skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the logic of it that's my issue, not the cost.

Cost to purchase doesn't have to be tied to cost to produce, plenty of people buy Gucci without thinking that Gucci is spending 100% of what you pay on the materials.

Yes, a photograph can sell for seven figures, but not generally speaking because that's how much the equipment used to take it costs, but because of how it is valued as art.
No. Why would you say that? Most of the things I own already existed before I acquired them.
I'm working on codemeet.com to solve this problem. I'm looking for beta testers. Contact me.
"""Cameras are expensive. Photographs are almost worthless. Supply utterly outstrips demand, especially for shots like landscapes that have great appeal for amateur photographers but little commercial utility."""

Really? Then the photographer could say: if that's so, go use ANOTHER picture, because I don't fu*n supply mine.

You can't have it both ways, i.e the picture is worthless AND I still insist on using it.
5 reasons an Internet business blog hurt you
I think he means they aren't moving their customer databases and what not to the cloud. But when VP Tom emails VP Susy about the presentation for X, they will be using Google Apps.
Can somebody elaborate? I am waiting for the day I get to wet myself with glee and shamelessly create arbitrarily complex Bayesian statistical models and brute force the parameter estimates with MCMC on a quantum PC... that will change things.
I like it, good job!

p.s. you should use a bigger macvim image http://macin.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/macvim-7-2-icon.png
(Not entirely relevant derail: it would be easy to get started in plastic ballpoint pen manufacturing for 0.5% of your stated figure (just google it), though no doubt you could actually spend $10m).
US Senator Seeks Federal Funding for New York Cloud Computing Center
US Senator Seeks Federal Funding for New York Cloud Computing Center
So funny this comes up today as I have spent the last 3 days trying to get access to a machine in order to troubleshoot a bug. It's a machine that my team is supposed to control, yet no one wants to grant me access. The network group sent me to the DBAs and the DBAs have sent me back to the network group and back.

Large teams also allow people to hide out which I think kills morale for the rest of the team. I still don't understand how the entire team can realize a person is ineffective yet management somehow misses it and keeps them around. At a minimum if management wants to keep a person around they should explain they are not cutting it and need to improve.

I'm starting a new job soon and cannot wait to get back into a small company.
Would privacy be a issue?
Ask HN: Have frameworks taken over?
It seams like web app/services nowadays are always built on top of something, be it Ruby on Rails, Django, Sinatra etc.

Does anyone write their apps from scratch anymore?
From the article, the only thing I noted from it was that the mafia was late to the game. These predatory lending practices is what led to the financial crisis and that companies, corporations and governments were more efficient at being gangsters.
Why not watch a video on how it looks like during a 2-min span during the first hour of being on top of Hackernews!

http://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-first-h...
I am an Engineer and an Operations Research professional. Yet I have mostly worked for companies that do not do engineering or are very small organizations. They do not want to allocate me the resources to research or software. So I've had to rely on what is open. I've used Free Software as a toolset to perform a lot of my work. Yet access to the research behind a lot of those tools is very hard to come by. Places like Penn State's Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index and R-Project http://r-project.org have been a great haven for open research for my work.

I do believe science should be open. Yet I also believe that the scientists behind the research should be compensated. But all the while there is great research out there sitting behind a publisher that limits access to us practitioners who do not have the resources to gain access. I think there is definitely an opportunity to find somewhere in-between where the two can meet.
I find this situation fascinating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
"""A replacement value is only relevant if it has to be replaced - if I use his photo without permission in a magazine or a website, he still has the photo, no replacement needed."""

No, he doesn't still "have the photo" as in "no damage done".

He has a digital file, but he just lost BOTH the exclusivity of the photo AND his say in how his work should be distributed.
I work at Cheezburger and our group is spread around the country with one person even working in Poland. Here are the tools we use:

Campfire (casual group conversations.. basically our "watercooler")
Skype (Main IM program for important questions, voice chat, video chat)
Ventrilo (Great for casual chat throughout the day.)
Google Chat (Some people use this in addition to Skype... dunno why!)
Webex (Whole company dev meetings/screen sharing)
Google Sites (Company blogs/information sharing)
Google Groups (For email lists)
Gmail
Fogbugz Wiki (dev work processes)
PivotalTracker (organizing team work)

For me personally having never been a remote worker before, it works so well that I don't feel like a remote worker. As you can see that's an awful lot of technology though. We're constantly trying new things to consolidate but the tools that do everything seem to just do it poorly.
s/Tech Company/Open Source Project/
A good friend of mine with a PhD in this stuff points out that to do any useful work (ie breaking 3DES) you need a qubit for every bit in the factor(key), and all must be super-positioned at the same time - and that getting each extra bit superpositioned seems to be getting exponentially harder - in short quantum computing is looking to be technically much much harder than hoped. Kind of next century harder.
Choosing An Internet Programming Paradigm
I wonder what Google thinks about this. Seeing as they discontinued their text translation API because of 3rd party abuse, I wonder if this would suffer the same fate if it gets popular.
Mr. Moglen: Thanks for the warm up. I'm having lunch with Stallman in un poco minutos. Bye!

Reporter: Like, bye?
I didn't used Google hangouts, but what is the difference between Hangouts and Skype? are there any better features?
IPad app inspired by Microsoft Courier has been rejected
" I consider it ($6,612) the replacement value if it’s stolen, or how much my lawyer will send you a bill for if it’s found being used without my permission."

I wonder how much his lawyer will send a bill for if someone uses 2 or more of his pictures without permission.
"""Many folks would be happy to allow their photos to be used just for "exposure" or even for fun. Likewise many writers would happily allow their writing to be published for free. This is the case for both aspiring professionals and amateurs who never intend to make significant money with their hobby."""

More power to them. Many others DO NOT.
There have to be hundreds of social media-related incidents that came up in the middle east during the Arab Spring uprisings. This one came up first on a search:

"Man gets three years in prison for insulting Islam on Facebook"

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/10/arab-spring-in-egypt-man-g...
I agree that assuming rational actors in regards to economics is utterly flawed.

However, economic rationality is one premise of the author's argument. Otherwise, there is no reason to care about efficiency.

Having worked in organizations both large and small, turf wars and petty behavior is hardly confined to large organizations and on the level of the production worker it is my experience that it creates far more drag in small organizations than large ones - in general, thirty person teams more easily replace a resigning worker than five person teams.

The term "waste" is as suspect as "dollars per line of code." A team of thirty is more likely to be dealing not only with an overburden of bureaucracy, but with an additional constraints such as systematic compatibility and legacy code bases - e.g. IE6 - while small teams of $10k per month programmers are probably more likely to produce code worthy of The Daily WTF e.g.

"True" = true
"true" = true
"TRUE" = true
"tRue" = true
"TRue" = true
"TrUe" = true
...[etc]
That's very true. It makes you wonder what internet entity (other than designated supervillain/punching bag Google) these politicians are aware of?

"It says here that Wordpress hosts 70 million blogs worldwide, which I find hard to believe. If Wordpress is this big, I'd have heard of it. And this Reddit? It's what... some sort of alien game thing?"

So quick to legislate something they profoundly (and proudly) misunderstand.
Moving To London (a guide)
Latest Launches From Harley Davidson at Auto Expo 2012 || thenewsjockey
Disruptive tech innovation is pretty much the only hope IMNSHO.

Ie invent something that makes politics irrelevant in some area. This is somewhat happening with education (ie Khan, Codecademy, Stanford, etc), for instance.
How much of the silliness in U.S. health care is caused directly by the tax code? For instance the largest health insurance company in my area also owns several hospitals. The hospital charges the insurance company for a procedure. The insurance company pays only half that amount. The rest I believe is written off by the hospital as a loss which lowers their taxes. But both the hospital and the insurance company are the same company.
It is not a necessary that the regulators messed up - it is also possible that the parties being moderated, are actively subverting the system.

As I see it, that is a problem with the regulation.

By analogy, when a hacker breaks into your system, you can't say, "our security checks weren't wrong; the users just weren't supposed to enter those inputs". It's your job to anticipate all the possible bad inputs, and guard against them.

Similarly, it's the job of the regulators to anticipate all possible routes around the regulations, and account for those.

Now, a bit of thought will lead to the conclusion that this is impossible except in all but the most trivial cases. I submit that this does NOT give us leave to shrug and just go through it anyway. Instead, it should force us to step back and consider whether the intended benefits of the regulations are great enough to counterbalance the cost of the complications that are certain to occur down the road.

(and I note a certain irony in your pseudonym "intended", since the problem here is UNintended consequences)
This webpage isn't free.

- Served from a $5,000 web server

- Data queried from a $10,000 database server

- Traffic routed via a $10,000 load balancer

- Traffic switched via a $2,000 switch

- Read on my $300 monitor

- Browser running on my $2000 workstation

etc, etc
Lincoln, it sounds like what you’re looking for is some kind of Pledgie-style progress bar that would show you the effect your donation had?

A new feature for Flattr where you could set a goal and state what you’re collecting the money for?

Unfortunately unrealistic that Amazon will ever mash its wishlist up with any financial service that what they already provide but perhaps there’s a way to build a connecting layer between those two services. You should submit this idea to our developer challenge, perhaps someone picks it up (more info on our blog).

Teller / I work @Flattr
The Leap Frog System 10/10/2011
Yeah, I was aghast when I found out about this. Perhaps it is just the departments that my friends work in, but I've seen similar murmurings on the internet.

I actually found out because I wanted to build a startup that used biomedical literature and biopharmaceutical companies. I basically axed the idea after talking to my friends.

To be fair, the decision to cut R&D in big Pharma is unrelated to the decision to remove literature subscriptions. It is just one of the strings of mismanagement episodes that pharma has performed.

If anyone is interested, this thread at SA is pure gold:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...

In particular, these are some quality posts to show the absolute inane nature of big Pharma:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
Keep Free Content Off Your Homepage
> Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?

You could make the same point more civilly.
Don’t Focus on Rank to Measure SEO Success
I don't buy that line of argument at all. You're claiming that if you can establish some line of cause and effect then anyone in that chain must take moral responsibility for the outcome.

That's like saying an author who writes something that offends Islamists is responsible for any violence perpetrated on them, since they had the choice of not publishing.

The moral responsibility for acts of violence lies with those that commit them, or incite others to do so.
Message Queue Evaluation Notes
Apart from "Oh Hai" I like it. Do you really need to associate yourself with a meme like that? In my experience, meme-loving people aren't very interesting to be around in real life, and that opening statement caused me to instantly jump to a lot of conclusions about you that are most likely incorrect.
Agreed. Larger companies can try to simulate this effect to a large extent by creating smaller teams. So visibility within a team is good. This can be taken to an extreme and lead so silo-fication so these teams are run almost like smaller companies, have their own hiring policy, budget, etc.
> or one of your friends must have interacted with

This is where I stop clicking "like" on anything (I already block facebook's scripts outside of facebook itself, so don't see their "like" buttons on external sites).

I'm not giving fb's advertisers permission to plonk adverts where my contacts will see them - if I think something is worth mentioning to my contacts I'll mention it myself. If someone places an advert on my news stream because I interacted with their page, then fair enough (I can just hit unlike should I choose to terminate that "relationship"). If fb want to advertise something to my contacts "just because" then they probably have the right to do so (no doubt this is covered in the Ts & Cs we agree to by creating an account and logging in), but I don't want to be a source of (an excuse for) advertising opportunities and won't be used as one.
While I agree with your point, the author's argument does not allow for rockstars and slackers - all programmers have been reduced to the mythical $10k/month level (i.e. man-month is the measure of all things).
In my experience, ALL the people who care about reading papers, also care about open access.

Because i am the only person i know, who want to read scientific papers. Which is probably because I have never seen an university from the inside.

So i am the guy wo would benefit from this.
Well, normally frameworks give you for free a standard set of practices that make it easier to build a secure and maintainable application, so it's normal that web development is being moved to frameworks.

I find that most web applications or websites built from scratch, normally in PHP, to be written by amateur developers that have little knowledge of security, maintainability, best practices, database design, etc.
The string data type in the db? Because Redis itself uses char-stars all over the place, with the libc string functions.
XKCD - Game AIs
Looks really nice. Is it only for code? I would like to write some text with formatting and draw some arrows on my ipad with my fingers, tables or something like this for effective speech, and then save it online, that employee can use it as a future reference. I would definitely buy/subscribe to your app if it will have these features. Not all of employees are developers, most hired people are non-developers. If you would have these features it would be a game-changer startup.
I like all the variants. I heard the unnamed engineer version.

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
33 Entrepreneurs Who Make This World A Better Place
Works in all browsers on OS X Lion.
Hey Tim,

I'm a little confused by the two different colored bars (blue and gray) in the skills section of your resume. What is the difference between them?

Also, it may be nice to include your name in the fixed header on the page. I think it's more important to constantly see your name rather than the navigation circles, especially if some people will simply scroll down the page rather than click on each circle.

Although people have said that resumes are no longer relevant, I'd still offer the viewers the option to print or download a standard resume from your site. Just cover your bases.
Yes, when you write C code and attach it to JVM processes, that puts the JVM process at risk. More C code, more problems.
Well, it's really not 35 dollars. Adding a 7 dollar power supply, a 5 dollar SD card and a molded case, it's more like 50 dollars. Plus shipping.
Mine cost $4k. This is getting expensive for anyone who might copy this page.
Am i missing something here, some versions of the andruino seems to be in a similar price range (at mouser.com), or is this board vastly superior to the cheap model andruinos ?
Can an MIT professor save the USPS?
There's a difference between pro and pro quality. Even then, pro quality is hard to define. I would like a world where higher quality TV shows are more common.
CES 2012: A Social App Developer's Perspective
They are not a huge single organized crime organization as the article says. There is no such thing. I bet legal lobbies in US deal with much more power and money than the single most powerful crime org in Italy.
I tend to agree, though this kind of reasoning followed through leads to very nasty conclusions. A fully automated world could eliminate most people, eventually, seeing them as parasites and freeloaders, but who would want to live in that?

People can still contribute in lots of ways which are severely under-appreciated by the capitalist system but appreciated by other people. There will hopefully be a point at which cutthroat "efficiency" and "productivity" is not the only goal anymore. After all, redundant and decentralized systems are more fail-safe, stable, and common in nature.

And the people are there, they may just as well do something... preferably something that makes them feel useful and belonging. Like open source software for programmers, art for creative people, caring for the old and wounded for empathic people, and so on...

Then again I might be a hopeless idealist. In that case, good luck holding on to a piece of the ever-smaller pie. The next round of musical chairs might be my, or your obsolence.
I work remotely with a web designer (I'm a programmer), and we mostly use a combination of Skype, GitHub and Gmail (for asynchronous communication)

We haven't found collaboration software for documentation and such good enough for our needs yet, but we are trying Trello.
NEC sets 4Tbps transatlantic speed record
For now, it's only code sharing. I may add text w/ formatting in the near future. No plans to add drawings though.
There seems little point when the 2nd most popular browser (Chrome) won't correctly display Unicode.

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

square square square

Contrast with Firefox
Thanks for the feedback. Even if my 'goal' could be "stuff on this wishlist" and not so much have a dollar value as such... just an easy way to say "you're giving me money for this stuff".

Then I guess everytime my Flattr account had enough money to buy something on the wishlist then to do it automatically would be cool. Especially if you guys got a referral fee somehow? Don't know :)

Thanks for mentioning the developer challenge, too. I'll definitely look into it. To be honest, my usage of Flattr right now is essentially zero, but I really like the idea of it and this year I'm trying to really 'support' these cool ideas.

Thanks again!
What are the regulations in the US about using such a service? The recording could be seen as wiretapping. Do you have to play a disclaimer on the call before you can use such a service? It sounds great and I'd love to use it but I'd be wary of the possible legal repercussions
True as far as it goes; std::string is safer than libc strings. If all your program does is manipulate strings, and not marshaled binary data structures or protocols, and your data structures are simple and you're very careful with your iterators (which themselves often decompose to pointers) and your object lifecycles are simple enough that you can reliably free things and know you're not going to accidentally touch the memory later, and-and-and, you can write a safe C++ program.
It's useful. I wish this is in my country (Malaysia).
He included the cost of the camera, but only the cost of the gas, not the cost of the car. Why include the whole cost of the camera equipment, but only the operating cost, and barely that, of the car? To be consistent, he should include the total cost of the car.

Yeah. I get that the photo isn't free, but to include all costs related to it is a bit hyperbolic. That's not a six thousand dollar photo.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I think all your points are accurate (with the exception of all peer-review being good - some journals really do have bad peer-review).

The life sciences would be a better place if everything was open-access.

My point is that there is zero incentive for those "in the power" to change. Scientists just want to keep running on the prestige hamster wheel, journals want to get money, universities pay the money because their scientists need the journals.

To break the cycle you need someone to get off the wheel first. Journals obviously won't. Universities can't (imagine a university cutting all of their scientists off from the data....). Government doesn't really play a role in this, they just hand out grant money. And they do require data to be open-access after a certain period of time if funded through the NIH.

So that leaves scientists. And very few are willing to stake their employment, livelihood and reputation on a "cause". The only people who realistically can do that are tenured faculty - and most of these are old PIs that like the system just the way it is, damnit.

So yeah, I agree with you. But I don't see it changing any time soon. Where is the incentive?

Edit: As an aside, you can lease the Medline abstract database from the NIH for free (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/license/license.html). You can also dowload Biomed Central full text archive too (http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/datamining)
You are probably right. But until somebody shows me a table comparing OCSE countries, I keep thinking the writer of the article has watched too many movies of the Godfather.
Psychological encapsulation
Actually, the large differences in individual productivity have more to do with the slackers than with the rockstars.

Some programmers, in some environments, are negative net productivity programmers. If some programmers literally get nothing accomplished at all, then you can easily say that "some programmers are 10^3 or 10^6 or 10^100 times more productive than others"

Another factor in "rockstar" productivity is that you need to get all the bull out of the requirements gathering process. I've seen so many places where it takes six hours of time working with "customers" to figure out the requirements for something that takes 6 minutes to implement. Tasks that are absolutely trivial can stretch on for weeks if your organization can't be decisive about getting them done.

Of course, in large teams there's a lot more bull to go around.