skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The things you describe are reasonable in general, but break down under the extremes of present day security, software development too. The problem is that most people who think they can do it, can't. That is, most professionals will take on more challenging problems than they are practically qualified for. If the bulk of an industry can't judge its own competence, customers and courts have no chance of doing so. And yet this is increasingly a requirement for doing business at all. You can't simply tell people to stop using computers.

If you can't define "reasonable" for the purposes of writing a law, it's a good indication that people won't know what it means when they try to obey the law. You can't make laws that nobody knows how to follow.
In Praise of Oversharing
OS X will follow...
This really should be a "duh" for any system administrator. If not, time to find a new job :)
A New Era In Science: "Synthia" The First Synthetic Life Is Created ‎
I wonder if on Reddit there are guys going "Hey! What is this? HackerNews?"
Why weren't there any cute boys?

Also, is HN really the only place you hang out? You might want to try hanging out in some other places as well.
Ok..I'm doing it..the FB alternative 
enough is enough? zuck and co. are enjoying the freedom of running on a vast empty field on their own, time for them to be disturbed with "brand new " neighbours, showing how things are done otherwise!
else what the hell are we all here for, if that is what we want web to become?

anyone to join, come over!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html
Keyword Research – Easier said than done
A good keyword research is critical to the success of any SEM campaign (both SEO and PPC), as the stakes are high in both cases.
It certainly would be interesting to see - some very strange things are done in the name of "SOX Compliance" and it would be nice to see what the absolute minimum that is required for the simplest possible company.
Tablespoon of cod liver oil from a big bottle (Lýsi).
http://www.lysi.eu/
I spent 6 months renting a desk in a large studio in Dalston, London. Wasn't IT/start-up focused, just lots of young small companies - graphic designers, artists, web developers, fashion designers. Quite boho. Was very cheap, amazing internet connection and generally good value. However it got freezing cold in the winter (it was a badly insulated warehouse) and being near the kitchen area was a pain cos people were always in there gossiping and making a lot of noise.

(Edit: plus the location was slightly dodgy. During my spell 2 shootings and 1 stabbing just yards from the entrance)
The 100 Greatest Science Fiction or Fantasy Novels of All Time
Debunking Michael Lewis’ The Big Short
Using Sandcastle to build code contracts documentation
Some of us barely have time to hang out here, let alone multiple internet communities. I don't get anything done as it is...
Post one and I'll upvote it.

I started googling "funny t-shirts" just on a lark last night. After getting a zillion, I narrowed it down to "funny girl t-shirts" because I liked that better. I like girls and looking at them made the shirts more entertaining to me (This also had the benefit of going from hundreds of thousands of printed jokes on jokes to a much smaller number of actual modeled shirts). That took me to about 200 shirts. I had no idea what to do with THAT data, so I further narrowed it to nerd jokes. Which took me to about 17.

Different paths give you different results. But really the only discriminator was that they made me smile, and the topic was nerd stuff (which is why I shared here)

Hacker News. Where even the jokes have algorithms

Okay. $20 bucks says if I had posted an article on "Erlang for humorous T-shirt picture selection" I could have ran the same article with 10 lines of code at the top and it would have been a hit.
100% agree with parent. I guess I subscribe to more or less the same notion of what street smarts are.

To me it's all about people and relationships. The older I get the more I evidence I have in support of this simple fact.

I was a CS major once, and I thought it was all about technology. That it was technology that changed the world and drove progress, saved the day and dashed out miracles. I thought that building something created meaning and brought satisfaction to the builder, and naturally I also believed that good builders were the most successful ones. But it's not that. The successful builder is the one who understands those he is building it for and those he is building it with. That's what sets success apart. Then there is socioeconomic background and all that.

Understand life is precious. Value other people. Never be a means to an end for someone else. If you are, get out of that situation as soon as you can.

Hold your ground for things that matter. If you think something matters think about whether the things you thought mattered 5 years ago still matter as much now. Pore over your decisions, and learn from your mistakes.

Learn what motivates people. This is especially hard to do when you are an introvert, which many people with engineering background tend to be. The reason it's difficult is because most people are motivated by other things. Once you get a handle on what motivates those around you, learn to motivate and influence other people. I don't mean use, I mean lead. I don't mean cheat, I mean compromise.

Separate business and family life. This goes back to knowing what really matters. Jobs come and go. You only get a few shots to surround yourself with the right kind of people for the long run.

No matter what you do, never lie to yourself. This is probably the worst thing you can do, as far as I am concerned. Much better to live with not so pleasant truth than to live a life of self-deception.

Just my 2c.
Depends on the market.

my figures: 1:10 visitor -> user, 1:2000 user to paying members
retention on average 6 months.
I'm a terribly picky eater. So terrible in fact, that there is a single green vegetable I'll consume and zero fruits. Sure, I'll eat things comprised of processed vegies (love me some pizza), but I won't sit down and eat a tomato, pees, bananas, etc. Okay, I eat potato's too, but that's a stretch.

So while I haven't done any research on the matter, I'd say it's pretty conclusive I don't get a good portion of nutrients I probably need or at the very least would benefit from.

That said, I take a "one a day" men's vitamin and then a single 1000mg Vitamin C supplement. Maybe I'm doing more harm than good? I'm not sure.
That depends mostly on what you get out of a user. I get plenty out of non-paying users, in fact they give me content so the more the merrier.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.
The problem with Reddit is that it does not localize content, only the interface. It should be either both or none.

Google, on the other hand, not only shows you German interface, but also significantly adjusts search results depending on your chosen language.
I agree with your sentiment but this is because of a more general conflict between those who see Hacker News as a place about Hacker stuff and those who see Hacker News as a place for Hackers. It's an important distinction - one would allow "light-hearted" hacker stuff (like dailyWTF) and the other allows "light-hearted" general stuff (like your T-Shirts, although they are kinda borderline because they're geeky jokes but you get the point).
Well I guess that it is ok to post humor on HN as long as it is intelligent humor or gives you some insight. It's banal humor which is not desired. I see some links to DailyWTF or XKCD from time to time and no one complains.
Laptop keyboard repair and replacement
The problem with laptop keyboard repair is that the keyboard component of your computer is completely integrated, and laptop keyboards are generally only made for the specific model that there are integrated into.
What field is he in?
I'm in a non-English speaking country.

My best guess is that all normal users buy a computer with the local language, but all technologically-minded users buy an English Windows (like me, for example). It drives me mad whenever I visit Google on a browser whose cookies I just cleared.

"I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy."

Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel.
China best tea
chinese tea is good for health
Apparently this happened at Johnson Space Center in a vacuum, so the temperature would be high enough to make that happen with the reduced atmospheric pressure (see the chart at [1]). The temperature in space is far, far colder, I don't see how this could happen.

[1] http://www.iapws.org/faq1/boil.htm

EDIT: According to the replies at [2], the retained heat of ejected astronaut urine is enough to first cause boiling but that heat runs out quickly and you get ice crystals.

[2] http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen01/gen01060.htm
Fortunately, I suppose, I'm a citizen, and other countries aren't dumb enough to inflict such terror on their guests.

Brazil takes fingerprints. Israel is also pretty intrusive, lots of questions, intense bag searches, putting your picture into a database.
pretty much every internet community has devolved into primarily sharing funny pictures, there arent just plenty of other places to go to find funny stuff, it is the rest of the internet.

I dont think many people think of new.yc as a humour free zone, its just the humour has to be on the side of the content, not the content itself.
>>"Not surprisingly, Facebook appears to have gone farther than the other sites when it comes to sharing data."

>This isn't really the expectation you want your users to have.

It kind of is - Facebook's raison d'etre is sharing information easily.
I'm 21.

I wrote a bit about how I ended up getting into Lisp at http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html. (And I'm glad I did, because I can hardly remember now.)
My philosophy about lying is like this: first of all, I must be honest with myself. Then, there are one or two people in my life to whom I just don't lie. I think we all should have a friend to whom we can tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
Concerning other people, I try to lie the minimum necessary to get away with it. There are some people to whom one must lie (i.e. government officials).
Our solar system - A Webkit Animation using CSS3
Sigh. This sounds more like an argument starting.

But here goes: XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

Explain the difference.

I am assuming that the cute girl does not somehow render technology jokes and drawings ineffective. You put an XKCD comic on a bosom, it's still an XKCD comic.

EDIT: And if you say something like "but the fact it was a girl was part of the content and not just the tech" then the point is that it's an integrated art form. The pieces have to work together. It is still tech related.

EDIT 2 (an hour later): I made the mistake here of starting to defend my actual article. This was off-topic from the question posed. I took the bait, and I should have known better.
I take an Omega 3 pill (not picky here, I've gotten these from Whole Foods, GNC, WalMart, Walgreens, wherever) and Centrum Men's every morning. I also usually eat a protein bar for breakfast. On lifting days, I drink a Gold Standard Whey (GNC) shake w/ skim milk. On cardio days, I don't take additional supplements. If I'm doing intense cardio, I'll drink a glass of Accelerade (think Gatorade w/ added protein) after.
Government Needs Business
Air conditioning shuts down on the weekend? THAT'S NOT HOW BUILDING HEAT REGULATION WORKS.
Isn't the point of taking of supplements that you cannot easily arrange a 'balanced diet'?
I reread pixel's phrasing and I'm wrong. Usage still annoys me but kevinh is right.
The Prophecies of Bill Gates (15 years later)
1. It really doesn't help to have HN overlap other internet communities. Adding stuff "of interest to hackers" that isn't really about startups or hacking is a little like creating bloatware (Studies show that the people who buy our code editor use Twitter to share photos. Let's add Flickr integration! And an instant tweet hotkey!)

2. That being said, there's absolutely no rule that says that something can't be funny just because it "Gratifies my intellectual curiosity."

There was a young fencer named Fitz,
Whose blade was exceedingly brisk.
So fast was his action,
The Lorentz contraction,
Reduced his rapier to a disc.

Question: Does Fitz's speed also reduce his opponent's rapier to a disc?
On a whim last year I searched for "atheist t-shirts" and to my delight found that there are actually quite a few available and that most of appeal to my sense of humor (mostly things along the lines of "my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend" etc.).

Then I remembered we were going to Egypt on holiday and suddenly this didn't seem like such a good idea.

(To be fair, Egypt is a lovely place).
I think Hacker News should do one thing and do it well.

If you really want to laugh then there are a million and one sites to do that. We all read other sites, it's ok for you to do that too. Hacker News shouldn't be the one-stop-shop for all things interesting to DanielBMarkham. I'm not sure I would want to spend as much time there (no offense).

There's a "delay" setting in the user profile if you're spending too much time here getting all depressed. ;-)

Or maybe this… start a thread called "Ask HN: What website made you laugh today?" and get it all out in one shot.
Just vitamin D -- deficiency (if you're not getting enough by being out in the sun) may cause all sorts of mild but strange nervous system symptoms, like passing numbness in various parts of your body and weak muscles (unfortunately these are also symptoms for anything from brain cancer, Lyme disease to Multiple Sclerosis, so I recommend seeing your doctor before spending too much time on Wikipedia).
Agree with too much writing. For example, "PowerGrabber is an invitation manager. It captures the addresses from your inbound and outbound emails, so you can invite the people you email to join your LinkedIn network." is too long for a headline.

Shorter version could be: "Easily invite more people you know to Linkedin", or something like that (you surely know the value proposition better than me ;)

And then but the most important things in bullets: the price, the fact that it's a Windows download, etc. Edit down that text, shorter is better :)
At the risk of sounding like someone's mother: snap out of that ridiculous picky eater nonsense. Unless you've got an actual medical condition that prevents you from eating certain foods you are likely doing yourself a hell of a lot of harm by only eating processed food. And spending your $ on supplements isn't going to make up for all the complex stuff in vegetables and fruits that you are missing.
How will you make money with any of them?
This article's title is a little misleading and editorialized. The word "arrogant" only appears in the comments by some annoyed Apple fan.
Open Angel Forum coming to Cambridge - Boston Business Journal
My morning routine is probably the biggest factor in my overall life productivity. Here's how mine goes:

Alarm goes off at 3:55am. I get up. First 30 mins are for tea and daily habits, which include reviewing short-term and long-term goals, reading Bible, journaling, spaced repetition flashcards (mnemosyne-proj.org), etc. Then I usually work for 45-60 mins until the gym opens, then head out for lifting and/or swimming. Home by 6:30 - 7am for breakfast and back to work. By noon, I've typically finished 6 hours of work and have completed most or all of my daily habits.

A few keys for me:
* Get to bed at a good time (I go to bed at 9-930, with 15-30 mins of reading beforehand)
* Exercise is vital
* Keep same schedule every day (weekends too if you can)
* Eat well
* Avoid checking email before 10am or so (check 2x a day)
I just don’t see how what you posted[1] is all that funny. I do think that some people here on HN are quite humorless, but there are more than enough people here who will appreciate a joke if it’s a good one. If, however, you want to see more of the kind of humor you linked to I recommend surfing Encyclopedia Dramatica (NAASFW).

[1] http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute-gi...
Dropbox is not a backup.

Backblaze is.
"I just posted "Nerdy Cute Girls. In T-Shirts" and it was deleted within minutes."

This is as it should be imo. (No I didn't flag that post - didn't see it even but if I had seen I would have flagged it. )

"the post wasn't controversial or off-topic"

Of course it is offtopic. Read the guidelines. Why would anyone come to HackerNews to see "cute girls" in T shirts with "funny" jokes on them?

"Can we share jokes and light-heartedness every now and then as long as we identify in the title what it is?"

Please, please, please don't. Plenty of options out there for people who want these things. If there aren't and you think there is a need, create one. (Hey startup idea?)

The answer to

"I'm just thinking that I've become much less happy over the last two years, and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that."

might be to hang out in other forums dedicated to posting jokes with no "Spock like" [1] people, or even better, meet non "Spock like"people who make you laugh in the real world. I have plenty of idiots sending me lame jokes and they don't make me laugh. Laughter in my life comes from interacting with funny/humorous people in the real world.

The last thing this HN user wants to see is to see "[Joke] blah" posts here. I for one will mercilessly flag any of these.

I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email. If I can get filters for HN, i.e, if I can make specific posts/users/topics "dispappear" in my view I wouldn't mind so much.

Just my personal opinion but you did ask "What do you guys think?"

[1] I don't think of HN users as "Spock like" at all fwiw.
There is plenty of room for humor here without having to resort to pics of girls in T-Shirts.

Go find the next Steve Yegge or something.
Red-Black Trees in a Functional Setting

Chris Okasaki

http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/jfp99.ps

It shows how to construct Red-Black trees in an extremely simple manner in Haskell. I tried this technique in C++ and I was finished within an hour!
geez. this makes me want to take some anti-anxiety meds. talking to strangers is very nerve-wracking.
We had a cooling failure in the room in our office that had the development servers (production server are in a data center).

It was well over 40C - the noise was incredible, sounded like the racks were trying to take off.
I dont think there is an important difference.

I dont think every xkcd / bash.org / dilbert comic should be posted either, and to be honest its been a while since I remember ever seeing any of these hit the front page. (scott adams' blog posts do not count, they are content).

I mean I like all of those sites, but I have the rest of the internet in which to find them.
Intelligent humour has always done well here (mostly in comments). Banality less so. shrug I quite like that.

Also: OMG geek girls is such an old and tired "joke" I'm not surprised it was killed.

and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that.

HN makes me laugh or smile daily, perhaps you are looking in the wrong places.
I don't think people would be big fans of XKCD or Dilbert posts here either.
I don't know whether this consequence is intended or not, but at times HN feels unbearably stuffy, self-important and, well, humourless.

I've always thought of hacking above all as a fun activity - in the way that posing and solving puzzles is fun ... or in the way that posing and solving jokes is fun.

Humour is all about thinking around corners, framing and reframing a set of premises, melding logic and creativity to produce surprising[1] results.

Killing humour to keep a hackers' discussion on-topic is like killing inductive reasoning to keep scientists focused on the big picture.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
Brazil tends to reciprocate the behavior of the other country. IIRC, they only fingerprint US citizens, because that's what the US does to Brazilians.
While I too would be interested in more details, there are certain types of people who if you let them get a toe hold in your company can effectively preclude future success.

E.g.:

They may be investing in tranches and you need future ones to launch.

If you have a bad/impossible relationship with them, future or alternative investors will steer clear.

They may be sufficiently nasty and wealthy that if you're successful, they'll sue you, or are at least making a credible threat to do so. It doesn't matter if you'd win if you don't have enough money to fight it.

The contract may have specified certain milestones, which they then prevent you from hitting.

Anyway, by and large contracts won't really protect you in a situation that gets ugly, their major purpose is to memorialize an agreement so that "but you said..." friction doesn't arise after an agreement has been made. Imagine how you might try to word a clause that starts with "In case of bad faith...", starting with the definition of that.
The treating of women as sexual objects in an industry over-represented by men.

The integrated art form you speak of is just thinly disguised sexism. I personally don't find that interesting or funny, I suspect others don't.

<edit>I got down-voted for pointing out something sexist? Now there's a telling thing!</edit>
> But here goes: XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

One thing I like about Hacker News is that a high percent of articles teach me something valuable about technology or business. I like that XKCD rarely if ever comes up here, even though I go to the xkcd site maybe once a month and catch up when I just want to laugh, and will likely see the most insightful xkcd comics embedded with blog posts. Likewise, a small percent of Dilbert gets linked here - most of the links are to Scott Adams' essays, some of which are pretty insightful. Likewise, cute girls in a humorous way is available everywhere, and doesn't teach on technology or business. I'll go to Reddit when I want to laugh, the Reddit frontpage usually has something funny right on it, like this one right now:

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/c6evn/winner/

Or maybe I'll go to /r/relationship_advice, which is unintentionally hilarious with blind-leading-the-blind advice, though I am forced to cringe, login, and give a drastically different opinion at times, which can be a time sink.

Anyways, long story short: Signal-to-noise ratio on practically useful things here is quite high. Maybe it's slipped a tiny bit, but it's still probably between 50% and 80% potentially valuable. It seems like it used to be 80%+ valuable, so the slip is a shame, but this has got to be the best site for both potentially practically beneficial while still be entertaining/stimulating/not too dry.
They have been upvoted in the past (I'm not certain but I think xkcd.com might be a banned URL now though) and hit the front page.

I think there is a distinct difference between them and "hot girls in geeky tshirts" or whatever. Usually they were "on topic" or actually amusing!
> XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

None of them should be on HackerNews. All of them can be found on reddit, which is where I go if I'm in that mood.
It's always fun to read predictions like these. One of my favorite books in the library of an ad agency I worked for long ago is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Predicts-Insiders-Computer-Indu...