skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
However, to answer your question: if someone can determine whether you get to keep your job, whether you like it or not you are that person's subordinate.

It's interesting how two different perspectives on what is largely the same arrangement can yield such different answers.

By organization, if someone can fire you, you are their subordinate. By productivity, the "subordinate" is not necessarily subordinate at all. The working relationship may be much more than of peers, where the pair of them manage to both get things done, and keep people informed of what is going on. It might even be that the subordinate in the traditional sense is anything but in the tangible sense.

What sucks is that the traditional organizational arrangement has a very difficult time representing this. It mandates a strict hierarchical arrangement of staff, even if the staff themselves does not view themselves as hierarchical.

Because, in this arrangement, one person is usually granted the ability to terminate the employment of the other, there is necessarily an adversarial component to their relationship. Even if they work as peers, one has to report to a chain-of-command about the other.

For people and teams who don't need this sort of arrangement, having it imposed absolutely sucks. But, because it so entrenched in corporate tradition, it emerges anyway.

I rail against it as well.

There are people who don't need it, but those who don't need or want this arrangement get it anyway, regardless of the detriment it causes. I get the sense this happens simply because of the perspective that it must necessarily happen, because people have all these preconceived notions about management and subordination that they have a hard time letting go.

I think we'd lose the adversarial perspective if we lost the notions, and that would be a good thing.
How Web Workers can Earn a Passive Income
I agree entirely about not needing threads in a scripting language like perl for CPU performance reasons, and being able to configure the threads to be scheduled automatically is a big win in my book. Thanks for letting me know about the library!
Not unless pg replies to this with "Please stop".
People here keep on telling me that my website (http://www.tarsnap.com/) is horrible. I'm not convinced that it's really as bad as they say, and given my intended audience (unix geeks who appreciate a lynx-accessible website) I don't want to lose the minimalism; but if someone can improve the site without losing said minimalism I'd be very interested to see the results.
Wow, still no comments?

Well, for those seeing this but debating clicking through, it's a quite good breakdown of how / why Map/Reduce works, and gives a good idea of why it's useful and some of the advantages. It's only a conceptual overview, but it goes a long way to understanding what's become a buzz-word lately (probably due to the NoSQL uprising).
hey jason

an open source application that i work on needs some serious UX love - both app and website

Simple Invoices
- website: http://simpleinvoices.org
- app: http://simpleinvoices.org/demo

your time and any improvements you could make/recommend would be greatly appreciated by our users

note: am in melbourne, australia - so timezone is all good

Cheers

Justin
Or searchyc could simply ignore robots.txt
This is what they'd say:

http://code.google.com/closure/

:)
Ask HN: Where is my dream monitor?
A friend and I were sitting around talking about our dream computer setups, and I got to thinking about monitors.

It seems like we have hit a ceiling at 2560x1600 and no one is even trying to break it. Is there a technical reason (DVI restrictions?) for this? I know modern graphics cards can push way more pixels. The Eyefinity stuff from ATI is one example.

My dream monitor would be 3840x2400 at 125ppi. This would be roughly 31 inches horizontal and 19 inches vertical, and would have real estate of four 1920x1200 monitors.

I know that Toshiba and Viewsonic/IBM had monitors at this resolution for like $18k in 2002, but they were medical-grade 200+ ppi and thus only 22". Surely we can make a lower density LCD at this resolution for much cheaper now.

So anyway, not sure of the point of this plea, other than hoping that someone at Samsung or LG reads this. Oh, and I'd be interested to know what other people consider part of their 'dream setups'.
Web Accessibility Improvement Tools
"the Romanian revolution was practically bloodless compared to what could have been"

Compare it to the revolutions in the other Balkan states around 1988-1992. It was by far the most violent. How many died in Hungary? In Bulgaria? In Poland? In Czechoslovakia?

"there were great fears that the Yugoslavian debacle might repeat itself there"

There were? Interesting, given that the Yugoslavian Civil War happened several years AFTER those 1000+ Romanians died. How would that repetition have worked?

"You can bemoan the people that died"

Could there be a more callous response to thousands of casualties? As I've shown above, this didn't happen in ANY of the other countries making the same transition. It was only the multi-ethnic and barely-cohesive artificial country of Yugoslavia that did worse. Several years later.

"Even a dysfunctional country like Romania has been able to claw itself to levels of prosperity no one dreamed about in 1989."

Sure, and this is a great thing. However, as my reply quoted, it was in response to "lacked any sort of violence." 1000+ dead and many more injured is a poor definition of "any sort of violence."
... And you can speed the site up. There's no reason HN has to be so slow.
Here's the Wikipedia link on the general subject:

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

I don't have any of those diseases, so I've had no occasion to try it.
Away3D Lite and Haxe - Building a Mesh
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this.

If you're wondering, here's what Helvetica can look like in Windows:

http://www.nivas.hr/pub/blog-images-aa/non-aa-1.gif

It's bad enough that Microsoft ripped off Helvetica, making it look crappy on the web is downright mean ;)
I'll venture a guess that most people have already tried that before they resort to infecting themselves with hookworm.
Forrester Research: State of Software & Emerging Trends
Henry F. Carey; East European Quarterly, Vol. 29, 1995, "Irregularities or Rigging: The 1992 Romanian Parliamentary Elections"
Maybe they're blocking everything while they're in the process of fixing it.
That may be the correct solution, but I'm sure the current option was chosen more because it was the quick solution.
Hmm, does search-fu qualify as something you can put on a resume?
Weighing in after 21 previous comments just to add that the one other conclusion I'm willing to at least move toward here is that Julian Assange is prone to dramatization.
Let me give you just two possible scenarios, there are plenty more:

- An insurance company somehow gets their hands on search data and finds a way to associate that with their customers, figures out who is probably about to apply for coverage for a bunch of expensive treatments and cancels their insurance before they can make the claim for some trumped up reason.

- A political party gets their hands on this information and datamines it to the hilt in order to figure out which talking points to trot out on what TV stations in order to swing a maximum block of voters to them.

I'm sure there will be people that will say both of these are unrealistic, but I think that given the amount of data out there it is only a matter of time before someone will find a way to abuse it in a way that we will not be able to ignore.
Actually, made for ABC1 the main ABC free-to-air station. Hungry Beast is supported (funded?) by Andrew Denton who still waves a reasonably sized stick around public broadcasting down under. The show probably rated in the mid 100,000s, so YouTube and HN views aren't a primary focus.
I've done it but I hated it.

Never again. I have a standing agreement with my business partner that if we ever find ourselves in the position of having to hire people that she will take care of that end. I really am not the right person for it.
Isn't that simply a matter of aesthetics though? I don't much like autotune either, but I'm willing to admit the possibility that it's simply because I grew up listening to a different aesthetic.

We've certainly lost a lot of aesthetics as art styles changed over time - when's the last time you saw a good tapestry? I don't see this as particularly bad, though, it's simply "the way it is" in art. Periodically we will exchange one thing for another, and life goes on.
I'd suggest 'nagios' to monitor if your stuff is working. That way you don't need to wait until a user alerts you.
I'll bet you back that very few people are willing to go as far as I have in that regard. I live without a car, I sleep on the floor, we wash clothes by hand (after having dismantled and trashed our washer and dryer) and dry them on a rack in front of a fan, cook a lot from scratch with specially selected and carefully researched ingredients, have been creating our own recipes to accommodate the need to cook with special ingredients, and own next to nothing, not even towels. I know thousands of people on some lists I belong to who have tried various diets and worked on cleaning up their homes/lifestyles. I am still considered a "freak" and my presence is barely tolerated (or sometimes not tolerated -- I've been thrown off a couple of lists).

Peace.
My bet is that it is for technical reasons. Whenever you see a reply link (among other things) the server has to persist a continuation for it. Getting all of those pages crawled must generate a massive number of continuations to persist.

I know that this is one of the reasons that vote-links look the way they do.

If that's not the reason, then my #2 guess is that getting the whole site crawled is moving too many comments into the cache. If I remember correctly, whenever an uncached comment gets accessed, it gets cached (basically adding it to a hash), and thus added to the in-memory ram. That gradually raises the memory requirements for running the app, until pg does a restart, which resets the cache as well.
I'm of two minds on this. For spammers I agree with the treatment, if a person is a long standing member of HN then I think some way of alerting them would be more appropriate than the current system.

PG does not like you alerting people on the site that they've been banned.
Facebook edges past Google for weekly traffic
Everyone RELAX. There's probably a good explanation for this, maybe it was even an (easily correctable) accident. Give Paul a chance to respond before raising the pitchforks, okay?
Phonebooth Cloud Phone System – Virtual PBX & Business Voicemail
Looks like the Readable Feeds stuff is still working. Not sure how this will effect it in the future.

http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/
I'm not actually sure it was ethical doing this research on a set of users who had no desire to be de-anonymized. While the data was out there, and anything you came up with on other data could certainly have been used to de-anonymize the netflix data, specifically connecting the two seems like a mistake.

In fact in using this dataset you've kind of done exactly what you set out to stop - used peoples data in ways they haven't consented to.
I would love some assistance, but I don't think this is the type I need. What I really need is some hook that will help get me mentally engaged and drawn into learning to make a simulation. I don't really know where to start and my attempts in that direction so far have not born fruit.

Good luck. I hope this goes very well for both you and whomever you gift your services to.
"3GS or better required" is much more understandable than "1Ghz Snapdragon or better required", since the package the customer buys says "3GS" prominently - it's even in the name of the device. In fact, customers already are faced with the decision of "3G" vs "3GS" when they buy an iPhone.

What this suggests is that the solution for Android will be to have some easily-understandable number or naming scheme to roughly classify the power of the phone, so apps don't have to list compatible phones en masse. For desktop software, most people basically used the required and recommended CPU speed as such a number. Even though it didn't really capture the full nuances of whether an app required more RAM or more CPU, it was a good enough rough metric.
Truth be told: On various occasions the site: operator on Google came in handy for me to dig out some nugget of information from the archives of HN.

I can't await to hear the reason behind that decision.
I'm thinking as an employee, and not as a dreamer living in a world where the boss asks you what sounds like fun.
Ask HN: How do down votes work?
I just realized that I now have the ability to down vote comments, but I'm not entirely sure how that happened.

Is it once your karma level hits a certain level? Are you ever able to down vote submissions?

Lastly, is there a common standard that hn readers use to determine if something should be down voted? Or is it a "relative morality" issue?

Thanks for helping me become a better hn citizen!
I looked at the methods used in the paper and it's clear that my definition of "privacy" varies greatly from the author's definition.

Essentially they are saying that if you know what rating someone gave 8 movies and the date that they gave those ratings, you can find a sample of their rating list (or something very similar to it) with 99% accuracy. So freaking what?

"Evidence" that flimsy wouldn't stand up in a local bar argument, much less a court of law. The records are still completely and totally anonymous. No names, no addresses, no way to identify anyone...nothing but a strong statistical correlation to a set of ratings in a database.

It sounds like they have a problem with the power of predictive modeling and not with the handling of anonymous data. Esstentially what they are saying is "if we know a little about you, we find can out things that we didn't know with a very high degree of accuracy, but no certainty.". Duh. That's what the whole netflix prize was about...using known data to make strong predictions about unknowns.

They had some interesting methods (especially in their similarity calculations) but this has nothing to do with privacy.
It seems that a lot is going on - in secret. Example: I just discovered that if I reload the page my votes for comments get rolled back.
There's been a lot of serious talk about living off the grid since the '60s. Trouble is the grid is an engineering marvel that delivers a heck of a lot of utility. (OK the pun is intended, but still informative.) Living off the grid is likely to remain the provence of dedicated hackers for a long time to come, not something for the masses.
HN is very, very slow. Removing crawlers likely helps with that.
All your Bayes are belong to us
I think you acquire the right to downvote when you hit 200 karma. (I didn't have it at 199 and suddenly did have it at 201 -- so that's what I'm guessing.)

There's links somewhere to guidelines. Hopefully someone more HN-savvy than I am will pop in and supply them shortly.
Buzz, Wave, and Gmail Chat (including Video) aren't enough for you? How about Gmail Labs, which didn't exist 2 years ago, but now lets you skin Gmail, use keyboard shortcuts, embed youtube videos, etc. etc.? Calendar integration, a better text editor, embedded photos, multiple simultaneous attachment uploads w/ progress bars, better filters, incrementally better spam protection, plus the fact that I now have 7.5 gigs of space in my inbox, all while fending off attacks from Chinese hackers?

I think you grossly underestimate the amount of things they've accomplished in the past year, and the number of people it takes to run a service this popular. Facebook releases with grandiose redesigns, prompting temporary revolts among their users. Gmail improves incrementally, so much so that I can't imagine living without it as my primary e-mail client, but the sense of novelty that comes with a massive redesign is lost. Personally, I prefer Gmail's approach.
Arial isn't a copy of Helvetica. It more closely resembles the predecessor to Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk.
I think the article is misdirected.
A few years ago Japan increased their money supply by 30%
to dig themselves out of their depression and it failed to work. So increasing the money supply I doubt will work any better here in the U.S.
All those people now being foreclosed on should have had their loan applications disqualified. That responsibility falls to Washington to regulate, not the Federal Reserve, and the biggest scream that "you can't do that" would have been Washington, not the Federal Reserve I believe.
So what's a good Swiss Modernist typeface I should use instead of Helvetica?
This is horrible. Now what's a talentless, middle-aged career software engineer with hopeless dreams of entrepreneurship going to do with his time?
I was wondering if someone would call him on the libertarian thing. While the general alignment of the person may be conservative, aren't the ideas still considered libertarian?

I've been considering a lot how to adjust use of words to make it clearer when I'm talking about ideas, since after all it's the ideas that matter if ideas are what we're discussing in the moment. Party alignments in non-election debate just muddy whatever the individual ideas are representing with preconceptions and even unrelated concepts, and it's harder to see where individuals cross-align, making negotiations and debates even harder than they already would be.
Why not? The whole goal of Android is ostensibly to have more people accessing the internet on mobile devices that are closely integrated with Google services. It wants to be what Windows was for the PC.

Windows also didn't really have its poor reputation among mainstream consumers until XP's many security/malware problems and Vista's flop.
As someone with really bad asthma, who coughs constantly when speaking to clients and thankfully works from home and uses a mute during coughs on Skype, this study is fascinating and I hope something comes of it for a vaccine.
Some Brainfuck to implement this suggestion:

,[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>++++++++++++++<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>>>+++++[<<----->>-]<<<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>++++++++++++++<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>++++++++++++++<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>>>+++++[<<----->>-]<<<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>+<<-[>>++++++++++++++<<-[>>+<<-]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]>>.[-]<<,]
A lesson in how and when to submit a project.
9 things about CSS any web developer should know
yeah? some of the Nazi propaganda also sounds very reasonable, and even "inspiring". The context is important, my friend.
Thanks. I went, met lots of cool people and was there to witness PG and Ashton Kutcher holding court outside the bar. I expected to see weirdness at SXSW and have, but that was up there.
For a few years, I had some pretty severe hayfever in the early springtime, but this year there's been almost nothing. I attribute the difference to diet changes reducing the inflammatory reactions.

Of course, that's probably not enough for all sufferers.
What's pg's problem with SearchYC? It's incredibly useful.
Working for Demand Media: The Web's Biggest, Scariest Content Machine
"aristotle: the knowledge web" By W. Daniel Hillis
Wow, you read my mind.
Your website actually has a decent design. It's easy to read with big enough font size, line-height and padding and basically it has no glaring annoyances that plague badly designed websites.

I say even more minimalism could do well in regard to the color scheme, and probably the flow of reading on the home page could be improved as well (e.g "Start Using Tarsnap now!" could be placed right underneath "Tarsnap pricing").

Other than that, buttons linking to quick download and registration should do well, too.
This sucks for one major reason. Sometimes I want to dig up a link that was on HN, and I don't know where else to find it. So I search google with site:ycombinator.com. If they block Google, then that won't work.

At the very least, add a search engine to HN itself so I can search for old links.
That it competes with webmynd ?

It is a clear conflict of interest, HN should simply get the best search available, so the 'funded' webmynd guys should get off their butts and fix it or HN should support searchyc.
And the regular restarts invalidate every single continuation-based URL
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#Program_...

The fonts are technically not "free" anymore.
Liberation: fast iteration for Flash/haXe apps
The robots page is returning the mime-type text/html instead of text/plain
http://searchyc.com/ (assuming it's not blocked also)
I would actually say that my #1 is when a client (non-programmer) will tell me how easy or difficult it will be to perform the task that they have just assigned me, in an attempt to have their fee waived/lowered.

A typical conversation would involve them saying something along the lines of:

"I just need you to do this (insert non-trivial task) for me. It's really easy, it should only take you about five minutes."
i just googled this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+Hac...

and found this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165279

one of the top replies:

My vote is to constrain growth as much as possible, at least that which comes from stupid sources. Smart hackers will find this site just fine without Yahoo or MSN, probably even Google.
As "evil" as blocking sites and crawlers may sound, I think these types of measures will be necessary to preserve the quality of content here. Whatever actions further that objective have my vote.
I agree, you have some of the most important things right. It communicates very efficiently and probably works well for your market. One thing to be careful about is it does look very generic, that makes you less memorable.
Why don't you just hash the ip and do a geo ip lookup before you log it? Voila, you add privacy, but keep the relevant data.
Groupon: Daily
> Is it once your karma level hits a certain level?

yes, 200 points.

> Are you ever able to down vote submissions?

No, but you can 'flag' them and if enough people flag an article it will be killed. If not enough people flag an article before it reaches 10 points it would take an editors action to kill it.

> Lastly, is there a common standard that hn readers use to determine if something should be down voted?

The official line is a bit blurry, but most people try to vote based on whether or not something contributes to the conversation rather than to express their agreement / disagreement, but plenty of people do that too and there are no hard rules about it. And even if there were those would not be enforceable.
Does anyone know why HN decided to disallow search engines? It's certainly up to the website owner to decide, but there are good ways to (say) reduce the load on the web server without blocking search engines entirely.
I tried search google go with and without quotes and the results were the same. Also, very few of the results actually pretained to google go. I would still rather have google...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_licenses

giyf.