skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 8 levels of good deeds, as organized by Maimonides:

1. Giving begrudgingly.
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.
3. Giving after being asked.
4. Giving before being asked.
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity.
6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity.
7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity.
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant.

By continually adding books, Mildred Grady fulfilled both numbers 6 & 8. May her memory live on through her good deeds and the good deeds they spawned.
The title "Senior Software Engineer" means "we're worried about you leaving, but we don't want to pay you more, so we're going to give you a title which sounds better in order to make you feel appreciated".
"Instead, given your skills, time and money investment and other constraints, you must choose the hardest possible business."

I'm not so sure about this golden rule. A lot of overly complicated ideas that consumers will never grasp seem to fit what you're describing.

I'd argue it's the easy to grasp ideas that are the ones that go viral and become successful. DropBox comes to mind. Posterous and Mint are also pretty straight forward. I don't know that these businesses were "hardest" thier founders could have chosen.
Some things are objectively bad. This is one of them. Try google to see why.
The paper is available at:

http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf

This quote just about summarizes every post-apocalyptic movie I've ever seen.

"After this fixation of pure horizontal learning, occurring very approximately 12,000 time units from the start, the population completely loses most of its ability to track the environment, and, when the environment changes, mean fitness declines and the population drops (Fig. 2). When the population reaches very low levels, selection may return behavior towards the environmental optimum (as there are very few individuals in the population, and one who is incidentally blessed with suitable behavior, because of the error (σ) around the target behavior, can have many offspring and so change the mean behavior of the population)."
Restraint
So many people have undiscovered personality disorders or neuroses that they think are just "how life is." I wish that there was a "mental health check-up" that everyone, whether thinking themselves healthy or not, was encouraged to attend at long-but-regular intervals, similar to a dental- or eye-exam.
Except that different yardsticks of measurement are required for "owners", "investors", and "employees" since they, by definition, have different areas of responsibility, and economic alignments based on nearly dichotomous ROI models.

Total "compensation" should be based on salary relative to their areas of expertise cross-industry & the current strike price of any option grants relative to current valuations & vesting schedules.

Based on the article, it not at all clear that Facebook is doing any of this.

FWIW, those maxims apply to compensation strategies irregardless of company size, business model, or public/private status. I refer you to Warren Buffett's many communications on such matters over the years.

Additionally, if anyone had similar access to the wealth, privilege, and social contacts as Mr. Zukerberg did during their childhood & adolescence, they'd better damn well be changing the world.
This is generally true of all complex systems. If a social agent finds a very fit region of the search space, it pulls other agents towards it. If the region maintains fitness over a long period of time, the set of agents becomes homogeneous. Suddenly, a change to the environment alters the fitness function. The system collapses and repair is slow due to search now being random.

Long live Axelrod.
> There is nothing in either the Constitution or in the existing patent statutes that expressly allows courts to limit process or business method patents

Except that they basically didn't exist before the StateStreet case. The court has signaled that it may be willing to reconsider its previous ruling, so there is definitely hope.
BBCHD and DRM: A Response to Cory Doctorow
Make sure you read the comments from nevali (first comment) and Cory Doctorow (13th).
Actually that was his definition of wealth, quoted from Buckminster Fuller.
Pretty sure Atom doesn't support ECC memory. Running a server w/o ECC is a bad idea.
Tip for getting rid of desktop old stuff in the notification area
I was talking about taking an image from the camera, scaling it down and then uploading it as an PNG. How would you do this from within a webview?
The Agony Of Choice
To me, "software engineer" means you can come to a large, existing project, look at their open tickets and begin to attempt to fix the issues. "Senior software engineer" means you can design such a project, push the first commit and supervise it as it grows.

But what does it mean realistically? Probably exactly what Colin said.
Obviously, working on the right thing is the best choice. The problem is that knowing the right thing is probably a function of mental abilities of one sort or another, and you may be deficient in that area with respect to your competition, which is the point of the post. You can't control whether you're good at knowing what the right things to work on are (although you can get better at it, maybe).
Image recognition in what domain? Do you want to be able to look at a photo and determine what objects are represented, or do you want to be able to do OCR or do you want to filter biometric data or something else entirely?
A few years ago I thought about moving back to the east coast, and stayed with my brother outside of D.C. Since most everything went into storage, my development machine was a Toshiba Portege 3440 with a 12" 1920x1200 WUXGA screen. (Great machine, BTW)

I worked this way for about 2 or 3 months, and loved it. I got accustomed to switching desktops and console sessions and toggling about.

Now I use a Dell Lattitude with a 15" 1920x1200 screen, and a 24" 1920x1200 monitor attached. And I have my Windows and Mac boxen sharing a keyboard (Endurapro 104 "clacky" keyboard with built-in clit mouse) and 24" 1920x1200 monitor as well.

The second monitor has its advantages (I can keep a nice busy set of IRC channels always in view) but I still tend to work via desktop toggling. Increasing familiarity with screen (and now tmux) is playing a role as well.
The second monitor is useful indeed, I tried it for a couple of months, but to switch is too much work for my eyes. I guess what I should really try is to use a very big monitor, so that I can have for instance the xterms in one side, IRC in another place of the screen, and so on, all visible, with a goal: instead of a notification I can see what is happening in the other windows, and chances are I don't need to take any action at all.

Btw using an external monitor I lost the "portability" benefits of the macbook, and I'm used to work on the balcony when it's sunny :)

This poses another problem btw, the contrast is too low with the macbook display.
That's one hell of a story.
He was talking about factors under your control. So I guess you have to decide whether you think you can get significantly smarter, which I don't. You can learn more, but that takes time and should be considered part of working, of course. Even if you can get smarter, that would also presumably take work and the more of it you did the smarter you'd get. What we know for sure is that you can't just wake up today and say, hey, I'm going to make decisions that are twice as good as yesterday.

And if working smarter means things like automating tasks, that also doesn't quite make sense. Of course you should automate tasks. Working harder doesn't mean being stupid. It means you should spend more of your brain time working toward your goals. If you free up time by automating some stuff, that gives you more time to be working on (including automating) something else.
There are no differences in work responsibilities. The term is an artifact of HR and organizational structures that have little to do with making software.
Well, most of low-end 1U servers goes on non-ECC ram, and main problem is still HDD reliability.
What is new?
Venturebeat really is a shitty site. They regurgitate Mashable and TC's news
I'm interested in the contrast between Flickr and the portfolio sites. I believe (I may be mistaken) Flickr restrained itself in order to allow the photos to be the dominant visual element.

I understand why the portfolio sites are overly designed. It's a quick way to scream, "Hey, we're for designers!" It's more for designers learning from other designers than as a showcase to non-designers.

Flickr is more about the mass market consuming beautiful photos, so that is different. It's interesting that Virb (http://www.virb.com) aims kind of in the middle, and its design is kind of in the middle.
Perl does not enforce good practices, perl does not enforce nearly anything. Which means which is a good hackers tool (isn't this HN?), but probably not very suitable for your "people who don't know any better".
Cover of the book he originally lifted:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/y/frank-yerby/treasure-of-...
If this is an actual question (rather than snark), check out the link I gave below to the changelist: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.0/pod/perl5110delta....
Good question --

I'm interested in detecting objects in images. For example, whether or not a car is present in a photo.
I get surprising (to me) amount of stuff done on my 10" netbook (a $200 dell mini 10v) with vim and git, while the kids are asleep, though my "main" dev setup is a 18.4" laptop + a 24".
The problem is, that he lowers the bar, strongly encouraging the "management™"[1] to AAPLy the mushrooming[2] technique, which I believe they [did] do.

[1] imho the whole story is BS (because he was bound to bump into someone, if not when going to the bathroom). AAPL is one of the few public companies being openly secretive, and they are known to use [military grade, an HP heritage] security: you simply cannot clown around for long unwantedly.

[2] Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
These are not alternatives to working harder. These are strategies to make your efforts more efficient. If you outsource some work, there is other work you can be doing. Presumably your competition will be automating, outsourcing, and avoiding unnecessary work as well.

People can reach many types of goals with ease. This guy is talking about goals which require beating competition to achieve. If your goal is to compete in low latency market trading, and you aren't already extremely wealthy, you aren't going to be able to be competitive and live a life of leisure at the same time.
The story unwittingly demonstrates a case where zero-tolerance policies could have created frighteningly different results.

In some alternate universe, the story reads:

The librarian noticed Olly tucking the book under his jacket. Following school policy, she called the police. Olly spent the night in jail and was suspended from his school. Bitter and vengeful, he never went back. His street cred soared, and soon Olly was accepted into the local gang....
I think you('ll) enjoy the play:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_&_Guildenstern_...
Dear Twitter. I Want To Share My Revenue With You.
If you are on a mac you can check out a program called think. It blacks out the background and all other apps that are not being used but still gives you the ability to move toolbars and menus over to the second screen.

I don't know if there is a similar program for the win/lin world.
So the quality of tools is not important?

Anything that is Turing-complete will do?
Gender Balance on Social Networking sites
http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=10978
Leo LaPorte explains podcast economics: $350,000 expenses, $1.5 million rev
It's only hard to know where to begin because you're seriously expanding the topic. Let's take point 5:

"You are the ONLY vested participant in the game [...]"

The point of the post was that working harder is one of the few resources under your control for working toward a goal for which there is competition. Whether there are other vested participants is irrelevant to that point. Whether there are costs to your family is a quality-of-life choice and a moral choice, but doesn't say a single thing about whether working harder makes you more likely to achieve your goal.
Remote Pair Programming with Screen and Vim
How much of a business do you believe can be built around Twitter?

This is not to sound sarcastic or not. I made use of the Twitter API back in 2007 to deliver mobile content and RSS to SMS, but those were just features of an application and not a business that relies on Twitter.

Do you really believe the Twitter ecosystem is viable for business in the long term?
I'm not saying they're a good idea, but countering an anecdote with another isn't a very good way to affirm your point. I doubt letting everyone go who tries to shoplift a book from the library in hopes of them becoming characters more fit for a movie plot will do much good either.

That said, you still received my up-vote since it made me think more of zero-tolerance policies and reading books in general. I remember reading a story on the Kindle's popularity with women. A lot of women it interviewed said they enjoyed the literary anonymity the Kindle afforded them in public places, as they generally didn't feel comfortable reading romance and pulp novels in public places like the subway.

The article felt to be in similar vein; someone discovers something that catches their eye but feels shame in seeking it out. I guess what we really need to test are programs that expose youth to a wide variety of material and the freedom and anonymity to pursue those interests :).
See the idea can be simple (not overcomplicated), but the harder the implementation the better it is. Dropbox, Mint and Posterous are rather simple ideas, but I can guarantee those guys sat around for hours trying to figure how to implement what appears to be so simple to many.
Is CTR useless? Are marketers looking at the wrong metrics?
The problem with zero-tolerance is that it too often equates to zero-thought. It drives out space for humans to exercise good judgment. And since rules often replace judgment, I think they should be evaluated in the same way we evaluate judgment -- how do the rules fare at their worst [1]?

In any case, I edited to make the anecdotal nature clear. Better?

[1] It feels somehow more 'scientific' to point out that some rule works 99.9% of the time, and to thereby dismiss anecdotes as non-evidence (not that zero-tolerance even comes close to meeting this standard). But if a rule unjustly destroys the lives of 0.1% of people who interface with it, I still consider that a lousy rule.
That depends on which school you went to, but point taken. I've inserted the parentheses.
> If you are building a browser-based app you need to protect the credentials from prying eyes/code.

Isn't this the problem that oauth is intended to solve?
That makes good sense. It also helps cement a business relationship that would be much more solid than the loose structure in place right now.

After all, who will you complain to if one day twitter decides that tweetminer has to die. Better if you have a win/win and it costs them too if they shut you down.

These 'third party products' on top of other peoples infrastructure are a recent thing, and I have to admit I'm still getting used to it and not really comfortable with it.

A project like that should be called a 'feature', it's not an independent business by any definition, even if it does make money.
You're totally right. Now that I think about it, zero-tolerance always equates to zero-thought, as the point of zero-tolerance to create a shortcut through judgment and rules.
I think it's just fine, it exactly shows what's wrong with 0 tolerance.

One day driving along Hwy 17, rural Ontario I picked up a kid, about 17 years old. We talked for a while and it turned out that he'd been suspended/kicked out from school for some small time nonsense under the 0 tolerance policy.

He'd been well on his way to be a Canadian hockey player, #1 player in his school. Because of his 'example function' he was expelled. He was looking to find work in construction.

Now, arguably being a hockey player is not the same as being a judge, but it's a damn sight better from an income perspective than being a labourer. And it would have gotten him to finish his school, instead of hitch-hiking cross country to chase the buck.
The above was intended to be deadpan; my apologies if it was unclear that such was the case. My further apologies if it was clear, but it was just that unfunny.
> For example, Pixar holds a patent on Monte Carlo sampling, and has sued or threatened a number of companies that used any sort of randomization in their rendering algorithms.

Actually, Pixar has a patent on certain uses of randomization in rendering. In patent-speak, randomization is the mechanism and rendering is the result.

I mention patent-speak because patents are the use of mechanism to accomplish result.

Would you object to a patent on certain uses of a lever to close a gate? (Ignoring novelty issues - closing gates with levers is well known now, while using randomization in rendering was presumably new when Pixar did their thing.) In patent-speak, the lever is the mechanism while closing the gate is the result.

If not, then you're arguing that a lever as a mechanism is somehow different from randomization as a mechanism. If so, you're pretty much arguing against all patents (using mechanism to accomplish result).
Working harder does not mean being stupid. I don't understand why people keep pretending working harder is somehow how inversely related to the quality of your decisions. Your IQ stays the same, you just work harder.

Let's take your example. Working harder doesn't mean naively running 10 hours more a week. It means doing research on training systems, consulting with coaches, monitoring your diets, revising workout plans, etc. Having been involved with sports all my life, I can tell you that this stuff matters, you can always do more of it, and it's work.
Here's my list:

For a general introduction:

* "Digital Image Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods

* "Image Processing, Analysis, and Machine Vision" by Sonka, Hlavac, and Boyle

After you learn the basics, some more advanced and specialized books I'd recommend:

* "Morphological Image Analysis" by Soille.

* "Insight into Images" by Yoo (explains many of the algorithms in the ITK library).

I hesitate to recommend this book because it is so dated (1992), but I refer to "Computer and Robot Vision" by Haralick and Shapiro quite often.
Sorry, dude, I don't know why you're getting all the defensive responses in this forum. Your advice is obviously inarguably correct.

If you want to achieve goals that normally are only available to smarter and richer people, working harder is a factor that's always under your control.

Another factor under your control, and a little different, is focus. Commitment to a well-defined goal and persistence can take you a long way. Most people, even hard workers, get distracted and take detours.
I love how he figured out business people require financial incentives to work hard, while engineers just want interesting projects? Man sick of this "engineers don't want money" meme, we always get ripped off.
Nice blog post. I especially like the idea of the "mediocrity trap" that occurs when we realize that we can get B results by investing 20% of efforts but need to invest 80% of effort before we start getting to A work.
This was instrumental in getting help to tough problems over IRC when I was still learning the ropes. Screen is an amazing, amazing program.
Considering the value of Twitter was really created by all the third-party apps that use it, it is very possible that a model where third-party developers bring in the revenue isn't so far off from what may happen.
> That leaves 85% for the rest, which is mostly marketing (couldn't they cut that down?).

Marketing includes giving away free/discounted drugs, telling doctors when a drug works, and telling people that the problem that they have might be curable.

Which one do you want to cut?
Interesting to think that if you are a non-conformist your role in our civilization's survival is to evangelize your new behaviors while trying not to get yourself killed, imprisoned or banned.
Using Webkit severely limits you and makes your app look pretty crappy. Objective-C really isn't that hard, nor is getting up to speed with the SDK. This is a common situation in programming, where a framework is developed that appeals to people's desire not to bother learning yet another language, and yet another set of APIs. But it is almost always a mistake. It requires a little more effort, but in the end, learning how to use the right tools is the only way to make something really good.
Scaling, converting to a PNG, and uploading the resulting image is trivial in WebKit. As for accessing the camera hardware to take a picture, that requires an API from Apple, which I thought you implied existed. :)
More insight from Malcolm Gladwell. Check out his discussion of Outliers [http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html] too. Software entrepreneurs may find this interesting: "I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there's a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It's remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely."
> I made another point: that the bulk of pharmaceutical business may not be really useful, or at least not critical (cosmetics and such). Did you say I am wrong on this point as well?

Cosmetics? What cosmetics does Abbott make?

To the extent that the argument has any connection to reality, it's a combintation of irrelevant and wrong.

If you don't want to pay the costs of "cosmetics", don't buy them.

To the extent that there's any cross-subsidization in Pharma, it goes from the "non-essential but popular" to the critical. In other words, you've got it backwards.
The 80-20 rule in witch I trust is a bit different: any complex enough program takes 20% of the time to get to 80% (that's a working alpha doing most of the things it is supposed to do) and 80% of the effort to reach a stable status where it's ready for prime time.

Btw the only reason this rule works is because programmers tend to greatly underestimate the time that it takes to do bugs fixing, testing, coverage of corner cases, and so on.
I agree with the article for the most part but I think it's academic. Anyone who was willing to stop at 20% of their effort and "accept the B" isn't interested in being extraordinary. While anyone who wants to be extraordinary is going to put everything they've got into what they do regardless.

So the 80/20 rule is only really of use for those whose goal is to get by on the "mediocre trap" level

(which isn't necessarily a bad thing btw. A lot of people are happy to be average at their job and put their focus on personal life and without those average folks the extraordinary wouldn't be so special)
I guess "wrong" is the new "right, but with a corollary" -- the 80-20 rule also implies that the last 20% takes 80% of the effort.
For VS2008 it's mostly the build engine, design surfaces / property inspectors, and various wrapper classes to permit managed code to interact with the older COM-oriented core.

I did a dump of managed heap on VS2008 with a managed solution loaded. These are the Microsoft.* classes which were instantiated at the time of the dump:

http://pastebin.com/f3010df3e
Palm reignites iTunes Sync war with new WebOS update
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