skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an Indian, I am absolutely delighted to hear of your positive experience. Way to go for your mentor, and for you too.

I have never had an Indian boss myself (I work in the US). But I have quite a few friends who have had, or continue to have (and who confide in me with their opinions and issues). Naturally I also know a lot of Indians in various industry or academic positions in the US (developers, managers, directors, professors). Most of these people (not all) are technically sharp and quite smart. At the same time when it comes to treating people who work for them, most of them - I dare say nearly all of them - are amazingly selfish, self-centered, uncompromising, and hard headed. Tact or diplomacy is virtually non-existant. The world is centered around them, around what they have done in life, and around what they plan to do in the future. The end justifies the means, in many ways, for them. I would even say that backstabbing (for the next promotion in industry, or so called fame in academia) is the norm. These cultural issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Mind you, I have specifically not seen many of these issues with most American managers or profs, or among foreigners, say, among the Chinese.

As for state policy, legal, and regulatory issues, those are well known at least among us who have lived in India. It will take me a few more pages to describe :) Suffice it to say we have a long way to go. A very long way.

For the Indians reading these lines, before you call me a self-hating Desi, just take an hour and really think about your own life and upbringing and behavior, and those of other Indians in positions of power whom you know. Be honest with yourself, if only for one time in your life.
TextMate and Subversion, with a post-commit hook that updates a checked out copy on a staging server.
I've been really happy with my Das Keyboard Professional. I've been using it as my main keyboard since it was first released about 15 months ago.

http://www.daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard_original_professional...

The only downside is the $129 USD price. You'll have to decide if it's "reasonably priced". I got nice discount on a pre-order, but at this point I would gladly pay more. This thing doesn't show any signs of ever dying on me though.

Update: I just checked and it's actually on sale right now for $109 USD.
False. The new fakesmc.kext replaces dsmos and doesn't perform any decryption. It simply fakes the SMC hardware device and provides the same encryption keys to the software that a real mac has in hardware, allowing Apple-provided code to do all the decryption just like what happens on a real mac.

This is still a violation of the DMCA. But it's no more of a DMCA violation than selling software that plays DVDs on Linux, something that, IMHO, should definitely be legal.
This is apparently written in MUMPS, a somewhat idiosyncratic language and platform used primarily in the healthcare industry. For more information on MUMPS, check out the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS) or a more critical view (http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx).

When I look at the code samples in the Wikipedia article, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me. Perhaps there are examples the are easier for me to grok. If there are genuinely useful technologies implemented in it (termed "heritage" versus "legacy" in the original post) it might be worth checking out. Nonetheless, I'm having a hard time seeing a case for introducing a platform like this into a system that's not encumbered by a legacy attachment to it.
I think his 555 timer is busted it seems to be missing a ground pin IIRC.

Also I tried making simple circuit, connecting a voltage source to a capacitor to ground, and it kept oscillating which isn't the right behavior.

I tried emailing the author but never heard back.
You can tell they're not sockpuppets by the account ages. In the situations you're talking about, the accounts are mostly new.
I see how what I said comes off rather emotional vs. rational(/logical). I agree that they should get a punishment that fits the crime. In fact I feel that so much that I think that each time a crime is committed, the person should get an individualized punishment regardless of what other punishments have been in the past. The punishment should fit the person and the crime. (Of course there should be guidelines w/e we don't want to hear me ramble =p)

However, I found it oddly ironic that the punishment they got for killing an actor was fame, and they didn't want the fame, which I personally believe they deserved for murder. And I was expressing that they got what they deserved, imho.

(I view murder as rarely forgivable.)
This is news? Small teams have been making games since back when that was the norm for the industry.

The juggernaut industrial game is the (comparatively) new phenomenon. The first games were what we'd today judge as indie, and it has always been possible to find that sort of game.
In this case, yes, but I only clued in to that later.

The link I posted above I would say is definitely a spammer+sock puppet or at least an acquaintance of a spammer.
Where is the atlanta hacker events list/twitter/etc?? I may be able to come to an event and would like a channel for event notices.
I am also of Indian ancestry and recognize absolutely nothing valid in your comment. Do you mean to say that the Chinese Communist party or the people who caused Enron and the recent collapse of the world financial system are more ethical?

Of course there are unethical people in every community, but there is zero evidence for your claim that said behavior is unique to Indians.
Unfortunately, "should be legal" and "is legal" are not the same thing. AFAIK there is, or was, a "legal" DVD player for Linux that pays the CSS patentholders' license fees.

The situation is ridiculous. I was hoping that Psystar's case would at least help expose some of the DMCA's problems.
Frankly, in the kind of environment where xmonad would be most useful (work), I have the least use for it. I simply don't fiddle with/change the windows my FreeBSD box at work.

It does one thing: sit there with all the terminal/editor windows open. It doesn't need to anything else.

For that matter, I purposely overlap and raise various windows in different ways that would take forever to set up with a floating layer in xmonad because I can't be bothered to learn the wm.

I might check out bluetile, that seems more promising. I just don't have the need to move my windows around much.

You know what I do need? A chromium package for FreeBSD. There's virtually no other web browser for *BSD/Linux that is tolerable.
This is like the little monster going up against the big guy and being squashed.
No, not really, unless you're running the code in a metacircular interpreter.

Imagine encoding the pair ('hello . 'world) into a function. You might say:

(lambda (msg)
(if (eq msg 'car) 'hello 'world))

You could get 'hello by applying that function to the 'car symbol, or 'world by applying it to anything else. Wrapping that in another function lets us generalise to any CAR/CDR.

(lambda (car-value cdr-value)
(lambda (msg)
(if (eq msg 'car) car-value cdr-value)))
I live in Amsterdam. The public transportation has a similar system: pay for each kilometer you travel. The system is pretty complicated and user unfriendly (I lost twice 4.75€ due to some confusion). I believe they want some fairness, but if you ask me, the old system (pay per travel) was better.
A few exceptions don't negate the rule. Many of the best productions are that way because the best people worked on it using the best available technologies. That comes at a price.

Just look at Youtube. Most of that stuff is utter crap. Just because you find the occasional gem doesn't mean that the site's not full of crap.
Any PSU Beaver Alumni on here @State College? :)
Here is an example:

http://www.cyc.com/cyc/technology/whatiscyc

A large knowledge-based system with several hundred thousand concepts (classes) and millions of assertions (facts and rules).

Under development since 1984.
Yeah, I thought it was worth reading. I liked Bentley's Programming Pearls more though, as a book in a similar vein.
Mathjobs.org uses something along those lines, though in my opinion better than this implementation.

https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs?info-ja
Sounds grand.
The article's not entirely without merit. It's true that new business models will pop up, but will they be as profitable as the current one? Considering the democratizing effect of the internet, I doubt it.

The same thing is happening with the music industry. Just because the record labels see a clear pattern towards electronic consumption doesn't mean that clinging to the old model as long as possible isn't the most profitable strategy.
You are over reacting. I am talking about Indians in technical fields (industry and academia, engineering/software in particular). I am not talking about "creative" accountants at Enron, or the capitalist Chinese communists, or Wall Street hedge fund managers.

Anyway, we have a disagreement and I leave it at that.
sane or insane argument is irrelevant. persuading a sociologist is enough in matters of culture.
Why does it not surprise me that emacs has this feature already?
I actually liked the article overall, and did vote it up. It was just that end that left a bad taste in my mouth...

They may not be as profitable for each individual company, but the pie is growing overall. More people than ever before are able to practice music as a profession. Consumer choice has never been greater.

If that comes at the expense of the big four, you'll have to forgive my lack of tears.
Biofuels Breakthrough: Making Fuel From Air With Engineered Microbes
One person's crap is another person's awesome.
As long as EULA's in software are legally binding, yes.
I thought the demo for Admob was extremely compelling and executed perfectly. If you only have time to check out one of the great videos on there then go for that one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7E5PosTG2U
This won't "enforce copyright", it will just push the sharing even farther underground. Compare Bittorrent today (with distributed trackers and every byte encrypted) with Napster from the beginning of the file sharing era.

The good news is that if you are planning terrorist attacks (via Skype) or distributing child porn (via Tor or Freenet), your chances of being caught are much, much lower than they were in the late nineties. Back then, the only people that needed the strong protection provided by modern file-sharing protocols were people trying to do things that most people would consider illegal. But now, you get that when you call your Mom on Skype or when you are downloading the latest linux ISO -- meaning that the "real criminals" are just noise now. There's nothing suspicious about having no cleartext coming out of your 'net connection anymore.

Suing people for sharing music makes the job of the terrorists much easier. (Can I have my Senate seat now? I'm from Illinois and am willing to pay for it with the money I've saved from downloading The Simpsons every week instead of buying the DVDs.)

Anyway, let's say we implement the system the article describes. Judgements of millions will be issued against people without that money. They won't pay. It will go to collections. They still won't pay. (You can't get blood from a stone.) They will be arrested and have another trial (at my/the state's expense) be sentenced to prison. Except wait, there is no room in the prisons, even for violent criminals. So society will have to build more prisons, at great expense, and pay to house these deadbeat file-sharers. Or, in the real world, they won't be sentenced to prison, and will do community service or something. They won't show up for that, and nobody will be care, because it costs society a lot of money to punish these people. Oh, and there's that whole Constitution thing too.

The "deadbeats" might also take a hit on their credit score, but there is nothing anyone wants to buy with credit anymore, so this is not much of a deterrent. Oh no, you mean I can't get a loan on a house that will decrease in value over the 30 years I live in it? OH NOES.

Basically, there is no way the Content Creators can win by playing the "punish the criminals" game. Society is already tired of it, and the strategy isn't even remotely close to being effective yet.

No, they will just have to adapt. Sites like Hulu probably took a bigger bite out of piracy than the threat of punishment ever will.
Ben Adida has been blogging about the election and verification in Takoma Park: http://benlog.com/articles/2009/11/09/takoma-park-verifying-...
It's a shame it was edited though. As it's hard to really get a feel for the flow due to the weird cuts. Of course, it might have been too long without it. :)

What was really successful about his pitch though was his tone. He is VERY believable. He comes off as so true. Add to that the fact that he told us that we was only going to cover three things and then nailed them, and man, that's a nice pitch.
Which libraries are these? How much internal tweaking was done to get them to install? Even the best CL libraries I know of (cxml comes to mind) have required lots of hacking (from me) to get them to work on my Linux + SBCL machine. That is the path of least resistance, as far as I know, and it is not very smooth. Even saying nothing about the underlying package repositories, asdf-install is certainly nothing like cpan or cabal-install. Counting the underlying package repositories... well... it's cute that CL tried... (I say this as a big Lisp fanboi, BTW.)

I went to ILC this year. It was nothing like any programming conference I had ever been to. Everyone droned on and on about their incomplete research project or some company they founded that happens to use Lisp. Someone who admitted to never programming in any language other than Lisp told us that it was clear that Lisp was the best programming language. Yeah, you sure convinced me...

Most conferences I go to are about programming techniques or actual working code you can immediately download and use. I think there were about 5 sessions like this at ILC. The rest were largely irrelevant.

The first Haskell report appeared 1990. I'd say there has been lots of time to get applications written.

No, Haskell was junk until about 2 or 3 years ago. Sorry. The runtimes were slow and buggy, there was no community of people writing software, and there were no libraries. There was no packaging system or library database, even. Expecting anyone to write a useful Haskell application would have been completely unreasonable. (But of course, there were some; darcs and ghc for example.)

The same is not true of Lisp. It has been pretty much the same for a very long time.

Look, Common Lisp and Haskell are among my favorite programming languages. But I am not surprised that neither have a wide following, either.
My intent for my new software that I am writing, is that white people do not use it. Seriously, this is not a troll (it is not really my intent), but you must realize that is a dangerous mindset.

The authors intent of use terminates at first sale, if you buy a painting from me, I cannot tell you that it can only be framed in a gold frame. I can make it a stipulation of sale and make you provide a gold frame before purchase but if you transfer it to a walnut frame after sale, I have no rights to enforce. Now if you start making prints of my painting then you have violated my copyright which does not transfer. if that nuance changes then the business tactics of the Apples and Sonys will get measurably worse.

On a more realistic note what if Apple decides that their offerings caters to the 175+ IQ group and decides that they will only sell to those individuals, any secondary sale by a different entity to a non 175+ individual would violate their rights and their intentions.
I am in love with my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Of course, if you don't like split keyboards, it is probably not for you. The two things like like about it most are the soft faux-leather palm wrest (very comfy), and the negative slope shim that it comes with. The shim makes the keyboard incline away from you slightly, which I find provides a more comfortable wrist angle.

There is, for me, one downside. I hate the F-Lock key with a passion. It turns the F keys into stupid M$ buttons when it is toggled on. For me, as a Linux developer, this means that my hotkeys start doing crazy stuff whenever I bump the F-Lock key. I really should get around to popping it off the keyboard.

Other than that, it is a good solid keyboard. I work on this thing for around 10-14 hours a day, and it has been pretty easy on my wrists.
Does the same apply to HN submissions? ;)
Sure they are; have you never heard the phrase "the plural of anecdote is data"? (half joking)
Here is a presentation that includes tactics on how to do usability testing as a startup:

http://www.slideshare.net/cindyalvarez/user-testing-tactics
Yeah, username + password + email would work. It's not as safe as username + password1 + password2, since you can mistype both, but it allows an escape plan. The way HN does it, with just username + password is dangerous, I think, because most people won't, immediately upon registration, go to their profile and put in an email; they'll just start using the site. And if someone mistypes their password once, and can't re-login to the site, they'll be very turned off.
Three things about Marco Arment…
I think the most important thing to do is limit your input. Find 5 people at most, and definitely document everything they say, but don't open up to the whole world. Otherwise you'll end up with so many conflicting opinions that you won't be able to make any decisions.
Well, then convince a few :) (I don’t think one would be enough.)
> so we have to buy electricity from France

No, you're really wrong. Just have a look at our realtime demand & generation graphs: http://www.ree.es/operacion/curvas_demanda.asp (right side)

As I write this, it's 2h05 (15-nov).

We actually have some spare energy, and we only import energy when we expect spikes (mostly by night). Right now, we're using exactly 1% of imported energy (..who said from france?). Also, at 22h45 (14nov) we were exporting about 4% of our energy. And we exported between ~4% and ~3% of our energy on the 22h to midnight term.

Yesterday (14-nov) we used between 0.5% and 1% of imported energy between 21h and 22h. And between midnight and ~3h in the morning, we're expecting to import between 2% (that actually was at midnight) and 0.5% (for the next 4 hours).

By the way, there's a clear policy about new nuclear plants: avoided if we can (because we still have some spare energy). We rely on combined cycle (17% as I'm writing this), wind (18%) and nuclear (26%). So, nuclear is still here. But don't need more. And, what we import is pretty ridiculous (we export much more than we import).

... Hey, we have nice-looking, nifty graphics, with real-time data! Please, use them! :)
The theory also applies to trees, ropes and pipes.
9% is the lowest value, not the average!
I agree. I think all Amazon log in systems favor new users and not returning ones. For example, here is the first result when googling "amazon ec2": http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

The way you would go about logging in from that page is less clear than most websites.
Rather than storing the actual passwords in the database, you'll want to only store a digest of each password.

For example, storing a keyed HMAC using SHA-2 is great. An easy similar method is to store the SHA(password + some server secret value + user's email address)
In this case the user's email address serves as the salt. The server secret value prevents a database-only compromise from leading to locally brute-forced passwords.
When the user logs in, on the server, re-compute the digest and see if it matches the stored digest.

I didn't notice any HTTPS -- you might want to use it for queries involving the password and any financial transactions.
Holy cow that's a big ask at the end of the Michael Prichard pitch, but man, best of the bunch. He told us what the problem was. He personalized. Why HE had to solve it. He ate his own dog food (literally). Explained how it would change lives / the size of the market / competition. And then finished with his ask. Not that he was actually asking, but that is a better pitch than all the rest.

One thing that got me about a lot of the others, they just didn't feel practiced. If they were, it was not enough. Practice, practice and practice some more and when you think you've nailed it ... do it again ... twice. :)
If everyone would do that, then that would be a problem. However, not everyone is doing it and it doesn't seem like more people are starting to do it. It's just not necessary to downvote superfluous comments; not getting any upvotes is enough of a signal.
Of course there is a solution. The problem is that courts just don't scale. In the 21st century, courts around thw world work like if it was still the 19th century. Suing people is expensive (both in terms of effort and money). On the other hand, retweeting is cheap. Courts just can't keep up with the Internet.

Now, imagine a world where you can find all the people retweeting 'illegal' information just as easilry as searching on Google and the cost of suing was just as marginal as retweeting itself. Maybe the system was aided by artificial intelligence (one of my college professors was researching the subject of application of AI in legal reasoning). That would change everything and I think this will happen sooner or later. (Sorry for my brevity, I was writing this from my phone)
A very poor article , taking a few outliers and extrapolating that to make it sound like "India"/Bangalore is the next Silicon Valley is just non-sensical.
This and the hanging prisoner paradox in the afternoon.

Must be epistemology night on HN :)
I think he’s wrong here. Job titles serve two real purposes. To denote rank and to represent what rank someone had at a previous company so they can get other jobs at that level.

The first need exists in any company with more than one person in a department. Once you get a second person you need to have someone be in charge in case there’s a dispute. So rank is valid for companies of virtually any size.

On the second point you don’t want your employees to take a hit by working for you. The problem with calling everyone a “member of the sales team” as he suggests is that you create a hole in someone’s resume where it looks like they dropped in rank for some reason (VP of Sales to Member of the Sales Team). In a tough job economy that perceived hole could be enough for a company to pass the resume over. So stripping people of rank becomes a disincentive to your employees.

Startups are a different animal from big companies. That I agree with. But they still live in the same world and in this world, for better or worse, titles are important.
re: Algol68 - try http://sourceforge.net/projects/algol68/files

The Algol68G interpreter has installers for for Windows, Fedora, Centos, RHEL, Ubuntu and Debian. And the source tarball will compile on Solaris, BSD and OSX etc.

Site also has stashed within the British DRA's (Defence Research Agency's) Algol68R compiler retooled to generate C. [as algol68toc] (DRA's compiler is actually written in Algol68!!)

Sample Algol68 source code can be found at http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:ALGOL_68

enjoy - N