skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software quality is a notoriously difficult thing to measure. Most studies are conducted over large codebases over several years (IBM & Microsoft have spent a lot of time on this). So, I can't actually prove it.

I have spent a lot of time dealing with it and I know what I'm most comfortable with. And there are always exceptions. I've worked with some really talented remote people -- oddly, they usually end up relocating eventually anyway because they want to. I've also worked with some remote people that really think they're much better than they actually are.

Professionally, the least satisfying jobs for me are the ones where people clock in and clock out. They may be very efficient, but I usually don't learn much from them and there's zero contact after we invariably go onto our next thing.

That's a long-winded way of saying you might be right and objectively team cohesion is overrated -- I really don't know. Subjectively, I found I'm happier that way and I do my best work when satisfied. I do believe it's resulted in higher quality products usually, too. It's often the stuff you don't think about. Like overhearing a couple colleagues discussing something and being able to interject and save them a couple days of frustration. That stuff usually doesn't land in IRC, Basecamp, Skype, or whatever.

But if you've managed to make it work, awesome. It's not my intention to combat the practice if it's working. I just don't like the attitude that anyone opposed to it is some sort of Luddite that sucks at business.
Does anyone know what the performance differences would be between MongoDB and SQL Server/Oracle if they all had enough RAM to hold the entire dataset in memory?

I'm only guessing but it seems to me that any database with their entire dataset in memory would be very fast, no?
True, but there's no "5" in "perl.org".

As a comparison, python.org has both Python 2 and Python 3 binaries clearly marked and available for download.

I'll be surprised if Perl 6 gets much attention until the perl.org download page has links to Perl 6 binaries, like it does for Perl 5 binaries. Visiting the download page, you wouldn't even know Perl 6 exists.
True that vast information resources from research conducted with publicly(at times) funded money is hidden behind paywalls like the one from ACM. Here is an old discussion about that topic

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2135423

Anyways, most of the researchers will have a pdf version of their paper on their site. Googling the first author's name or the paper title generally throws the desired result most of the times. Also, as mentioned in another comment Google scholar does show a PDF link on the right if it finds one.
Er no you just need lots of money to get that.. Wikipedia says

"The "Centurion" card is invitation-only after appropriate net worth, credit and spending criteria are met. American Express does not publicly disclose the requirements for getting a card"
Happy New Year from Toronto too! :)
Yep, I live in a neighborhood where all the teenage boys worship at the altar of Fast and Furious, and I didn't totally believe the article's thesis.

They have not only muscle cars, as you mention, but hacked together roadsters, freaky modded VWs bugs, tuned Hondas, lowered El Caminos, and raised 4WDs. Not to mention the motorcycles.

The idea of moving to Copenhagen and pedaling a bicycle to the tram stop does not seem to have seized their imagination in quite the same way that Vin Diesel has. ;-)
Happy New Year From Minnesota!
You seem to know a totally different set of engineers than I do. I work in Silicon Valley, and the vast majority of jobs here require on site presence. This is the case for a very specific reason - the most productive engineers work best when they can quickly and easily share ideas with others. You would be wasting a significant amount of their ability by not having them around in person.

The proof is in the pudding - every highly successful, well admired web company you can think of employs the vast majority of its engineers onsite, and those that are offsite are not core contributors. To claim that working in an office is "outmoded" is ludicrous when there has yet to be a successful case that succeeded with a team that is mostly remote. And no, 37signals and its dozen employees don't count as a successful case of remote teams. I'm talking about a venture funded company with dozens/hundreds of engineers.
I have to wonder whether that's because many devs started using schemaless databases for the first time over the last couple of years, and haven't yet really experienced the nightmare of data which was scribbled on by various forgotten buggy versions of the apps and never rigorously migrated (because they're self-selected to regard that as unimportant). I once worked on a Lotus Notes-based system with documents eventually reaching such nonsensical states that the dev team couldn't even say what app behavior would be appropriate, much less what the latest version of all our code would happen to do.
Happy New year folk
How is that possible? Virtual memory is written out to the hard disk, so presumably, anyone with physical access to the drive could read off anything that might be stored there. You wouldn't need admin rights to the box the way you would to force aes to run in gdb, right?
Thank you restofus,
But as I had mentioned in the question above, I am already aware of the course and I'm going to take it. I'm just looking for more resources meanwhile to work on.
Anyone know if this can be applied on Mac OS X Lion?
"Facebook whitehat card not as prestigious as the SVC card, but very cool."

What's the SVC card?
Trust me and, more important, trust your team. They are on your side and know what to do. Just encourage them to communicate and they will probably be able to arrange it. They'll do the right thing.

As for me, my current job involves being in the office - the company, the portal branch of a telco, doesn't believe in telecommuting just yet, despite us techies pushing for it. We have lost a couple good people over that issue and it prevented hiring several others I'd love to have on my team. In the past years, I have been involved in several projects that were conducted without physical presence and most of them worked just fine. Keeping everyone on the same page is critical and the least successful ones were when communication was difficult.
Happy New Year from the Internets!
There is a difference between using violence to protect my home and using violence to get myself a little more "me" time or literally more cash.

Most libertarians don't advocate for no government, they advocate for as little as possible to maintain order and preserve freedom.
Just how bright a laser are they using? I would hope they're not using anything bright enough to cause damage.
I'd like to hear your response to Milton Friedman's view on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJEP1BzSeMQ

It's not about not wanting to be taxed, not at all. It's about removing the incentives to tie profit to violence.
The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight
Holiday entitlements, probably not. However, in each country where there are things like corporations, directors can go to jail for stuff like nonpayment.
This was presented at the 28C3. http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4869.en.h...

Recordings are available at http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/28C3/
Happy New Year from Las Vegas!
In case anyone else was curious, 4.5 million minutes works out to about 8.5 years.
Happy new year from Paris !
Well, sorry about that :)
You are correct - any database with the entire dataset in memory will be incredibly fast. SQL Server bypasses the Windows file system cache and will aggressively manage memory to keep frequently accessed data pages resident in RAM. The read/write performance is what you would expect for a database with fine-graned lock management - when you have to go to disk things get slower, otherwise I/O is only limited by RAM and the overhead of lock management.
Esmerelda's imagination
Seriously, what is going on with this post? Why does everyone feel the need to downvote it? Even the reply from the parent poster is basically "yeah, there's not a lot of modern day use for it".

I swear to God, I get more unexplained, unwarranted downvotes in the last month on HN than I can possibly wrap my head around.

And now my original post too? What the fuck? Are there really this many people here who have no taste for discourse or downvote posts that they simply don't like (maybe because it implies they ought to be accountable for their own actions?) Does anyone care to explain why irresponsible sites shouldn't be held accountable, why it's excusable to use the same password everywhere or why a friendly suggestion of LastPass is so out of line here?
That seems nice but it's taking, also, all my CPU time on my windows machine. I don't get it, yesterday there was another WebGL demo on HN and it did exactly the same thing. Is that something which we have to live with in the future ? Is WebGL going to be too much CPU intensive, so much that nobody is going to be able to run that ? Or is this 'demo' asking too much of WebGL ?
Stored Value Card? http://www.fms.treas.gov/eaglecash/svcfacts.html
Thank you for this. One of the links in the article was rather helpful in putting words to things in my past. :)

http://www.aane.org/asperger_resources/articles/miscellaneou...
It's similiar to how clang tries to be a gcc replacement. I think clang got started in ~2008 and now you can build most of the open source projects with it. But still some packages use GNU extensions or they depend on some gcc-only features.

I think the reason it works for clang is because they're really trying hard to be drop-in compatible with gcc. I remember reporting some minor thing like: command line flag -- in gcc generated a warning, but it didn't return an error code on exit and it did in clang, so they've changed it, because it caused crashes some project builds.

Not sure how pypy handles the compatibility now, because I couldn't compile it yet, tried like 4 times already and it always crashes randomly or it gets out of memory or something.
Somehow, I both don't quite understand what he's trying to say and strongly agree.
Amazing - perhaps my favorite graduation speech with "This is water" by David Foster Wallace (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction).
MongoDB's journal is another collection that only syncs to disk 10 times a second. It's not a true journal like a write-ahead log. You can force that collection to fsync, but... yeah, I get get stupendous performance using a cheap RAID controller on commodity hardware with an old and busted relational database. Hooray for 40 years of technology!
And in case anyone was wondering about the easiest way to figure that out: https://www.google.com/search?q=4.5+million+minutes+in+years
How does putting one's purse in the bagging area indicate a lack of attention? It's fully likely that I'm not using the machines correctly, but I didn't exactly go through a training course. I just use them as I'd expect them to work, because that's about all I have to go on.
UEFI may be an improvement over BIOS, but it sure is no Open Firmware...
I noticed something : when the viewpoint is lookint at a flying block wich is not that big, it's lagging the same as looking at the entire world. Is is rendering something in the background which is out of the view ? I'm not saying it's not a nice demo, actually I like the feeling very much. This perlin noise is pretty enjoyable. But I can't understand why it's that slow ;(
Isn't Guile going to be integrated with Emacs at some point? I thought the work has already been completed so Guile can run elisp as well. If Emacs devs could switch to Scheme (Guile) while having backward compatibility with elisp then a lot of cool stuff could be written in Emacs that can't be done now for performance reasons.
Heh, that's precisely what I did to find it.
Happy new year from CENSORED. (East coast.)
Cloud service (instead of in app scraping) for website content/actions
I am thinking of providing a cloud service for websites that dont have a REST API. This will eliminate the need for maintaining messy scraping scripts that developers have to maintain. I wanted to know if there is a need for such a service.
Happy New year :)
It's a nice overview, but it's extremely basic. I would have appreciated some further reading (specifically for Django signals and injecting into views). The Python skeleton package is cool, though.
If it's bright enough to be visible, it's bright enough to cause damage.
Just to represent: happy new year from Brazil.
The cloud isn't quite ready imo. Maybe in a few years, but hey, if you live in a tiny apartment in SF with no car, family, or anything else but a Mac it might work. You 20 somethings.. lol
The truly innovative startups, the ones every investor wishes they were in on the ground floor of (Google, FB, Twitter, ...) could not have been summarized as "the X of Y" before their introduction.
Things I Learned Building a Company in 2011
I think the ideal is even simpler. You just go in, take what you want, and leave. The exit is the scanner.
"iPad on a Segway" pretty much describes what this robot is.

Also, pretty horrible title as having a robot doesn't let you be two places at once, it just lets you cut down on travel.
#FaceTheBuzz Top of 2011
What Final Cut Pro X Can't Do, Your iPhone Can
No I did not, I have contacts in the organization, but more importantly, they did a good deal of postmortems and white papers on the subject which where pretty frank about their problems and the solutions they tried using to address them, highlighting what worked and how it worked and what failed and why it failed. I read most that where available because it was a treasure trove of experience in aligning a large organizations development to improve it's quality. As such there are not many other examples that have had the success in doing it that Amazon did. AWS and S3 where two new lines of business that came out of that alignment. They streamlined the idea of business and technology as services to the point that it became a commodity in their organization.
Not true. Lasers are just light. They can be dangerous because they can focus a lot of energy on a small area, and are actually more dangerous when you cannot see them, but if they're weak enough, you can, in fact, stare directly into the laser with no eye damage. I have done this as a demonstration.

Granted, I was using a weak laser pointer I knew to be safe and I'd never do that for a powerful or unknown laser, but that particular one I used wasn't any worse than staring at an ordinary light bulb.

I should mention that there are "laser pointers" strong enough to be dangerous (e.g. the ones that can pop balloons or be seen from X miles away and whatnot). The one I used was not one of those and I knew that the wattage was low enough to be safe. And I have the eye doctor take pictures of my (very healthy) retinas during screenings, so I'm reasonably sure there was no hidden damage.
My position on mongo is thus: Its goal is humongous data sets, hence the name. Until well proven, I'm not the type to use it for huge data, but will keep an eye out for case studies.

I have used Mongo on two projects with reasonably small data sets. My largest collection at the moment is 5 million, and that's basically a log. Other collections are less than 100,000. I've been running mongo 1.6 for a year on these two sites without so much as a hiccup. I do the normal very simple things to protect myself: a cron job to dump db and then copy it to a backup server. And that's it.

I enjoy using mongo for these projects because when I want to add a new feature to one of my domain models, I don't need to think much about retrofitting the data for all instances of that model. I just add an attribute where its needed for the new use case, ensure I have basic checking in my ruby model object and my system keeps incrementally improving.

I think the mongo folks are fantastic in their open dev process and maybe one day, some threshold will be crossed where I can say that for certain types of big data usage mongo is a clear solid choice.
I love perl6, and though I wish otherwise, I have to agree with this assessment. #perl6 is a resonant echo chamber, but I do admire the people and enjoy reading the logs. Maybe one day...
I believe NORAD computers still use vacuum tubes.
Hmm... That would be better than usual, when I'm just trolled :-)
Like you alluded to, but I think it's good to be specific, dim != weak[1]. There could be a lot of infrared coming out of a cheap laser device you cannot see. Obviously no one should do your demonstration unless they have the laser device fully vetted by someone who knows what they're doing.

What was the milliwattage of the laser in your demo? I imagine 5 - 10mw is too dangerous, so it must have been really low power.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/laser-pointer-haza...
Never considered it from that angle. (You may have just convinced me software patents are indeed a bad idea; I was on the fence.)
Best algorithms preprints of 2011
If there is a university near you, go to the library and use the computers there.
Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I recall that it was by then already quite clear that al Qaeda was behind the attack, and that al Qaeda and Iraq were far from friendly.
Previous thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3400449
Happy New Year from Boston! (and Pune,India!)
Valuation, sure. If the numbers ever get out, be seated at the time. It's a very lucrative product.
Has anyone tried this video calling website? Where do you stack it?
Fact, Doc brown invented the flux capacitor. What a great invention, I may have to go forward to the past and change the education system.
From what I understand, it looks like basically a branded VISA gift card. The interface to add value to the card is going to be something VISA controls, not Facebook. So searching for weaknesses to add value to the card is equivalent to searching for weaknesses in the VISA network.

If that's incorrect, someone who knows more can correct me.
Single sentence assertions with no supporting detail, are by and large, not suitable fare for HN. Especially those which complain that a submission is not appropriate for the site. [1]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Slightly faulty.

Bush tried to make it sound like Saddam hired the al Qaeda, that they were some sort of mercenaries for hire. If anything, they were murdering drug and crime lords for violating the Muslim ethics code, which makes them sort of anti-hero (and yes, I feel icky saying that). They wanted Saddam for the reason that he was torturing Muslims to death for fun.

I'm completely for Saddam being dead, but the American people deserve better than to be lied to, and so does Ron Paul.
Size doesn't matter in this context. It's about stability and longevity of the company (and the ability to operate well without localized teams). I'd love to see some data to support the success of local vs. remote teams (especially since the ability to have strong remote teams is fairly young).
Meh. Google was "yahoo search but simpler/better", FB was "myspace but non-customisable". Twitter is arguably more innovative, but could be summarised as "the texting of internetz".
Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house

Could you explain this for those of us not familiar with the UK? You have to pay to watch TV that is already broadcast OTA?
Happy new year from Zambia!!
oooh. I think that would be a popular one. Who still has the data? Who will keep updated when new data gets leaked. Winner!
Happy New Year from Hawaii! (not 2012 yet, but will be out and about then)
Cold fusion competition heats up as a rival to Andrea Rossi emerges
Thanks. I'm planning some additional posts to cover these in detail.
In the UK (as in South Africa incidentally), the public broadcaster (BBC) gets its money via a license fee that tv owners pay rather than out of the government budget as happens in Canada (CBC).
Bush may well have tried to make it sound like that (although I don't recall that coming up until the runup to the invasion), but it was still clear that Iraq and AQ were not buddies despite what may have been said otherwise.
Happy New Year from Nepal!
I want it to be used in a finance app, so I'd rather buy from a vendor.
Oil from the tar sands in Alberta is sent to the US to be refined and then sold so while the numbers might say one thing, the truth is a bit murkier.
you have an extra ']' at the end of your link to 'hiring'
A point that shows up in some of my writing. e.g.:

---

I'm not going to try to convince you that the foreseeable future is a wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of technological progress towards everything allowed by the laws of physics, in which case you’ve probably thought this all through at some point, or you don't. Life, space travel, artificial intelligence, the building blocks of matter: we’ll have made large inroads into bending these all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technologies yet to come: growing up without the internet in a 1960s or 1970s urban area will be the new 1900s farmboy youth come 2040. Just like the oldest old today, we will be immigrants from a strange and primitive near-past erased by progress, time travelers in our own lifetimes.

---

But fundamentally the issue is that most people live in the world of their parents and grandparents, their [views] shaped by what has happened to people who did not have access to the technologies that will exist in 20 or 40 or 60 years time. [People] expect the course of life they have seen happen already to those they know best, not the course of life that is possible with [technologies] that will be developed over the next couple of decades.
I found this quite biased towards recent papers. Almost all papers was published after 2000, and not a single paper before 1990. Many of the best papers was published in early days of computer science, but not a single one of these was on this list.
Authors entering public domain in 2012
Does anyone have pointers to good resources for workers looking for remote positions?
Well, There's No Longer Any Mystery Why HP Fired Mark Hurd
Comparing to C++/Java, I felt that Design Patterns are more tightly integrated with Objective-C. So it is a very important subject to learn in Objective-C, imho.

And that is very good book for this important subject.

Good luck!
and North Dakota
Snapseed for iOS is free for limited time
Worth noting that Google Chrome also uses K-Means to select the color of the stripe below a website thumbnail: http://www.quora.com/Google-Chrome/How-does-Chrome-pick-the-...
This is something I would personally use but won't simply because there's no way to stop it. It seems like a bad idea to just add a 'cancel' button but I'm not willing enough to post a goal without a lot of detail about the process, how the votes determine if a photo gets posted to Facebook or not, etc. Let's say I made a goal to exercise 3 times a week for the next 3 months and then broke my leg a week in. Boom, picture released. I also wonder how many people would vote that you didn't complete a goal when knowing they would be rewarded with a compromising picture (if familiar with the app). A picture needs to be bad enough to motivate. I don't have a solution for you unfortunately, but hopefully this helps you see the thought process of a potential user who won't try it and help you from another perspective.
Have we missed the oppurtunity to make the 'next big' web startup?
Happy 2012! Success and Joy!!
Disco Era Clothing
That's an awfully heavyweight approach to something that can be solved just as well using the existing CPU affinity functionality of your OS.
Ed Glaeser at Harvard has written extensively about this, including in his recent book. Ryan Avent also covers this on his blog and I think in his book The Gated City as well.
Thanks. Well after finding out tomorrow is a public holiday, I will try this out when I return on Tuesday.