skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a tech journalist, it was common for large firms, Apple IBM etc to ask you to sign NDAs when showing you research stuff. They tended to fly you to the factory first, then whip out the paperwork.

I would quite happily sign - once I had struck through or amended the clauses I didn't like. That used to confuse them occasionally, but they never argued.
I'm surprised everyone here dances around the issue rather than using brute force.

I own 4 alarm clocks, which I set to go off at 5 minute intervals. I also stuff small wads of paper into the alarm on-off switch, to force myself to use the snooze button. 20 minutes from the first alarm, I have 4 alarms going off a few seconds apart.
Indeed, Ruby fans (I refuse to call them "Rubyists") love to talk about how Ruby is a great language for creating DSLs, which is true, but that doesn't mean you should create a new DSL for everything just because you can.
"Technical Debt" is a surprisingly self-explanatory term. I have used it to great success with my management team when arguing for time for refactoring, code reviews, and other non-user facing work.
Fixed. They now fade out immediately instead of hanging around for a whole second. It's a little easier on the eyes now, and you can actually see what's being drawn without it being lost behind a wall of stickies.
> storing sessions in cache is a really bad idea

I've never had this issue, so I'm either using a bigger cache than you, or I'm storing less in the session.

>. Cookie store

I can't really speak to why the rails core team made this default, I think it's a step backwards.

> libevet...

That's certainly an option too. The beauty of this tool though isn't in the ruby syntax for cron. It's in using capistrano deployment flexibility and expressiveness for managing distributed crontabs.
The actual headline of this article seems as if it should be: "New Rule: Online storage alone is insufficient for an online storage venture to succeed".
Lift is based on JVM and Scala. So, I think we can assume that Lift actually supports every JVM library.
Cloud Computing Roundtable Sold Out, But It Will Be Streamed
Tech people can be as bad as anyone else when it comes to this kind of stuff. Put one hacker "in charge", and make another hacker a subordinate, and suddenly you've got these kinds of authority issues. In fact, they might be worse, because hackers are always fond of thinking that they can do things faster and better than the other guy, and they're especially fond of being confrontational about technical issues.

Other than that, I agree with you. Last year, I heard a talk given by two co-founders (one technical, one not), who were discussing their working relationship. The tech guy got a big laugh with this line (paraphrased):

"Every once in a while, [my cofounder] gets on my nerves with questions like 'why can't it be done sooner?' It's really helpful to be able to answer 'because fuck you, that's why.'"

That's a luxury that most programmers get to experience, unfortunately.
$25 Billion to Promote Electric Cars Is Untouched
@jason: No kidding.

@sam: Will you be my user too, and send me stack traces when I fuck up? :)
Interesting that you mention phone companies. Because that's one area where I feel India is far superior to what you get in America. American phone companies are always trying to shaft the customer with lock-in on phones and monopolistic pricing. In India, the competition is much more healthy. I've generally been satisfied\impressed with Airtel's customer service. I can only remember one instance in the last 4 years when my internet access went down - it was for half a day and was out all over south India. Maybe I'm just an edge case.

But with retail and restaurants in general, yes, consumers get better treatment in America than probably anywhere else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Abbreviations

That's very interesting. I didn't believe it at first -- hence the link that starts this post.
At the other end of the formality scale was a company I read about a long time ago. They posted everyone's salary on the bulletin board. If you wanted a raise, you went to the bulletin board and wrote in a new one. I dont remember the company's name. It wasnt in software development. More likely it was some snowshoe manufacturer in Vermont.
> The fact that politics exists doesn't provide particular evidence that any widely held scientific view is incorrect.

I never said that it did. You're the one claiming that a political process, namely funding, is a strong indicator of scientific truth. Or, are you still arguing that funding isn't political?

>> When I hear "scientists" arguing that folks should be put in jail for disagreeing with them

> What? Where?

"In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623...

> > When I hear "scientists" say that they're not going to release data to folks "who want to prove them wrong"

> Um what?

I'm still looking for that cite. (While looking for the incident that I was referring to, I found suggestions that Mann et al, the authors of the "Hockey Stick" paper haven't released their methodology, but that wasn't the one that I was looking for.)
If you're looking to get into Lift Development, three of us (Derek, Marius and I) are writing a book.

You can grab the source here:
http://github.com/tjweir/liftbook/tree/master

You'll need Lyx to build a PDF:
http://www.lyx.org/
Yes, but

a) My PC is too loud, I prefer sleeping with it (and everything else) turned off

b) I was using Citrus Alarm Clock on Windows ( http://www.ornj.net/citrus/ ), which faded in MP3s, but I woke up and turned it off within a couple of seconds, so it was rather a pointless feature. Less annoying than a loud buzzer though.

After waking up it takes me a while to boot - I could probably benefit from an audio reminder of what day it is and what I want to get up to do.
You could look into an Asterisk telephony solution - anywhere you have access to an asterisk server, setup a cron job to get it to ring you (and text-to-speech something to you).

Perhaps possible with http://www.twilio.com/ ?

(As a way to get information to you without leaving your computer on - but some BIOS's have a wake-on-modem option so this might work for that with some tweaking).
Funny Town Names
lol yes this is a biased site.

Nonetheless, I so wish I could experience how it feels to be selected by yc.
Racetrack Memory
A "reality checklist" for enterprise software vendors
Really cool stuff! How does the client/server stuff work? Is this a comet based application that gives it the snappy refresh rates? Great work!
Very thought-provoking idea.

So, here I am designing the Next Big Language. And I'll take your suggestion.

Now, first issue: if I say x = "dog", then the value of x is really

1 => 'd', 2 => 'o', 3 => 'g'

Right? And despite the fact that this is an O.D., it should print in a string-like way: dog. Now suppose I do

x['z'] = (1 => 2, 2 => 3)

Now x is

1 => 'd', 2 => 'o', 3 => 'g', 'z' => (1 => 2, 2 => 3)

How should it print now?

Next issue: If I do y[1] = 'a' and y[3] = 'b', and then y << 'c', what is the value of y?

Final issue: Do the above questions really matter?

One could argue in the first case that if I want something to print nicely, then I will probably keep it in a "reasonable" form, and not mix data types in odd ways. So it really doesn't matter much how the O.D. I came up with prints.

Similarly, in the second case, if I want a collection to work well as a stack or queue, then I am probably not going to use the bracket operator to do strange things with it. So it doesn't matter which of the multiple reasonable options for the behavior of << is chosen.

Or maybe it does matter?
a cellphone that surfs the web

...cost $20 and a one-year contract in Japan, back in 2002. The experience has improved in the last few years.

If you expect web access to be an awesome revelation to the Japanese cell phone market, its something like saying "Hello, Japanese consumer! You may think you have accessed to advanced technology, but check this out: you can MAKE CALLS WITH THIS PHONE! Amazing, isn't it!... Hey, why aren't you buying..."
Stackoverflow: Finding Success in Failure
The link is interesting - it's a diet by the guy who founded AutoDesk (AutoCAD), and has some good discussion on plotting trends of weightloss, taking into account large noisy fluctuations in water weight.

There's an unofficial site you can join and plug data into to get those graphs here: http://physicsdiet.com/
I've thought a lot about why technical debt seems to be such a hard concept for non-engineers to grasp; certainly given how few business people or managers seem to understand it, it clearly must be difficult. I think it's because A) it only affects a truly long-lived, stateful process, like a software (or many other types of engineering process) where the output of one phase is the input to the next phase and B) there just aren't that many sorts of processes that occur in ordinary life.

Sure, in any field you can screw up in such a way that it hurts you in the future by damaging your reputation or annoying your customers, or make bad technical investments that turn out to cost you. But in engineering disciplines, doing your core activity (engineering) poorly can hurt your ability to keep doing your core activity (engineering) in the future.

If you're in sales and you cut corners with one client, it doesn't make your phone calls take longer. If you're in a restaurant and you cook things too fast or cut corners on ingredients, it doesn't make your future cooking take longer. If you're a doctor and you're too hasty and mis-diagnose a patient, it doesn't make your future surgeries and checkups take longer. But in software, if you're too hasty adding feature A, it does make your future features take longer to develop. And that's because in software, your future features are built on the previous ones, whereas with sales, cooking, or medicine the duration of any given prospect/customer/patient is relatively short-lived and finite.

That's my best theory as to why it's so hard for non-engineers to understand.
The built-in 3d accelerator cards are widespread and "good enough" now in ubiquitous computing that the time is coming where Adobe will have to buy or build their own solution.

Hopefully, the next generation of "browser plugins" (like Flash) will be completely Free Software. Flash has been a nightmare, because it generally works well -- except it crashes a lot, and Adobe won't release it on "unpopular" platforms. We can't keep doing things like that, we need the web to stay open. Otherwise the web is going to become AOL 2.0, 20 years too late.
I'd be curious to know if pg and gang do exit surveys to find out what founders thought was valuable and what they thought could be done different/better.
South Carolina isn't asking for a bailout.

The bulk of the difference between CA and SC in federal spending appears to come from matching funds for Medicaid, caused by a lower per-capita income in SC and a higher percentage of people below the poverty level.

Relative to other states, SC has a slightly below-average state payroll, and seems to be criticized more for not providing enough services than for being profligate.
It's running on a conservative-leaning site. Its clearly making fiscally conservative points.
All good questions.

Our whole philosophy behind mugasha is accessibility and portability. So Mobile apps including streaming iPhone app are next steps. Our main focus right now is to get licensing worked out so we are in the green area.

Keep watching our blog and/or @mugasha. or find me on IM if you want to chat more.
dodeja - gmail.com
Right now, I'm using it to pimp consulting services, but I don't expect that will generate much revenue: most of the site's visitors are individuals learning on their own, not people using it at work.

Package up similar content in a way that is easy to deliver to employers for them to give to employees for training. Enroll your employees in our MS Word training, $45 per employee, just as effective as having a consultant or courses but at one-tenth the cost. You don't even have to develop the course yourself -- there are almost certainly a million available, and since they're infinitely scalable information products they should have generous affiliate payouts.

It doesn't matter if most people are using your site for work. They're the fuel in the rocket, the upsell to the course is the payload.
I think Amazon could work pretty well. Using Jeremey's numbers, but taking into account Amazon's tiered affiliate percentages, you would actually get 7% assuming you make 260 sales / month. This gives $819 / month.

I run a tutorials site for programmers (its much more loosely focused than your site though, with code tutorials, career advice, a few open source projects I've built, etc.), and my Adwords CPC is similar but Amazon earnings are historically 5-6 times better than Adwords.

The key is to link to relevant books within the text of an article. In your case what might work is add references section to each category page that contains links to reviews on books on the subject. Review the book well, describing what type of user the book is geared toward, and only recommend books that you personally stand behind. This problogger article contains some nice tips for getting free review copies of books: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-fre...

Good luck to you.
This replay tool simply loads up a big batch of actions and plays them from the client. Once the page is out the door, we never hear back from it.

Twiddla itself uses good old-fashioned polling, along with a crazy fast message dispatcher on the server.

I'm still not sold on Comet. It's cool in principle, but you essentially need to build your own webserver if you want to do it. Personally, I'd rather simply handle 2000 tiny requests per second than try to juggle 2000 simultaneous open connections. Naturally, there's a bit more lag with polling, but in Twiddla's case it's hard to notice.
qft

---

Geekstas Paradise

by Sinc
(thanks to Gangstas Paradise by Coolio)

As I walk through the valley of silicon of death
I take a look at my screen and realize nothing's left
Cause I've been working and coding so long
that even my boss thinks my minds gone,

But I never compiled
lines that didn't deserve it.
Me treated like a saleman, you know that's unheard of
You better watch how you're 'sperging
and where you're ogling
Or your career might be just a fling

I really hate noobs but I gotta lob
As you leave I see myself in a bigger cube
Fool! I'm the kinda eng that interns wanna be like
On a plane in the night
Cursing Boeing and the red-eye flight.

Been spending most of our lives
living in the geekstas paradise
Keep spending most of our lives
living in the geekstas paradise

Look at the hours they got me working
I have no life to depend on, I'm owned by Python
So I gotta be down with the code team
Too much manpage reading got me printing reams

I'm an educated fool with money on my mind
Got my grants in hand and IPO in sight
I'm a locked out geeksta; set TRIPPING="banger"
My shares are down so don't arouse my anger.
Taco Bell ain't but a bubble burst away
I'm tired here, do I leave or stay?
I had X startups die, will there be X+1
The way things are going I don't know

Tell me why are we
too blind to find
That the days we waste
are yours and mine
Been spending most of our lives
living in the geekstas paradise
Keep spending most of our lives
living in the geekstas paradise

Options in the money, but girls not an option
Minute after minute, hour after hour
Everybody's coding but there's no one's looking
We keep on bitchin'
When we should be fuckin'

They say I gotta earn
But no more engineering me
If the manangement can't stand it, why should they make me?
I had CS,
I had EE,
I had enough!
That's why I'm getting outta here fools!

Been spending most of our lives
living in the geekstas paradise
Keep spending most of our lives
living in the geekstas paradise
Tell me why are we
too blind to find
That the days we waste
are yours and mine
Ask YC: What to do if burned out, and have dozens of deadlines for tomorrow
Just wanting to ask for your advice, on how you deal with this problem. I pulled an all-nighter yesterday in order to meet with my deadlines for today, but have a dozen more for tomorrow. I can't seem to find the focus and concentration needed to get something done due to my lack of sleep. What other options do you think I could opt for besides going to bed and missing those deadlines?
> I laughed because I was sure she was kidding. Turns out she wasn't. ... It turns out she never did follow through on her threats.

I'm confused. Doesn't that mean she was kidding? Or at least, how does her making false threats reinforce your paranoia?
Just skimming the headline, I read that as Box.net was going down. After reading the article I of course saw that Box.net was criticizing others for going down. However, I have to wonder if the confusion of the blog post's title hurts their credibility more than than the article helps it.
Chalk me up in the camp that thinks there are basically two options now for music sales: compulsory licensing (ie, $10/month pass to absolutely everything), or no sales at all.

I suppose this is true, if your business model is selling music to people who don't pay money for music. It is also true in software, if your business model is selling software to people who don't pay money for software.

I generally recommend selling software to people who pay money for software. It is probably good advice for music, too. (These people exist! Step away from the techy cocoon and you will meet a whole world full of all types of interesting people. Many of them have strange habits like working from 9 to 5, routinely paying money for goods and services, and using weird non-electronic implements to cause glyphs to appear on paper -- which they sometimes even use for paying for goods and services!)
>> When I hear "scientists" say that they're not going to release data to folks "who want to prove them wrong"

> Um what?

Philip Jones, in response to a request for "his" data (which was paid for by taxpayers), said "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Does this prove that he knows that he's hiding something? No. It doesn't even prove that he's unknowingly hiding something. For all we know, his data could be perfect or even more supportive of his theory than he's stated. (However, there is the small matter that it looks like every correction to the prominent AGW research has gone the other way, which is statistically odd.)

However, it does demonstrate that dejb's "pure/rational scientists" theory is bunk.

> Seriously though this is getting a bit far off the deep end.

What's "deep end" about the truth?

Scientists are monkeys and they (occasionally) behave like monkeys. If your belief system requires otherwise, you've got a problem.
And just think, if you had NDAed her first, you would never have had this problem. Her superior PR, industry collections, and high-paid team of lawyers would have quailed at the notion of having your NDA presented to them. Because lawyers facing contracts are like vampires facing crosses: as soon as they see one its like "Oh no! There is a contract! Guess we can't suck your blood today!"
Kevin Rose confirmed this during the Digg Townhall, and Jay Adelson said "we're not going after stumbleupon" to which Kevin replied "we kinda are."

Still doesn't interest me that much though, rarely use digg - just every now and then when I'm bored.
I wonder if I'm misunderstanding you - maybe you're saying the news article itself should've linked to the original paper? If so, then I definitely agree. I read your comment as a criticism of the post on HN, that the title should've linked to the academic paper rather than the news.
What are the rules for voting something down? I don't like this, and I disagree with her argument. It feels too weak to fit in here.

There is still a lot more racism than I would like to admit, but creating another forum to run in circles about it isn't going to help. Discouraging the behaviour will over time.
Women in games isn't a problem, they just don't seem to be into them as hard core as some men, thats all. Between halo and smash bros they'll go mostly for smash bros. (Though I realize how competitive smash bros is, or was?) No one cares, there just aren't as many of them on live, or presumably the psn.
One problem it seems to me is that once a site like this becomes successful, RIAA will enact stealthily measures to screw the site.

I can see them flooding the site with copyrighted music and then suing the site in court for copyright violations, putting demands that music gets screened for copyright, etc.

That will drive up the costs to a point where it's not profitable anymore.

That is unless there's technology available that can accurately screen any uploads for copyright violations.
Let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Based on your formula, if I wanted to lose 10 pounds over 10 weeks, needing a deficit of 514 kcal/day, and my basal metabolism rate were 1800 kcal/day (roughly what mine is), ignoring exercise I would need to maintain a diet of no more than 1284 kcal/day.

How I interpreted your first comment was that you were arguing this would work for the entire 10 week period. My point was that it would not, that over time the rate of weight loss would slow as your basal metabolism rate drops. Given a constant diet, at some point an equilibrium will be reached.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.
> But only 13% of savings actually went to the citizens. 87% of that tax money went to coroporations with large tracts of land (agriculture, warehouses, ...).

The last time I looked, biz were owned by people. More important, biz expenses, such as taxes, are paid by people too. As a result, that distinction between "biz" and "people" doesn't make sense. Prop 13 limited the tax increases paid by people due to property value changes.

> stated that the property tax of a piece of land would be fixed at 1975 levels with a maximum of a 2% increase each

As I pointed out, that's wrong. There is a reassessment on on sale. My "prop 13" basis was set when I bought my house, decades after 1975. (My parent's basis, on the other hand, was set in 1975.) That's why my property taxes went up last year even though my "if I sold" value went down. (They'll go up next year too.)

That's why CA's property tax revenues are roughly stable.

I note that CA's income tax collection is incredibly variable, in part because so much is paid by the folks at the top.
Take a nap, feel better, then triage. Do things in priority order and don't stop working on item #1 until it's finished or you're blocked.

In your spare time, read Getting Things Done. Even if you don't like the book, it's decent advice.
Fifa world cup info page
This sounds like the ladder used in the pharmaceutical business which is fine except for the "value" attached to having a PhD and acting like a "scientist". If you don't want to manage, or do project leadership or do the give-seminar/publish/give talks bit, you top out just where PhD's walk in the door. It's a base requirement to do all those things as a starting-up PhD and then the management/fellow/whatever questions start hitting them after 4-8 years.

So you have to deal with people in a positive way that just aren't going to make it to the upper rungs of the ladder. Some, maybe those who read the Peter Principle, won't give you a hard time, but I fear most will resent knowing that they've hit 30 and are basically maxed out.

They're SUPPOSED to accept the challenge and move upwards, and some do, but that'll leave a bunch of dissatisfied people I fear. And these are the set of people at most risk of underemployment and job-loss from outsourcing.
Then get an idea going!
Yeah, but the paper's easier to read, doesn't require batteries, lacks DRM, stores well, ... And I can't see wrapping a fish or fries in a Kindle.