skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's one way to [re]ddit it. Here's another:

The DA has reason to believe some guy is in possession of a very important piece of stolen property. They get a judge to sign a search warrant. The police execute the warrant. The guy's lawyer says the guy is a member of the media. The DA pauses investigation, and will likely kill it. The guy's property will be returned. His damaged door paid for. Everyone is perfectly safe and okay. The system works again.
I liked it, actually. But that's what the Simpsons do. I'm tired of seeing it everywhere else, especially in places where they wouldn't say the same thing about other successful companies that owe their success to more than the fickle winds of fashion.
This question has been bugging me in my mind ever since I first saw this presentation back in 2005:

What integer value in a game gets so big that it can potentially overflow a 64 bit integer?

I've literally been thinking about this question for years and I can't think of a single case. Bignums are pretty much only used in scientific computations and the only thing in a game that would come close to this would be encryption, in which case the programmers would know what they are doing and wouldn't mistakenly used fixed size integers.

(Of course back in the day integer overflow bugs in games were everywhere, one awesome example being level number 256 in pacman)
Isn't that sort of like scalping concert tickets?
Nah, "floppy" was a reference to the media, which was quite flexible for both 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks, despite the different casing.
The thing is, a truly great technical manager will sit in most of those meetings for you, and give you a digest.

You still want to interact with the customer whenever possible, but not so much so that you can't get anything done!
"... When I was a teenager at school I definitely did not fit in. I had glasses, was awkward, brainy, wore the school uniform because I had no idea what else to wear, and suffered insults from my classmates. One of these was the frequent and common slander “poof” (which is probably the closest thing to the American term “fag”).

I was either ignored, or verbally abused, or physically assaulted. In one attack two boys pinned me down and asked me the incongruous question: “Do you prefer music or art?”. “Art” after all was something only a poof would like. ..."

Cripes @JGC I feel for you mate. The self description as a student could fit any reader here. There but for the grace go I - except I was probably bigger & uglier than yourself.

Anyone who wants a quick understanding of the mechanics of bullying and ways to circumvent it, take a peek at "Hacking People" ~ http://bootload.posterous.com/hacking-people and some thoughts on identifying Cyber Bullies ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2010/03/13/hacking-bullies
A bunch of my coworkers are Swedish, and I've had similar issues with the brackets. It's aggravating.

I use the English/American Dvorak, but it takes me a second to switch back to qwerty as necessary. (I'm probably in the rare niche of mixed vi/emacs users, FWIW.) Vi + Dvorak isn't so bad, though I feel like Dvorak is (somehow) more compatible with Emacs.
My wife's car was stolen. When it was recovered we found ATM receipts in the car (presumably from the thief). The Toronto Police never called us back about it when we told them that we found the receipts. I mean, we had the bank account numbers of the thief (or at least someone that knew him/her). There was even a parking receipt from the Toronto Zoo and a receipt for school supplies from WalMart (along with an un-opened pencil sharpener).

I mean it was a f'ing car and the police did jack shit about it.
Your phone, obviously, isn't that important.

When the phone in question is a prototype of a model that is destined to sell millions, it gets noticed. But, it's important to look at this as a criminal investigation. There're is the suspiction that a criminal act occurred. A judge agreed, and issued a search warrant. Just based upon Gizmodo's coverage alone, there is enough to suspect that a crime happened. Because this is Apple property, it gets greater scrutiny, but it's not like Apple signed the warrant.

You can expect a whole other level of hurt for Gizmodo from Apple in a civil suit.

And I thought Google blocking cnet for a year was bad... Just imagine what the Apple blackout will be like for Gizmodo.
How Facebook is putting its users last
i hope you paid through paypal with a credit card. if so, call the credit card company or go online and dispute the charge. it will be on them to go after paypal to get your money back after crediting you your money back. file a police report, file a report online with the FTC, keep disputing the paypal charge. if paypal is able to contact this person to get their side of the story, they should be able to give you that information to hand over to the police.

do you still have the emails/phone numbers from the craigslist contact? print out emails with full headers for the police. i'm not sure if craigslist changes any headers for mails sent through their sale-XXXX@craigslist.org addresses. might want to contact them as well to get any information you can to hand over to the police.

just some general words of advice with paypal: always pay with a credit card. you get protection for just these types of cases. if you receive payment, never let it sit in your paypal account. immediately move it to a bank account. once it's there, paypal can never take it out without your authorization (if the situation were reversed and you sold something, the buyer disputed it, and paypal tried to reverse the charge on you). paypal is not a credit agency, and any claims that they're sending you to collections are just empty threats.

i've gone through this once before selling a laptop on ebay. the buyer paid me with a verified paypal account that had been compromised. i shipped the laptop, a month later the legitimate paypal account owner disputed the charge, paypal tried to get the money back from me and threatened me with bogus collection attempts.
> "I know we discussed that you like to come in at 11 and stay late at the interview, but the adjustment period is over now."

Wow, outright lying?
Node.js via CGI
I'm surprised he didn't touch on "give your devs decent hardware & tools".

This should be such a no brainer but it's far and away the most common complaint I hear.

$900 on a workstation every 2 years -> happier, more productive devs.
I am delighted to inform you of the relevant agencies you can complain to. I highly recommend you complain to the local cable commission. From a subscriber's rights pamphlet that arrived with my first bill, verbatim:

If a problem or question has not been resolved to your satisfaction by a Customer Support representative, you may request to speak with a supervisor in that department. If you are not satisfied with the results, please write to us at:
Time Warner Cable, Research Department
41-61 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11355

You will be notified, either by phone or by letter, within two business days of our receipt of your letter. We will make every effort to resolve the problem within 10 business days. Should you still remain dissatisfied with our resolution, you have 30 days to refer the matter to the State of New York Public Service Commission, 3 Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY 12223, Phone: 1.800.342.3377, or 10 days to refer the matter to the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Telecommunications and Cable Television Division (DOITT), 75 Park Place, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10007, Phone: 311. If the matter is referred to the DOITT, it has 30 days in which to investigate the issue and recommend a resolution to the company. If the matter is not referred to the Research Department in 10 business days, our resolution shall be considered final. We also participate in the Better Business Bureau (BBB) Customer Commitment Program. The BBB can be reached at 257 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010, Phone: 1.900.463.6222 (Calls cost caller 95 cents/min.).

- Now the text implies that there is some sort of time limit regarding when you can file a complaint, but if you visit the websites of the respective agencies (NYPSC: http://www.dps.state.ny.us/New_complaintdept.html, DOITT: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/html/consumer/consumer_cable_s...), there is no mention of a time limit. I would suggest complaining anyway, since you have nothing to lose, and the purpose of these agencies is to serve the public. And of course the Better Business Bureau: Better Business Bureau: https://odr.bbb.org/odrweb/public/getstarted.aspx
Hey, I have a bill here that says you owe me $1 million. It may be a mistake and you could argue about it, but I'm not answering your emails. I'm not going to send you a readable copy of the invoice, either. If you don't pay me today, I'm sending this to a collection agency, so you have no choice but to pay.
I think games would be a great way to learn a lot of things. If I ever get time I want to make a "pathogen" video game - you would have to identify the pathogen and attack it with the right antibiotic or immune system component.
Exactly this situation happened to me here in Houston with my 1st generation iPhone. I left it by the DDR machine. The result? I went to the barkeep, and someone had turned it in!
I'm sorry to say this, but if you just got scammed out of $1,000 then you just got a $1,000 lesson in life.

I think it goes without saying, but if you were going to meet to pick up the mac, why not pay cash after you turned it on and made sure everything was all set? I'm guessing it was a great price.
Vice travel guide to North Korea
My Vertu Phone
Hilarious videos
I feel similarly as a gay-affirming Christian. Standing up for equal treatment of people doesn't make a person gay.
I have Time Warner and can only dream of having a connection stable enough to even think about playing an MMO. I don't even know if this comment will go through, since just a moment ago my roommate asked "Did the internet go out for you, too?"
i agree, i'm not sure why you would ever pay for something sight-unseen.

arrange to meet in person at some neutral place that has wifi, turn the laptop on, use it, make sure it's ok, then login to your paypal account on some other device (not the one you just bought) and pay the person. they should be able to check their email and confirm payment.
> I plan to be one of those parents that don't own a TV.

The modern equivalent is denying your kids Internet access. According to a (somewhat) recent Variety article, the median age of TV viewership is 50.

(Yes, I do trust Variety to get entertainment news right.)
The 5th Amendment says that you can't be compelled to incriminate yourself, but I don't think that covers everything. If you have a safe in your house and the police have a search warrant for the contents of the safe, I think you are legally required to turn over the combination or key.

I remember hearing about this being used as a justification by a judge in a case relating to encryption. It's just sad that most cases involving encryption / computer crimes are related to child porn charges so people are more worried about punishing the person than they are about protecting the rights of everyone that is brought into the court system.
Infertility can begin in the womb
All in all, a great essay. But:

>I’m conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt.

Why on earth shouldn't a gay couple be allowed to adopt?
I've remapped caps lock to ESC

I find that Mac keyboards are very difficult to remap. Is there any reason for that? Or maybe there's some utility that handles remapping I just can't find. Buggy as it is, I miss xmodmap.
mkturner, bitter experience teaches me that I (you in this case) should've been more aggressive about getting the situation resolved. A little goodwill on your part i.e. attempting to find a reader would have gone a LONG way to closing this case. I empathize, but not doing your legwork is inexcusable.
Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan's Ultimate Mix Tape Of The Human Experience
They are trying to find the guy who sold it to Jason Chen. Hence the search warrant not the arrest warrant.
Perhaps he foresees a high score inflation.

My favorite integer overflow bug was the max score in original tetris -- 32767. Although seeing IKEA chair* tester's counter overflow and bring the system down is a close second.

[* chair tester just like one shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaZ3ikJ-M4o&NR=1]
The Attack Coming From Bytes, Not Bombs
Your Blog Is Blinding Me
One thing I've seen work is to make it clear that, while you have the liberty of working odd hours if you so please, your work product will be under greater scrutiny to make sure you can "handle it".

Make it clear that it is a privilege which can be revoked. This lets your alpha programmers who like to work odd hours excel and keeps your mediocre programmers who might be tempted to mail it in from even trying it (because there's nothing mediocre devs loath more than heightened scrutiny).
If that were true, then how did they so easily contact the guy who lost it and out him after the original post detailing the phone? Conceivably they could have called him before they printed the story about him.
How to convert MKV to iPad on Mac?
Ok, I'm constantly seeing inquires all over the place where people are asking the same question about if they can play MKV files on their iPad to be answered by "No". Well, here is a guide about how to play MKV files on your iPad.
Well I read two lines and stopped: "I’m not, so what was it that drove me to stand up for a gay man?"

Is that a serious question? Who the hell wouldn't stand up for a man who was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. I mean, what reasonable non-crazy-fundie person would support that?

Wow, I kept reading:

"Many of those people who wrongly assumed I was gay would probably be surprised to learn that I campaigned for Alan Turing despite having my own discomfort with homosexuality. I don’t have clear thoughts about whether gay marriage or civil partnerships are better; I’m conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt."

Seriously? This is worthy of being the top article on HN. Shudder. Not rhetoric I'm proud of in the least.
Shield laws protect journalists/sources. In an ideal world, we'd be cheering for a good guy. In this case, the TMZ of tech is in the crosshairs. Not going to do any armchair lawyering, but I sure can't wait for the other side (not the whitewashed Gizmodo story) of the story to come out. Sadly, the conditions for Godwin's law are rapidly being met on this situation. sigh
Programmers aren't the only people in an office and there are social norms which affect general productivity. I don't give people deathmarches and don't ask people to work overtime (a social norm!). But I will get rid of someone if their behavior leads the rest of the team to slack off or miss targets.

Personally, I think the poster is wrong to complain about not being allowed to work 30 hours a week when he has a fulltime job, but that's his issue with his employer. In my experience, if you want to rock the boat, you've got to be able to manage the communication and signaling problems that creates in the workplace. This guy is offloading that problem to his manager and doesn't seem to understand the issues he might be creating. So it isn't that I don't understand his point. It's that I don't think his sarcasm offers any practical advice for the people he's complaining about other than "let me do it my way".
I agree with you on trying to return it directly, I found a blackberry while skiing and called the "home" number and was able to get it back to the guy. Keeping it would have been a nice upgrade (maybe if it were a Droid I would have).

However, they obviously knew the owner SINCE HE WAS CONTACTED AFTER THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE, and they failed to return it. They did the equivalent of checking the address book when they went on Facebook and then didn't do anything to return it.
Ah, didn't know that. But they can factor this traffic into their average and get more money in the next set of contracts.
my x200 takes 20 minutes to POST and the BIOS downgrades fail via both GRUB and windows7. similar experiences litter the lenovo forum. if apple had an issue like this it woulda been frontpaged on every tech site and fixed within a day..

its hard to avoid rebooting because the hardware hardfreezes a couple times a day. also the network slot has a very small whitelist should your card crap out
Strength Training For Women
I'd be shocked if there was not precedent dealing with exactly this kind of stuff. This is hardly the first time a person in the press has paid for the inside scoop on a trade secret. Ignorance of the case law does not make a person (or corporation) innocent.
Have you ever tried reading the manual? Seriously, the level of the documentation is pretty good for a free piece of software.

Edit: actually, its pretty good for any piece of software.
True story: I owned a small business in the late 90s. At some point we had a billing dispute with Sprint long distance. Briefly, we required our (large) telephone bill to be sent to us electronically (diskettes at that time) so we could rebill our customers. For some reason which I don't recall, we only received the paper invoice for a month or two.

Every time Sprint called looking for payment, we told them to just send us the electronic data and we'd pay the bill. They never did, and eventually it got turned over to a collection agency, which began hounding us.

When that happened, I created a fictitious lawyer working for our company and had him author a sternly worded letter to Sprint. It reiterated the facts, firmly stated that we have no intention of paying, and demanded that they remove (I recall using the word 'extirpate') all traces of this obligation. The amount in dispute was much more than $100, so the time involved was worth it.

I mailed the letter and we never heard anything more about it.
If you eliminated sports, alumni giving would drop significantly, almost certainly by enough to offset the small gains you got from eliminating sports.
Has_opengraph: easily publish opengraph data from your models
If the demand for adoption outstrips supply, and if (big if) a man and a woman parent substantially better than two people of the same gender, it might make sense to have a blanket preference for heterosexual couples when choosing parents. There could be something innate in each gender that contributes to a child's upbringing, and depending on the value of those traits, it could be responsible to maximize the number of children who benefit from both.
If Apple is claiming trade secret protection, they need to demonstrate that they attempted to protect the secret. Apple authorized taking the phone into the public. These "secrets" were not taken from the Apple campus or workplace.
Nor are most Hacker News posters. At least Wikipedia cites sources. :)
What is 'parent substantially better'?
BIG if
Repeal title 9, kill the women's sports that produce no revenue but have large costs, and the problem is solved.
I guess that's the same as saying: "I wouldn't mind if I grew up with two dads... at my ballgames, science fairs, where ever." If you can say that, you should be all for it.
Location chosen for European Extremely Large Telescope
I'd say that geeks tend to think about their environment a lot more than other people because geeks tend to think about systems in general.

I have never encountered a rational argument for homophobia. Gay people seem to me to be just as likely to be virtuous or decadent as straight people.

Discriminating against people for having a different sexual orientation seems totally irrational to me. As far as I'm concerned, 'gay rights' generally equate to 'human rights' and you can sign me up for supporting those any day.
> The other thing with great programmers is that if you don’t give us a sufficiently interesting problem to work on, we’ll often go and invent our own (whether consciously or not).
> That might be a plus for someone like Google, or sometimes for some kinds of start-ups, but not so much for some more pedestrian smaller businesses.

If you actually like programming (as oppose to pursuing it for the money), you should only seek to work at places where you, as a technologist within your particular field will make a difference.

Problem is that it's tricky to tell such places apart from the rest. Everyone calls themselves a "technology company". Mission of the company isn't a good heuristic: there are e-commerce retailers that are run like "IT shops" and there is Amazon (a true technology company). Nonetheless, from this message I can tell that something is different here and better here:

http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc?...

In most other cases it isn't so clear; you have to read between the lines. Job descriptions only asking for years of experience with specific technologies, non-technical interview questions or interview questions that only involve language syntax and APIs but don't touch on algorithms and data-structures, inflexible working hours, mandated technology stacks (with no exceptions for new projects or experimental code) are a way for an employer to signal "hackers not wanted". Fortunately these are very easy to spot and avoid, but I've been surprised when people (who have other options) choose to work at companies that require them in their seat at 8:30 and clearly under-use their talent.

On the other hand, I am afraid excessive commitment to methodology (e.g., daily stand-ups, inability to write any code without meetings + permission of the "scrum master" + index cards, pair programming, mandated test coverage percentages and "always write tests first") is another such sign, but unfortunately I am in minority.
Therein lies the rub. It is logically possible. It is practically unlikely.
If these secrets are so valuable maybe Apple should rethink its policy of letting them walk out the door to go to a bar.
This is awesome. Why limit it to infectious disease? Acute non-infectious disease (trauma, vascular events, cancer) would be a great next step, followed perhaps by common disease. This would be a tremendous way to learn pharm. At the end of the day, rote knowledge can lay down a nice structure for actual understanding. (I know this sounds backwards, but if you know the right answer then it makes it easier to remember the mechanism by which it is correct.)
That's a rather interesting mix of good points and religious crazy talk. I think the most pertinent point is that the U.S. has in fact acted in an imperialist way over the past half century or so, and has killed a very large number of people in the process, many of which happen to be Muslim. I don't agree with the theory that this results from a lack of values on the part of Westerners, but I can see how Muslims might feel like they are being attacked on all fronts---both militaristically and culturally.

From that perspective, the idea of refraining from unnecessarily insulting their most important religious leader makes sense to me. In context, it sends very much the wrong message, and is counterproductive. Of course, death threats over the matter are stupid and counterproductive, too, as it only feeds into the jihadist stereotype.
Kirby, I just sent you an email. I'd like to try and help you if I can. (The same goes for anybody else on HN by the way.)
Or you can just use Air Video. Live conversion that allows me to play any file. It's like a dream come true.
reviews to-be-released movies

well might you ask. In this case, an unreleased movie made its way through a longer chain of people, eventually ending up on bittorrent...for which the uploader did ~5 months in jail and >1 year of supervised release: http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/valenteCharge.htm

Not an identical situation, of course...but not so very different either. Apparently the sentence was reasonably light on the basis that there was no profit involved. Adding $ into the equation usually changes things for the worse in a case like this.