skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I apply a higher degree of skepticism any time the results of a study funded by an organization with a viewpoint support exactly the conclusion you'd expect for that viewpoint; if nothing else, I'd expect a high degree of selection bias, if not a predetermined conclusion in mind during methodology selection and data collection.

I'd strongly question the results of a study funded by The Pirate Bay that said the ready availability of downloadable films increased movie sales.
Perhaps a distinction is drawn between building companies, and getting funding from certain types of VCs
MIT doctoral student finds better way to match Boston children to schools
He mentions JVM memory usage.
A video taken at 48 frames/sec or more would begin to show you the "truth". The faster the frame rate, the more true to life it would become. This is a perfect example of a signal approaching the Nyquist frequency of the system sampling it.
How can I become a world class engineer?
Hi HN,

I'm a software developer who's been stuck in the "Enterprise" CRUD world for far too long. I used to be passionate about my career but after a while life got in the way, I lost my passion and I've been stuck doing the same for the past 8 years.

I want to change that, I want to become a world class Software Engineer, thing is I don't know where to start.

My skill set is pretty limited: I know basic linux cmd line, proficient with SQL, enough java to tie frameworks together and a little bit of javascript.

Going back to uni is an option, but I've tried coursera and the other web based uni courses but I always lose interest or get too far behind with the assignments.

To all the world class engineers in HN, tell me how would you start all over again and what would you do today to get where you are now, what should be the first step?

Thanks.
Glue guns are fun.
I actually read this paper without knowing it was sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America and without realising that it wasn't peer reviewed. I cringed on the thought that this is the level of social science.

In my profession (law), proving loss of revenue is so difficult that it is in many cases considered impossible, even in civil cases. You have to take into consideration many factors and you can't just automatically ascribe declining or increasing revenues to one fact, even if it seems plausible. You can't just make up a model full of assumptions and attach fancy names and mathematical symbols to it. No decent judge would fall for that. To start with you would have to make a year-on-year comparison spanning 5-10 years. Then you would have to make a convincing argument why the revenues didn't just decline or increase due to one of the many other possible factors such as popularity of the movies, internet penetration, broadband access, weather, macro economic trends, changes in taste, normal seasonal changes, supply of alternatives (cable tv shows, sport games etc.), changes in payment options for the legal movie outlets, other changes in business model or marketing that could explain why the legal movie outlets sold more after the shutdown.

If the product had been more generic that might have been possible but with movies the popularity of the supply varies so much that changes could often be ascribed to differences in popularity.
I haven't worked with ExtJS but I've heard from developers I know that have worked with it that it is painful to deal with. Full of bugs, hard to customize, and overall just challenging to do anything with. It also has a pretty large footprint.

I think it would be a good idea to try to push for one of the other technologies you listed.
Sounds like a good fit for Google, who are leading patent disarmament among tech giants:

http://www.google.com/patents/licensing/index.html

Though Google seem to think you can still make money despite/because of sharing, through other means than patent licencing.
Morozov - can Internet really change politics?
Generally I don't understand "C++ programmer" to mean a programmer who is an expert in C++, and C++ only, but rather a programmer who may be comfortable in many languages but has a special expertise in C++. All my team identifies as C++ programmers, but we all speak Python and Java, and some can do Haskell, etc.

It takes a long time to become really good at C++.
But now the game has changed from "most people don't need this" to "if you bought Apple you get Apple".

The latter does not deflect the original criticism thrown at Apple here, they are overly restrictive to the point where it's bad for their users.

I think that is a valid point to raise against Apple without meeting a blanket "You bought their product and that's just how they roll". Under that, no company can be criticized for anything, ever.
Pranksters who sent a Nigerian scam artist on a wild goose chase 1,400-miles
In 2008, the radio program This American Life ran a story on some anonymous pranksters who sent a Nigerian scam artist on a wild goose chase that spanned 1,400-miles into war-torn Chad for a promised cash payout at a local Western Union branch.
And they convinced him to do this while carrying an anti-Muslim/pro-George W. Bush note, which stated his intention to rob the Western Union. Their entire plan was spelled out on this website, dedicated to turning the tables on Internet con artists (Warning: contains Not Safe for Work language).
You can listen to the episode of This American Life
in the form
I'm from Toronto, and I've been in Palo Alto for the last month, and all I know about Atherton is that you do not want to be there.

http://imgur.com/a/aNPaI
I just get insulted that they think I don't know how to operate a belt buckle or that I care about what can be used to float when I am dead because the pilot smashed the plane into the atlantic.

Now if they told me how to operate the ejection seat or how to best overcome a muslim hijacker...
I am guessing that if Posterous and the ones who is responsible ultimately, should be giving the data to archive.org directly. This is the only sensible thing to do. Of course, they have to clear copyrights first.
You're absolutely right that losing weight has a lot to do with psychology, and that the execution of it depends on finding a method, a diet tailored to the individual's needs, to succeed.

But that diet will only result in weight loss if there is a caloric deficit, completely independent of insulin spikes. Now, the trick to achieving and maintaining that caloric deficit over a period of time is an effort that is psychologically demanding, absolutely. But the weight loss itself is pure thermodynamics.

If your interest lies in designing diets or meal plans that help people achieve their weight loss goals, your focus should rightly be the psychological aspect of it. That's the battle. But at the end of the day, a caloric deficit is necessary, whether you choose to ignore that or not.

IMHO, diet and nutrition is confusing as hell to the average person, and hiding the necessity of a caloric deficit and instead talking about "good" and "bad" foods or macronutrients, is a poor approach in the long run. But that's just my opinion. The necessity of a caloric deficit is not opinion though, it's cold hard scientifically proven fact.
Remembering that Chad is majority Muslim, we had to think of a sign for our lad to hold that would make him stand out to our local missionary. Well, see for yourself:

Quote:
DEAR XXXXXX,
THIS IS TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE RECEIPT OF YOUR MESSAGE,THE CONTENTS OF YOUR MAIL IS WELL UNDERSTOOD.
PLEASE THERE IS A MISTAKE I HAVE ONE WAT TICKET NOT TWO WAY TICKET PLEASE.I WANT TO TELL YOU THAT I WILL START MY TRAVEL ON MONDAY TO MEET YOU IN CHAD.
I HAVE NOTED THE SPECIAL CODE THAT I WILL HOLD TO MEET YOU IN CHAD.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR MUTUAL COOPERATION,GOD BLESS YOU.
BEST REGARDS,
ADAM

Attached is a file that he made up himself with the following code, so that I can recognize him:

Quote:
LOOKING FOR THE TWAT MUHAMMAD

SIGN:ADAM

I imagine that he will have a warm reception with that sign.

So, we will post updates here. This is going to be an interesting trip to say the least.
Minimal Valuable Experiments
Is the code open-source ?
Yet another article I won't read, because the site takes pains to break zooming on iOS devices. No zooming, no reading.

I really can't understand why people do that. Is it arrogance (this is how my site looks like, PERIOD!)?
In my experience, a lot of biologists avoid debates on creationism because it is not a scientific theory. Getting into a debate as a scientist would suggest there is something to discuss scientifically, there is not. Richard Dawkins voiced this publicly many times.

Furthermore, and more importantly, avoiding public debate is very different from changing the results of your research. If you are implying that some people have results that support creationism and keep it to themselves, I would like to hear more about this. I cannot even imagine how you would conduct scientific research on creationism.

Another point: you are using the word "confess" which has negative connotations. It is perfectly normal for a funding agency to voice their concerns on, e.g., the design of an experiment, if they can think of an improvement. There is nothing wrong with this, there is nothing to "confess". In some cases the agency might be altering the design to game the results. That is wrong, of course; but your phrasing is too general.

If noone really knows, than maybe nothing substantial is happening. "slightly threatening phone-call from the funding agency" sounds near paranoid. And again, your wording is way too general. For example, it would include NASA (as the funding agency) ask a laboratory that is designing a detector to make modifications to allow higher resolution in higher energies.
Plastic surgery, oddly enough, contains no plastic.
For now, no
The IMDb 404 page is the best 404 for the movie fans.
Just for the record, there was previously a study saying pretty much the opposite. Then this study appeared and was trumpeted loudly in the press by MPAA affiliates.
Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate?
This is unlikely with go as it has a good standard library and a central place for documentation of all the packages.

http://golang.org/pkg/

Third party libraries are also listed here:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/pure-go-libs

And the ecosystem is not so broad or mature that you would miss significant libraries because there are too many options and you just didn't find them.
Why I hate Google Chrome?
It's about 2 years that I switched to Google Chrome from Firefox. All my data, histories and saved authentications are stored in all last two years on Google Chrome.

Today, when I was going to the "cookies and data sites" tab from settings menu for removing one specific record from history, suddenly I clicked wrongly on the "Remove all" button inside the box.

What you expect to Google Chrome do after clicking on that hell button? Confirming that "Are you really want to remove all your cookie/session data?", right?

But it's completely removed all of my two years (cookie and authentication) data, without asking/confirming me.

REALLY, I HATE GOOGLE CHROME NOW.
You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)
the crontab business is unnecessary. ls /var/spool/cron?

other than that, I learned some new tools - ss is pretty awesome!
Yeah, my HTTP server made in Go usually starts up at around 6MB or so.
As someone who said exactly that and pays for FogBugz, but uses GitHub: now I read about what they did and think "why would they do that? It's a horribly complicated technical problem, I can't be sure they got it right, I'll stick to GitHub".

So, still no money from me, unfortunately.
Some commentators, like Popehat, are speculating that a criminal referral might be in the cards. This is entirely possible.
True, and as the value of those potentially doubly-spent coins increases, so does the cost of preventing such an infraction. This is necessary to protect the at-risk merchants whose presence on the network is vital if BC is to succeed.
Also, massive loss of confidence resulting in destruction of the value of my assets would have the same net effect to my wallet as theft.
So, it is in our general interest that BC transactions by required to pay into a commonwealth of miners who will burn GPU for us. This should be taken out of the now-optional transaction fee. Satoshi apparently had anticipated this. Under such circumstances, I believe your models of power consumption are heavily understated.
Yes, I really think it is.

The presence of amazing startups finally punching through the incredible awkwardness and extreme hassle that is consuming content legally is certainly the driving force behind increased sales.

I've never understood why people think piracy is some form of theft. It makes more sense to think about it as a form of advertising/marketing. You see, media companies NEVER have sales. The closest you'll get is watching 20 minutes of ads per hour on cable TV while footing a pretty intense bill in addition.

For over 100 years, it's been sound business sense to give things away to increase market penetration and drive increased sales. Sales bring buyers who also tend to make other purchases, which leads them to advertising to their friends. Giving things away to people who broadcast the products to a large audience is advertising 101. Loss-leading is a modern strategy that is working very well for expensive electronics. It works by essentially giving people technology so that they can consume more easily, expecting them to compensate you for the difference over time.

This is all identical to how I have actually seen piracy affect the media industry. It's literally just marketing. People who pirate stuff typically aren't people who would buy it anyway. I really do not see a negative impact whatsoever. There's so much evidence to the contrary that I find someone making a claim that "piracy made more difficult, content sales up" is anything other than a context-free juxtaposition of facts absolutely inane. Piracy is easier today than it ever has been. For < $200 in hardware you can have your own personal Netflix but with all the latest movies and TV shows. Yet sales continue to rise, and the failed and hassle-filled pre-internet business models are falling away, leading to a minimal-cost sampled environment where the need for something like piracy is growing smaller all the time.

Then there are some industries that are devolving and paying for it severely. Remember demo disks when we were all kids? I could, every week, get a demo disk with all the latest games on it. Maybe I got to play 10% of the game, but I didn't have to go pay $60 to see if I liked it. Now that digital purchases are non-resellable, fewer and fewer companies offer demos of their games to people so they can try before they buy. Piracy is useful here, and still tends to be an advertisement rather than a hindrance. And these companies want us to buy into always-on, in-your-face, and anti-consumer DRM? They're making it harder to consume legitimately! That's the exactly wrong thing to do! I haven't pirated a game in a long, long while. But I haven't bought any either (except a few indie games and the humble bundles) because the industry seems to be incapable of making any good business decisions.

So yes. It really is so far-fetched that closing down a "major" (what, <5% of all piracy?) piracy site would increase legitimate downloads by even 1 sale.
Another day, another Go PR post on HN.

What is new about porting code running in one of the slowest interpreters around to a compiled implementation of another language?

I was already porting Perl/TCL code to C++ back in 2002 with similar performance results.

Don't kids nowadays learn anything about performance in their CS degrees?
I think he may be talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ
> unless you’re a celebrity

Same as in music or movie industries. They squeeze all they can from the common folk. I hope more authors will go independent and help further disrupt the monstrous middle man.
Like any other language with static typing and available compiler implementations.
Only if it is AS/400 based systems.
Who in their right mind would want a cosmetic skull replacement?
I upvoted this. Yes, if :-)
I think it is because Apple is first, and was the biggest for quite a while. Since they were first, and Samsung/Amazon were not producing their own devices, it made sense to put them on Apple devices.

Interesting to see if this will continue in the future.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5248780
Maybe it's

1). Have a reputation for charging more for hardware and attract people willing to pay more

2). Create devices that take advantage of people with more disposable income
If investment banks want to invest in Bitcoin a hedge fund would give them an easy way to do this. The fund would cover the IT side of things, i.e. coin storage.
They also did not mention why they didn't try any other of the more performant implementations of Ruby.
Ads/ Promoted posts on HN front page? 
Just spotted something interesting on HN front page page. What I consider as an advert or a promoted post.

http://i.imgur.com/T5U60Oh.jpg

Is this something that happens often on Hacker News?
and implying they're hippie kumbaya love-ins instead of a huge, well-supported tool with the features he implies they lack

I don't see this in the article anywhere. Sounds like you're trying to create controversy where there isn't one.
http://jsfiddle.net/dirkk0/MySJf/show/
Thus the improvements where not a result of using Go (which is is a fine language). The improvements came from replacing a bloated system with a leaner one. You can do that with many other languages. There is no magic in that.
The Ouya Will Have Limited Features At Launch
> Any serious programmer should be a polyglot by default.

Fully agree.

At the end of my CS degree, I was able to code in:

- Pascal

- C

- C++

- Prolog

- Smalltalk

- Camllight

- Java

- Assembly (x86 and MIPS)

- PL/SQL
Accept Markdown in comments. I think it's really necessary to have a style in comments.
What makes you say it doesn't have a testing culture? I think you're just trying to justify not using Go and sticking to your choice.

I haven't came across any Go libraries without tests.
Dunno, mine is a bit lopsided.
Ask HN: I'm being asked to sign a NDA with a startup. Should I be concerned?
A startup in town is in the process of building their team. They're asking me to sign an NDA before even starting any serious discussion. I know very little about their business, which might very well be your run-of-the-mill product.

Should I be concerned?
That's how I use it with vim. It's easy there to bind a key to `:colorscheme focus-dark` and another to `:colorscheme yourdefaulttheme`. I guess it wouldn't be hard to make one that toggles between both, but I was lazy.
You have another account here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=timoreilly
I think for some long haul flights it would be nice to have rows of, say, 3-4 seats that can fold down flat into the floor. Then you can lower 3-4 hammocks hanging above each other in the same space.
Yes, and not everyone uses orange top color anyway.
May I ask whether you have much experience as a sole proprietor or solo founder?

As a solo founder of a startup that I've been running for almost the past four years, if I had anyone in my network that wasn't scared to death of leaving the comfort of a full-time job behind to join me as a cofounder, I would have brought them on board in a heartbeat.

One reason a technology startup is significantly more stressful than a standard business is that, by definition, you are in uncharted territory. Traditional businesses have loads of successful examples; the business model and value proposition to customers are both largely consistent. With most tech startups, you have to invent a new business model, create new technology fron scratch, and convince customers that your never-before-seen product or service is something they should spend their hard-earned money on.

1. The business model: Though there are a few general patterns available for web startups to use (e.g. freemium, ad-supported), every startup has to figure out how to become profitable within its particular niche. It's unlikely you'll find success by copying someone else's model exactly, while you can do exactly that in the small business world. Startups selling physical products (such as mine) likely don't even have freemium or advertising as options for experimentation, though there are some product startups exploring variations of those options.

2. The technology: Writing code and designing user interfaces is nothing like repairing cars. There's no doubt that there are a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable mechanics (even some who are also software developers), but there's a very large difference between understanding an existing system, and creating a new system from nothing but keystrokes. The common tasks of the mechanic can be done almost by instinct and memorization, leaving sufficient mental horsepower available for the few particularly tricky problems. Most startup-worthy software projects will involve intense creative effort at every step of development, which is far more mentally taxing.

3. Value proposition: Consumers already know they need a mechanic, or food, or a dentist. As a restaurateur, for example, you mostly need to convince willing consumers to come to your restaurant instead of your competition. A tech startup has to convince customers that they need to spend money on an entirely new category of product. Most people will agonize over the smallest expenditure if it's not part of their traditional purchase sphere (purchasphere?).

In summary, the stresses of running a tech startup, especially for someone in their 20s with at most a couple tens of thousands in savings, are far beyond what most solo founders can bear, and only those who are determined beyond reason (or already rich) should dream of going it alone.
TLDr Plz ?
Here on HN we're all hackers who like to roll up our sleeves

I think you're very right about this, but there's even more to it. When O'Reilly started, getting a book published was like getting a chip design fabricated. You had professionals who worked with software that cost thousands of dollars producing "camera ready" pages for printers, whose enormously expensive equipment required very special formats. And the end product had to go through a channel as a physical product being moved to tens of thousands of bookstores, because those incredibly fragmented physical sales locations were almost the only places books were sold.

It just didn't matter how much of a "roll up your sleeves" guy you were in that world (which I remember like it was yesterday.)

But that world is gone. These days, you can create your book entirely with free software as you sit on a beach, and you can sell it in electronic form off your own website to the entire planet (without leaving the beach.) You can do all the marketing, all the selling, collect your paychecks, and use them to buy stuff, all from that little spot in the sand.

O'Reilly is still needed by some, but for "roll up your sleeves hackers", I think their time has past.
Sadly the material is not adamantium.
You must be new here. YC companies get limited advertising.
It goes both ways. You won't make it in academia if you don't bring in grant money, and researchers know which side of the bread is buttered.
Same thing happen to me, I even did some small contributions around 2010.

Then I discovered D and Rust are better languages for my purposes.
If others haven't noticed it already. Don't forget to refresh the page!
Life is dangerous, and as world population increases, it's becoming more dangerous

Not even remotely true.
It's clear that it's a lie because if it were true it would've been delivered in a form of an awesome tech demo and not an excuse for broken game.

That said however...

If there's a shared world, then running its simulation server-side makes sense. Not the game minutiae, but global state. Something like weather, simulated stock markets, etc. The environment, basically. That's not to say that SimCity has any of this, because it doesn't.