skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to clarify I was not a financial adviser. I worked in the corporate strategy group that oversaw all the financial advisers and how the division ran.
Marvel lawyers fighting to prove that Mutants aren’t human
My money is on someone getting "facts" off Wikipedia or similar without doing any smell testing on the numbers.
I think this knowledge inversion where the "individual contributors" know more (about the job) than the manager is why many managers do not like agile methodologies like Scrum. Developers are "seizing the means of production". ;)

When developers can work directly with product owners and track their progress, the traditional manager loses. I'm not sure how a developer-driven team might handle HR issues though.
evincarofautumn mentioned this from one angle, but I too think that high karma levels on HN are already valuable. Just look at the false acclaim that gets heaped on every time patio11 posts something. It's not that he never posts anything worthwhile, but you can definitely see some wild responses that are directly attributable to Patrick's place high on the HN total karma list (like that thing on lionhearted's blog a couple of years ago, on how patio11 should charge people A LOT of money because he's like the smartest guy ever).

I suspect that many offers for consultation come in to HN's top commenters and many of the things they say get noticed above the sayings of the common pleb. If you have a high amount of karma, I think it's definitely worth some money.
There are certainly smart people in every field.

The problem is Wall Street can afford to pay way above market salaries to pull the top grads from the best colleges away from fields they would have normally gone into.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits.
it's not fact. you're deluding yourself.
This is how we were instructed to think about transforms, in school. I'm not sure how common it is, but I also believe that this is how XNA performs transforms. It has been two or more years since I have worked with XNA though.
Registers. Love 'em.

Where's the BSD version?
The second link doesn't even have any comments...what value does that add to the discussion?
I could be wrong on this, but we learned about K-means clustering this year in college, as far as I know, the K random exemplars which you use for K-means clusters obviously reduces the number of colors in the image to a certain N ( N <= K). This would mean that any live manipulation of the K colors would actually only modify the image which consists of only N colors.

The net result would be a live image like you suggest, but one with much less detail. Still very interesting though.
I posted this above, but I will comment here too: Just to clarify I was not a financial adviser. I worked in the corporate strategy group that oversaw all the financial advisers and how the division ran.
You don't need camaraderie - you need a shared purpose and team play. They don't have to be friends - all they need is to respect and trust each other within the limits of their professional activities. Skype conversations have nothing to do with it except, perhaps, helping establish the mutual recognition more easily. Textual communications may become abrasive or be interpreted that way.
Okay well on the surface what you're saying makes sense. You make a good point. They could apply their talents elsewhere but some people really do just like the money. Furthermore moving technology further is a little narrow. What I'm talking about is helping humanity in the larger sense. Sure, some smart people can find jobs doing good and get paid well but on the whole most good causes don't pay like the banks. You're either working for charity or bootstrapping some business of your own that will be beneficial to people but getting it off the ground takes time and money; two things that you cannot get without selling your souls every once in a while to continue pursuing your grand goal.
In Europe (or at least in Belgium) driving on a manual transmission is default, automatic is rare. When you learn to drive with automatic and pass the exam, you are not even allowed to drive manual.

It is something you pick up after a couple of hours of driving and becomes second nature.

That said, I would prefer automatic, especially in traffic jams. Unfortunately it is not always an option when driving a company car.
The posts I learned the most from this week
Sorry for being obtuse, but I DLd the 1GB repository - where is it stored and how do I access it?

I see I can go to the index, from this page - is this index served up from the 1GB DL I just did?

How can I transfer this to [device]?
Why did you change the title? The author didn't make any claim of Airbnb filtering potentially negative reviews. Airbnb didn't allow him to post a review in the first place since he didn't actually end up staying in the room (which I think is a reasonable policy that covers 99% of cases just fine). The point of the article, and what the original title of the article conveyed, was that there are some situations
where this is not optimal and where Yelp's review model has an advantage.

(Edit: Fixed now)
And I'm serious about that statement.

The only reason someone would use such bank products is because they actually owe something to that bank. It's not like you, or me, are investing. Those investments are part of a larger deal, pretty much like "Hey, I give you 500k but you need to open X account with us with XYZ fees, ok?" or "Look, if you don't pay us the 10m you got from us, you need to put at least 2m in that specific investment"

This is not like you or me are investing our savings. This is some obscure, barely legal, deals.
I'm not doubting you, but can you provide actual examples of how this has resulted in a better work product?

I don't doubt that working together physically has benefits for feeling closer to your coworkers. But I do wonder if that actually has solid bottom line results. And do those results outweigh the benefits of have more talented and productive teammates who are not in the office?

When I'm stepping back to take an objective look at it, "team cohesion" is one of those things that could easily have more value ascribed to it than it actually provides.
https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts
X-ray emitters use vacuum tubes. That means, every doctor's office has at least one.

I guess that the radars and other high-power radio equipment still uses tubes too
Price is unbelievable now.
It sounds like his review was blocked as a side-effect of a rule aimed at something else (fake reviews), rather than an attempt to filter bad reviews.
Maybe in the form of CRTs?
Yes, you're right. I was forgetting about the Wii.
Absolutely, but things get complicated when you compare the little guys in any situation. It's not so easy to compare.

I am a low-level functionary on the death star :)
I'm happy that Jony got awarded this honor. But when I read "Commander of the British Empire" I chuckled and thought to myself, it's 2012 and this really ought to say "Commander of the British Empire or what's left of it" ;)
I think it applies more on the early days of a startup.

I believe Github had no remote employees when they started. It was only later and when their culture is established that they had people working remotely.
Wikipedia lists some other modern uses including (most unexpectedly) in particle accelerators:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the...
The problem is that he feels like he was making the bank rich and the customers didn't get much out of the deal. You're right that they provide services people want and need and generally speaking there isn't a problem. But in this case he was observing that the bank was able to enrich itself while providing nothing in return for the customer. That could make anyone feel bad.

I hate when people beat up on something because it's popular at the moment. I honestly see both sides of this. I'm not a fan of certain banking and investment practices and some of that culture, not all of Wall Street. At the same time I feel for the author. The bit where he mentions being fired really distracted people from his main point too which I don't like seeing.
You are overlooking things like magnetrons, x-ray tubes, photomultipliers, CRTs (which still have a lot of applications outside of the video display sphere), krytons and so forth. It's not all about diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes.
You're Cleaning Your Glasses Wrong...
That's not unique to CTA. That is the nature of public transportation - you will always deal with those characters.

Its no big deal. The usual response is to ignore them and generally they will go away (unless you are up very late at night). Nothing too different from ignoring the beggars coming up to you during a traffic stop. I am not sure why the OTP is making an issue out of it.
that's very rude and patronising. You have no idea whether that is/is not the case. Don't assume and act snobby + elitist.
> MongoDB, as some of you may know, has a process-wide write lock.

I've never taken time to see what MogoDB db is, but thanks to this opening sentence, now I know everything I ever wanted to know about this system. Having worked for 13 years on database system design I am pretty confident that a system not designed with concurrency in mind cannot be retrofitted with any decent concurrency later.

Thank you Rick for saving me the time.
Show HN: my 10 minutes project for next year.
Judging from the comment, your writing seems fine to me. I know a lot of people who are "fine" at writing/math, and perform well spatially. Yet, I have never met a spatial genius who couldn't succeed in the deficient rigor of the public school system.
Worked for me, thanks!
Having been to football and baseball games, I do have an idea of just how much I miss. I prefer watching on tv (at least for football, baseball is more fun in person because I find it boring as hell but at least in person I'm there with friends). Obviously this is just personal opinion, but I think there are probably a lot of people who don't care about what everyone is doing and therefore the TV views are more than adequate.
Why do we allow governments to control a scarce supply of "honor" that can be bestowed in circumstances like this?

Legitimacy through association, honor from titles, etc., is part of a desperate, dark-ages mentality that is completely opposite to creativity, novelty, and the democratization of technology.

Apple did not succeed b/c it made devices fit for kings, but because it made devices loved by normal people who use them to do actual work, not simply to inhabit a position enjoyed via birthright, etc.

The amazing design of Apple products is based on smart supply chain provisioning, clever design, and judicious use of materials. Contrast this to the stolen gold wasted to make medallions, crowns, etc. The two just couldn't be further apart, and so yes it tremendously disappoints me that Ives didn't scoff at the supposed honor.
Everything is more complicated than it seems but we live in a world where bumper sticker politics reigns. If you can't say it in 140 characters or 6 seconds then it goes over everyone's head. These days it's now about what makes sense but how you can market a bad idea to look like a good one.

It's hard to argue anything these days because once you show that you understand the shades of gray people think you're wishy-washy or a hypocrite. It's so hard to have real meaningful discussions these days and I've found the best you can do is pick one point, base your argument on that alone, and let the complexity be damned.
Didn't you hear? Mongodb is webscale and runs in the cloud. That's all you really need to know, please ignore any rational arguments and just repeat webscale and cloud endlessly.

Remember that if you run into scalability issues in the cloud all you have to do is spin up 300 instances to get the performance of one 5400 rpm laptop drive. The cloud is webscale your laptop is not. Also please ignore that a laptop with an ssd will need about 3000 instances to get the same performance.
I'm reading the U.S. Census Bureau report from October [0] and I can't for the life of me figure out where these numbers are coming from, they seem to be flat out wrong.

Using NAICS product categories the "top 5" through October appear to be:

1) Transportation Equipment - 164.79 billion

2) Chemicals - 156.7 billion

3) Non-Electrical Machinery - 118.4 billion

4) Computers and Electrical Products - 102.4 billion

5) Petroleum and Coal Products - 81.26 billion

Am I reading this report wrong?

[0] http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_pr...
I too had a bad experience with a vacation rental and was unable to post my review to VRBO. That's why I founded Dwellable, a vacation rental site. Here's the full story on GeekWire from a few months ago:

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/hawaiian-beach-vacation-hell-sp...

This behavior on the part of HomeAway (VRBO) is really a natural consequence of their business model. When the property manager is your only customer, it doesn't make sense to post negative reviews.

We're doing things differently at Dwellable, of course.
Thanks for your insights.

A lot of the problem seems to be marketing and getting-started help and not just technology.

Based on our conversations with older people, we've been seeing a higher interest in tablets than other computer technology; the interaction model of tablets seems to match non-tech-savvy users' mental models much better. Direct manipulation (just touch it!) and not having to worry about files, folders, and the OS makes it much more approachable... but like you said, a demo is still needed to convince them. Have you or your friends had any experience with tablets?

We'll look into how far we can push voice-to-text, and we'll avoid 'boomer' henceforth. Thanks again.
K-means is only grouping all of the pixels in to K disjoint clusters, not actually altering the value of the pixels. Taking an entire cluster of pixels and shifting their values in the RGB space could produce some very interesting images. For example, you could easily make all of the almost-white pixels slightly blue. There would be no loss of variety among the pixels, they would just all have their blue values bumped up.
I am really wondering whether physical proximity of the employees, empirically, has a reasonable relationship to early success?

A pure guess (based on personal preference) is a mix of remote and local working, favoring remote -- would still produce big successes. (Although, this balance should be kept flexible depending of the state of which the project demands.)

This could stem from programming requiring a mix of social and private time, which works naturally with local and remote working.
Are you a young American?
What is gained in hiring remote has a cost. A significant percentage of human communication is non-verbal[1].

When hiring remote, make sure to put "communication skills" near the top of the requirements, since any hire is going to have to make up for the loss of presence.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language
It's prestige without power, pointing out the lack of power lowers the prestige.
You compute 'centroids' which denote the centers of the clusters, but you don't have to change the values of all points to the centers of the clusters.

In other words, you can maintain the detail in RGB space (as this author has) while reorganizing things in location space by their k-means clusters.
Great to see the entry cost of an embedded linux development kit dropping from over $500 few years ago, down to the price of a pizza or two.
This means we're going to see more young talented developers with actual embedded system skills.
That's a scary title.
I'm not convinced. I'm not saying that MongoDB is well designed -- I don't think it is -- but it seems to me that a process-wide write lock would be perfectly fine for a data store which is designed to cluster at a one-process-per-CPU-core level.
Learning from Other Industries
Unreal iOS uses the same toolchain as the PC and console versions, including the same scripting system - that's the point of having a multi-targeting engine. Unless you modify the engine substantially you probably won't need to fork. In fact, if you use the UDK you can't modify the engine source anyway. In most cases you'd probably worry more about assets that work on multiple platforms rather than code.

But anyway, I think this exercise was to have the option of deploying to multiple targets, not every single target at once. The difference between the Flash, HTML5 and iOS versions of your game could be very small. For another game you could use the same toolchain to target PC, Mac, consoles, etc.
I understand this, but does this mean that it is bi-directional in that a change to one of the palettes would reflect in the image. This is what I understood from the comment. If so, how does this work? Sorry for any misinformation in my comment
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."

When you understand that Hemingway quote, you will realize that all ratings services are inherently useless when it comes to the value of trust. In the case of Yelp, there really isn't any reason to trust them when their [financial] existence is maintained by the businesses that are reviewed on their site.

So when you're about to decide where to take your parents for Sunday dinner when they come to visit, don't reach for your iPhone. Go to a nice part of town and walk into a restaurant and be seated. And in the case that you don't like your parents, just take them to Denny's.
You sound like a "database system design" is just one specific thing that has a well-defined definition which is known to and agreed on by everyone. Ughh... fine, not arguing. But in that case MongoDB is not a "database system" then.

How about I call it a tool that holds your data for you and gives it back later. This tool has certain properties that make it work (or not work) for certain applications. It is just that simple.

I do not work with/for 10gen but we have been using MongoDB since version 1.5 and found it incredibly useful addition to our toolbox. It always helps to own more than one hammer.
Top API Evangelist Posts for 2011
I don't know, the guy has a point. Maybe you can explain why it's myopic and arrogant for us because I thought his explanation was perfectly reasonable. In the situation he describes it makes sense to say "no victims there". I don't see a reason he'd lie about being in the industry and I also think his job gives him enough credibility to comment like that.

I know we all hate banks lately and rightly so but I feel like a lot of us are blinded by our bias and can't accept a valid point when it comes from them.

That said, I could be wrong but I don't know enough to be sure. I saw a comment from someone in the banking industry that seemed perfectly valid. If its not I'd really like to know what is wrong with it.
Or what about the person who pays taxes to such a country or buys those cheap clothes? We all have some level of culpability, whether we choose to admit it or not. I think that the realization of this makes people very uncomfortable and one way people deal with this is the desire to find all of the bad things and then perform a stack ordering of badness.

A couple of examples:

For the sub-prime mess, people will argue for hours whether it's the fault of the borrowers for taking on more than they could handle, or of the banks for pushing the loans or of the government for encouraging the sub-prime market. Fact is, it's probably a mix of all of these things and we should address all of them.

Secondly, a common argument against veganism is that no matter how much you try to avoid animal products, it's impossible to do so in today's society as animal products are in a lot of innocuous seeming things like film or tires. But this fact doesn't invalidate the vegan's goal of trying to reduce (what they see as) evil as much as possible.

In short, the attempt to find every bad thing or trying to pick out the most bad thing is an impediment to ever making anything better.
I agree 100% with this blog post.

I have worked remotely for Mozilla for the last four years: first as a senior dev, now as an engineering manager with a team of currently 7 people. My team is located in Africa, Europe, and North America, and we work closely with ops people located in the US and Asia (Singapore, India), as well as people in other parts of the company in a number of other timezones. I believe more than half of the Mozilla workforce is remote from an office. This includes places like Portland OR which has more than 10 Mozillians, but no office.

Some riders:
- We work hard at being remote friendly. We all spend all day in IRC. We put people's timezones in the phonebook. We make extensive use of IRC, the phone, Skype, teleconferences, Vidyo, email, Bugzilla, wikis, and etherpad. We get together throughout the year - sometimes a couple of people, sometimes just our team, sometimes our group, sometimes the whole company, sometimes at an office, sometimes at a brewpub or cafe, sometimes at a conference.
- We actively screen for remote suitability when interviewing people who want to be remote.
- If people are in a country where we have an office they are employees, if they are in a country where we don't they are FT contractors ("geo-contractors") but we treat them like employees in every other respect. I think it makes life a touch harder for our admin staff, but they are awesome and take it in stride.

I've been doing this for a while, it's the best thing I've ever done, and my team kicks butt.
Set the title of a bash terminal on OS X
Extremely true observation. Even though I'm optimistic about what we can do with these APIs....you are definitely spot on in your objection.

Let's keep the heat on with government agencies to keep opening up data....complete sets...and maintain and keep active.
Not sure how, can't find an edit or delete button. (except for this reply, it has both. But the higher level one does not)
I disagree with a fundamental assertion you make here. I think a software engineer has a very low ceiling when working remotely. Engineers that I consider "good" or better not only must be on site most of the time, but they WANT to be on site most of the time. It's the only way to maximally impact whatever it is you're working on, and any good engineer wants that.

Also, many of the things you are talking about are red flags that would cause me not to hire an engineer (FWIW I'm a lead engineer). If I'm paying you a good salary to be on my team, I don't want to structure our work arrangement around letting you work on various side projects. We pay well, we expect a lot, and you should deliver as such. And I have consistently found the only way to make that happen is to enforce physically spending the majority of your time with the rest of the team.
"Not using shared_ptr a code smell?"

Yes. It's part of the C++ standard. All rants against Dave Abrahams and Boost aside, not using the standard library to do standard things is a code smell.
Until you donate all of the money you made to some charity or OWS, STFU. (If you did this already, good for you, and the rest of this comment is not directed at you).

You can't have the cash and the moral righteousness. I know you don't it owe it to anybody, but if you want your post to have any weight, you should. (Alternatively, get off your moral high-horse).

I've known a bunch of people who did the Wall Street thing. They complained about it during and after they were employed. Some left willingly. Not one "returned" the money to society. The effect? More people think "oh, I'll just make some money for now" and spend their youth doing that.

Personally, I have no qualms about Wall Street. Is it moral? Who knows. I'm no one to judge. The people who protest and the people who run it both make good points. But the people who bitch about it after taking the money are just plain hypocrites.