skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How many hours a day does the average Valve person spend in meetings? How are they organized?

I've looked into some co-ops, including San Francisco's venerable (and very profitable) Rainbow Grocery. One of the biggest complaints is the amount and/or difficulty of meetings, but they see them as necessary to settle issues with sufficient buy-in from all stakeholders. How does Valve minimize that pain?
Looks like it was patched: https://twitter.com/#!/ryanr14/status/196461808331132929
"Generally, there is one thread for each application and one for the operating system’s user interface as well."

I think the article writer meant "process" -- there are many threads per process, and that is present in most "contemporary operating systems". If this is their (Haiku Inc.'s) attempt at PR... they are not doing it well.
BeOS's (intended) competition was MacOS 8 and Windows 95, which probably weren't that thread-savvy. In retrospect, the forced multithreading certainly improved responsiveness but also made porting software painful (since all other GUIs have a single event-loop thread).
I am nowhere near as optimistic as you are. One of the biggest problems I see with the way we interact online is that there are very few places* where people with differing viewpoints interact at a level of trying to learn from or understand one another. The result is that politics are even more fragmented than ever, and everybody feels more righteous and mistakenly better-informed, because they've never had to read and seriously and honestly consider an opposing viewpoint.

* Honestly HN is the closest I can think of, and it's skewed pretty heavily liberal with a touch of libertarian.
New alias. Same stupid web site.
Some of them worked for Nazi Germany or Stalinist regime or horrific Japanese medical "science" / torture so not all of them were working for freedom. Scientists sometimes say that science is neutral, and it's up to society to use the results wisely.

I appreciate that scientists don't always have freedom of choice under a brutal regime.
But certainly not all of it. As another commenter upthread put it, I might have a company that makes $5 billion/year and a $100 million/year lifestyle. I will never spend all of that money.
Well, you may call it inertia. But really, once you add up all these challenges, it tends to be quite substantial.

For example, say, you are a skilled plumber who owns a similar business repairing/installing plumbing in Shanghai, China. Theoretically, all these skills would actually make him/her eminently employable or set up a similar business, say in Sweden.

Unfortunately, that is really not the case.

Be as much as most of us would wish, capital has really achieved utter victory over labour. Till we have some major innovation which will neutralize the advantages of having mass amounts of capital, we are transitioning towards a new feudalism.

As I was mentioning to a colleague, the only reasons why we have a job is that software development/programming/computer systems is still sufficiently complex enough for up to 80% of the world population.

Or else we would actually be quite screwed as well. ;)
According to this from the FAA, they commonly approve flashing lights:

http://transition.fcc.gov/mb/policy/dtv/lighting.html

And this advisory (PDF, admittedly from the Alaskan office, but I doubt there is much variance), provides for flashing lights on towers:

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato...
For that matter, 1) non-industry groups haven't found an epidemiological link between cell phone use and cancer, and 2) those making the claim have little in the way of evidence that they aren't safe.
Barack Obama on his dog: "Sometimes I have to scoop up his poop, because I don't want to just leave it in the lawn!"

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-501370_162-7160351.html
that military decided needed killing

No, politicians decided that. That's an important distinction. If we don't like what the military is doing, we need to place blame where it belongs: on the politicians.

There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade

The military is still highly important. Think about the role it played in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII, to name a few wars that most consider to have been justified for the US to enter. More recently, the Gulf War where Hussein invaded Kuwait. I personally believe that in the future, Iran and/or North Korea will acquire a nuclear weapon that threatens US citizens. Somali pirates. Who knows what else will come up. We still need a military.
Here's a link to an article that was published about a year ago. It describes several reasons why microcredit might not alleviate poverty despite encouraging enterprise, such as the fact that most families must spend a large part of their loan on servicing other debts, medical emergencies, etc. There have also been rogue microcredit agencies that operated like loan sharks. The article proposes savings and insurance programs to augment loans -- a more comprehensive "microfinancing" scheme, as you proposed.

> In fact, although many microloans did go towards starting businesses, a huge proportion was spent on simply getting by and surviving in poverty. The villagers used the loans to pay off other debts, meet medical fees or fund their children's weddings.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/why-the-dream-o...
Basketball nerds out there: Was KD's shot against the Mavs luck, or physics?
What if you're running on a PaaS like Google App Engine or Heroku?
Jacqueline Fernandez Bollywood Indian Actress...
I'm surprised that the google engineers and managers involved in the project were so stupid/arrogant/lazy that they deployed a program that seemed to just vacuum up payload data for later analysis instead of processing and sanitizing the data as it was collected. Maybe google needs to tweak their HR algorithms to focus on hiring people with a bit more common sense. It's nice to have a powerful legal department that can help get your engineers and company out of trouble when they really screw up, but it's still a PR disaster... Google has a big problem now that on a corporate level they seem unable to do the right thing when they have clearly screwed up. Just come clean about what really happened, sincerely apologize, and then take serious steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
It IS legal to film a movie played at a drive-in theater if you can see it from your house.

If your neighbor leaves an opened piece of mail by a window, are you allowed to read it?
You're playing fast and loose with language, and that's a big no-no for thinking rationally.

militaristic view of the world

That I think the military is a tool we need, does not make my worldview "militaristic." (Truly, I think the military is needed to ensure peace, but that's beside the point.)

should impose our views

I'm not imposing my views, I'm sharing my views. It's rational discussion. If you act as if sharing views equals imposing them, than you're giving a free bone to the dogs that want to destroy free speech (and believe me, they're more common than people think).
Don't know abou the U.S., but in Australia they were found to have breached privacy legislation. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/google-austral...
I feel like this is a matter of trust and credibility more than anything.
This looks far more computationally expensive than without shaders.

That side scroller benefited because it could just draw the background/foreground sprites at a lower resolution before blurring. You wouldn't be able to get that luxury easily with a 3D game.
Downloads are still there.

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.14/
Anywhere there's money flowing, scammers will appear... clearly, this sort of problem is going to be a growing pain for Kickstarter and the whole crowd-funding idea. It's certainly not insurmountable, but it's an issue that isn't well handled/prevented now, as far as I see it.
There is a lot of good quality stuff that comes out of China but equally there are people happy to risk our lives for a bit of profit. Some of this stuff clearly doesn't meet safety standards and shouldn't be in sale.

Here is another one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88ej64aXUM
And a cheap one done right for comparison
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F3XlFI1JBo
That's a bit like saying that because you forget to lock your front door anyone is allowed to walk into your house and read all your confidential documents.
Would you consider Cyanogenmod to be to stock Android OSes what Linux is to Unix?
I recently wrote on the subject. Have a read:

How Can Hackers Help In The Fight Against Cancer? - http://www.nilkanth.com/2012/04/18/how-can-hackers-help-in-t...
I sent two emails during the app process; I was a bit worried after the first one so I sent a second one about a week later.

Message ids: <CAETzaFkOzgx46pHttRy3TE6WU6TEfD0p4WmtM0ZhRz5OXVHmRQ@mail.gmail.com> (sent Mar 23)
<CAETzaFmPjK7NDBS5X_B9R0qjiqEoWZNOZ=LKtFp=QhBUZe_8HA@mail.gmail.com> (sent Mar 29)

I'm sure you guys have hired someone else by now, but still, one of the suggestions I had in the email was a real ATS. :) That's absolutely something you should do (or at an absolute minimum, an autoreply that it was received -- then in the ads, you can say "If you don't get an automatic response, we didn't get your email")
For more reporting about the disadvantages (and sometimes the advantages) of microfinance the IRIN site has plenty.

(http://www.irinnews.org/AdvancedSearchResults.aspx?KW=microf...)

Micro financing thought to be neutral:

(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95067/Development-Microfinanc...)

Some microfinancing is corrupt:

(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/82247/BENIN-Corrupt-microfina...)
I just commented it out myself but validating $shortcode might be a better solution.

[update] that wouldn't work either. it would still allow people to insert random shortcodes with whatever params they like. i'm not sure what the point of this function is, I don't think it should allow shortcodes to be passed in at all via _REQUEST
This is actually great, I had the same idea last week coming across that handbook, so hopefully someone at Valve can shed some light.

I was mostly curious about project management. It seemed like everyone could be very fluid going from one project to another, or even proposing one on the spot and going on to execute it. There has to some sort of enforcement for this though. Are there expectations, do the self-selected leaders lay out milestones or goals, what happens when those aren't met?

Valve doesn't necessarily seem to have a reputation for having too many product delays vs. always shipping on time. They definitely seem to have constant flow of different products getting out the door though.

Hopefully someone answers, otherwise I might just hitchhike across the lake into Bellevue and see if I can meet with someone there. Very curious to learn what makes their system actually work well.
Cluster2 : ql.io blog
Need some Saturday night programming tunes? Try ChartBRAIN
It's more like yelling out your window "My house is unlocked, my house is unlocked" and getting upset that someone going down the street recorded you saying this.
Cube: 3D home printer starts shipping in days
still reading the actual report, but this is always an interesting topic whenever this story is being written about:

> Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material.

put another way, Google refused to provide information it had collected about people without a warrant, which is probably the correct behavior. On the other hand, how can you have oversight without seeing what was actually collected? If google is operating in Germany (I assume so), they'd have to obey a court order, so did german authorities see the actual data?

Maybe the FCC didn't have that power, but it would be nice if the nytimes at least provided some depth there. Otherwise they're giving the equivalent of "'I didn't murder him' is exactly what a murderer would say!"

edit: to answer my own question, the report mentions that the FCC didn't pursue access to the data after the refusal because bodies in France, Canada, and the Netherlands did view it and issued reports.
Except... the site works fine like it is. And it's not a mass consumer site. It's mostly for techies/geeks. And it's not PG's core business. YC is.

Believe me, I have at least a few upgrades I wish were made here (fixing that "the link does not exist" bug, and making commenting/editing more friendly like Reddit), but they are not a big deal, we'll survive.
I can't find an article. I can only find a link to a product for sale which promises to accomplish this.

Spam?
"Linux, by contrast, has hundreds of APIs..."

Wait, there's only one set of system calls into the kernel. What exactly are they talking about here, anyone know?
The php code would be inside a shortcode that looked like [php][/php], so no, that wouldn't protect you.

The smart fix is to check for user permissions and nonce before rendering the shortcode preview, which I hope is what the Woo patch does.
Haiku can be built with/for GCC 2 or GCC 4 and ship with libraries for the other. Some time after R1, the gcc2-hybrid releases will probably be flipped to gcc4-hybrid, and the gcc2 libs kept around for backwards-compatibility purposes only.

The current setup is really only used to the benefit of applications - the kernel interface is not ABI- or API-compatible, for the most part, with that of BeOS R5.
iOS doesn't actually spawn a new thread for every window in an application. All of the UIKit calls are still very thread-unsafe and expect to be used only from the main thread. This doesn't really cause much of a problem, since apps are page-based: you don't need to update more than one or two windows at one time, anyway.
They are not VCs. They are opportunist/tech celebs with a pool of cash. I simply do not see the announcement of them "becoming VCs" as much more than PR. When they actually start investing and getting returns, THEN let's give them some attention.
پاسخ مقام معظم رهبری به استفتاء در مورد فیس‌بوک
Palm bought BeOS for $11M (and those assets were later transfered to PalmSource which became Access).

In 2001 (when BeOS was bought), it might have made a bit of sense. Be was pretty modern then - competing against Windows XP and either the Classic Mac OS which it was far better than or OS X which was very new and so incredibly slow it was nearly unusable - I don't miss those days being a Mac user. However, in 2001 it had just been bought. Palm wasn't going to turn around and say "we spent $11M on this, you guys want it on the cheap?"

Today, Haiku has probably surpassed BeOS in any relevant way. The issue is that the world has moved on. Imagine a really well-made car/engine from 1990 (and imagine that it was like code which doesn't corrode and such). It can still be a great car today in many respects - maybe its performance characteristics still make it a lot nicer than many modern cars. However, you then start thinking about how it doesn't have anti-lock brakes, traction control, electronic slip protection, air bags, a CD player, iPod hookup, bluetooth; plus, it has a an analog carphone installed in the center. That's a bit like was BeOS would be like today.

For example, Haiku just got preliminary WPA support in October. Frankly, if an operating system doesn't have wonderful WiFi support, it's missing a key practical piece for me. Likewise, other operating systems have put considerable energy into compositing window managers to provide things people take for granted today like shadows, transparency, minimization effects, etc. Plus, and this is pure speculation since I haven't used Haiku recently enough to really comment, I'm guessing the web browser ports aren't quite as mature/good as they are for other systems that have a lot more users/developers.

So, licensing the BeOS IP isn't the issue. It would basically be buying an operating system that hasn't been updated since Windows XP came out. Sure, Windows XP isn't terrible today, but part of that is because Microsoft continued to update and maintain it since its release in 2001. Even then, it seems old.

If BeOS was open-sourced in 2001, it might have seen decent adoption. It had a nice GUI, was really ready for the multi-core processors to come, and it might have gotten the traction to see things like Mozilla concentrate on it as a platform. When OpenBeOS (Haiku's former name) started, I think there was a lot of hope. Of course, as they were concentrating on replicating BeOS R5, the world moved on and Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux community had an army of programmers working on advancing their systems while Haiku had a small team trying to resurrect their beloved system. BeOS was very advanced for its day and in some ways I think it's still better, but BeOS today would just be old in many practical ways even if it was awesome in many other ways.
It would have taken a lot more than some 3D mock ups to make this project believable. First he'd have to fix a bunch of stupid mistakes like leaving Activation/Blizzard (they are two separate groups that are just own by the same company), and claiming to be working with Disney (what happens when someone at Disney asks who this idiot claiming to be associated with them is.) Probably, most damming though was his claim to already have funding for a AAA title but still needing an extra $80K overall the numbers just don't add up. This is a really tight spot if he asks for too much money it is more likely funding will fail or that people will investigate his claims. Too little money and he doesn't sound credible.

Second the game concept was incredibly vague about a game that was supposedly already in production. Making big vague promises should always be a warning sign of scam. Conversely when Double Fine did their campaign it was okay that gave gave no details about the game because, 1 it hadn't been started yet, 2 they actually explicitly stated that the game might suck. Coming up with a real good detailed game concept is actually pretty hard.

Next the studio and team wer never shown. Instead you see one young guy sitting at a desk in a poorly lit room with no windows, and a laptop running some stupid animation on it. In other videos we walked though real offices with real people with names, and real workstations that actually look like they are in use.

These last two are going to be very difficult to fake as they require a reputation, accomplices, and money, which scam artists tend to lack. Not to say scams are impossible but I think they are going to be harding then people think.
Something created existence (not just the matter of the universe - the concept of there being "something"). You can argue about the nature of this thing (is it sentient, does it desire interaction), but that something created existence is indeed self evident.
In FY 2011, Google reported earnings of $37,905,000,000. So as punishment for obstructing a government investigation, they were fined $25,000, which is the equivalent of less than 20 seconds of revenue. That'll show them.
cool thanks, yea i just looked at do_shortcode again. this woothemes function seems like a bad design.

Authentication would plug it from random attackers at least. But it seems to me it would still be ripe for a CSRF attack..? That might seem unlikely but I can imagine the attacker could post a comment with a link on the victims blog who had been identified as having a wootheme installed. If the victim clicked the link (likely while authenticated) the attacker's php code would execute.
Possibly criminal offence in the UK.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4721723.stm)
The article is very well written but I don't like the use of the word 'fake'. It is not 'fake' unless it pretends to be something it is not (like if it was actually pretending to be produced by Apple, or be produced to standards it was not). It may be cheap and nasty, but what would you say if a company that wasn't Apple produced a fantastic and superior charger? Would that be a 'fake' too?
its pretty hard to know what is important in the moment.
Oh-- the unix dictionary includes every letter as it's own word for some reason. So I required words to be length of >= 2. Probably my mistake.
XFCE seems to turn into KDE 3

I sort of wish it would. :)

I'm a fan of KDE3, but I've not been able to get it working right with more current versions of Ubuntu, so I'm sticking with 10.10 in the meantime.

That, of course, brings it's own problems.
Kernel and user interfaceS
github has a similar structure. Maybe a githubber will chime in.
Data Driven Decisions for Startups
I got a job where we don't deal with Oracle at all, life is so much better! I'd recommend it to anyone. Eat your veggies, exercise regularly, and work in an Oracle-free workplace .... this is the secret to happiness!
There might be a limit set on how much a company can be fined. The $25,000 is almost just a way of letting the public know they are guilty and for a company that requires so much trust regarding privacy from users the bad publicity is far more costly.
I switched to ArchLinux and Xfce a month back from Ubuntu. I really liked Unity and I'm looking forward to trying out Ubunto 12.04 but for all purposes I'm going to stick with Arch and Xfce.
Interesting theory, but didn't the Roman Consuls lose all their power when the Republic ended and the Empire began? Yet Rome continued its conquests under the Empire, and achieved its maximal extent long after the Consuls lost power. That would indicate the the Consuls and their one year terms were not the key to Rome's aggression.
To be fair, that's what I would do if I was doing a legit product- mock up the t's and bags, then get them printed once the money is received.
The most important tool for Ruby/Rails on *nix