mean Xeroxing it. You can do 100% of the work, draw all the images yourself etc. As long as the output is, shall we say, unreasonably similar then it is copyright infringement. In this case all he had to do is not directly copy the artwork and everything would have been free and clear. Look at the images of the tanks in both games it is pretty open and shut to me.
Cigarette companies also provide a service a lot of ppl want and will pay for.
We exported a lot of it straight into the ocean!
This post was about me evaluating my life during this past year. I got laid off and that would suck for anybody, but I am sure given enough time I could have found another job in the industry. But I do not want that. This is my chance to go a different direction with my life, instead of continuing in the industry.

Also, I wanted to write this blog post while working, but that probably would have gotten me fired at the time.
Sorry, had to step out for some new years celebrations.

The long story short, I've had the mandylion for several years, before LastPass came to be. It was the only solution at the time that offered automatic generation of passwords, automatically re-generating them after a configurable amount of time, and something I could take around with me between various machines at my university / work. Now, I could use LastPass but I already have the Mandylion worked into my daily habits.

Anything that's a passphrase is something like a sentence out of a book or song, so I just remember the passwords for them. YMMV.
> I would rather do what this guy did then spend 40 years of my life trying to get people to click ads.

I agree with the sentiment, but that's like saying that anyone who works in TV is spending 40 years trying to get people to buy shit they probably don't need. Although I wouldn't desire to build a business which monetizes primarily on selling ads it does a disservice to folk at FB and google suggesting that this is what they do or what motivates their behavior.
If you ever get around it, you should share your stories and takeaways with the rest of the community. I've never realized that women in tech had to deal with all these issues on a daily basis. Raising awareness can only be good, right?
That's the cheapest round trip plane ticket I've ever heard of.
Why Salespeople Make Bad Fundraisers
By the way, you, too, are insane for not agreeing 100% with me:-)

It would be seem we agree on many points, but you've thought a little more about the meaning and implications of (un)civil discourse. At first glance, maybe one would feel compelled to label insane proposals as such. But the lack of a clear arbiter of what is sane and not sane is a bit problematic.

Everyday life has always involved a bit of insanity and unreality, yet somehow we all muddle through.

But what if a person's value system defines certain ideas as wrong, and unsupported adherence to those ideas as insane? Is it wrong in a society that supposedly values free speech to express this belief?
According to this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guz...

we exported $37.1B worth of vacuum tubes last year. I could be wrong but that amount seems wildly implausible. Could the category actually be "Vacuum tubes, etc." where "etc" is semiconductors?
> But here's the thing - when you don't have money to begin with its hard to quit a job or refuse a job even if you know deep down its wrong. Most people don't have the luxury of being able to listen to their conscience without ending up in the poor house.

But I thought these financial people are "some of the smartest people in America" (OP's quote and a sentiment I hear often)? Surely they could apply their immense talent to other fields. I've been reading all year that there aren't enough capable people to move technology forward and that companies will pay a high price for such a person.
Late-Stage Web Companies Took In Largest 2011 Tech Investments
For those that wonder what AOL actually does
See nitrogen's post. The gp didn't mean imagination so much as internal picturing. I'm not sure about children but some people lack this ability the same way others are better with turn by turn directions than a look at a map.
Top Easy-to-Keep Resolutions for This New Year
Glad to help! 10gen actually has a policy of never sharing benchmarks so that explains why they never said anything.
Where to watch the Rose Parade & Occupy protests online
Paul Krugman articles are, by and large, not suitable fare for HN.
Facebook hands out White Hat debit cards to hackers
Be careful extrapolating from such small examples, where the memory usage is dominated by fixed overhead. Running Django or something similar is more likely to give a real world result, and even then, a bunch of tests is far better.

3mb vs 30mb might be par for the course for smaller programs, but either is negligible.
I see it a matter of degrees. Every last person is complicit in some way in awful things, but the garbage man that works for the government that kills people in Iraq isn't quite as culpable as the hedge fund trader that directly harms the world economy.
Short at Macy's: http://www1.macys.com/shop/product/marc-ecko-cut-sew-shirt-w...

Compare to a cheap online-only retailer in Denmark: http://www.smartguy.dk/toej/skjorter/lange-aermer/Roed_Blend...

They have at least 2 photos of every shirt, no matter the price. This shirt is $32 which is dirt-cheap in Denmark (+$100 is the usual price for an average shirt).

Having a model doesn't help me in deciding what to by, smartguy's photos are plenty fine for me. Macy's might think otherwise, but sometimes 'creative visions' gets in the way of a sale.

There simply is no excuse for having only a single lowres photo. If you don't have very good photos online, you don't exist.
Robert Khoo (Business Mind of Penny Arcade) Does Q&A on Reddit
It's a great situation for the millions of young people living in suburbs, where the lack of a car basically means that they need to bum rides or stay home.

Sprawl sucks.
How many websites does a typical Internet user visit in a year? If you discover ten new websites per day that would be less than 4,000 sites. Let's make that 40K sites per year. It is absolutely trivial to have the client computer handle DNS for these sites. Maybe that's the way the industry pushes back on ignorant politicians: Obsolete their law before it can even affect the system. Decentralize DNS and put it in the hands of every single Internet user and every single device connected to the Internet.
How Netflix gets out of the way of innovation
We organized and hosted Hack4Reno, which was Reno's first open data hackathon and what we discovered is that the government is listening but they are not equipped with the knowledge or the tools to provide the information in a useful, meaningful way. If you talk to the individual departments and agencies, they all love the idea of being able to have a better handle on the information they have so that both internal and external applications and reports. Doing so would allow the departments to make better decisions and ideally make a more informed and engaged citizenry.

Most of the datasets we provided for Hack4Reno were things that we found by scouring local government websites and finding random static spreadsheets and pdf documents. In some cases, we actually had data delivered to us on a burned CD or via flat files in FTP. It blew our mind since most of us were so used to consuming APIs to get real, timely data.
I certainly haven't. Isn't it incredibly rare?
Sorry if you received a 500 Internal Server error when trying to load my site. I just installed a Wordpress caching plugin to handle the increased load on the server. The site should be working now.
I wouldn't want to rule that possibility out. But I've worked with people remotely for years and known very little about them. Because our communication is almost solely work-related. Whereas the people I work with locally I know very well. We go out for lunch or for drinks. We chat about random crap in the office. It's not really work, but from it I learn how to work with those people much better.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks (Unless It’s Your Boss)
Control of Computers/information systems is going to become one of the only real ways to exercise control over people in the future, because it will encompass everything else.

What if another nation, say China, decides that it doesn't need to lock down general purpose computing, and instead promotes the availability of unfettered general purpose computing within their borders as a competitive advantage? (Though, sadly this might be due to the sufficiency of political/network dampers on freedom.)

This would make for an interesting world: one divided between a totalitarian regime with free computing and democratic countries with locked down computing.
رسائل راس السنة 2012
رسائل راس السنة 2012
http://arab-timess.blogspot.com/2011/12/2012_31.html
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-beta-board-10...

Currently more than 10x the normal price.
What if every time you did a deploy, afterwards you kicked off a job that wrote a snapshot and brought up instances based off that. Then at any point you'd only ever be at most a deploy behind.
I think the author is missing the point that culture can transcend location. Looking at 37Signals, Github, and many other successful companies, you can see that people who are in constant communication with one another, and actually like one another, you will still get an amazing product.
How about government registration for general-purpose computers? (I do not support that idea. Rather, it is the next step in this line of reasoning.)
Despite the flux of the Perl6 specification, many Perl6 useful and usable compilers exist and implement several portions of the specification.
The only things I really know of that would still use vacuum tubes are esoteric high-end audiophile amplifiers, and some "old school" guitar amps (Marshall, Hiwatt, etc). Is there really that big a market? Are they used for anything else?
Obama Discreetly Signs NDAA on New Year's Eve
I have a ruby solution that takes 20s to run on a machine that's about 5 years old.

I just brute-force generate the strings from 1-999999, as well as "million-prefix" strings of the form "(1-999)million". These are then sorted in the same array. Also compute the sum of the length of the strings from 1-999999 while we're at it.

Then, run through the sorted array, keeping a running total of the length. Each time you hit a "million-prefix" string, it's easy to compute the total length of all the numbers that start with the prefix - it's just the sum of the string lengths from 1-999999 plus 999999*prefix-length.

If this subtotal doesn't push you past the 51B limit, then keep going. If it does, then run through the 1-999999 numbers only, adding each one to the total individually, until you reach the magic 51B mark.

The practical upshot is that you can skip millions of numbers at a time.

Ugly code here:
http://codepuppies.com/ben/ita/t2.txt
How tochange UINavigationController animation style [iOS]
Why is everyone paying so much attention to MongoDB? It has been criticized a lot for its design and implementation problems, but still for some reason it's so popular.

To name a few,

* word-unaligned memory structures, which leads to incompatibility with virtually any non-x86 CPU architecture

* explicitly little-endian processing in the server, so there is no way to run the original code on any big-endian CPU architecture.

There has been a patchset which was tested on a SPARC CPU, but last time I asked the author, the 10gen team completely ignored this effort.

apart from that, there have been reports of data loss without any failure note
> In MongoDB version 2.0 and higher, this is addressed by detecting the likelihood of a page fault and releasing the lock before faulting.

I'm assuming MongoDB tries to detect this with OS-specific syscalls. Has there been any attempt to determine whether it would be even faster and/or more portable to just unconditionally "read" the pages before acquiring the lock?
Technological change is ecological
"if you get one of the first 10 units you'll get a MAC address with a lot of zeros in it"

And a price with lots of zeros in it, it would seem! (All in a good cause of course.)
heh - yeah, that's like 10-20 startups worth of cap! ;)
If you work with shitty people on a shitty product, you'll have problems locally or remotely, for sure. I'm working on the assumption that people are competent in their job and working on a good product. I still don't buy that a Skype conversation is going to afford more camaraderie than grabbing a beer at lunch or playing a game of ping pong. It's that whole company culture thing. It's the difference between people I work with and those I kick ass with.
This is something I've been wondering about as I've noticed increasingly high stakes items being reviewed on sites like Yelp.

For example, I'm trying to figure out where I want to move next and it's commonplace for high rise apartment buildings to be on Yelp, but now that we're talking about a $25,000 lease rather than a $40 meal, the incentives to play around with the sentiment of the reviews are significant, as well as the potential financial reward for doing so. How can we trust the neutrality of the venue in these circumstances?
It's "popular" to beat up on Wall Street in the same way it's popular to frown at a guy who steals the coffee shop tip jar.

Without getting into the issue of privatizing gains while socializing losses, or any of the other crooked shit that's just another day in that industry, the OP makes a perfectly reasonable case for feeling bad about working for his financial firm.

"It was a farce. We were actually not very good at producing returns that beat the market (the standard for measuring performance). What we were good at was applying lipstick, the bank’s marketing materials, to the pig, the bank’s investment returns. Clients paid us a lot of money in fees when there were better ways out there to investment one’s money that are cheaper and generate higher returns (1). None of it made much sense."
d3 is an absolutely amazing datavis framework. With it, Mike Bostock has created the future of information visualizations. And since svg is finally getting the acceptance that it should have gotten 10 years ago, d3 runs almost anywhere -- ios, webkit, gecko, android, even the latest IE. It's relatively low-level, however; users need to be pretty adept at the DOM, javascript, and svg. As a result,I suspect that someone will create a higher-level interface for it, maybe even a web-based one. I've thought of doing that myself, but it would be a big time investment. Anyone else pondering such an open source project? Something akin to an MIT- or Apache-licensed framework like High Charts, but based on d3, and with an optional web-based interface.
Why not just go take the write lock out of the db all together if it doesn't need to be journalled? It's obvious at that point that missing / mangled data is acceptable. It's not particularly amazing that not writing data to disk is faster than writing to disk. What IS amazing is that the geniuses at 10gen have some how managed to make not writing to disk thousands of times slower than writing to disk.

Who would design a database so shitty that journalling the data impacts performance. Typically you only need one spindle for a journal to support 100 to 200 data spindles. If you can't pull 80 to 90 mb/sec sustained write from a log drive something is seriously wrong.

48 iops now that's what I call "web scale". Let me just throw out my acid database that does 30000 iops on Win2k3 of all things, to get 48 iops with out journalling.
Agreed. It's a great way to share reddit links.