skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I guess people have different experiences. As long as I haven't been in a car (too much metal), it's always worked fine for me. Certainly more than good enough to orient myself on google maps (which is where it's little "beacon" light let's me know my actual orientation on a map)
Ask HN: My Macbook is about to die. What do I do?
I have one month left on the Apple Care (3 year plan). My macbook has begun crashing as of late. It's just in a barely usable state and I can't really afford to buy a new macbook. Also, the CD drive doesn't work and the battery dies after just less than an hour when unplugged. Did I just over use it?

A few months back I reinstalled the OS, that did very little help. Often when I have Coda, Firefox, and Photoshop open, I have to force the laptop to shut down in order for it to allow me to be productive again.

Do I suck it up and just buy a new one just before my warranty expires? I just about have had enough.
Chatroulette Launches Channelroulette and Localroulette
Had the same thought, though the article says that the lack of infectious disease (parasites) would cause intelligence gain. The population of countries where disease is less of a problem wouldn't see the same benefit...
Wow, downvotes. I'm not sure why. All I'm trying to point out here is that there are many people out there who have bought the iPhone 4 and can't hold it naturally and make calls. Now it turns out that was a potential issue known about as far back as a year ago at Apple, but it was ignored because the new design of the phone was liked at Apple.

Does no one else see something seriously wrong with that?
I also do have those suicidal thoughts, I gave up internships, friends and stuff to get better at programming and do a startup but I didn't get anywhere yet, I don't even have an idea. That made me lose some contacts and I hardly go out. But the deal is... I belive in myself so should you too, also I can't let the people that care about me down. In life you have a history ahead and you are a part of what will happen in the future of many people, of your future husband/wife, of your kids and many more. One thing that i do to relieve depression is work out, I seriously hate it but in the end of it I feel good and that I did the "exercise of the day" or go for a walk. Lately I haven't really taken my emotions seriously(yea... i'm even getting used to it) so I haven't been that much depressed.

I hope you do fine.
Me too. Although, then we'd probably call that relationship symbiotic and not parasitic.
> Stop drinking if you lose control of yourself while drunk, especially if you're a sad drunk. Or at least limit the number of drinks you consume.

Coming from someone who struggles with anxiety and paranoia, the first thing I was told when I went to the psychiatrist was to quit drinking. I am by no means an alcoholic, but I used to go out probably twice a week and I'd also have a beer after work to unwind.

The results were like night and day. All I had to do was not drink during the week and go out less (maybe once every two weeks). You may not be in this boat, but if you are you're doing yourself a favor to cut back.
How MG Siegler Thinks the iPhone 4 Press Conference Is Going to Play Out
It is something I am considering as well. I am a partner in an LLC that owns a couple of retail stores and am thinking that my future plans will involve buying existing businesses that I feel are under-performaning and that we have the skill set necessary to turn around.

For now I am excited about using the site to start evaluating opportunities for businesses in the areas where we are currently operating, maybe figure out who they are and do some evaluation so that when I am ready to pull the trigger I have a good understanding of the market.
The most World Cup-crazy countries
How to scale code deployment like Twitter does
Is there a reason this isn't covered under warranty? Did you physically damage the machine?
s/bank account/credit card/ is probably what patio11 meant. No idea how correct that is, but it's somewhat more plausible.
How old is it? My Macbook (which I am currently using) is 2 years old and only got a screen backlight problem (one vertical strip is dimmer)... What have you done to hurt yours so badly? I mean... I've had mine at 90ºC for more than two hours several times, while doing calculations (before I got to use my office's computer)
Yeah, that can really help. The worst part is the next day hangover. Dealing with suicidal ideation and a hangover is not fun. Also, if you're like me, you feel bad about yourself when you "waste a day" on a weekend while nursing your hangover.
The point being that there is always risk, and if you currently have the end result, there isn't much reason to give that up so that you can make a bunch of money and get back to where you started.

This is somewhat related to one of the best comments in the FU money thread. If you were happy before the money you will be happy after the money. If you were miserable before the money you will likely be miserable after the money.

BTW, that IPO isn't a sure thing either. I would guess that a successful IPO is less likely than a big competitor ruining your business.
great meetup, in the future maybe not use meetup though...
"If there's a chemical imbalance, drugs can help."

Medical statistics seem to show otherwise. For people who undergo a first bout of depression, most people who don't medicate get better in 6-18 months and then never relapse. Whereas those who medicate have a much higher chance of relapsing multiple times later in life.

source: Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker.
I am happy to see this, but I will withhold judgment until I see it for myself. Ultra Edit on Windows could be a bit of a beast a times.

Text editors on the Mac have stalled in recent years. TextMate 2 (also known as TextMate Forever) has been in the offing for years now. Coda is unstable. JEdit has poor OS integration. Eclipse is great for a heavy IDE, but too bloated for basic editing.

TextMate is still one of the best editors available, and I still use it for all of my Python development, but it has gotten way too old, and has long fallen behind the OS so that you could hardly call it tightly integrated.
Russian Tea How-to
Impressive that your MacBook worked at 90ºC -- how'd YOU make out? (That's 194ºF, so I suspect it was a typo.)
I think a large-scale recall is unlikely. True, in places where reception is already bad, touching the no-zone makes things worse. But overall call reliability and data throughput (especially 3G HSPA upload rates), even in poor reception areas, is far better on the iPhone 4 than on any previous iPhone.

If the reception issue were a dealbreaker on the iPhone 4, I think we should expect that people would be returning the phone on a massive scale. But they're not. People love their iPhone 4s.

If anything, I think they'll give out free bumpers. Or, perhaps, $100 at the Apple Store for all iPhone 4 owners - just like in 2007, after the original iPhone's launch. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/
The Unpaid Intern: Legal or Not?
Coders guide to good coffee?

Nah, Russian Tea HOWTO:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1519624
I was a situational alcoholic during my startup days and quit drinking regularly a little over a year ago. Since May 2009 I've gone out for drinks 4 times. It is astonishing how different I feel now. Before I was very dour and cynical and now I'm generally upbeat. If I drink more than 2 drinks I'm reminded the next day of how crappy I used to feel on a regular basis.
It's still working, somewhat.
Actually, I think this is likely the best way to deal with trolls. Having someone input their credit card gets rid (at least in their mind) of the anonymity that trolls thrive on.

The majority of the anonymous-posting news sites I have visited have been filled with trollish, often misspelled comments (on a side note: I think there must be a direct relationship between how poor a speller one is and their political leanings..). The NYTimes is the only major news source where I have found the majority of the online comments to have been written in a legible manner.

If HN grows too big or unruly to manage, I fully expect pg to implement credit card registration as well...
Ask HN: Review my startup and help me stress test my infrastructure?
Hello HackerNews,

I've recently soft-launched my startup in a private beta and need some more users to help me test my infrastructure to make sure that everything is scaling properly.

I've built a real-time analytics service (similar to ChartBeat and Clicky) that gives you real-time website traffic reports. One thing that we offer that I personally find fairly useful is the ability to set up various visitor count thresholds and specify an alert to notify you if your website is getting hit with an unusual amount of traffic.

If you have a website with moderate amounts of traffic (less than 25,000 visitors per day please) and are willing to participate in our beta test, please head on over to http://userping.com and enter your email address to be invited to our private beta. I'll be up and watching the beta queue for the next few hours to quickly send out invites as they arrive.

Thanks. I appreciate any and all help you can give.
I have no idea. I have had 2 hard drive replacements in the past. The 2nd time they told me I might have a defective machine but I had a paper to write than night and they could only give me a hard drive so that I could have the laptop back. It's almost a 3 year old machine.
Clickable link: http://userping.com
Hacker News Google docs
Just checked: adblock + easylist = no ads on reddit.
From the first link: "For legal reasons I can't talk about air popper roasting too much."

And the author doesn't elaborate. Weird?
The Hacker News Contractors links seems to be dead. This link works though:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...
Using anecdotes to prove a point is precisely what I mean by cherry picking. I know that Lisp projects can be successful, but is there some systematic way to show that they're in fact more successful? Google and others throw money around at a lot of non-Lisp shops too. Because it's possible to succeed with method B does not mean that there is a reason to switch if what I value is success.

If it makes programming more fun for you, great, but I think even that (if it's systematic for lots of different programmers) should impact the bottom line in some way that I could imagine measuring?

It just seems to me from casual observation that the success of Lisps is disproportionately low (not to be straw-manned into zero) compared to the enthusiasm and the exposure so many programmers have had to it through means like SICP at MIT. This is admittedly unscientific.
I think this sums it up: http://twitter.com/shusta/statuses/18634722063
The majority do not understand file systems, that is why. What do you NOT understand about this? Why do people keep making this comment.

I like file systems, I understand them, but I used to program dos interrupts, and actually reading sectors of the drive. But I can understand filesystems, a lot of people don't.

What people want is an all their photos grouped together, all the vides grouped together, all their documents together. They don't understand the different between the desktop, user folder, trash can etc...
Exactly. Being a connoisseur is a disability. Becoming a connoisseur deliberately is a terrible idea, and doing it because you think it'll make you look more sophisticated is akin to poking one of your own eyes out so you'll fit in better at the Veteran's Association.

Me? I accidentally drank too many good cups of coffee while I was living in Melbourne, and now I'm stuck as a coffee connoisseur. I ate too many good cheese and now I'm a cheese connoisseur. Whisky? Oh yes, whisky too. Luckily I've managed to avoid drinking too much good beer and wine, so I can still enjoy readily-available mass-market versions of those.

I know people who would rather have caffeine withdrawl symptoms than drink Starbucks. Personally I just drink the damn Starbucks and try to ignore the taste.
This is not serious, useful advice like the other posters (and pls listen to them)... but I always thought, if you are considering suicide, why not fake your death? All the good stuff like re-birth, freedom, and what not... without the bad stuff.. like being dead forever.
Most people think it's just a long pipe going down there, and you can put your thumb in it.
GitHub Notiﬁcations: Stars, please
Headline:

"Apple Knew of iPhone Antenna Glitch"

Body:

"Apple said, "We challenge Bloomberg BusinessWeek to produce anything beyond rumors to back this up. It's simply not true.""

WSJ regurgitates Bloomberg, buries the rebuttal, and headlines the rebutted info with nothing to substantiate why the rebuttal should be dismissed.
This is going to sound nuts, and of course I offer no guarantees, but I found that I did a lot better on days I ate bananas.

Hear me out for a moment.

I really like bananas... I buy a couple bunches and they're gone in a few days. Yummy. But then I don't get to the store for a while, and so on. One day not too long ago, I saw a bit of a correlation between my mood and the days I had bananas.

Digging around a bit, bananas (or papaya or dates) turn out to be one of the fruits that increase serotonin levels, one of the chemicals that might play a role in depression.

So... at this point it might be all placebo, but I don't care. I eat bananas every day and feel generally good! (Hey, it's only a couple bucks to try out, and at least it's not heroin or something!)

Naturally, the banana is no substitute for professional help, etc.
It's built on GTK+ but doesn't depend on GNOME.

Xfce is where I am now thanks to KDE4. If KDE4 and GNOME3 are big boosts to Xfce, I hope Linux desktop developers take the right lesson from that. If they want to keep "revolutionizing" things, they had better give us a good reason to put up with the learning curve and the sudden nosedive in usability and polish.
Top 5 Boston Developer & Startup Events
Ha. McClure is a CHARACTER. But the guy LOVES to make spreadsheets and powerpoints. Yes, he adds sometimes way too much junk in them but where I am not always the best at it he definitely is a great web strategist.
Still sounds pretty damn implausible to me.
Well, it's not as if the disaster is over.
It's weird, but as a stats guy, this makes total sense to me. They are sampling a small (hopefully random) group of internet users in order to draw conclusions about how the population at large behaves. It's no different than a political poll. Just like political pollsters, they express their results in relative terms to sidestep the much trickier issue of guessing N, the population size. Hence pollsters do not try to estimate voter turnout, and Alexa does not try to estimate how many people are online.

FWIW, the firms who are giving absolute viewer totals are (I'm pretty sure) just taking this a step further by estimating the total number of people online and multiplying. This is a way harder estimation problem, which explains why the resulting numbers are all over the map. The Alexa data is not any more worthless, just less ambitious.
At this point you are simply being a troll. You are using a classic troll script, i.e. a variant of "You suck. Prove to me that you don't." Are you actually looking to get something out of this conversation?
Why can't they just return it? I've returned products to an Apple Store and it's been completely painless. Is it different with the iPhone because of AT&T contracts or something?
Nice! You forgot this one :
http://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?key=t0Yf_w1vphN-ZT0LCU2u...
It's not obvious that they are a good idea in general. One pretty bad issue is that if you don't know about work spaces, then hitting Ctrl-Arrow will have the effect that everything vanishes with no obvious way to get it back.

It's also not clear to me that they actually make people more productive even if they are aware of them and understand them. Of course many nerds feel they are being more productive, but that only indicates that if you wish to sell to nerds, you should include them at least as an option.
Or maybe just trying to get a piece of the media pie.
So you're saying that when my fabricator in China mass produces these plastic keychains I sell, that a % of the $0.05 they charge per unit they are actually paying out as licensing overhead?
How To Phish, Protect Your Email, and Defeat Copy-And-Paste with CSS
Or if you're not a religious chap, replace "Go to church" with something else regular and social like learning a language (no, not a programming language), dance classes, cooking classes, etc.
> is far better than on previous iPhones

An Anandtech followup backs this up:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...

1. Reception in average conditions is sometimes significantly better on the iPhone 4 than on the 3GS.

2. Signal strength is sometimes the same as or worse than the iPhone 3GS.

3. The iPhone 4 is better at holding onto calls and data at very low signal levels.

The combination of these, it is reported, means Apple made a design trade off to achieve better calls in more low signal areas.

He calls innovating on antenna design in a way that works better most of the time but might be picky: "ballsy".
Music--Mozart's 40th has occasionally been a reminder that life is worth living, though I must say that the moods where I've wanted the reminding have been more in the nature of snits.

Yes, exercise.
Oh, it'll get rid of trolls alright. Trolls post stupid and insane comments which they don't really believe. Instead it'll just get filled up people who post stupid and insane comments which they really do believe. A victory for those whose job it is to police the comments, but not really a victory for sensible discourse.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: what I really want is a browser plugin which blocks comments. I never want to see another comment again, on any site. That'd be a pretty sweet internet.
Relevant discussion from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1516710
My advice? Stop reading Hacker News. You can't afford distractions. Finish your project.

In fact, I'm going to take my own advice.

Good luck.
I don't know how many local newspapers you've read, but this is exactly what the "Letters to the Editor" section is in my hometown local newspaper.
BP Finally Stops the Oil Leak
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." — attributed to Voltaire (a Frenchman, natch)

Or more prosaically, the French decided that advertising neutrality is more important than cracking down on speeding.
Self-analysis - is there any rationale behind your thoughts? If you can pull yourself out of the bowels of misery long enough to think (it's hard, trust me), why do you feel the way you feel? There's always a good chance that there's a more serious disorder lurking, so don't take this to mean that you shouldn't see someone. Don't discount psychologists just because they sometimes follow quack theories, either. Sometimes, just having someone to talk to is enough.

The dangerous threshold you cross is when you jump from extremely graphic, horrifying thoughts to physical activities that motion you on towards suicide. Once you, for example, start driving to a point where you want to jump off from or shopping for antihistamines to keep poison in your system, you're beyond the point where self-help can be effective.

I've been through this, and despite all the points where you tell yourself you're just going to do it, you reach a moment of mental clarity where you truly internalize the notion of suicide. You'll either push forward and decide to go on with it, or you'll realize that you just feel like shit and suicide is your pre-programmed pattern of thought for coping with it. If you decide on the former, stop and call emergency services so someone can save you from yourself.

This advice isn't pulled out my ass, either. I wake up every other day or so with the desire to crash my car into the local river or hang myself. But after thinking it through, I know it's because I have a shitty, non-relevant job and attend a crappy school in a backwater state in a country full of and run by ignorant loons. Just rationalizing my emotions removes the stinging pain that makes me want to kill myself, although I still feel the desire to bulldoze everyone in my local Wal-mart, so go figure. (-;

If you have a preferred contact method, let me know. I'd be happy to talk to you. Although I AM NOT A DOCTOR, NOR A DECENT SUBSTITUTE FOR ONE, I have been through something like this, so I may be able to provide more insight.

Take care.
Isn't it rather like Microsoft used to be, when they can assume that their sweeping changes will be unquestioningly accepted by everybody, no matter what the final result is like? I thought open source freed us from that. Of course, I'm grumpy that Kubuntu moved to KDE4 by default. I know KDE3 is still available, but c'mon, how could the Kubuntu guys look at KDE3 and KDE4 and decide to ship KDE4 as the default? When I installed Lucid (to give KDE4 yet another try) notifications were sized and stacked illegibly, and I kept losing notifications I didn't want to dismiss. Do a fresh install with default settings, and basically the first movement you see on the screen reveals a major usability problem! Well, it's obvious how that happens -- months before the final product is even scheduled to be finished, distros have already decided when to unleash it on their users.
Where do currency symbols come from?
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cdigg.com...

Google Trends implies Digg to be about 2.3x the size of Reddit.
Zuckerberg's theft robs Pearson of sleep.
Google's fight to keep search a secret
So here's a startup idea:

Work out a solution to verify the name. Allow anybody to sign up for 99 cent.

Now allow trusted sites (newspapers, Amazon.com etc.) where the feedback is important access to your authentication.

Let people use alias with the caveat that if there's enough "bad behavior" report / warning, their true name will be revealed.

This would make the startup the Equifax or BBB of the public forums. "Public credibility FICO score" and similar services would be next.

It's good for consumers too, soon the 99 c will add up.

When true anonymous comment is required, just send it to a journalist, they will make sure the person's identity is protected.
Ask HN: Review My Webapp: Sneffel
I wrote a “virtual whiteboard” application several months ago in adobe flex. I thought I'd re-write in HTML5 with websockets and canvas (apparently, I write really messy javascript.)

After talking with some of the few people who use it, I thought I'd experiment with monetizing it by making whiteboards expire and having users pay to re-activate.

Anyways. Sneffel is a collaborative drawing pad, built using html5 (so no IE support.) You can draw with friends, replay your drawings in an animation, customize the colors of your whiteboards, and embed them into your own websites.

Http://www.sneffel.com/about (demo of the replay)
and http://www.sneffel.com (should dump you into a brand new whiteboard.)

I would very much appreciate your criticism. Thanks.
If the machine is having hardware issues (which is probably the case if you did a clean install of the operating system and the issues are still recurring), and they are not the result of any accidental or intentional damage (as grandparent poster stated), they should be covered under AppleCare.

The only exception to this would be the battery (most laptop batteries are only covered under a one year warranty). It is extremely unlikely that your battery is causing applications to crash, though.
Another HN participant told me about a reply to this latest paper by these authors.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/2...

When I see gee-whiz news reports about science, even in very reputable publications like The Economist, I think to turn to Peter Norvig's article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

to evaluate the research.