skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I only read about half that article before losing interest, but one argument jumped out at me: the mandatory office parties and drinking outings. This, IMO, is not a Japan-only phenomenon, although I'm sure the Japanese put their own cultural twists on this lovely concept.

This was the best and most interesting part. The rest were minor cultural gripes; but Japanese corporate culture, from everything I've heard, is severely broken even by our low standards.

American and Japanese corporate conformity seem to be different in one aspect. The Japanese-style conformity, as described by the OP, seems to be about seeming like a "team player" rather than standing out. American-style Wall Street conformity is about the "hungry" image.

The best predictor of who will succeed on Wall Street is commute time (as a negative correlate). This is not because of the long hours or stress, but because of the image one projects by one's choice of neighborhood. (This is also why Manhattan real estate is so expensive; there's a professional stake in one's location.) 40-year-old MDs with families are "allowed" to live in Jersey, but a 24-year-old who lives in Brooklyn is just weird; either he doesn't expect to be successful, or he's saving (gasp!) and might do something funny like launch a startup. No one will get fired for failing to show "hunger", but you definitely won't get promoted.

My experience, however, has shown that "hungry" people (i.e. those with empty or overtly material ambitions) are generally one-dimensional, sociopathic backstabbers with mediocre ideas and whose overall worth is less than nothing.
First iPad ad debuts during the Oscars
I'm not sure if I'm saying this delicately enough, but Cadillacs also have a reputation for being popular among black people. I'm not sure why.
I'm not too up on Google's Checkout offering, but we have some stats and pretty graphs and such, multiple buttons, and we work with PayPal (which has more of a name recognition for buyers anyways).

I'll definitely look into Google Checkout though, its probably a great option for selling ebooks like you said.
I'm using Inkscape instead of xfig for drwaing graphics.

However, there's also TikZ -- a LaTeX package that takes the descriptive approach to graphics: You describe what you want and get almost always a very nice picture that fits perfectly with the rest of your LaTeX document:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/

TikZ comes with an amazingly good manual:

http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generi...
dice.com and craigslist.org are two major job sources for SF bay area
run run run away? seriously... think it through. app engine is relatively equivalent to ec2. why not just eliminate this variable and switch unless it is cost prohibitive?
Start your own micronation! :)
The "from 2000" is not really relevant -- all the same technologies are in use and are likely misconfigured in the same way. There are probably 100s of sites on the Internet that could be owned in the way the article describes.
Based upon that data it looks like the best time to submit the data is between 12 and 16 UTC.

Edit: This is with thirty seconds of tossing it through awk. It is pretty well distributed so maybe it is insignificant. I only counted articles that reached 1st place, you should parse it yourself rather than take my word for it of course. And a graph would be nice.
I wasn't confused. I was wrong.

I have an old TeX reference which suggests TeX pays attention to rivers. But based on your challenge, I skimmed through the description of the line-break algorithm in Knuth's "The TeXbook," and found nothing about rivers. (There is a bit of attention paid to making sure adjacent lines are compatible in terms of how squashed or spread out they are, but apparently nothing that tries to catch rivers.)
Ditch automated ads, ads that try to steal our focus away from the content, and ads that hog up our bandwidth, screen space, CPU time, etc. They're annoying, usually irrelevant, and serve no good.

When you write, include in your writing very brief endorsements for products related to your subject. Don't just randomly interject with "oh by the way, go buy Product X!", but if Product X is a brand of hard drive and you're writing about hard drives, take a sentence or two to talk about the advantages of that particular brand. In plain text, just like the rest of your article.

There are TWO important parts to this equation. Many people only seem to realize the first.
1) Make your ads not so obvious that machines can tell they're ads.
2) Make your ads not so annoying that people will update their ad blocking rules to remove them.

In other words, working around the ad blocker to present annoying ads is just going to annoy even further. Your ads have to be seen AND they have to not be immediately blocked again and/or just ignored, and that means they have to be manually inserted so that they are intertwined with the content from both a technical and a writing standpoint.

You might even get away with static banners, that don't stand out too much, at the top and bottom of a page (where we can scroll it off the screen), and text links next to the content area. Just not IN the articles, unless it's part OF the article.

Why did I install an ad blocker in the first place? Because ages ago on gameshark.com, an ad popped up, demanding I join the US Army. I've never left Canada and I was maybe 13 at the time. This ad, for 30 seconds, played an animation with loud sound effects, hogging up all my CPU time and bandwidth (now I knew why the page had loaded so slow), and centred itself under the mouse cursor at all times so I couldn't click anything. It was a Flash layer of some sort, rather than a window, so no keyboard shortcut would be able to do anything either.
When this ad finally disappeared, I IMMEDIATELY looked up and installed an ad blocker, and never again went to gameshark.com. If I'd had any interest whatsoever in joining the US Army, that also would have killed it permanently.
This is the perfect example of how to do EVERYTHING WRONG with online advertising.

PS: one of the worst comment systems I've ever seen. Requiring registration? Fail. Not stating this until AFTER the comment is submitted? Massive fail. Not stating the requirements on the form until they're violated? Cherry on top.
I workout every morning, first thing.
They're getting the app for free, so the onus is on them to add any features they want.

If you are writing a paid app, then maybe you should be nicer. But I wouldn't want to listen to your whining for 99 cents either.
I agree wholeheartedly. It is a lack of understanding on the part of the business owners for about what a website is FOR and a lack of interest in educating them on the part of the developers on these websites.

I'm sure this isn't an original idea but web development firms should offer a subscription package to owners. This subscription would assist them in monitoring the performance of their total web presence (not just the website which is becoming less relevant these days) and assisting them in improving it. It could certainly prove a point of difference in a saturated market especially if you got a great case study or two behind you to present to customers.

The difficulty is that site developers are just programmers and designers and not salesmen and marketers so they either don't understand or care about what I just talked about or don't know how to sell it to the business owners.
After Insert Credit imploded, the forums moved to selectbutton.net but without any "main content" (the front-page stories are just selected forum threads). Soon afterward, Tim started up actionbutton.net to host game reviews by himself and other like-minded folks; they're generally just as good as the old Insert Credit material, and of course more up-to-date.
As an H1-B holder in a similar situation, I advise you not to do this. It's not as simple as Europe.

The USA makes it very hard to get a visa. Also, even if you do get a job, working on your startup part-time is yet harder. Valley jobs typically take much more than full-time hours and have little time off. Welcome to the USA.

Also, you haven't really defined what your goals are, other than just being in SF and working on a prototype. Without the motivation of being in a program like Y Combinator (not to mention all the introductions and networking they can arrange) this doesn't sound like a great plan to me. If you want to sprint for a prototype in some cheap apartment, you can do that anywhere.

I'd advise you to do this instead.

1) You seem to want to soak up SF & Valley culture, so do that first.

- Get an internship at one of the better companies, ideally Google

- Participate in one of Google's Summer of Code projects.

- Visit SF on a tourist visa and just hang out. Meet a lot of people in the hacker and startup scene.

Then:

2) Invigorated with all these new ideas and contacts, go home, get some partners, and work on the prototype.

You may not appreciate how much simpler this is right now, but you will if you try to live here for a short while. You can probably even live with your parents, since you're so young. Or go to one of the cheaper European countries, and hack by day, enjoy yourself by night. You're only young once so why not do it in style? It's called the World Wide Web for a reason.

3) IF you think you're picking up momentum then try to find people who can bring you into the USA again. Hopefully you will have met enough people in stage 1 to do this.

P.S. There are a few tricks out there to establish an American startup with non-American workers, but they are very high risk. Even if the INS buys it, you will end up signing most of your rights over to someone American. For obvious reasons I will not detail the legal tricks here, nor do I advise that you get into this without advice from a lawyer. But just be aware that there are possibilities if you find someone here that you can really, really trust.
You should do neither. If you present good ideas to people that can execute them when you can't, why wouldn't they just take them? You should just be patient, take a passive note for some additional months. Write out your ideas on paper. Write down your skills. Depending on your age, consider going to university or getting work to bring up your skills. Once you are able to execute a significant portion of the work, then and only then is it time to move forward.
Excellent link! I've been looking for a term to stand in place of "we're not allowed to blame ordinary people for ordinary problems," and I think O'Rourke's term "blameless citizenry" is exactly that term.
Creating change
But that just negates the reason for having a website in the first place. As a business owner surely they don't want their (and their staff's) valuable time taken up fielding phone calls that could be readily solved by a half decent website. Sure it won't be the preferred method for everyone so you will still get phone calls but the cost/benifit ratio is high.
Anyone cares to comment on the downvotes?
Erm. Yeah I know for a fact that not ALL PHP functions are first class. Which was all I was saying. PHP does have lambda, but not EVERY function is a lambda.
This is really great. And it's more than just a neat analogy... in a very real sense, the momentum of a particle can be thought of as the fourier transform of the position (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_space).
Going outside and enjoying the world might be more rewarding but if you've paid actual money for something you have a right to expect it to work.
I'm surprised this wasn't thrown out as an idea in a recent Ask HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171520
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC I've used this successfully with <whatever mac thing name is>
and did not consider distribution time at all which makes the results largely meaningless.
OpenSSH 5.4 released
I think the top bar is a little screwed up on the jobs page - the word jobs appears twice. Here's how it looks to me:

new | threads | comments | ask | jobs | submit | jobs
Right, I want to be clear: I'm not saying cars don't accelerate on their own. In your case, you had an actual mechanical problem and did the right thing which prevented a tragedy. I knew a Ford Taurus owner with that sort of problem, as well. My point was that the big-story cases with Toyota (and Audi of the past) focus on these harrowing "I was pressing the brake as so hard that I hurt my ankle" kind of stories where we're not allowed to second guess the driver's actions.

There was a case in Minneapolis some years back where a police van accelerated, from a stop, and killed at least one person during some festival of lights thing. What they found, eventually, was that the police department wiring modifications from the stock van (to get the cherries and strobes working correctly) could cause the police vans to accelerate on their own. It wasn't a manufacturer issue, but it was still scary stuff.
Yeah, think of all the meetings they had to design this feature. They can't let those go to waste; better to have another meeting to decide how to beef up the network.

I love all the blog posts that say "don't hire good programmers because they will waste time programming something fun instead of doing work," but of course, in the real world, "doing work" is the much bigger productivity sink. Imagine how much better the game would be if all the resources on the anti-piracy team were programming the actual game instead. Maybe more people would be willing to pony up $60 for the game if it was better.
Even so, as long as that was the perception they still lost points.
The book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely has a chapter about "the power of free", and how even the difference betwee 1 cent and free is actually huge (based on the experiments they did).
Why settle if you know you are going to win?
It's raining.
Why would fragmentation be a bad thing? This is similar to Clay Shirky's whole "Ontology is Overrated" piece [1]. To borrow his example, there is probably not going to be a second date between a man who is passionate about "LGBT issues" and a woman who reads books on "the homosexual agenda".

You adjust your "tag" based on your ideal date. If you tag yourself in a narrow way on some attribute (ethnicity, profession, interests, whatever), it means you do not want to be found through searches on that attribute, except by people who use that exact term. But you DO consider that attribute important enough that you want to send information about it to people who found you through searches on other attributes.

And on the other hand, you may provide a very broad tag for "ethnicity" (e.g. "Black", "Asian", etc.). That means you want to be found by people who search using those very broad terms. And on the gripping hand, some users may choose NOT to provide a tag for their ethnicity. Their ethnicity may be reasonably obvious from their photo, but their failure to provide a tag also sends a signal --- namely that they don't want to found by the kinds of people who search based on ethnic/racial background, and would resent being set up on a date with them.

Basically, free text allows not only for signalling about one's race/ethnicity, but "meta-signalling" about how important you think race/ethnicity should be on a dating site. Satisfies a lot more use-cases than a drop-down field which requires you to fill it out.

[1] http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
Interesting - I'm guessing that is stemming from the "groups" they have. For example, they have a network for tech blogs, mommy blogs, etc. I am just guessing the tech blogs one I had been talking with them about was very competitive and just based on the nature of tech blogs, fairly high-traffic.

Or they've since changed some of their strategy.
Is twitter really more popular than RSS? How many of those 10 billion tweets have ever been read by anyone?
That kind of split is what you'd get if a company became really big. So it's more an ideal outcome than a typical one.
This looks like it could be a combination of on one hand some people that aren't good at operating a car. Accidentally pressing the wrong pedal. Failing to use the clutch or shift into neutral.

Like this 68 year old woman who said "And I can't remember if I had my foot on the gas pedal … the brake or the gas, I can't remember"
http://cbs3.com/local/Montgomery.County.Toyota.2.1454021.htm

And on the other a government that wants to hurt a competitor to their Government Motors.
With LaTeX, I was able to compose and typeset a full IEEE-format paper, full of diagrams and equations, in a day. I've done the same in OpenOffice, doing part of the work in Word, and I spent half the time fiddling with the figures to get them placed decently, and in the end it still didn't look nearly as nice as the LaTeX version.

I don't know many LaTeX tricks, mostly how to make sections and subsections, insert a figure, add some citations, do monospace text for code, but I can get beautiful papers out of it.
A bit like a cultural uncanny valley. Sounds plausible to me.
First iPad Commercial Released - what do you think?
After 25 years, My Mac Plus Still Works
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-5-2010/even-be...
I've found that just writing LaTeX source is much easier than tracking down the appropriate menu item/dialog box in Lyx. Plus, LaTeX is more commonly installed than Lyx, so I'm more likely to be able to work on school computers, and if it comes down to it I can edit my LaTeX source in any old editor, then test it at home.
How to Slow Down Now
Probably that the 80% solution to a problem is probably good enough. Though, a lot of business does not target that large of an audience which make the 419 scammer economics work.
Hence the "knowingly bought" qualifier. I sure agree that you ought to be able to expect your fair use when you drop your cash, but unfortunately the days are long since past when that's been the case for anything content related.
Someone who likes invent wheels, go ahead, may be u are the creator of next tool or framework.
Someone who likes stack wood, come on, u should be happy for so many woods in the library of computer treasure.
Whatever you choose, happy programming is most important.
A very drunk robot randomly clicked the "down" button?
It's not that hard. Give it a go somewhere quiet and out of the way, and then just take it easy and practice, I was a few weeks before it was second nature. Just make sure you can actually pull it off in your car before trying it near traffic/children/animals/police.
HNers getting their TRON on? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1IpPpB3iWI#t=2m
It's relevant, as there is a very different level of interest in Apache.org being hacked 10 years ago, and today.
From an article on Toms Hardware:

>It seems that the game may be making repeated requests for authentication between levels before allowing the player to continue.

>An early crack was also released for Assassin's Creed II (which hits Australia and Europe before North America's March 9 release), but those who have tried it say that they are unable to advance very far into the game without being sent back to the menu screen.

Maybe they are victim of accidental DDOS created by their own DRM security strategy. Maybe the consequences of the "repeated requests for authentication between levels" for hacked versions is what is causing the DDOS. Then hilariously, people who legitimately bought the game but can't connect try to download the hacked version and it only cause more authentication request and make things worst.
It looks featureful and effective. Are you concerned about your "image" if people see you using software that looks old? Do you constantly switch editors because the one you like starts to look dated? I like the "1999" look, because everything is small and simple, there's no glowing shiny ribbon thing oozing across the top of my screen.
"Afterthought" is precisely true. Knuth made up his own character encoding stuff which ought to be replaced now, but in 1982 I doubt he had any better alternatives.
# 16: Women are extremely rare and get to enjoy swimming against the current in a river of testosterone.

:(
a better way to look at it is: utilized on a daily basis.
Apple’s New Stance On ‘Cookie Cutter’ Apps
mother fucking lame as fuck.... seriously!?? a post-mortem on a 2000 year hack of apache (a patches a fucking lot cause I'm fucking insecure) -- how the fuck did this shit break hackernews?! this is one of the many reasons why the 'security scene' sucked 10 years ago when I was involved in it and why it still sucks now -- this is not news -- what a crappy waste of time
My thoughts exactly.

When you're out of college, you're used to living on a shoestring budget. You can get by without quite little because you haven't really raised your standards of living around a big salary.

When you've worked for a few years, you've likely saved up a decent amount of cash (unless you live a life filled with consumption). You may have to cut back on all the perks but you can still get by.

Most of the people I know who want to start a company don't want to risk their current cash flow. Yet all of them have been working long enough where they've likely saved up enough money to go a long time without making money and be ok. I think the only thing is that people raise their standards of living (more expensive rent, big car payments, high rent/mortgage) such that they feel they must continue to make their current salary in order to "survive."
> Wow, I had no idea that human beings were such simple creatures that they could be compelled to purchase goods and services against their best interests by a simple flashing picture

People's moment to moment interests often differ from their stated long-term interests. If this were untrue, impulse purchases would be impossible. How do you explain impulse purchases? How do you explain people who "want to lose weight", yet eat an extra snack that they know they shouldn't eat.

Notice that I didn't write "compelled", anywhere. That's your choice of words, and it creates a straw-man argument. "Enticed" would be closer to the mark.

Let's examine this claim of yours that "there's nothing wrong with being persuasive". Persuasion doesn't exist by itself. One tries to persuade someone of something. Considering persuasion alone, without considering the context is not very deep thinking.

If I try to persuade you to believe something that is untrue, or that is likely not in your best interest, then actually, there is something wrong with that persuasion.

I'm arguing here, not for the sake of arguing, but to persuade you of something that I believe is true. While many advertisers may believe their own claims, many do not. Furthermore, many who believe their own claims do so out of a failure to question them with the same rigour as they might question a position they disagree with.

Going meta, the pattern I see in your response is that you take what I wrote to an absurd extreme, and then point out the absurdity of (your interpretation) of my argument. What do you think of this?
What did anyone expect from "Bing"? They claim to be a "decision engine", and at least in the commercials I've seen, they don't say that the users get to make the decisions.

Disclaimer: I've only used "Bing" twice myself.
Exactly. It all reminds me of the bit where the designer tells American Airlines or Zappos they're idiots, and the company tries to explain that their design is made to move shoes or airline tickets, not win design awards.
Some were posted roughly a year ago, but they're no longer up. I might have them somewhere, give me some time to dig.
The biggest connection I see between body builders and entrepreneurs is discipline and ambition. Deciding that you're going to maximize your body's potential is quite similar (in spirit) to deciding to maximize your earning potential.

I think body building is about 100x easier though. Unless you're aiming for a pro card, there's really no uncertainty to deal with. That's the toughest part of entrepreneurship. There is no formula for success. Imagine exercising and eating according to a plan for 3 years and then ending up obese.