skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm shocked that in the last five minutes the two comments on this post so far are both from people, who, like myself, and the friend in the article, worry about sending invoices!

I thought it was just something I was struggling with. It's re-assuring (in a strange way), to know that these are fears that a lot of people have and not just myself. Fortunately my Mrs won't let me get away with not pressing that big nasty send button!
One further observation: the original poster never said she alone could choose to spend more time with her child, yet many people are leaping to this conclusion. Both her and her husband are incredibly successful and both of them could spend all day at home; OP did not exclude this possibility. Perhaps her husband will stay at home. But she clearly will choose not to spend much time at home (at least not initially).

Ultimately the original poster is objectively correct in stating that anybody who, in a position of absolute and complete financial independence, chooses not to spend more time with their children makes a very public statement about their priorities. You only have a fixed amount of time in life, and a fixed amount of time to spend with your children. It simply is not possible to be CEO of Yahoo without compromising on the time you spend with your children.

Whether or not it will have a measurable effect on the development of her relationship with her children, or their future personalities, is a matter for personal opinion.
Well I'm from Australia, so I think there are at least another 5-10 public holidays that i'm not counting.
Beautiful, high resolution, sand photography
I wrote an IRC bot with them when I was 18, and I'm not particularly smart. Also, the bot wasn't particularly smart.
If FB or twitter miss a status update, it's no big deal. If you bank misses your salary going in, it is a HUGE deal. Use the right tool for the job.
There is a classic geek reaction to such things that goes like:

"There is nothing to fear because tech can't be bad / more tech will get us out of this mess / it's always been that way so no way it's man made / etc".

Particular among Ayn-Randish/Ray Kurzweil/Free Market/ types...
Blooie - Intelligent Conversation Platform
:) surprising?!
This is an extraordinarily dumb paragraph:

"She could have run off and been a startup founder and "CEO," but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it."

Why would she have to beg for VC? She has $300 million. That's just working like a dog? The author just described that Mayer already does that. It's a gamble at best? We're talking about Yahoo here.

Mayer would NEVER have to beg for VC under any circumstances first of all. And second, you can easily swap out dealing with VC's for some things that can be worse: dealing with analysts 24/7, activist investors, board members, shareholders in general, public company regulations, and on and on.
Bangkok Transfer
Bangkok Limo vehicles have been providing reliable Bangkok transfer
services for a number of years. Their conscientious professional drivers
will pick you up and take you to your destination on time and without fuss.
Step forward the new Publishers re-purposed as curated search engines.

There is a real possibility that all you would end up with is an on-line version of the current crop of dead-tree publishers. In addition to simply democratising publishing there needs to be some thought applied to the subject of the publisher as an institution. Learned societies and universities fit this approach so tools that made publishing easier for these group to manage would be a step forward. However any concentration of power or influence results in some of the current set of problems quickly resurfacing. Perhaps it is simply a facet of any enterprise where humans are involved and a revolution every so often is needed to shake things up a little.
Something that tends to get overlooked in pg/mysql discussions is administration - more specifically account management. all of this is done in the 'mysql' database via SQL directly in mysql ('insert into user', 'grant permission', etc). Most tutorials on PG I've seen over the years show these things being done from the commandline, and assume a unix environment, and an understanding of connecting from various account shells and such.

i've been made aware that you that there are other ways of dealing with user/perm management in pg, but from the perspective of people running shared hosting, the default tutorials feel extremely burdensome compared to managing everything in one database via SQL (no need for multiple user accounts on the system - just multiple user accounts on the database).
Let's go with $15/hr instead, since that's probably what the testers make. That's about 2666 hours of testing.

Now, how many different XBox 360 models are there? Count each one twice, once for the hard drive and once for a USB Stick that people will use to store the game and saves. http://beta.ivc.no/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_Revisions 8 x 2 = 16.

Now we're down to 166 hours of testing with each revision of the 360.

Let's put 4 people on each one and let them test it for only a week.

And just like that, all that money is used up.

I'm sure some of that money goes into bandwidth, administration, etc etc. So they don't even get 4 people to test it for a week for that money.
It's been done. There's a link on HN few years ago about a company doing exactly that. Can't find it now, though.
Wow that's hilarious and depressing at the same time. Intentionally maintaining a buffer of bad employees to keep your good employees around is the pinnacle of big company crap culture. If I ever have a company large enough for this type of problem I'll make sure that every manager can anonymously warn me if they start thinking like this.
In australia the unions are so strong in certain areas (mainly skilled labour) that most of the tradies working at one place (where I did some tech consulting) had 40-60 days paid leave (including public holidays, normal paid holidays, R&R, random union days and 10day sick leave).
Reading this memo, she seems more like a manager instead of a leader. Nothing inspiring, just orders. Also, very awkwardly written.
Yeah, the trend doesn't go any further; whales was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Kickstarter is a kiddy-car kind of way to get 'funded'.

I looked at a few funded projects with large tiers; the bigger donations were often friends and family. So not really fair; they didn't need kickstarter to get that money. I'm not sure there are any real whales at all.
It's a journalist's job to get the internal story, even if that requires exploiting various forms of petite disloyalty. Also, a rah-rah message this generic was written with the expectation it would be leaked.

And, Swisher as a journalist would likely expect (and perhaps even respect) if her own correspondents leaked her own emails, if and when it could advance a story of industrywide interest. Journalists aren't especially thin-skinned, naive, or hypocritical about such things.
Yahoo & Marissa Mayer
http://blahshack.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/yahoo-marissa-mayer/
The 3 Fs of Office Giving
In the race to commercialize space, SpaceX is in... Fourth?
G*D that's an irritating site. No doubt very clever, but genuinely painful to try to read and use. I tried, I really tried, but by the fourth "clever" animation I just couldn't stomach it any more.
At their scale I doubt they are using LSA or anything of similar complexity. My guess would be something like tf-idf coupled with any thing from naive bayes to logic programming for entity recognition.

Final output would likely use some hand curated rules on how to combine the above with infromation from curated databases like dbepida.

________________

There is this thing called random projection based on the observation that in high dimensions, most direction are nearly orthogonal to each other. This is a wonderful observation because it allows us to write stupendously simple (and fast) algorithms that give good results for mathematically sound reasons.

I strongly suggest anyone who is interested in LSA but wants something scalable, simpler to write and faster to look into Random Indexing.
Im not disagreeing that in most cases these conspiracy theories are complete nonsense but I think it is pretty important that we encourage people to come up with alternate theories to events and actions and not instantly dismiss them. Always trusting the "rulers"(as they would call them) could end very badly in the long term for humanity.
I don't see any evidence of a grudge in this article. It's just Swisher covering her beat. (Has some bit of editorializing been clipped out? It's essentially forwarded without comment.)
> It creates an incentive for Microsoft to not do a very through review of the first patch

MS has no incentive to review any patch at all beyond "it won't break stuff other than this developer's stuff". Unless I'm misunderstanding the review process code quality is the developers problem and if they release a bad patch that MS let out because it looked OK form their PoV (it applied cleanly to their test systems, and doesn't make the resulting app break any of the walled garden's rules) then that is not MS's fault.

Yes, it is a bad system. But they can't sign up for a bad system, give exclusivity to that bad system, then moan that they are stuck in a bad system and expect me to have sympathy for them. The way to try change the system as a developer is to refuse to take part until it is fixed - if the system loses users due to lack of content then MS may listen. The users are not going to fall for the reverse ransom that they are trying to pull - the average player is going to think "I paid you for the game, you need to fix it for me, I don't care what the costs are to you, that is a business problem for your accountants to sort out".
I'm not a publisher but have worked at publishers in the past.

> All the journal does is provide a crappy web app
> to organize the process.

I'm guessing you're being facetious ;) but that's not true. It depends on the publisher but they may also edit the manuscript; find the right reviewers; have a full time editor make a decision based on the reviewer's feedback; typeset or convert it to machine readable format (authors submit in Word, but this'll often be converted to an industry standard XML format to allow interoperability between different databases - both abstract databases and publisher ones as journals change publishers frequently); ensure the content is properly stored (this is not the same as putting it up on S3 for 2 cents a month. It's the scholarly record and publishers generally take the responsibility of maintaining it seriously. Publishers pay a fee to put content into a darknet run by a consortia of libraries - if the publisher goes out of business the consortia makes all the content available for free. They also pay membership fees to industry organizations like CrossRef that allow them to deposit canonical metadata in a central database and mint DOIs) and discoverable (at the end of the day your paper will get much more attention when published in Science than it does your blog).

Are all of those things worth paying more than $99 an article for? It's debatable.

But can anybody with a Wordpress blog do what publishers can? No.

(Same sort of thing applies to trade. Look at self-published books. You can create great content for free and stick it in an EPUB but you'll rapidly find that you need to start shelling out to be included in the book databases bricks and mortar stores use, to have a cover designed, to get an ISBN, to start actually selling through Amazon or wherever... publishing isn't as trivial as it seems.)
Show HN: RoaringApps crowd-sources application compatibility for Mountain Lion
Just curious how you were able to get a domain hack approved with an .ie domain. I had tried previously a few years ago, but Ireland was very restrictive in allowing them.
SlimberryXtreme
I've been neck deep in MySQL for the past 5-6 years, simply b/c that's what my company uses.

I've been wanting to pick up postgres but my only motivation has been curiosity. Any good resources/tutorials people here can recommend?
> that scheme is a superior language for bootstrapping people into the programmer mindset.

And I am saying that there is no evidence to support that assertion.
It's probably much simpler than that. You know that study where most people chose to be the top dog of a small group instead of being part of a larger group, but only a subordinate? Same goes here.

Besides, maybe she really believes she can turn the company around - who will be laughing if/when that happens?
I'll counter your anecdote with my anecdote: My wife could have done it, I would wager.

Advice to Marissa Meyer:

- the baby and the nanny should be with you 24/7. I don't care who you're meeting with, you should be holding or wearing the baby.

- if the baby fusses, don't hand her off to the nanny -- start nursing her or change her yourself, no matter who you're with. You can still carry on a conversation with them, and you're powerful enough they have to pretend they're not offended -- they shouldn't be, anyways.

- invest in a standing desk and a sling. Babies love to sleep in those things, and are usually quiet even when awake. They'll be much more comfortable if you're standing rather than sitting, and it gives you the ability to rock them while working.

- have walking meetings. Great for you, the baby and the participants.

- it's your partner's (or an employee's) job to make sure that you get a proper sleep at night. The shorter the interruption at night, the easier it is to get back to sleep, and the less the interruption. Your only job is to nurse. It's your partner's job to pick up the baby when it cries, to soothe her and to change her.

If the baby is colicky, all bets are off. But most babies aren't.

And this advice is only for the first 6 months or so. By then the baby is much more awake & aware, and is probably better off in a nursery right next door. Working at 6 months is fairly well travelled ground.

Very few women have the luxury of stopping all work when their baby arrives. Heck, most of them don't even get 2 weeks off. I'm willing to bet that running Yahoo and raising a single child is easier than cooking all the meals, doing all the cleaning and looking after 1 or 2 preschool children as well as a baby, if only because Marissa will have nannies, housekeepers and secretaries.
You've touched on something real here.

The term 'genius' bothers me too because it seems calling someone a genius is less about the object (ie the person we are talking about), but more about the speakers feelings toward that object (eg godlike awe etc).
The PostgreSQL official C client library, libpq, (which most language specific wrappers are based on) works the same way as you say the .NET adapters do. Every statement is by default implicitly wrapped in a transaction until you run "BEGIN;".
Whoa, I think you're mixing things up there. Your original claim was that compilers get rid of the imperative nature of some programming languages. I pointed out that a compiler outputs something that is about as imperative as it gets, ie the compiler has made code mode imperative, not less.

The fact that compilers use s-expressions as an intermediate form says more about the recursive nature of most syntaxes than it does about the imperativeness or not of the program being compiled, and the program being output.

Also, as an aside, if you take some machine code that was compiled from C, even these days it is still ridiculously easy to take that code and turn it back into C. I have quite a bit of experience at doing precisely this. The only thing that has changed is that the compiler has got better at identifying code that is recalculating the same value over and over, and gets rid of that code.
It's indeed re-assuring to find out that your fears are not unique and that many other people think the same way you do. I think basically that people fear anything that is related to money.

I found that the hardest part is not about sending invoice tho, but the hardest part is to actually collect the money. I once dealt with a company I needed to collect money from for a job I did, it took me 364 days (yes, almost a year!) to get the money wired. Thing is it could have been dealt faster (it was part my fault as well), but I kept delaying talking to the people in charge of accounting because I really didn't like the though of begging for my hard earned money.

Part of that fear by the way is derived from the fact that you still want to retain some kind of good relationship with the company/individual and you wouldn't want to harm any potential future jobs. However if you're not getting paid instantly, would you really keep working for the same guy?

I have a rule in my company, we pay immediately after the job is done. We don't wait 1 week, 2 weeks or 60 days like some other companies. We pay immediately and I think so far it paid off since freelancers like to work for us.
Walt Mossberg ethics statement - good sense of humor
One gem:

> "I do occasionally take a free t-shirt from these companies, but my wife hates it when I wear them, as she considers them ugly."

I like it.
Yeah, I read it like this..

Letter: "Your starting annual base salary will be $83,333.33"..

Me: O_o That's it?

Letter: " per month"..

Me: O_O Ohhh!!

And it only gets better from there with the incentives and awards packages. Yes, there's a lot of work to be done. Being the CEO isn't just putting your feet up and yacking out orders. You gotta work your butt off. Not only for you, but the people who are counting on you to move the company in great direction.

I hope Marissa does well. Yahoo! hasn't been relevant for years now and I hate to see them just go away. We need more competition out there and I'm sure there are a lot of brilliant minds that can pull things together.

As for me, I need to work even harder/better if I ever wanna see that kinda scratch.
Well the fact that both of the founders are Irish really helped the matter ;) I think you can get one if you move to Ireland but you have to be really committed to the url you want!
Thanks a lot for your kind words. If there are any specific features you would like, feel free to email me or raise an issue on the projects' github page.

By the way, pgXplorer has a quick find feature that can highlight the searched table/view/function. Hopefully, you find that useful. It is a really useful feature especially when dealing with CJK table names.
One problem I see with self-affirmations is that they only change your perception of what you can achieve, not what you actually can achieve. No amount of self-affirmation will help you become a painter unless you take the pain of learning how to paint. And failed expectations after some time build frustration. So you must be cautious of what you make yourself believe.
There is a joke about a guy that was praying his whole life asking god to let him win a lottery. He never did, and after his death he asked god why. The god answered "What could I do? You never bought a lottery ticket".
Show HN: Gronto - Create a viral flash sale promotion to sell anything.
That's not silly at all - I think the root of that fear is that we don't want to be perceived as 'nagging' individuals anג perhaps harm any potential future projects. However think about it - would you like to work repeatedly for a person who doesn't pay you in time?

Would you stay at a job where your salary would be delayed by 10-20 days every time? The answer is most likely no, then why do we settle when we are freelancers?
5 Free Photo Caption Apps for iOS
Not silly. It's supposed to be this way. And don't skip out on the angst.

A starting businessman should be apprehensive of sending out invoices and questioning himself.
Yes, it does feel like "begging", but it makes sure you don't lose out because of hubris. Over time (if you're doing everything well) you will have more money and business acumen, and it will become easier, since you won't be needing the money on the short term. It will also allow you to better negotiate higher prices.

And when you've mastered it, you can hire a (part-time) secretary, who sends out the invoices. That's your reward. You faced your fear, learned how to handle it, and now you can let it go, because with someone else doing the billing, you can always fall back to it being a secretarial error.

There are whole industries based on making it seem you have enough cash and confidence so you feel you have a stronger position to negotiate, skipping out on what I feel is a basic business skill.

Or you can do it the hard way, without leased luxury and practicing the voodoo feelgood technique of the day. Building a business on hard work and gathering confidence in your own skills through your customers, without blaming your parents or the world or your mirror.

Dont' be an actor playing an entrepeneur; be an entrepeneur.
The Daily Protein: An Integrated Online News & Media Gadget
SaaS & the Art of Software Pricing. Jeff Lawson, Twilio
I was unclear the part that is a myth is that they are slow in _PostgreSQL_. COUNT( ) is actually slow in general on databases with high concurrency requirements. Because you have to sacrifice something to make COUNT( ) fast.

If you had read his benchmark you would have seen COUNT( ) was slow in both databases (three times as slow in MySQL).
There's no benefit to Oracle in providing a general purpose server linux to compete with Debian, because there's no profit in it. They're providing this linux primarily so they can sell a vertically integrated stack with their applications on the top, and secondarily to get some revenue from the kind of companies that insist on big name support for anything they use. Debian does not compete in that market, and they're unlikely to have customers demand debian binaries because the kind of companies that run debian don't run oracle applications.
KineticJS - HTML5 Canvas JavaScript Library Framework
14 dead at theater shooting in Colo.; 50 injured
I had the same thought. Here's Tom Cruise explaining Study Technology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S800ilR9c4&feature=youtu...
Then you could follow those blogs, pick out the best articles, and link to the good ones. You could even offer constructive critisism (i.e. "I'll link to you if you expand a bit on how you did step 3"). Kind of like a journal.
The Trouble with Online Education
Years of Dedication and Passion for Blogging, Recipes and Stolen Photos
Good post. I'd add another hack: While maintaining drive toward a big success, establish and reach small goals along the way. This keeps one from being held back by fears that can crop up around success; it safeguards against using unattainable goals as a type of irrational defense mechanism.

Strings of small successes also provide fertile, solid ground for successful pivots as more is learned. An endless set of reworked plans toward overly grandiose goals can be a barren pivot quagmire.
It's not really appropriate to this particular story -- high school student vs VC-funded startup -- but what really bugs me about all "the next Google" reporting is that they ignore the biggest gotcha of search: corpus size matters.

The secret sauce of a successful search engine isn't the core algorithm which handles 90% of the work 90% of the time, it's the millions of tweaks which keep the millions of pathological cases from making every query useless. On a small enough corpora, even grep does a great job. But once you are trying to search the world, it stops being an insight problem; at scale there are so many corner cases that you can't ignore them.
Shooting at Batman Premiere
Exactly. Paper cups connected with string would arguably change the way your department communicated, collaborated and operated.