skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[So I guess my real question is, did you give up gaming to become a better programmer? And if so, what sort of things did you replace it with? I am the kind of person who needs some sort of competitive hobby and I having a hard time finding one.]

So I too did Counter-Strike and WC3. When I was in college, my friend and I ran a website called thewac.net (kinda dead now, don't bother going there), and it was associated with our custom counter-strike servers with a zombie mod. That taught me alot about programming and community.
I moved on to create a DC++ Hub on the college network and that taught me more about systems administration, data/user management, social community, etc. etc.
Then I graduated.

I've been working at my new job for almost a year, and my coworker has like 20 years under his belt in experience, and I've learned more from him about programming and technology in less then a year, than I did in 5 years of college. He's also a gamer, so we also discussing gaming as well. (Currently Bad Company 2).
If you want to keep at programming, I highly suggest you jump into the Unreal Tournament 3 engine or the Source engine (Valve) and try programming for a game.

That said, if you want something competitive, I recently took up hiking in the Adirondacks, and I've decided I want to do all the summits of the ADK's and the Catskill's here in New York State. The amount of punishment it is on your body is brutal to me, and yet liberating.You compete against yourself.
Your other options are to look for local sporting leagues to join, or pick a hobby for competition.

Look at yourself and think of what you want to improve and then ask "What can I do to improve that part of me?"

For me, it was my physical shape, and my lack of adventure. Hence, hiking in the largest state park in the United States, and picking Mt. Marcy for my first hike. Eventually I'll move to Colorado and do the rockies.

I hope that helps.
"Some folks will notice but they'll be ignored because folks really want to believe."

The UK doesn't really have a significant number of people who vocally and unwaveringly support particular political parties. This may be because there is a greater proportion of political cynics in the UK, or perhaps it merely appears that way because of our smaller population.

Regardless, the way politicians are portrayed in the media, and the general perception of politicians in general, is almost entirely negative.
Well, using a generational milestone doesn't really work well here. That's like saying every Ford these day, with so many models before it, should be flawless.
Could you post the link for the download? I can only find 3.6.4 build 7
The industry is moving in that direction as well. Nurse practitioners are now the common entry point into the medical system, with doctors reserved for follow-up. Even LPNs are being phased out in favor of medical assistants.
Jerry Maguire.
Labor laws in the US clearly state that if the person is working unpaid the company cannot receive any immediate benefits for his or her position. This means that you can't have the person "hands on learning" while working on your product or working at a client site. That is purely illegal unless they're doing it for course credit. Again if you take on a college student but they cannot get course credit, however even if their university offers it and you derive immediate benefit from their employment it's illegal.

I understand if someone cold cases you for an internship and you cannot pay them but they want to learn and have some position in your company it's a bit more acceptable. But essentially if you send out job postings for interns you support a systematic evil in the job market of the US. These people have no choice but to work for you if they want to work in their field, and obviously no choice but to do so for free. You essentially try to write it off by saying it gives them value or experience but you as an employer are more interested in the free labor rather than what they derive out of it. There is no way around that. You aren't hiring them for their sake, you're hiring them because you get free labor that they are excited to do, and that's the best deal for you because you get the profit from it.

This hurts what people value their career at a critical juncture when they enter the job market. They see that everyone has to take unpaid internships meaning that companies aren't willing to value their work, this gets them thinking that their work is valueless. Which in turn is worse for any employer because the performance of the employee would suffer because of this diffusion of responsibility.

In short posted unpaid internships hurt the job market, hurt companies and most importantly hurt workers in their most critical time. Not only that but you seem to relish the opportunity of a person who is super excited to work on something for you for free, which is disrespectful of anyone you hire. I'm not against all unpaid internships, but most people see it as free labor, not altruistically training new employees for the job market. Even this article is prefaced with "Yay free labor in the summer!" which is what triggered my response, specifically this line: "I’m talking about internships - free, grunt work labor in the hopes of making connections and gaining a little bit of experience along the way."
One of the problems is that MSFT is too large, so they tend to look for market opportunities > $1B if they want to do something. Hence, usually they enter a sector only if some other company has already done some good work to make the sector look juicy enough
Wild guess: $15 million for a small company milking an one-hit wonder. With security and resources the dev team can finally move on and make something cool: Club Penguin for iOS!
Does offlineimap provide a means of keeping messages in a local store after/despite their being deleted from the server?
one of the few species that have been observed to participate in oral sex.

There's also the notorious example of bats.
Firefox 4.0 beta 1 is not released yet, but it probably will be within a few days. (There was a candidate build yesterday, but we decided to wait for a second build with some more fixes.) When it is actually released, it will be announced on http://blog.mozilla.com and available from http://mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html

For now you can download the latest nightly "Minefield" build from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_4.0b1 to track progress of the release.
I like it, good job. I love the slideshow-style in uniform sizes, and the keyboard shortcuts.

Image search is used by (and for) kids a lot, and I think this kind of presentation is perfect for them. Do you intend to keep it around or is this just a demo project?
Wow, this seems really stupid! You're telling me that students shouldn't have encrypted search available? School FAIL.
Finland Gives Citizens Right to Broadband
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: iTeleport
Crunchgear deliberately left out the context for the email exchange. http://www.edibleapple.com/steve-jobs-relax-it-is-just-a-pho... gives the comment some perspective.
Freezer ziplock bag full of ice to go around your neck will cool your core down quick.
You can also just regularly goto the faucet and rinse your wrists and neck with cold water to help cool your body down as well.
I live on the river, so I keep the windows open for the breeze and the blinds down to block sunlight.
I've heard of constructing a water tank that fits to your windows, and what happens is the sun heats the water up over the course of the day, but still lets water in, and then at night when its cool outside, the windows maintain an even temperature releasing heat.
I know some people do this in their kitchen windows using clear glass bottles filled with water stacked on top of eachother to fill the window.
Ask HN: startups web dev advisor
My startup is pretty close to getting funding, and will be able to afford to hire me full time. I'm the main developer, and we'll have 1-2 more guys full time. I've 5+ years in this, and we're not building anything that is too complex. The other guys all have 100% confidence in my abilities, and don't doubt that I can do the work and manage the other coders as well.

However, my president has said he'd like for me to have a senior level advisor for the coding and architecture. Specifically, he wants a person who has done it all, so I can ask questions if needed.

I've explained that 1) developers generally don't work for free (we've gotten great business advisors like that, but I don't think that's generally how the dev world operates) and 2) between HN, SO, and a few other communities, I've got a ton of resources for questions.

His response: "if Paul Graham were willing to talk architecture with you, would you do it?" Of course I would. But that doesn't seem to be a realistic option.

Do any of you guys have advice on looking for an advisor? The kinds of questions I'd like to chat (with someone who has done this in a startup, successfully) are things like:
- what kind of problems were you initially unaware you'd face? (What do you not know, that you're unaware you don't know?)
- what are some tips for managing a small in-house team and a larger external outsourced team?

Thanks for any advice you guys have. I know (and importantly, my team knows) that I am capable of this, but they still want the official "development advisor" person.

Also, we'll probably be hiring in a few months, so keep an eye out for a posting regarding that coming here soon.
What happened to Mixpanel?
Cute... It reminds me of proofs my father designed into a barn he built years ago.

http://waiveris.com/project/fractals/barnwindows/
Lift Version 2.0 Released
They'd be a one hit wonder if they only succeeded with their first version of TTR two years ago when the app store first came out. They're actually many hit wonders. Smart move by disney here.
Should I Get the New Kindle?
I'm a programmer (both professionally and as a hobbyist). I have a huge amount of books (mostly technical) that I enjoy reading, and I spend probably 100 -> 200$ USD / month on new books. Most of the books I read are O'Reilly, Apress, Pragmatic Programmers, and a lot of the other big tech publishers.

My question is--should I buy the new kindle? I've always been interested in it, but I have an attachment to my book collection, and worry that I won't be able to find as wide a selection of ebooks for download, or that the device won't be as pleasurable to read as a real book.

From a logical standpoint, having a kindle would help me save some money, reduce clutter around my house (I have a lot of books), and be far more convenient to reference old information (via searching a book on the kindle vs. flipping through pages).

Do any of you own a kindle? Do you find that it is pleasurable to read from? I'm especially interested in the opinions of other software developers who read a lot of technical books.

EDIT: The kindle I'm thinking about buying is the new graphite model DX which is 9.7" http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002GYWHSQ/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=5676908467&ref=pd_sl_1bi5098qpb_e
Looking at the screenshots, this appears to go pretty far beyond the original Mac System software. I mean, it's a full OS with file management, pre-emptive multitasking, networking, Web browser, FTP client, USB with device drivers, multimedia playback and a full GUI with transparency and perspective transforms. The Macintosh had — well, it had primitive file management, at least.
Which means wall papers if it didn't work out. If the failure rate of startup is to be taken into account. It should be divided by 10X to 50X.
One reason why not to read HN over lunch.
It shouldn't be a problem with strings and numerics in arrays (the array contains copies of the values), but with arrays of functions/objects, the elements of the array are not copies, but the actual objects themselves. So if you change an object in the array, the object itself changes (and vice versa).
WikiLeaks answer (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17461648435):

Wired says we are in disrepair.Untrue-upgrading infrastructure to deal with growth.You can help: http://bit.ly/cpxJWC
stegdetect isn't all that great. I've been working on an improved steganography technique (actually, an alteration to pretty much any existing methodology) for the past 6 months as a side project.

stegdetect is jpeg-only (yes, LSB steganography on raw audio/video is really, really lame, but it's really easy, too) and it really depends on the input media. Using stegdetect itself on the sender's side with various source media makes it easy to avoid detection in-transit.

Plus, any statistical analysis tool is only useful for long messages (higher signal:noise ratios). If you're sending one-liners in a 2MB photo, for all intents and purposes, the original photo hasn't been modified and is really difficult to catch.
Time to do a story on Quora!
These are really not the same things at all

1) stealing business secrets (and paying for stolen goods)

2) being unhappy with a $199 purchase
Why hack around this when you can use JSON?
Not knocking their hustle. Every company needs cash money to keep the lights on but they've only been doing TTR and branded TTR for the past two years. Twinkle, the closed in network, was cute but didn't take off. Kerfuffle over Contacts made it disappear.

Point is the Tapulous team has experience and capability producing really high quality iOS apps. Now with Disney IP and security they have no excuses left to do something more interesting than dots that blip to a Hannah Montana beat.

PS. When are you coming back to California?
37signals provides an explanation at the top of the page and a call to action (link to the app store) at the top and bottom of the page. You should consider doing the same with your signup form. This pattern is also noted on Google's results pages where they have a search box at the top and bottom.
Cool, now Steve can feature more of his own apps! :)
I don't think that Google Reader can export as JSON... ?
Is it down for just me?
I agree. $200 is a lot of money for some people. It doesn't matter who you are - as long as you are selling something, you need to respect the fact that your customer was willing to spend time and money in purchasing and using your product. You need to respect the fact that they paid for your product.
Orthogonal to that, I would be angry if I bought a phone and it didn't let me make phone calls consistently.
How is wartime != nefarious?
The article reads with a bit of hype, but all of the commentary aside, the specs are pretty impressive.

In particular, the 4.5" screen at 1280 x 800, 1.5Ghz Snapdragon, and 1 GB RAM are incredible specs. I'm curious how affordable this phone will be.
Maths always works as a great turn on for geeks. However, the fact that the project is open source will help it gain a wider acceptance.
Looks like an awesome app. When are you shipping the beta?
The example is not all that potent. before the link even loaded, the following flashes through my head:

'well of course carbon from the air. ... oh, and water. They have a lot of water.'

He tries to use something pretty clear cut, like mass and trees (mass is mass, and trees are pretty typically also trees) as an analogue to something inherently vague- psychiatry in this case. Whether someone is bipolar is way more up to interpretation than whether something that weights 100kg has a mass of 100kg or not.
You sure about that? I admit I don't know about the iPhone, but most every other phone I've seen doesn't take noise into account at all.
I'd sure hope you can do better than stegdetect, in that you've had over 10 years to improve on it!

I was overly terse in dismissing steg; I didn't really provide a rationale for my comment. But I expect you'll agree with me anyways. Image steganography is a pet trick. Given the constraints of a meaningful image file, it's unlikely you're going to come up with a technique for encoding a covert channel that will be truly hard to spot.

Meanwhile, it's a lot of added effort for a very minimal theoretical gain (and a very likely severe practical loss) in operational security.
Judge "rejected all of the EFF's arguments" on P2P cases
I didn't say that... I did relatively well (8k total for a small quotes app) I merely stated that I always had trouble getting blog writeups.

I understand that this doesn't seem like a great deal, my question to you is how much money are people using a service such as admob losing in order to acquire users (Are you able to acquire 20 new users for 11.75 for an app priced at 0.99?)? I have seem some pretty terrible conversion rates (although feel free to point me in another direction if you feel this assumption is misguided).

Yes there is a certain level of trust as well.. but hopefully the site will grow and this trust will be established. I'm not out here to make a quick buck by swindling developers.
Since Wikileaks is intrinsically both a journalist organization and an activist organization, I'm not sure what you expect Assange to do.

Are you criticizing how the Apache helicopter attack video was handled?
"Oh, hey, do you have a second to take a look at this over here?"

"I'll be there in, uh, a minute."
I read about the radioactivity somewhere earlier but could not relate it. This gives a better insight. However, what about the other countries. Not everyone smokes American cigarettes.
In the article (which is two weeks old, by the way), they say that he was scheduled to speak before all this started, but they're not encouraging him to attend given all that has happened since.
This forget's about all the H as a tree get's most of it's hydrogen from water.

EX:"Glucose" (C6H12O6) is from 6 * H20 + 6 * C02 => C6H12O6 + 6 * O2.

So a reasonable ansewer would be mostly air and water with some minirals from the soil.
Kindle DX gets better E-Ink screen, lower price
This is a web framework in the style of web.py or Sinatra.

I was wondering if anyone had much experience building a significant web application with one of these frameworks? Are they sufficiently powerful to enable fast development? I worry that a simple system like this might lack some of the templating and and database layers I am used to in larger frameworks such as Rails and Django?

I suppose I might just be afraid to lose having the framework do most of the work for me. It has made development quite fast.
Paper.li - read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper
Uh, the second "section" on the page basically says about the same thing :)
I have essentially no experience with Microsoft products, but in order to collaborate with some folks, I recently prepared a MS using google docs. It was a pretty terrible experience, which I never want to repeat. It kept getting confused about where I wanted to put my text, and the font I wanted to use for it.
One component of what drove the adoption of Facebook was that it provided an opportunity to peek into the lives of classmates you'd lost touch with, or maybe never really were very close with to begin with. It was socially acceptable to request a connection from somebody simply because you were in the same graduating class years ago, and the payoff for both people being connected was to get a look into the private lives of somebody you knew something about.

The problem Google faces is that for everybody that's already got a Facebook account, this motivation has already come and gone. There's a large handful of connections that remain in my Facebook account that I probably wouldn't bother to request or accept if given the opportunity on a new social network. While you could argue that this provides a "cleaner" social graph, from Google's perspective the more connections, the better as it provides one more piece of insight into their users.

In order to be successful, the next social network must incentivize its users to form connections with some other payoff, because Facebook has already spent this one.
1.5Ghz for this device and 2.0Ghz planned for end of 2010 smartphones. Is this the same "race" of Pentiums and Athlons?

offtopic: In 2005 i bought a Fujitsu Siemens laptop with same resolution, 1.66Ghz y and 1GB RAM. (1000€ —16% VAT— in Spain)
So far, none of the videos I have seen show the iPhone being held "normally". They first show it lying down. Then they grip it like its a million dollars. Then they show "oh look, its ok if I just hold it by the top".

Why don't you hold it like you're making a fucking call?

Oh. Because then it would work fine.

But the real reason I don't believe the bullshit: my wife has one, and if there was a problem, oh boy would I know about it.
Twitter issue: tweets disappearing
How can they let this happen?
New Ideas in Local Search from Geodelic
Interesting case study in this series. Is iTeleoport just a VNC client?
Craigslist Redesigns Its Homepage
"I understand if someone cold cases you for an internship and you cannot pay them but they want to learn and have some position in your company it's a bit more acceptable. But essentially if you send out job postings for interns you support a systematic evil in the job market of the US. These people have no choice but to work for you if they want to work in their field, and obviously no choice but to do so for free."

Wow! You're telling me that if I send out a job posting for interns, not only am I supporting a "systematic evil in the job market" but they have "no choice"? Really? First, what systematic evil are you referring to? Second, nobody is holding a gun to their heads. They have a choice. Do you want to give up some of your time for a chance to learn something? Yes or no. There's no duping involved. It's laid out. Also, at the end of the post, I clearly state that anybody offering an internship program SHOULD offer some sort of fiscal or other reward if the intern performs well.

As for the line you quote: in context, it's written from the perspective of the intern - not the employer. I'll concede that it wasn't entirely obvious, though. :)
Some trees are more than 50% water by mass

This is true, but missing my point. A lot of a trees weight is water but the H in it's DNA is from watter but not still water.
Well said. Tapulous' talent with (iOS + disney's ip)*(acquisition of wideload games bringing on board Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian) equals huge potential.

ps- stay tuned. will be in town in late July.
Keep in mind the Jaegermonkey project, which will greatly improve javascript performance is still under heavy work. So as of today, the javascript performance is still significantly behind chrome. (http://arewefastyet.com/)

That being said, javascript performance currently has little impact on user-perceived speed, and the "Reducing I/O from the main thread", GPU accelerated rendering, and startup/shutdown perf improvements are already causing incredibly noticeable perf gains.
Excellent. After the first line I deliberately closed my eyes and tried to re-reason it (and got it right, thankfully). It was quite refreshing to have a blog post make you actually stop and really think for a second.

The point was good as well. ;)
Message just sent: "Consider yourself invited to lunch at our office or a beer after work any day."
It's not "just a phone". It's your communication link to everyone you need to talk to, including family, friends and business associates. Imagine trying to have an extremely critical business call and it keeps dropping. Nope, not just a phone.
I doubt Apple/jobs would have the same reaction if the money they received from iPhone buyers was as defective as the phone. That being said, I do think people are going a little bit overboard in their reactions. Just about every phone, especially smartphones, has unusual reception quirks, the iPhone 4's quirks are worse than most but also not completely debilitating and there are plenty of functional work arounds.
This is a great idea. All jurisdictions should have something like this.

Someone should build a generic webapp to host this to let people post and vote the law to repeal. I'm sure you can get a government grant somewhere to bootstrap the site.