skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, this is Google Voice. It sounds like you and your friend are talking about Widgets. Here's a list of widget retailers you may be interested in. Press the 2 button to hear more about Acme Widget company. Press 3 to hear about Joe Widget and Sons...

Acme widgets are currently $2.99, press 4 to enter your credit card number and purchase widgets directly from Acme widget company. How many widgets would you like to order? Please enter the number of widgets followed by the pound sign...
It's "standard" relative to the rest of the world, no?
Anyone want to meetup at SXSW?
I'm @kmx, and I'll be listening to #HNatSXSW on twitter.
Jon Stewart Brutalizes Jim Cramer
how is this more intuitive than text printed on a screen? computers are a natural evolution of the book format of presenting information. I doubt you can get better until you get direct interfaces.
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I see where my examples were largely limited to coding conventions, but the point was that when we are free to work on our own we all have our preferences for everything. And we all do our own thing when it only involves only ourselves. Here is another for instance that is somewhat less trivial (I'm a C++ guy):

"Why should I have to use use this boost::shared_ptr for everything? This class clearly has ownership of this data. I'll take care of everything in the destructor. If you need a copy, make a _copy_. I'll write you a deep copy function if you want."

"But I don't want to make a copy. It's inefficient and I find it unnecessary. Just use boost::shared_ptr for everything and it will all be ok"

... for code that will probably not be used anywhere in a performance-critical section of the code but it's hard to know in advance.
U.S. Congresswoman on CNN: Contemplates Legal Cannabis Pilot Program In California
I don't buy the argument that this somehow puts a big provisioning planning burden back on users.

Most small users of EC2 know that they are going to need one or two instances on all the time. Amazon just lowered their base costs, making it easier for them to choose EC2 over another VPS offering.

Most larger users also know they have a "base load" that they have to meet. It's not hard to imagine that a lot of sites will have 2 machines as redundant load balancers, two as redundant web/app servers, and two for a DB failover cluster.

Paying in advance for these instances is a no-brainer once you've decided EC2 is for you. If figuring out the rest is too much work or involves too much uncertainty, the on-demand pricing is still compelling.

"In principle, it costs the same to run one instance for 1000 hours than to run 1000 instances for one hour."

This wouldn't be true if you were operating your own datacenter, and it's not true in Amazon's datacenter either. In order to offer on-demand instances, Amazon has to keep idle capacity in reserve. There is a difference in degree, since Amazon is averaging over a lot more customers, but they still have to build and maintain capacity that will sit idle for significant periods of time. By creating a new pricing tier for reserved instances, they can both reduce their uncertainty about unused capacity, and give customers a better price for making that commitment.

What's really missing here is another low-priced tier for low-priority instances. These would either be suspended and paged completely to disk during times of high load, or they'd be started and killed automatically to make use of idle capacity. They could be used for long-running batch jobs.
one of the draws of thievery is that it is a profession for the renaissance man and also the profession for those who can look outside the box to solve a problem. the best way to get into a place is to use a method no one who designed the security system would have thought of.

I'm betting that a lot of people who make good thieves are also the kind who would make good entrepreneurs.
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You can also take advantage of predictable declines in costs by setting pricing below your initial costs, but making sure that its more than made up for over the life of the subscription as your costs decline faster than your pricing drops. You can be sure your competitors will take advantage of this.
Yeah, you're probably right. There are now so many more votes on the top stories that they do stay around longer than they used to. I just increased gravity to 1.8 and the frontpage looks better now.
It's true, Eisner was doing the initial pixar deal but negotiations fell through several times.

Actually Bob Iger (Michael Eisner's successor) successfully negotiated and finalised the Pixar deal after he came to the realisation that all of the popular characters in recent memory in their theme parks were (in large) a result of Pixar's work. He came to this conclusion watching a parade while attending the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland.

He was more ready to do a proper deal that didn't screw over Pixar (which Eisner had gotten quite proficient at during his time). This resulted in Ed Catmull (then Pixar CEO and Pixar co-founder) becoming president of Disney Animation, John Lasseter (co-founder and director of many fine Pixar films) becoming Chief Creative Officer of Disney Animation and Steve Jobs getting a seat on the Disney Board.

Anyway, Eisner did nearly kill disney animation (It's not good when they're selling off equipment...) and his predecessor didn't do a very good job either when they decided to drop the use of multiplane camera's to reduce costs.

Also the later cel animated Disney films that people loved (beauty and the beast onwards) were helped in part by software that Pixar created (but the name of it escapes me at the moment)

So there you go :)
this would make a good movie. it's quite funny that despite the extreme technical sophistication of the vault the thieves were only undone by a panicky cohort.
Just have a method. Any method. Democracy is nice. If more people agree on something than the rest, it's the way it'll be done.

And somedays you have to tell people to suck it up. "Oh, two spaces indentation in Python is how Google does it? Well, it's not how we're doing here".

When it's allowed to break the rules? When the method you choose allows it. For example, breaking code convention is a no-no under whatever. But boost::shared_ptr? What everyone else on the team thinks? What does your "method" says? That performance is more important than readbility?

If you have a prima donna developer who doesn't accept his peer decisions, then you have a bigger problem than just silly arguments. You've built the wrong team :p

Smart people love being corrected, most of the time. They're in it for the learning, not to display their awesomeness.
I have a friend who does his programming from an armchair and I often wonder how long it's going to be until his wrists start to be effected by the massively subergonomic elbow/wrist placement that it forces on him.

Anecdotally, my sister is a chiropractor and the Aeron (when properly adjusted, which can take a bit of doing) blew her mind in terms of back health goodness, which served as a pretty big recommendation for me. She also recommends yoga balls as well. I'll have to ask her about armchairs :)

Talking to your local chiropractor or ergonomics person is probably a good plan if you're going to be buying any furniture you plan to use intensively.
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Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), by W. Ross Ashby
also, firebug has a "delete element" function.
Ironically, that's the point of this event. They don't have anything ready, they just want to tell people what's coming. If they tell you now, their precious event will be pointless.
Somewhat related:
http://blog.thejit.org/2008/11/27/using-ocaml-to-visualize-r...
I personally went nuts when I saw this on the front page. For a very specific reason. About a year ago I purchased a sweatshirt made by a cool little fashion company called Distilled. It had a really neat design on it that was reminiscent of electrical circuits. It also came with a little booklet explaining the origin of the design. The booklet revealed it was created not by a distilled designer but a collaborator ("partner in crime" as they called him) by the name of Jeevan Kalanithi and the design was derived from his "connectibles" project. Pretty cool check it out:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~jeevan/pages/distilled.html
What do VC (Venture Capital) firms look for?
It would be nice be able to zoom down to the point where you are viewing the actual source code.
I honestly can't see a way to think about computers as a natural evolution of the book format of presenting information. They use text that's true but that's pretty much where the comparison halts. Computers are capable of taking in substantially more information then they put out, with books all you can do is turn the pages and start or stop reading. Seems really different to me. Do you disagree?
Obviously, these are not aimed for optimized display of large bodies of text. Along the same reasoning, the book/monitor format is not optimized for non-literate applications.

The demos are quite interesting. It's as if Wii controllers have become self-aware. Obviously, potential is lost when opting for physical items as opposed to holograms, but until simulating weight and feel is viable, these miniature devices do have a place in a myriad of activities.
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Planning - how we really do it in practice
An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool
I probably spend more time writing actually.
For the Windows crowd, there is also SQL Server Reporting Services which is "free" if you already have a SQL Server license. It's more of a roll-your-own reporting package but it's quite easy.
Got to repeat what I said previously:

I always had serious doubts that Google is going to track users in such a way, as Google is always looking for a way to collect users' info - Look at Youtube and all of other Google's acquisitions!

Specially after their acquisition of Urchin - currently known as Google Analytics.

In fact I was asking myself, when Google will use these huge data sets that it has about us?

The interest based advertising is something that I am working on (research), and I am trying to code algorithm that would understand users' interests...
Tim O’Reilly prescription for the ailing economy: Work on stuff that matters
Tools like this aren't a stopgap. They're real, they create new possibilities, and they're our future.
Iostat -x
Results For The Short Term, Capabilities For The Long Term
In these tight times, we are acutely aware of cutbacks, of scarcity, and of the need to streamline. However, really, these are indicative of management practices that should be occurring all the time. In portfolio management, especially, it is important to have a healthy balance between short term considerations and long term considerations. It is all a balancing act and the equation really only changes slightly during a downturn, such as we are currently experiencing.
Amazing story, once again security fails due to a lot of human error.

Spoilers below if you haven't read the article:

1. The key shouldn't be kept in the closet outside the safe

2. Opening the door should force the magnetic sensor to be triped, the door must be in the way of the sensor. Additionally, why was the sensor on the outside of the door?

3. The combination lock should have a viewing angle that requires the user to block any cameras.

4. You need human patrols.

5. Sensors should be independent; the heat/motion sensor shouldn't both need to be tripped.

6. They needed sensors that could not be easily seen or detected by someone in the safe (hidden cameras, sensors embedded in another object).

7. The needed multiple sensors instead of one each.

8. The sensors should adjust the current flowing through them so that the wires can't be bridged, and the wires shouldn't be exposed.

9. There needs to be a random factor inserted such as random patrols, a sensor that moves in a random way, the combination is changed randomly.

10. They should have a time control on the safe that only allows it to be opened during certain times. There could be an override, but it'd be it should be difficult and rarely used (hard to copy).

Just a few off the top of my head, more cameras would also be good -- what else did they do wrong?
Amazon EC2 Introduces Reserved Instances
There’s Real Money To Be Made (And Lost) In Virtual Economies
If we open up a newspaper or surf the internet these days, we come across a multitude of stories that relate to the current financial troubles that people are facing the world over. However, as we touched on in a recent article, virtual economies are booming, so I present to you a light-hearted look at a few virtual economies that are worthwhile right now.
I'll add that "Extreme Programming" and other forms of Agile is mostly a buzzword/re-branding to wrapper quite a few "best practices" from the OOP world. Which is appropriate since so many of the early agile manifesto folk were the same ones that pioneered the OOP best practices.
Bachelorette party
Amazon releases Reserved Instances
The first thing that struck me about this video was how awesome this technology is. The second thing that struck me was how most of the presentation fell flat.

The technology is totally amazing and it's going to change the way we live and learn (this isn't a prediction about Siftables specifically, but this type of technology in general). Even still, it's possible to give a presentation about it that doesn't blow people away. It's a good reminder to not let a modest reception affect how you feel about your own work.
If startups are cool everywhere, is Atlanta still just as hosed as Munich?
This is the most entertaining article I have read in a very long time.
You are correct sir!

$ time find . -newerct '10 hours ago' -print
real	0m4.262s
user	0m0.090s
sys	0m1.014s

$ time find . -newerct '10 hours ago' -print
real	0m0.516s
user	0m0.057s
sys	0m0.251s

$ time find . -newerct '10 hours ago' -print
real	0m0.302s
user	0m0.056s
sys	0m0.244s

$ time find . -newerct '10 hours ago' -print
real	0m0.311s
user	0m0.057s
sys	0m0.251s

$ find . | wc -l
13167

Is there a way to reliably flush the disk cache besides restarting?
The thieves made quite a few mistakes.

1. Why did they have anything with their names on it. The invoice, and business card should have been destroyed long before they broke in.

2. He should have emptied his apartment before the robbery.

3. Of course the other trash should have been destroyed.

4. Why didn't he have a back up plan for his friend, he knew his friend might get panicky, so he should've planned to drop him off at the earliest possible moment.

5. They should've done random checks to make sure the cases they were moving contained the diamonds (if you believe this segment of the story).
11. Video cameras -- keep the lights on everywhere.
If you didn't assume bad intent (or even if you did, really) then perhaps you should have approached this more civilly. You called his actions 'assholish' and accuse him of 'pretending'. These terms appear to me as an attack on the author and not just his headline. For someone complaining of a rude headline your comments can come off as awfully rude themselves.
I agree. Their homepage looks like one of the most poorly designed homepages I have seen.
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For all we know, these 'mistakes' could have been intended. :D
Interesting article overall, but one clueless sentence amused me:

"Meg Whitman grew rich by developing an online marketplace, eBay, where people could buy and sell without ever meeting."

I recommend the book Paypal Wars. It was written by one of the "Paypal mafia." The book goes into quite a bit of detail about the early Paypal-eBay story, with an epilogue covering events until 2006. The reality is exactly the opposite of what the article claims.

Under Pierre Omidyar, eBay was a nimble start-up, and by the time Whitman came in, had established such a lead that the network effect was sufficient for them to retain their monopoly in the online auctions space no matter what. Whitman brought a culture of suits, endless meetings and powerpoint presentations into the company and quickly transformed it into a beast that moved at a fraction of its former speed. The new eBay took years to effectively integrate the payment system BillPoint which they purchased; if they had moved quicker, Paypal couldn't have survived, since they depended very heavily on eBay at the time.

The corporate culture-shock that the Paypal employees experienced upon being acquired by eBay, and their consequent mass exodus is now famous. If there is one positive thing that came out of the Whitman years at eBay, it is the fact that the Paypal people dispersed and went on to do great things and truly change the world :-)

Ironically, it was only around the time Whitman finally departed last year that it became clear that eBay was ripe for disruption. It amuses me that most of the business world, knowing none of the back-story, will think of the Whitman years at eBay as a glorious success.
I worked for a Fortune 500 out of college for 1 year. That was 1996. I have been an entrepreneur ever since with some success and lots of failures. I have been a lone founder to employing 40+ people.

It's hard, lonely (most of the time) work but it's rewarding and invigorating. And you learn a ton (about business, yourself and life).

I transplanted to Manila (from SV a few years ago) trying to convince young local hackers to start their own or join my startup (the call of MSFT, IBM, etc. is strong in these parts). I have infected some young minds and plan to infect more.

If you are from the Philippines, give me a shout. Startup entrepreneurs are still hard to come by.
Scott Burkett on Military Lessons for Startups
I know this isn't a military crowd, and I'm no military guy but Scott Burkett talking about translating what he learned in the military to his wild enthusiasm for startups is really inspiring.

This is a must-listen, Scott's perspective is refreshing.
I don't quite follow your reasoning, why would they want to get caught? Or are you implying that they may have been framed?
But the thieves weren't stealing the routers - they were stealing parts to go in the routers.
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A browser-agnostic plugin system?
Surely the entrepreneur's answer to "What do you do?" is "Whatever it takes!"
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Get logmein. It's free and will save you hours of potential tech support headaches :).
Google don't have to beat Facebook, its Facebook who have to beat Google, who currently have a major advantage. If Google can build their own social graph and have their applications run on top of it - there is less of a reason for users to hang around at Facebook.

Google are defending from a dominant position, which is always easier.
This is cool, but should there really be patents filed for this? Seems a pretty obvious setup.

"Cube World" http://www.firebox.com/product/1201/Cube-World is a pretty similar, if more primitive version.
I agree.
The evolution of X into computer seems so 70. (it's like a book, a library but digital !).
computer games is like an evolution of interactive theatre.
computer search is like an evolution of a really boring besserwisser ( aka messerschmitt).

I think Alan Key somewhere talks about the chord keyboard.
I could be all wrong but what stuck in my head was that machine and man both evolute together thus providing with new and better ways to interact.
What do you mean by "Slicehost's ram is far less "efficient" than linode"?
There needs to be a random factor inserted

thiis the #1 thing that would prevent a lot of crime. people dont do it because it makes logistics harder. people like routines.
I refuse to help people with their computers unless I can remote control them. Even then it's only for close enough friends and family.

Programmer != Technitian :(
What's the point of articles like this? You can find any number of things which "cost" any amount of "lost productivity". If a few minutes lost to DST is such a big issue, what about Youtube? Shouldn't the government ban that?

The whole thing is a beat-up. Human nature, not any particular outside cause, is responsible for "lost" time. And human nature picks it right back up, too - this idea that "minutes spent with an app open" is some kind of definitive measure of productivity is utterly useless.

What is it with people and DST, anyway? I've never had even the slightest problem with it. Time zones are pretty much arbitrary, and we have to constantly adjust them anyway (witness the leap second at beginning of this year). All the infrastructure to do that is already in place. I don't see why it's such a huge issue. Personally, I like it - if we didn't have DST here, the sun would come up before 5am. I find the arguments about "the sun is in my eyes when commuting" utterly spurious, the sun is always going to be in someone's eyes.

Don't see what the problem is or what necessitates these contrived justifications against it.
Linux driver map: paste the output of lspci -n, get your hardware and appropriate drivers.
Note that by "plugins", the author seems to mean what Firefox calls "extensions" and I think IE calles "add-ons" - not third-party libraries for rendering new content-types within the browser, but code living in the browser that can modify page content automatically.

The venerable Netscape plug-in API is about as browser-agnostic as one can get; I don't think there's a modern GUI browser that doesn't support it, except perhaps Amaya or something.
Couldn't Blizzard argue Prior Art due to MUD's and MUSH's, thus simply nullifying the patent troll's position?
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Exactly - that's (one of the reasons) why systematic and disciplined inquiry is important.
What makes a system hard to work with?
I say "I make computers do what other people want them to do".
If it's getting trendy, maybe now is a good time to go work for some huge behemoth corporation?:-)
Actually, he seems to be referring mainly to userscripts, which are a sort of step down from extensions. Extensions typically add to the browser GUI and make only minor adjustments to the DOM, whereas userscripts operate entirely on the DOM and are limited in interaction with the containing browser.

At least, this is my impression. The line gets fuzzier all the time, so feel free to disagree.

The userscript approach would lend itself better to cross-browser compatibility, in addition to being a relevant platform in the era of HTML-JavaScript apps.
Transcript?

Also, does he talk about what doesn't work well, or what he had to unlearn? I can see taking away some valuable lessons, but they are different environments. Does he talk about that?
This is a duplicate!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=514635
I don't exactly remember, but I do recall reading about posture in office chairs in nytimes, something about the sitting errect was not the right way and the traditionally sloppy way was more easy on the back!
I looked up one link at nytimes - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/health/12real.html - suggesting that standing erect is the most efficient.
I agree with you 100%, the way they murdered dejanews is symptomatic of this problem.
Careerwise, I answer "programmer, for TV news systems". That seems to work pretty well.

When explaining my hobby, "programming" seems to generate strong associations to Excel for some reason, so I usually answer "mathematics" instead.
I've actually done some work with this data. Everything is available on Google Code.

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/