skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sometimes sounds better to phrase "I don't know" along the lines of, "Let me check on that and get back to you."

In Navy ROTC 'boot camp,' it was verboten to respond "I don't know"; the only acceptable phrasing was "I'll find out, sir." (And the cadre followed up to make sure we did find out.)
> It is a corporation and a dictatorship of sorts isn't it?

Facebook is a corporation, but it lacks the ability to coerce anyone. Instead, it depends on their voluntary acts, which they're free to stop at any time.

Dictatorships, heck govts, don't work that way.
Who?

Edit:
He's the design director for The New York Times.
Plato? Is that you?

EDIT: What, nobody read the republic?
Well that's a convincing sample-size:

Two-thirds of the approximately 700 software entrepreneurs who participated in the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey report that they neither have nor are seeking patents for innovations embodied in their products and services. These entrepreneurs rate patents as the least important mechanism among seven options for attaining competitive advantage in the marketplace. Even software startups that hold patents regard them as providing only a slight incentive to invest in innovation.
Distributed Agent Based Modeling
My daughter is a little over 2 years old and I have been working on my startup the entire time she has been alive, I can't think of anything I could have done that would have let me see her more than being on my own has. (well, other than not having a job)

I work from home so I see her when she gets up in the morning, I take her to school when it is in session (she goes half-days during the year), I see her during the day for lunch and snack times (my office is by the kitchen). Then right at 5 I stop working and we all have dinner, then we hang out and play. After she goes back to bed at 7/7:30 I often head back to work and work until 10 or 11.

I couldn't imagine having to leave for work before she wakes up and if I hit traffic on the way home not getting home until 6... I would see her a grand total of 90 minutes a day.

Working for myself also lets us do much more, we take more vacations (since I can work a couple days and keep up) and last year we spent 5 weeks in San Francisco.

If you are raising a family and a startup, then this is a must read: http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur... - it totally changed how I work and has a made a huge difference for my family.
Currently it has less users, but building a site takes time. You can post a comment and check back later if you please. The point is that if you want, you can interact in real time within topics. You can also bump other people's topics to talk about them. This allows those users to check back later and review other people's interactions in their topics.

As for spam and hate speech, their is a standard report topics icon, and obviously it is the job of the admin to monitor activity. Additionally you can prevent people from commenting in your topics by 'banishing them'. This feature can be accessed by reviewing another user's page by clicking on the other username.

I will eventually add ads but I would like to receive feedback first to help fix issues and build site content before I can even get approved for an ad service.
There are two different ideas going on here. There is the legal and the ethical. It doesn't matter whether an agreement is legal or not, in the realm of ethics if you sign willingly you agree.

Would you care to explain how you can defend breaking a TOS when you have a choice on whether to sign it or not?
How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger
Ah, sadly nothing for a weekend hacker but nice to know it exists.

I'd guess anyone who spent time figuring out how to do Windows filesystems would want to be paid for the trauma.

Thanks for the pointer and good luck with the project, I've signed up for an invite. :)
Alumimum is commonly found in most (all?) anti-perspirants. It's definitely not something limited to Old Spice. If you want to avoid aluminum, you'll probably have to stick to using deodorants that are not also anti-perspirants -- it might be the case that Old Spice doesn't sell anything like this.
> I find better just to confidently state something, and get called out for inaccuracies (it's certainly more memorable).

Of course this is dangerous when talking to people who know less than you about something, since they may not have the ability to call you out.

To that, if you do see something wrong with something you said in the past, it is morally imperative that you correct the mistake.
Listen video interviews of some founders at http://mixergy.com/

Founder At Work is really really useful. It is startup biable. If you read it then surely you will get inspired http://www.foundersatwork.com/
Look at an Amiga. Find out how Linux is not like an Amiga, UI-wise. That's probably what's wrong with it, from Sassenrath's POV.

Glaring error #1: At Commodore it was a rule that user input should be prioritized over all other processing. This determined things like, for example, how interrupts were prioritized in the kernel. No modern OS does this, resulting in UIs that lag and shudder as the machine restores some process out of swap before getting around to the thing for which it was built: responding to your commands.
Horrible Safari privacy bug: take action now
And why do you think that is? I've seen too many situations where the reward for being more productive than lesser-clued co-workers was a greater share of grief and stress.
Aluminum has not been proven that aluminum causes Alzheimer's...

Many other deodorants use aluminum as well, Old Spice is hardly unique in that regard.
1. It should work great for huge files, especially over LANs. Right now a 1byte change will mean a re-download, but one of the first things we're doing is introduce diff-based downloads :)

2. It should

3. We're not 100% sure how we're going to charge for it yet, but anyone who signs up for the beta will be grandfathered into whatever system we end up using (i.e. you won't have to pay)

4. I'm actually going to address this in a separate post, but we've designed it in such a way where you'll actually stream files from one device to the other (based on a least-recently-used policy), so in effect you should have access to ~104GB of data.

5. This relates to #4, but is up to you, largely. If you have computers that are up 24/7, great. If you don't, you can leverage our cloud servers for better availability.
I just watched (well, really mostly listened to) the video embedded in the article and I highly recommend it.

I was involved in VC negotiations during the bubble and was a bit confused about some of the stuff beyond the basics. Luckily, we had good lawyers and my partners were fairly well versed in finance.

I've also noticed that many people have are confused about how the corporate governence works. They also talk a little about how the board of directors work and how it interacts with investor rights.

Finally, if you're not comfortable with finance, you might need to watch it a few times before you fully understand what they're talking about, but it's well worth it.
Last time I tried out bpython, it seemed to crash at the slightest hint of any error. I'll have to try it again and see if it's improved.
Well, most liberal governments, you're free to leave and go somewhere else at any time. You can even cancel your citizenship if you want.
Totally. But the kicker is scorched earth makes a lot of money.

Those projects they canceled, and the craptacular ones that somehow managed to make it into production, maybe for 30 years, those are the decisions that are making a lot of money. The idealized view of the peace and love and beautiful code making money are just not how it's done in the real world. I'm not a Microsoft hater, but hey, there's a good example for all you haters out there.
Descriptive Essay Samples
A sample essay always helps the student as a guide when writing his/her on essay. Descriptive essay must make the reader feel that he is experiencing by his/her own senses, the thing being described. This is how the writer should use the language to achieve this.
An experiment with generic arithmetic
Look up .NET Terrarium. You programmed behaviors for "bugs" that could either be herbivores or carnivores. It was pretty amazing - it would serialize people's AI controller classes and inject them into other players' instances so copies of them could compete. Sadly by the time I discovered .NET Terrarium, it had already been abandoned (having served its purpose of demonstrating the power of .NET serialization). It's a tragedy it was never open sourced.

Interestingly the ultimate winning strategy was a herbivore that acted even more aggressively than a carnivore. Any carnivore that wantonly killed everything would also be wasting its food source, but a herbivore has no such limitation. Someone programmed herbivores that formed packs to attack everything & keep the plant for themselves, and it was impossible for anything else to gain a foothold once bugs with that strategy were in a terrarium.
Less Than 1 Year Until The Internet Runs Out of Addresses
> Go to a chamber of commerce meeting or grab 20 random restaurant owners ... what will you find? 40 and 50-somethings who barely understand email and the web, let alone smartphones and location-based social networks.

Please tell us more about your research in this area.

They do know how to attract paying customers.

They are deluged with new ways to attract customers, the vast majority of which don't work and most of the rest aren't worth what they cost. And the worst of them are more valuable than monday morning quarterbacks.

You think that you can do better? Great! Show us.
If sales would have been -14% without the commercial but are only -7% with the commercial, then the commercial did raise sales. You measure vs. the counterfactual baseline, the one where the rest of the world is held constant but you don't take the action that you're measuring.
Then what effect will the plants dying have?
> Your expectations are unrealistic.

Wait, what? You think it's unrealistic to expect every security-related bug filed to get some kind of a human follow up within 30+ days?? And this from a company that made over one BILLION in profit during that same time frame?

Uh, no.
Racket has a lazy module that can let you have lisp+laziness. There's also typed scheme which lets you do lisp+types. Now if only someone could make a lazy typed racket.
That's excellent that it's working out for you, and I knew someone would have a counterexample, that's why I said "may".

Do you collaborate remotely, or are you working on your own? It sounds like the home office is really what makes it work out well.

My daughter is about that age, and honestly the home office thing hasn'ed worked so well with her, because she wants to come play with me.
I don’t think Denmark has a state run economy. Free market with extensive regulation, maybe. And a few state owned companies, probably.

Economic policies tend to to get discussed with those dichotomic arguments. I really do think that’s wrong. As though the majority of people in Europe or even just the political elites are in favor of state-run economies! That’s so wrong, it’s ridiculous.

There is a whole wealth of decisions you can make about economic policies, not just one.

(I personally tend to think that free market mechanisms are a incredibly valuable tool which work in many, probably a large majority of cases, but I don’t think we are lucky enough to always get what we want with them. If the free market would always work there truly would only be one decisions to make – i.e. free market everywhere without restrictions – but I don’t think it’s quite so easy. But that’s just my opinion.)

I veer wildly off-topic so I better say that, in the end, I agree that the US would turn into Denmark if they adopted their economic policies 1:1. That wouldn’t work and would be a bad idea.
The greatest thing about you is that at least you admit it.

As a nobody I think that the biggest sign people are venturing into areas where they don't know what the hell they are talking about is when they start using buzz words, technical terms and oft quoted stuff a lot. I think that when people have thought a lot about something, or truly understood it they tend to talk about it in their own words, and they don't talk about terms or something arcane but concepts behind them. They take into context things that just aren't at the surface, and then base their conversation on that.

This isn't a hard and fast rule though. As it varies with a lot of people, but it is really useful for me as I have to turn to 3rd party sources to learn stuff pretty often (a textbook or a teacher is a first and second part resource. You know if you can trust them or not. Online help sources whereas are another game altogether).
I tried to, but the markdown ate my formatting & I don't know the escape code.
No, it doesn't stand. It proves too much. It proves you should never take any action, and for that matter also that "no action" isn't acceptable either. This is not a useful thing to "prove".

See also the logically-unsound "precautionary principle", which has the exact same problem for the exact same reason.
Everything we do, or decline to do, has implications we can't understand. Second guessing ourselves into paralysis is silly and pointless. The best we can do is act on the implications that we do understand.

When the benefit is 1M lives/year saved and there do not appear to be any drawbacks, it's damn well full steam ahead.
Design for mobile: 8 things to remember when designing for mobile
This is an excellent example of a common misconception about the Web:

I didn’t come to your site. You came to mine.

Yes, I did. You treat it as the equivalent of coming to your house to disturb you. That is the heart of your misconception.

Your site is not like your house, it's more like a ham radio frequency. You're broadcasting your thoughts and opinions at anyone who comes to listen. Not only that, you provide your listeners with a mechanism to broadcast right back on the same frequency.

Yes, "listening" to your "frequency" is voluntary, but that doesn't make it any less public. If you really don't want to deal with any negative comments whatsoever, I can think of two solutions: 1) protect the site with some authentication and authorization mechanism; or 2) restrict or disallow submitting comments.

Am I like this offline? Pretty much, yes. If I'm in the street and I walk by someone standing on a box and shouting at everyone, I'll probably ignore that person. However, if that person tries to call my attention by, say, yanking my sleeve, I'll talk back at them and I probably won't be very well disposed towards them.

How did you yank my sleeve? By linking to your site on HN. So let's not pretend people just "stumble" on your site and start harassing you out of the blue. If you try to attract attention and you give people a way of talking back at you, then you really should be prepared to deal with what they say.
You seem to have missed the point of the question "After all, how do you know that sales wouldn't be down 14% without the ads?".

The commercial is not the only thing affecting sales. If there is some other factor driving sales down strongly the sales may still fall overall even if the commercial is successful (i.e. attracted a large number of sales).
Sidewinder...now there's a name I haven't heard in a while.

The Economist fell for the PR submarine because Infosec is completely outside of their realm of knowledge. The "story" sounded intriguing and would get them views.
if you are brilliant and working for google, shame on you!
Droid X rooted
Is there a technical reason preventing the big guys (youtube/yahoo /vimeo etc.) from developing this kind of thing? I always thought running voice recognition on user submitted videos would require massive infrastructure. How are you guys planning to solve that? Congrats & best of luck with the rest!
At the risk of getting downvoted, I'm going to try to reply to show something. Give me the benefit of a read through before downvoting? Discussion is welcome, too.

The point I was trying to get across was that people will look qualitatively and ignore quantitative arguments when it suits them, and will do the opposite when it suits them.

Heck, you can see it here - "A capitalist economy with a 50% tax rate, more generous pension, health, unemployment benefits and a larger public sector is still fundamentally a capitalist economy." - You could've made a similar reply to ugh explaining why Singapore and the USA is a valid comparison for qualitative reasons despite the population difference.

There are qualitative similarities between Singapore and the USA (market economy, dominant emerging industry is information sector, high personal freedom in some areas but strong anti-drug laws, economy is facing falling global demand and a banking system with downward pressure on interest rates due to other countries cutting theirs to rock bottom)... and ugh tosses those qualitative differences due to population size.

People don't do the same when the arguments suit them. So people will be skeptical of Singapore data because of its different population size and landmass, while they embrace Denmark... despite the fact that it's a different population size and landmass. This should be noticed and ideally transcended if we want to get to what actually works.
We generate a temporary password for the user being invited and encode it in the invitation code sent to the user's email address. We use this temp pass to verify the user when he/she signs up and destroy the pass immediately after. During initial setup, the user's device generates its own public key pair and sends a CSR (certify signing request) to us for certification.
Any updates on the number of visitors?
Singapore is run very much like a company. Despite being a democracy, power very much lies in the hands of the government elite. Lee Hsein Long, the curent prime minister, is the son of Lee Kuang Yew. Together, the Lees have been in power for 37 out of the 51 years of the country's existence. The People's Action Party has ruled since, well, the country started become self-governing in 1959.

The government owns much of "private" enterprise. The current prime minister is married to the CEO of Temasek Holdings, a $100 billion sovereign wealth fund that is owned by the Ministry of Finance. It owns the largest companies it Singapore, including telecon, bank, Singapore Airlines, the media, electric. For good measure, they also own the zoo and 49% of Virgin Atlantic.

The government also does a great job of recruiting talent. Males are required to complete military service - a way to build loyalty to the country and create disincentives for moving away. The government also hands out "scholarships" for US college education, but really these are loans that require one to return and work for the government for X years (5+? anyone at Stanford or Cornell + maybe others would know what I'm talking about).

All this ends up in a country thats focused, prime and nimble for economic growth. Not sure if its a good or bad thing, but certainly interesting.
Startup Tackles Rural Transportation Problem in Africa
The day Facebook monopolizes the use of force on its members? That's the day it becomes an nation.

It is nowhere near, no matter how many people join.
Looks like they do it with javascript + YUI which is pretty cool: http://showmetheheaders.com/static/showme.js

You can do it with curl too for all those who don't know

curl -I example.com

works with multiple domains as well
To me, I believe that with some time, and work to improve the site based on user feedback, and with some more users, the site will begin to become useful and a unique experience for users. I will change the collabrr thing to posting lol and fix the links issue. There is a slight glitch in the drag-drop in chrome, which I will fix. I do agree about the interface, and I will address that. Really appreciate the feedback 27182818284.
> "It's a bit awkward as a fully standalone language, since things like IO don't always mix with backtracking. It's great as a rule engine, though, and would probably also be brilliant as a query language for a document-oriented database."

Fully agree. I'm learning prolog too, and it's really fantastic for the types of problems it was designed (e.g. resolving constraints and expressing relations), but I didn't enjoy doing IO in Prolog. My solution is to use lisp as my primary language and use an implementation of prolog-in-lisp (e.g. racketlog for racket). This way I have the best of both worlds.
IPad Education Apps
Download Blackberry Desktop Manager 6.0 Free
I've been using Linux (Fedora) for about 6 years now, and sadly I have to agree with the article. Although the newer releases are far better, there are still bugs which hamper user experience. For example, Fedora 12 (and 13 the current release) have a bug where even after switching off my laptop scroll pad through an external button (my laptop has one), the mouse pointer moves every time I touch the pad. There are a few other bugs which are really annoying. Since I'm a CS student, I love Linux and use it for my work, I have the patience and interest to look at solutions and workarounds. I don't think an everyday user would be bothered to do the same.
For me, a physical keyboard is very preferable for the same reasons. Unfortunately, most of the high-end phones with physical keyboards that are coming out soon have capacitive buttons. It seems to me that people who prefer physical keyboards would also prefer mechanical buttons, so I'm a bit confused by the behavior of phone manufacturers in this case.
From the article:

...McAllister says that their pollination isn't crucial for crops on which humans depend.

Compared to the lives of millions of people, not any effects I care about.
Get Feedback from your users.
Find ways for them to play more with your site, for example even though reddit is a text only place there are lots of games users play like ITAP or GoneWild or AMA, what you should try to do is find ways for your users to play that kind of games.

Another good example is also Chatroulette where users play games like Tilt your head, Play you a song, show you the bird, etc.
clever concept. there are some typos on their site, like break instead of BRAKE but neat idea. does it mention intended price?
"Its like being an awesome carpenter and saying “I want to go work at Ikea” so I can churn out follower products like an open-source mobile OS 5 years after Symbian or web-based email 10 years after Hotmail or a webOS 3 years after Palm did it. Way to gooooo, you are such wonderful innovators, you are applying the Microsoft method of “do it several years after everybody else”."

He then proposes that these developers instead work at a company that is producing a simple email device fifteen years after the launch of RIM's predecessor of the BlackBerry.
And a bidirectional programming language: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/
Maybe genetic engineers could come up with another pollinator, sans the blood lust :-)
Ah okay, I understand what you meant now.
One thing however - if it is a macro, couldn't it just be:

#define getc fgetc_or_similar

At least C89/90 only mentions that if it is a macro, it may evaluate arguments more than once (but then it may not, as in the above case).
> Oh, wait, those are all random collections of people that have nothing to do with "nations". My bad.

"“[It] is a device that allows people to get together and control their own destiny, much like our nation-state,” says David Post, a law professor at Temple University, Philadelphia."
He only said "what could possibly go wrong", hardly the same as saying "it should never, ever be attempted".

It would be interesting to hear some success stories in contrast? I suppose stuff like importing potatoes would count?
Be a gentleman on the treadmill