skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What was really funny was that he moved back home, then when he couldn't find a job there, he moved to India.

If you have a political science degree, why not move to Washington?
When I woke up before 6am, it was at 1. Then 2 (with my vote). Now it's creeping back up...
He asked if you could explain them, specifically what they are about I think.
sounds like a neat business idea. You could get a bunch of polisci majors who can't find jobs in this economy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545019) and hire them out to be "fictional tony's". Sort of like a more specific version of the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
10 minutes of jogging burns an apple.
CNN anchors attack the scourge of anonymity
Amazon Mechanical Jerk. I like it.
I'd suggest that the doctrine of laches is completely valid in this case. Facebook isn't just a company that has "recently become cash flow positive", it's a company that's been highly valued for at least six years. In June 2004 Peter Thiel invested $500K for 7% (giving it a valuation of $7.1M) and Accel Partners invested $12.7M in May 2005 (valuation ~ $100M). I'm not sure you can say it would be a waste of time to sue for ownership of Facebook as it existed at either of those points as it was clearly valued by astute investors.
Oh no, there's no crime in Japan.

He didn´t say that, nor did he imply it. Using this kind of straw man argument polarizes the discussion.
after some time, they delivered me a faulty product: i wanted to return it. it turned out they were 'peacocking' their customer service team as well as their accounts team.

i don't think it's ok to 'peacock'; it's tantamount to fraud.

if your clients are concerned that you cannot cover their requirements, you should address these concerns, not lie to them
as this impedes their due diligence.
if you get caught, your reputation is destroyed, and i would be surprised if there were no legal recourse.
Oddly, I'd say it has the opposite effect to a certain extent (Similarly, I'm pretty familiar with front end web development but am most definitely not a hacker)

StackOverflow produce concise and clear answers, Rails webcasts insist (sometimes not entirely convincingly) that everything is quick and easy. HackerNews is frequented far more by programmers with serious breadth and depth of interest and far less by people looking for a quick fix or help with the learning curve. The resulting fondness for arcane languages and esoteric solutions can at times be overwhelwing even for the motivated novice.

On the one hand I think it's important for even non-tech people interested in that startup ecosystem to gain a basic understanding of how hackers think and the choices they face, which is my chief motivation for reading a lot of the programming articles posted here.
What do you mean by better Java support? That JRE doesn't support kqueue, aio, and other base functionality?

btw, what's wrong with openjdk6 port?
Expert analysis here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541729

Jennifer's a friend of mine who knows her stuff when it comes to 802.1X, NAC and WiFi. It looks like it's only related to broadcast traffic, and you have to be authenticated. Also, I can't tell, but it sounds like it might be restricted to radius-authenticated networks (WPA / WPA2 Enterprise, not PSK like you'd find in a coffee shop)
I think it was in the book Coders At Work that someone said coding is to software as brick-laying is to buildings.
> In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.

Others have found this a surprising claim, so do I. How has it been weakened or erased? Are they talking about different mental elements or creating offences which do not have a mental element at all? The first doesn't strike me as particularly novel, or objectionable.

> This is a slope that we have been sliding down for some time. While ignorance of the law has generally been excluded as a defense in criminal cases, our system of laws is becoming so convoluted that it is almost impossible to know and understand the applicable law.

This isn't a good thing by any means, but the issue of the law being unknown or incomprehensible to laypeople is nothing new. Take common-law requirements. Honestly, how many people read the relevant case law, or even understand its general effect? People have bumped along for, literally, centuries knowing little more than the broad outline of the law.

I'd also point out that "increasingly codified" isn't synonymous with "increasingly convoluted"; common-law rules are often pretty convoluted.

> Thus we are all at risk.

I'd actually suggest that the general level of legal knowledge has improved. Thanks to the Internet it's at least possible to get at the content of laws without access to a specialised library.
> (If somebody asked me to do consulting vis a vis a Korean company I would tell them they are boned and charge two hundred bucks. It would be cheap at the price, too.)

For those of us without your degree - why would someone be boned?
Seems like zfs is still unstable, at least if you take a look at mailing lists - people still reports crashes and problems. There are more hype than stability.. ^_^
3600 miles, 100 milliwatts, 5Hz of spectrum near 10MHz, rooftop mounted dipole, $25 of parts to make radio (including obligatory Altoids tin) => 0.05 bits per second.

[Edit: to lose that extra zero. Thanks Joe.]
You watch Fox News? Wow, the first person I have read admit that! I thought no one watches Fox News but the dumb.
His argument doesn't make sense to me. Consider the uses he gives for the shortened URL:

* Presentations
* Email
* IM and Twitter

Given these use cases, what, exactly, is the utility of retaining the longer URL? If every time you reference the location it's through the short URL, then the advantages of the longer URL (comprehensibility, mainly) are lost -- because nobody will ever look at it!

It seems like the only reason to do this is to maintain compatibility with systems which impose a particular URL scheme.

The post is a good argument for making shorter URLs in general, not a good argument for a personal and application-specific URL shortener.
The community does not owe him an explanation

Howeverm, merely posing a question, even with a suggested answer, is not a demand for an explanation. davidw doesn't make me feel like he thinks anyone here owes him an explanation.

Also, reading this same question in many threads becomes a
bit annoying.

Which is an argument I agree with. On the other hand, the question is valid and warrants some discussion. Perhaps we need a meta-HN, where davidw could start a topic and we could discuss his actual question.
In my opinion the main problem that EU regulations brought to Europe is exactly that it's now much easier for big companies to push through new laws which are good only for the mentioned big companies and which then get applied by all the members.

And sorry, I falsely understood that you believed that the easer issuing of patents which is probably coming in EU is what's "better" in EU than in US. Now I've read more carefully -- I'm the one who overlook the "but" in your sentence.
http://bitbucket.org/repo/all/popular/2008/ is the last page of repos. At 15 items per page, that would give ~30120 repositories.

But you have to take into account that on BitBucket you get one private repository for free, so I guess there's loads more of them than on GitHub. Also, I'm not sure if all repositories are on that list or not - they don't seem to filter it, since there are some repos 0bytes big at the end.
The Dell Bombshell (76% earnings in Q107 from INTL payments)
Used to go to bed between 12:00am and about 3:00am, however since I now get up for work at 6:30am it's exceedingly difficult to stay up late even when I want to. However, I still routinely stay up past 12:00am but generally hit 11:30pm
It's the classic desire to believe that you have complete control over your life. By looking down on people who are having a rough time you can re-enforce the view that you are doing well because of decisions you made.

tkahn's profile mentions that programming since the age of 9. That sounds like some pretty intense natural affinity for a technical skill to me. It's pretty lucky to be blessed with a natural affinity for a skill that is rewarded well by the economy. Most people aren't.

(think about it, if enough people possess a natural affinity for any sort of skill, that skill won't be rewarded very well, because that skill will always be plentiful)

I'm not denying tkahn's hard work, or smart decisions. I'm sure there were both. But there's also a lot of luck involved in tkahn happening to have loved programming from a very early age. When I read the article in question, I see a lot of hard work and a smart decision, too. What I don't see is someone who naturally happens to be awesome at a very desirable skillset. That doesn't exactly seem to warrant mocking smug superiority.
> This is the reality of Wall Street, any time you tie your self to a certain predictable future behaviour, people will figure that out and figure out a way to exploit you.

Markets are anti-inductive? http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/
It doesn't seem so surprising to me. The naive solution is of course to just try out all possibilities. As there are an infinite number of such, it will take infinite time.

So the first thing which comes to my mind: This is unsolveable unless there is some tricky way to reduce the problem somehow to a simpler (finite) one.

As it was proven, there is no such way in this case.
What Does A Small Start-Up Like Us Need To Do To Get Noticed?
Try to buy foods with only one ingredient, avoid packaged foods with more than five ingredients, and don't buy anything with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Those three tips alone will have a profound effect on what ends up in your shopping cart if you currently buy a lot of unhealthy processed foods.
I have to second the drinking water rather than anything else point. Thats one of the easiest changes (so easy in fact, that its the only one I currently can stick to) to achieve, and you will feel fantastic for it (give it a few weeks for the caffeine fuzziness to fade).
> A good quality sea salt

Is there often a difference between various sources of NaCl? ;)
Interesting - so there was only an issue when they caused you a problem through their negligence. It didn't actually have anything to do with the accounts team or customer service itself.

I certainly agree with your sentiment though - misrepresentation is bad, and to be avoided.

For a sole proprietor who is trying to win business, but has no resources, funds, or choice, I view this kind of 'peacocking' as a functional but temporary solution; especially if the sole proprietor is certain they can fulfill the clients requirements.
Github Badges (Built during Open hack day, India)
> I generally am not a fan of software engineer, because most software seems to involve a much higher level of trial and error than traditional engineering disciplines.

Software engineers just have a very high standard for "it is now complicated enough". If an engineer is forced by circumstance or insanity to add lots of features to an analog circuit, they end up in the exact same tar pit as the software engineer. Ditto for chemical processing plants, jet engines, etc. In fact, the usual approach these days is to move a lot of non-software complexity into software when possible, so trial and error becomes a feature.
It's not the coffee, it's the gallon of milk they add to it
http://tantek.pbworks.com/NewBase60#AdditionalImplementation...

I can't find any actual code for the shortener. But the base60 should allow you to come up with your own shortening scheme
I do think some of the preparation BP did after the disaster should be prepared ahead of time to be standing by for a future disaster.
You can turn off the flashing red light, you know.
Make than near 10MHz.
Keep a spreadsheet of everything you eat. Include the total calories. Pick a max calories per day. This will make you start to think in terms of good taste per calorie- "that snickers bar looks nice, but I'd rather have an entire meal".
You need to find something to occupy your time. Even if only a pet programming project. Something you force yourself to do for 2-4 hours every day non-stop as if you were at work. You'd be surprised how your body and mind relax into a "normal" schedule once you've got that "I'm done with work" feeling.
I don't think 'history tends to get lost'. It happens, both intentionally and unintentionally but preservation of history is a big, often deciding factor in such a switch.

These types of comments are common, I think, not so much because it's so hard to migrate history but because the VCS in use doesn't have facilities for cheap local commit and there's no immediate local history. The workaround is to place important version-change information straight in the source. Which is perfectly sensible in those circumstances, I just disagree with the OP's idea that this is somehow a desirable or best practice.
Personally, I have to have clear, simple, and hard-edged rules when it comes to my eating diet. If I give myself any wiggle room, I find myself wiggling more and more until I'm back where I started.

I've had great success cutting back on junk by following Reinhard Engels' "No S" diet. http://nosdiet.com/

No Snacks
No Sweets
No Seconds
Except, sometimes, on "S" days

(Where "S Day" is defined as "Saturday, Sunday, or special cultural or religious event)

--

If that doesn't work for you, here are some other hacks I or people I know have used with success.

- remove all junk food from your home

- don't buy any when you go grocery shopping

- stop hanging out places where there are a lot of snacks

- Set up a Seinfeld chain http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se... (Personally I use http://joesgoals.com and keep a chart widget on my igoogle page)

- if you simply must snack... then figure out what snacks are compatible with your diet and put them on the top shelf of your fridge and in the deli drawer... the first place you look for a snack when you open the door.

- tell all your friends that if they catch you eating junk food then you will give them $1,000 (or some other painfully large amount). (Just remember Inspector Clouseau and make sure you have a halting condition)

- if your friends try to sabotage you then drop those jerks. It's not funny, it's not "a joke"... it's getting backstabbed by someone you thought you could trust. Life's too short to put up with that shit
This is terrible advice.

If a client isn't holding up their end of a contract with you it doesn't suddenly make it okay to start lying to them to get what you want.

What happens when the client finds out that you invented a fake person to pressure them into paying you? What happens when word gets out in your industry that you are a liar who will stoop to deceiving your customers if you're not getting what you want?

There are few, if any, things more important in business than your name and your reputation. I would much rather take the loss on the contract and move on than risk being seen as untrustworthy.
I love the feeling after having rewritten some code part with the results of having it much shorter, much clearer, more stable and even faster. :) In almost all cases, it was worth it.

The strange thing is, sometimes there are multiple iterations of this on the same code part (sometimes by different people, sometimes even by my own).

Then I am thinking, maybe I just have gotten wiser, have learned my lesson or whatever. Stupid me that I haven't implemented it in the first place like this.

Also, I am always wondering, how much more iterations are there until I get to some final, perfect, optimal solution.

Or will I really end up with one single line of code in the end? :)
How to Choose Discussion Essay Topics
Discussion essays provide information only and do not express any opinion or a standpoint on any topic. It should bring unbiased information even when on different angles. This brief piece of text shows how writer can share his knowledge with the reader.
In 1998, I actually made the first soft synthesizer in Windows, controlled by MIDI, based on an emulation of the C64's SID chip. I sold 2 copies.

Apart from that, nice-looking project.
Does The President really hold the Power?
I've a friend with a philosophy degree, which has made her actively and openly contemptuous of practical, commercially relevant skills.

She's been stuck in dead-end jobs literally for a decade, which she, despite being intelligent enough to get said degree, finds completely unfair and incomprehensible. Her solution? Go back to college for a master's degree in philosophy...
It's a pretty interesting story to put on a resume or cover letter- I'd imagine he will at least be able to get some interviews.
Wannabe entrepreneur symptoms and cures
First real language I learned was Scheme in college. There were a couple weeks where I had to stop myself from putting parens in place of periods)
I haven't seen anybody write new Swing GUIs like he did in quite some time. First of all, you don't have to declare the listeners on the form class, and you typically would create an anonymous that listens to each component.

Second, there is a library called swixml (http://www.swixml.org/) which allows you to write the GUI part of the code in a declarative manner and have the library wire the two things together.

Both makes it much less of a pita to write GUIs in Java.
"Puerile" teen FB posts not libelous - computer not "dangerous instrument"
All code can be made shorter. But all code also has at least one bug. So eventually your code will be just one byte - but it will be the wrong byte :-)
I wonder if this is similar to what Paul Lutus did to communicate from the open seas back to his Oregon home during his sail around the world?

Here is an excerpt from his book:

My ham radio link is working better than expected. Before I started this sail, I spent some time installing and testing ham radios and computers in both the boat and my house in Oregon. I wanted to be able to write a message here, transmit it by radio, and print it on paper in Oregon. At the Oregon end, because a normal person (not a radio nerd) has to be able to use the system, there's a simple "message screen" on display. A person just sits down at the computer and types a message, then presses a key that saves it. The next time I make contact I collect the messages.

http://www.arachnoid.com/sailbook/Chapter_2_--_Oregon_to_Haw...
Here's a couple of things I've done over the years to make seemingly boring foods tasty:

-Make shakes. Almond milk, protein powder, berries and sugar free Jello. Buy like 5 different flavors and you can have strawberry cheesecake, dark chocolate, and butterscotch all for a snack without any of the guilt!

-Sauces will save your life. Pesto, hummus, sugar-free marinara, mustard, lemon, lime...mix and match all of these on various meats and vegetables for truly delicious meals.

-Lots of water. Water satiates you and is good for you. Always drink a ton of it to limit cravings. Green tea and mint tea are also shown to curb cravings.
Look at me, i took a 1957 strat and turned into a guitar hero controller. Call me luddite but that's just sad. And if you really care about technology, the organ is the real wonder.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وحرس الحدود
paleo diet. start here:

http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/
Sure, I'll add in my speculation:

IF it's not an entire forgery: There will most likely be a large settlement here. The guy won't want to go through the legal troubles associated with the case since it will take years. He's not like Aaron or the twins, which saw more than just money in the case. Paul Ceglia wants his money. Facebook will also not want to go to court on this one as the PR drags out and there's a decent chance that something devastating could happen. The question is: What's the PR play? If FB settles for a large sum of money very quickly it will just add to the line of people that Mark "stole" the idea from.

There's also a chance that it's a forgery or gets thrown out on a technicality. Here's my somewhat logically, but still randomly decided likely outcome %s:

Facebook Settles For Large Amount of Cash: 45%
The entire thing is a forgery: 25%
It gets thrown out on a technicality: 30%
Goes to court, Facebook loses (likely in 2012), devastation: 5%
I don't necessarily see it as a 'wow' language, but I think the real valuable thing about Scheme is that the implementation details are within the grasp of a twelve year old.

Python on the other hand requires a lot of high-level CS to properly understand its inner workings.

And you can do fun stuff in any language.
Google Cache[1].

Reminds me of that TDWTF post where engineers were paid based on the amount of lines of code they had written - led to massive comment blocks explaining the simplest things ("This is a for loop that works by...").

[1]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...
Personally it doesn't work that way for me.

On top of it, I'd feel bad constantly for pretending to be a Tony when I'm not one.
When I was about 10 until the time I was about 15 or 16 I would have 2 big cups of chocolate milk with extra sugar. I woke up one morning and decided I couldn't continue doing that or I would have some serious health issues down the road. The next morning I stopped drinking my milk that way, every couple of days I would cheat and have 1 glass, but then I would feel guilty and stop again. I'm 19 now and I drink one glass of 1% milk every breakfast, work out 3 times a week and I stick to a healthy diet that fits my goals.

Perhaps what you need is a lifestyle change and a new way of thinking about those cravings. I firmly believe in the saying "healthy body, healthy mind", and that shy's me away from anything unhealthy.

Of course I'm no saint so I choose 1 cheat day a week and I eat as much junk food as possible, after the day's over I don't want to look or eat any junk food until the next cheat day.

--

I should also mention that at around 16 I became very interested in fitness and nutrition so I spent most hours reading up on it. It made me more aware that our bodies are just really REALLY beautiful machines, in order for it to run at full throttle you want to feed it the proper nutrients or else it will just chug a long.
Bananas: ip addresses & spam management for Rails
Ten Techniques for Total Team Accountability
You don't exactly get pure substances in the world. Soo, very much so, there are differences. Get a couple sorts of salt. Dead sea, Mediterranean, and the generic stuff, and you can certainly tell. Whether or not they have health benefits...
View Earth From Above
View from above allows us to consider designs and patterns on the surface of the Earth
I've thought of this before, but dismissed it as being completely dishonest. What happens when your client decides he/she likes Tony and decides he wants to take you and Tony out to celebrate some business milestone that your service was key to achieving? Do you get a buddy to play Tony? How far down the rabbit hole will you go? Even worse, what if the clients decides to sue based on some bad advice "Tony" gave? Then you're in all kinds of trouble.

I appreciate the advantages of psychological separation between founder/pal and money chaser, but why not just send an email from 'Accounts?'
correlation does not equal causation
If you really believe this, put your money where your mouth is: Tell all of your clients that you do this.

Then, report back to us what they think. Somehow I don't think they'll buy the "I was lying to you for your own good" line.
qmail has been placed in the public domain a few years ago.
Can you outline a scenario where you would be doing this for gain other than personal?