skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've worked for HP (one of the examples in the article) since 1999 and even back then the free-time thing has been talked about as something from the "old days" when the HP way was still intact. I also did a stint at HP labs in 1988 and back then I remember my mentor showing me labstock and he told me that if I needed any stuff for a side project, even outside of work, I could use what was there. However, I never witnessed anyone taking advantage of that, people were way too busy on their main projects and had other hobbies outside of work (not many PCs and no internet back then).

On the other hand I'm extrememly fortunate that I've always worked on projects where 80% of the time felt like working on my favorite hobby - building prototypes, coding, working with other HP sites across the globe.

I think if I had to look for 20% of "fun" time I'd surely look for a different job. I think a better strategy for large companies would be to get your employees to spend 20% on learning new stuff and I'm not talking about online classes or touchy-feely offsites.
Wikileaks lawyer Garzon 'worried' for Assange health
Some color blind people are more affected than others on their same color blind group.

In my experience doing an Ishihara test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_perception_test) whith someone else while telling them what are you seeing on each pod does wonders to make them understand specifically what shades of color cause you troubles, that's how my wife got to understand my color blindess.
Theoretically, a single pixel camera that scanned fast enough and held the result in memory could create an image with many pixels, so it seems like this barrier isn't necessarily absolute.
It's funny - GNOME 3 looks great but doesn't do what you want it to do, while KDE 4.x looks god awful yet is the most full featured of any of the desktops.

I wonder when they'll realize that those intrusive glow effects are just not cool and come up with a sensible default configuration.
Master the Assembly with JustDecompile Plugins
Maybe a stupid question and I've missed something, but why even bother telling us they're using 32GBs RAM for benchmarking if they're using 32-bit Ubuntu? Just to be totally transparent? Is Windows a 32-bit W7 too?
"Would you go to Mars?

I would. The first flight would be risky; if I felt comfortable that the company's mission will continue, that my kids have grown up, then I'd be on the first mission."

I love that the risk of death only frightens him from a view point of responsibilities. As the father of his children, and apparently the father of humanities future in space.
Sounds about right.. I guess.

I have a fake account that I use just to like random bullshit and to also use to sign into random stuff. It's kinda like having an email account you use to send you spam too.
I've occasionally mulled what a 1-bit camera could do, in the same notion as a 1-bit audio A/DC. Cross this with CS's gazillion millimeter computers and emerging 3D image extraction (term escapes me, take lots of photos and deduce the source objects a la Google 3D Maps).

One camera may be too small for an image (both resolution & color depth). A lot of them, thrown randomly around, may provide interesting results given enough math.
How Much Would You Pay For Facebook?
That was reference to the fact that current mid-end is fairly equivalent to couple generations old high-end.
I wonder what he thinks of Steven Pinker's paradigm[1] that world violence has been declining for centuries and is the lowest it's ever been.

Besides, there will be too many old people in the US to have mass riots in the 2020's.

[1]One example: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190410670457658...
If I could have taken a job at Facebook five years ago, I would have. I'd still have made out like a bandit despite their recent troubles.
I love how lucid and articulate Musk comes across as in these interviews. He's a great spokesperson for entrepreneurs and technologists, and he's cool to boot. I'm sure a generation of kids will be inspired by his example.
I also have a 'fake' account I use for Spotify, as well as to like random stuff without bothering/pissing-off my friends and family.
...and even PHP and Perl, God forbid.

"so if you've invested yourself heavily in either of these languages, you'll be perpetually looked at as a 'B' player on our team... so really, you shouldn't bother applying."
Not perfect but it's time to integrate web notifications
Do you have actual stats on this, or are you guessing?

Also, access to financial services (e.g. health insurance) is irrelevant. Financial services are intermediary goods (like education or business suits) - irrelevant by themselves, but sometimes useful to get other things you really want.
That might have been true in the OpenGL 1.5 days.

There are few things one might miss in core OpenGL 4.2. If anything any features exposed in extensions building on OGL 4.2 are so new or experimental that D3D doesn't have them at all.
Explorer works like an alternative player when creating the thumbnails, so it can use the same codecs as media player. You could have only the codecs and remove media player, and thumbnails still should work.

There is a 64-bit media player, it's just not the default, maybe due to lack of 3rd-party 64-bit codecs at the time. To make it default: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-w...
> And at the same time legal services are still horrifyingly expensive. This is partly because law students have unreasonable amounts of debt. Somehow there's too much supply keeping jobs scarce and too much demand keeping prices high.

Price is the equilibrium of supply and demand. Cost (the expense of educating each student at an accredited school) doesn't influence the price.

The problem is that people are defining "supply" incorrectly. Firms don't want to hire just any of the 45,000 law students. They want to hire one of the 1,000 Harvard, Yale, or Stanford students, and then depending on the market one of the 4,000 students at the top regional schools like Duke or U Chicago. The enrollment at these top schools has grown only very slowly over the last century.

The price of an associate at a big NYC firm is determined b how much it costs a top Columbia graduate to go to that firm as opposed to a competing firm. Associate salaries thus exploded in the 2000's as the demand for legal services far outstripped the enrollment at schools like Columbia, while they have effectively been cut substantially (due to reduced bonuses) in the last 5 years as the demand has dropped while enrollments have stayed constant.
Knight Trading's 440 Million Dollar Blunder
Good day for Getco?
Why the Blank Ad Test is flawed and misleading
A Startup's Secret Weapon: The Rookie Advantage
Blindly speculating on Twitter’s future
> Wii, Kinnect and Move are all fun for a while but there really aren't many great titles taking advantage of the new controllers

My feeling is that innovative software solutions come a good amount of time after the release of hardware that enables them; gaming consoles just don't keep the hype alive long enough to pick sufficient interest.

> I'm not convinced anything that requires physical sensors on the body is likely to become part of a mainstream UI

Maybe not, but the physical sensors could be attached to a structure resembling a bracelet. Make it wireless and aesthetically pleasing, and I could see myself wearing one without feeling silly.
To give HN skimmers some context: Hari Seldon is a key character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. He develops a new science called "psychohistory", which enables accurate prediction of the behavior of extremely large (galactic scale) groups of people.

When I read the first book of the series, an idea that resonated with me was the marginalization of scientists. I kept seeing aspects of current society reflected in his work. What I wonder is if scientists felt the same way at the time Asimov wrote the series?

P.S. It is a fantastic series of books. I encountered them my chance in the last few years. Highly recommended!
I've gotten free games out of complaining to publishers. (Lucas Arts and Cyan Worlds come to mind).

"I can't finish your game, it's got color based puzzles in it."

"Sorry, sir."

"Do you know that about eight percent of your customers have the same problem I do?"

"What!? Uh oh..."
Desktop, laptop use of New York Times’ website drops over two years
Quake, mentioned by the OP, is one of those old games where this fix is needed. You'd know this if you played Counter-Strike :)
Yeah I'd reckon with the depth and breadth of talent across the testing business now, it should be really cool. I hope they make the internal information sharing/collaboration piece a priority.

Almost makes me regret being a freelancer.
This is the reason I installed Mountain Lion. I've only used it a bit in the last few days, but I haven't seen crazy amounts of mds RAM usage since installing either.
Google maps used to use green or red lines in custom created maps. In satellite view that color had a very bad contrast with the surroundings, especially area's with lots of (green) nature in it. They now use a bright blue, never had any problems with it.

The new bike navigation feature is a bit more difficult. The legend is hidden in it's initial state, making it difficult and confusing to determine what colors are used for the different lines. After checking it appears that they are using a solid black, solid green/red and a dashed green/red line. Works pretty well, but in absence of the legend there is no way of knowing of you're missing something. Minor problem I'd say, but still :)

If you'd run things by me or get in contact with other colorblind people, shoot me a message via twitter (@wearecolorblind) or via the contact page on the website!
What it makes really hard to be well on estimating time: Programmers often have to solve problems they solved never before. You rarely solve exact the same problem multiple times. And what it makes even more difficult: The environments and tools you have to solve these problems are changing. So you don't really have that much experience you can rely of.
"If you thought I was insufferable before..."

First, congratulations. I did notice though a change in your comment tone from some time ago. (Unfortunately I can't recall exactly when and there is no easy way to draw up comments on HN from "x" days ago you have to go through page by page.) I'm wondering though if it coincides with this (or maybe another deal) going down. Meaning either the stress or elation of this or another potential transaction altered your writing.
A peer-to-peer escrow
I believe that Year of the Linux desktop will truly gain momentum when Microsoft Office or something as powerful as that, is released on Linux. Does the average user need the full power of Excel or Access? No. But the familiarity with the brand name and interface of Office (no one can dispute that this is probably the most widely used software, in enterprise and home environment) will not allow them to switch to another office package. Many home users are not aware of the fact that there can indeed exist multiple software to edit the same file-type.

I'm reasonably certain that MS even know that releasing Office on Linux will ring their death knell. Although, I do feel it a bit unfair that it's available on the Mac OS.
Go to Mars. I'll at least watch the video. We need the wild west with space helmets. We need big impossible goals. Or else it's just us here talking and warring over one marble running out of raw materials.

I am encouraged by the recent progresses. The upcoming rover landing is a big test. If they can master robotic rocket landings and material transport on the surface we are making progress.

My wife has set a rule that no children we have are allowed to leave the planet before they are 18.
OK, that's enough reason to do the upgrade.

Parallels gets abysmally slow for me when TimeMachine starts up.
Estimating time is no trivial task. From my past experience I can say that it really differs from person to person from team to team. In fact in the past we have wasted so many hours estimating work load, time that could have been better spent on the actual tasks. It took quite some effort to get into a Kanban style process. Not for developers but for business and product managers as their central question 'when?' is meassured differently now. We got away from developers guessing how long it will take and instead take the past performance to guess future timelines. Works better for us.
The whole point is: Take burden off your developer, improve your processes around him. Provide better requirements, give valuable feedback, understand issues and risks. The more input from your side, the better the 'estimations' from your developer.
With $1/day plan, Aereo snubs its nose at broadcasters
Beer surely makes it much more productive.
It also depends on location. $40K in the midwest is livable, while on either coast, not so much.
Ask HN:  Online Courses For Someone Interested in Basic Design?
My girlfriend is interested in design (graphic design, web design).

I wanted to send her a free course from MITx or Coursera, but couldn't find anything design specific.

Can you recommend courses/links that I can send to her?
I've found this website to be useful for seeing what an image would look like to a color blind person:
http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/
That's very nice. Congrats.
The article is interesting even if bits and pieces are out of date. It's nice to see other's viewpoints.

My one complaint about this article, and a lot of articles of the same ilk, is the part where Americans get criticized for not "traveling abroad" and not "seeing foreign countries".

I suspect most american's will travel more MILES than the average european without ever seeing another country. It's far far more expensive for an American to visit other western countries than it is for the average European. We'd absolutely LOVE to be able to fly to France for the price of train ticket from London to Paris. Sadly, the price of oversees airfare is pretty damned high.

I know visiting different states isn't the same as visiting countries but I think people living outside of the U.S. don't understand just how different various U.S. regions are from each other. Really, you might say it's a bit silly to go visiting foreign countries when you haven't even experienced all of the diversity in your own country yet.
Perl 6: Windows .msi now available for monthly Rakudo Star releases
So have the acquired you solely for your (current & expected) revenue, or will you bring other wider benefits to the group? Will you just be producing profits for them, or are you planning any kind of inter-play with other group companies?
I agree that the default theme and the glow effect are unpleasant, but once I've switched from Air to Oxygen (Workspace Appearance -> Desktop Theme -> Oxygen) and removed the glow (Workspace Appearance -> Window Decorations -> Configure Decoration -> Shadows tab -> uncheck 'Active Window Glow' box), things suddenly look a lot nicer.
... there are superusers ...

In what sense is this peer-to-peer?
My battery life seems to last as long as it did on Snow Leopard, too.
My battery life seems to be back at Snow Leopard durations, too.
New York City | Full Time | Open to Covering Relo Costs
Developers | Designers

We automatically create 3D models of real spaces that you can see, design & share on the web.

We have paying customers and are and backed by two of the highest profile seed funds in tech, one on the west coast, one east coast firm.

We are looking for developers, especially people who are interested in computer vision problems and potentially have experience in online 3D technology. Technologies we currently use include: Ruby, Rails, Python, Blender, JS, CouchDB, Meteor, Heroku, Git, OpenCV, Unity, OpenGL and graphics accelerators.

By joining us now you'll have the opportunity to be part of a founding team and to help set the culture & long-term software architecture of our company.

We are a small, technical team with diverse backgrounds.
We've worked for companies such as Zappos, Microsoft (Kinect/Xbox), Knewton, Bonobos, TellApart & Accel Partners. We're graduates of schools such as MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon & Brown.

We're fortunate to be working out of Class A office space donated by one of our investors and we're working hard towards long-term profitability.

To inquire, or apply, please email dave@lofty.com with "Hacker News" in the subject line. Please include:
* A quick introduction
* Your portfolio, resume, or Github account
* Any other materials you'd like us to see
honestly I would probably pay in the order of sub $5
Well good version of OpenGl 5.0 would be very welcome(even without complete rewrite), but history shows that ARB(Architectural Review Board) likes to shoot itself in foot[1]. Design by committee usually takes a lot of time, so rewrite would probably take forever given number of legacy OpenGL Cad applications.

Small nitpick: OpenGL would be catching up with Direct3d not with DirectX(which includes parts like input or sound that AFAIK are out of scope for OpenGL)

[1]http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-...

edit: found HN discussion about this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711231
Also for osx, preview works fine for the .ps.
As expected. Many people have and will leave Facebook.
They came to cash-out thats what they did after the IPO.
And now they are off to new ventures.

Same has happend and will happen to all big hits who go IPO.
You will lose a lot of talent. Maybe this was one of the reasons they pushed out the IPO date so many times.

Golden Handcuffs are good sometimes.
So it's okay for people to risk their lives deep sea diving, climbing Everest, etc., but not here?

It's not like the people doing this wouldn't know exactly what they were doing and how dangerous it was.
Sky Survey launches astrophotography iPad app
I've also been developing since RC2 on a decent sized project. SocketStream is the glue that holds it all together (backbone.js, twitter bootstrap, mongo, mongoose, jade, stylus, redis, etc.)

It is a joy to develop with -- flexible, simple, and it just works. I hope more people become aware of SocketStream, because if you haven't heard of it, you are missing out.
Space-X has plenty of competition. After all NASA doesn't make it's rockets itself - Boeing, Lokheed-Martin, Orbital Sciences, etc do. The difference is the funding model, but there's nothing to stop these other companies adapting to the competition Space-X is providing.

The risk of wishing for a competitor is that one will turn up that doesn't compete on innovation and efficiency, but competes on some other axis such as financial or political muscle. That might provide benefits in the short term, but long term it would be terrible if Space-X were pushed aside that way.
Knight Capital Says Trading Glitch Cost It $440 Million
What tradeoffs does Gatekeeper force you to make?
Plug-In Kit Turns Any Car Into a Hybrid for $3,000
I just want to point out that in #1:
"Time for starting the computer, the development environment and getting the right source."
What programmer needs to start their computer to fix a bug? That is crazy talk.
I'm having a hard time imagining anybody working for these seed companies couldn't find a job. What was created, exactly?
Another way to keep track of your time is to run a screen-recording software through the day, and then do a review In the evening.
How everyone benefits from Verizon’s FCC-mandated free tethering
Here's an Innovation: Free Speech
It's not an assumption at all. Anxiety is well understood to have negative emotional effects. I wholely disagree with the "I'm not thinking about outages" point.

It's natural -- responsible, even -- to consider the "what if" any time you're introducing a new dependency on a service. You may not consider it consciously, but even the most reliable services we use fail us sometimes. It would seem impossible not to develop this sense at some level.

> Conventional wisdom says that reliable services that are always online would be perceived as being more trustworthy than those which go down.

That's not conventional wisdom, it's naivety. 100% reliability doesn't exist over any significant time scale, thus the assertion of this particular "conventional wisdom" is a wisdom that no one has developed. If it is anything, it is a conventional misconception. We might tell ourselves this with our consious minds, but we are all weary of the risk of failure at some level.
Illinois making it illegal to ask job applicants for online profile passwords
Can you explain why you wouldn't trust SFML? I've been using it for a few months now and haven't had any problems.
The IBM Research Website [1] shows very diverse work in all areas of chemistry, physics, biology, materials science, electrical and systems engineering, theoretical computer science, and mathematics. IBM is deeply involved with cutting edge research across the board in a way that very few other corporations are. I think Intel Labs (according to an Intel employee I spoke to once) looks at about a 10-15 year timeframe, but their purview is more localized than IBMs). Watson Research is an amazing place to be doing science.

[1]: http://www.research.ibm.com/
How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization
I take issue with this kind of generalisation. I don't think these problems are inherent to knockout, but I do think there is a lack of architectural guidance on building large apps with it.

That said, building a maintainable, extensible knockout app is the same as building any other object-oriented system. First, decompose your app into multiple view models (a single view model doesn't have to be bound to the entire page) with clearly defined responsibilities. Combine that with a good Pub/Sub system [1] and you're most of the way there.

That said, it would be nice to see some examples of large-scale knockout apps, as there doesn't seem to be much discussion out in the open in this area. A perfect candidate (in my mind) would be for Steve to release the source code for the knockout tutorial site since that is fairly complex.

[1] https://github.com/rniemeyer/knockout-postbox
How chaos monkey works at Netflix (and other things) [video]
I live my life on the Scotty Principle... http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Scotty%20Prin...
Why blame the programmer?

Bad estimates, like bad anything, have all kinds of possible causes. The programmer's "estimating weakness" is just one possible (and often unlikely) cause.

In general,

A. People do stuff.
B. Programmers write code.
C. People do stuff.

so don't automatically blame the programmer for fuck-ups in Phases A or C.

More specifically, one of my recent real world examples:

http://edweissman.com/it-takes-6-days-to-change-1-line-of-co...
I'm not sure if this is the right answer or not, but the Linux kernel has supported PAE[1] for ages, which allows for more than 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit OS (though it remains unusable by a single process, if I understood that correctly). Maybe someone else with a better understanding of the 32bit/64bit differences can chime in.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
I'm sorry if you missed the big picture. The aim of this article was to show how to quickly build decent APIs using the Symfony2 framework. As far as I know, there was nothing documented yet.
"The right way" mainly means using the right tools and following best practices.
I'm doing some Memrise now and the best thing about it is they seem to have gamified it. The plantlings that grow really do encourage me to keep, well, playing.

Excellent idea.
Show HN: Makr.io, a creative and collaborative way to play with images