skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Graphing Calculator Story.mp4
54:26 - 3 years ago goog://

I find the story to be just the opposite: such behaviour of The Corporation is not motivating at all, in the productive sense. It is rather motivating to do something completely different from productive coding/work.
He's talking about the behavior of the employees who made the program.
this is great. better than forcing a refresh every x seconds (which gets irritating VERY quicky).
In countries like the U.S. with rigid building codes, it could take quite a lot of work to turn a storage locker into something that you could (legally) rent as living space.
Video interview of sequoia and Y Combinator
Okay. Tim. I understand why you're mad about the iPhone development situation. I would like to offer you, however, the following points to give you a teensy bit of perspective:

* 99.9% of all applications submitted are approved without controversy.

* The App Store is still new. It's slightly more than a year old. Therefore, it's still got glitches in its processes, very obviously.

* For something so young, it's exploded in use. Two billion app downloads in just over a year? That's insane. That's so insane I doubt anybody can quite process it mentally.

* Therefore, every small error in Apple's process has been magnified to the point it looks like a gaping wound.

* Apple is certainly working on this, and putting a lot of effort into it.

* Apple won't TELL you they're working on this until they've already come up with what they believe is an iron solution, because Apple doesn't like admitting their ideas don't spring fully-grown from the head of Zeus.

* Apple's got an amazing track record, and so it's logical to think that within a year or two they will figure out how to suck a lot less. That's a reasonable amount of time to give them.

* No excuse about "I can't make a living reliably until they fix this", because anybody insane enough to try and make a living from a brand-new piece of software ought to at least know the risks they made.
Agreed - the ruling totalitarian government would be more accurate.
Very spectacular but the normal Beijing people were kept well away from the parade. Like many things it does this display demonstrates the weakness of the regime rather than the strength. It needs such a display to attempt to show to its people (and in a smaller part to the world) that the Communist party is powerful and everlasting. That the Communist party brings great face to China through power and prosperity.

China is on the edge of the precipice. Especially with this recent economic turmoil. While they live in an authoritarian society, Chinese people are not sheep. There are far too many have nots and the memory of standing up and deposing the government is still in many peoples minds.
Ask HN: Image recognition books and resources
I'm interested in learning some basic image recognition and analysis techniques. The ideal resource would be one that starts from scratch and includes lots of examples and code.

There are several expensive books on Amazon and the web turns up plenty of technical papers, but I'm not sure where to begin.

Any recommendations?
I"m sorry, I don't buy the "lone lunatic" theory. Its a very interesting debate as to whether change at the amount and rate China went through over the past 120 or so years could have occurred without such cost to human life. I like to believe societies even this large can change for the better without so much bloodshed. But no society to date has shown it is capable of behaving with such peace and rationality. This is not pulling excuses for Mao or anyone else.

Icons "morph". I don't like the new Chinese money. I think the old bank notes were beautiful and representative of their recent history. China has decided to use Mao on their bank notes and as such has committed to protect his image as being a man of positive change and ignoring or excusing the brutality.
You don't really provide any proof to back up your assertions.

What makes this statement true?

> Perl is by far the worst widely used language that I have ever seen.
Wonder how long it will be before Hacker News is blocked in China....
Boy Lifts Book; Librarian Changes Boy's Life
RedHat attempting to get rid of copyright in the US.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/10/red-hat-bilski-brief-says-software-patents-stifle-innovation.ars<p>Looks like RedHat is trying to get rid of copyright... And if I had to place money on why, it is to get rid of GNU and thus make RedHat Linux the only way to get their Linux Distribution, no more CentOS (maybe even no Fedora).
Did you see the headings on those pages? "Ah, paperwork."
"Ready, Set, Go." Details like that fascinate me. It suggests that even when making a document that very few people see, Apple sweats the small details.

Also, it's not branded paperwork. It's well-designed paperwork. There's a difference, though I suppose if you're the sort of person who still thinks a Mac is just a "branded computer" we'll have to disagree here.

Also also, I'm going to rant a second at you, because Apple is not brand-centric. I've got a Samsung phone that uses AT&T. The word Samsung appears three times on the phone's hardware, the word AT&T twice. When I open the phone, the AT&T logo is on the front screen and the back screen, and then it remains in the top bar no matter what I do. THAT'S branding for you. It's desperate, ugly branding. Meanwhile, if I total up ALL the Apple products I have with me, and that's a power cord, a laptop, an iPod touch, and an iPod cord, the Apple logo appears a total of three times, once a product; the name Apple appears a total of three times, once a product; I see the Apple logo briefly when I start up my Macbook Pro, but not when I open my iPod touch.

Mac products are very not branded, compared to their competitors' products. The thing is, Apple's brand has a reputation, unlike Samsung/Motorola/Nokia or Dell/HP, and so when you see an Apple logo it means something. When you see a Windows logo plastered on the front of your laptop you don't call it "brand-centric" because nobody cares about the Windows brand. So when people complain about Apple's logo being ubiquitous on their product, I scoff, because the complaint's really that Apple made stuff good enough that people recognize the name Apple over their competitors.
I appreciate what you're saying. I was a big Perl fan, working with it almost daily from 1996-2004, and I still wouldn't strongly disagree with your first sentence :)

The thing is, it's like complaining that duct tape is poorly used.. which is often true, but duct tape still rules ;-) Perl has more than its fair share of problems but it has bound a lot of the Web together over the years. (Oh, and more recently there are some really clean, well structured Perl projects out there, but.. too little too late IMHO.)
Copyright != Patents.

You seem to have a few things mixed up, GNU software exists by the grace of copyright, and copyright isn't going anywhere, at least not for the foreseeable future, even though plenty of industries that base their revenue streams on copyright are going to have to rethink their business models because of the ease with which copyright infringement can be done.

Software patents are a way to lock other people out from doing the same thing that you are doing using software only, it is a fairly recent and extremely misguided (imo) extension of the patent system.
This makes sense. Here's the four I got from you:

1. History is fairly inconsistent.

2. The Nazis were across-the-board evil, whereas the Communists at least pretended to have some decent intentions.

3. The big one which makes sense - the governments and descendants of the fascist areas owned up to what they did and denounced it. Most places don't.

4. Finally, no real theatrics or drama at the end. Communism just slowly eroded and died, there were no cities sacked or surrenders signed.

Good points: #3 was the biggest one I hadn't considered enough.

That said, I've traveled around the world some, have friends who had parents in the Communist Party, and have an older acquaintance whose family were Polish resistance fighters to the Nazis later turned black marketers/Polish underground.

Pretty much everyone with exposure to Communism thinks it was a pretty awful thing, on pretty much all levels.

Berlin's got to be the most obvious example: You can walk through old, pre-WWII Berlin neighborhoods (beautiful), Allied post-WWII Berlin neighborhoods (pretty nice), and Soviet post-WWII neighborhoods (very ugly, foreboding, and dreadful aside from what the citizens have made of it recently). It's a pretty incredible contrast.

But the way you outlined it makes sense - great points, and thanks for shedding some light.
Question: do you use horizontal or vertical monitors? I've gotten so used to vertical for code and for web pages I'm developing with Firebug that I can't imagine preferring horizontal for writing code. But I've seen few others running that way. Am I crazy?

I use 4 monitors. The 4th one is great for not having to manage IM window positions or look at them when I'm working, since it's outside my normal visual focus, while letting people still contact me asynchronously for things they need from me.
There are at least three alternatives to working harder: automate the work, outsource it, and elect not to do it at all. These are often better choices, since not all work adds equal amount of value (and much work subtracts value).

I'm working on a blog post about this subject, as "longer hours is a proxy for productivity" is the most pathological thing I have seen in my career as a Japanese salaryman.
Why the 80-20 Rule is Wrong
One really big one works better than two small ones.
What? No comments. This is cool -- but why would I do it instead of some kind of VPS?
Synergy sounds like xdmx ?
This is not right. Work in a manner that the work you are doing can be spun off and will continue to work on its own, leaving you free to do something new that will build on top of that.
Can Anyone Actually Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News?
What seems to have died is the dream of any kind of useful generalized intelligence

Ever read Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and "The Language Instinct"? He makes good arguments that the human brain doesn't have "generalized intelligence", it has a lot of specific modules, and is less like a single organ for thinking, more like a system of organs that work together.

Ever considered that progress in "generalised" AI may come about when there are enough "specific" AI modules developed that can be joined up?
So, in the 4-8 million years since H. sapiens began to diverge from what would become chimpanzees and gorillas, we gained the ability to walk and run, use tools, and use language. The females of our species stopped having estrus, the males' penises got bigger, we lost an amazing amount of hair, gained a fair bit of height, domesticated a bunch of animals and crops, and started the long process of irreversibly modifying our environment.

Despite this massive divergence from a common genetic ancestor almost 20-40 times longer ago than our species has even existed, folks still want to base what it means to be a human on what it means to be a gorilla or a chimpanzee.

To make an easier point: do you think you could be typing on a keyboard designed and manufactured by humans using a computer designed and manufactured by humans which communicates with other computers using protocols designed, implemented, agreed upon, and re-implemented by humans in order to use a service provided by a human so that humans could meet and talk about a tiny slice of the things humans meet and talk about if humans weren't embarrassingly social and cooperative?
IN the UK, it's just not an issue that you think about. Your NHS cover is unaffected by who, if anyone, employs you.
I'm not any sort of expert on the neural network literature but these were some papers in the last three years that caught my eye, Yann LeCun also does work on neural nets, but I haven't been all that impressed by his results. One of the main advances has been ways of developing 'deep' architectures with multiple layers rather than the traditional shallow neural networks (arguably the SVM, for instance, is actually a very cleverly trained single layer neural network)

Here's a Geoffrey Hinton paper on training deep belief networks:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/ncfast.pdf

Here's some stuff from Andrew Ng's group:
This paper shows how his deep belief network was able to 'learn' in an unsupervised manner certain plausible image primitives
http://robotics.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/nips07-sparsedeepbe...
This won a best paper award (application paper) and its about fast ways of building a deep belief network:
http://robotics.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml09-Convolutiona...
0, you unsensitive clod, it's a laptop!
Nearly the whole thing. Visual Studio 2010 even goes as far as to use WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) - a GUI layer entirely written in managed code.

Of course, satellite dll's & exe tools aren't all written in managed code. It's silly to re-write everything. But the main Visual Studio application has been at least partially managed since the Visual Studio 2002 days.

P.S. I don't work for MS, but I do know this for a fact.
The Talent Myth: How rank and fire destroyed Enron
In absence of a theist point of view, no credible moral criticism of Mao is possible. Mao was determinedly and consciously a monster, per his self assigned civilization imperative to achieve the shared goal (of the Chinese intellectual elite) to unshackle China from Chinese history and historic mindset.

The bitter irony lost on the swept away former comrades of the helmsman was his violent intent to show the paucity of the convictions of the intellectual class (which he amply demonstrated in the gruesome display of the Great Leap Forward).

Today, China is a nation completely denuded of ideological inclinations in its ruling classes. China is again restored to her former (power centric) social structures, having traded (empty) Confucianist morals with (equally empty) koanic musings of the CCP chairman (e.g. Three Represents), and fully equipped to function in the modern world. That is Mao's achievement.

I am not a fan of Chairman Meow, but I consider him the most honest of the revolutionary/reformist monsters. At least he didn't b.s. about his self appraisal as the new god for his people. A positive consideration of Mao may find a parallel in the fictional character of the Worm-God Leto in Frank Herbert's Dune.
How 11 Organizations Use Games to Promote Learning
I've just submitted "The Talent Myth", a great analysis of how rank and fire contributed to Enron's demise:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15668431/601TalentMyth
IBM to launch GMail rival
The dynamics at work in a typical IT shop are different.

Indian IT industry does not depend on "programming geniuses". getting their shit done by the day it was promised is more important for them, because the client will not pay for "indian outsourced guy" for having a moment of programming epiphany.

Of course, this is not just to blame the customer.. Most Indian IT Managers still believe in Taylor's "scientific" management methods.. So, whoever is "seen" working 10 hours to solve a problem will earn a brownie point.

note: Edited for clarity
As noted above, I meant forking in the "fork a project" sense, not the fork(2) call.

I'm being a bit nitpicky, though, so I'm going to let it go.
I thought the hourly hotels in Japan were "love hotels", due to lack of space available for privacy?
I can't wait for 5.88.
Why? It's a fact that Bush was very unpopular internationally.

It's not a political statement, it's a historical fact.
Kind of frighteningly, it's now back up in it's original form, ready to take your money again.
Although "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" is a pretty terrible book, I liked his definition of "rich": how long can you live your life without working. (Of course, a more precise definition would need to factor in standard of living)
> Why promote it here?

Why expect the world to conform to your point of view?

Your post might have been useful if you had taken the time to list concrete things about Perl that you object to. As it stands, you just whine that someone posted something you don't like. That's pretty silly.
You and Rick are incorrect. The pure research part is, as stated, a small part of the costs, but 2/3 of that amount is not dedicated to patent applications, and of the remainder the bulk of it is taken up by the costs of testing. Marketing is a large part of the costs, but it is not the largest component.

> I may be wrong on each point,

You are.
2, but I really only use one. The other is for email, IM, music or TV or something.
Do you care? If so, why?
Both. I have two horizontal and two vertical (from left to right: V, V, H, H). The last horizontal I use mostly for IM windows, comparing versions of a page in the browser, etc. Sort of like my monitor "scratch paper" -- I could do without this one if need be.

The two vertical make it easy to compare code and work on two files side by side. The first horizontal is great for checking UI work in the browser.
I had one of the 30" ones at google, and I preferred it horizontal because I could get about four 80-column terminals across it with decent fonts. Maybe two vertical 24" monitors would be nice, but I can't imagine trying to tilt my head that far to see both ends of my code. In either case, if you need to look at more than 30 lines of code at a time, you're probably already in trouble.
synergy is one of those apps I can't live without
It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing

... and have a team of slaves or servants doing everything else.

I'm not picking on Jefferson. It's worth remembering that most such famously productive historical figures were of a class that never had to cook anything, clean anything, plant anything, etc., and didn't even raise their own children. That's got to free up some time.
The cloud is a powder keg
The fact that Perl is so unfashionable and yet still far more prevalent than the trendy Ruby and Python (which are also good languages - I am no partisan) should tell you that it is not a bad language. I does however enable bad programming in a way that other languages do not.
In theory I agree and a few years ago this were exactly my words. Now look at the successful web sites and acquisitions of the latest years and tell me if you think there is a match.
Continuous Deployment, Minimum Viable Products & the 5 Whys: A Podcast
While I appreciate the article, it's somewhat hard to take the author seriously when he begins by angrily pointing out that it's impossible for pilots to adjust air flow within an airplane, and then goes on to describe all the ways in which pilots can adjust air flow within an airplane.
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?

Anyway, I am quite ignorant. Do you have any references I could read so I have a better understanding of the problem? Thank you.
The difference is that source code is the recipe, not the steel. When a company "dies", their trade secrets aren't destroyed, but rather left laying out in the open for anyone to find.
Although this is HN and we should not discuss politics, just a few points.

Firstly, the Nazis may have been bad – but the treatment of post-WW1 Germany was bad and a causing factor of WW2.

The Treaty of Versailles ensured in effect that there will be another war in Europe. I think that Germany was uniquely the only country in the 20th century to receive such a hard “punishment” (both economically and culturally) when they lost the First World War.
Let's be clear. My comment was made in jest at this subject appearing on HN and not at Apple. This was in no way suggested.

----

Branding is much more than logo and where it is placed on an object. It is an entire experience targeting the consumer, employee and stake holder. It is entirely about product recognition and generating brand equity, which in turn provides real value to the business. Apple are masters of this. These documents are sample proof of this at work.
It is all part of the Brand Experience.

Apple are about as brand-centric as it gets. They are a case study on how to manage a brand properly.

Perhaps next time you should familiarize yourself with the concept of branding and all it entails before you direct an unnecessary and ill advised rant (your words) at me or anyone else. Familiarity of the individuals background and knowledge of the subject might also be a good idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand

I wrote this on my 24" iMac by the way.
And he's talking about the insidious behavior of Apple.
$200 a night is "budget" in NYC? Jeez, that makes even London look cheap!
And Buffett thinks he could do very well with a small sum:

> "If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I'd be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that. "
Ask HN: What is the difference between Software Engg. & Senior Software Engg.?
Hi, I recently got promoted to senior software engineer position. I want to know what are the differences in work responsibilities that you think for software engineer and senior software engineers positions. Help me understand!
But his boss's boss, Dogbert, is.
I wasn't talking about immigrating, I was talking about visitors visas. Big difference, the US was planning to remove the visa-waver program because of the British Pakistani community.

However, I understand what you mean about illegal immigration. Although I completely understand why people work illegally when they do go to a different country. I'm immigrating legally to Canada and it's been almost 6 months without a single response, but I can't work for risk of voiding the application process. I'll be lucky if I hear anything before the new year.

However 1 year of unemployment is a better option than the potential 5 years my wife could face trying to work legally in the UK. Plus, you know, Canada actually has vegetation in the places they call 'cities', which by far beats the UK's desolate wastelands (personally I don't count many British people on the streets as alive, at least from the city I came from, I think 90% would probably pass a test for P-Zombieism).
Call me a masochist, but I have a single 13" monitor where I write all my code (that's my macbook screen).
So creationism is not a bad theory because many people believe it?
Nice work, but the attached photo gallery ("Olympic Village") is an absolute mess - the photos didn't follow the theme, and some of the pictures were downright horrible (the TV shot from the '84 Olympics - what was that??). You might mention it to your editor.

But again, nice article.
You may want to check out Envato for a template to get you started. ThemeForest.net looks to have some nice stuff that's reasonably priced.
I currently host on an VPS and have been considering a switch to an Atom based server. Some of the reasons for me:

* With VPS systems you generally have to run one of their kernels, or at least Linux. Very few BSD VPS sites and none allow me to run OpenBSD, which is what I would like.

* The low cost Atom systems give you much more ram and hard disk than the VPS sites for comparable cost. In the $30 range a VPS will give about 512M of ram and 10-20G of hard disk space. Most of the Atom/low cost dedicated hosts are roughly the same cost and give 2-3G of ram and 60-100G of drive space. (I hadn't seen SSD's used before)