skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The major problem I see with QR Codes is that they tend to be 'naked'. They're an opaque blob of stuff and it's not clear what I'm going to get for scanning one. They seriously need to be accompanied by some sort of text and it would be ideal if there were some standard for how that text was presented so I can quickly figure out if it's worth scanning.

This is especially true of QR Codes because the use of them in public is asking people and not machines to interact with them. Contrast with barcodes and MICR codes which were primarily there to be read by machine but both are human readable (almost all barcodes have their number equivalent below them).
How can you cast it as a "dumb plan," by "caricatures," when it succeeds?
Tons and tons of sites use the 3-4 column approach to showcasing plans and pricing
Here are just a few: http://patterntap.com/search/pricing

In terms of styling, you're right, it's very close to 37signals.
For a web developer creating a website these days by himself it's starting to get daunting, there's so much things you need to consider that you really need to start working with other people if you want to get your project running in a fair small amount of time and have a solid project.

Today you need to consider: responsive design,javascript frameworks, css frameworks, LESS, websockets, nosql vs rdbms, server-side frameworks, good quality design, good UX, cross-browsing etc..etc..

Back in the old days we didn't consider or even thought of half of this, not that it was better, obviously not, but most of us learned gradually. I would hate to be a programmer and have to start learning all of this from scratch :X , the entry barrier is much higher now, it's sad.

On the other hand, mobile apps don't have all this fat around, you can easily build an app by just using the APIs and focus on design and UX
The author wants:

time that isn’t owned by someone or something else beyond my control

Depending on how you look at it, no time is ever beyond your control (except arguably something like incarceration).

If you don't want to work one day, you don't have to work. What's that, you have a full-time job? You still don't have to work.

I think the real issue is that, if you have a full-time job, not working if you don't want to can have undesirable consequences. But I think these consequences are often overstated, or rather avoided to a degree that is not in line with their actual effects.

I also choose to keep my commitments and responsibilities low.

I'm not sure what to think about this either. Part of me says, good on you if you can manage it. But then, there is a difference between an external commitment and an internal commitment. You can have "commitments" as an employee or employer or boyfriend or husband, but unless you let these commitments decide your actions, you aren't really committed. I don't know if that makes sense.

Who has more time under his own control: the man who chooses to go to work to develop software every day because he finds it to be an efficient use of his time to acquire money, or the man who struggles to make a living wage off passive income because he's attached to a misdirected notion of "free time"?
Network Marketing On The Internet - Why So Many People Are Failing
The NEA is a grant-maker. Kickstarter is a platform for a capital campaign. These are two incredibly different types of "unearned income."

I have never seen an organization have a successful annual campaign through something like Kickstarter. Kickstarter itself makes it very clear it is to be used for capital campaigns with very specific purposes.

Take a look at the 2012 NEA grants and think about how many of them would thrive on Kickstarter. The BSO for example, the Tanglewood grant miiiight be able to be funded but the general grant almost certainly would not. These arts organizations are modeled around an in person annual campaign through their development offices, and large-scale grants from charitable foundations (or the NEA). The entire model would break down if all funding came direct from patrons.

Whether or not that model should be broken down and disrupted is a different story, but almost none of the arts organizations that are receiving MAJOR grants from the NEA are set (or may ever be set) to deal with it.
What It Means to be a "Civic Startup"
We don't allow you to delete your current default engine, but we do allow you to delete other engines, because you should be able to get rid of things you don't want.

We used to have a "restore all settings" button that would fix this (among other things), but it disappeared in the preferences UI rewrite and though I've agitated for it to come back, it hasn't.
New Cheap Touchscreen Phones From Nokia
What do you mean "reason nature had to make things so damn complicated"? Nature has reasons? And even if it did, why does this "reason" have to be simple? Does it even have be something humanly comprehensible or even observable?

Could an ant ever comprehend or even "see" a microwave oven?

Nature is what it is. We may only ever get glimpses. And a bias toward simplicity may be more a function of human limitation than some fundamental truth.
Similar for the UK, is http://www.raintoday.co.uk/
This tutorial looks pretty solid, LadyAda is pretty great: http://www.ladyada.net/products/tfttouchshield/
FIS Global is currently recruiting for a Security Developer

FIS is one of the world's top-ranked technology providers to the banking industry. With more than 30,000 experts in 100 countries, FIS delivers the most comprehensive range of solutions for the broadest range of financial markets, all with a singular focus: helping you succeed. Every FIS solution has the strength you need for profitability today, and the power to help you manage whatever comes next.
FIS is part of the S&P 500. FIS has also been named the number one overall financial technology provider in the world by American Banker and Financial Insights (FinTech 100).
Job summary:

Us: The Architecture Oversight and Framework & Standards teams at FIS; the world's largest global provider dedicated to banking and payments technologies.

You: Security developer

Job: Work with a talented team of developers and architects to assist with ongoing work related to emerging threats. This is a hands-on position which will focus on implementation of specific security initiatives across the enterprise.

General duties and responsibilities:
• Driving proof of concept, pilot, and implementation support activities for specified initiatives.
• Researches, tracks and understands new technologies to provide technical leadership in developing service applications and analyzing business requirements as they pertain to intranet and external Internet-based systems.
• Work with product teams on critical remediation activities
• Builds applications and framework components
• Builds custom rules for security code analyzer
• Provides written design documents, test plans and test results.
• Manages, develops, integrates and implements related applications components, including front-end development, server-side development and database integration.
• Plays a direct role in programming, maintenance, technical support, documentation and administration of the applications.
• Establishes and communicates standards to manage cost and ensure continuity of applications.
• Suggests technical alternatives and improves/streamlines processes and systems
• Completes project assignments and special projects commensurate with job expectations
• Conducts planning, analysis and forecasting activities to plan projects and tasks
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Requirements:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline; or equivalent combination of education and experience that is required for the specific job level. Post-graduate education is desired.

Primary Location US-PA-Malvern PA
Other Locations US-WI-Milwaukee WI, US-AR-Little Rock AR

ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

EEO/AA Employer

Please email resumes to john.koscielak@fisglobal.com
Song of the Day: The Scarlet Ending - 'My War'
This article fails to mention that the FBI has illegally copied and extradited out of NZ jurisdiction the vast amount of data gained in the illegal raid on his home.
Yeah, it's probably not worth the time investment to make sure employees are rewarded for their work in an equitable manner. If they can't sell it, why bother?
"Any" number of machines? I don't own a Mac, but surely it's similar to the iTunes Store and its 5 activated machines?
You can stack additional licenses on top, but that's not the same as the right to change the license. Also, why isn't apache 2 listed as a "changeable" license?
Vrikhter - would love an introduction to your lawyer if possible azifali at gmail.com is my email id..

Thanks in advance!
Other engines can access this functionality just fine (and do, as other people have mentioned). We simply don't have UI for you to manually tweak the relevant settings. (There's a bug on adding such UI, but it's low-priority, so no one's gotten to it.)
Find a grad school with access to a supercomputer. There's a lot of fun ChemE problems that require one of these to solve. Simulating classical or quantum systems (molecular dynamics) takes a lot of algorithmic knowledge from CS and a lot of chemistry knowledge to understand the principles. Then the engineering knowledge is for scaling it up so that you can make something practical with your results.
Love blows chat room
Balmer and the other managers aren't the only ones at fault for bad bureaucracy --- the employees that live with the system against their better judgement, rather than leave or fight, are also responsible.
If you liked this you may also enjoy http://genius.cat-v.org/brian-kernighan/articles/beautiful (simple regex engine in C by Rob Pike, article written by Brian Kernighan).
Tightly coupling products does not necessarily lead to greater innovation.
How's the battery life on the Nexus, and how's the PenTile screen, if I may ask?

I've been curious about the controversy around the pentile display, but I haven't physically seen one in my own hands to get my own evaluation of it.
Coming up on my first performance review at Accenture. I'll see how flawed the system is in a few weeks ;).

The problem is with what the viable alternative is for companies that are huge like this. It's just tough. Maybe we all just need to stop worrying about how other humans measure our performance/value.
Note that you didn't discuss the fine arts, the one category that actually is heavily funded through grants and sponsors. Free and cheap access to the masters work is about education.
At a 9 Billion USD price tag, what are our governments buying for us? There must be something beyond scientific intellectual curiosity. Those of us with this curiosity may be happy to pay for it, but how were politicians convinced? What value will this provide to the governments of the world who made the decision to purchase this answer.

False dilemma. When we spend trillions of dollars a year to kill people in the name of stopping violence, 10^-3 of that for curiosity is not something that is rational to attack. Particularly when exploration for curiosity's sake has led to plenty of demonstrably beneficial results.
No, it's broken because valuation isn't based on anything concrete, and people who moved early essentially made money for free. When you and I disagree about valuation by a factor of 10 or 100, people "unfairly" hold on to domain names because they think there's a chance they might get an offer 100x larger, and you (as a reasonable buyer) get screwed.

The other problem is that, unlike land, domains aren't really "reusable". You can't rent them for a year, then give them up. Your whole brand is tied to them.

I've encountered a number of people/companies who own good domain names, who don't actually use them at all. One is waiting for an unrealistic multi-million dollar purchase, and refuses to part with it for the market price, which is around $30K, and for which he's gotten a number of offers through the years. He's convinced his domain is his ticket to winning the lottery someday, when Microsoft or Apple decides they'll name their product exactly what his domain is and decide it's worth $3 million. It's ridiculous.

The other is a company which has nothing to do with technology, which owns a "domain name portfolio" of names completely unrelated to their business, with the explicit purpose of holding on to them and not selling them for any price, at least for a decade. It took me weeks of research to even get in contact with them, because they view it as a purely financial decision, and don't want pesky Internet people bothering them about their domains.

This kind of thing doesn't happen with stocks or product pricing. The domain market system is fundamentally broken.
A Regular Expression Matcher (Brian Kernighan, code by Rob Pike)
Hollywood should do what Hollywood does best. I'm still waiting for the movie "based on a true story".
Al about finding your true partner.
Thanks for your feedback! We are helping people figure out the skills they need for a new role, connecting them to disparate content via our partnerships and then in the backend integrating with those content providers to track your informal learning in one place so you can use it to apply for jobs.

Will definitely try to get that across better with our landing page.
Firing the bottom 10% company-wide is quite different from firing the bottom 10% from each department, regardless of the performance of that department relative to others, which is closer to what the article describes for Microsoft. As the original article noted, being in a 10-person "unit" meant that 1 out of those ten was guaranteed a bad review, even if that unit as a whole somehow generated 50% of Microsoft's profits for the quarter.
Heh, came just at the right time... About to do a project on regexs. I've implemented a regex engine before, but never a the parser bit.
Yup, stack ranking effectively punishes good teams. Why should a manager strive to consistently hire the best people possible when some of them are going to have to be unfairly ranked?
I'm assuming you're just naive and lack the experience to see through this BS. This type of system can be gamed 'til the cows come home! Here are some corrections to your description:

Currently Windows is in calibration, where we stack rank and reward behaviors that can easily be sold to one's boss. This is not done on a team basis, an organizational basis or really any rational basis at all. Everyone at a given level competes with everyone else at the same level for the next level of management's affection. Those who kiss ass up and trash talk their co-workers/competitors are rewarded in various ways. Usually with an ego boost but occasionally with a monetary reward.

Stack ranking is not based on what you accomplished at all rather how your managers perceive what you accomplished. There are three main pillars: how close you are to your manager, how effectively you can trash-talk any competing co-workers and how you helped your manager sell your accomplishments to his or her boss.

There is no perfect system, but to be frank, the calibration and review system rewards people more for their political skills than technological merits and therefore is pretty damn good practice for a career in playing corporate politics and approval seeking behavior in general.
France Gives "Fairness Doctrine" Details; Will Tax Millionaires At 75%
A lot of companies offer private health / dental cover as a benefit though... don't know about the cost comparison
GE's system (at least the one originally set up by Jack Welch) isn't quite the same, although the idea is similar‡.

Basically there are 3 "bands" in the Welch system (with the lowest band being 10%). You reward the top band (20%) heavily, the middle band (70%) modestly, and dump the bottom band (10%) every year.

In some ways, the intent is similar to the economic class system (incentivize the middle class to become the upper class).

GE had a lot of success when they adopted that model, although obviously, they did a lot of other things as well which may have been a more direct effect (getting rid of a lot of businesses they were in, for example).

I can appreciate the ideal of constantly cutting out the bottom-performing resources, provided that the mechanism to track performance is sufficiently quantifiable (and accurate). I haven't heard enough from people at GE as to whether or not that is the case there, though.

‡ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Straight_from_th...
I think pilif meant that you'd have to wait for the progress bar (about seven seconds) to finish before you noticed something was wrong. For example:

"Call the Drake Hotel in Toronto."
*bling* "Calling..."
(wait seven seconds)
"Hey, this is Drake. What's up?"

Versus what Siri does:

"Call the Drake Hotel in Toronto."
*bling* "Calling Drake Smith..."
"No, wait! Stop!"

Think about using the voice commands when you can't see the device. Like when you're driving or running. It's useful to have the audible feedback in addition to whatever's displayed on the screen.
Hopeful, or clueless? RIM CEO says there’s “nothing wrong with the company”
Forward. — Barack Obama
ha, ha.

(so people realize you're joking)
Can you render a large resolution so we can see the small dots with labels?
Mobile email opens overtake desktop
How We Built eCommerceHackDay with RedisToGo + SendGrid
What about the value that someone else could created by using that property productively over those three years? And the likelihood that, three years from now, item X turns out not to be worth $1,000 at all?

Then that value has been destroyed in your scenario.

This is why property tax can be a good thing: set properly, it creates an incentive for conserving property for future productive uses when those seem likely enough, but also incentivizes people not to waste current possible productivity.
I agree with you - debt is a big big no no - and having been here for some time now, I think China functions in an very very different way than the west, which is also why we see these conflicting reports telling us China is going down or up and so on. I am having a hard time understanding it often myself, but I try and sometimes, when I need to get stuff done (and I mean, just get stuff done!), it really helps to think like a Chinese..

Let me give you a simple maybe non-related example.. I tried to get a visa for China and it wasn't possible at all through official channels.. No matter what I did (embassy, visa offices and whatnot), they simply wouldn't grant me a visa which would allow me to enter and leave China as I wanted (only single/double entry, which is no good).. In the end after some help from a Chinese friend, I managed to get a visa because he knew somebody who knew somebody at the local police station, who could print a visa for me..

This is how you get stuff done in China - you know somebody - I now owe my friend a favor and as I understand it is unforgivable, if I do not pay him back some day in some way. China is driven by guanxi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi) ..

I am totally speculating here - just a laowai trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Someone Chinese please enlighten me!..
isn;t most o fthe stuff on ebay fraudulant?
> WP7 phones in the wild. They're all owned by Microsoft employees however.

Well, that's a reserve around their natural habitat. It's a far cry from "in the wild".
I'm not familiar with anything .NET based that has similar functionality. Redmine was pretty easy to setup and configure. If you just want issues/roadmap/repo, that's probably what I would go with. If you're just looking for a fancy todo list you could try something like trello or workflowy (not open source, but free).
Microsoft Takes $6.2 Billion Write-Down in Failed Digital Ad Foray
Queen of Carbon - Graphite Advocate - Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus
If all art is popularly funded, you'd only get pop.

There are certain types of investments that are very long-term and tend to have high risk. These sort of investments tend to fair poorly in a free market system--markets tend to only look at the short/medium term and shy away from certain kinds of risk.

A perfect parallel is basic research. A significant amount of basic research in a bunch of fields (like cosmology and more abstract mathematics) is done on public funding. Why? It's simple: companies and individuals rarely want to invest in such ventures because there is no guarantee they will be useful in any reasonable time frame. And yet this is doubtless a good investment for the future--we are much better off thanks to mathematical developments that most people would have thought too abstract initially.

If you asked the people on the street to fund research in category theory (before it got all popular :P), nobody would have done it. So basic research is exactly the same--it's funding something nobody wants. And yet it is patently useful.

Basic research is exactly one of the things that I do want even a minimal government to fund. The exact same logic applies to art. After all, I certainly don't know what sort of art will have cultural significance in the future, and don't see any reason to exclusively trust the public at large either--just the same as I don't know what mathematical research will yield useful advancements and wouldn't trust the public there either.
So when I was at Google, hiring was not done by the groups with the headcount. Instead they were hired centrally and then later dispatched. The reasoning for this is that for a manager, someone who is just good enough will generate utility and thus should be hired. The central hiring is supposed to enforce companywide higher levels.

I wonder if stack ranking is the same but for getting bad people to leave? Even a weak employee can be better than no employee for a manager...
"Your wasting a lot of money here, so you shouldn't mind wasting a lesser amount here"

Government funding needs to justify itself, not against other uses for the money. The bills have come due and we need to cut out what isn't vital. 9 billion could have paid a lot of health insurance policies.

I'm glad they valued this, but it needs to be valuable based on its own merit.
I had a Handspring Visor with Spring Board a decade ago. There's not as much difference in the UX between my wife's iPhone and it, as there is between Word 2003 and Word 2007.

That's not say that there aren't a lot of things that one can do much more quickly with the iPhone (e.g. maps and surfing the web), or that these don't tend to make it more useful...though I don't find the touch keyboards quite as fluid for writing as Graffiti under Palm OS (hardware phone keyboards being another matter).
Another site with facebook login required, no thanks. Why not openid, or other authentication options?