skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At my last company we had a co-founder like this. He would implement stuff extremely quickly, often at odd hours to fix a pressing bug. However, the code was just garbage from a maintenance standpoint.

It was hard to criticize, though, because he pretty much single-handedly got the company off the ground by quickly implementing features people were willing to pay for. This code was good enough to get the company up to $2 million annually.

The downside is we spent about a year re-writing the software to get it to a state where the company could scale to higher levels. During that year we had to stop adding new features.

I remember getting very frustrated with the code quality, but I often wondered whether that was just a price we had to pay to get cash flow positive.
Uh huh-huh. Huh huh-huh huh-huh-huh.
Why not the third (and in my experience most common) alternative? Autocommit but if you explicitly start a transaction then automcommit is turned off until that transaction has been committed.
...and Windows Installers are a lousy way to get someone to be able to run your program.

I see Native Client as being an extremely nice solution to several issues at once:

- runs fast

- the programs don't need an installer

- I can trust a Native Client program (that's me personally)
Perfecting The Art Of The Ask
So true.

Wait for the next "think of the children" legislation...
I remember reading articles about COM+ which didn't mean MSMQ but looked more like something close to what .net framework became. Then I've read that Msmq and thought "what?" Wasn't then COR the first mentioning of what you name COR?
Simplify * 3 ?
The Ubuntu Android Phone/Computer
Do you have any good links/references/experience with 'managing social media'? My wife has been offered a social media position with a small local company but neither of them know 'what to do' beyond managing facebook and she really wants to do well at the job (she's excited!) so is looking for ideas.
My girlfriend was doing medical transcription for a while before going back to school. It's boring, but it's a somewhat skilled position and thus the pay is decent (my girlfriend topped out around 2k per month). Your wife will have to get a medical transcription certification first, though.

Here's the company she worked for: http://www.nuance-nts.com/ - they're the same people that do Dragon Naturally Speaking and Siri. Kinda weird to be training algorithms that are replacing you.
Just like you can't look at the sun directly - because it's too bright... and Hubble is constructed to mainly look at the faint objects far-far away.
>"This issue doesn't impact Lion FDE at all. Lots of people use Lion FDE."

Wouldn't it be the case that if a person used the same password for full disk encryption that has been exposed by the security flaw, that Lion FDE security would be compromised?

In other words, this seems to be a case where an isolated software flaw creates the potential to exploit a common wetware security flaw.

The claim the ZDnet appears to be making is that this flaw is most likely to make its appearance felt in environments with lots of Macs and a need for backwards compatibility or flexible support for employees with Mac laptops.

It looks to me like the risk is to any ecosystem which supports heterogeneous OSX configurations - e.g. the VP of Sales Macbook may be an attack vector due to the way in which he uses it at home.
she could sign up to be a translator on mygengo: http://mygengo.com/
The conference where she delivered the speech was at the re:publica in Berlin (http://re-publica.de/12/). I've seen her talk in entirety on Friday, and I was deeply impressed with her opinions. Usually, when politicians (particularly older politicians) talk about Internet topics, their opinion is mingled with half-knowledge and the hope to enslave the internet and make it a read-only thing.
However, Kroess' speeach was fantastic and it made me almost happy to see such a level of understanding of the importance of the internet, and the questions, dangers, and opportunities it raises for the future to come, in a politician. Especially someone who has such an important position in the EU.
>We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all

Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus).

As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational.

[1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...
Is all manual labor off the table? Does your wife have any crafting skills?

On Etsy, I've seen a lot of people making things that don't seem like they would be labor intensive beyond the occasional shifting and arranging of raw materials.

If she's capable of making things that would do well on that website, count me among the jealous :)

Good luck.
She could be a virtual personal assistant and work from home on Zirtual: http://zirtual.com/
Ruby 1.9.3 added File.write("filename", "some data").
Most voters simply feel compelled to vote and go for the overall feel or 'brand' of the politician.

I agree. Something the Obama campaign understood and mastered. I don't want to make this an overly political discussion, he's made some moves and gestures I disagreed with, has some policies I didn't like but he knew how to run an election and change the conversation. Branding is what did it for him.
I don't know about the "One True" language, but it seems clear that people are casting about for the next generation successor to C and C++; that is to say a fast, compiled, statically typed language incorporating the lessons of the last 25 years and dropping various baggage. It's what the whole D/rust/go thing is about.

D is really great. The terseness, modeling power, and general ease of writing it correctly the first time seem to obviate the need for higher level languages, for me.
I'm getting ready to start an online forum, but I don't relish the prospect of having to monitor it for spam/abuse. It seems like having one person casually scan 10, 20, 50? forums throughout the day could easily keep the spam at bay, and each of those forums owners would probably be quite happy to pay $100+? per month to keep their forum spam free.
I think we all know that spice coffee is only brewed and enjoyed in the comfort of the sietch. When you're deep on the sand dunes, the only thing you are drinking is your own refiltered urine.

Although now I want to see a study on coffee spillage while riding Shai-Hulud...
How to properly log an issue
Does the debian package work in Ubuntu?
Facebook Adds A Stalking Feature
A big factor is you used to have to pay for the compiler and the run time.
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick (The real story and not movie version of Facebook) very good
Thank you for bringing this up. I've read that thread a couple of times but this has completely escaped my attention.

I still think there's business in drop shipping as long as you do your home work and apply common sense.
The comment did not point out anything factually incorrect in the article. The claim was that the author didn't know anyone who engaged in the practices which would lead to a security breach. That's anecdote, not evidence - even given the poster's experience in security there's reason to suspect that such experience would be primarily with Mac installations which take security more seriously than Apple's marketing department portrays it.
You can't be perfect but you can at least try to reduce complexity. Saying "just paint over it with pretty colors when you're done" invites unchecked complication. That attitude is what drove all the monkey/ninja patching that we saw with some early Ruby modules. They were beautiful, yes, but it made some code impossible to reason about.
Yes. Isn't there research showing that trying to persuade people to change their position just strengthens their opinion?
Packet capture or it didn't happen.

(OK, that's the cranky developer-speak for "If you can reproduce the problem while taking a packet capture I'd be glad to help troubleshoot".)

I don't work at Google or on Chromium but I can take a look at it and pass it along if it looks like something out of the ordinary. My email is in my profile.
There's a potential monkey wrench with storing all times, in the database, as UTC: daylight saving time. If you have, say recurring events, or an event in the future, you need to take into account whether the DST state matches for today and said date. One could account for this before storing the time, but the rules might change on you, as happened a few years ago, here in the states.
Schools can't stop wondering what students are up to on Facebook
On inspiration and the chain
Good tutorial about how to use e4rat: http://www.howtogeek.com/69753/how-to-cut-your-linux-pcs-boo...
just a wild, very wild and untested, idea. a mini-niche "mechanical turk" iphone(andorid) app.

i.e.: if your wife is called "gloria" the app is called "Ask Gloria"

* user types in an question/request.
* gloria (the real gloria) response.

the app is free(? or 0.99) with a 1 question package.

an additional question pack (of 5 questions) costs 10(?)$

the selling point is that not an anonymous person or siri-AI answers your stuff, but a real human being. the app can be pitched to techblogs and other stuff as an (funny and "slow life") alternative to siri & co.

it's the smallest niche i can think of. just a wild idea, would love if you give it a try and report back to HN.
Is she good at making things? She could set up an Etsy shop. Know a couple of stay at home moms who make a few thousand dollars a month selling art or crocheted things.
Yes, you might need to remove ureadahead though.
Ask HN: How to restore a disabled Facebook App?
My popular Facebook App [former id #5000008279] has been disabled. In itself this is odd as it's innocuous and long running. However, when I try and start the appeal process it tells me I'm not an admin. [I suspect a bug due to no app, no privileges]. Yet there appears to be no obvious way of directly contacting the Platform team and user complaints are starting to mount...Am I being daft and missing something, or do I have to throw my hands up at a popular (and innocuous) app being disabled for no clear reason?
Do your accounts, chase invoices, quarterly returns etc.. pay her a salary reduces corp. tax liability and enfranchises her into your startup.. it's working out for us both.. so far
Congratulations! You just won the pedantic comment of the day award!
There are quite a few forums out there that do seed swaps/parcels for established members. You can often get rare varieties for very little cost, while passing some of your own collection on for others to grow. It is probably something to try later on, but worth joining gardening forums that do it (so that you can have enough posts) to take part.
I've done some research into the area. Email me and we can chat.
> Jeff was ahead of the curve with the online book company

That's a popular belief, but it is wrong.

Back in 1990 (pre-web) there was an online books company at books.com. It was an outfit in Ohio, which started with telnet access and ordering from their online catalog.

Amazon came later and executed better. Books.com was sold to B&N around 2000, if memory serves.
I'm not really against hybrids, but I'm also not sure how much of this is a hard resource limit versus a current economic one. In the latter case, there's considerable headroom for production to ramp up if economic realities made it viable to do so (e.g. if domestic food prices returned closer to 1980s levels). There's a lot of former cropland that's currently fallow in the U.S. because we don't actually need it; prices for staple crops have been driven so low by oversupply that it's just not commercially viable to farm a large portion of formerly farmed land.
Would it make a difference with SSD drives?
A good question, to which I do not know the answer. I would imagine the problem is either that there are parts that cannot be allowed to get too hot, or that stray light might wreck optical sensors.

So I looked into it. Wikipedia[1] explains that the Sun is never allowed to illuminate any part of the Optical Telescope Assembly. And therefore Hubble never points within 50 degrees of the Sun. This is the "Solar Avoidance Angle". A forum on NasaSpaceFlight.com[2] has a message that adds more detail:

In general the following viewing constraints apply:
- 50 degree solar avoidance angle
- 20 degree from illuminated Earth
- 6 degree from dark Earth limb

So it seems very likely that the problem would be stray light wrecking optical sensors.

I don't know this, however. Further info from someone knowledgeable, would be nice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_space_telescope

[2] http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=17256.0
Actually, that's Butthead's laugh.
No, it moves the files used in the startup to a closer sector and won't speed up your booting time if you're using SSD discs.
How I use MindNode to help me write articles
Infographic of how the USA gets and uses energy (2010)
Emre Ilkme
Marketing tips by Emre Ilkme . Effective communication with one person can be tricky. How can your company effectively communicate with large groups of strangers, keeping their attention long enough to explain why you should be chosen.
YG WQ J SABVB 7UH TYHGFAW CDR
What about the Holy Roman Empire?

I believe the Hapsburg monarchy controlled a larger portion of it than the Prussians, so it technically it's closer to Germany having been part of Austria than the other way around.

Of course it is even more accurate to say neither is true, since the holy roman empire was more of a loose confederation than a country, i.e. closer to something like the EU than to Germany or Austria.
Indeed. I may or may not have asked whether they had revision control, but I do remember Weber remarking that his editor and publisher liked the old paper ways of doing things, and that's why he still was mailing back and forth physical books and paperwork.

(As I get older, I am becoming more sympathetic to this: paper stays put when you take your eyes off it, while bits do not.)
Just do what I do: I reflexively downvote any comment starting with "This[punctuation]".

Variations (e.g., used elsewhere in this discussion, "Exactly this.") also get the downvote.

If we all do "this", we can perhaps stamp out this annoying habit.
Marketing tips by Emre Ilkme . Effective communication with one person can be tricky. How can your company effectively communicate with large groups of strangers, keeping their attention long enough to explain why you should be chosen.
A few years ago Air Canada offered a new trial product: unlimited-travel flight passes. If you were willing to limit your travel to a small region, you could get one for only a few thousand dollars. Some enterprising individuals picked these up and proceeded to take as many as a dozen flights per day on short-hop routes... racking up frequent flyer points for every flight.

Six months later, the unlimited-travel flight passes were introduced as a permanent addition to Air Canada's travel options, with one slight tweak: You now get a fixed number of frequent flyer points per month, independent of how many flights you take.
How Tech is Changing College Life
Gist to add CoffeeScript friendly argument order to Underscore.js
Buy Argan Oil Online | Argan Oil
Earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3936310
"UCS-2 (2-byte Universal Character Set) is a character encoding that was superseded by UTF-16 in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard in July 1996". Java adopted UCS-2 which was later supplemented with UTF-16 support.

There are at least a few languages in this world which do not use roman letters and are better represented as multibyte sequences :). That is why Java added support for supplementary UTF-16 characters over and above UCS-2. That said, use of UTF-8 would have been optimal for western languages, but sub optimal for several other languages.
Some companies succeed in spite of their engineering teams, and some companies succeed because of their engineering teams. What exactly is a good company? Is a great engineering team backed by incompetent management a good company? Or what about a company that has the full package but is unable to mail out paychecks on time and has a HR department that runs off anybody who exhibits an iota of independent thinking. It's really hard to say until you really meet with the company and spend some time there... and even then it's imperfect.
Disruptions: Indiscreet Photos, or Sexts, Glimpsed Then Gone
Snapchat allows people to take and send a sext, then control how long it is visible by the person who receives it.
Y'know, it's funny. I also hate "This" as a usage for, well, anything. Reading this comment made me go look to see what moron posted "Exactly this" only to find out it was me. :-(

It gets worse too, now that I think about it, in that I responded to a comment about the article without having read the article.

I suppose it's contagious? Ug. Now I'm having a crisis. Either way, thanks for pointing out it, however indirectly.
Does this remind anyone of unlimited data plans?
right, geoIP is another interesting solution... the best is to combine several guessing techniques, when available
Exactly, I also though of 2d3 as soon as I have seen that blog post. I came to know the company since it is linked by the (very valuable, if I may) book "Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision", http://www.amazon.com/Multiple-View-Geometry-Computer-Vision... . IIRC the company is run by Andrew Fitzgibbon http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/awf/ , which now seems odd to me since he's a full time researcher at Microsoft. I wander how Andrew's algorithm in the 2d3.com product differs from the one published by the youtube guys in the post.
On TV they always do this phone sex thing :-)
This site promotes horrible spammy paractices such as "article spinning" (automated word substitution) and cross-posting the same (spun) article to numerous sites to with links to the niche site to enhance google-rank. Every link here is an affiliate link for another marketing site in the dense web of self-referential marketing guru sites. Not HN-ey is one way to put it!
As mentioned in the blogpost, the rolling-shutter version of this won the best paper prize at the International Conference on Computation Photography (ICCP), which was held last weekend in Seattle. This is a fairly new but very high quality conference. In many respects, I prefer it to the standard-bearing vision conferences like CVPR, ICCV, or ECCV -- although of course, ICCP is more narrowly focused on computational imaging and photography applications.

In their talk, the authors of this work showed many more video results and they were all quite impressive. In fact, they were good enough to fall into an "uncanny valley of motion", similar to the "uncanny valley" of faces or humans [1] that most people are familiar with. I.e., the motion correction was almost perfect, but just enough off that something felt vaguely surreal about the results. Nevertheless, it's a nice step forward.

Also, as others have pointed out, this is a fully uncalibrated method -- requiring no knowledge of how the video was captured. If you do have some knowledge, then you can often exploit it to do better. But the authors mentioned that most videos uploaded to youtube have either no calibration information, or if present, it's often incorrect. As such, it made sense for them to focus on the uncalibrated case.

Finally, I should point out that rolling shutter, standard on most mobile cameras, is causing all sorts of problems for traditional image and video analysis algorithms, which often make the assumption, sometimes implicitly, that the entire frame was captured at a single instance in time. This is not true anymore, and can lead to gross errors in many methods. Hence the many recent papers on correcting for, and in some cases exploiting, rolling shutter effects.

A recent interesting work along these lines from my former lab at Columbia University is "coded rolling shutter photography: flexible space-time photography" [2]. This paper takes advantage of the fact that different rows in an image are seeing the world at slightly different instances in time to do things like high-speed photography, HDR imaging, etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

[2] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/crsp/
A very dumb article. A shame, as it seems the author did have some interesting insights, but missed the main point completely.

Bezos is a very, very smart guy. He's the closest thing we have to Steve Jobs right now.

(Though that's not really a fair comparison -- Jobs excelled at product and branding. Bezos isn't as good in those areas, but he has a solid background in finance and tech, and he's far better at strategy.

Jobs was a samurai warrior that was so good at swordfighting he didn't need much guile. Bezos is a ninja; not as tough in a straight fight, but he never lets it get to a straight fight.)

E-books are a massive growth industry right now. In a growth industry, it's generally strategic to invest heavily in growth at the expense of profit. If you want to have a nice profitable business, within a few years your business will be undermined by the "foolish" guys that burned cash to gain market share. Walmart followed a similar strategy.

(Lesson: if you want a nice profitable business, don't enter a new, high-growth market).

First the publishers ignored e-books, then laughed at them and hated them. Now they're fighting, and some time in the next two years, Bezos will likely win. When you look at the Kindle strategy, you're looking at a business unit mobilised for war. An army doesn't return a profit until after the land is conquered.

I read Bezos' biography recently. From that, and from other comments about the guy, I think the guy is thinking long-term. Not just "a roadmap for the next 5 years and vaguer plans for the next 10 or 15" as another commenter said.

I'd guess he has concrete plans out to at least 2030 (though obviously with room for various contingencies and black swan events). His current areas of focus like retail and cloud computing are likely just preliminaries. As one internet commenter put it:

"I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff's secret goal is to achieve Singularity in space by 2030. That isn't my guess, but that's the scope you should be considering."

Sources:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/12/14/the-amaz...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understa...
Last I was on (which was a couple of years ago) you could get a good hourly rate (>$20/hr) if you knew how to sort the HITs properly. There were a lot of tasks where the payoff per task was very low, and if you believed their estimate of how much time it took per task the hourly rate was very low, but the task was actually much quicker than they estimated.

For example, a "which of these things is not like the other ones" type task might be estimated as taking 15 seconds, but if you're in the zone you can do them in 5 seconds, netting you 3x the hourly rate.
Sequential reads are faster than random even on SSD drivers, so it could help but I am not sure how much.
So are there better resources you would recommend?

Thanks.