skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sales people's commissions tend to be inversely related to customer demand. iPhone demand outstrips supply to incentivizing salespeople to sell iPhones makes no sense.

Think the numbers have dramatically changed since August? http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/08/10/can-anyone-he...
They would if it worked, but email spam is mostly solved these days. Everyone uses a spam filter.
Whoa,

foreach(sentence in yourReply)
{
Citation.needed = true;
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{
Return YouADouche();
}
Morality, The Next Frontier in Human-Computer Interaction
I think the author means that he prefers to learn by writing something meaningful, rather than doing coding exercises like "use each of these in a small Python program". I agree with him - I'm too impatient for something like LPTHW.
I disconcur with the evaluation criteria. It took me to this website, which is anything but useless: http://heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa.com/
So basically, because default Drupal's database schema is too normalized and generic you experience problems.

As for Postgresql - you are going to write new code anyway - either in Rails or patch Drupal modules to work correctly with Postgresql. So this one is definitely not a deal breaker.

I would advise also to look into option of upgrading to Drupal 7 and using its DB stuff. While it is still join-heavy by default, you have more power to manipulate schema and for example to have flat tables for your content types or store some stuff in MongoDB. And all of it with still Drupal's flexibility and mostly configuring stuff instead of writing it.
ARPA-E energy innovation grants
I like the idea of more transparency from publishers, but like the UK cookie law this just seems like it would just add a lot hassle for not a lot of benefit. It's not like the people using Facebook aren't aware that it tracks you.

I think if a permission request for tracking were required, it would be treated much like "I agree to the terms and conditions" checkboxes are today...almost universally ignored.
The problem now is that if you do it entirely with WebGL, you won't have as much people who can play it. WebGL support is still far from Flash support. It's however something that will change over time.
In 2020, they will probably be able to grab some weed from the family pantry.

On a different note, I am curious to see how economy and society will shape up once most low entry barrier jobs are automated.
Here is the crux of the matter:

In the book, Mr. Khan also advocates for a separation of universities’ teaching and credentialing roles, arguing that if students could take internationally recognized assessments to prove themselves, the playing field would be leveled between students pursuing different forms of higher education.

Removing our heavy reliance on higher ed credentialling seems central to his idea, and yet the proposed solution is simply "internationally recognized assessments", which sounds suspiciously like "standardized tests" to me.

Sadly, many professions are not well-evaluated by standardized testing. This is not for lack of trying -- we already have the GRT and all of its related subject tests, plus the entire raft of tech-related certifications that aren't worth the paper they're printed on (remember "A+ certification"?). Grad schools look at GRT results, but usually only to make sure you didn't completely bomb the test.

This is the hard part, and will require a lot of careful though to untangle.
How much material is covered by any single MS certificate? A semester's worth? If an entire 4-year curriculum were covered by the certification exam, it would be near impossible IMO to cram.

Of course, having your entire college record decided by a single exam is quite a scary prospect..
We've made the corporate decision - after many bad experiences - to purge PHP from production, for the sake of our sanity.

We are not doing this lightly. The current codebase has ~2.5 man years invested in it.
I feel skeptical. "We'll have robots delivering packages to your door within a decade" has been said before, and AGI may or may not even be possible. Our understanding of how we work is still very limited. I'd like to see what new insights this project may reveal, but I'm not holding my breath on being able to have a conversation with an AI any time soon.

Posted a little while ago that's somewhat relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4729068
From what I understand they often start with some sort of brainwashing, they are also taught weird beliefs like "every time a customer says no the odds of the next customer saying yes will increase".

I guess it will depend on what the product being sold is, enterprise software is probably somewhat different to timeshares or double glazing.

It is worth bearing in mind though that some of the best salesmen throughout history have probably been people who were knowingly selling scams.
I agree, the more targeted the ads, the higher value of the page view, the more free services. Plus people tend to buy things they think they want, so they are happy if they get ads that are actually relevant.

The problem is that there is a lot of value in that data beyond just targeted advertising. That's where things get cloudy.
Don't get me wrong, I dislike Dell's hardware and sales tactics. I do however understand why the new Ubuntu laptop would cost more. Dell has affiliates that get to install their software on your new pretty machine, and they pay for that advantage. Dell is most likely making money on their Windows machines because of the 3rd software they can peddle on those machines. It did not look to me like they have taken this approach with Project Sputnik. I would gladly pay extra to not have to deal with spamware. On top of that, Dell spent a large amount of time and resources to not only be the first OEM to provide such an offering but also to provide two new solutions to developers that use their laptop. Their new Cloud launcher and Profile tool seem worthy to spend a little extra cash for as well.

To make remarks about how Dell should have the Linux laptop cheaper because the OS is free is somewhat asinine. You must try to put on your "business hat" when you think about such things.
This is standard hyperbole.
If people want this business model, why is adblock so popular and getting moreso?

15 million daily users for just Firefox ABP alone! For comparison, this is roughly 5M more people than play World of Warcraft. And I'd wager most people know someone who plays that game..

Why are advertisers so scared of DNT on by default? If people want it so much, surely they'd go out of their way to enable it?
Its great to know how, but here is why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H40EsEVU1Wk
NSFW/NSFL

Apparently, bombing people turns out to be bad PR when they tweet about it.
Well, I totally agree with you that there are no perfect companies but for the rest, I believe you don't have very good arguments.

I do understand that recruiters have to place people and they don't really mind/understand if the company is good or not but I can't see why this should be our problem.
They also use Empythoned (CPython compiled with Emscripten, https://github.com/replit/empythoned) and Emscripted-Ruby (Ruby compiled with Emscripten, https://github.com/replit/emscripted-ruby) and a version of Lua compiled with Emscripted (https://github.com/replit/jsrepl/tree/master/extern/lua), among others.
BlackBerry 10: Awesome
I was thinking more along the lines of "get 100 credits in this game by giving us your gmail password/control over outlook so we can send to people in your contacts list" rather than outright blind spamming.
Ubuntu laptop with Windows logo on keyboard. Great.
Hello Hesham,

What a great idea and execution of this idea. Kind like a visual lego mindstorms. Maybe the kids get better introduced if you show both screens at the same time, so they can better relate the action with the reactions ;-).

This concept and game really relates well to our own product/platform we're creating, letting children learn by doing and using visual building blocks to teach how software works.

we want to ensure no one is left behind in the digital world and we don't get a new social divide between the makers and users of the digital world.

if you're interested we have a few more details on our website and blog mostly working under covers and with education institutes (schools, government, universities)

http://www.trnk.com
http://blog.trnk.com
Thanks for your comment! Fair suggestion about the title, though I think even though your title is more accurate it somehow seems even worse than the current title (I'm not happy with the current title either).

If anyone has suggestions for a better title, let's have them...
Google Spreadsheet supports Regex
Where the internet ends? http://www.wwwdotcom.com
[Android][Feature request] Query Play Store for applications with intent filter
Homesick is another good one

https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick
It's a triumph that we're automating these kind of jobs. Why are we wasting human talent on inane jobs like store checkout or junk food production? Every person in one of those jobs is a wasted mind. If we could put those minds to work on something meaningful think what we could achieve.
Agreed. I got to play with http://www.koalastothemax.com/
Dialects of...sure. Definitely not "the one true lisp".
There's a lot of money that developers have to put into simultaneously keeping up to date with modern technology and supporting legacy technologies from a decade ago. At best, that cost alone ultimately has to get passed on to the customer. At worst, the end result is poorer quality software which brings higher support overhead and lower employee productivity.
WordPress.com Verticals and the Future
Twitter Case Exposes the Downside of Grandstanding
You can get fish syntax highlighting in zsh by installing zsh-syntax-highlighting ( https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting ). I prefer just enabling it in prezto though (which is a fork of oh-my-zsh that is a lot lighter weight and more modular https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto )
brilliant. Thank you
While I agree with the sentiment, the basis for the argument is clearly factually inaccurate. There are plenty of successful salesmen who sell products that cannot possibly benefit the buyer - c.f. boiler room operations, etc. When you ignore or distort obvious facts to make a much less obvious (but possibly true) point like "sustainable sales practices are more accretive over a long enough period" you make people who read your article wonder what else you say has been fabricated to support your position.

Let's flip it around: to give out good advice, you need offer it based on actual experience and not just suppositions. (not necessarily true either, but it sure seems like it would strengthen your argument)
More importantly, how will people learn basic job skills, like "show up on time" and "do what you're told" if all the traditional first jobs are automated?
Is Guile only for GNU system? Can it be embedded in OSX, iOS or Android application?
I have a feeling that many low barrier jobs will end up being stuff that is either dangerous or morally gray (I forsee a booming market for sex work for example). So a lot of stuff that people wouldn't be comfortable with minors doing.
That one really stuck... 5 Minutes later, i was still staring at the screen and hitting reload for another round...
I really miss the Coverflow view :(. Might be worth downgrading for, actually.
The only thing I would add is to make it a habit to meet regularly (preferably on the same day and time) with your mentors. Often mentors are giving advice to multiple startups so they sometimes can lose track of what you're working on.

My startup focuses on peer-to-peer mentoring so a lot of what you described in the post applies to what we try and implement in our group setting. Thanks for the tips!
Isn't that what schools do? Or actually, parents before you get to school age?
Biggest thing in music? I think that's overstating him quite a bit. He might be the biggest thing in electronic music, which is a much smaller pond.
Is software eating the world, or vice versa?
>I want advertising. It tells me about things I might like.

I hate advertising. Usually the ads are irrelevant and for things I do not and would not ever want, are often scammy, sometimes they carry malware, often get in the way of me retrieving the information I went to a site to see..

I bet if I counted every time I clicked on an advertisement in the last decade, that number would be less than 20.

That said, I agree completely the "tracking" worries are absurd and more borne out of FUD than any concrete privacy issue.

>Look also at the recent EU cookie laws, and how ridiculous and needlessly cumbersome they have made websites that have addopted it.

Due to shoddy implementation of a shoddy law - that does not reflect whatsoever on the concept. And cumbersome? Really? Could you point to an example site?
I guess this is my naïveté showing:

1) What is the advantage of SPDY over HTTP/1.1? (Besides a possible (and debated?) speed up? (Due to sending assets w/o a request for them?))

2) Is it as easy to debug with tools like curl, wget, and telnet?
True, but of course not all minds are created equal.
There is also the risk that they put those minds to work on something that is not so meaningful (e.g crime).
Webinar platform built to help and advise Job Seekers
I absolutely agree. The moment there's a more economically efficient way to do X, doing X the old way is a "broken window".

That doesn't mean there aren't downsides, though.
I imagine that GMail, Yahoo, AOL, and all of the major email providers would slam that door shut pretty quickly. Much faster than Facebook closed the door on inter-friend spam.

After all, a webmail provider gets nothing from such behavior, and it represent a giant security liability.
It's a UI problem. If a site wants to track you, it should somehow instruct the browser that it won't let you in with the flag enabled.

1. Add another 400 code: "Privacy not allowed".

2. Browser displays dialog box "This site wants to track you. Yea/Nay?".

3. Everybody clicks Yea, since they want the site.
Ask HN: Wedding planning tools for nerds?
I just got engaged and am amazed at how shitty the wedding planning industry is...its all crappy, SEO optimized lead gen. Are there any tools/startups you'd recommend for a HN nerd who wants a better experience?
That's very nice of Google and Twitter. I really appreciate all the efforts which allow people to keep sharing.

ps. I wish the Turkish land-line number (+90 212 339 1447) ended with 1337 instead =)
School is a lot more lax about it because it's so much more difficult for them to kick you out.

When I was at school we would sometimes turn up over an hour late or just skip the day altogether. Was a culture shock when I started my first job and got a roasting for being 5 mins late.
Now workers can be promoted to tomato feeder, or waste fat disposer - at least until those tasks are also automated.
James Bolivar DiGriz will come along and make the first order for a porcuswine burger I'm sure.
Introduction to database indexes and their structure
IT for Oppression
See my port of my little scripting language (NCD) to Emscripten: http://badvpn.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/emncd.html
The Cost of Poor Web Performance
Ask any teacher, and he/she'll have plenty of stories about parents who do nothing to teach their kids these habits, or even exactly the opposite of that.
An assertion of fact can be right or wrong, but it can't be a fallacy. He's saying that not believing in your product will cause you to fail to make sales, not that it will disqualify you from greatness by definition.
What Is an Attractive Body? Interactive 3D Program to Create the Ideal Body
Not exactly kitchen-free, is it? You've got to have food storage areas, produce washing stations, produce prep stations, garbage disposal, and even if the actual grinding, cooking, and sandwich assembly functions are all contained within the robot, you're still going to want to house that somewhere out of reach of the general public, making that area a de facto kitchen.

I wouldn't worry too much about jobs--you're still going to need people to wash, inspect, prep and load the produce, as well as the meat grinders and bun burners. And there better be someone in there to disassemble the robot periodically to give it a good thorough cleaning and reassemble it.
> It's not even really clear what a Cleanweb would be

http://www.cleanweb.org.uk/about.html
"We have a big problem to solve, and the web is the fastest-moving tool we have. Whether you’re building energy monitoring systems, helping people network around local food, or making the web itself greener, if you’re developing online tools for sustainability, you’re part of the cleanweb"
"As programmers, I think we're sometimes too eager to 'get our hands dirty'. Getting experience with a particular project is valuable, but it's akin to heading into the woods with no idea where the trail is. If you're experienced with the tools and workflow of the team you're joining, you may be able to spot the trail easily. If you're inexperienced, your eagerness to get started might have you wandering off and getting lost."

One thing that I'm really thankful for at my current job is that the developers also handle support tickets and when I first started I was assigned the point on the help desk. I knew that I would be doing some support going into the job and wasn't too thrilled about it, but from doing the support I learned so much about the product and why things are the way they are in the code. I feel that I learned all of this not only faster than if I was to just look at the code myself, but it was also easier. On top of that, I was able to find out what kinds of problems our customers were having which could lead feature development.
Learn programming and do some spec work.
According to Firefox, they have 450 million users... I wouldn't call 5% "so popular". Having DNT on by default (and advertisers actually paying attention to it) would result in an immediate 100% of firefox users.

From my perspective, I'll use adblock, but I want everybody else to NOT use adblock. That way more websites can exist on advertising revenue.

edit: not quite apples-to-apples, as DNT reduces the value of an ad, while adblock eliminates it. but the general idea still stands
But if you're going to take the Nihilist position, why do anything?
I name this Praziquantel Day.

(Praziquantel is a drug used to kill tapeworms.)

This is very, very good for Facebook. They are upgrading their brand and image by doing this.

The major reason Google+ Games did not succeed is that preferential treatment was given to mainstream developers (e.g. Zynga) who didn't expect us to thrive and therefore gave us their second-string stuff, as opposed to indie developers who would value us and the access we could offer them and give us a very high (brand-defining) level of quality. Having raised this issue, and having proposed an alternative strategy that would have worked exceedingly well, is the major reason I am no longer at Google.
Those looking to make less of a commitment to cuddling might consider the Cuddle Pillow:

http://www.armadillow.com/
Well, and this is why I recommend running solr on a standalone instance. It (and java/jetty/tomcat/etc.) are very memory hungry in general, so it is worth your while and money to spend a bit more and spin up a separate instance or whatever type of services you are using to run solr. It'll also run faster.

One last thing you can do if none of that is possible is use a better VM like Jrockit (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/jrockit/overvie...). Jrockit with the right GC in my experience is much better about running in lower memory type situations.
>“Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students),” he writes. “Our university would list the great entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives serving as student advisers and mentors.”

Why would "great" entrepreneurs, inventors and executives have more time than Nobel laureates would to spend mentoring students?

Mr. Khan's model can work as one-of-a-kind college, but to scale it up to the mass, it will probably fail miserably.

The best model for future higher education is probably being done at MIT and Harvard through their joined venture EdX, where students are being educated and trained on and off line. In other words, these finest educators are taking advantage of both latest technologies and traditional methods to educate their students. Hopefully, in a few years, lessons will be learned and we can all benefit.
Show HN: Quickbooks REST API
>You're perhaps one of the very very few people who dislike being told about things [...]

The question is told by who, when, and at what cost?

If the answer is, by someone with a vested interest, all the time, and at the cost of someone accumulating massive amounts of very personal information about me, then no, I don't want to be told about things.

I really don't think many people see advertising as valuable information. They see it as payment for a service they want and that's what makes this issue so difficult. I don't like being tracked, but if I have to pay for every single service with my credit card, that's not going to increase my privacy either.

It's a real dilemma.
21-inch iMac teardown shows newly rearranged innards
I agree, poor choice of title... That being said, a throughput of 1 burger every 10 seconds is pretty impressive given the final product. By fast food standards, maybe not so quick, but look at the ingredients they're using - I'd argue they're actually real!

Also, I love the conclusion in the article - "After all, how 'gourmet' can you get when your cuisinier is made of cold steel and plastic?" I don't know what the author uses to prepare her food, but I guess gourmet somehow means I should prepare my food with wood utensils over an open fire.
Perhaps if US companies didn't start from a mindset which consistently refers to "domestic" and "international" business, their performance might be better. Europe is not one country yet, never mind everywhere else.
> also, since you're into JITs, you might enjoy his "a brief history of Just-in-time"

Indeed, I've bookmarked it, thanks! I couldn't find the other paper you mentioned about fiddling with compiler output; would be very interested in seeing that.

LuaJIT2 was the first interpreter and JIT that I ever studied deeply, so while I am very impressed by it, I don't have a great understanding of how it differs from previous work. How is its interpreter substantially different or more impressive than previous interpreters written in assembly language? Don't all assembly language interpreters need a fixed register allocation?

I've been a big fan of Mike's work for a long time and helped him get some Google funding: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/01/love-for-luaji...

By the way, when I was searching for the John Aycock paper I came across your dissertation which I've also bookmarked. I see that you went to Trinity College Dublin -- I visited Dublin a few years ago and what a beautiful university that is! Looks like there's a lot of interesting JIT-related research coming from there lately.
Project Hangovers and Self-Criticism
>"You're another whore at the capitalist gang bang and if you do a commercial"

Are we to assume that Mr. Hicks never promoted his gigs, and performed them for free?
Western Music Formation and Influences by Genre and Region: http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic...
This is the future. It's not just highschoolers that can't fund their pot habits (ha), it's adults who can't put food on their family's table.
The term is defined by its context within the manifesto, which I presume you read?
Ok, that's it. It's now officially f__k this s__t o'clock!
I typically SSH into my boxes, but it isn't really a shell - you don't have dynamic fonts/colors per application and stuck to 256 colors.

Maybe I will have to run a linux distro in order to share the love.