skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For his part, Mr. Carroll admitted that he had caught himself often trying to drop his credentials into conversations at his new workplace.

“Obviously that stems from maybe some embarrassment at the level that I’m at,” he said. “I do want people to know that, to some extent, this isn’t who I am.”

It helps somewhat that most of his former business school classmates are hardly becoming masters of the universe.

“It’s not like anyone else is tearing it up,” he said.

While he is happy for now, Mr. Carroll worries about what will happen once he has finished the more interesting work of overhauling the department. He wonders how long simply having a job will be enough.

This does not sound like a person that is happy. This sounds like a person who feels embarassed, forced into a position he feels above, and typically jealous comparing himself to his friends' success. It's kind of pathetic seeing someone trying to fake taking the high road ending up with remarks like this.
Is that actually true? The last person I know who formed an LLC in California had to publish an announcement of his "doing business as" name in the local paper.
Exactly. He's more than welcome to not follow people who use the platform in a way that he disagrees with. This is just as bad as people who tell others that they're using twitter wrongly. Some people really do use it like a group chat. Some people try to use it to spam others. Some follow interesting people and, for the most part, just lurk on Twitter. There's not exactly a "right" or "wrong" way to use it.
Say good-bye to Linux on the PS3
I'd like to know if they perform significantly better than previous employees...
Snow Crash is amazing. But it definitely IS related to software :)
"Similarly, the Russian Soyuz capsule’s computer ran on only 6 kilobytes of RAM until it was replaced with newer systems in 2003, which most probably was the cause of its subsequent crash-landing in Kazakhstan."

Really? Really?
The primary reason to run Solaris is to have access to the broad base of Solaris ISV and IHV products.

OpenSolaris will is incompatible with Solaris in many notable ways. (e.g. uses GNU for libstdc++.)

Losing free Solaris x86 means I can no longer recommend it -- not when CentOS, a 100% ABI-compatible RHEL clone, exists.
Bolstering Backupify
It's interesting how quickly the wolves jump on an easy target. Some of the comments on reddit and elsewhere I've read are talking about making throw-away Facebook accounts to confront/embarrass people with their private pictures. I've already seen a few names posted. I'm willing to cut people some slack for looking at the pictures (a harmless crime, human nature) but doing the leg work to connect anonymous pictures to a real identity to simply embarrass them is taking it way too far.
Executive's guide to Software Product Innovation
Even if it only makes moderately health-conscious people more healthy, it will still be a net benefit to the overall health and productivity of Americans. And if it reduces healthcare costs of the average American by even a minuscule amount, it will easily compensate for the effort required to put up the calorie coutns (which is honestly not very hard nor expensive)
or if the audio tag were designed differently
10 Startup Anti-Patterns
"Everyone was scrambling to get Flash ported to their mobile platform (Android, WebOS, BB)."

And now that's stopped?

BTW, "scrambling" is a bogus description. My G1 has no flash support. Google didn't didn't seem terribly concerned with shipping without it, though if and when it becomes available it will get added. It's not as though all the other mobile players have been treating Flash as the Ur media format. Mostly it's been "take it or leave it."
That is'nt very surprising for a person working the semiconductor design industry. Actually there are no AND/OR/NOT gates fabricated on a modern IC.

They are all NAND gates, since they have better electrical characteristics and are Universal Gates (they can form AND/OR/NOT gates in some combination).

What is surprising is that they used NOR gates - while they are Universal Gates as well, their fabrication apparently leads to poorer electrical properties.
50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology
Ask HN: Should I comment in HN or on individual blogs?
I'm new to HN and I see some posts (which link to blog entries) have quite a bit of commenting and discussion going on here while others don't. Is there etiquette involved in discussing here vs. discussing directly on the linked blog.

Insightful discussion is valuable to a blogger's community but is HN-only discussion more valuable here?
Worse: they could say yes, but poison the referral, ruining your chances with someone that (if you had gotten a different referral) would have invested.

I don't suppose that this effect is large, but it might be noticeable.

Don't think anyone would poison a referral? If someone wasn't impressed by you, they might agree to the referral anyway -- perhaps thinking they are being nice -- but when they tell the third party about you, they say "yeah, this guy didn't impress me, but I promised him I would refer him to you."
Here are some books that are a mix of psychology and economics that I think are especially suited for HN:

Behavioral Economics:

Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
Nudge - Richard Thaler
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard - Chip and Dan Heath

Economics:

The Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Taleb
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb
Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow

Psychology:

Opening Skinner's Box - Lauren Slater

Management:

The Education of a Coach - David Halberstam
Awesome. I loved this book. Easy read. Enjoyable.
Wahoo!!!
We need a "http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com for locally installed software, maybe we can call it http://messedupforeveryoneorjustme.com and it could run as a locally installed app with a web connection/interface.
What is a "fug"? could this word catch on?
fug [fuhg] (n)

1. a very poorly thought out feature.

2. a bug so virtuous that it appears to some as a feature.

From the fusion of “feature” and “bug”

What do you think? Would you use it?
The Pete Michaud Message (retired at 25)
Greg Egan writes fantastic stuff.

Another really good book is Ventus by Karl Schroeder. It's phenomenally entertaining and has some really interesting ideas in it.
I've never understood that quote as I believe it removes a necessary word. "Needless" describes the type of word to delete. Without it, isn't William Zinsser suggesting we should omit random words?
I almost always comment on HN because I like the people here. Some people post on both the blog and here. Some people just post on the blog.

It's really up to you; I don't think there's anything wrong with posting in both places if you want.
Citrus juices, like orange juice. They mask it well enough.
Nothing really notable here, Apple products always ship a bit before the official launch day and are held until launch day for delivery. They've been doing this for years.
I don't know what you mean by "related to software". I'm going to take a narrow definition that you mean related to the process of writing, designing, tracking, etc. So something like Information Rules on the economic theory of pricing software products is OK. Or a classic on managing software developers like Peopleware is OK.

Some other general business books I like include The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution and First, Break all the Rules. A non-software specific design book I highly recommend is The Design of Everyday Things. Even though it is geared towards manufacturing related industries, I'm also very fond of Winning at New Products.

If you haven't already you should learn more about negotiation. Even if your only negotiation is negotiating a new job every several years, reading a book on it is very worthwhile. If you can negotiate yourself an extra $1000 bonus, once, the book has paid for itself with interest. The two books I recommend there are Start with No and Bargaining for Advantage. I'd recommend the first if you need a general purpose bargaining strategy and aren't experienced. I'd recommend the second if you're an experienced bargainer who is looking to improve.

A few years back I read The Prince by Machiavelli. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

For general interest for anyone who likes math I strongly recommend The Mathematical Experience by Davis and Hersch. My summary of it is that Godel, Escher, Bach is the book that non-mathematicians have on their coffee table book, while The Mathematical Experience is the one that mathematicians have.

Lots of people gave sci-fi recommends for you. To those I'll add Peter Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series and Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. Furthermore if you haven't seen it yet, go to an IMAX and see Hubble 3D. If you ever dreamed of space, you need to see it. Really.

For random science fact, I like Jared Diamond. I like virtually everything by Stephen J. Gould. I recently re-read Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and still love that.

I could list more, but that's enough for the moment.
Pale Fire, by Nabokov. A story of insane obsession, which I'm sure many HN readers could relate to...
The hand-woven core memory "rope" is what blew me away.

http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...
On the links I clicked, middle-click-to-new-tab definitely worked.

Search is atop every page, just to the right of the logo -- and autocomplete is wicked fast.

When you click a topic -- which has a blue-background, rounded-edge 'tag' look -- you get the topic page, with a list of 'open questions', 'best questions', and 'topic activity' (both new questions and answers/comments). Not exactly recent questions, but pretty close.
Great suggestion. I asked our video guy to upload one.

Edit: It's live now. Thanks.
Sania Mirza To Tie Shoaib Malik?
> Suppose the initial investor is the government, and the sorts of businesses are only the types that are good for the country: health, education, and energy.

This might work in theory, but in practice, the money always goes to politicians' friends, allies, and funding sources. Consider all the bridges to nowhere built. Or my favorite example - building troop transports that the Joint Chief of Staff says the Army doesn't need or want any more of. One billion per transport, but we aren't likely to be needing a larger scale Normandy-style invasion transport any more, so they go unused and take up space and require maintenance. But they're built in some influential politicians' district, so each year they keep building and shipping one of these billion dollar paperweights that the Army doesn't want.

In fact, I'll go a step further - there's a decent chance that some of these programs will actually be destructive by chasing out legitimate businesses that can't compete with government subsidized preferentially treated nonsense.

In theory, we could stipulate that "the government will only fund good, non-corrupt stuff." This, however, has pretty much never worked in practice anywhere, especially not in a representative democracy where politicians take legal bribes (we call it "campaign finance") and then the politicians give business and money back to the people who campaign financed them. I mean, what do you call a politician taking money, using it for his own gain, and then giving public money back to the person who gave him money? That's almost exactly the definition of corruption to me, but it's institutionalized in America as campaign finance. So no, I have no faith that the politicians would allocate funding to "only the types that are good for the country." At least, they're not doing it right now with the billions and trillions they're spreading around, and I don't see any reason to think additional funds would be spent more judiciously.
I just finished 'A song of ice and fire' series by George R.R. Martin and it's an amazing read.
Another good Behavioral Economics book:
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
I liked it a lot better than Predictably Irrational.
I'll repost my suggestion from the last "great reads" thread on HN.

----------------------------------------

The Bet by Anton Chekhov

You can read it here: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Bet.shtml

It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. It's so fantastically misanthropic, I cannot recommend it enough.

The polemic against society at the end is just epic.
Fug already has a meaning. It's the smell of a stuffy room. (It's one of Rtm's favorite words.)
* I assume the fifth is setup in case of software failures.*

It is. The 5th has just enough to get the shuttle home, and is designed by a separate team. The presumption being that anything that knocked out the first 4 is probably a systematic failure.
For those interested in software issues in aerospace, you might want to listen to Episode 100 of Software Engineering Radio: http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2008-06/episode-100-software...

It features an extensive interview with a guy from DLR, the German equivalent of NASA. They talk at length about culture (freedom to fail), practices (extensive re-use), and ballpark performance metrics (on the order of < 10 LOC per programmer per day).
In networking seminars, classes and sales conferences
around the world, people are told some version of "if you get rejected by someone, ask them for a referral." This has never worked for me when dating. (After being rejected, I don't recall saying, "I know you aren't interested in me, but do you have any friends that are?") I've never really understood why people think this works in a business context.

It doesn't happen explicitly, but a lot of the time, a person who's already in a relationship (i.e. who will reject the suitor for non-personal reasons) will refer attractive singles to friends.

If a VC rejects me, I'm going to assume that I'm not offering what he's looking to invest in, because the "VCs invest in people, not projects" line is wrong and it's legitimate and expected that a VC will reject people who aren't in his domain. If he refuses to refer me, on the other hand, to someone who might be looking to invest in my project, I'm going to recognize that his ability to judge talent is nil.
The moderately health-conscious person is not the average American. The average American is ignorant and overweight and has led a life of poor eating choices. Not because of lack of information, but because of lack of caring and lack of habit. No nutritional label is going to change that.

Unfortunately the government is in the business of creating illusions. As long as we slap a label on something we create the illusion that we are making progress.

This is along the same lines that the government thinks they are making school lunches healthier by adding a fruit cup with their food but pay no attention to that fruit cup being loaded with sugar because of the heavy syrup in the container.

It just creates the illusion that we are doing something healthy, but not actually fixing the problem.

I do not believe that there is much we can do about the majority of adult Americans, but we could start shaping the future for the children and foster proper eating habits from the beginning.
Well, it'll hurt your future relationship (should there be one) with the VC, which could be detrimental further down the line if they remember you. Plus, if every VC behaves like this, it'll hurt you because nobody will ever refer you and therefore you waste the few seconds you spent typing out the question.

I can see this from both sides. We are trained as entrepreneurs to ask, ask, ask. If they say no, ask them who might say yes. But if they say no because they're a biotech late-stage VC, and you're after social-web angel funding, so they read your first two sentences and then turned off - what value does a referral really have?

It all comes down to doing your homework, IMO. If someone who should be interested declines, they can probably help you. If you're mass mailing every VC in Silicon Valley and asking for introductions from those who bother to reply to your poorly-targeted pitch, well, you've got a bigger problem than a VC writing a blog post about you.
World hottest news: EPPICard: The loaded and unsecure drawing near to ..
Yes I know, seeing it on the package after you order it couldn't possibly stop you from repeating the same mistake and avoid ordering it the next 100 times.
I can do better.

My third grade teacher was a lovely woman but very old-fashioned, and at the time very few people had a personal computer. When I handed in my first paper, typed up using a word-processing program, she refused to accept it.

Why? Because she was convinced "the computer wrote the paper for me." I tried to explain to her that computers as portrayed by the media (this was 1985) and computers in fact were quite different, but she was firm. So I spent the rest of the semester typing up my papers and then re-copying them by hand to hand in.

It's funny to think that twenty five years later, the computer STILL can't write my papers.
jedberg, I'd first like to say thanks for weighing in on these conversations. It adds a great deal to these discussions having an insider to clarify things and offer a unique perspective.

> "If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have to pay the bills somehow."

This comment, however, isn't helpful, and obviously isn't true. Reddit built a really cool, useful site for sharing and discussing interesting things, and nobody begrudges them for trying to turn a profit. Reddit wasn't acquired by Condé Nast because they are interested in having a cool service, it was acquired because they intend to make a lot of money off of it.

The fact that Reddit has found a way to do this while keeping the ads relevant and non-annoying definitely impressive, but we're kidding ourselves if we call these ads a necessary evil instead of the core of the business model.
New Lean Startup Conference website, speakers, agenda
not sure.... the more I hear, the less I believe it!
The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas P. M. Barnett.

It's like The World is Flat on steroids. It's probably even more pro free trade. It's the most optimistic look at world affairs I've ever seen. The idea is that trade ties countries together and makes them stop fighting.
I think he realizes that, while rejecting someone is just an impersonal and inevitable matter of business, refusing to refer someone is a personal insult, and one that can bite a person in the ass later, and he doesn't like being in the difficult position of taking this risk.
Recent reads I'd recommend...

Seth Godin's Linchpin

Viral Loops by Adam L. Penenberg
There is a genre-resemblance to StackExchange -- especially the Q/A/comment three-types of comments.

So far, some contrasts are:

- nothing as front-and-center about scores/achievements on Quora

- Quora far more focused on instant updates/notifications -- to the level of an instant-messenger's "...is typing a message", and immediate advisement of every upvote/response you get

As a result, they both feel a bit game-like, but with StackExchange the notable driver is, "I hit a new high level", whereas with Quora, it's "gotta click back to where the new stuff is happening right now".
Employment contracts: What are they good for?
Atlas Shrugged bu Ayn Rand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
The HN convention for older articles is to append the title with the year.

Finally something that explains Rails architecture [2007]
are there any serious (e.g. larger than I am) virtual infrastructure providers using KVM?

on the other hand, the linux guys /really/ don't like Xen; There are some open bugs in the debian paravirt xen kernel that have been open for quite some time. KVM unquestionably has a massive mindshare advantage when it comes to Linux developers.
Second for Meditations. I'm slowly reading it, reflecting on the passages. Seems like the way to read it.

It's a bit like an ancient Roman Twitter account.
I disagree with the analogy. An ORM is like automatic transmission -- it hides the details of switching gears but the gears are still there. SQL is manual transmission: You have maximum flexibility to access your data in a variety of ways with reasonable performance. NoSQL then is like having no transmission at all! It's simpler, as there are no gears to shift and no clutch, and it's faster under very specific conditions. Just as NoSQL has no complex query API and is optimized to fetch your data in a very specific way.
Flash may be FREE but only for Windows, Mac OS X And Linux users(and it does a poor job in the last two). Everyone else has to live with out flash or pray that gnash works if they really need the functionality. I think I rather have widespread HTML5 use even it means widespread H.264. Even if the worst comes to be they can't possibly have the money and time it takes to sue all the millions of H.264 users there will be. On top of it different countries have different laws.
It'll force some restaurants to rethink their menus.
Well, it'll hurt your future relationship (should there be one) with the VC, which could be detrimental further down the line if they remember you.

Rejection's just a matter of business, but if he refuses to refer you and doesn't have a good reason (e.g. "everyone in my network is interested in biotech, and you're a web startup") he already thinks you're a loser and beneath consideration. At this point, getting his panties in a jam by asking a question he'll find annoying is a (small) benefit.
Review my Chrome extension : FlashPlus
Really disingenuous how he frames it as a "security breach".
I wonder what would happen if they offered a 10-15 GB option at half the price of the 50GB option. I know a few dropbox users who keep hitting the 2GB limit, but don't want to upgrade because they think 50GB is more than they need and they'd feel like they're paying for something they're not using.
And it required 380 engineers to build the Burj Dubai.

The only difference is for most software projects it is acceptable to have "bugs" as customers will still pay for it, even if it's in a poor state of quality. But "bugs" in a 2,717 ft tower are unacceptable.

It comes down to, in general the cost of a bug in most software is relatively low compared to other engineering disciplines. Of course if the software is critical support systems for Astronauts that's a different story.
What’s in a Startup Methodology?
> Maybe it would help to have a scheme where the government must (try to) get out of the company in X (10?) years.

"Today, Senator Joesph Hanson announced that the United States would not be able to meet its deadline of pulling out of businesses by the year 2030. Senator Hanson commented, 'These programs have done a lot of good for people, but aren't stable yet. We've seen improvements in the lives of Americans, but the programs aren't strong enough to stand on their own. We're extending the program duration and allocating additional funding with the intention to exit by 2035.' The USA-FUND-LIFE program was conceived in 2010 to stimulate industry and $300 trillion has been spent on it so far. This is the third extension of government funding for the FUND-LIFE program which was originally set to expire in 2020."
...wow, that is really, really high. I've run a few ads on reddit and got clicks in the hundreds for that price, not the thousands.

That's less than $0.01 cpc...which, from what I understand, is completely unheard of.
Using Arc (Jarc) with App Engine