skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people get the CS degree and stop learning or lose the drive to write or create anything interesting. Who knows, maybe they never had it:
It's easier to take a creative person and teach him engineering than it is to teach an engineer to be creative.

Me: B.A. English and Classics. I'm getting a masters in CS--only because I already read/have read many of the graduate texts. I started programming at an early age, but I wasn't interested in CS because the universities were still insisting on Fortran and Assembly, and I'm sure Cobol was on the list of requirements too.
Lastly, deep domain knowledge is priceless--no fancy algorithm trick can beat it. Someone without specialized domain knowledge can't even envision what he doesn't know.

Success in software and startups is largely determined by one's commitment to keep learning and trying to improve.
I'm admittedly assuming, based on the severity of Jason's reaction, that the email was the first he'd heard of Evan's resignation.

Had it been a face-to-face conversation, then a letter, the fireworks could have been avoided. Speaking from first-hand experience, it can be absolutely gut-wrenching, but ultimately feels like the right thing to do.
It seems to be an eternal truth that older generations think younger generations feel too entitled and don't respect their elders, the value of hard work, authority/hierarchy, or paying your dues. It was basically the complaint the WW2 generation had about the 60s/70s generation, the complaint the 60s/70s generation had about Gen-Xers, and now apparently the complaint Gen-Xers have about Gen Y. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Making of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3HM1bQzubw&feature=playe...
edit, long after the edit term expired, how would that survival clause be handled in the case of a bankruptcy?
Ask HN: Language & web framework advice?
I recently came up with a new idea for a web app I would like to put together. I have been a long time perl/mod_perl web developer, and I am thinking of trying my hand at a new language and framework for this project.

I am thinking of trying out Ruby on Rails, as it seems to be the "it" thing in web dev, and I quite like the term "rapid development".

I'd like to put the question to the HN: Is Ruby on Rails a good choice for a new language/framework to learn? Are there any major drawbacks to Ruby on Rails? Are there better choices out there I should be looking at?

My aim is have some fun learning something new, while building something cool, while also improving my marketability by getting another useful skill in my toolkit.
The way you prove any corporate crime. Evidence would have to be obtained that the insurer acquired genetic information and then terminated coverage for individuals it perceived as high risk. This would likely involve many people from within the company. You would have to count on one of them to provide the evidence.
I didn't know about sync.js - this seems like exactly what I want.
YouTube Movies
YouTube Movies
In light of the response, you could even say that mahalo employees might prefer to resign via email rather than to face the full brunt of the response in person, your assumption could easily be right and there might be a good reason for it.
Yea, I thought of this (I'm sure others have, too) a few months ago and dismissed it after a few back of the envelope calculations made it clear the business model just wasn't there.
In order to create this 'targeted advertising,' they create huge databases of information on people. People called this creepy when the FBI was doing it, but it's ok when a private corporation does it? It's not like the FBI/CIA/MI6/etc doesn't just send a request to the company and get your data anyways... So I'm not really seeing the difference between any company having access to this information and the government having access to it.

In some cases, it may be that the government has better controls over who can internally access the data. Not that I necessarily trust the government to create such oversight, but the sheer amount of bureaucracy can prevent things from happening. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that have 'organically' grown from a point were everyone was trusted, and now they have poor controls in place or they just have the bare minimum 'government mandated' controls in place to comply with the law.

In general though, I don't really think that anyone can be trusted with that sort of information.
I've failed to get offers when I've been up front and said, "I'll leave in two years if I'm not challenged anymore." And that's okay, because it probably wasn't a good fit.
That's good. It reminds me of TheDailyWTF's piece on a "culture of quitting": http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur...

It would be ideal if an employee parting ways didn't seem like a betrayal or bad break-up.
That's a very good point. Considering the sorts of things that people are able to ignore (while paying attention to other, highly insignificant things) I think it's mostly about what feels good to the people doing it.

In a world in which seeming "socially responsible" and "environmentally responsible" is a status signal, people will do small things to give off that signal.... while ignoring all sorts of other areas in which the slightest awareness or outrage would lead to immediate change.
Or there is a big push for Facebook for create/fix publishing controls? (i.e. 'publish this post to everyone except mom & dad')
Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?
I hope a less evil alternative emerges shortly, because it's already starting to get ridiculous even just a couple days after being introduced.
If anyone's interested, wiki.scalr.net/Getting_Started is a good place to start. Or PM me!
I also watched the wikileaks video, and went Army ROTC to pay for college. I'm not particularly pro-military (though I respect them deeply and thank them everytime I see one), nor bloodthirsty, but if I were in a situation where I honestly believed that insurgents were carrying AK-47s and an RPG and represented a threat to my ground troops comrades, as evidenced by actual small arms fire minutes earlier, I would hope that I would find it within myself to fly the chopper and/or operate the cannon or Hellfire missiles so as to most effectively neutralize the threat to my brothers-in-arms.

I don't get the sense that the helicopter crew thinks they did something spectacularly good overall, but rather than they did their jobs and protected the lives of their fellow soldiers on the ground. Even the comment about "well, that's their fault for bringing their kids to a war" has merit, IMO. If you don't want to be shot, don't go where insurgents are openly carrying weapons and firing on US troops...

Yes, war is tribal and brutal and messy/disturbing, but the things we ask of our young men and women are precisely those things that we're often unwilling to go to personally do. As a result, I believe we owe them our intellectual, emotional and political support, and when they do something that "we wouldn't have done" from the comfort of our climate controlled and eminently safe offices, that we need to cut them some slack. Watch that wikileaks video; I defy anyone to say that's a camera and not an RPG in the company of those carrying AK-47s in an area where our troops are taking small arms fire.

I have a baby daughter and it ripped my heart out to listen to the ground units' reports of the injured children, but that doesn't make the Apache crew monsters. They acted reasonably (in my opinion) and consistently with the rules of engagement. If you have a beef with those RoE, that's fine, but your beef is not, IMO, with the heli crew. (I realize that the immediate parent poster is not saying it's their fault.)
Wiser than the author? Where do you get that from?

Also, while I agree that the piece is more philosophical than literary, it's more than just an argument for the younger man's perspective. After all, if the argument were irrefutable, the banker, who knows everything that we know, would have adopted the younger man's perspective. Instead, he hides the papers in the safe. Why? And in what other ways do people "put the papers in the safe" so to speak?
I think you mean to say that you discovered that you have an increased chance of being lactose intolerant through 23andme, they do not tell you that you are lactose intolerant. It may have been something that you found external confirmation for, but 23andme deals in probabilities, as far as I understand the process.
I also use this:

#!/bin/sh

test -n "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" || CHROMIUM_COMMAND=`which chromium-browser`
test -n "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" || CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR="/tmp"
USER_DATA_DIR=`mktemp -d "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR/clean-chromium.XXXXXXXX"`

case "$1" in
cleanup)
(cd "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" && find . -name "clean-chromium.*" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 -r rm -rv )
;;
*)
chmod 700 "$USER_DATA_DIR"
echo "CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR = $CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR"
echo "USER_DATA_DIR = $USER_DATA_DIR"
echo "CHROMIUM_COMMAND = $CHROMIUM_COMMAND"
echo "Running '$CHROMIUM_COMMAND' --user-data-dir='$USER_DATA_DIR' $@"
"$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" --user-data-dir="$USER_DATA_DIR" $@
find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 700
find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 600
;;
esac
Google takes down Downfall Hitler Parodies, Watch the parody of the take down
use python and either django or pylons. Ruby will be familiar to you - rails might be a bit new.

(coming from a perl background some (questionable) elements in ruby will please you like built-in regex operator ~ and backticks)
Considering Jason's response, I would think Evan had good reason to think that a phone call might not offer him the opportunity to properly express why he's leaving and his appreciation for the job. He may also not want to subject himself to such treatment on the phone.
Heh. It's actually pretty easy to identify the people who aren't lactose intolerant by their comments.

Trust me, there are three wonder drugs on this planet in my experience - these aren't like "Aspirin" or "Tylenol" in which placebo effect might be possible, these are drugs where there are almost instant and _very_ physical changes:

o Tums - when I have a really acid stomach. Typically within 90-120 seconds my stomach clears up.

o Amodium - If you ever have the runs (though, you then have this freaky experience of not having a bowel movement for 48-72 hours). Use with extreme caution. I've taken a total of three in my life.

o Lactase - Which basically eliminates an entire suite of issues associated with the inability to digest lactose. In fact, the first few times I used them with a milkshake, the impact was so great, I was a little nervous until I did some reading and discovered the underlying mechanisms (basically breaking Lactose down to Galactose + Glucose) - Changed my life.
From the 23andme website:

"You should be careful about sharing your genetic information with others. Currently, very few businesses or insurance companies request genetic information, but this could change in the future. While the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act was signed into law in the United States in 2008, the protection it will provide against discrimination by employers and health insurance companies for employment and coverage issues has not been clearly established."

So it's a law but there has not been any test of this. Let's hope the law holds up.
Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure
The trick is to start with a bang, say giving away 500 – 1,000 iPads in the first 48 hours.

Hi, the 1990s called, they want their dot-com bubble back :-)
Agreed. Blaming a whole generation is silly. If you want to play that game, then blame the parents of the trophy kids who decided that it was a good idea to give everyone a participation trophy.
A bit after the fact, but apparently they have the option to 'biobank' your saliva, which means they store it for the longer term. It would be interesting to know how many people use that option.
Yes, and it's very simple. Don't type anything important unless you also typed the URL into the address bar. Plenty of real mail from reputable, very phishable, sites actually say exactly this in their real emails-to-customers sometimes.

Laziness, of course, is a problem also.
Ha people are probably dreaming about the good old days of myspace, when you could leave a website behind.
"It's also not a great example of forward progress considering that the latest language version (1.9) has been around for years and none of the alternate implementations fully support it, not even the one that is now on the verge of release (Rubinius)."

Possible reasons for this: People working on alternate implementations of Ruby started on 1.8.x. 1.9 has been evolving over time (even after its release) , and is different enough from the 1.8 version that having a single interpreter that can handle both 1.8.x and 1.9 is non-trivial. The 1.8.x version is by far the most popular, so people working on other implementations focus on them, looking to fix bugs, make them faster, etc.

I think that were there a big demand for JRuby 1.9 or IronRuby 1.9 then the appropriate teams would have it done, but right now it isn't (I imagine) a big priority.
It would be nice if Internet culture could evolve to reserve judgment when a story like this appeared, in the same way it has evolved not to trust any story that appears in a much-forwarded email. I would be proud if HN was the place that mutation began.

I'll keep this goal in mind, and try to remind participants here not to jump to conclusions based on first, partial reports.

BTW, the comparison to how skeptically we read forwarded emails makes the point well. We should treat most blog postings, and especially most viral tweets, in much the same way.
I published my notifo notification code at http://gist.github.com/377357 .
Even if this is the whole story, the pose of righteous anger by many commenters is silly overkill.

So, Calacanis got emotional and snippy about losing an employee. It shows he cares. Despite the armchair philosophizing about its effects on morale or recruiting, it might be a net win for the Mahalo team for Calacanis to show a little anger/disapproval/impatience when this happens.

You'd think some of the finger-wagging fuddy-duddies had never heard the stories about Steve Jobs' "soft touch" with employees and partners...
While it might be looking funny to you I truly feel for the Status.ly founders (and others screwed). Having burn myself all my savings in the past I know what it takes to start over again. And hearing how these guys at bootuplabs have first helped it happen and then made this sound like it isn't a big deal makes me want to scream.
Well, yes and no. Most things that 23andme deals with is probability, but there are some genetic markers that specify _traits_ instead of "probability" - these are things like EarWax (Wet/Dry), EyeColor, Bitter Taste Perception. There are, in fact, 10 "Traits" that 23andMe will test you for - And Lactose Intolerance is one of those Traits.

To be precise, their report said:

"Likely to be lactose intolerant due to lack of the lactase enzyme as an adult. Unable to drink more than a glass of milk a day due to lower adult lactase enzyme levels. (May still be lactose tolerant for environmental reasons.)"
OK, but UTSC addresses the idea that a trade secret could be acquired 'by accident or mistake'. When the guy found it and popped the cover, he guessed what it was but the general public did not know. So he got that info thanks to the employee's mistake. If he had locked it away or returned it, none of us would know.

Gizmodo might be idiotic for paying $5000, but more likely they thought it was a prototype, which would be newsworthy. And nothing forced them to post 20 pictures of the internals after deciding it was real. Up to that point, the internals were secret and not even the finder knew what they looked like.

I'm willing to wager $10 on it if you like :)
Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns?
It just doesn't seem like Zuckerberg is going to let up until all of our personal info, connections, interests, etc. are being sold to the highest bidder. So today, I quit. It's really not that bad. Just 2 clicks, and then 14 days without a login attempt. http://bit.ly/chsPFo I'm curious if anybody else on HN has quit and why.
What happens when the insurance company sees that you've been browsing swingers sights? Maybe they raise your rates because you're into 'high risk' activities?

You browse for 'sexual' things in 'private browsing mode' you say? What about the insurance company finds out that you're on a rock-climbing mailing list or that you frequent a rock-climbing forum? Up goes your rates!

Access to these kinds of information need to come with a set of rules regarding how the information can be used. The problem is that hindsight is 20/20 on what rules will work the best (i.e. which are too strict, which are not strict enough, which don't do anything, which have loopholes, etc), too bad foresight isn't.

I personally don't think that private B2B contracts can get everything right, nor do I believe that the government can/will pass any laws that will fix this. Personally, I don't think that anyone can be trusted with the vast quantities of data that are out there.
I'm still in contact with quite a few of my ex employees from over a decade ago. It's a small world, and burning your bridges is always bad form and potentially very harmful to your company.

If you fire the wrong person like that/send off emails like that it could easily lead to a mass walk-out by sympathizers, so it is not only 'nice' to be nice, it also makes good business sense.

Who knows when and how you run in to each other again.
In which case you have an opportunity to wake up the next day, decidedly the bigger person, wholly assured in your decision to leave, and with no regrets about how you did so.
Retarded.

Enlightenment is about understanding pleasure, pain and peace through knowledge and experience.

With money you can mostly avoid pain while seeking inner peace and enjoying once in a while a well deserved pleasure.

So even if you find the budhist nirvana of controlling misery by supresing all needs, you still need to live by the standards of this world.

And you need some money for that.

I'd take the money and run for the hills.
Can't even miss notes. Every time you press, a note comes out. The only thing you can fail at is causing the notes to play at the right time.
They have a picture comparing Facebook to cocaine, right next to their "share this story on Facebook/Twitter/etc" strip...
take a look at a combination of nginx and unicorn or uWsgi.

Avoid mod_python.
Yes, the deal is finished: http://twitter.com/23andMe/status/12732636102

It ended at midnight GMT which is also 5pm PDT, perhaps for the business day.
Why don't state lotteries do this? no more paper waste

maybe build a product and go pitch it to them.
Hm, I'd read the 'likely' as an indicator of high probability, not as an established trait.
You're forgetting that body language can not be transmitted over text or audio. You're also forgetting that tone of voice cannot be transmitted over text.
Jason shall not bother about employees. His money-making Spam-machine is already doing magics. And will probably continue to run even if all workers leave.
Opening Night at the US Imagine Cup Finals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE
Could have the interstitial ad after the scratch but before the result is shown? People would be paying more attention then. Work in a survey question even.
Mark's comment here : http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bv9gt/dive_into...
"food and shows"- that's what the masses want, unfortunately
I'm definitely tempted to quit. I don't like the way Facebook is going for sure, nor do I like the idea of one company, a foreign one at that (I'm Canadian), having so much control and power over my digital identity. Though I fear I may be too addicted to quit.
I think the App Store also prohibits "giveaway" apps (see the comment on the blog).
RAID mirrors are a poor alternative to proper backups. They don't protect you from catastrophic file system problems, accidental deletion/corruption, flood, fire, theft, etc. I suppose for people on the road a lot, away from an IT staff, there is some benefit to having higher availability but in a world of <$500 laptops $30-$50 is significant.
> It stands to reason they may have texted, emailed, twittered etc in the course of making the deal(s). The computer crimes folks are most likely to be able to trace that stuff down.

With most of the younger generation texting, emailing and twittering now-a-days, are you implying that all gang-related crimes are also investigated by the 'computer crimes folks?'

Are you also implying that the police don't bother to track down text messages, emails or 'tweets' for other crimes? Or are all crimes handled by the 'computer crimes folks?'
Clerc Replica Watches, Replica Clerc Watches, Fake Clerc Watches
Wow, superstar judges.

Here's an idea for you android developers out there.

Build a scavenger-hunt type app. get people to check-in to places, city halls, museums, parks etc (educational stuff?) and they submit picture to prove it. Earn Karma points. Give them a calorie count for fun

Also let users build/design scenarios for other users.
Companies will love this too, get their staff on their feet and moving.

I'm a UI guy, if you need my help.
I think what we learned was that its really hard to tell 'which' crazy idea will make it. Even google was dismissed as a feature, not a company.
There were so many thousands of micro-decisions along the way, in all three areas of HTML, JS (language and DOM) and CSS, that the result looks more like a random walk than a set of well-thought-out standards at any given point.

Still, they're what we have, and, like the gauge of railroad track in Europe based on the ruts originally made by Roman chariots (the width of two horses), we gotta build the trains to run on 'em.

And, unlike the physical case, we can widen the rails every so often when most trains have adapted to the new widths.
I completely ignore all that social networking stuff; my brain sees them as ads and blocks them subconsciously.
Perhaps my reading of the letter was excessively influenced by what I expected to happen, but I thought the story was more literary than philosophical. I expected the piece to end with the young man achieving so much enlightenment from his studies that he no longer needed the money, and by the time I got to the letter I was disappointed by its contents. I suppose it's equally possible to read the letter as showing that the young man is thinks he's become wise but hasn't really.

I think the story would be enhanced if we were never shown what was in the letter. The banker goes to the cell and finds the man missing and the letter in his place, reads the letter and goes and locks it in his safe. I think that would be a better ending, but then again there's probably a reason why Chekhov is considered a great writer and I'm not.
Again, the only source of the "left in a bar" story is Gizmodo. That may be the story the seller told them, but it hasn't been confirmed by anyone else.

If the seller "acquired" it by more overt means, they have plenty of reason to lie about it. Particularly if they "acquired" it after noticing it wasn't an ordinary iPhone, at which point things really do start to drift into trade-secret territory.
Are the iPad people really the type of demographic that buys state lotto tickets?
Yea, that's great. I just saw that in the info email they sent me. It was worth taking a chance at this price even before knowing.

Also nice is with the complete package you can download your data. Maybe not useful to a lot of people, but I build genetic analysis software for a living (mostly focused on academic research - goldenhelix.com), so it will be quite fun to pull in my data and play around with it.
If jerks thought like that, they wouldn't be jerks...