skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes... I would expect a pragmatic scientist to be pragmatic about science, and a pragmatic politician to be pragmatic about public issues, ie politics.

I fail to see how Columbus holds any credence in the conversation, Columbus sought the favors of royalty for the purpose of creating wealth for royalty, the public interest was of no concern and never was to him. Nobody may think of Columbus as 'the man who failed to discover a westerly trade route to India', however some may think of him as foreshadowing the European colonization of the "New World"- thereby destroying and exploiting many indigenous people, or others may think of Columbus as the man who brought Syphilis back to Europe. Those would be pragmatic historical perspectives of Columbus...
Yeah, disappointing article -- big old piece of software A sucks in the ways that big old pieces of software tend to.
Man I would have loved that camp.. :)
So potentially you could use an iPod to fix the damage caused by an iPod.

Personally I choose not to use earbuds or even earphones because the dB level produced in the ear is far too high. I prefer headphones (on ear or over ear) with noise cancelling, I barely need the volume up to get the feeling of loudness as they better produce bass noises and the most damage done to our ears is typically by high-frequency noise that most people don't desire when listening to music.
Here's my rule for estimating time: figure out how long it should take and multiply that by 3.

This has worked out to be in the right area about 80% of the time. I have one particular client where I bumped the multiplier up to 4 because of how often they ask for major changes halfway through the work.
I also use a map of Atlanta. When I'm in Atlanta. But I don't need to store it with my salt and pepper or underneath my TiVo remote.

Cruft isn't simply a measure of menu volume, and IMO it's not necessarily about removing tools.

It's about failing to maintain an updated, sound, and sane set of affordances for doing the most important or common work with the least friction possible. To me fixing cruft means making decisions about arranging things well and moving anything that would work better (or less intrusively) someplace else. And, yeah. Removing stuff that simply shouldn't be included. That's the kinds of decisions good developers make.

For me, cleaning up PShop would be like making sure that map of Atlanta is in the right part of the garage. Alongside all the other maps that I "actually use." But which I certainly don't "actually use" quite as much as the salt and pepper or the TiVo remote.

Those? I want those right where I can get to them.
The major problem with Flickr's scheme is both academically trivial and something that Colin didn't (in any public forum) notice. Which says nothing about Colin, who is very smart, and everything about how ridiculous it is to try to build secure systems that depend on basic crypto primitives.
You need sustainability first then worry about redundancy. One requires a complete revolution in human thought and behaviour. The other, expansion and technical problem solving, comes naturally.
But that quote was, at least, funny!
One meta-observation: given the emphasis in Valley (and YC) startups on "rockstar hackers", I am surprised that most replies so far tend to favor candidate B.

Maybe it's because the PST workday is just starting and the advice so far is more east-coast :p
This reminds me a lot of the problem the amazon s3api v1 suffered from. (It's referenced in this paper.) Colin Percival did a wonderful job alerting amazon and getting it fixed. Reading the paper it looks like they tried to alert people, but they didn't go into detail.

You can read more about the amazon problem at Colin's blog.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-12-18-AWS-signature-ver...
Well, it is open source, but there's definitely a question mark as to how many people will be paid to work on it, and what direction they'll be taking it.
Sounds interesting, but looking at http://www.restoredhearing.ie/ it seems they're running some kind of pay as you go system. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I guess any therapy is like that, but I'd like to see clinical trials for this, assuming their idea has validity.

I suffer from chronic tinnitus myself, and I would be a changed man if I could get the ringing to go away. But I'm also pretty skeptical of any treatments that claim to reduce ringing, considering everything I've heard from doctors is, "you're stuck with it."
This is a good paper with an empirical example of a molecule level ratchet effect, but the message here is way overstated. It is definitely NOT the case that evolution "can't go in reverse" as a categorical statement.

1) First and most importantly, if selection pressure was reversed in sexually reproducing species, it is (a) unlikely that the ancestral allele will ever completely die out and (b) also unlikely that a sequence of recombinational events could not reconstruct the ancestral allele.

So reversed selection pressure would lead to an increase in frequency of the ancestral allele. Doesn't require the (much higher) level of difficulty of pushing six consecutive mutations to fixation in a single protein.

In bacteria or archaea it would be even easier -- just pick up the ancestral allele through horizontal gene transfer.

2) Second, even discounting sexual reproduction for now, given strong enough reversed selection pressure, either the species would go extinct or (more likely) some other protein would have been co-opted into pursuing the new function. That is, this road might be blocked but another one will almost certainly be open.

3) Third, this particular example has an accumulation of several mutations that act as blockades in fitness space.
But this is far from generally proven. You'd need to do some serious correlation of activity with multiple sequence/structure alignments across large families of proteins to show this ratchet effect.

4) Finally, the whole concept of QSAR (quantitative structure activity relationships) is based on the idea that activity-structure relationships tend to be more continuous than not, in the sense that small changes usually have small effects on activity [though in dealing with adding atoms to molecules, you're talking about irreducibly large step sizes in different dimensions]).

And continuous alterations in activity usually imply reversibility as a function of many small steps.
Thanks for the feedback. I think I have a little too much material in the talk for the format. The same slides took me 2 hours to get through at a user group meeting that night. My next goal is to cut the talk in half. Maybe 2 talks, one on the API, and another on the use cases.
> I would pass on them both.

What? C'mon. You gotta give people a chance. Not everyone is going to fit into your expectations of the perfect employee.
Not an obscene racist after all: 4 flagged for Facebook fake
Works for me, I'm in the UK.
Good work from Bruce Leidl's team at Netifera (Bruce is brl, a regular).

Long story short: with all the mainstream hash algorithms, if you know the length of a hashed message, you can take its hash and from it synthesize the hashes of messages with arbitrary suffixes. It's called a message extension attack.

A really common pattern in hand-rolled authentication schemes is to hash a message needing authentication with a secret key, and then send the message and the hash. If you know the secret key, you can verify the message. The secret key doesn't need to be sent at all.

If your scheme is vulnerable to message extension attacks, attackers can mint arbitrary messages with valid authentication by taking an already-authenticated message and extending it to cover a suffix that changes the meaning of the legitimate message. It's a game-over flaw.

Colin Percival noticed a related (but less serious) flaw in Amazon's AWS authentication scheme. At the time, people asked if he'd looked at Flickr's scheme. He had, but not very closely. Colin's flaw was in canonicalization of messages, which is a more obscure attack (by a little bit) than message extension, which is is described in the Wikipedia under "Cryptographic Hash Function". Colin didn't flag this flaw.

Which just shows to go you: crypto primitives are radioactive. You are not going to get them right. Use high-level interfaces like GPG or SSL or cryptlib, or design your app not to need crypto.
Why do think A will quit? You dint keep him happy? Its a tendency of great hackers to quit if they throw crap at them. Remember programmers never quit when they are happy.
Ask HN: Check out my little app
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...

'Never say "Maybe, I can’t tell." If you can’t tell, that means No Hire. It’s really easier than you’d think. Can’t tell? Just say no! If you are on the fence, that means No Hire. Never say, "Well, Hire, I guess, but I’m a little bit concerned about…" That’s a No Hire as well. Mechanically translate all the waffling to "no" and you’ll be all right.' -- from 'The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing' (linked above)
Well, let us put it straight! GitHub uses MySQL. In fact, these guys maybe helped install the new GitHub at Rackspace's data center, but their choices are irrelevant to GitHub choice of platform (the title is bit misleading though).

AS for the subject itself, I guess, if you are more comfort with either one of them, this one would be the best choice for you.

If you never used anyone of them and wish to start a new project which requires an RDBMS, you may search for other comparisons at Google (as well as look at here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184328)

Most important, no matter what language you are using, make sure to use a database abstraction library, so to make it easy to switch between them in case you are not satisfied with your first choice.
Grandes ideias da Internet surgem sem alarde
a linux distribution inspired by Chrome OS, that's all...
I built this in about two hours. The phone number is provided by dropio, but I plan to switch to twilio in the near future. I built it out of boredom, so constructive criticism, even if harsh, is welcomw :)
The Speech if Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon
It is interesting that people are so upset about being "naked" on a screen somewhere. I find it much more troubling for someone to root through my consciously-collected possessions. That says a lot more about who I am than my standard-issue body that is pretty much the same as 3 billion other people's.

Yet nobody has any problems with that -- only being "naked".
Very nice. Services like this should be considered a basic human right :)
Treatment For Prostate Cancer - Which One is the Best
Google Chrome Frame — technical notes
Make your start page clean
Oracle can't do much except at worst, drag a stifling cloud over its future for as long as possible. If they actually stop or stall it, some fork will grab its momentum and run.
Disagreement is healthy and appropriate. How else could we discuss this.

My post is based upon my own experience. I have seen enough instances of programmer behavior to appreciate patterns. They may not be fair or conventional, but they are most definitely my experience.

Two of the biggest things I've observed are...

1. Senior people usually have set practices that work very well for them. That's probably how they became so senior. Unless those practices mesh well with your organization, there will always be uncomfortable potential energy, which can quite possibly have a negative outcome.

2. I have never met anyone (myself included) that performs anywhere near their potential. This applies to everyone, not just programmers. There are as many reasons for this shortfall as there are people, but the biggest ones I've seen are the belief they can't be better and the belief that "speedbumps" are "roadblocks". I have hired many Candidate B's and all have become better, often much better by improving their environment, removing obstacles, providing better tools, and most of all, getting them to believe that they could become excellent. From OP's original question, I believe that this can be exactly the outcome for Candidate B.
Ask HN: My Bio on Ex-Employer's Website
I resigned from my job a few weeks ago but my employer has kept my name and profile on their website. They have also kept my name set up on their voice prompt system. Based on my experiences at the company when other employees had left, I assume that they have kept these two indicators of my presence in place so that incoming requests for myself can be "funneled" to the right person to alert them of my departure and make sure their requests are taken care of.

On one hand, I can understand why they would want to do that. On the other, I don't feel like they should still be "pretending" that I work there and using my name and associated reputation for their own benefit.

What is the "grace period" for this sort of thing, before I request that they do something about it?
Here's another great reason not to lower your rate:

If your client base is large companies, all of which have professional purchasing departments, you will never get your rate back. Rate hike discussions are zero-sum negotiations in which either you continue working at your original rate or the purchaser takes a job performance hit. It may be easier to acquire new customers at a higher rate than it will be to jack the rate up on an existing customer. And eventually, you're going to run across clients you really want, under competitive RFP situations, where they'll demand "most favored" rates --- so that 60% "entry" rate is now your permanent negotiating floor, no matter where your industry goes.

Discount with project scope, or with deliverable depth, or with long-term support, or with scheduling flexibility. Some of these non-financial perks are more valuable to your clients than the monopoly money they're spending out of IT budget --- all the more reason not to send an "amateur" signal with a below-market rate. Don't discount with rate if you can possibly avoid it.
Putting quotes around the name doesn't make this title less misleading.

This is not related to the official Chrome OS in ANY way. The key sentence here is "this early stab at a fan-made Chrome OS".
It's nice. It's not initially clear exactly what it is or how to use it, but I think that would be rather simple to fix. Keep it simple when you start working on the visual front.
Stripped-down linux distro with easy access to Google desktop and web apps. Maybe useful to set up grandma's cheap Linux machine?
it's cool (love the name), but I would just use drop.io for conference calls, since I use it for other stuff.

what i would LOVE though, is a free, simple, web-based screensharing tool.

i've used skype but it requires, obviously, installing their software. drop.io comes close, but only allows me to share content already on a drop. and tinychat sounds cool, but isnt free.

thoughts?
I know a lot of people who've gotten insurance with Techinsurance, too.
Yeah, grandma loves Alpha-quality distributions
Yeah, unfortunately it's very hard to provide praise, or technical challenges, with vesting:

"Great job! Is what I'll tell you about the project you just finished. But only if you're still here in two years!"

The nice thing about money is that it's so easy to fiddle around with it to get the incentives right. But I agree -- this doesn't work if the person you're dealing with isn't strongly motivated by money.
As far as I can see, they take about 3 pounds to try it out.

If there is a 10% change that it will work, will 30 pounds be worth it to you?
My first hesitation was... will this work? I would explain what service it is using, or something to inspire some more confidence. Nice idea though and good name.
Seems like not many know about sql_mode in MySQL :(
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-sql-mode.html
You don't have your e-mail listed in your profile though.
Thanks for the pointers.

Looks like the linux/ubuntu equivalent may be 'pfmon', also not enabled in the stock kernel.

I think this is the relevant project page: http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/man/pfm_get_cycle_event.html
1. have the conference number generated be of lesser digits unless you are expecting and ready to support 10^9 simultaneous conferences. Having something like 4 digits should suffice.

2. Not sure how serious you are about this app, but the next features I would want would be to allow users to register and permanently reserve pin numbers. This will ensure I can set up numbers and put them into my meeting invite for that meeting next week
The irony is rich.
Again, good points! But you really have to keep in mind that there are more size customers out there than 'large companies', plenty of companies that require IT services are in the medium bracket (say 10 to 100 employees).

They're also usually quite price conscious, especially in the current climate. Even the bigger ones are looking at their budgets with a pretty sharp eye.

(depending on the market you're active in), you can wonder though, do you want or not want the customers that are shopping around based on price only ?

Food for thought.
Yep.

But it will be done in a couple of days (2 days == couple), I guarantee it.
There's one here in Melbourne already, out of 15 in the world. http://www.ondemandbooks.com/our_ebm_locations.htm We usually get cool stuff last.

$US100,000 is a long way from mass-market, but we already have cheap home/office colour laser printers, so it seems conceivable. Imagine one in every library, kinkos, post office, video store... very science fiction.
Ask HN: Checkout my CS open learning website
I have organized computer science videos from open courseware and a couple of other sources, as structured courses. Each topic page also uses Disqus to let people leave comments and ask questions.

I have several courses (currently 11) such as Algorithms, SICP, Machine Learning, Data Structures, etc.

I am working on creating timelines for existing videos, and will also add new courses in time to come.

The website is hosted at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net

What features can I add, which will help people in the learning process?

If you are aware of video courses which are not included, please point me to them as well.
Duct tape context: A tale of two rewrites
Re-enlisting the Data General
Maybe the quotes do nothing to make the title "less misleading" but the word "Unofficial" was a big hint for me.
Yeah, and you need to hover over one of the comments for it to work, too.
It's not even a working "Chrome OS". It is a fan based unstable linux distro revolving around the Chrome browser. One might as well make chrome and open office the only two apps on his or her computer and call it chrome OS....
Yes they are:

http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/about_iplayer/lic...
This isn't very good. gOs at least looks nice and is simpler.
http://www.thinkgos.com/gos/index.html

Doesn't have chrome but then again chrome on linux is fairly unstable for normal use. That said I use it normally :)
I disagree that only 4 digits should suffice, after all, that means that once there are 10,000 simultaneous conferences going you can basically just try pins at random and see whose huddle you drop in to. And with less conferences the chances would still be pretty good, just try a couple of times.

The pin is the only thing between an outsider and your conference. (assuming the phone number is the same, which seems to be the case right now).
There is a big difference between your consulting rate and the cost to a customer to get job X done. I'm not saying a scheduling system for your local dentists office needs to be a six-figure job; I'm saying, pull the right levers to get the number where it needs to be. Specifically:

* You can make 24/7 support a line-item premium service.

* You can make support after a 2-week "acceptance" period a line-item premium service.

* You can have your basic rate include a 6-week window for delivery, at your shop's discretion, and make a more predictable delivery date a line-item premium service.

* You can have formal typeset documentation be a line-item premium service.

* You can have access to improvements and feature requests incur a full consulting dev cycle on your basic rate, and offer a line-item premium service to do point- and major- release updates for N years.

* You can staff projects with timelines that allow you to juggle 3-4 projects for different clients simultaneously (even if you do them serially, you preserve the scheduling flex to deliver them all at once), and offer a line-item premium to get a 100% or 200% improvement in time frame.

* In bare-knuckle negotiation with a client who is just being a good businessperson and determined to get the lowest rate possible, you can strip off features from their requirements, down to the minimum they could conceivably accept and still call the project a business win, and negotiate over features instead of rate.

If you do all of these things, you're rustproofing. But if you're not prepared to do any of them, your only lever is going to be your consulting rate, and the dynamics of the freelancing market are going to tend to drive your rate down over the medium term.
You can set the expiration time to 1 year after last view, so it would be pretty permanent.
How is it better than http://www.logmein.com that is also free ?
I think Lightroom is good because they were able to start from scratch (kinda like how MM said in the article). The problem with their other flagship apps is that they have been around for so long that they've accumulated so much stuff.

Additionally, Adobe really doesn't have any pressing need to change. I don't know the specific numbers, but I'm pretty sure GIMP isn't even considered a competitor by them.
I did add that information at the "learn more" link, but I will try to make it more apparent.
Where is the control group?

They seem to have tested this cure for temporary Tinnitus. But I can easily see this being a placebo effect. Since this was a temporary condition they were trying to alleviate, would it have gone down to the same degree just from waiting?
do you think Accountants sit on forums and blogs all day and say "there are two kinds of Accountants in the world..." or is this something unique to software people?

I think almost every profession gets together and starts a conversation "There are two kinds of ___ in the world," however nearly all of the others are introducing a self-deprecating joke whereas programmers seem oblivious to the ridiculousness of trying to classify such complex activities, teams, and people on such simple lines with so few discriminants.
The rising power of Zero Hedge
http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net -- clickable link.

I would really work on the design. It looks very immature and I would immediately dismiss it as a fake site or wouldn't invest much time in it. It just looks like a bunch of exported Word documents.

Also, use UL's and LI's for the list of topics rather than tables.

You could easily re-set everything back up as a Wordpress site and get some great themes for free (or very inexpensively) and it would immediately add a lot more features.

Its a good idea though, and I do appreciate the work to bring all those videos together.
My personal experience suggests otherwise. I've been harrassed in real-life by someone to whom I made an inoffensive and passing remark. For some reason they then followed me spouting obscenities.

I suggest you simply haven't (yet!) had a bad experience, and I think you're possibly unqualified to suggest they never happen.
New York Meetup - Venture Hacks
If the web app firewall is part of the network I control, I still have to pay all costs associated with "bad" communication with it. If it's not part of the network I control, then presumably I still have to pay something to use it, and moreover I can't trust it, so I have to duplicate all checks in my application anyway. (All this even if we grant the implausible claim that the web app firewall can reliably stop a useful set of attacks.) Where's the savings?