skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for that. Given your writing about the pain of dealing with open source, I would have expected you'd have that autogenerating from the start.

For what it's worth, the reason I'm not running git on my Linux box is that I'm a C# guy by choice. ABingo seems like something the .NET world needs, so I want to look into porting it.
First Follower idea is all yours
It's also worth noting that the political factions promoting climate change as an issue, and the policies and actions being proposed as solutions, are largely unrelated to the details of actual science.

It's a perfectly reasonable position to say "the science indicates global warming is likely, but the proposed solutions would be worse". Many people would disagree with that position, but it's not obviously absurd.

Yet in practice, people's opinions on climate change seem to correlate pretty strongly with having political views that do or do not like the proposed solutions. Funny, that.
I just tried your first test... and the digits were indeed different... (the last two digits, in particular).

I guess that means I'm dreaming?
But it's only natural for a handful of companies to control the beer business.

It is a very very difficult business to succeed in. The capital expenditures are tremendous if you want to get a facility going that produces large quantities of beer. Then, just distributing it is another pain all together and forces you to give up margins on your product in order to make sure it is distributed properly.

For anyone interested, there's a great book called Beer School, about the guys who started the Brooklyn Brewery, which chronicles their brewery startup. I highly recommend it.
Books ??? - Its kind of funny on my front. I live the nomadic lifestyle and the box I have never opened since my last move has been my books. I plan never too and possible avoid any more technical book purchases. ( My bit for the environment )

How do I manage technical dilemmas ??? Google ... Seriously - Google like mad.. And i end up learning/reading a whole lot more in the general direction of my problem.
What's really wrong with MySpace and it's API
Or maybe you should learn to hire innovative MBAs ? - a lot of stupid MBA bashing completely ignores the fact that there are a lot of MBAs driving very successful start-ups and large tech companies. Especially if you look at business rather than consumer focused start-ups.

There are crappy MBAs just as there are crappy programmers. Thinking that all programmers are crappy because you've only worked with crappy programmers is a logical fallacy.
Business School is a Joke
Many logical fallacies are actually good quick-and-dirty heuristics for deciding whether something is worth considering. "The source is biased, therefore the argument is wrong" is clearly incorrect, but "the source is biased, therefore the argument has a high likelihood of being wrong, therefore reading it is not a good use of my time" is not just correct, but also a very useful rule.
> I thought I was going to have to get a joojoo instead

You could always just not get a tablet thing and make do with whatever technology you already have. The stuff we have now seems to work OK.
One of the few movies where I consider the (1997) remake to be superior to the original. With the absolutely creepy scene where a conversation is punctuated by insects getting bug-zapped.

Neither movie contains anything explicit beyond kissing, as I recall. But there's no doubt what's going on.
I think you are mistaken, income taxes are horrid and make you a serf to the state.

The income tax was started in 1913 (not counting the civil war) and was high till the late 80s. Now during that time most of the industrialized world was destroyed by wars and America was able to prosper significantly -- as global competition picked up we were no longer competitive. It has nothing to do with high income taxes.

The country is in 11 trillion dollars in debt because it spends money it doesn't have on things it shouldn't be spending money on. 90% of what people need from government is handled at the local level -- @ the federal level we have national defense, immigration, and the federal judicial system. After that there really shouldn't be too much (SS, Medicare, and Medicaid should be at the state level if at all).
Isn't it a bit incorrect (or at least irrelevant) to say that the robot is running Ubuntu?

Maybe things have changed drastically in the last few years, but the last time I checked, Ubuntu was a pretty installer and package manager for gnu/linux.
He had no furniture. I doubt the same is true now.
I think this is finally the right direction for AI to move in. For a while it has seemed like AI researchers were too enamored with the idea that humans were inborn with certain ideas like language and motor capability, and that they should try to replicate that inbuiltness in a machine.

My take is that humans are born with little more than sensory perception, and a mechanism for recognizing patterns and cause and effect (this is known as memory).

If you observe the actions of young children closely, I think you'll find that they are consistent with the actions of someone trying to conduct experiments in the world beginning with very little information.

When my younger siblings were babies they would do the old routine of "holding my hands up around my face and waving them around." I think this is the process of forming the deduction "when I fire my motor neurons something appears in my sight." And eventually this association becomes so strong that the child recognizes the hand as something he directly controls, i.e. the self.
How To Disable Google Buzz
> I'd kept pretty fit myself. But I realized that my lifestyle had put on a lot of pounds while I wasn't looking.

This is a very good sentence.
> as well as a ring for her for whenever that moment is right

this might be an interesting read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

maybe separate the ring from the 'really great mate' part?
I found a similar problem on one of my own hobby sites. I don't think the problem was with a compromised PC, but with a bug in an old version of WordPress. IIRC, there was a weakness with WebDAV that provided a back door.

Anyway, the solution was both more obvious and easier to fix than this article describes. Every PHP file had a line injected at the very top. It was simply a matter of stripping this extra line from each of several hundred lines -- a little time consuming, but not a big deal.
I made it available through git because that is the de-facto standard distribution method for Rails coders these days, who are the audience I needed to reach with it. If it were consumer-facing, oh yeah, I would have done something much easier from the getgo.

I concur that .NET desperately needs an A/B testing framework. Stack Overflow should have one. Give me their worst .NET engineer and two months -- one for writing A/Boverflow and one for writing tests -- I could increase almost any metric on that site by 10%. What is your worst engineer scheduled to do this month that is more important than that?

That's a question I'd like to ask anybody who isn't A/B testing yet. Seriously. What keeps you so busy that you can't adopt a low-risk, battle-tested, low-investment strategy with stupendously scaling returns like A/B testing? (I can only hope that every company with a web page pulled a Google, built one of these internally, and keeps vewwwwy vewwwwy quiet about it for fear of letting people know how easy it is.)
What a waste man, I've never even heard of omegle.

Keep that in mind please. In spite of whatever the buzz is today, except for the top 10 sites or so the majority of websites have not been visited yet by the majority of the people on the planet.

There definitely is room for more than one in almost every space except for social networks that are 'feature comparable', sooner or later one will gain the momentum and crowd the other one out.
What a load of crap.

It is expected that even the Google designers themselves could not predict how or where their systems could be used.

But now it is clear: Google Buzz is social media, competing in the same space as Facebook and Twitter. Google wave is enterprise colaboration, competing in the same space as Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint.
Little, inexpensive things mean a lot
Einstein's Love Equation, or don’t try to be cute, just buy a Hallmark card
Hey, I thought it was funny.
The best I can piece together the impetus for these computers followed the Battle of Manila Bay, where Commodore Dewey's gun crews fired off a whole lot of ordinance for very few hits. At the time each gun crew sighted their own gun.

By the Battle of Tsushima in the Russian-Japanese War the Japanese, if not the Russians too, must have had this kind of fire control on their British built ships.

All done by slide-rule and machine tools.
Think twice about down-modding for strong language?
A lot of people are getting down-modded for using the word "rape" to refer to how they feel about certain cyber events. There is legitimate room to disagree on that kind of use of that word. Here is a 1993 Village Voice article on the issue that blurs the on-line/off-line distinction (warning, a bit nasty): http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html .
We have too many things that do too many things.
My response was less than civil, yes. Your bringing Steve Jobs' "Always stay hungry" into it struck me as exceptionally shallow and myopic and since I happen to be a big fan of Kafka's work, more bile went into my response than would have been proper, I guess.

The comment you've posted since (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124805) seems a lot more sensible. So it appears I have misjudged you, though, reading it over again, I'm still not convinced that I did that with your original comment itself.
I've seen this happen as well. Some PC malware grabs dreamweaver ftp settings and sends it to a remote IP. The remote IP will keep adding the exploit code to the index.* pages until you change the ftp password. For us it was trying to ftp in once a day. Also, ban the ip.
The submarine fire control computers had to solve a three body problem, not a two body problem like the surface ships.
What was more disturbing was the realization that there were folks around that did, and that were willing to seek and create and use those parallels.
Reminds me of the equally poorly considered geek pickup line: "Hey baby, can I measure your space-time curvature?".
No sarcasm font, but I hope everyone gets the point.

EDIT: it wasn't meant as a serious guide, but reading the comments I understand it might be taken as such, so added a link to the real instructions now.
Unfortunately, my worst (and only) engineer is me, and he's busy trying to get FairTutor.com launched by working out how to store dates as UTC and display them correctly in local time zones so that students in LA can schedule lessons with a teacher in Quito and not show up 3 hours late to class.

Once that's done (or instead of it because frankly this is more fun), we'll see about getting a drop-in AB component built for ASP.NET too.
Too true, but... Rule #1 for wanting to profit off of something that's actually innocuous: Make a big deal about how the innocuous thing is actually dangerous to you and your family and then sue the richest person you can find.
No. It is unethical to risk user privacy and data just to benefit the company.
As posted on Sivers' blog:

Yes, indeed, it is ours - I first heard it back in June 2009, on Seth Godin's blog. It got posted up on Hacker News too.

Here's the seth post of the same video, making the same post (though he reckons guy #3 is more important than the first follower):

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/guy-3.html
It's not a laugh track as such. It's an actual studio audience laughing.
I saw the dancing video before and it was hilarious, though that guy was dancing for a loonnng time before the first follower came along, and there were people came in on and off in between. He had to struggle for a while before it became a movement. But the First Follower idea is very insightful.
I've been doing this for quite some time.

I make plenty of money, and I have very little interest in most stuff. The only stuff that does interest me is books, video games, and computer/electronics equipment. When I want one of those things, I buy it.

I've also been involved with an animal rights organization I co-founded for 11 years or so, so every birthday I simply ask everyone to make a donation to that organization.
1. How does taxing CEO more solve the problem of you having to move?

2. "that's a good thing only for the CEO of Pig Farm, INC who's raking in the money with the increased salary due to demand for bacon and pork and sausage" - and for local community which gains work places, and for local shops that may offer lower prices due to lower transportation costs, and to the local services since Pig Farm INC needs a new road so the trucks don't break, and ...
I thought one of the complaints was (at least until recently) "disabling Google Buzz" mostly turned off your controls and notifications- but did nothing to prevent others from following you.
Ask HN: You're not allowed to comment/ reply on your own submissions?
I made this submission earlier:

http://corporatecrimereporter.com/barrylynn021310.htm (Two corporations dominate US beer market).

And I'm unable to reply or comment on my own post. In place of reply I see "-----."
If a novel is not worth reading slowly, it is not worth reading. Most of the time.
I, on the other hand, am very happy that my Facebook and Gmail accounts are different and with different passwords.

Making all your electronic life have a single point of failure: your google password, is just a bad policy.
It's really not that bad. The things that are time consuming about moving are packing, disassembling, organizing, reassembling and so on. I own over 1000 books and live on the 5th floor of a building without an elevator, and even so, with 4 people it took us about 5-10 minutes to move the books in. Packing them into boxes took maybe 20 minutes.

Even though by weight it's much lighter the book shelves are a real pain in the ass.
A browser button for Privacy settings for sites? Last section of link article.
A bad workman blames his tools
FYI: #returning is a hack that #tap supplants, and is supported in Ruby 1.8.7 natively, and is supported in Rails via ActiveSupport for older versions of Ruby.
Suggest HN: Leaders List useful anymore?
I'm pretty new to HN, but I'm a budding UX designer. One of the things I've noticed about Hacker News is the Leaders link at the top.

The Leaders link (if you haven't seen it) shows the top voted users. Early on this was probably pretty useful. Now though the top user has 33101 points. This is 7931 points above the next user, and a ton more above the users below the second rank.

At this point there will be very few people who will even come close to that number of points and if he stopped posting for the next year (He's 2.9 years old) he might still be on the top, along with the rest on the list.

This destroys the use of a list of "leaders" because if, for instance, I make 10,000 points this week (1,428 per day) from great ideas/links I won't even show up.

So my suggestion is to not make the list 4 columns:

Col1: Users by highest # of votes for that day

Col2: Users by Highest # of votes for that week

Col3: Users by Highest # of votes for that month

Col4: Users by Highest # of votes for that year
does anyone else find it deliciously ironic that brett bender is complaining about being ass-fucked?
Our Politics May Be All in Our Head
Plea bargaining is one stage of prosecution, intended to avoid a trial. If they don't get prosecuted (for example because there's no evidence that they ordered the books), there's no plea bargaining.

Plea bargains are not unique to manga-related crimes. If your claim was accurate, it would be easy to get someone locked away for any crime just by planting weak evidence against them.
That's just for anger though.
...and they fixed their error - http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-buzz-start-up-expe...

But yeah, damage is still done.
These instructions are incorrect. Clicking "turn off buzz" will only remove the Buzz label from your Gmail account.

You need to either (1) delete your Google profile first; or (2) if you want to keep your Google profile, edit your profile to not display followers, then delete any buzzes you may have posted, then removed connected sites, and THEN click "turn off buzz".

From Official Gmail Help:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
That's because it's (rightly) dead.
That's not a good reason for taxing the top 1% more, that's a good reason for taxing those benefiting from military and government contracts more. The two groups don't perfectly overlap.
Eh. Not sure it's "the future" in its current form. While clicking next a few times (read: few hundred) is strangely addicting, a session feels like a bad night at the poker table - empty, wasteful, and morally depraved.

Without filters or some kind of account system it will remain mostly a diversion for bored and lonely youngins and pervs. I think random video chat has a place in the wider world of normal people (e.g., foreign language learning), but not in this form.
How Much is Your Time Worth?
Yeah I did see that in your comment - "wow this guy really likes Kafka, that's awesome." :)

In my original comment I should have written something like "It's interesting to compare what jsomers wrote / Steve Jobs said to what Kafka has written, though for now I'm reserving my opinion." I remember reading something along the lines of, "people rarely understand each other, and when they do it's usually by accident." Anyway, I'm sorry I wasn't clearer originally.
You can see that right here. First few votes make a submission die or get to the front page. And then it's just momentum.

IMHO, this is detrimental to quality and doesn't fend off bandwagon bias.
Some obvious and high-impact taxes that this chart misses:

- Property taxes
- Sales tax
- Tax-free executive perks

And of course, the discussion about fairness isn't taking into account the large percentage of industries that trade in or are based on commercialization of natural resources, nor a whole lot of other things like the large amount of current wealth, as well as industrial and military power still held that was originally bootstrapped or massively grown by colonization, slavery, and wars of aggression.

Fairness discussions like these are worse than useless, they purport and perhaps even intend to be amoral, but fall quite short and instead mislead.

[Edit:] Actually it isn't that they purport to be amoral, they can't be. Fairness is intrinsically moral, and thus if you're gonna talk about it you have to try a lot harder to bring in the real meat of the fairness discussion, like for instance, where is all that wealth coming from. People are quite worried about the lazy dude playing video games but getting a free ride from "socialism" (an abused word if there ever was one), reminds me of the mote and the beam.
"The source is biased, therefore the argument is wrong" is clearly incorrect, but "the source is biased, therefore the argument has a high likelihood of being wrong, therefore reading it is not a good use of my time" is not just correct...

No, your reformulation is also incorrect. A correct formulation might be "The source is biased; therefore I would be wise to be skeptical and subject any claims to greater scrutiny."

The overarching problem is that everyone with expertise has a bias. It's crazy to claim that those skeptical of AGW may be biased, but those backing the notion -- like the British scientists who found themselves in hot water last year -- are somehow above it all.

Everyone in this game is biased. Why would they have become involved if they didn't have some passion for the subject? Thus, we're left with needing to subject the ideas of all to great scrutiny, on both sides.
The top 1% of all earners and the top 1% of people putting a strain on the national infrastructure aren't the same thing. (Nor is 1% of the American population, which is more than 3MM people, all 'CEOs of large corporations, celebrities, or professional athletes'.)

If you're arguing for taxing people at differential rates based on something besides income, fine. But don't confuse 'income' with 'strain on the national infrastructure' or anything else.
How iPad Multitasking Might Work
FWIW, this blog was running WP 2.8, which is about 6 months old. Current is 2.9.1. Upgrading is trivial.

If you're not keeping Wordpress updated expect this to happen to your blog too.
you might want to check out lists at the bottom of the page. here's the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Building a crypto system that will last for 100 years
I appreciate the tips, but please don't confuse ruby and rails.

I'm scared for the poor newbies who don't know where to look for help when things go wrong. If they think they have a ruby problem when it's actually a rails problem they'll be stuck looking in the wrong places for help.

Also, doesn't exactly make you look smart :(
Quite useful! Thanks!

Still, it's out of the way (I didn't notice it!) and doesn't quite hit the mark.
Ask HN: Where do you find leads?
I wonder how you can find leads (buyer/sellers) for a specific product/niche. How can you contact them and get a quick response.

I looked over Digital Point, but it's full of crap (things like $1 for a 500 word article), even SitePoint is crappy (they are charging to post a listening, it's a little better than Digital Point).

Is there a website I'm missing? A website for webmasters/developers/freelancers where they can find quality leads and reasonable prices. How do you do it?
There is no meaning to life, once that's accepted you can create your own meaning. Look around, decide what you want to do and do it.
"spider pig, spider pig, doin' whatever a spider pig does"...:)
Would this work in a non-Rails project? Say Sinatra?
Collapse of the euro is 'inevitable': Bailing out the Greek economy futile
This test is greatly complicated by the internet, where 'community' takes on a whole new meaning.
I like Sivers' version because it was more thorough. But it's good to hear the same idea expressed by a new person in a new way. You need new iterations and personalities you trust to make things click. That's essential to them spreading.
Make Love Not Porn (2009)
Yes, but that was the argument that xcombinator lead with; that expressing violence in a controlled manner is a good thing - which is contradicted by research. Anyway, the idea that masturbating over fictional depictions of child sex is somehow preventative of actual child sex abuse is orthogonal to the problem being discussed here.
Ask HN: what do you think are ebay's weaknesses?
I was chatting to a friend of mine about PG's "Ideas we'd like to fund" and we had an interesting debate about online auctions. At the moment, ebay has a near monopoly and my friend doesn't think this will change any time soon. I disagree. There are countless examples of start-ups disrupting existing monopolies.

Many people try to out-ebay ebay, and I think this is their mistake. There's not much wrong with ebay from a buyer's point of view. Yes it has it's flaws but not enough to convince buyers to leave en masse.

The seller's experience on the other hand is drastically different. The web is littered with complaints from sellers yet they continue to sell on ebay because that's where the buyers are. All the ebay competitors that have come and gone over the years have focused on tempting the seller away (usually with lower fees) but I think that's the wrong approach. Competitors should concentrate on winning over the buyers and the seller's will follow, but as I mentioned earlier, while there are no major issues with the buying experience, buyers will stick with ebay. I think this is what's behind ebay's recent spate of policy changes all designed to keep the buyer happy, regardless of the cost or inconvenience to the seller.

What are people's thoughts on this? Does ebay have an Achilles heel?