skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sleek, pre-assembled 3D printer at USD 347? Here’s how Pirate3D is doing it
There's a saying that when a company starts cutting pens and station office availability, it's time to search for an exit. I'd say it's the same kind of mechanics here: It's not that soda is so valuable, it's that the company reached a level where every little thing starts to get scrutinize and needs justification, and there's no going back from then.
The One Question Every Entrepreneur Should Ask Themselves
Remind HN: Your Flickr Favourites Are (Still) Public and Searchable  
A lot of you probably haven’t used Flickr in ages like I, and maybe Flickr or you have changed since then.

In late 2011[^1] (pre-Mayer), Yahoo! allowed users to search in the favourite collections of each other. Here is a basic query for mature content for your own profile to see what people might come across in your collection of favourites:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=faves&q=sex+or+boobs+or+butt+or+porn [^2]

To search within another user’s favourites, retrieve their user ID from idGettr[^3], and paste it in a query like this:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=faves-[[ ID ]]&q=sex+or+boobs+or+butt+or+porn [^4]

I didn’t know this, and I imagine it happened while I wasn’t using the service. Add to this that you cannot opt out of this.

I have been in touch with Yahoo![^5], and to summarize their response, public, searchable favourites with no opt-outs are here to stay. To each their own, and I am definitely a bit on the nutty side when it comes to privacy—I just can’t bring myself to ever have a Facebook account, but I totally understand people feel differently about these things. I’m sure other privacy fanatics on HN who check their privacy settings meticulously were as unaware of at least some this.

Some things have changed since the last time I and you used Flickr, and many of them are here to stay, so in the spirit of Steve Jobs’s choice words on privacy, at you at least now should have a good idea of what you’re signing up for.
This would reduce the frame rate, and even HDR has its limitations. But who knows. Maybe.
The rise of the "/Developer" — boosting your career with code
Making me feel even more strongly about that Fred Wilson's "got soul" comment. +1 Fred.
You aren't required to buy it or use it. Cooking and shopping is a horrible chore for lots of people. Those are the people this is marketed for. "I am not the target market for this product" is not a problem with the product.
On the PC platform we've definitely seen it. Counter Strike been the obvious one.

But there is a different culture around PC and Console. Console has always had DRM, PCs drifted along with CD-Keys that limited online play, then Steam came along, which /r/gaming appears to fawn over, yet deride any similar change in DRM on the consoles.

As it stands, I think the PS3/Xbox360 are less restrictive because of their DRM than PC gamers who have to use Steam or Origin. The publishers needed a mechanism to stop what was told as rampant piracy. Steam filled that void.

Now consoles are moving more in that direction people are treating it as if its universally bad. It doesn't have to be. So long as it isn't a case of always internet, always on, from day one, I don't think it will be.

I remember people banging on about SmartClients less than 10 years ago. These were apps which would sync when the internet became available and gracefully handle the disconnection. Ironically Outlook was often the example. Nowadays most devs don't bother with that because there isn't the demand and its not worth the increased development and maintenance costs. I wanted some flowcharting software the other day, the first 3 hits were all online cloudy hosted type things. This is the way things are going, there are benefits, its not all bad!
Links/footnotes:

[^1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/13/how-flick...

[^2]: http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=faves&q=sex+or+boobs+or+...

[^3]: http://idgettr.com/

[^4]:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=faves-[[ ID ]]&q=sex+or+boobs+or+butt+or+porn

[^5]: https://twitter.com/pessimism/status/336090432398323713
People are totally irrational about sex and love, too, but you can still screw up royally and hurt relations that way. Rationality don't enter into it.

Really, I think part of the affront here is that the absence of such a minor thing--perhaps especially because it's so cheap--is a really bad sign about how much the company values its people.

~

An anecdote:

About the best thing that my previous employer did was offer free coffee, if you could be bothered to make a pot from the existing supplies.

So, a coworker and I took to taking coffee breaks to buy some from a local coffee shop. Usually done after lunch, but still, it got us out of the office for maybe a half-hour or so. We really enjoyed this, because it gave us a chance to talk about other things and get some fresh air.

Said coworker also took to making runs to a convenience store to buy sodas--offering, of course, to do the same for other folks.

All told, these little expeditions probably amounted to a few hours every week in not-working time. Had the business been particularly ruthless, they would've noted that perhaps $10-12 every week in drinks could have kept some of their $50K/yr engineers from being useless for a few hours in search of nourishment. I'm not claiming that this was right, and we're more experienced now, but the fact remains.

A similar story was us getting kicked out of a conference room during a major refactor--we needed to pair program and use a lot of whiteboard space, and after a day or two (this was a really, really hairy unfucking of some core code that had no test suite), and got thrown out mid-project.

That code and project went down in true viking fashion a week or two later, and I left shortly thereafter.
Cynical, but true. Once the company reaches a certain stage, this is a valid (albeit evil) path to travel down. Upper management gets rich, everyone else gets the shaft.
That gets into state-by-state law. In Minnesota, all charters have lotteries (and those that can't "sell out" and completely fill their classrooms will probably have financial problems).

States that allow charters to be selective are on a bad path, imho. Like public schools, charters should be required to accept any students who apply and get through the lottery.
Never receiving another marketing email, ML for gmail
It has a lot more to do with how you are treated. I don't drink soda, so free soda does nothing for me. But the fact that company I work for has those things and asks the employees what they want in the fridge is a very different experience than at a company without that concern. It starts with the snacks, but it goes all the way up to sitting down and asking what I actually want to get out of the job.

It's the difference between a company acting like you should feel lucky to have a job there, and a company acting like they are trying to keep you in your job there.
Wait. But that's what innovation cycle looks like. You try a bunch of stuff, and most of it fails.
What is digital identity? Can we define it?
.... why not just use a mobile phone clipped to your shirt (since that's all a star trek communicator is).
Haha, well played.
Ask HN: Should I code my next project in PHP or Ruby?
Hello,
I'm a PHP developer and I'm working a new video hosting project and was wondering if I should learn Ruby and then code it in that or just use what I'm good at, PHP.
Thanks :)
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the article was about music history.
[Contest] Can you turn geo-tagged data into in a stunning video for Shazam?
What does this achieve? If a profile only omits features, then browsers that do support EME and other omitted features therefore also support FreedomHTML. So if Chrome supports EME, they can still say they support 100% of the FreedomHTML profile.
Is there anything about the way you query your data that a traditional serialized object store wouldn't handle? Being that you want it embedded and therefore local, I'd imagine you're talking about relatively small amounts of data and your performance concerns aren't too extreme?

Would something like this fit the bill? http://www.db4o.com/s/monodb.aspx
He specifically said compared to eating any other food. Every food can be contaminated. In order to sell this, he has to meet the same requirements every other food producer does.
I've seen free snacks go away at one company - but it was during the company's first downsizing. The company was losing money. We engineers grumbled a bit but no one really faulted them for it.

The Support department set up a cash shop with far more variety of snacks than we had before.
Even if they don't care or consciously notice, the small details do make the experience. Even the reader who can't name even one font of knows what serifs are will experience the different fonts differently. One site will make his reading a little less comfortable, maybe make him tense some small facial muscles, and after a few minutes he just closes the tab because for some reason he doesn't even care to articulate he just feel slightly annoyed with the site. Another site has a design with a calming and harmonic color scheme, few distractions, a font that can be read without strain and our reader finishing his reading in a good mode and adds the site to his RSS feed. :)

Of course the most perfect site won't save crappy content, but the ugly site's content may never be read. It's similar to all the non verbal clues in human interaction. The tone of your voice and even the color of your shirt do make a difference.
My Remote Publishing Octopress Setup - Matthew Lang
As long as free fizzy drinks are considered sacred, engineers will never reach the income levels seen in the legal, medical and financial sectors. Employers will treat like adolescents those who behave like adolescents.
Google+ allows you to search for things in your photos
I can't help but view charter schools as a means to further the social and class stratification of America.

I certainly agree that the same shoe can't fit every person, but systems that allow self-selection and the stranding of the downtrodden in hopeless and ineffective environments can't be good for the health of a nation which relies on elections and by proxy the ability of each citizen to think and reason their way through the ballot box.

I tend to think that forcing everyone to use public education would coerce the parents who send their kids to charter and private schools to instead push for improvements in public education that all students would benefit from, rather than being able to ignore large segments of society and having strong incentives to make public education worse at the expense of the country as a whole.
I use Cinch and SizeUp to get the Win 8 aero snap jazz on my mac. Both by http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com
Okay, I didn't make my point very well.

To put it another way, it's amusing that the software engineers make a big deal out of free food and drinks, when the people "above" them are getting massive pay checks from the software engineer's work.

It's no wonder we're getting another tech bubble when software engineers will sell themselves out for $5 worth of snacks.
Actually it's not true that it's a good sign for the company: once things start going downhill, the best people look for somewhere better to work. I recall at one company, they fired a bunch of people, many of whom really were not top performers. Immediately after, the best people started trickling out.

A few years later, the company was acquired and a few years after that, the whole thing fell apart.
As much as this story is meant to be about keeping staff happy and managing expectation. Actually what I think it really does a good job is illustrate that finance and hr teams are pretty bad at managing the complex cause and affect that balance sheet decisions make. How many times have you seen someone leave because they were turned down for a pay increase?. The company then has to pay 12%-18% of an increased annual salary in recruitment costs for a replacement - added to the costs spent for managers time during hiring.
Definitely an igloo. He used a squarish paper bin to compress snow and get bricks.
A bag of salad goes bad very quickly, I can't keep it on hand for whenever I need it. Frozen crap meals are clearly less healthy than soylent, and are also more effort to prepare.
What I want to do is watch auto-play video ads, because reading is too hard.
But that's the thing, eh?

Free soda is a perk that costs the company say $10,000. It makes taxes a bit complex (because do people really declare the free soda?) but it's cheap and easy and people love free stuff.

The goodwill you get from that simple gesture is worth more than just giving people the cash as part of their salary.

You either have PHBs that get it, and leave it alone (while monitoring for abuse) or you get PHBs who don't get it, and who cut it, and who then have to spend a lot more money replacing all the staff who leave.
The complaint seems backwards: the actual inconvenience the the author is posting about is a direct result of the fact that Google isn't forcing users into Google+, but instead making it an aggressively promoted opt-in option for users of many of its existing services, providing a list of the benefits and a chance to opt-in when an existing service which it can enhance is used.

If it was actually forced, this would not occur.
Back in the original dot-com bubble, I worked at a place that had the most amazing coffee machine I've ever seen. It was the size of a Coke machine and made ten thousand varieties of boutique coffee, most of which I'd never even heard of, all made to your specifications. It was incredible.

Then one day a guy came in with a hand cart, loaded the coffee machine on it, and rolled it away. A week later the layoffs started.

The lesson here isn't that there's something intangible or magic about free sodas or coffee. It's that when you used to give out free sodas and coffee, and then you stop, you're telling everyone in the company that business isn't as good as it used to be. Beverages are an easy thing for the bean-counters to get approval to cut, so when times get tough, they get cut first. But they're also a small line item, so while they're the first thing to get cut, they're usually not the last.

In other words, the free sodas are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When they die, it's time to get out if you don't want to die with them.

This is why, when I visit clients these days, I make a point of going with them to their break room to get some coffee before our meeting starts. If their beverage situation has been upgraded since my last visit, they're doing well. If it's been downgraded, I know to be on guard for bean-counters coming after my relationship with them.
I was in the same shoes, and I decided to learn Rails. I haven't looked back since, but then again, I was in a startup and wanted to walk out with some new skills.

Rails is great, not for everything, but it does make standing up a new site pretty darn easy. Personally, I won't touch PHP again if I have my choice.
Don't plan, Live
Right, because a block of un-indented python is syntactically incorrect. It would be just like stripping all the brackets out of some C code and asking the editor to add brackets to the resulting mess properly.
Ah, alright. It's Georgia on my system as the Adele font is not loading (maybe Ghostery, dunno). Strange that the fallback of a sans-serif font is a serif one, but well.
That's neither here nor there.

For one thing, software engineering is a lucrative profession. It pays more than most other white collar jobs in New York, except some law, some finance, and some consultants. But it is certainly better than the large swaths of people in marketing, HR, PR, accounting, etc.

The choice of city vs not city is completely independent of the startup vs non-startup thing.

If you are intent solely on maximizing cash in your pocket, then I doubt startups are the best path. If you want that, just go work on wall street. I grew up around that, and I've known for a long time that no matter how much money there is in it, it's not a great life.
A Integração de Turbinas Eólicas em Fachadas de Edifícios
If a site is down, ask a bunch of meerkats
I'm curious. What is your experience with "true innovators" in capital-intensive fields that makes you think that they don't need any protection from copying?
It's not just selection bias, though. Charters, having distinctive education styles, will be more appropriate for some students and less appropriate for others. The other layer of "selection bias", then, is that parents/children will be more inclined to charters that seem more suitable for their own needs.

For example, in MN, we have a number of Somali-language bilingual charters for our massive Somali immigrant population. Fantastic option for Somali immigrant kids. Not so fantastic for other kids. That's not just selection bias on parental involvement, that's appropriate environment for the kids' needs.
Good staff can get new jobs. So they leave first.

You're left with people who are duffers, and possibly doing harm to the company. Or with people who have many years with the company and who will be expensive to layoff with redundancy payments.
I remember being told that one of the CEO's of British Telecom is said to have said to his CFO "thank you for telling me what the cost of things are but I know the value of them"

Ironically BT a huge company started to go towards free tea and coffee but this was stopped by HMRC (the taxman) who wanted to charge tax on this benefit in kind - and you think the IRS is bad.
It isn't really about the snacks as such. We don't have free snacks here but we never ave so I don't care but I can see why such a change is very noticeable.

If the company used to given free snack but is now so short on cash that they can't, then perhaps people's positions aren't as safe as they thought they were previously. Whether or not there is a real problem, that is likely to be the perception.

Also we have an informal arrangement here: if I'm working late and get hungry I'll have food delivered and expense it. If I couldn't do that I'd have to go home instead, so if people are using the free snacks to stave off hunger at busy times this could be a detriment to the company.
The bar exam is a part of the hiring process, its just that its outsourced to a licensing agency. In the software field, each company just does it themselves.
Because it's an indication of intent, a change in the winds.

It's feels like your employer saying 'numbers are now more important than getting things done'. It's basically signalling the beginning of bureaucracy.

And that's exactly what happened in Derek's example. So they were not irrational at all, it's a very powerful social cue that the company didn't even know it was giving.
The point is that Apple is not just operating in the USA; it is operating around the world and makes profits around the world. No one disputes that Apple pays U.S. taxes on their U.S. operations, and no one has accused them of moving U.S. profits overseas to avoid taxes. The big to-do is entirely about their earnings overseas.

The question of the ethics of international taxation is complicated by the fact that most countries in the world do not expect their companies to pay both local taxes and domestic taxes; the U.S. does. So it is not like Apple is violating some broad standard of behavior. If anything the U.S. tax system is the aberration.
BuyMyStartup.co - a new tool
A friend of mine just launched this and is looking for feedback. Something between ExitRound and Flippa - what do you think?
It's odd that people would be expected to click through to follow just based on # of followers.

Why is this so odd? This is a fundamental aspect of human behavior. The # of twitter followers is in indication (not perfectly I might add) of the viability of credibility. This is no different than case stories, customer references, etc. which are all the cornerstones of successfully marketing entities.
There are various aspects to that. For example, I recently took over a project, where the hardware part needs to be cost optimised. Basically, when the product was put together, two elements pushed the cost higher than I'd like:

1) Both software and hardware teams like using the best components possible, without necessarily putting enough thought into the target market, which the product is serving. I'm not saying that the product should be as cheap as possible, compromising on quality, but there needs to be a ceiling, depending on the market requirements.

2) Not enough thought was put into the most efficient structuring of the supply chain, resulting in unnecessarily high shipment and tax expenses.

So, the first exercise was very much similar to what you're describing - go through the bill of materials and one by one try to identify any cost savings. This is causing some loss of happiness (treading on people's toes, having to push for different solutions, in their eyes compromising on quality) but is necessary in making a better product.
Stop talking if you don't look it up first. There are several examples of entomophagy in the western world. It's not been long since cockchafer were eaten by your (grand-) grandparents.
This is a start for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy

Insects are part of my diet pretty much since I started making Sushi regularly. And I'm planning to have a farm in August with a friend who is a farmer.
Your claim is not backed by any evidence at all. There is nothing special or magical about "whole foods". And what is wrong with what you just mentioned is that now I need to keep fresh fruits and vegetables and milk on hand, those spoil. Your proposed meal replacement is also incredibly deficient in over half of known vitamins and essential minerals.
I don't think this is the b-school experience, more likely it's a result of management consulting experience.

Consultants often get into this mindset that they need to find a way to show their value in the most immediate way to their clients, in order to justify their high fees. Basically showing how quickly they "pay for themselves".

Coming in as a brand new CFO, you have to prove yourself quickly and justify the high salary you just took. The easiest way is to do that, is to find cost savings within the company and implement them expediently.
Employers will pay their employees what the market bears.
Personally, I prefer Ruby to PHP. But:

If the point is to build the video hosting project, and you are productive using PHP, then that's probably the best option.

If the point is to increase the breadth of your development skills while building the video hosting project, choosing a new language like Ruby might make sense.

If you've identified a specific technical challenge in what you want to do that makes PHP problematic, investigating alternatives (including different languages, though that's probably not the first thing to look at) for that particular problem also makes sense.
Thanks for that :) I'm looking into RoR but I don't know where to learn it, can you give any suggestions? Also does RoR have support with mongo?
EDIT: I think I'm going to go with node.JS
What can I say? Other than software, metal (and glam metal in particular) is one of the things I'm most passionate about. If I had a shred of musical talent, I'd probably get out of the software business and join a glam-metal band.

Sadly, I am pretty much tone-deaf and couldn't carry a tune with a wheel-barrow.
What's especially awesome is when they take a minute to load, after you've switched to a different tab and have no idea which site is playing them. You get to hunt through all your tabs just to discover who's playing such an awesome ad!
That discussion seemed to be about server names? b^)
IPaaS: Cloudy with a chance of integration