skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a simple guideline for real life interactions with others that carries over quite well on-line, "Deal with issues; ignore details."

It's amazing how well this works in person, especially when trying to get something done. My number one question to another is probably, "Is that an issue or a detail?" We can almost always decide together which it is. Then, if it's an issue, we deal with it, and if it's a detail, we move on to the next issue.

This has also saved me countless hours and aggravation on-line. If I post something and someone disagrees, I quickly decide whether or not it's really an issue and only engage the other if it is. I realize that this is just a judgment call, but I'd estimate about 90% of on-line disagreements are just details. In these cases, I think it's best to simply move on.
Note: the company claims they were hacked by competitors.

I know Russian police is stupid, and they compensate for their stupidity in brutality and corruption, but I think even they would have noticed a fake feed. You know, it's snowing outside and the camera shows daylight... pretty easy to notice. I would side with the company and would claim one of the competitors hacked them, then bribed someone in the police department to make a stink => Profit.
Memo to terrorists: wrap your next bomb in a shiny white box with an Apple logo. No one will question you.
Compared to a very shy guy, the self-aggrandizing guy might do better. Compared to a confident, outgoing guy, he'll probably do worse.
‘Airline pilot’ protocols in finance
If you watch the opening scene from the new Star Trek movie closely, you'll see Randy Pausch in a cameo. (If you miss it, turn on the audio commentary, which points it out at the time.)
Why do proportional fonts fail so bad with TextMate?
This is why my blog doesn't have a comments section either. I really don't care what non-hackers think of my blog. I value the opinions (and the opinions about the opinions, complete with a useful points system) of people here much more than I would just any casual observer. Also, I don't have to worry about the typical: "[blog post about blah blah blah, continued at...]" spam.
You guys are right. I confused myself with the wording and thought too much about it.

Thank you for correcting me.
Does length matter? It does for video
To be fair, these laws have been consistently struck down by the Supreme Court.

I wish that were completely true. Unfortunately, it's not quite the case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
Hackers create tremors online by 'poisoning' Haiti quake searches
Bonus points: Make sure the shiny white box actually turns on and there is pretty graphics on the screen.
Did they pull the "Mercedes SL55" reference out of their asses, or are people at Apple (or Steve?) really known for driving those?
VMware Adds Zimbra: The Q&A
Perhaps governments will stop spending beyond their means and producing fake money with their central banks. Perhaps.

It seems more likely they will blame "the market" and use trouble they created as an excuse to extend their control over their economies.
Yep probably being the JQuery group an order of magnitude bigger and older it's a totally different matter, and I guess this means that even the Redis group at some time may need to switch to something else.

EDIT: I just received the first of such spoofed spam messages. So indeed this is going to be useless :(
LoseThos 64-bit Operating System V6.00 Released
Japan's government debt is awfully high. He hasn't made that up. The demographic situation is also real. And he has mentioned that Japan's debt is mostly domestic debt, which is one reason why Japan has not defaulted yet and why any default could be a stealthier thing than what we know from Latin America or Russia. He also said that it could go on like this for years. So I'm not sure what you find so suspicious about what he says in this article.
Date Founded (1998 vs 1976) is listed as a difference, but really, it's more of a similarity. The "new" Apple, with Steve Jobs at the helm, was founded at about the same time as Google.
The repetitive and boring gameplay in WoW is probably intentional.
Thanks! Here was mine:

Hello -

I was very concerned recently to read of your school being forced to evacuate after finding a suspicious device in the backpack of one of your students, as reported here:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jan/15/students-evac...

I realize that the press often distorts facts in order to better fit their own narrative, but the idea that a child at a technical magnet school is being embarrassed at a school-wide level for doing experimental technical work in his own time is extremely worrying. The suggestion that he is being sent for "counselling" is even harder to believe.

As I'm certain you're aware, America has an ongoing problem with adequate science education, a problem schools like yours are meant to correct. This kind of hysterical overreaction is only going to discourage children from building their own devices, and from creative play in general. It is part of a deeply worrying anti-science trend in this country, and I hope you agree that the real changes needed here are at the administrative level, to prevent these kinds of misunderstandings from getting so out of hand in future.

Sincerely,
Laurie Voss.
> that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal.

I think it is more subtle than that. If it was about safety, they would cancel cheerleading and football. I know I have been repeating myself in 2 other comments on the same thread, I feel strongly about this, see here http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5538a1.htm for some CDC stats on 2005-2006 ).

What seems to happen is that schools are interested not in safety but in avoiding litigation. So they are only concerned with the perception of safety. It all revolves around "Would we get sued?" or "Legally, did we cover our asses?"

Schools should just merge with TSA, they both seems to share their delusions about safety.
This is such a succinct and helpful post. I'd upvote you many more times if I could.
Sadly accurate. And unfortunately the tone here has been getting nastier. There was a thread a few days ago where I found myself thinking "I feel like I'm on reddit."

Nastiness is a problem intrinsic to forums. But I'm optimistic that it's solvable. So few things have been tried so far. Plus I think a lot of users here would be happy to try out (or at least put up with) design changes intended to increase civility, because that's why a lot of them came here in the first place. So this is going to be my main focus for improving HN in 2010.
I get that from time to time on the Hecl google group, but so far it's not too bad. I wonder what prevents them from fixing it.
Ask HN: Interesting software jobs in Chicago?
(posting under a different account, as my coworkers read HN)

Chicago is a great place, but industry-wise, it seems heavily skewed towards the boring and corporate. I've been browsing all of the usual places (37 Signals, Crunchboard, Craigslist, Stack Overflow...) and I'm just not seeing the sort of position I'm looking for. I'd really like a position where the work is varied and I have the opportunity to learn and grow. I'd also like to find a company where the mission is something other than "Make money". Tall order, I know.

I'm a senior developer with a diverse background and a graduate degree. And a mortgage. So that also colors what I'm looking for. Over the past two years, I've grown to respect the opinions of this community, so I'm taking a chance and reaching out to see if the community is aware of opportunities that I'm not. Any Chicago area hackers (or hackers with knowledge of Chicago) have any suggestions?
This post is great. The contention among people is really frustrating, especially since the great majority of it is just useless babble that doesn't solve or address anything relevant anyway.
"No Waiting Room" and Queuing Theory
Postabon (NYC, lisp-based, startup) is hiring a front-end dev
Hello fellow HNers,

I don't know if this is kosher or not, but my startup (http://postabon.com) is looking to hire a front end developer (who would have the opportunity to branch out and learn about other things like Mobile App development, machine learning, Lisp, etc in the future if they're interested).

You should be pretty smart and comfortable with HTML/CSS/JS. Beyond that, some 'nice-to-have' skills include familiarity with Git, Linux, jQuery, XML, HTML5, Lisp, or mobile app development (iPhone, Blackberry, Android).

Our website is really Javascript heavy - so that's going to be the key skill we're looking for. You should understand the prototype object system well, be comfortable with lexical scoping/closures, not be scared by the word 'this', etc. In return, we won't make you support IE6 ;-)

We'd strongly prefer you be based in New York City, but we're willing to consider working remotely for the right candidate.

Postabon launched about 6 weeks ago. Since then, we've got a lot of great press, and a decent number of users. We have raised a small amount of working capital, but are in the process of closing a decent sized round now. We can pay you some combination of cash/equity, depending on your preferences.

This is our first technical hire, and you could have a lot of influence over the future direction of the company. We're open to all sorts of suggestions (want to change the UX? Use compass? Make our API more RESTful?) - although I have a list of 'todos' a mile long myself (combine/minimize JS/CSS server side, finish our redesign, tweak the recommendation engine, etc).

Email me at [myusername]@postabon.com if you have any questions or would like to talk about the details.
>> One's for people inside the company

That one, I'd venture.
I did a quick search - I thought what they've been talking about in Zimbabwe was fascinating: http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/markets14.17028.html.

The basic idea if you believe that a hyperinflationary environment is coming, you borrow money to invest in hard assets and selected stocks. Hyperinflation will cause the value of the currency to fall dramatically, driving up the value of assets relative to that currency. This is why whenever you see countries devalue their currency to reflect rampant inflation (e.g. most recently Venezuela), people run out to buy whatever they can including TVs, disposable goods because these hold value better than cash.

Of course, if you're wrong and the opposite happens (e.g. deflation where currency rises in value but assets fall), you lose money. That said, I'd agree with the general fundamentals Evans-Pritchard describes - but also as he describes, it's basically unknowable when the crash will happen.

(By way of warning, when it comes to applying theory to practice, be careful when playing between various currencies - e.g. http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/what-is-the-carry-trade... - which is basically what happened when the markets started unravelling in North America)
My apologies, I searched for YCombinator not "Y Combinator" and didn't find it. I see it now. With so many incubators it's a natural and useful extension for TheFunded.
And yet people still think of Google as more evil than Yahoo. Even when Yahoo has sent some bloggers to jail and now that.
I deleted my post. Arguing politics on HN is pointless and detracts from the experience. Bye.

Enjoy!
Google Safebrowsing API Triggered the same thing on my FireFox just now.
The thing is I was playing nice - responding immediately to your Twitter message, changing the rate asap. But then I come onto HN and see a complaint from you without mentioning we responded quickly. Not cool in my book. You're saying people should play nice when you're just telling one side of the story.

Edit: I should note the response would have been even faster if you had emailed us from the contact page that's on the website we link to in our request header. Tweets go to us marketing/biz-dev guys. The contact form goes to everyone in the company. I'm not sure how much nicer we can be beyond doing everything we can to be reachable and identifiable.
There are a lot of good (and great) engineers out there. They just don't seek the spotlight. Most I've met prefer to work on interesting problems and once solved/implemented tend to move on to the next interesting problem.

Most people not closely involved in the problem have no idea how good (or great) some of these people really are or how ingenious some of their solutions can be.
Confessions of a Knowledge Worker
the way I look at it is that engineers fall into 2 categories, the startup guys who want to take a risk with a new company and corporate guys who want a big name on their resume.

NYC is filled with nothing but the latter. Noone wants to take a risk here. They all want to work at your Goldman Sachs and Citigroups.

Calling NYC a tech hub is insane, sure there is a # of people here who dabble in tech...but that's just a numbers game, NYC is one of the largest cities in the world. But percentage wise? Austin TX probably has a better ratio than NYC.
For the jQuery Google Groups we didn't see much improvement. There was a slight reduction I the amount of spam but we're still getting spoofed, which really hurts. I can't wait to be off groups and on to the new forum fulltime.
I'm a big fan of Vanilla forums: completely open-source, they were in Techstars last year along with me, and overall it's the nicest system I've used. The only drawback is that it's focused on web use rather than email, though there is some mail functionality.

http://vanillaforums.org/
Maybe not an IDE, but the AppleScript Editor in Mac OS X (and Classic, IIRC) has you enter text in fixed width by default, but then changes it to a proportional font after syntax-checking.
In more detail, TXT has an instruction called SENTER. It loads a signed chunk of code into the cache and locks out all RAM accesses. It verifies a signature on the code and if it is valid, jumps to it. Behind the scenes, it also resets the TPM's hash registers (PCRs) to their initial state.

Only Intel can supply an AC (authenticated code) module since only they have the signing key. The AC module is typically stored in the BIOS, so this bug would be fixed by a BIOS update. The default AC module just initializes the system to a state where no other code can affect it, hashes the next level bootloader into a PCR, and jumps to it. Since no one can reset PCRs without running SENTER, programs can use the contents of the PCRs to see what code is running.

The biggest issue with this advisory is that there is no way to revoke old AC modules that I know of. So an attacker could always run SENTER with the old AC, compromise it, then boot the real hypervisor. When that hypervisor tries to access the PCRs, the rootkit can virtualize them. No one later in the chain can tell the difference. This is a fundamental problem with trusted boot in general -- any time a flaw is found in one link in the chain, everyone after it is compromised.
What about the quants?
You're missing a closing quote in your first paragraph! Your post is therefore irrevocably flawed, and your point completely lost on me.
Because we are a bunch of nationalistic idiots who hates everybody who isn't white but we can't admit that.
When reading about scientific history, I noticed that many times, it was noted that several scientists stumbled across the same fact independent of one another. Several inventors independently conjured up similar solutions to a given problem years apart. These days, startup founders find that someone else may have had the same idea not long before (or not long after) they did.

I have a feeling that many of us are somewhat in the "information wants to be free" camp (some to a higher degree of fanaticism than others). I fail to see how keeping information secret will keep other people from independently reproducing, reverse-engineering, discovering or inventing the same.
Please pardon my double-post. The mobile broadband dongle gives a very spotty connection.
Apologies for the double submission. I just thought it'd be worth sharing. To be honest, when it comes to this video I hope that a few more people do get to see this.
welcome to 1988
Okay. Why then, do the education folks complain so much about how USA students test lower in math an science than other countires? Clearly, math and science are dangerous.
What is your graduate degree in?
Ask PG & HN: Hardware VCs
Hi Guys,

I have a working prototype for a device that addresses the needs of a large and neglected sector of the tech market (the blind) and am looking for a VC.

What are your suggestions for a startup with a finished product looking to go big? I'm looking for the industrial connections, product advice, etc. that only someone in the field would have. The current hype is all about (web) software, but I have a hardware product I'm looking to make something out of it.

From what I've been told, the terms of hardware VCs are much more favorable towards startup founders than in the software world because (esp. with a finished product) the result is tangible and the founder has done all the hard work and then some and it's basically a more sound investment, but I don't if that's actually true.

I'm looking for investments in order to pay for the legal costs (several patents on this product), the development of a polished version instead of something hacked together in a workshop, as well as marketing and business costs.

Any advice on this matter is most welcome.

Thanks!
If only more techies understood and respected the basics of community management. http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/news/?p=76 lists that and other people skills that modern developers need to get ahead.
I'm not sure I understand you, could you provide an example of what is an 'issue' and what is a 'detail'?
They do? I am surprised. In what circles?
I find Tufte's "Envisioning Information" the most valuable (missing from the list).
I think the key word here is perception: both perception of safety and perception of threat are at play. Sports are not perceived as dangerous, technology -- unless contained as I described above -- is. I'm not sure about degree to which the threat of litigation plays here. Certainly one would think that millions of dollars lost in airport shutdowns would have some weight, but it does not appear so.
There are several reasons to allow comments in your blog, but the one that speaks most to me personally is learning from people who are smarter/wiser/more knowledgeable on a given topic than you are.

If you're blessed with readers who're able - and might be interested - to challenge you, call you on your bullshit, point out your faulty logic, tell you where you can learn more, and explain what it is that you don't know you don't know - then it's crazy to intentionally disallow comments, as far as I'm concerned. Sure, sometimes you'd get feedback by email, but mostly you won't. Looking at myself, I'm about 10 times more likely to leave a comment on a blog where I can add nontrivial information, elucidate a point or give a reference, than send an email to the owner. Are other people very different?

To me, a conversation with knowledgeable and intelligent readers is absolutely worth ten times its weight in fluffy or incoherent comments. Of course, there're people with different priorities. There're plenty of people out there whose blogs are essentially PR vehicles. To them, having comments is probably only worth it in terms of drawing more readers to the site; and that can be offset by other reasons. (I just guessed, without looking, that Seth Godin doesn't have comments in his blog; then I went to look - turns out I'm somewhat wrong; most entries are closed to comments, but there are rare exceptions).

I get a huge number of comments, because I write a popular blog, and many of them aren't worth
my or anyone's time. I learn so much from the other kind, however, that it's absolutely worth it to wade through all the fluff. Every time I forcefully present a point of view I hope for someone to intelligently challenge it, and most days that's what happens. The value of that is difficult to overestimate.
Businessman sues British Airways "for treating men like perverts"
My advice would be to read Richard Bartles book, Designing Virtual Worlds at least twice before attempting to design an MMORPG. He covers all of the common recurring discussions and then some. Besides, its an interesting and fun book to read, even if you're not designing an MMORPG or MUD.

I'd also suggest checking this out: http://mu.ranter.net/design-theory
I'll be damned, there he is!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqFyY5f8Zmw
I prefer Safari's debugging and Web Inspector tools to Firebug at this point.
I think the problem in NYC is primarily cultural -- a lot of MIT talent is hardcore eng

Maybe the fact that all their engineers went to same school is scaring people off. Imagine going to a "lesser" school and having to work with that group? Sounds like a nightmare.
Today's Top Trends
You Name It, Its There... Breaking News, Latest Headlines, Tech & Science, DIY & How-To, Weather, Lifestyle
From http://www.lehigh.edu/~dmd1/art.html (just somebody's term paper I found on Google):

The Tarahumara are not very hygienic to even modern day indigenous standards. They are not very cleanly and the washing of their clothes is usually either an annual or semiannual tradition. The Tarahumara have no regular sleeping habits and simply go to sleep whenever and wherever they are tired and feel that they need rest. The practice of childbirth is also distinct to the Tarahumara. When a woman feels that it is about time for her to deliver the baby she will go off by herself into the wilderness, brace herself between two small trees and attempts to have the baby safely. There is a very high infant mortality rate among the Tarahumara. This fact is counterbalanced by the fact that there is also a very high birth rate. The average Tarahumara woman gives birth to about ten babies hoping that three or four will survive into adulthood. Adulthood is usually short for the Tarahumara with the average life expectancy being forty-five (Lutz 50). These factors are believed to help the Tarahumara survive as a race.

Perhaps the reason they have low incidence of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease is that these ailments often set in after the age of 45?
Little farm towns are the last bastion of sanity in this respect. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, too; the prevailing philosophy there is, if anybody else can do something, then I might as well try it.
A proof that penguins rule the universe
New NYC startup looking for front-end JS developer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057281
The girl who conned the Ivy League
I don't think the flaw-finding mindset is inherently wrong. I think the problem is that many people have a hard time presenting their criticism in a non-offensive way and aren't always ready and willing to accept an answer and change their minds about said criticism.
Exploring real-time Haiti USGS Earthquake data [...] using Python
Content-free list of tools. Nothing new or explained.
I discussed this a long time ago in a comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226688

The reward treadmill is the secret to retention. Get 'em hooked with quick rewards in the early part of the progress curve, then string them along at the highest levels. Otherwise people will quit in droves before the expansions come.
what's (also) shocking is that he and his parents have to go to counseling for this.
Should we encourage self-promotion and lies?
I'm not sure if it's that people have a hard time, or they don't care to. Perhaps it's just semantics; either way I agree with you.

I'm curious what PG says about this - Isn't HN's roots in his distaste for what programming.reddit became?
I imagine it is something like this: An Issue would be something like a race condition, a detail might be something like a slight inconsistency in naming of attributes.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality
I wish someone would make a study about why there are so few Israelis in open-source projects.