skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"if you need DB like tools, why not just use a DB"

A) people don't really know they need db-like tools.
B) even if they did, setting up a database to have even a portion of the "up and running" aspect of Excel is extremely time consuming.

The closest I've seen is some companies that get advanced enough set up a database engine somewhere, then set up Excel to connect to it as a datasource (ODBC or whatever). This still requires them to understand how to set up a database, secure it, and model table structures around their data, which is asking quite a lot from someone who really just wants to create a few short forms to collect data.
I am curious what other people think of the rt.com channel. It is a Russian funded news organization and I have heard that it is just a propaganda tool, but a lot of the news seems very legit especially the coverage of all things our mass media ignores or hides. I used to watch it slot but found myself increasingly aware of even more crap I didn't know or government was doing. I found myself wondering if it is just a spin, true to the information but spun in just the right way so as to bring the most negative light to bear on events. I crave a real news source untrained by politics and corporations, but I have as yet found none, so I instead piece the events together by reading opposing news sources and grok from the diff. Would anyone here know the validity or the restrictions with which the news people are constrained to tell the whole story?
Well, Russia watches Game of Thrones and we couldn't if not for pirates.

This makes me un-sad for society as whole. We become richer from piracy than we could be without.

Martin sells much more books in Russia right now than he would without the TV series, and HBO aren't losing money because they don't want our money anyway.
The mainstream press in America is very pro America. They don't air lots of news pieces that would paint a critical picture of the US. Is it any surprise that Assange's show is not aired by the mainstream press? How is RT's slant towards Russia any different from CNN's pro-America stance?
Civilized is not exactly a well defined term. It's essentially a subjective criticism.
It is not true, Apple proved otherwise.
Despite what you may think, the war crimes during ww2 were not the result of a culture unique to Germany. For example, in my country, Holland, relatively more jews were killed, because the dutch people gave them less shelter than the german peope did, and were more likely to rat them out. Nazis got to power in Germany, but as a cultural movemet was a lot larger than just germany. And nobody cared about the jews: for example, not a sinle rail road track was targetted by any of the thousands of bombings by allied forces.

What happened should be in every euopean nations consience, and generally is.
Successful Startups Often Come With a High Price
Thanks! Yeah I have problems too, especially on a touchscreen :/ I tried to blow up the east coast states but RI is still too small.. maybe I need to try to magnify it more by itself or something
There are so many players in this overall story, and so few good guys.

In one corner of the ring we have the content industry which seems to care far more about chasing pirates than with making life nice for the people who will actually pay them. Customers who play by the rules are "rewarded" with region coding, DRM, and lots of arbitrary restrictions.

In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything. When confronted with with the moral/economic questionability of this approach, they have an extensive set of indignant rationalizations prepared; some of these are true but irrelevant to helping content creators get paid ("record companies are dinosaurs"), some of these are wishful thinking ("they can make money in other ways"), all of these are fronts for the fact that they just like getting things for free.

In another corner are governments and law enforcement which are gung-ho about legislating against piracy and prosecuting it, without understanding or properly considering the ramifications (see SOPA).

The good guys are: people who will pay a reasonable fee or watch a small/reasonable amount of advertising to consume the content they like, content creators who release their stuff in a convenient way without requiring an absurd amount of control, tech companies that are providing media services that strike a balance between creators and consumers (DRM-free Amazon, Google Play, Apple iTunes is getting better but is still pretty locked down).

May the good guys eventually win.
Why there's no point continuing?
Speak for yourself, as a Westerner I find it horrifying. Not having tact doesn't make your point better, it just makes you a bullying jerk.
Content owners may not be able to 'win' against piracy, as there's no way it can be feasibly eradicated, but it's not at all impossible to at least try and lessen the impact of it on the business.

Such ingenuity is incompatible with the entrenched industry's old-school way of thinking, though. They want it their way, how it's always been.

The consumer is moving at a much faster pace, willing to consume content in different and often more convenient ways. They use the internet, which is global, and want to consume content that is still arbitrarily restricted to national boundaries. This is a demand that has yet to be legitimately satisfied, and thus naturally, the consumer becomes demanding.

Unfortunately, the industry is determined to defend itself from a changing world, instead of embracing it. DRM, unskippable piracy warnings, local content restrictions, etc. are all manifestations of such a practice, and all of which actively punish the legitimate customer.

The internet, and everything it has enabled, is still pretty new. In some ways, this resistance to change isn't surprising, and it's easy to be a commentator on the sidelines. It'd be better to reflect on it with the benefit of hindsight.
> There is apparently a rule that says it’s perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government (Kaplan/The Washington Post), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it’s an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government.

Full Analysis and links: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/18/attacks_on_rt_and_assange_re...
+1. Please give him respect. It's not often that a 17 year old hacker builds a site in 4 and a half days that begins processing over $1M USD in volume. Of course it's going to be a target for hackers. Do you insult the local jewelry store owner because his diamonds got stolen?
zhoutong, you are definitely an inspiration. Sad to see you leaving bitcoin.
Sony Xperia GX Android Smartphone Price, Features
The new Sony Xperia GX Android smartphone is designed for the style and net savvy user. It has a large 4.6 inches TFT Capacitive Touchscreen display with high 720 x 1280 pixles resolutions. The innovation doesn’t end at that, as the Sony Xperia GX comes with 13 Mega Pixels Rear Camera with Auto Focus and Geo-tagging and 1.3 Mega Pixels Front Camera for video calling support. This highly innovative and users friendly Sony Xperia GX incorporates Android v4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, Dual Core 1.5 GHz Processor, Sensors, Audio Streaming and Snapdragon S4 Qualcomm MSM8960 Chipset.
..and a big lie.

>Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it.

See here for example:
http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

Stallman and the FSF apply the same standard everywhere. He rejects Red Hat (a major GNU sponsor) as "non-free" just like OpenBSD, in contrast to what the BSD guys claim.

>Richard has personally made sure that all the official GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows.

What?! Most official GNU software does NOT run on Windows.
>The right to free speech doesn't promise every citizen a printing press.

Well, it should. Either that, or access to one.

Because else, people have the right to free speech, but no way to be heard, whereas a tiny minority controls the media, and their's is the only speech that matters.

Giving actual resources and physical dimensions to a right doesn't cheapen it, it makes it more concrete.

What some people don't understand is that the "right to free speech" wasn't about idly talking in your house, it was about the right to make political statements on the issues of the day AND be heard by your community. That was far easier when the concept was established of course, where communities and cities were far smaller and knit together.

Free speech between friends or in your house is BS, even the worst dictatorships had that.
With gamification of the workplace in particular, there seems to be a repeating cycle. Each cycle does come with some shifts in focus, but it seems mostly implicit ones, without a lot of reflection.

I've been doing some preliminary research trying to track down each of the cycles and how they relate, but the fact that so much of it is ephemeral and buzzword-heavy, and the studies are done by self-interested people with poor documentation of results, makes it a bit difficult.

As far as I can tell, the earliest proposals for using game-like processes to motivate and engage workers came in the Soviet Union, for the obvious reason that they needed a replacement for monetary motivation ASAP. Lenin called it "socialist competition", and had this vision of friendly, game/play-like competition as a replacement for cutthroat, loser-ends-up-homeless capitalist competition. I wrote a little about that here, though it's more like a preliminary collection of sources than a proper history at the moment: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html

Then sometime in the 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s, the idea of the power of games and play started becoming a huge thing in management. There was even a hilarious consulting job title for a while, "funsultant", someone who would come into a company and help make it more "fun" and "gamelike". I suspect there are similarities between today's "gamification consultants" and 1990s "funsultants", with the main shift being less focus on play and fun, and a bigger focus on reward/feedback loops. In effect the '90s game/play management techniques are merging with the much older behaviorist-reinforcement management techniques. I wrote a bit about the funsultants and some of the reactions to them as well (Office Space's flair scene is probably the most memorable example of a backlash to mandatory fun): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/funsultants_and_gamification.html

So I guess what I'm mostly missing from gamification advocates is a clearer picture of what's new here and how it relates to previous approaches. How much of it is about Skinner-style behavior-loop reinforcement? How much of it is about fun? About competition? How do the new approaches, whether we call them "game mechanics" or something else, relate to existing research findings on how effective each of these things are? As far as I can tell nobody actually wants to mention any of those things, instead presenting it as something totally new: game mechanics used to be used only for entertainment, but in the 2010s we realized they could be used to motivate non-entertainment things as well. But I don't think it just fell from the sky with no relationship to previous attempts.
Miguel de Icaza isn't exactly known for being nice, but even he defers to civility. Belive it or nor, respecting other people, even if they don't have your gigantic brains or knowledge, can go a long way in your social interactions and professional development.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
In a more meta way, just about any innovation goes through a 2-steps forward, 1-step back cycle. The 1-step back is always due to wide-scale adoption where the original message is somewhat lost in translation, but as a whole actually moves things forward (ie. agile 'methodology').

I think when it comes to gamification it's perhaps better to reframe it as a more targeted engagement structure. If you think about how big the actual video game industry is, how much people are _paying_ to solve problems, that there could be a better way to flip that script, because they are in fact doing work in the guise of entertainment.

Right now the whole concept is in its infancy, but I imagine five years from now it will be prevalent in most everything we do, perhaps in a very indirect manner. It might even be the perfect cure for procrastination (ducks :)
They certainly don't seem to care. They're more willing to give up the political entity of Japan than open the borders to immigration. To be fair, it's 1000 years in the future so maybe in a few hundred years they'll change their mind, but for now no one cares.
I used 2 monitors, and actually really preferred that model of behavior.
Off topic, but that inline 'tweet' button to tweet a choice quote from the article was an interesting touch. I hadn't seen this technique before.
I think Julian should release the leaks on Bank of America that he has been holding over their heads for two years. Here's to hoping it isn't anything too egregious.
By asking them not to contact his current company. This happens all the time.

I really don't understand why there's any drama here at all. As a matter of course, you should have your next opportunity lined up before you inform your employer that you're thinking about leaving.
First, anti-monopoly regulation is not noncontroversial. Second, why do you think corporations are something other than a mode of cooperation of real people? When you are a customer - you cooperate with other people by exchange of money for the service. When you are a capitalist, you cooperate with others by paying them for the services upfront before the product is sold. When you are employee, you cooperate by renting your labor for money. And so on. Why do some people think they are entitled to intervene in the other persons' cooperation?
$1 billion city without residents to test out next gen technology
Clay Aiken to discuss Obama's endorsement of gay marriage
Why the increase? Thoughts:

1) Easier and quicker to push options (20/30/40%) than key in lower amount.

2) Pre set options may lead to mistakes.

3) Customer doesn't want to embarrass themselves by entering an anoint so just pushes a button.

4) The average fare and average cash in hand leads to per tips versus card payment. Eg Avg fare $9 and most payments with a $10 note.

5) Customers willing to tip higher due to preference towards card payments.

6) Peak in typing due to early adopters using technology.
Couldn't they stamp RST packets with the IP addresses of other file sharers? That would reset the connections with those nodes.
You can enjoy engage and benefit from the vast majority of important stuff on the Internet with a 250kb connection.

No not really. Streaming videos down, or streaming videos up (i.e. video chat) is harder at low speeds like that. With 250kb/sec you can consume textual content easier.
Interesting that you know the probability of -any- warning shot, fired in -any- direction, at -any- time...

Bullets fired into the air have regularly caused deaths and injuries around the world. [1]

In several US states firing a bullet into the air is a crime, in some, a felony. [1, below]

I find it difficult to believe that any person is well trained enough to take all critical factors into account during an armed encounter to determine whether or not a bullet will ricochet off a non-target surface, and in what direction it will ricochet. [2]

"So, 50 years or so of warning shots and no one was hurt. If a warning shot kills someone today, those 50 years of warning shots only had to save two lives (someone decides to give up instead of seeking confrontation and being killed) to be worth it.

I think it's pretty simple, actually. On the whole, warning shots seem quite beneficial, that more than outweighs the low probability of hurting or killing someone."

I find this a starkly terrible calculus. Are you really saying that cops can kill one innocent person for every two potential deaths they may or may not have prevented?

"But humans are bad at dealing with probability, so your error is understandable."

Consider this statement in light of actual statistics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire#Falling-bul... (Numerous citations)

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=VbrDbbHAflsC&pg=PA109&#...

EDIT: In the essence of improving one's self, what about this rebuttal causes so many downvotes?
Is it here because of OGG-video inside?
But what if someone buys a Ferrari for 80,000$ in another country, drives it thru the border and sells it to you for 90,000$?
You know, they (official distributor of Ferrari) consider it piracy too, and they sue that guy for trademark infringement.

Therefore, we are not going to buy your argument.

What if you want some product from USA, and you live on one of countries USA chooses to BULLY for no apparent reason (think Cuba), and you buy the product somewhere and smuggle it home? Is it morally wrong? I will say it isn't.

Therefore, we are not going to buy your argument.
These methods will not work for long, and it's not a basis for a business. The adverts are extremely intrusive and irritating for users.
If you feel bad about leaving, try to find a good replacement/contractor for your role, that way you won't leave them "high & dry".
Owners of a corporation define the way their assets are allocated and used. Just like you define how you use the contents of your wallet and bank account. There's nothing ethically special in the business operation from your allocation of personal labor, capital and time.

Apart from that, there is no such thing as "society entity". Society is only a group of acting individuals.
> it's unbelievable how many people are leaving.

Where have you been? Yahoo! has been in limbo for half a decade, there has been a constant brain drain for all that time. The only engineers still working at Yahoo! are probably there because they can't find a job somewhere else.

I wonder why Crockford stayed there for so long, to be honest.
Hm, clicking should work during the rotation. (or it seems to work for me on chrome and firefox) What browser/version are you using? Yeah the east coast states are difficult, maybe I should try making zoom box larger.
As far as resources for learning languages, I have been using Duolingo (http://www.duolingo.com/) to learn German over the past few months, and can't praise it highly enough.

They currently offer German, Spanish, and French (which is in beta). It's in private beta, but I recently had an influx of friends added to the site, so it seems like they're sending out invites pretty regularly.
Microsoft "investing" $100,000 is like you giving $1 (insert small denomination currency of your choice) to a beggar. They're not stupid. They know there is a relatively short expiration on this technology, so they probably reason they can make it difficult enough for maybe 500 people to pirate copies of Windows and Office that they'll buy them.

They may not even think that, and this is the old Microsoft strategy of structuring a contract in such a way that they now secretly own all of your technology.
Again, comments like these are why the down vote was created. Please be constructive with your feedback. Where do you think my assessment falls short?
> This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser
in urban areas and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as directly using population density.

Please be so good as explaining you point better, I do not understand it. If you are going to wire up every lot in the state, you will have to traverse all roads in the state to do a cable drop to every lot in order to do so. What does road density have to do with it?

When building wireline communication networks, the deciding factor costwise, is the number of linear cable sheet miles. As such miles of road is a good proxy for comparing deployment costs between locations.

Please note that I am discussing wireline broadband. If you have you heart set on wireless coverage, then we have to talk different measures, and even there population density is not the tell all metric.

> But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm

My bad. However that does not still make it cheaper to build in Finland, it merely brings up Texas and Finland to par on miles of road per population. Several things still favour Texas in the cost per capita, such as: economics of scale, ability to perform construction year around and no need to put utilities under the frostline.

There are no technical or cost reasons for Texas to be unable to offer the same level of broadband service as Finland. It all comes down to other reasons, perhaps such as lack of political will in Texas.
I've been doing marketing for a while. Mostly for my own businesses. After some painful trial and error I found out that direct marketing is usually the more effective choice for a lot of businesses (including startups).

Adwords might seem direct, but its not. It is marketing at large, and depends heavily on things that are out of our control. Software like ad-blocker makes things worse.

Yet, the do work as a combination with direct marketing. Approach them as you would a radio ad on a small station.

Now, cold calling. There is nothing like selling over the phone. It just works, and repeatedly.
I will always try to work into any campaign some kind of calling program. It allows you to break the ice. People do respond well to it and response ussually raises significantly.

Problem with cold calling and phone marketing is that people approach it wrong. They let the prospect take control of the conversation. They call with just some script and maybe behind a computer.

I don't. I prepare as if going to battle. Everything I might need is close and ready. Pen, notepad, calculator, specs sheet, the actual product, at least 2 scripts, the computer connected to the net with DDG ready to go, etc.

I take command of the call and just set out to conquer. Now, I hardly ever sell a product on the phone anymore, but I sell the appointment which will ussually lead to the sale.
Sometimes you have to look at it like this: It is a Job, It pays the bills, unless something better paying shows up, I a sticking with it.
At the end of the day, money in the bank is the best way to achieve the freedom to do what you really want to do. (when ever you figure that out)
Often times the prospective company will ask you outright if they can contact your current employer. Companies with a formal application process may prompt you in the documentation they ask you to fill out.

Regardless, there is no harm in saying no. It's the norm for folks that are exploring other opportunities. The only time it may be questionable is if you've already left (or been let go by) your previous employer.
How is this not a computer crime?