skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's terrific that you're making choices based on what really interests you, rather than optimizing your income. You're obviously the kind of person pclark was talking about, and that's admirable.

I do think, though, that if the institution's executive goals are more along the lines of "make money" while an individual's are more "do cool stuff to change the world," he or she is setting himself up for an enduring conflict which can be hard to negotiate, or even to keep track of at times, because the institution will have so much influence over their life.
This feature was there before, you could enable it for your account by visiting https://dropbox.com/enable_shmodel. This gave you the context menu in the desktop software as well as the buttons in the webview. Also, you could create links to anything you wanted already in the Android app.
So asking for forgiveness and not permission would work out for Google? I don't see how that can work, the only way is if API's are not copyrightable, which will be up to the judge and not the jury.
The new Official.fm launches
As for the Xbox, it's a huge loss leaders. The division is billions in the red. XBox 360 (which had a 33% failure rate) started to make a bit of money last year (or maybe the year before that)..but it's a fraction of what they've put into it.

From what I've gathered, the entertainment division has been making a profit since 2008. It's tough to get solid numbers on the contribution of the 360 to that, since the division contained things like the Zune for a while. I would be surprised if they don't end up profiting overall on the 360.

Sure, that might not make up for the losses on the original Xbox, but that generation was always about gaining a foothold, not making a profit. MS didn't have a horse in race until a year after the release of the PS2. To go from that to the market share that the 360 commands right now is impressive.

Eve that said I don't think making money on console sales was ever the main reason MS got into the market in the first place. I think they realized that gaming consoles were going to become an important part of household entertainment, even outside of gaming itself. Consoles are becoming one-stop shops for all forms of enterainment nowadays. I use my systems to watch disc-based media, streaming off other devices in my house, Netflix, etc. MS would be in a really tough spot if they had let Sony snatch up this market without putting up a fight.
Reminds me of a place I worked where we joked the company's technology was 180 degrees out of phase with whatever was the hot new thing. Looking at the code base you could see how it oscillated between what was hot or great at the time.
Umm.. The author is not objective. He (Norman Matloff) had long since been spouting off on H1-B and why its bad. He also found a way to work it in to the article, in the same way that he had used in the past so effectively, to scare the current programmer segment in to being worried for their jobs.

I am not saying that H1-B isnt abused, but his take on it is largely one sided, and against.
A loop is a loop. Math doesn't change much either. Nor does the concept of space and time, etc. It seems new and different to young people, but underneath, it's mostly the same as it was 40 years ago.
Some programmers dodge this bullet, others don't.

I know a guy who worked for UNISYS his whole life writing Macro Assembler for 360 mainframes. A few years back the state of New York found that the official printer interface for IBM mainframes wasn't fast enough to print all of the paperwork New York State sends out, so he invented a whole new printer interface.

He just retired at age 60 and he's got enough $ to have a home in upstate NY and one in Hawaii.

The trouble you do have is that as you get older you will want to get a more senior job and those do get harder to find.
ZX Spectrum Child
So, I'm confused. What percentage of English majors are still in the "English" field by age 40? What is the English field? Outside of academia, it barely exists. Publishing? So, it's laudable to receive a general education which provides one with many opportunities in life? Great, I agree. Now, why shouldn't the same logic apply to a computer science degree? Aren't the ways CS majors learn to think easily transferred to other endeavors? Why is it not celebrated that CS degrees are so flexible that a high percentage of graduates ostensibly find ways to do what interests them, pays well etc.?
It failed to track me even though I opened the link in a new tab beside the first one.
How many times have you googled some question just to find out the solution was correct 5 years ago but doesn't work with any current release of the software your are using?

Recently, the Ubuntu community took down a lot of wiki pages that had howtos for ancient versions of the OS.
"This page is not available for mobile viewing at this time."

Are you kidding me?
IANAL but according to Wikipedia[1], typeface (and rasterization of the typeface) is not copyrightable although the font file do:

> Under U.S. law, typefaces and the characters they contain are considered to be utilitarian objects whose utility outweighs any merit that may exist in protecting their creative elements. As such, typefaces are exempt from copyright protection in the United States. However, this finding was limited in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc., wherein it was held that scalable computer fonts, i.e., the instructions necessary to render a typeface, constitute a "computer program" for the purposes of copyright law and hence are subject to protection. Hence the computer file(s) associated with a scalable font will generally be protected even though the specific design of the characters is not. Furthermore, a rasterized representation (e.g. bitmap) of the characters in a scalable font is not protected by copyright in the United States.

According to this, the author will have to create his font by directly modifying the original font file to make it a derived work. Since his font is created from rasterized representation, the resulting font file is not considered a derived work. But again, IANAL.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protectio...
Parallel Sets in D3.js
Either that or programmers will have to play catch up and become fully literate.
> But definitely not law. I don't want my son spending the rest of his life chasing dollars." Strange remark.

That is a strange remark indeed, but I suppose I could understand that sentiment coming from a doctor whose main interaction with lawyers involves "ambulance chasers" trying to squeeze money out of his practice.

Most lawyers don't do that kind of work and aren't in it for the money, although a law degree will mostly guarantee you a comfortable middle class life. I know quite a few who work for the government in tiny crappy offices and who will tell you that going to law school was the biggest mistake of their lives. Law is a surprisingly misunderstood profession.
I think what swombat's calling out here is the difference between the social nature of startups, where everybody wants to look cool and do and say the right thing, and the actual nature of startups, where if you're not growing eyeballs exponentially or making something somebody actually pays you for then you're dead.

The startup world is a social community just like any other guild or clan. We have leaders, common dreams, mantras, and so on. It's become quite popular for really rich guys to tell us how it's not about the money. When I first heard this I took it at face value. Then I realized what they were really saying was you can't just focus on the money. That's a big difference!

Part of the danger in hanging out in places like HN is that it's easy to pick up on all the social cues of the startup world and miss out on the practical nuts and bolts of it. So we'll get our nerd on and discuss esoteric programming concepts. Or we'll rant at company X and praise company Y for basically doing the same thing. Or we'll vote up an essay by famous startup icon even if it's not that worthwhile. More to the point we'll praise one startup idea because it's "cool", then we'll shun another because it's unpopular in our social group.

I love making things people want. People show me they want them by paying me. I need the money, so this works well for everybody. Once I don't need the money, I'll still love making things people want. At that point, however, I need to be really damn sure I'm actually doing something that has value aside from just a bunch of people in my peer group telling me how awesome my idea is. And before I get there, the last thing I want to do is use their opinions as any sort of useful metric at all on what I should be doing. Money is a much better temporary proxy.
I don't know. I for one enjoy many material things that I'm not yet able to afford on a consistent basis, and that keeps me pretty motivated.
A Brief History Of Digital Video File Formats (INFOGRAPHICS)
BlueSnap and Elance Offer 1M/1M Scholarships
I don't think I've seen a 17" mac in around three years. See a lot of 17" gaming laptops, but aside from editing video or photoshop, I'm not sure why you would want something that big.
I don't agree with "mutually beneficial" in either case, and "agreed upon" is murky in the case of HFT and at least somewhat misleading in the case of domain squatting.

And "I take money from people to increase available funds for others' business purposes" is not much of an ethical argument, either.
You and mchurch should start a YouTube sitcom or something, where you rant about all your horrible experiences.ike a Curb Your Enthusiasm for techies. It would be entertaining and more profitable than just posting on HN. Larry David should love to invest, you've nailed his technique of railing against the firstworldproblems facing people who can't be happy in the most rewarding and comfortable niche around, and brought it from the LA social scene to the Silicon Valley / Seattle office space. And you are good writers.
they've done that a few times in the past.
'DOM Doodles' from actual interviews at Monetate
I would love to see these statistics...anything available online and if so, any links?
A possible labor issue behind shortage of iPad retina display
A recent report speaks about the reduced production of the latest iPad Retina display. This comes across as a shock for all those who have been expecting to see more of this product in the market for purchasing it. So, what has been the reason behind this?
Android Trojan steals password via motion sensor (Google Translated)
Aye, very good point -- I'll update the story to reflect that.

I still think it's surprising that there are very few computers that are _really_ cheap (like the Raspberry Pi).

The difference in computing power/packaging size/etc between 1982 and 2012 is far greater than the price difference the ZX Spectrum and, say, a netbook. Even the $25 Raspberry Pi is probably (relatively) expensive compared to the ZX Spectrum.

edit: I mean, a really cheap home computer today is around $300 -- just $150 less than an inflation-adjusted ZX Spectrum.

I guess there's more to a modern computer (bigger case, drives, expansion slots, etc.) but there's still a big price disparity. I guess I'm just surprised that it took this long for something like the Raspberry Pi to arrive.
I read up until the point where the author compared online payments to the Facebook like button.
Making their design fit the strict requirements for the $10 million prize was probably not worth it for the competitors.
Brain scan predicts mistakes 20 seconds before you make them
Stupid bloggers who don't know their weapons.

I can't play the video. From the still it doesn't look like a machine gun, but a rifle.
Amen!

Whenever I ask "startup" people - "how does it make money?" - I often get odd looks. The same people are usually on the look out for funding.

Yes, it is honourable to run a business for love and passion of the idea. However money pays the bills and keeps you in the game longer.

It is not so honourable to ask for money from investors when you haven't considered how your idea will generate revenue.
One would think, with the story coming from Bloomberg, that they might mention that finance almost exclusively hires older programmers. Hedge funds, trading firms, and even the banks place a significant premium on expertise and are generally staffed by a much older crowd than what you'd find in Tech. (For many of the reasons you'd expect...)
To view the generated site you can run the command python -m SimpleHTTPServer inside the public directory.

I'm confused: you're starting a python server (adding a python dependency to your instructions) to serve static files? Just open the file. Am I missing something?
Money == Freedom

Don't you want freedom?
That's true, but software development is special because not everybody can do it.

Don't get me wrong here, I actually think that mostly anyone (lets say over average) can learn to code, including very young children or over 40 adults ... the difference between normal people and people that make a carrier out of it is that building actual applications is a lot harder than printing hello-world or sorting an array or scripting your home appliances.

I think that if you don't start doing software development early in life (at most in your early twenties), then chances to make it as a software developer are rather poor.

A couple of reasons come to my mind:

- like with every hard skill out there, it takes a phenomenal amount of time until you're able to be effective at it

- we constantly have to learn, just like doctors and while doable, it gets tiring. You can learn new stuff based on what you already know, so you never restart from scratch, but many people simply stop giving a shit

- getting a hello-world working feels like magic at first, but repeat that 10,000 times and pretty soon it starts feeling like drudgery. That's the story of most things you end up working on. And it is impossible to work only on new stuff, in fact most of the work in software development is drudgery

- related to the above, the motivation of senior software developers has to pivot from working on cool stuff to seeing happy users, or to money earned, or to other tangible byproducts or your work, because "cool" is relative and the initial magic starts fading away (which is why I believe many developers move into management)

- the demand for "good" software developers is high. But it's actually pretty hard to find a job as a software developer if you're not at least decent or come from a good university. This makes it a hostile environment for rookies, being a bitch to get your foot in the door

- software development is not only hard, but must be complemented with people skills ... being able to communicate effectively with others is of extreme importance, knowing how to do efficient marketing is also essential if you want to build your own products or if you want a good carrier path
Since the 70s, most apps have comprised "forms" (screens for a user to enter something, that will be stored in a database) and "reports" (screen that nicely format the contents of a database). This is all Facebook et al really are...
Linode is a much better choice for VPS. Rackspace cloud currently runs entirely on old AMD 2374 hardware. Sure you get 4 burstable cores for all instance types, but these do not perform even close to as well as 4 core on Intel 55xx or 56xx hardware many other cloud providers utilize. Disk IO may be better with Rackspace on th low end (e.g. Compared to M1.small), but it doesn't scale, and you'll be getting the same IO on a 16GB instance, which doesn't even come close to an m2 or cc instance with EC2.
I've found an easy answer to age discrimination. For the past seven+ years I have worked from home. Many of my clients and coworkers have little idea of my relatively advanced age.
The requirements for the prize are: "It would draw no more than 10 watts of electricity, be truly dimmable, flip on and off without flicker or hesitation, and emit a pleasant light. It would also have to fit into a standard socket and last at least 20 years."
100x better is a bit much. 10x better, maybe.
This is pretty nice. Thanks! Has a ton of features I've been looking for.
>linux was the least mature.

This I can agree with. I'm surprised that MS was well done though because their API appears to be a mess if Wine is any indication.
Marketing Strategies for A Successful Online Business in 2012
In 2011 we witnessed great change in the online marketing industry including few Google search algorithm changes, the rise of Pinterest and the social revolution brought by Google Plus. Now in 2012 is time to take advantage of these great innovations and prepare for future.
I absolutely love the fact that we are recreating all the work that went into building computers in the 70s and 80s in 0x10c. It's such a great way to learn the fundamentals of computers and appreciate where we are today. There's lots of stuff going on underneath my fingers right now.

I can't imagine what it's going to be like to play the game, but it's going to be awesome. Even if it's just a boring world with DCPU-powered ships, the community itself will make the game diverse and interesting.

It's pretty obvious who are networking guys, OS guys, and language guys, and others :)
Is it okay to want food?

Then you have your answer.
The article states: "A large technology company might typically pay new law-school graduates and MBAs salaries and compensation approaching double what they give new master’s degree grads in computer science. "

But, from what I've read, those high-paying law school jobs are very few, only for the elite of the elite, and requires the new employee to work insane hours. Same for those MBAs.

I'm pretty sure that, on average, a new master's degree grad in Computer Science outperforms a typical law school graduate, and should be close or better than an MBA.

Let's Google:

http://www.nalp.org/classof2010_salpressrel

Law graduates:

"The national median salary for the Class of 2010, based on those working full-time and reporting a salary, was $63,000"

and only because of those few outliers making $160,000.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/06/06/paying.jobs.2011.gr...

"Computer science -- Average annual salary offer to 2011 grads: $63,017"

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2009/bs20090...

"PayScale's average (for starting salary MBAs) clicks in at a much more modest $66,300"

So, basically, he's wrong.
Analyst: Apple will Kill 17-inch MacBook Pro this Year
Mobile games mean big business {infographic}
Alt Text: Patent Nonsense From Smartphone Power Players
I built my first web site/blog a couple of weeks ago, and I've been experimenting with advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, etc, and I have to say it's been a really interesting experience.

Basically the most important thing I've learned is that I have to understand why my users are coming to my site, and from there tailor my site around that.

I have a very high bounce rate of around 75%, but most of that is due to smartphone users and the fact my site is pretty hard to use for them. Creating a simplified page is my #1 goal over the next couple of weeks.

Looking at logs, I also realized that my landing page was hard to use for a significant percentage of my new visitors. I could see from the logs that they were getting confused, trying it out a couple of times and bouncing. I was working on this last week, and tried a couple of GUI changes, but decided that having unintrusive error boxes would probably help better. Hopefully that will help those users having trouble.

But from the ones that stick around, I do have a few pretty regular users, and that leads to what I think is a kind of nice ad clickthru rate. I've paid a good chunk of all my costs in the first two weeks (of course, my costs are only around ~$30).

Thanks for the pointer to Mixpanel. I was looking for a better type of analytics than Google Analytics which doesn't offer me a great deal of information. The only hesitation I have is whether or not having all this javascript client-side tracking will cause users to question their privacy. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Max career length depends on how the young engineer sets himself up. Early in your career you want to bootstrap yourself with some hot new technology to get your foot in the door. Once you are about 3-4 years in, you need to switch gears and focus on learning the things that change slowly. Such as:

1. How to work with people (technical/non-technical)

2. More about math and general concepts of your craft, not just new language X.

3. Measuring the business effects of your work.

People are more apt to deal with a 20 something nerd with a bad attitude because he's cheap and fits the stereotype. An expensive 40 something with the same attributes will be seen as a weirdo.
Sales Report #1: My App's First Months of Sales on Android And... WebOS?
A Bug in the Bigcomp Function of David Gay’s strtod()
It seems to me that a huge amount of developer effort tends to be expended in mapping data between different data structures as required by different algorithms or API's.

If a way could be found to automatically discover a set of feasible and approximately optimal data transforms to meet the requirements of the operations that need to be performed it seems like very large productivity gains might be obtained.
Dropbox Unveils Incredibly Simple Two-Click File Sharing