skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love how Dodd seems to extricate himself from his own statements, "the white noise has made it impossible to have a conversation about this," he said. "We've gotta find a better way to have that conversation than we have in the last two weeks."

It's as if his head isn't attached to his mouth, which I think goes for a lot of current politicians. Bringing them all down a staff of notches is entirely in order, lest they forget they represent the "people".
Flaws in Videoconferencing Systems Make Boardrooms Vulnerable
What I've read about welding, for example (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/24jobs.html), suggests that there's no good path to break in anymore: welders with 10+ years of experience are in high demand, while novice and intermediate welders aren't, mainly because the "easier" jobs can be done by machine these days. But how are you going to get 10 years of experience if there aren't jobs for welders with 4 years of experience?

And the pay even for the very highly skilled doesn't sound that great; the NY Times article linked above quoted a rate of $22/hr for a highly skilled welder, which is decent, but not particularly great for something that's considered highly skilled and has a 10-year skill ramp (works out to $44k/yr pre-tax, if you work fifty 40-hour weeks).
cloud9 is good, for me somehow it's too slow to use in real.
It's true that MVCC does mitigate some of the problems, but in a write-heavy OLTP database (such as the one I'm working on now) it's still a significant issue. I also am not aware of any database that supports explicit ordering for the locks, but it's only ever really an issue when using a relational database since you have to lock multiple tables for a single entity.

I agree that deadlocks aren't as harmful, but they are a pain and do hurt performance, so it's another thing you have to worry about.
This is certainly an inspiring article. I've seen both bootstrapped companies grow and VC companies grow and for a personal experience I would say bootstrapping and doing it right from the ground up feels like the best way. I've also seen how stressful it can be on people if you have a VC invested who is demanding more revenue, more sales and better margins.

If your business can generate cash and support itself there needs to be no reason for a large VC cheque that will add extra costs and stress to your business. Just as the article talks about a Taxi business getting VC, there are a number of small web startups that will just never return the capital quick enough to keep their head above water.

I've also seen investors with personal interests place roadblocks as they want you to use a particular platform, their services or a related company they own for your outsourcing. While this can work very well it often seems to work the opposite and slowly bleed the business to death as the investors draw out capital.

Many businesses don't operate on double digit growth figures and I don't believe it's sustainable in most cases to expect all businesses to grow like Twitter or Facebook.
"10 million people contacted Congress, Wales said. “That’s not an abuse of power, that’s democracy,” he said. “[Dodd] had best get used to it.”

Quoted for truth!
I think doing work you don't like or that you find difficult is compatible with new tech you want to learn just for the heck of it.

As an example I'm currently trying to deep-dive on Natural Language Processing. I'm a middling programmer but quite useless at Maths, so I know my weak points are going to be the stats used in NLP.

In this, I've picked up the most highly recommended university level NLP text I could find I'm putting in a couple of hours a week studying it. After about thirty minutes in, I begin losing focus and it starts becoming really easy to think of distractions or reasons why I shouldn't be doing it.

It's at times like that when it helps to realize that no, I should be doing this, I don't need to take a break, I should just power through. I'm not necessarily enjoying everything I do in these sessions, and it's definitely hard work in unfamiliar territory.

I've found that concentration is like a muscle, the more you train it, the harder and longer you can maintain it without taking a break. For me, expecting the work to be fun sets me up to give in as soon as I start losing focus.

Interestingly, after going at work 100% for hours at a time, I actually feel way better than I do than after a half-arsed attempt at productivity. Usually I've created or learned something, and I don't have that guilty feeling that I could have got more done today.
I've always been annoyed in Firefox and now apparently Chrome that you cannot just have a simple, single-file extension if you don't need any external files.

Why can't it just regex the manifest, etc. from the extension header in a comment field.
I think what's he's saying is that it's a bad business model for Hollywood, but it's exactly the kind of business model people are willing to pay for.
True enough, but as I mentioned in my long ramble, what I'm talking about here are simulators, which make up just a small part of a design suite.

(And Synopsys is larger than either Cadence or Mentor, actually)
Book Review: Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli
True, if you are advertising a job and get 1000 applications how on earth do you find time to read all the narratives?

You would probably just have recruiters who would grade candidates on the basis of how many times the word "excellent" appeared on the report or similar, no doubt startups would pop up offering machine learning type solutions to these problems as well.

Not to mention it would be easier to corrupt the system as there would be more plausible deniability if a professor simply "forgot" to include some negative factors on the report.

Much easier just to filter numerically based on grade.
Also most of the smart people who do enjoy the learning as an end in itself should know the material well enough to do well in an exam anyway and just view the process of revising for the exam and tweaking their coursework for good marks as "playing the game".
In a world where I have an absolute defence against the invasion of police officers, I also have protection against criminals. The "real world" version of cryptography does not of course exist, but nevertheless I subscribe to the belief that all transactions should be voluntary.

Police can serve warrants to search my home. There is nothing I can do to stop them, and I won't attempt to stop them (since I value my life). However that does not mean I consent or approve. "They have a warrant", provides me with zero comfort.

tl;dr: Police are going to keep being police without my approval, so I don't see why my system of ethics needs to give them room to operate.
That is fantastic. Just what I needed!
this an absolutely ridiculous position. if you are charged with a crime, police absolutely do and should investigate for evidence, which includes breaching your privacy. the entire of idea of finding evidence is to breach your privacy.

without this, almost no crimes would have enough evidence to go to prosecution. that includes stuff that you don't care about, like privacy, and maybe stuff you do care about, like murders and kidnapping
What I learned about open source development from Tina Fey
To add to bdg's response....

I've experienced 12designer's project posting and they have been separating by category and putting a minimum project price on projects within specific categories. The price can be raise, but can't be lowered. A minimum price could help standardized the playing field.

To quote bdg: "take with it what you will"
it does give a very strong indication that size of government isn't the problem

Not necessarily. It may be that size of government is a problem, but those other countries have encountered a different bottleneck before reaching it.

Nice try. No, this is "access to media."

If you're saying that I won't be allowed to put up a billboard saying "Senator Smith is a rat", or take out a newspaper ad saying the same, then you have shot the 1st Amendment squarely between the eyes.

all evidence has been that the greater the democracy, the greater the success. You can take the king; I'll take the people, every time.

I think you're arguing in circles. For one thing, there are still a lot of monarchies in the world, many of them quite free.

But more important, the entire point that you're arguing against is (if you'll excuse me for paraphrasing; I hope I'm not making a strawman): "It seems to me that the real solution is to dramatically limit the size of government, so that there is nothing to be bought"

That is, the top post in this thread wants to strip away the power of government, and allow people to make their own decisions (including using the power of the market to constrain the action of corporations seen to be doing bad things).

But you seem to be saying that in this case people cannot be trusted, so we need to give additional power to the government to constrain runaway corporations, and in particular to keep those very same corrupt politicians from selling out.

This is self-contradictory in two ways:

First, you've said on the one hand that you'll take power away from the government and vest it in the people, "every time" -- yet in order to support this, you're proposing that we do just the opposite (i.e., prevent people from voicing their opinions as widely as they feel warranted).

Second, you're postulating that the politicians are corrupt and can't be trusted. Yet your solution relies on giving them more power to limit our political behavior. It seems like you're giving them our weapons while telling them "use these guns to ensure that you don't shoot us".
Try reports from IBIS, FactSet, etc. They helped me out a lot when writing pitchbooks/models. Of course, with a somewhat undeveloped market like that, however, it'll be hard, but try one of those dbs. Do you have access to any of those?
Call A Convention, by founding member of Creative Commons
Countrys are to big, there is too much power in few places. I think a more federalistic system helps and even within one governing entity you can distribute the power more. One thing I really like that we have in Switzerland, we have 7 instead of one president and they are all elected from parlament (the president cant just get people who are his drones).
I don't know why you are getting downvoted, you present valid objections to the assumption that everything will always go smoothly. Education should be highly fault-tolerant instead of punishing failure which might not even have been in your power to prevent.
Welcome to KodeNode
KodeNode is a collection of code snippets (or “nodes”) for people to translate into different programming languages or improve in the same language
Although I can program already, I'm sure most people would agree that James's idea of putting a post on his learning experience of Ruby would be an interesting read.
How any company can cross "The Developer Divide"
"I see no difference in principle between a search using someone's hands and search using X-rays."

Then you are hopelessly inhuman. The difference should be obvious, and likely cannot be explained if it is not.
A core point of existentialism is the need to act without certainty. Ie the dizziness of freedom, as Kierkegaard puts it.

Fundamentalists are trying to satisfy their need for certainty by pointing at a certain holy text and going "this is the Truth!".

I think there has to be a way of satisfying the need for certainty without compromising epistemic rationality, however. I have yet to find it, though :(
totally agree. usually Jason writes great stuff. this is just an ad.
But literally all historically successful democracies have limited what set of populace are the "people".

I am not US citizen however I know that when the US was created "the people" were pretty much in minority. It was also expected that "the people" will respect and defend their civic freedoms.

The Switzerland for example historically only allowed armed men to vote and even today if one rejects their military service they give up their voting right.

As noble as this popular democracy concept seems in theory in practice it means throwing pearls before the swine. In modern west 50% of people are just to willfully ignorant to understand what civic rights and duties mean.

I am not in favor of any kind of representative model I am also not in favor of direct democracy.

One mechanism would be imposing a citizens tax of 5% of income for those who want their civic rights. That should clear the field pretty fast.
Actually a lot of people in the USA think strikes, boycotts and demonstrations are stupid. They look at the huge number of strikes in e.g. France and don't understand how the French get anything done. And then they whine that the government doesn't listen to them.
Those look like great resources, but I unfortunately do not have access to either of them. I'll see if I can change that, though!
Rewriting software to start fresh always SOUNDS like a great plan, especially to engineers, but this usually ends up bad for the end user and takes 5 times as long as planned (Netscape anyone?).

Basecamp could definitely use a refresh, but as a daily user I do worry something will be lost if it's completely redone.
Welcome to KodeNode
KodeNode is a collection of code snippets (or “nodes”) for people to translate into different programming languages or improve in the same language.

Use it to learn a new programming language or improve ones you already know.
I may have missed it, but have they actuelly had real users(i.e. not ui designers) do some usability testing (i.e. actual real work) on this? Coming up with it an pushing it into a public release in 4 months looks risky to me. Given how frustrated some users were with Unity, I really hope they learned the lesson.

This as presented this has a very high risk of turning into a "guess what the designers were thinking" game. While very flattering to the designer, it is frustrating as hell to the user. Arguably the current interfaces offer pretty much the same issue : a "guess in which menu I put the option" game - however there is one crucial difference : we got used to the current one, and actually have a really good idea how the designers were thinking - and where they put that option.

EDIT : Right. I did miss that. Thanks.
Ubuntu rips up drop-down menus
I'm not sure it would be legal.
Charity is Selfish and It Needs to Stay That Way to Succeed
Bug? Some Apple TVs Unable to Connect to Ad-Hoc Networks
Actually I don't think it is listening at all when not in use. In fact the sound card even powers itself down when not in use, which can actually be heard in some cases (with some badly shielded/grounded HP for example). It's on when the prefpane is shown for the purpose of displaying that VU meter but as soon as you quit the prefpane, the hardware turns off. And as soon as an app opens it, it turns back on.

Even then, let's assume the sound card is always on (like my old SB16):

- what would listen to it if it was on? necessarily some code, or else it just goes straight to /dev/null.

- so if it's external code injected by a malicious guy, what prevents him from setting it back to internal (and setting it back to line-in when you're looking)? Or craft all sorts of drivers hooking into or replacing AppleHDA.kext or whatever?

- but if it's not external code it has to be internal (i.e Apple provided), so what would prevent Apple to simply tell you it's off when it would not actually be?

- and since line-in disappeared but the (HDA or whatever) sound chip certainly still has this functionality, what would prevent Apple from having a second microphone plugged into that line-in, completely hidden and uncontrollable?

Now Poe's Law kicks in and I can hear headlines already "Apple removed the line-in on purpose to spy on us!"
Well, the article reminds me of the "Webcam" short film. It is not so much about covert NSA agents taking over your computer as targeted malware... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i841CamEX3o
Was Megaupload Targeted Because Of Its Upcoming Megabox Digital Jukebox Service?
Why don't we see more large donations to open projects from western startup CEOs?
Great google talk on the subject for those interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc
The MPAA knows watershed events, alright.

I'm still waiting for the VCR to destroy movies, as his predecessor, Jack Valenti, predicted: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Speaking of which, the petition has been completed, so let's see what the Obama administration does about it now:

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate...
My main concern with this is discoverability - menus are helpful in that they convey a very precise listing of the app's possible actions (when designed well), something that's hard to otherwise come by.

Blender is perhaps the extreme example of this - it has an incredible amount of features, so they can't be placed into menus, and you spend some time learning where (in the hundreds of panels) or which of the thousands of keyboard shortcuts to use.

That said, I find keyboard-driven user interfaces very powerful, so I'm curious to try this out. Fortunately, there's been a way to turn off Crazy Ubuntu Features in most releases if you know how, at least so far.
"creatively speculating on the unknown" - sounds more like philosophy than religion to me.

"unquestioningly believing what you've been told" - how about that?
Or it will become moot when ACTA is ratified.
That's probably because we all wanted to be pop-stars in the 80s. I did anyway...

Today you only have to look at Youtube to see 12 year old kids doing professional level programming presentations to know that programmers are the new pop-stars. They spend ages in their bedrooms practicing their programming and showing the world through screencasts.

The vast majority of these have american accents and whilst it's difficult to know where anyone is from a film, I'm guessing the UK lags behind somewhat but this decision is a very timely one.
Oh and on top of that we pay an extra tax (which goes to the artists) on casette tapes, CD-R's, DVD-R's, VHS tapes, etc. After all, we might record songs & movies on those mediums. And before you ask, no, despite us paying that tax, it's still not legal for us to do so.

Isn't that to compensate artists for the right to copy something for private use. At least that's how I believe it works in Sweden. Unfortunately we also have laws that forbids us to circumvent any form of DRM or copy protection and since nothing is sold without DRM today we are paying for something we can't legally do. And this is something that even extends to external harddrives, MP3-players and I believe smartphones as well (not sure on that though).
Emulating America isn't always wise: Read the story of hedge funds and shiver
My favorite trick was to poke values into the sound registers, THEN goto!
> "if you're sure your hardware hasn't been tampered with, this should physically disconnect the microphone."

Why so? Most soundcards merely detect an impedance change and flick a bit to switch from internal microphone to line-in but you can have full control of that bit by software. That's actually what the prefpane does: even with something plugged in the line in, one can switch back to the internal microphone as a source. (EDIT: apparently it goes hidden on new hardware revisions but the functionality is there, just boot into Linux and do some poking on the soundcard to see what's really available)
Good job man, had a brief look around, looks swish. Hope to have a more in depth look a bit later on. One thing i did notice in your signup form for workers, i hit enter accidentally before filling out 1 field. This caused an error and i lost all the information i had previously entered. Barring password and perhaps username do you think that the form should reload the information if an error has occured? Something to consider perhaps when you have the time :P
The White House petition to investigate him and MPAA for bribery has also been completed (25,000 signatures in 3 days), so at the very least maybe this will hasten his resignation:

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate...
That article only scratches the surface. My background in manufacturing is specifically for a welding manufacturer. There are kids graduating from high school going right into weld school, then getting jobs dealing with nuclear applications and making $35+ an hour. Background checks are needed, and many of the 35+ year old guys have DUI's, failed drug tests and other offenses given they've had a longer timeframe to acquire them.

A good pipe welder can make much more than that, granted the conditions are treacherous where some of those pipelines go.
Hedge fund rushes to settle massive Dell 'insider trading' case
Dragging the colour selector in chromium is a little weird, sometimes it starts to highlight things or drag other elements.. Otherwise quite nice.
I'd just like to chime in with another vote for soundflower. It's useful for any number of things, I have recently used it to pass youtube videos through VST plugins to clean up the audio, and to make Cave Story, a somewhat old game, work with my external soundcard. You can also use it as an alternative to those ripoff "record your audio output" programs.

It is made by the fine people who produced Max/MSP.
Business Models and Google Chrome
Baristas get ‘Samsunged’ in new Galaxy S II ad [video]
I was hoping to see Solarized Day and Night in the theme list.

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
By the way, almost every country in europe has a TV licence. It definitely can be a good thing, most brits would accept that the TV licence is a good price for the BBC. They provide quality television/radio for minority groups and tend to invest heavily in industries like documentary film-making which might otherwise be ignored in a purely capitalist TV industry.
6 Link Building Tips For Small Sites
For anyone who wants a dose of philosophical ultra-pessimism without any hope for the future, check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Against-Human-Race-Contriva...

It's basically a philosophical treatise written by a lovecraftian horror writer, containing discussions on existentialism, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, etc.

Don't say I didn't warn you, though.
Relational databases are awesome. SQL (the ansi standard) is pretty good too. But Rows suck. My data almost never exists as a row in the app. For me the siren call of NoSQL was storage systems that stored and returned my data the way it actually existed in my app. The vast majority of my CRUD apps don't need joins. They need to update an Entity that has a tree like structure. The biggest pain was deserializing that structure into a set of rows and then back again. It's a pain that ORM's tried to fix but caused additional problems. What I really want is a relational database with a sql like query language that isn't stuck in a world of rows.
Hi Pyre,

I agree with your comment. However I would understand due process as process that seems to be fair and just, not something legal. Because if tomorrow the government says by law that part of the trial is to kill the culprit before the trial that would be legal in regards to the law but not in regards to the basic human principles. I know the example is extreme but I hope you see my point on the matter.
In that case even before the trial the parties are punished and destroyed: no presence anymore on internet, no servers, no domain names. It certainly feels like somebody is punished even before the trial, no?

Also the fact that the FBI (FEDERAL) has power to seize or take things oversea is seriously worrying. I believe there are more urgent matters that needs to be taken care in the united States by the FBI before investigating that. This is a result of the PATRIOT Act. Great!

To sum up I believe that MegaUpload profit came massively from copyright infringement but even the worst killer should have his rights guaranteed.