skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the latter. I have been looking at proper led-lighting for my house a few months ago but when you want a lightbulb comparable to a 40W incandescence lightbulb it's filled with 80 LEDs (though it consumes only 4W). The cheapest I could find cost about €20,- while a simple incandescence lightbulb costs about €0,50.

I could also get 'High-Power' led-bulbs, filled with only 3 - 10 LEDs and producing the same amount of lumen but they all had a higher power consumption than the 80-led bulbs and strangely where more expensive (this probably has to do with heat removal requiring big heat sinks).
That was brilliant; unsure if the intent made it to the proper destination however.
Writing a Book: Part Two (Structure)
How to Localize Your Software without Losing Your Hair (or Shirt)
Help fix government data APIs
I found this in the HN/YC FAQ (linked at the bottom of the page):

Do we have to be US citizens?

No, as long as you can get here for at least three months. We've funded several startups founded by non-citizens.
Having both worked in industry and academia, I think the author considers so called "real world knowledge" as the only kind of useful knowledge. For example, a working programmer might learn Ruby on Rails very well by working with the framework but be completely oblivious to other frameworks or programming languages, not to mention theoretical computer science.

Academia, on the other hand, focuses more on a high level knowledge by focusing on publishing results in the form of short papers with the most central results and references to the most central knowledge about the problem in research literature.

I think that for someone who wants to work as a programmer grad school is indeed "broken", since it underemphasizes the first kind of knowledge. On the other hand, many advances to technology come from academia, so apparently that system also has its advantages.
JavaScript Function Tricks for Making Callbacks Better
Best Excel to PDF Converter Specially Designed for You
Excel to PDF Converter is a fast and affordable utility which allows you to batch convert Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into PDF file.
Don't worry, you're in good company, for example: http://janestreet.com/

I (a Haskeller) interviewed there, and ended up in an long debate with their CTO Yaron Minsky poking at warts in each other's pet languages and patterns of thought -- in retrospect we were trolling each other pretty hard just as a natural reflex.
Renraku OS: The Way Up
I just want to thank everyone here for your support over the past month or so. The feedback on the previous Renraku posts has been greatly appreciated.
nope not the case,
I know a bunch of people at these various schools, and the crux of the problem is that theres a huge culture at MIT (and moreso than many peer schools) of celebrating herculean last minute efforts that get the grade. This is great for experimental hacking on a weekend, and "good enough" for research, but it does not encourage an incremental design sensibility, owing to its last minute nature.

This is not to say that any of these people are bad at what they do, they just have bad habits that they need to walk off, but first someone needs to tell them!
My account was once temporarily suspended. Reason was probably because I used to have 2 different gmail id one for personal and one for office adwords, adsense, analytics, webmaster etc.

Had a very similar experience of realizing how much we rely on google. I couldn't check my emails, could not IM anyone except for the ones on old ICQ account. Have no access to a report I was creating on google spreadsheets and fear of having lost all photographs on picasa, my reader list, calendar and more.

Google is already a pseudo-desktop/OS on the web. And if that crashes its as worse as a MS blue screen.
Very impressive work. But you'll need to implement "import this" for it to be considered a serious Python implementation.
LOC is a horrible metric for this, given the degree to which morons can get comfortable with copy-paste and IDE-generated boilerplate.

Gzip-bytes of source FTW.
hi Rob,

I think what he meant to say was

'we agree with you that everything is information'

but we'd like to add to that:

'not all information is hidden, some of it is in plain sight, you just have to read a bit between the lines to get at it.'

From your answer below it was divined that this second part is still in your future, hence GGPs writing.

greetings,

Jacques
Over reliance on third party free services is a real danger.

This seems to imply that if he were paying money for his Google account he would have either been safe or gotten prompt customer service if it suddenly stopped working.

That has, sadly, not been my recent experience.
Good point, I hadn't thought of the ease with which text can be copied and how much garbage an IDE will spit out. Thanks!

Clever trick to measure the real information content of code using gzip too.
"You do not have health insurance."

The logic at the beginning of the post to justify this hyperbolic title was atrocious. Shouldn't be on Hacker News.
Hi Jacques,

I've read the links, I've put information in the about field.

Not exactly sure what you are referring to, do you want to keep it to yourself?

Best,
Rob
There are several thousand people out at Cupertino - what are they doing?
I think he missed one.

A bad programmer won't understand or take into consideration the limits of the target platform.

A good example is posting an article to a host with limited bandwidth.
That's not quite the case any more--those teams have gotten larger over the years (from what I've heard). That said, building the right features/product is often a lot about focus and focus is much easier to obtain with a smaller team. Apple's are definitely smaller than Microsoft's but Apple, imo, also tends to hire developers who are more considerate of or passionate of customers than Microsoft's more tech-oriented engineers.
I concur, not from personal experience but from that of friends.

That on top of the article about rescission that was in here yesterday, should make people think. You insure against catastrophic losses. It defies logic that the insurance companies should be able to retroactively cancel your policy.
Juan Enriquez Shares Mindboggling New Science
The article was quite neutral. I think women tend to be better collaborators and I fully expect the open source explosion to be lead by females.

Good process and interaction can be developed by anyone regardless of gender and other genetic factors. Nonetheless, it does seem that women tend to be aware of and do the actual 'house keeping' of project accessibility and comprehensibility for other developers (docs, overviews, diagrams). This is huge.
Seems particularly appropriate in light of Trevor's debut on MTV for Surrogates the movie :)
Well, at least he would have had a right to it. With free services you can expect to get what you paid for, with a paid service I think the bar is a little higher.

If google maps stopped working tomorrow and your business depended on it I really wonder who you would look to to complain.

Email is of course a different matter and I think they handle account disabling in a very silly way at google. But it's still much better than at PayPal for instance (and technically speaking you do pay for PayPal).
Explain please. I thought the distinction between what he called "employer-subsidized health care" and an insurance program was fair. It's not insurance if the very thing you insure against, a catastrophic loss, makes it likely that your coverage will be dropped. Insurance is supposed to be the spreading of risk, not the milking of those that are low risk while denying coverage to those that are on the red side of the equation.
It sounds like you still have a single point of failure in there somewhere.
Open Office is gratis, and USB sticks are cheap.

When you really think about it if you are a single user you do not actually need google docs.
subdirectories are case sensitive? pros and cons people, discuss!
Part of the problem is that no one has health insurance - they have heath care coverage (for lack of a better term).

Insurance is meant for rare, but disastrous things. Health insurance would only cover surgery, cat scans, things like that. But it would NOT cover ordinary medical bills.

Personally that's what I pay for. It's called major medical, or high deductible insurance. You have it for years and never once use it.

There's probably no chance of the US covering this type of care for everyone. But that's what classical insurance is: pool everyones money to handle a disaster.

Trying to cover people for ordinary care is welfare, not insurance.
He fails to mention the restrictive state laws on the books that heavily regulate who can pay for what in health care. With 90% of health care being basic and routine care, we should only need insurance in catastrophic situations.

For example, a health care start-up in Seattle (Qliance, website: http://qliance.com) had to lobby to have the State of Washington's laws clarified so they could legally operate, while the insurance industry lobbied to make their innovative model too costly to operate.

I bet if everyone in America had affordable basic health care, such as that provided by Qliance, the health care debate would become more or less mute.

For additional reference, the Direct Primary Care Coalition:
http://www.dpcare.org/
I need just a single word to refute everything he said:

COBRA

(Can't afford it? That's a different story - but you do have insurance as he defined the term.)
When you say "all browsers", did you mean to include these three?

1) The one run by an advertising company which happens to employ a lot of engineers

2) The one paid for entirely by a deal for search engine services with the advertising company from #1

3) The one run by a software company which owns an advertising platform and under absolutely no circumstances will exit any market entered by the advertising company from #1

?
Daily Business Update
New open office UI prototype
Google pays the Mozilla Foundation $50 million or so a year to be the default search provider for most versions of Firefox. This provides about 90% or so of the revenue the Mozilla foundation earns.

But I'm sure they could totally give that up if the users wanted it. smiles wanly
Rackmountsales
Rackmount Monitor
Rackmount monitor is a cost effective solution over large CRT monitors. Rackmount monitor is ruggedly packaged within a steel or aluminium enclosure and capable of being mounted in a server equipment rack.
http://www.rackmountsales.com/Rackmount_Monitors_s/52.htm

KVM Switches
KVM Switch is a hardware device that allows users to access multiple CPUs from a single or multiple keyboards, mice and monitors.
http://www.rackmountsales.com/Cat5_KVM_Switches_s/56.htm

Rackmount LCD
Rackmount LCD has seamlessly combined comfort with technology. People these days look for comfort and ease while working in their computers. They also look out for space-saving options.
http://www.rackmountsales.com/
Just as a side note, the "gigabytes of cruft" mentioned cut from Snow Leopard curiously comes to almost exactly the size of removing the PPC binaries from Leopard.
I find "Google 2009 == GeoCities 1999" very thinkable, especially if tweaked a little to "Google Sites 2009 == GeoCities 1999".

Empires rise and fall fast on the net. Google is now a mish-mash of offerings which get uneven attention from their internal talent. 'Sites' itself is a successor to the soon-to-be-shuttered Google Page Creator (which unlike Sites allowed custom CSS and JS). A few key people leave, a couple bad quarters -- 'Sites' could get the axe too.
And when your COBRA expires?

COBRA is a (usually) spectacularly expensive, short-term solution. As an entrepreneur, it puts you in a position where you can be forced to change jobs or suspend a venture to get coverage for your family. It's a bad answer.
As someone very familiar with the PM process at Microsoft--I don't totally agree with the conclusion. PMs can be incredibly valuable to a team and are, in a different way, a creator/do-er. Unfortunately, most PMs construct obstacles and walls rather than bring focus and help a development team navigate their direction.

Also, one thing I see a lot of PMs who follow the "minimalist" approach confuse is that the idea isn't really to remove features to strip the product down to it's bare capabilities in the name of minimalism or elegance (while not a bad exercise, can make certain types of differentiation challenging in a competitive space). Instead, it's about good design and delivering quality on the core user scenarios rather than allowing yourself to stray to "it'd be cool to do this" without fulling thinking through the needs of your users, the resulting user experience, and the dilution of effort on your dev and QA team by chasing those edge scenarios. It's that lack of focus and discipline that ultimately leads to features that need to be removed.
hi Rob,

I humbly ask you forgiveness for my inability to express myself clearly and directly in the English language.

It is not my mother tongue and it is very well possible that the confusion between us is grounded in this fact.

best regards,

Jacques
I worked at Apple for 6 years. Believe me, the teams are still very, very small and focused. If you have a small team, you don't need to worry so much about feature creep: you don't have time to work on the less vital stuff
That's both true and irrelevant. Young healthy males have no trouble getting either high-deductable coverage or conventional HMO/PPO coverage. Everybody else is playing roulette in the individual insurance market no matter what product they're trying to buy. When we started our company, we tried to get individual high-deductable coverage. None of us have any "interesting" medical histories. Denied.

The US health system is broken in ways I don't think you fully comprehend.
Try filling any modern screen buffer (>1024x768) pixel-by-pixel

Sure, if you completely throw away SIMD, things might be slow.

you are given just ~300 cycles/pixel, which is gone quickly after slow memory accesses

Memory accesses are pipelined and are generally not slow; an L1 cache access is 3 cycles and prefetching on modern CPUs is generally flawless for such situations.

multi-cycle instructions.

Since when do you need multiplies to fill a screen with a solid color? Even if you had to do YUV -> RGB conversion, that is done much faster with a multi-dimensional LUT than with multiplies (see swscale). Of course it's even faster in SIMD.

It's quite possible to do very fast rasterization on modern hardware without a GPU. It's just that people generally don't do it, because everyone has GPUs to do it for them.
From the article:
"Ph.D. students should spend most of their time doing real, publishable research alongside their professors, working as apprentices."

Most computer science PhD programs I know of have as a goal to get you to this point. Well, sometimes you end up working alongside your peers instead of seeing your professor. Different places do have different ideas about how early in grad school you finish classes and how many you need, but after that research is your full time job.
New NCover Plugin for .Net Code Coverage with Hudson
There are about 20k, up from 10k when I started there 6 years ago. But I think 5k-8k of them work at the retail stores around the world.

Then take into account all the people who do QA, all the management, marketing, business, finance, and other teams.

And you're actually left with a pretty lean engineering force. Apple engineers more stuff in house than a typical company like Dell, so that plays into the head count as well
It's not like any other Firefox extension -- it's a system extension, it's not in your profile in ~/.mozilla

It will always be enabled by default, you can't uninstall it, and you can only disable it after you've created a profile.
My dad, an MIT alum (though in chemistry, not CS), likes to tell the story of how whenever new grad students arrive on campus, everybody's wearing Phi Beta Kappa rings. By the second week, they've all disappeared. When everybody's got one, flaunting yours displays arrogance a whole lot more than intelligence.
The fact that health insurance is tied to employers is a major challenge for the kinds of companies people on Hacker News try to start. For the first year or so of our company, we didn't offer health benefits, and that cost us candidates. Plenty of A-players need to cover families, and can't do it on the individual market. To understand how severe this problem is, work from the assumption that you simply cannot buy individual insurance at any reasonable rate.

The current system distorts both the health care market and the job market, and makes it harder both to start and grow new companies.
yeah, it was too early... anyway, who still counts seconds? :-)
I disagree that the author considers "real world knowledge" the only kind of useful knowledge. If you read the preceding entry on "The Agony of Grad School" it clarifies that the main problem here is this person has a really high cost for context switching, plus a really low tolerance for distraction. That's a bad combination, because you end up thrashing all the time. In the preceding entry, he talks about how he wants to know what's going on in a theory of programming languages course (not really "real world knowledge" ;) but he can't due to the context switch overhead from real analysis.

It sounds like the author unfortunately hit a place that requires more classes and teaching before getting to the point where research becomes the full time 100% job.
It also sounds like the author was trying to take several courses and be a teaching assistant at the same time. That's a lot of work for anyone, even people who are good at multi-tasking.
Thanks Cody! I wrote the code that generated that report for the same reason: I wanted to be able to research what decisions other domain owners have made. I'm happy to hear that you found this information useful too!

Did you see the code I put on GitHub? http://github.com/jpf/domain-profiler
Yeah, I think that the netflix prize would make an interesting documentary.
Search engine optimization tips, usability, pay per click
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. You will hear and read more nonsense on the subject of search engine optimization than almost anything else on the web. The truth is make your content relevant and keep it fresh. To get high search engine rankings ensure you create quality content, relevant linkage and researched, targeted keywords.
I've seen weak work from a few Stanford grads.

While I have great respect for these institutions and the aptitude required to succeed within a difficult program, it's not a guarantee of quality.
I will never ever trust anything even remotely associated with OpenDNS or it's progenitors.

They're not Open in any way, and their service is not DNS either. They're just an 'underdog' Verisign -- same bullshit, different self-image.
I run my mail locally and use gmail as the backup.. hopefully losing a Google account and a disk failure wouldn't happen at the same time.
Sometimes the (seemingly) simple act of trying to come up with a name for a subroutine helps me reason about what it is I'm trying to do (whether the chunk is re-usable or not).
I feel the author is saying that knowledge should be tested against reality. The test should not be a quiz administered in a closed classroom. Knowledge should lead to outcomes in the real world. It should be hardened against the real world.
"The vast majority of us are, actually, poor. The combination of job loss and serious illness could wipe out almost anyone."

That is why 'you do not have health insurance'. The very fancy employer provided plan I had at one point was no use when I broke my arm after quitting that job to start a start-up.

The role of the government is to be the 'enabler'; what better way is there to enable than to assure you that tripping over a rock won't be the end of everything you dreamed of?
Buggy Dice.com Scraper that Requires a Profile? Not Good.
He's right about most "health insurance" being "employer-subsidized health care," but he's wrong that the reason is that it could go away. My car insurance will go away if I lose my job and stop making payments, that doesn't make it "not insurance."
I don't know - my personal solution to this problem is one of reciprocity and mutuality in my business etiquette. If I'm going to spend all day working at a coffee shop, I'm going to buy a fair bit of stuff, too. Not all at once, of course, but in some sort of steady trickle. The impact this has on nutrition and caloric intake is left as an exercise to the student.

It's not that I'm rich; quite the contrary, actually. But I understand that a coffee shop needs to be able to justify the opportunity cost of giving up a table, let alone the sort of comfortable table at which I often like to work.

I think what the coffee shop owners and employees like to see isn't me paying their wages; I can't afford to buy a latte every hour either financially or biologically. But what I can do is buy a latte when I come in, and maybe a few refills of drip coffee throughout the day, maybe a bagel and whatnot for lunch (money that would otherwise be spent anyway if I'm not near home). Oh, yes, and I tip pretty generously throughout it all, which keeps the employees that might otherwise look askance content--although, of course, that is not the only reason I do it.

I frequent a variety of local coffee shops with a range of attitudes toward laptop campers, although all of them tolerate laptop users, just some more begrudgingly than others. And yet, I'm one of their favourite customers, it seems, because I at least try to make it worthwhile for the shop to have me around, too.

Of course, my story here may not be universally applicable; I spend half my time in a college town, where people who colonise to study or work on a computer all day are universal and if you locked them out you'd simply alienate 90% of your customer base.

(Here's a hint: Don't open a coffee shop in a college town, or you will constantly struggle with this problem; there's just not a lot of table turnover, but you can't really tell them to move along when the sort of customer they are is a majority constituency.)

The other half is spent in Atlanta, equidistantly from two fairly major state universities. That imparts a vaguely similar quality upon the whole thing, and the local coffee shops are also unusually, uh, 'progressive' in Midtown.
Indeed.com's results for today (for me, at least) are all from this site. I spotted a job I wanted, jumped through 30 minutes of hoops setting up a mandatory profile, only to get bounced to a removed dice.com listing. Awesome.
I suppose I was wrong about the author's reasoning, but I still think my description applies to many people.

Personally, I think both camps have their problems. Academic people can be quite annoying when they talk about something like they know everything about it just because they've read some paper about it. On the other hand programmers knowing only one language and framework are equally limited in their view.