skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool idea! Looks great! Here's a couple of critiques:

1. On the main graphic in the middle of the page where it says "Matchio is The best way to buy and sell your books locally. Period." the letters run together when I view it in Safari 4.0.4

2. On the very bottom, the "Learn More" section, I feel that this is kind of an unnecessary use of JS animation. This section is asking for feedback, and provides useful links so if you don't expand it you might never see this info. I would just keep it expanded.

3. Everything under "Feedback" in the learn more section does the same thing.

4. Privacy policy and Terms of Services links don't do anything (I'm guessing they already know that though)

5. I also noticed in the source that there's a lot of inline Javascript, some in using JQuery, some not. I would try to keep it consistent and I'd throw it all inside of $(document).ready() to keep the markup cleaner, plus everything inside here will be ready to be used immediately after the DOM is loaded.
Chat Roulette Cock Map
In your deflationary scenario, you'd be better off holding the cash, because there are costs for storage. Your cash would appreciate as much as the price of the goods.
But how do you remove the threat? That is, how do you eliminate the crazies?

Granted, I don't know how many crazies there are. Suppose it would go down as in my worst case scenario, with crazies killing cartoonists left and right. Assuming most crazies would be caught after the deed, after a while all crazies might be used up. The cost would be quite high, though (lots of dead cartoonists).
Invariants are still here. Instead of talking about them in comments, you can have automated test-generation via QuickCheck:

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_QuickCheck
Steve Jobs: There won't be a Mac app store
The irrelevant and distracting pictures of food on this blog are really starting to annoy me. I wish the irrelevant picture URL was more predictable, such that it wouldn't accidentally conflict with e.g. a graph or diagram.
Most people would betray their race for someone who looks like tricia helfer.
If half is surely wasted, it still remains to be shown that the other half provides a good return on investment.
Consider a computer program with access to the memory in which the program is running and no other inputs. The program is information, and only has access to information. The information is embodied in some set of hardware, but the computer program has no way of knowing or accessing this hardware (and we assume the hardware is 100% reliable, e.g. no memory faults due to overheating RAM or whatnot). So from the perspective of the program, everything is information, including the program itself. Substitute 'conscious mind' for 'program' and you have a conscious mind in a world of nothing but information. The fact that a 'hard' world exists outside of the 'soft' world is irrelevant, by virtue of being unknowable.
Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it, since it comes to mind every time I see an article like this. Let me know if I'm off track.

Isn't it more accurate to say that "description," rather than "information," is the root of everything? Information itself is pretty abstract, so it seems far more useful to do it this way.
And on the other side...
WARNING SARDONIC
"Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima"
Leonard Cohen
I always hear Zynga mentioned as the success story for Facebook Ads. If you had to name an example other than Zynga, who would it be?
Our parents lived without "media". Their grandparents, without planes; theirs, without cars; telephones; lightbulbs.

The timeline might be off, but the point is as soon as we get used to tech, living without it is a struggle. Nothing new.
John Paul Shen's _Modern Processor Design_ is my current favorite. It covers the design of recent (and also some historic) processor architectures, including pipelining, cache and memory systems, superscalar, and so on. Some concrete examples are given (e.g., PowerPC, x86).
Airplane assembled in under 3 minutes
Tough choice, because you really want both, and yet you can't have both.

I think a nearly-optimal strategy is to have breadth in a variety of technologies and then deep expertise in one, which you choose based on what you're most passionate about when exploring technologies. (It also helps to keep an eye on the market, so it's not completely useless.) That deep expertise is what will open new opportunities for you - nobody hires a dilettante. But the opportunities will be worthless if you get stuck in a specialty you hate.
probably a stupid question, but how much karma do you need before you are able to down vote something?
>(in this sense it's not quite entirely a ponzi scheme, but there is no closer idea)

Why not just say, "I'm super ignorant. Sorry about this post."

A lot of companies have made statements that in retrospect, and maybe even at the time, can be seen as pure hubris.

You could say something cliched like, facebook: web bubble 2.0. Another cliche, facebook management: irrationally exuberant?

Or you could reference companies that failed: facebook: the Global Crossing of our social network.

There are a great number of ways for a company to fail. Many of them do not involve being a fraudulent investment scheme.
WOW! What a great piece! It's the systems that matter. There's all this discussion lately about "Never hire job-hoppers." No, that's completely wrong. It's all about the systems that companies have in place.

The Freemont experiment took the workers and put them in a different system and things changed even though they were the worst workers before.
Yes. And let's get rid of our comment functionality.

Reddit has comments, HN never should have implemented that functionality.

This is kind of like saying [some group of unliked people] eat sandwiches, so let's not eat sandwiches.

*Edit: Hurrah for accidentally downvoting me three times :)
Salman Rushdie
CTRL-F works pretty good, too.
Why Start-Ups Must Pay Attention To What’s Behind The Curtain
It uses emacs bindings. A lot of OS X does, they're actually really useful once you get familiar with them. I've also mapped caps lock to ctrl to make it easier on the pinky finger.
I believe it's around 200.
I want to find out who started that rumor and take their internet connection away from them.
If you like TAL, you might like Radiolab from WNYC (Science focus) and Planet Money (Economics focus).
In Monty Python Fluxx, you can play "Play All," use "Bring Out Your Dead" to get rid of all your cards except for "The Cheese Shop" which you then play to win.
I suppose it refers to this tweet and picture: http://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/11524252866

The interesting thing is that this wasn't talked about that much. I remember thinking it was funny that Steve Wozniak would get a 3G on the launch of the wifi-only iPad but didn't think more about it: all versions of the iPad had been presented long before so it was nothing new, just funny that Woz would get an unreleased product on that day.

So, if the engineer did get fired over this, I would have to go with the "culture of fear". Or at least, in this case, it seems that Apple stuck to its policies instead of figuring out the damage done. (which was none)
I'm not sure you can define how a standard can "injure" users.
Charles Stross has done an analysis of the economics of star flight and came to the conclusion that interstellar travel makes no sense at all. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high.... It may not be possible at all.

From the article you linked to:
"This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary."
Glad you liked it so much :)
This comment seems somewhat incoherent.

The question of how much experience a candidate has on your platform has nothing to do with how often they "hop jobs" (and can we stop calling it that now?).

It's hard to interview people, and the penalty for making a bad hiring decision really is steep. But don't scapegoat.
World’s Fastest Robot Versus The Wiimote
My friends all think
that I'm a neb
Cause I spend much time
here on the web

The good things here
I do not abuse
Except lots of time
on hacker news

I don't read reddit
I will not digg
I'm not on facebook
My work's too big

I do not text
I do not tweet
I just work on
Things that are neat

I check email
throughout the day
But there are no games
that I will play

My phone's on vibrate
I do not chat
My work is really
Where it's at

Knuth and Turing
are my big heroes
I love to move
Ones and zeros

My head is down
I'm in the mode
Don't bother me
I have to code

Those who need me
leave voicemail
I'm much too busy
trying not to fail

I learn on-line
and from my schools
But I must avoid
all sorts of trolls

I can't believe
I wrote this ode
When I have so much
I have to code

I'm not an addict
I have no drug
I've got to go
To fix a bug
Somewhat off topic: Has anyone heard anything about Google and VP8? Weren't they supposed to be making an announcement about it (or was that just a rumor)?
Unfortunately, the guys on it know almost nothing about anything, but rather only follow up stories that confirm their biases.
The headline is misleading. As the article points out, it's not clear what Jobs is "noping": that there will be a Mac app store, that Macs will only run Apple-authorized software, or that there is such a rumor going around.

I suspect Jobs is saying "nope" to the "no software without authorization from Apple will run on Mac OS X" and nothing more.

Pretty cool to get an email from sjobs@apple.com, but why doesn't he use the ridiculous stationary included with his Mail.app program?
Apple can and should do many things to improve the automatic switching. If you want them to get that message many little rants appearing all over the internet can help.

Doing graphics switching automatically is certainly the way it should be done – but Apple might not be quite there yet. That’s no surprise, it’s pretty new after all. No reason not to rant, though.
Section G of the complaint: http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-59.htm
>They're not going to be co-founders, they won't have a great upside, they're going to be paid a salary to do a job for you.

This is a point that I think most (especially first time) founders would do well to keep in mind when thinking about loyalty or even overall commitment of employees.

As an employee with 1% or less of the company in options and a normal if not below market salary, I simply don't have the upside incentive to go "above and beyond." Combined with the situation of responsibility (handling outages and other emergencies) without authority (advice on major infrastructure changes ignored or delayed), my loyalty or commitment haven't been earned.
Despite the downvotes you've received, I agree that you are the internet Ron
- connectors: people who make a real effort to know who you are, what you're working on and how they can help you. these people follow up via email and make intro's for you, without you even asking.

How does one make a living from being a connector? It sounds like a lovely job, but there's a reason why more people are empty networkers: they are pushing their own agenda to make a living.

I know you could say that one should take the long term view, and that if you are a great connector, eventually good things will happen. It's like saying that you should start a blog to find a job. The blog won't make you money, but it will land you a job (maybe). Connecting people may land you a great job at some point. Too bad, I wanted to keep being a connector. How do I do that?
I would prefer you don't. Meta is boring and usually unwelcome on HN (from what I've seen). I don't want to read a comment about how you voted or meant to vote.
The only thing that seems to consistently work for me is disabling my internet connection. Freedom (http://macfreedom.com/) is what I've used. Apparently it costs $10 now, but also works on both Windows and OS X.

With linux, I expect it would be fairly simple to write a script that did the same thing, though I don't know how it would get enforced.
"This event is no longer available because it has been cancelled." Wikipedia entry is also gone.
In case anyone else noticed that the author seemed familiar, he's the same one who did the Harmony sketcher: http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/

Lots of other incredible demos on his portfolio page: http://mrdoob.com/blog
Makes for a great story.
After I recently accidentally downvoted a comment to zero I wrote a answer to that comment, apologizing and asking two people to volunteer upvotes. After the parent picked up some votes a few minutes later I deleted my comment. But that’s certainly only possible for submissions high up on the frontpage which are seen by a lot of people.

I probably wouldn’t do that when I weren’t sure that many people would see my comment within minutes, I also wouldn’t do it when I accidentally downvoted someone who already has a few karma points.
A lovely story (which I urge anyone reading this to go and read; it's much geekier than it probably sounds). But wait: isn't there a factor-of-2 error right at the end, and doesn't that rather spoil it? Or am I missing something?
yes.i.am

upvoted for insight.
I may be being pedantic, but are you wanting to learn about systems architecture or learn about the internals of C++? Because those are two completely separate questions.
>For a startup it is vital to not have half of your companys knowledge walk out the door.

This strikes me as putting the onus on the company to ensure that knowledge isn't monopolized (as a previous commentor suggests) and, perhaps more importantly, to ensure retention of key people.

One way is to provide ownership, perhaps in the case of a startup, literally, of the company and its outcome.

In effect, this is the difference between another (likely unequal share) co-founder and merely an employee. Even if such a co-founder moves on, there's a strong enough incentive not just to "walk out" and leave the company without access to that knowledge.
Serious?! I thought it was real good out-of-the-box thinking.
Did you mean "Becoming"?
people like people
ByZe.us - Link Shortening, Sharing, and Tracking
The author admits to taking some liberties with the story, which he clarifies here (you appear to be concerned about #8): http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
Markupslicer: a tool for slicing HTML markup into Rails templates.
Anyone got any good Redis use cases or success stories I could add to a future version of the presentation?
Agreed. I gave two week's notice earlier this week. This is the first time I haven't lasted two years at a company, so I am feeling a bit like a job hopper. But the reasons I'm leaving are very much about accountability without authority.
iirc, even in the good old days, GM was more profitable as a car financing company than a car manufacturing company... profits which were then transferred to employee benefits rather than reinvested in the company
Ron Conway would be privy to plans of many companies, and in connecting it reinforces his deal flow as startups think "he may not invest, but he may know a first customer or an alliance partner with whom he is also privy, and then if he does invest, we know he'll be doing the same for us permanently without us asking." In this case, Conway's benefit from the connecting is a reputation of such that causes further deal flow, and this is the fuel of his business.

Other forms of monetizing connecting include finders fees, commissions, and direct work to realize the connection, eg documentation in an M & A deal. But if the connecting has no direct benefit to oneself in the ways mentioned, the only thing one can expect to gain at best is improving one's aura, frequently just being sidetracked, or at worst doing something for a competitor.

-- if one does a random connect and one has no direct relevancy to the underlying commerce, the parties at best may remember you if you ask for some type of help later (they may also request or expect more free service from you, seeing you as a sucker), and at worst want to avoid you in the event they fear you'll want or demand a share of the gains later from the success of the connection with which they never requested.
JavaScript has probably become my all time favorite programming language (beating Common Lisp and PostScript).

I wonder if anyone has done an OS command line shell with JavaScript as the scripting language - having commands pipe JSON to each other could be rather cool.
Well, there are two ways to deal with employee churn. The first is to create such an awesome work environment (via wages, stock options / golden handcuffs, learning opportunities, career growth, flexibility, etc etc -- whatever it is that works for individual employees) that people laugh at the recruiters that inevitably call. The other way, which Marc advocates, is to create systemic discrimination against employees that seek out the best opportunities for themselves. This is contrary to Marc providing the best opportunities for employees.

Consider, as an example, the Mahalo stuff that started this. Jason's employee was given the opportunity to use his web dev skills on a much higher profile site and to work on a big open source toolkit (I assume he was referring to YUI or similar). Jason could either have wished his employee the best as said employee tried to take his career to the next stage, or provided him with some similar opportunity to convince him to stay, or... advocated for a system in which employees have difficulty switching jobs in order to keep the employee in an inferior position solely for the benefit of Jason. This is what Marc wants.

Note that in Marc's article, there was nothing about retaining employees by creating such an awesome environment that they don't want to leave. Oh, and btw? Here's a protip. If a dev in the valley making $100-$150 leaves for a $10K/year raise? It isn't the money. It's the boss. I claim that except for exceptional cases, salary is a 2nd or 3rd tier consideration for most great employees.

So, does Marc's advocacy of keeping employees by urging employers to systematically discriminate against people that switch jobs to find their best place that make him an asshole? In my book, yes.

ps -- protip #2? One way to discourage people from saying their boss sucked was to discourage it, ala Marc. The other way is to not be a shit boss. Again, Marc chooses the first path.
Nice article. There's been a backlash against formal correctness and verification in software, but fundamentals like asserting (or even just writing) invariants can make almost everyone's code better.
The PyCon live stream we did was a pretty good case study. We pretty much hacked together a pub/sub system on top on BLPOP, so it'd be even easier going forward. Hopefully we'll open source it :/ (we've been meaning to for a while now...)
Karma isn't enough. Apparently there's also an average karma per comment threshold.

The down-arrow is always displayed for me, but often the up and down-arrows have no real effect: for instance, if I upvote a comment its count goes up but after I reload the page the count is back at where it was. This is a known behavior though I don't think it's documented.
I accept that some people, perhaps even most people, are fully immune to anything like Internet addiction. If you're one of those people, great. I envy you. But I can say from first-hand experience that compulsive Internet use ("Internet addiction" is a casual misnomer at best) is real. Further, I very strongly suspect that low-latency Internet connections, up-to-the-minute news and blogs, and social sharing of content have exacerbated such compulsions by enabling and rewarding rapid-fire consumption and shallow analysis of content.

I doubt these inventions are the only cause of Internet compulsion, but they encourage it in people who have pre-existing compulsive tendencies. Analogously, gambling addiction is known to be caused by excessive dopaminergic activity in the brain, but that doesn't change the fact there would be less of it if there were no casinos.

Many studies show ( http://bit.ly/deum0v ) that compulsive Internet use responds to the same sorts of medications used to treat OCD, namely SSRI antidepressants. You might want to consider speaking with a doctor if your use is really that severe. For me, they have helped considerably.
Awesome, I'll keep an eye out for that. Don't suppose you have any interesting numbers on traffic / performance etc?
Information and entropy are absolutely not equivalent; entropy describes the upper bound on information content, but says little about the actual information contained in a coding. The statement that information is spontaeously created isn't based in any physics I know of.
Ask HN: a service that needs SMS
I wanted to create a service that needs send SMS to people (Brazil). I know that Google Agenda, for example, has integration with some cellphone companies, so they provide these APIs to Google. But how could I, a no one with no BigCo behind me, do something like this?
Of US homes 16% can now get fiber, but deployments slowing
Read it before, but enjoyed reading it again.
No software will be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 without being approved and signed by Apple, Inc.

Remember when we used to own our computers?

Time to sell my Apple stock and donate the money to a Linux distro.
A concise summary. Clarity is a state all humans strive for, reach for clarity in your writing and lucid expression will be a natural by-product.
The masses prefer the easiest way to have fun. Drugs, alcohol, unhealthy sex are all dangerous but ... fun.

And maintaining independence takes a lot of effort, which isn't fun.
You may want to read "CODE" by Charles Petzold
I don't have any numbers, but during Guido's keynote (which was twitter powered) tweetfall was too far behind live, so they switched to using our feed. We frequently got comments that we were updating faster than twitter.com was :)
As a PM at a company that uses Facebook ads extensively to attract users, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Facebook ads are worth it and the author of the article doesn't know what he's talking about. At all. End of the story.
The distinction between tenured and assignment mentalities made in the HBR article is vital: before offering or accepting a position, make sure you understand the other's understanding of the relationship sought and the nature of the work. Distinguish between project-oriented and task-oriented work and act accordingly. Project-oriented positions have natural life-cycles with obvious times to conclude the relationship and move on (e.g., product delivery).

Finding people with an earnest, project-oriented mentality is hard. A lot of people believe or want to believe they are project-oriented, but are really case-workers, and vice-versa. A good portion of people aren't project- or task- oriented, they're people-oriented and will conform to a project- or case-oriented environment to the extent that it fosters good inter-personal relations.

A small fraction of people are entirely self-oriented: they'll do whatever is necessary to build their self-esteem and satisfy their will to power. They're cancers. One is enough to destroy the team. Filtering-out these bad seeds is the hardest and most important skill a hiring manager (or potential recruit) can develop. Mr. Suster's post isn't particularly helpful in identifying these most toxic individuals: they bind tightly to their hosts and stick through the disease they create, gaining greater responsibilities and better titles.
I'm addicted to the feeling I get when I split my focus into a thousand different streams. Yoga seems to be the only remedy for the 54 tabs I currently have open.

When I'm away from my computer for an extended time I feel better physically and spiritually. I also get nothing done. We need to treat these machines with the respect we give hallucinogens and power tools.
Exactly correct.
AdBlock. Right-click the iframe and block it.
They're using information in a technical sense, in the sense of "information theory" and maybe "Kolmogorov complexity".
God and the Brain: Faith is More Than a Feeling (2001)