skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally agree.

It wasn't expected and I don't think anyone would have thought worse of him if he kept the money.

Actions like this restore my faith in humanity.
This is Uber's issue in a lot of places, I think. They're trying to apply the SF model to cities that doesn't care about it anywhere near as much. I rarely have issues getting a cab in NYC- at peak times you do have to wait, but 5-10 minutes- I doubt an Uber car would get there much quicker and would cost a ton more. I also had no issues getting cabs in Vancouver.
Things to do with a year's supply of free bacon
:O

I love the Internet.
What's your claim of LTE offering better battery life VS 3G based on? The battery test that Anandtech designed for the iPhone5? I personally can't put much faith in this particular Anandtech battery test:

It doesn't jive with my personal experience using the iPhone5 on LTE and 3G

It contradicts Apple's own battery life claims

Devices with the old SOC get dramatically different results on the new test (see for example the results for the HTC OneX in Anand's initial review and compare with the results in the iPhone5 review chart).
Tried a while back, the experience wasn't great and I didn't find any approach that I thought was viable. I probably will try again soon though as I've since moved to Ubuntu so really need to get off ITunes.

It isn't very different that moving from Android to another OS. Just to be clear I'm not criticizing Apple specifically, I'm just saying that the process of moving is not quite as painless as you might hope for.

I do think it is in the big players interest to consider making it easier to move. I know why they don't but I do think a company like Apple, confident in their hardware and software, would stand to benefit as much as lose out from such standardization. People like me might give up on ITunes for a year or two until the retina airs are more reasonable then switch straight back, where as right now if I do take the pain of switching I'm unlikely to be back any time soon.
Truth On Obama Phone Over Stuffing Turkey And Media Lies
If you want a Star Trek future, the last people you should be listening to are Jobs or Disney: http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of...
If you as an individual believe it's the right thing to do, then it's not a waste of time for you.
> something that most business guys have very little empathy with (engineers are tools in their toolbox)

That's why I stay away from the "business guys" whenever I can.
IIRC this is still a problem if your carrier doesn't fully support LTE, i.e. you still need your 3G radio switched on to receive calls.
Wow, why is everyone jumping to copy Apple? I just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and the battery, RAM, and SSD are all non-removable. I had to pay a huge premium to increase the RAM to the maximum of 8 GB, whereas in the past I would've bought it with the minimum amount and then upgraded it myself with aftermarket RAM purchased from Newegg or Amazon at a discount. I left the storage at 128 GB, so I'm going to have to carry around an external HDD. It's a really ugly trend in the industry.
YouTab - Social Tabs and Chords for Guitar, Bass and Drums
which is a non-answer.

your salary often has no bearing on what you're capable of.

If I'm working for a company that only knows how to extract $80k of value from my labor, and then only pays me $65k, that says as much about their ability to manage their business and resources as it does about my innate ability. My exact same skills might bring $250k of value to a different organization.

Paying me based on what I earned in the past is ... wrong.
I've been rating my music ever since, and then using playlists

I think I spotted your problem.
Black Friday Shopping: Will Canada Play?
HNers Anonymous
Does anybody feel like they need it?
That is a tricky issue and comes down to financing riskier innovation. It is worth remembering that GNU originally existed as a way to clone a non free system in a way that made it free.

A lot of open source development is also done or funded by corporations to help build commoditize the parts they need in order to create platforms for software and media that are in many cases fairly walled garden.

Stallman and the like may have produced fine C compilers and text editors but it would seem unlikely for them to come up with something like the iPhone.
Job boards have one weakness: They reflect supply and demand. There is not much demand for Scala programmers. This may be because all positions are filled. Or, a more probable cause, that Scala programmers are not hired on Job boards.

Note that I have had 5-6 Jobs. I do FP for a living. And I have never been hired through a Job board advert. I think this is common with many FP people. Usually, when you want to hire FP people, you go to the mailing lists and community and get the guys you need. It is much more effective, but it won't show up in the Job board search at all.
open source is a co-operation model. Historically new and sucsessfull cooperation models(democracy, capitalism , scientific method) had a larger effect than new products and services.

One interesting example is the industrial revolution: some claim that the technical innovations at that time are the result of England becoming a capitalist state based on competition(starting with land owners encouraging competition between farmers on productivity).

Will stallman succeed ? I don't know. But i wonder if the option he opened of extremely open source software has made companies more receptive to various kinds of open source licenses and business models that led to the large open source ecosystem we have today.
Yes, I've had this in my contract with every job I've had except my current one. My current place was set up by developers though and I think the contract reflects that. It actually specifically states that I can do stuff in my own time as long as it doesn't affect my normal work.
Apple Reportedly Changes Battery Suppliers As Samsung Walks
This is one reason I'm excited about the Google-Dish wireless carrier news. If they made a 4G-only carrier, you could use VoLTE for calls. By removing the need for non-4G chips, phones would become lighter, smaller, cheaper, and less hot when running. And hopefully service would be cheaper and more stable too.
you can see replies on twitter...

i have gotten two so far:

'shut up' and 'thank you!'
Ray Kurzweil's Anti-Utopian Views
Yes. You have a point. It requires a lot of yelling.

I've just realised I like Excel, for what it is. I feel dirty. Maybe this week has been too long.
Build your Assembla Merge Requests Gangn..Err Gerrit style with Jenkins
Yeah, there's no chance I'll want to listen to a song in ten years when the record label that owns the copyright has gone out of business and so can't license it to whatever streaming service is new and trendy. No chance of that at all.
How to do fuzzy search in big data
This is one of the reasons I love services like Spotify and Netflix. They have no devices in the race, and tend to have client software for almost every platform. I can switch between phones, tablets and operating systems and still access to the same music and movies.

I could even drop Spotify and switch to Rdio if I wanted, and all I would lose are my playlists (not a big deal to me, but may be to some). These services don't lock me to devices, and I also don't feel locked into the services.
Tictail - free hosted ecom, paid addons
I think Google Wave is an undeserved mention in the list of killed off DRM services.

First of all, Google supported data export from Google Wave[1]. Additionally, Google open sourced the project and it's available as Apache Wave[2] or as a protocol[3].

[1] http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/11/multiple-wave-export....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

[3] http://www.waveprotocol.org/
Thanks omgmog, really good to hear your thoughts.

Cool script, it would definitely be useful to support your "Install all firefoxes script", possibly in a collapsable developers section.

Good ideas. I'll definitely be adding links/descriptions if the site gets any sort of traction.
The only problem with your scenario is malware. That's not insurmountable, but people have spent so long concentrating on building the walls that the reasonable vision you present will probably never happen.

I agree that's a great shame.
> There is a reason walled gardens work.

Amazing, how often this is forgotten. And way to often the attitude on HN is similar to that in Orwell's farm: "four legs are good, two legs are bad". Walled garden? Bad. Open? Good.
The truth however is that goodness or badness is not defined by this.
> Sure, iTunes sells DRM-free music now, but it didn't always so many long-time users will still have DRM'd content around.

All of it can be converted to DRM-free, including directly from itunes.

> And you can pull the DRM-free music to another device, but then there's your playlists, your ratings, play counts, current podcast subscriptions

There's a whole cottage industry of software reading iTunes Library.xml, though as a last recourse you can also copy your lists directly, as if it were a spreadsheet (it'll be placed into your pasteboard as tab-separated content)

iTunes itself is shit, but there's surprisingly little actual lock-in going on.
Maybe he could add a third button, "Not a question", classify each question into "answerable question" and "not a question" categories (according to which button the user clicks) and see which category new questions are classified into using a naive bayes classifier? I think it could work quite well
But utilize doesn't do joins.
>> Look at email as a standard - a few people have tried to extend that and it hasn't worked.

Bad example. E-mail is basically just formatted text with binary attachments to be interpreted by the e-mail client. Still, almost every e-mail client uses some internal database-like format to store your inbox and augment it with metadata to make it easily searchable and whatever. E-mail clients are to e-mail what music players like iTunes are to music files. You can't just pick up your Thunderbird e-mail database and drop it somewhere for Outlook to use, just like you can't pick up your iTunes library and drop it into Windows Media Player or whatever other music player. With some effort you can often import/export e-mail databases between clients, but that's no different from importing/exporting an iTunes library.

>> Or, look at HTML as a standard. People want to extend that so they fight in a committee and collaborate until there's something which is mutually beneficial.

One of the most-heard complaints about the HTML standard is that it moves so freaking slow, and is still full of cruft and inconveniences from 20 years ago. HTML isn't actually that great at all, it's just the least worst option we have if you want cross-platform markup with all the features HTML offers today. That's not to say I propose a proprietary alternative to HTML by the way, just that HTML is hardly the prime example of a model you'd want to apply to every other piece of software.

>> Or, look at USB. Literally a one-size-fits-all plug on both ends and a common transport layer - but you can stick whatever device you want on either end.

First of all that's not entirely true, because USB only defines a transport layer, not how the data going over the wire should be interpreted. It isn't all that different from something like RS-232 serial communication, just a lot more advanced. In itself there's nothing you can do with USB alone, you still need a protocol, which is usually implemented by a driver. Apart from generic hardware such as mass storage devices, almost any USB device that implements any kind of specialized hardware functions needs a hardware-specific driver, and more often than not, thesre are proprietary. Don't confuse 'open' with 'generic' by the way, because even if some piece of hardware uses an 'open' protocol, it's still not 'generic' as you can't do anything with it without a (very specific) driver. Second, USB is not really the epitome of 'openness' either, as you have to pay royalties to sell hardware that uses the USB standard and carries the USB logo.

Any more examples? ;-)
True. But that was Palm's decision. Apple was under no obligation to make any changes to prevent Palm's questionable decision.
Planets outside of the solar system are not detected using light from the body itself. They are detected by their gravitational pull on their host star (i.e. tides; causing a slight twinkle in the light emitted by the star), or a transit (eclipse) of the star (causing the star to become slightly dim for a period). In both cases the telescope is looking at stars, and isn't fixated on one star but rather a field of stars, waiting for one to show activity.

Never mind the fact that even if we have a telescope that big, the issue is that these telescopes show a microscopically small field of view. There's a whole sphere that would need to be observed, and repeatedly (since the bodies move).
2012: A Look Back Into Parallels Between Cloud And Education
Lower than market rates on Elance/ODesk? People are working so cheaply already that it would take ages to make $2k. You can make big money on those sites but you have to build up a profile and that's not done quickly.
Sorry, but that is utter bullshit.
Somehow Stallman's importance is somewhere in foggy future with a lot of handwaving and FUD.
The real relevance of his ideas is already in the past.
I won't be surprised a bit if at the time you are talking about most OSS will be under MIT/BSD type licenses not GPL.
Don't hold your breath on that staying the case. We're going to start seeing those services get temporary exclusives on artists, because ultimately it's the only way to get an edge on their competitors.
This was when the Pakistani girl was shot for displaying "Western beliefs" by going to school
Good engineers care about being consistent with language idioms. The only practical consequence is that they are a little bit slower than they will be after a couple of years; but they are still faster than nearly everyone else anyway.
Legend! Thank you so much.
Mozilla Pulls Plug on 64-bit Firefox over "Misunderstanding and Frustration"
sigh Again?

There are tons of great advice in that post, but the title and the eponymous section are based on something I didn't buy the first time around, either: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”

Heck, I'm just 34 years old, but you make me feel like a friggin' dinosaur because I got into this line of work out of my love for programming. It used to be an exciting thing to do, with a whole world of new things to explore. Nowadays you have people who are trying to make it sound like you're doing something mundane and boring, like you're expendable and should be ashamed of not having achieved anything greater than being a nerdy peon.

Look, as far as I can tell, it doesn't matter what you call yourself. From what I've lived so far, until you build up some solid skills and experience, nobody gives a damn if you come up with a fancy name or explanation for what you do. And once you've built up some cred, it won't matter what you call yourself either, because you'll be able to prove your worth.

Here's another piece of advice people don't offer frequently because it's not glamorous: do what makes you happy. We all grow up thinking we want to be rich, famous and/or powerful. If that's what you still believe in, go read or watch "Fight Club". Then come back and try different things and different paths. Maybe founding startups will make you happy. Then again, maybe working for BigCo Inc. and programming your own stuff on the side will make you happy.

TL;DR: The post offers good advice, but use your own judgment. There's nothing wrong in being a programmer.
We detect these planets light years away when they go between us and some light source, or when they change orbit of some light source (thanks to gravity). If the body is cold and the background is black we won't see it until it's close to our sun.
Also, if you're pitching money savings then you're moving the client into a money saver mindset which might make them think your rates are too high.
Don't worry, our intelligence services are great at covering up the evidence. Oh wait...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d...
Amazon EC2 with Hadoop is 4 times more expensive than running on our own cluster
Deep Value runs Hadoop at scale on EC2, but we find that running our own cluster is significantly cheaper. By significantly, I mean 3.8 times cheaper.
Was the Nuclear Rocket Engine NERVA too powerful?
Like most Google open source projects, the open-sourcedness of Wave was open-washing, nothing more. To my knowledge there aren't a lot of Wave services floating around out there, and Wave's codebase was highly coupled, making it difficult for anyone to create a server.
I'm a user who cares. Please don't pretend to speech for the world.
Yes! Sounds awesome. Of course, it's unclear how such a system would produce beautiful and easy-to-use products so that users clammer to use them.
Patrick has often suggested replying to that question with some variation of "As a matter of courtesy to my former employers I prefer to not disclose the salary they paid me. I will, of course, extend you the same courtesy." and then back to establishing your value.

I have no gauge on how well that would work; it's been aeons since I've done a job interview. It's true that your previous salary is none of their business, though.
"That salary was what I was worth when I started working for them. I've learned things since then. If you don't believe I'll be more valuable to you than to them, why are you hiring me?"
I think you just answered the question yourself.
Insights and Process for Building Software Applications
Everyone deserves an upvote in this thread. Great post!
After watching Elon Musks talk at oxford, I was browsing a bit thru the alternatives to chemical propulsion and once again stumbled across NERVA. Now it seems to me that project was abandoned not because of the fear of the technology (nuclear fallout, etc.) but essentially because it threatened the US budget and would have enabled NASA to pursue extensive mars explorations.
ikonic: 150 vector icons (25 free)
I am not sure what you've just tried to tell me.

It's the people? That move away? So, move away? :)

I had heard of half of those organizations. Thanks for the link. Do you do Barcamp?
Smells like test data to me...
It's not about idioms themselves. It's about the thought processes behind those idioms. The difference between learning language idioms and learning the thought processes behind them is like the difference between learning how to solve math problems that appear frequently in exams and learning math.

I'm not arguing that you can't be a decent programmer without "mastering language idioms", but there are good reasons why different languages exist. If you just pick up a language without understanding the problem it solves, you're just adding a tool to your toolbox without knowing how to use it effectively, when to reach for it and how to accomplish what it does when you don't have it.
+1 for this line:

"Actions like this restore my faith in humanity."
I'm not sure leading humanity should be done according to agile methodology ;)

It's hard to estimate how long it takes for another humanity to develop if we screw it(so we don't know iteration length), and there is the problem of telling them what we did wrong after we were destroyed.
>My biggest weakness was always idiocy - and trust me, I picked the wrong profession for that.

If you're an Android developer:

1/5: Unstable garbage. Constantly force closes on my
overclocked phone running nightly builds - patched over
with a custom kernel.

Review systems are a pretty interesting problem that can't seem to evolve beyond "1-5 stars, maybe a blurb". I'm sure it's quite a delicate game to juggle engagement, filtering, averaging and all.
> I'm pretty invested in apps for iOS. I'm okay about this, I don't begrudge being locked into an ecosystem as I made a choice to be in that ecosystem.

That would be great, if it were easy or even feasible to be a member of no ecosystem, but it's really not.
Templating: Clojure's Backtick
SeedInvest: This Is Not Kickstarter
Apparently there's no world record set the world record for the world's largest bacon sandwich? This one looks good to me http://sodelicio.us/2012/05/the-worlds-meatiest-sandwich-28-...
Hah. Your post made me curious which xkcds are the most popular on HN. This is the top10 (caveat below):

48 http://xkcd.com/927/
48 http://xkcd.com/386/
33 http://xkcd.com/538/
28 http://xkcd.com/378/
24 http://xkcd.com/810/
23 http://xkcd.com/327/
22 http://xkcd.com/323/
21 http://xkcd.com/605/
19 http://xkcd.com/936/
17 http://xkcd.com/552/

You can easily reproduce the results by using the hnsearch API via

curl "http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com&limit=100&start=<iterate>

and

grep -ohE "http://xkcd.com/[0-9]*/" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Unfortunately, I could only process the first 1000 entire list of ~1500 results because the API refused queries with start > 900. I have sort of a bad conscience because I'm polluting future queries by posting the top 10 list above, but I think I can live with it.
Bates method: Need for eyeglasses can be reversed by relaxation
Those things are never going to be adopted by Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, or any other non-Debian based distro. That is reason enough not to use it.
Did you just have to change the setting via ##4636##?

I'm with Bell Canada and not having LTE is a deal-breaker for me.
They also spend time on external libraries, such as Akka. Part of the appeal of Scala is that its design for extensibility can make libraries feel like part of the language and Akka is one of the best examples of this (and indeed was designed with input from Odersky as a replacement for native Scala actors).

It really is a great book. I never thought I would read this type of technical book on a Kindle but it reads really easily and I have read far more of it than I would on paper (even though paper is better for a reference book, I don't want to read a big heavy book in bed but I really do with the Kindle).
The link to the original L'Astronomie journal article, which contains a diagram and photograph is here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Vt1NAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA347#v...

"PASSAGE SUR LE DISQUE SOLAIRE" p. 347, L'Astronomie Vol. IV

Transcript (French)
https://gist.github.com/4136038

Transcript (English, Google Translated)
https://gist.github.com/4136045

Also, it appears there are letters to the journal regarding the original article in the subsequent Vol. V, which can be viewed here:
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015069401779?urlappend=%3Bs...
Subjecting people waiting in waiting rooms to advertising is hardly going to improve the experience of waiting in a waiting room.

I don't donate to Cancer Research UK any more specifically because they had an annoying advert on heavy rotation in a waiting room I was waiting in.
If you read some of his other stuff you'll see that they did hire him and paid him somewhere in the region of 5 figures per week. :-)
Here is an ITU blog post responding to press criticism on the WCIT-12 conference: http://itu4u.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/the-real-work-starts-a...
Bookmarked.

As a developer with 0 design skills stuff like this makes me feel like I can fully complete my work.

I personally appreciate the fact that you did this out of love for your craft and respect for the industry. There are too few of you in this industry my friend.

Thank you