skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great idea! Quick question - It seems you find a way of doing all three during the day, is that correct? Also, and this may sound like a silly question, how do you divvy up the hours, how do you know how much time you can/should allot to each category?

I see from your profile that you are interested in all sorts of things (to mention a few Technology, Philosophy, Startups, Movies [I like these too]). Are these all in the Out-there learning category?
Am I missing something by not using XMPP?

Identity and S2S federation. IRC is fine for a closed system, but XMPP's global namespace has a lot of potential for integration between different real-time systems.
If you were to start a web application from scratch, how would you deal with important database backups?
Hm, parterburn = stwc on reddit?

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/7xrm8/stuff_that_was_...

Anyway, this post is not HN, IMHO.
The more I program, the more I write about what I'm going to program.

I haven't gotten to the point of writing my code on paper, though.
I remember watching a PBS program in the early 90's with a girl from the 'hood saying essentially the same thing. Her take was that the dealers on the street weren't going to stop just because the cops/city government wanted them to, but if you could find a way for them to take the money they made and channel it into legal businesses, most of them would rather do that because they knew what their life expectancy was otherwise.

In her words "they're already businessmen. They know how to make money and talk to people but everybody looks down on them for what they do." I thought it was a very insightful comment even back then.

The thing that drove it home for me was when driving through the projects some years later, I saw a well-dressed (complete with walking stick!) elderly man selling heroin on the street. No way you're just going to get people to stop unless you show them an alternative.
How to hire a Product Manager?
Maybe there's ground in the middle that looks something like this: VCs have a stronger bargaining position in capital intensive startups than in software. Stronger bargaining leads to more power to direct the returns to their pockets rather than the founders'. So the model is VCs maximize their after-costs (founders and otherwise) rate of return which is likely to be higher in non-software ceteris paribus.

However all is not equal, the extraordinary returns in recent memory have come from the web, and so venture capital firms will likely still be putting their thumb in the pie, even if it means cashing out to founders, letting them be CEO, giving them smaller rounds, etc. for software start-ups.
This makes me seriously think about quitting FB
I don't see a lot of commuting in these "habits". Interesting how much of a time waste the average drive into the office creates for most people.

It seems if we wanted to look for realistic ways to increase productivity in our society, we'd really focus on this one.
According to their SEC filings, Google turned a profit for the first time in 2001. Their first funding ($100k) came in 1998. They then secured $25m in 1999.

AdWords was not launched until 2000 so it wasn't possible they were turning a profit before then.
They were profitable from their deals to supply search technology to Yahoo, etc. If they didn't call themselves profitable in their SEC filings, it was presumably because of some accounting rule about the cost of options or something like that.
Yes, when XP came out it was beautiful, wasn't it :D I still used the classic theme though. Im not that much of a windows user any more, so it doesn't bother me that it looks like it came from the 90's, and im a 90's kid, so there :D
There certainly is no official scientific consensus on anything. That's an oversimplification made by politicians for mass consumption. That's fine and dandy.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of relevant scientists believe in global warming. Call it consensus, or whatever you want (or nothing at all), it's very real and stupid to ignore.
Anyone know how rdiff-backup compares to duplicity?
I know duplicity has an option to turn off encryption, if one wants to remove that overhead...
A lot good things already posted. What helped me a lot was this ebook: http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-produc...

And one thing: Be brave with your name.
We are working on filtering by location. I wish it were done already. But for now, we are posting all events to Twitter http://twitter.com/editconf Tumblr http://editconf.tumblr.com/ and FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/editconf so you can use one of them for a feed.

Good luck on your photography version!
What does the "subject only to your privacy settings" phrase in the new ToS

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/terms.php

do for users? How do you set your privacy settings on Facebook?
The H-1B Fraud Rate: Over 20%, Says USCIS
It seems _why is a very enigmatic figure and his real identity seems to be not known. However I respect his desire to stay anonymous despite the fame he deserves for being a very creative and respectable hacker.
Not if you want to quote lines from his interview on HN.
unless your corporate network's internet connection is down...
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=91115&vi...

This looks like a simple and safe way of handling repeated MySQL backups.
What Else Acts Like Cheap Wine and Cigarettes?
Are you seeing any trend of investments getting smaller? E.g. would your firm invest $200k into a promising company, or is that still out of the question even in these "tough times"?
Reading the article, I couldn't help thinking of parallels to drawing and particularly that book (well, the original -- I haven't read the "New" one).

Contrary to the expectations of most people, life drawing is largely a mechanical process that can be learned. It is very much a matter of learning to "turn off" the part of the brain that interprets images so that you can concentrate on relatively unimportant lower-level visual details, such as the angle at which the contour of a nose intersects the contour of the cheek behind it. The exercises in the book -- copying upside-down pictures, copying pictures in a grid, concentrating on negative space shapes, etc. -- all help do this.

The physical left/right brain distinction, by the way, is speculation on the part of the author; apparently people with damaged right brains are also capable of learning life drawing. It does serve as a useful metaphor, however.
Canvas gives you pixel-level control, but it doesn't do 3D yet.
They certainly have a business model. Advertising. Problem is, they haven't accepted who their paying customers really are: Advertisers.
" 1. H-1Bs can only be hired for jobs where 'no qualified American can be found' and

" 2. H-1Bs must be paid market rates so as not to depress tech salaries.

"Critics argue neither provision ever gets enforced, and in practice H-1Bs compete directly against American citizens at cut-rate prices, making life miserable for IT workers."

As an immigration lawyer (not actively practicing immigration law at the moment) this sounds very plausible. The law of most immigration categories has never been very vigorously enforced. Before, during, and after when I was actively engaged in immigration law practice I saw some very dubious cases win visas because no one really challenged the visa application. If I remember correctly, at least a few of the terrorists who crashed airline planes into buildings on September 11th, 2001 didn't have valid visa status to be in the United States on the day they made those attacks.
the socio-economic conditions from pre-independence have created the vicious circles .... also lots have to do with caste system as well; where brahmins were known as the best .... after independence if you want to do better then you have to have better education and to have better education you need to have better scores .... now the situation is so worse that even if you have better scores you still can't get admission in good schools ... the competitiveness has grown because of non-availability of very few premier schools. Also there is something like Status Symbol - parents are just dying to get some kind of status in the society and that they try to get it thru their kids... poor kids, the young minds are sometime destroyed because on this unusual pressures.

Also there is not much importance given to other extra curricular activities/career.... this is also due to to not having good institutions/infrastructure. If you are from middle class and god forbid if you want to leave your studies for getting in to sports or music or modeling then the whole society will come down on you as if you're a sinner. Though this mentality is on the verge of changing (in urban areas only) but not at the pace of 21st century.
No, Google is the perfect investment for VC. Most founders (or anyone for that matter) can't afford the huge data centers that Google needs.

That server farm costs a lot, and therefore the required investment is a huge barrier to entry.

That business model is perfect for VCs, and that is where they should focus.
Matt Benwell quickfire profits Reviews|Quickfire profits|quickfire profits
Reports show that on the internet over 800000 people make either part time or full time incomes from using online sources. These methods vary dramatically from online businesses selling physical products, affiliate marketing (where you get paid a commission on sales, from visitors you send to the merchants website) and various other online money making opportunities. The internet has opened the door for just about everybody that can get online to take advantage of these opportunities.
I think that increasingly, software-based businesses will be starkly divided by the "application" and the "infrastructure" realm. While the former is made by a single person or a small group and runs on preexisting systems, the latter builds and maintains said systems, and has to pull in serious resources to do so.

For the app-writers, it won't just be seed funding anymore - it'll be no funding at all. The most they have to do is pay for some hosting, legal and financial services, but their burn rate will be so tiny as to do it on part-time wages.

As for the remainder, they'll still be operating a traditional startup with real funding needs.
Stats on text message signatures and how they affect parsing
We currently have the ability to upload your own theme and customize existing themes, in development. Shoot me an email, chris (at) weebly.com, and I'll give you access. Otherwise, this feature should be live early next week =)
Oh. It's by Dziuba. No wonder it reeks of envy and poor writing.
This was not poison gas. The victims were simply asphyxiated. Nor was this unique. In ancient times, fire was commonly used by armies besieging towers, and in the casese when it worked, smoke must often have flushed out or killed the defenders before flames did.
Ask HN: Help I have to mentor some programmers
I'm a soft-spoken typical introverted geek who doesn't like being in the spotlight. I'm the only member of my tech department (small department; big company) who knows Ruby and my boss has tasked me with teaching Ruby to two PHP developers who are not very technically ambitious. Nor are they interested in learning Ruby. How do I make my lessons compelling enough to reach people who may be resistant to learning this technology? I've been reading Garr Reynolds book "Presentation Zen" but find it hard to apply to programming presentations where a lot of syntax information and concepts needs to be conveyed that are often difficult to illustrate visually (especially for someone not very graphically oriented like myself).
I just quit today. I was only logging in like once a month anyway. When I clicked deactivate account, FB showed be some random friends and said they would miss me!
What about the consensus of scientists that don't believe in the man-made Co2 theory of global warming and the lack of evidence to support the Co2 theory? I've looked at the research and journals for both sides, and the Solar scientists who are accurately predicting this current cooling and actually an acceleration of this trend seem far more convincing.
"Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica?"
I don't know... I am with Herbert here: "The universe is always one step beyond logic."

We may (and in my opinion, definitely will) continue to refine theories of physics in the future but I don't think we will ever achieve perfection. There will always be some minuscule break that will give rise to a new theory.

[UPDATE]: Of course, I have no logical means of proving that except inductive reasoning from history (we haven't come up with a perfect theory yet but we have continued to improve what we have) just as there is no deductive means to prove that a fundamental theory (however complex) does exist.
Handle 1 Billion Events Per Day Using a Memory Grid
Why We're Not Socialists
The best part about _why: if this guy completely loses his mind one day, no one will notice any difference.
The server infrastructure they have now costs a lot, but they've paid for that entirely by themselves.

When they became the default search on Netscape, they had 30 computers.
The issues you point out are real and no one so far has answered them conveniently. What do you think will be the parameters for success if someone comes up with a local advertising or promotion platform. What will be the driver for local businesses to generate leads or traffic.

Kundi
Because coming up with salary/living expenses for themselves is not the definition of entrepreneur. The successful ones do it, but there are plenty of not-yet-successful entrepreneurs.
If newspapers are dying, what will replace them?
Every quarter long established newspapers are reporting decline in ad dollars. This scenario is forcing them to cut journalistic staff. Some have even gone so far to file for bankruptcy. Others are cutting down on home deliveries.

In this scenario, will the bloggers replace newspapers as a source for local news. But if that is true who will aggregate these bloggers to provide latest local news, traffic condition and city hall announcements.

what is the future of local news? is the real question.

regards

kundi
Facebook has the right to use your picture in an advertisement. I find that disturbing. I'd imagine Barack Obama's account might have some useful images (they'd never do that, but it drives home my point).
Ok... now what feature that people need does that translate into? Honest question - I don't know much about the space.
The server is not responding to me. Is there a cached copy elsewhere?
An interesting data point in the electronic medical records discussion.

Those (admittedly few) primary care practices which choose not to interact with the insurance companies, and operate on a cash basis, also happen to be the ones who are pushing through higher efficiencies through technology. Hello Health (https://www.hellohealth.com/), in Brooklyn, uses and develops a medical web platform through its software arm, Myca. Qliance (http://qliance.com/), in Seattle, has been using an electronic records system from the start, which was described to me as "just a glorified CMS".

It does seem strange that paper is the word of the insurance world, and I don't know the industry well enough to explain the problem, but it seems the problem may have something to do with the doctor-insurer dynamic.
Do you have any source for this? First time I've heard of it.
No...they can also, for example, use your picture in a Facebook TV advertisement or use a modified version of your profile, name, and likeness in a Facebook promotional video. These are not even the most extreme examples I can think of.
I was just sort of curious. My own answer was simply 'hacker', even though I wouldn't rate myself a very good one compared to some of the really amazing hackers I've met (I got to watch Paul Mackerras start a Linux port to a new PPC machine... he started out by fiddling with the memory by inputting hex numbers to see what came out. It was seriously impressive). I was also curious about the number of people who actually run profitable firms as opposed to those, like myself, who just want to.
From the article ... " They have used Microsoft and others in the past, and they works...".
What?
Are they even proof reading this thing before hitting `publish`?

That para onwards, its all old fashioned FUD.
This is what I do. Using Amazon's EC2+EBS makes it dead simple. Every time we test a release I setup a staging env (from scratch) and restore the latest EBS snapshot. That way I'm testing both the database backup and that I've kept all of the server images up to date as well. It doesn't take much time either (about 30 minutes) and is done weekly.
Interesting article, but lines like this always make me groan:

The aliens would, like us, be astonished by
the patterns in our shared cosmos and by the
effectiveness of mathematics in describing
those patterns.

Why should we assume that any intelligent life form should have a psychology that is human-like in any way whatsoever? You can make the case for mathematical sophistication; but astonishment? I mean, if there are conceptually sophisticated aliens out there (which is a huge "if" that we have no evidence for or against), who's to say that they even have such a state as "astonished"?

Maybe they're sitting on their planet right now, and some uninformed and unimaginative journalist in their species is writing in their language:

The aliens would, like us, take the patterns
in our shared cosmos completely for granted,
and find it utterly unremarkable that mathematics
are effective in describing those patterns.

Just say NO to humans in funny suits!
My knowledge of chemistry is really shaky, but I guess if I put two electrodes into a salty solution, I have created "nano spaceships" (ie little molecules that travel through water)?

Maybe I should apply for a research grant...

(Probably the nano car IS cool, I am just saying...).
An interesting claim I haven't seen before: nationalization of failing banks does not constitute socialism. Rather, it's the legal--and responsible--outcome under normal bankruptcy law.
Local TV isn't likely to expand coverage beyond the items typically reported on during daily broadcasts. In the mean time the kind of local and hyperlocal coverage traditionally handled by print media journalists is going to be largely absent, which will in turn reduce the amount of grist for the blogosphere.

Some believe that bloggers will pick up the slack (and possibly even improve coverage) when newspapers drop off. Having worked for the 2nd largest newspaper company in North America for a couple years now I'm unconvinced. Simply put quality journalism (as opposed to editorializing) requires a tremendous amount of time and effort to pull off, and is very expensive.
Does it really matter? FISA will scrape it all anyway.
Both my parents and I are immigrants, and where they came from they were the minority. As such, they personally encountered and had to deal with both racism and xenophobia. It's more subtle in their professional fields, but not nonexistent.

Parts of Texas are still horrible, but Northwestern is amazing when it comes with dealing with diversity.

I have carried with me the work ethic springing from their statements, but tend to ignore the ill will that inspired it. It's useful to learn how to work hard.
My recommendation for basic backup needs: rsnapshot. I backup our public server to our internal network as well as my desktop machine to an encrypted portable drive using it: http://www.rsnapshot.org/

It's probably similar to rdiff-backup, which I haven't used. If you're fine with daily or hourly backups and don't have too much data (<100 GB), rsnapshot together with regular SQL dumps works fine.
Don't Blame H-1B Workers for Woes
Yeah, I use a similar approach. However, for ma.gnolia we are talking about a database reaching half a terabyte (unless I misunderstood), so my question was more like: what do you people consider the best way to approach database backup so that it's sustainable, scalable and the most disaster proof? Got any testimoniance (whether personal or of public companies), or case study?
They're building on top of GNUstep.
Quick cherry bomb to lob into this conversation: populating insecure test servers with sensitive production data is a classic web app company security failure. It probably doesn't matter for you, but be cognizant of it.
I happen to be working on a site in this realm as well. We should talk: ben.woosley@gmail.com
I don't see bloggers only replacing the news, unless those bloggers are just the journalists switching from writing a column in the paper, to publishing their articles at the newspaper's website (maybe in weblog format).

I think the biggest problem for local/print news has more to do with how delayed the news gets to the reader. If anything, I would see more newspapers abandoning or reducing paper editions in favor of online-only news (like the Christian Science Monitor (I think it was them)).
Insiders
My firm would do and always has done pre-Series A stage, with a view to building a relationship and following-on in due course. However that is and has always been a less common strategy: most 'bulge bracket' firms (active fund of $300-600m) don't invest such small amounts.

More generally, no, I do not see any trend in rounds getting significantly smaller. I do see a trend in pre-money valuations coming down, of course, but that's entirely different.

The economics of bulge-bracket VC work when you invest say ~5% of your fund in each portfolio company, in the hope that 1/10 or 1/20 of your companies will hit it out of the park. Total fund size equilibriates when drivers for scale (partners' remuneration, principally, less relatively invariable overheads) balances with diseconomies from political inference effects which kick in when too many partners try to reach consensus and cut the cake. That's why top tier firms with a 'plain vanilla' strategy have roughly comparable fund sizes.

FUD aside, nothing I'm seeing at the moment that gives me any reason to believe that underlying model is 'broken' or failing (though of course '07 and '08 vintages will be shot). Almost all successful start-ups need a lot of money to scale beyond a certain point. Free software doesn't really change the cost of airtime, or a VP bus dev. I'm writing anonymously so I have no real axe to grind in saying that.

What is certainly happening in the industry is a shake-out. Good firms with strong reputations are raising quickly and comfortably (if quietly because it's not a time to be above the parapet), and will continue to invest without interruption. That is because there are well-priced deals to do in this environment, and innovation doesn't stop in a recession.

A number of 2nd tier firms, on the other hand, are finding fundraising very difficult. Many will not survive.

Firms that are thriving seem to be investing more slowly just at the moment. This is because there is a lot of noise in the market, and visibility is currently low. Analogy: when it's foggy you drive slower. (Economically: transaction costs rise as expectations less aligned, so liquidity declines.)

What is tough is the squeeze at the bottom end for start-ups. I get the impression (though have less direct evidence of this) that there is a bit less easy money on offer from HNWs sub $500k as many are licking wounds, etc.
I just coded a level file in XML for a game being developed in one of my classes. The same group member who was so adamant about coding the levels in XML had neglected to build an XML creation program. So there we were, trying to wade through > 10,000 lines of XML. I wanted to cry
Non-Hierarchical Management
rdiff-backup keeps a live version of the filesystem available, in addition to backups. This means a full restore is just a `cp -a` operation.

FWIW, I've used both, and I like the opacity of the duplicity backups, since I store them on S3. If you are syncing to a nearby disk, though, then you might like rdiff-backup better.