skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have an undergraduate business degree from the University of Washington in Seattle and I think it was very helpful. I'm sort of a "business geek" and I really enjoyed learning some things that I wouldn't have been able to learn on my own. Basically, I know I can teach myself a new programming language, but I can't really teach myself finance or marketing. I did take a handful of CS courses, just enough to realize that CS isn't really about writing software.

A few months ago, I went to an informational seminar for the UW Technical Management MBA and I realized that MBA, in that context, stands for Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon. Something like 76% of the students came from those three local companies. I see the value in networking, but if I wanted to meet a bunch of Microsofties, I would go work at Microsoft. (Not that I have anything against Microsoft, but I know it's not the right culture for me)

And while I don't doubt the quality of the education (some of the professors were the same ones I had in my undergrad and they were awesome) the whole thing was pitched not as "look at all the cool stuff you'll learn" it was pitched as a way to break through into a better job/better salary at your current big company, which felt a little discouraging. I felt a sense that actually writing code was somehow distasteful to some of the audience, and they were willing to pay around $80K to not have to do it anymore.

If the lack of paper diploma is really holding you back, then I guess it's a good thing. If you really just want the education, there are plenty of better learning experiences to be had for that kind of money.
Jabber servers works really well for workplaces... they have chat rooms and private communications.
I don't know. People on HN talk about this dichotomy between the value producing Silicon Valley startups, and the valueless of activities like HFT stock trading. In my mind, in most cases, it's not so clear.

I worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years. Many of the projects I worked on had negative financial value - they never made any money. So essentially I was just wasting some rich person's money. The projects that were successful in terms of users and "eyeballs" often had negative social value. The whole point was to induce users to spend more and more time on our sites. Finally, some of the things going on right now in startup-land are quite frankly, creepy. The last project I did in Silicon Valley involved working with all these vendors who essentially are building up dossiers of every human who uses the internet and shopping it around as "market data." When I realized I was basically contributing to a surveillance state, I quit and moved to Manhattan, where at least I'm only fucking around with rich people's money, instead of fucking around with people's lives.
Thanks for that, I'll let you know if I get stuck.
I think we use plain ircd as a server software. As for the authentication, we have shell servers to run irssi with in the same LAN, so we haven't perceived need for any additional auth on the ircd.

edit: we also have invite-only channels on ircnet
I'd be interested in using that. Got a mailing list I can sign up to?
At initial viewing it looks very very awkward. However, I enjoy the circle in the middle, it gives you a quick point of reference once you've seen the map a few times.

The map on the bottom, of what the Metro map could look like in 100 years is just downright frightening.
That's different. The security is: if a programmer implements the code correctly, but the market turns against the strategy and the strategy loses money, the programmer generally won't lose his job.
I agree that is makes sense to respect companies you are working with wishes.

In this post though we are merely speculating as to the reason for the meeting and looking for advice from the HN community. If the company had suggested to us that we should keep the fact that we are having a meeting with them confidential, we certainly would have. It is definitely the right thing to do if people ask.
"We Are More Often Treacherous Through Weakness Than Through Calculation."
> But does it have to pay for itself? Nobody buys a car that is above the cheapest model expecting it to pay for itself. A sunroof or bigger engine will never pay for itself, and is usually bought to get some other benefit (sometimes mostly in the mind of the buyer).

Bingo. So, what is Volt's corresponding benefit, how much does it cost, and how many people are willing to pay that much for that benefit?

> By the time all the early adopters who buy them for the technology or environmental benefits have one, the technology should have improved

"should"?

If Volt doesn't recover its development costs, how is GM going to pay for improving the technology?
Just curious, why not have the windows key be your primary meta for XMonad? In general I try and use that key for my WM shortcuts since most apps don't use it.
Say something stupid and the rest of the world gets to see it. Write about a particular belief or political stance and it may come back at you.

Start a journal and keep that for a month. If you like it and can devote time, then think about making it public.
"At this point we were about a half-mile short of the runway, about 25 feet above the trees. Bill quickly initiated the ejection sequence using his face curtain. A sensitive accelerometer on the nose strut recorded and telemetered back to the ground the little blips showing the firing of the canopy and then the ejection guns on the two seats in turn. That all took 0.9 seconds as advertised; 0.4 seconds later the nosewheel hit a tree!"
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for being patient with my questions.
vi ~/notes/category/what.txt

next problem...
Another one is "phased" in place of "fazed."
As a fighter, definitely.

When you compare it to other larger military aircraft, it doesn't seem very long at all. The B52 has been in active service since 1955. The A-10 was introduced in 1977 and isn't expected to be replaced until nearly 2030.
Yup, the invite one. Not all were cofounders (probably half were people with advice), and probably half the response for cofounders were people that wouldn't work out due to location. But yes, it was an insane response.
Before you start your project, it’s important to know how your graphic designer prefers to communicate, and then do your best to accommodate it.

Really? You want your customers to accommodate you? If a company is at the point where they're hiring a graphic designer, then they probably have many outside parties they need to communicate with. Assuming that the graphic designer is of such importance that they should accommodate you is presumptuous. The ideal, of course, is for both parties to explain how they prefer to communicate and figure out a compromise.
Got a "top 5" of the things you're happiest to have learned in an MBA setting? I'm interested.
I assume there is also other perl activity on freenode because it comes high on the IRC stats at http://langpop.com
What the hell is Snooki?
After thinking about this heres a few thoughts
a) Providing reputation metrics and discoverability for remote services is going tobe big.
b) There will be opportunities to manage and run remote services. aka some dental robot CVS like location on every third block. This looks like a naturally monopolistic business.
c) Telepresence might provide a counter balance to location based network effects. Currently things are completely stacked in favor of moving to big cities, in the future living in a low cost area might be the source of some competitive advantage.
And you show this by talking about being annoyed by the people on reddit? Are you not seeing your own tribalism or am I just not getting your sarcasm? :)
Why would you feel that someone from the outside would be a better judge?
I open Colloquy to get help or to see what the cool guys are talking about.
"Sales" isn't that easy to measure. Sure, the sales person might have been the face to the other company, but were they the real reason the sale closed? I've written a bunch of small pieces of software for my current company and many new clients have said the only reason they picked my company over a competitor was my value add software. Did I see any of the sale commission? Nope.
If there's enough sunshine to grow grass and trees, there's enough to make energy.
That's the argument I hear from trader friends, to which I respond, the people who produce wheat/iron/cheddar and the people who consume wheat/iron/cheddar can figure that out perfectly well in the absence of speculators and high frequency trading.

Your other points are well taken, but I do think Krugman is largely referring to equities, and I sort of parrot part of the argument made by Mark Cuban in the following link without sharing how I got to that line of thinking:

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/09/08/talking-stocks-and-money/
My experience is with Investec and Standard Bank. But I've heard good things about ABSA, Nedbank, and FNB as well.

Competition is pretty strong, so fairly comparable across the board.
Because if you've been coding since you were eight then you should probably know by now the difference between anecdotes and data.

And that enjoying a privilege despite limited resources doesn't make it not a privilege. And that most of them relied on decisions made by an adult, not by the future hacker (parents stretching their budgets, teachers/schools offering use of their computers, etc.).
true but your investment could help the industry evolve and help others in the future. these grateful folk wake up to a world with time travel and return the favor ;)
Five Websites That Will Make You A Better, Smarter Geek
Let’s face it, internet chums. For all the wealth of incredible, mind-expanding content there is online, we spend a lot of our time looking at junk. Celebrity gossip. Mindless updates about that new camera that now has 20x optical zoom. Video clips of people embarrassing themselves. There’s no shame in this. We all do it.
WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious 'Insurance' File
Interesting stuff, following the saga of the recent WikiLeaks disclosure, they seem to have implemented some form of dead-man's switch on a future release of information.

http://cryptome.org/0002/wl-diary-mirror.htm

I would be curious to know if it's a fully automatic switch, maybe requiring a webpage to be visited, an email to be sent, etc. every x hours, or if it's human-based. Which would be more susceptible to attack, humans or code?

Reading up on AES256, it seems physically impossible to crack at this time. But with the decades spanning lead the military/intelligence community likely has on the private sector, it does make one wonder is the NSA, or other anonymous agencies, will be able to crack this file?

Other source:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/wikileaks-insurance-file/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
Breitbart has proven to me twice now that he is an unreliable source. Viewing the video in its entirety, I witnessed no such acceptance.
Given Apple's suits against HTC for using Android, I see no good reason to give them the benefit of the doubt like that.
The only information I can provide is that she's some girl on a reality show called The Jersey Shore. I'm embarrassed to even know that much.
> a smart work splitting algorithm

Not to detract from anything you said (which I agree with), but when Guy Steele gave a guest lecture at my university on Fortress a few months ago, he said that the work splitting algorithm still needed work, in particular the part that decided the right amount of granularity for the given task (i.e. when to stop splitting the task into smaller subtasks).
I don't think it'll be so bad getting used to this phenomena.

We've been through this before with cellphones. For example, people used to assume that if they could get you on the phone that you were in the same town because they would dial a local number. "Can you come over?" "No, I can't; I'm in Texas."
The Vampire Diaries - XviD - Staffel 1 eMule Download
Entrepreneur Super Hero Archetypes
What type of company wouldn't be classified as a socialist dictatorship in your analogy? Government and business are two entirely different things. (another good reason to be skeptical of politicians who run on their experience as a CEO)
Flash to HTML5 Video Fallback
> it's all implemented in terms of macros

This is not true at present. The core data structures, and the STM machinery are implemented in java, not as macros.
Also, the geek in me wants to download this file, but I don't very much want flagged in some government DB, which leads to the question:

If a file contains illegal content, is it also illegal to possess that content in encrypted form?
They have some powerful lobbyists which you can be certain will push for more licenses to keep their jobs in the country. But that's largely just serving their own interests. It's this kind of tech that really could provide cheaper health care for all.
I applaud you for this. Frankly you'll end up being more desirable if the company notices that you don't really care about them that much. As you say, it will send strong signals that you will succeed regardless and they'll probably want to acquire you now on the cheap than wait till you become too expensive. Don't listen to the other people that want you to jump hoops for something that may not even pan out.
Obama had mentioned Snooki in the past. Maybe he is addicted to the stream as the rest of us (god, I hope not). http://theweek.com/article/index/205575/did-obama-lie-about-...
There are tens of thousands of consumers and tens of thousands of producers for many commodities. Each of them have different cash flow demands and different tolerances for risk. All of them operate in a world that creates risk.

Sure, products could still be moved without all the market's actors. But they'd move at inferior prices, jackpotting some producers and bankrupting others by sheer chance with little opportunity for smart producers to mitigate (or even profit from) risks.

Even pure speculators serve a purpose in the market; if nobody wants to hedge a risk or lock in a price by dealing with them, they can't succeed; if people do want to do that, the speculator is providing a service to them.

This, by the way, isn't any great insight on my part; it's the first chapter in any book that explains futures and options.
Yes and no.

It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing in a patter and changing while sharing information.

It isn't surprising that we don't understand this, but you'll be amazed at the psuedo-science out there did you know that there was something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (see: http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-diso...)? I cannot name one scientific, unbiased experiment for the root causes behind expression and functioning in gender variant, or intersexed children.

There is some amazing work being done at the national institute of mental health in the underlying neurological basis of mental health disorders like depression and PTSD, but it isn't enough. (see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...)

The disappointing thing is not the lack of knowledge but the psuedo-science out there and the self proclaimed experts willing to ruin lives without a flinch. We've come a far way, but we have even farther to go.
Exchanges like HFT because they make the markets work: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65T5IF20100630 From that article: Shortly after the flash crash, U.S. exchange executives told the SEC these firms help keep markets functioning.

Playing games with prices is not providing liquidity.

If you look at http://batstrading.com/ and click through to the fee schedule, you see that Bats pays liquidity providers $0.0024 rebate per share traded.
The $0.02 spread you pay is the cost of getting filled right now.

The cost of it getting filled right now against the maximum spread they can find, even if that means executing a dozen obscure orders that cancel each other out in such a way that the spread can be reaped.

If HFT's are actually creating value (or preventing value from being lost), they are immediately cashing all of it. I'm not sure that counts as something good. Inevitable perhaps.
"Technical" as in meaty discussion of economic effects, not "technical" as in source code included.
Anybody have free access to this?
Sysadmin Choose Your Own Adventure
The "runit" binary itself is supposed to replace init. If you want to use runit as a user-space process manager you have to use runsvdir and friends.
I've been through it with YouTube, drop me an email if you have specific questions.

I'd love to be able to share our story with everyone, but we are bound by confidentiality agreements. I couldn't even tell my friends what was going on until the day we closed.
David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Aug 2004
Gruber is wrong about OpenAppMkt the fight for open is about distribution
I hang out on 3 networks. I am on Freenode for a few different projects I support and associated chat channels that I've been at for years. I am on StarLink, a small network, for the two channels associated with Alpha & Omega Ministries. I am on EFNet for one specific channel of a website.

I also use a local bitlebee server for instant messaging.

All in irssi with screen on a local server in my house.
7 Lessons App Developers Should Learn from Flipboard
This Flipboard thing is a true phenomenon. If you have an iPad or are interested in the wild success of this new computing platform, you have most likely heard of Flipboard.
Sort of right. The problem is most startups don't go after existing markets, as there's already existing companies there. So startups try to hit an emerging niche in an existing market or even a brand new market. And it's much harder to discover a market do that then copy an existing product and market meaning during the initial life span of a company, much of it they spend floundering about trying to find "product/market" fit. So what IMVU did is very typical, they thought they understood their market, built a product to meet that market, and only then realized that their product didn't fit their market. When a company reaches this realization they can then "pivot" meaning they can either take their existing product and try to find a new market or take what they've learned about their market and build a new product.
Hardware wise, I suppose I can't fault the build quality. But the form factor and controls - a tiny screen and a NSEW joystick were very limiting. The keyboard was tiny but worked pretty well. But it was definitely the software that ruined it for me. Opera mobile wasn't terrible but it was really hobbled by the navigation hardware.
Also GCC's days as the dominant C compiler may be numbered - clang is catching up, and they are even trying to get it to compile the Linux kernel http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4068
Tropical Weddings - Make A Lifetime Of  Memories 
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This article blithely draws you in with an unassuming, if witty, introduction. Before long, though, it begins to investigate a profound yet practical philosophical problem.
Ask HN: Best Practice Authentication for Mobile HTTP Backend
I’m writing a mobile app that uses a private web API back end to provide services to user devices. Users have individual profiles stored on a central server that they should be able to modify but other users shouldn’t. So I need some form of authentication to prevent users from modifying the wrong data or accessing data that they don't have permission to access.

Trading passwords or API keys plaintext across the network makes me a little nervous. My research into alternatives has me confused and unenlightened. So for the benefit of myself and others struggling with this problem, what does Hacker News recommend for authentication in HTTP backends of mobile services?

Thanks!
We're very interested in deploying them as field support robots. Especially for physical equipment. We'd be happy to have you in our beta test program. info@anybots.com if you're interested.
At some point you must accept that this argument is no longer applies for some generation of hackers and those that follow it.

Of course, but it looks to me like most of those working in the industry are still a fair bit older than I am (and it's been a few years since I was an incoming undergrad).
You should write about your experience with that, I'm pretty sure that lots of people here would be interested to hear that and how it worked out for you.
At the company where I work (a web startup with 100 and some odd employees, half of which are the engineers) EVERYONE uses IRC. The engineers, yes, all the teams have their own channels, general channels, etc.

But so do the support staff, the business folks, marketing, etc. Its amazing.
Does it, really?
Most likely they are using JS to secure the position, and yes you are right Mobile Safari doesn't support position:fixed;
I do this. But I have a really hard time segmenting conversations. So I end up with large logs and no way to read them.

I wish there was a way to say, "show me everything from the current conversation alone". Maybe by tracking @replies or something.
Why not link to the original article?

http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=2226

I thought blog-spamming was not kosher on HN. Am I missing anything obvious?
Awesome. I'll shoot you an email when I'm back in town.
Isn't "pivoting" a huge drain on a startup though? You throw away a few months of code and have to create another product. It just cuts into your runway, so much better to get the right product as early as possible, through early customer development.
It's about control of distribution. Apple clearly is cool with HTML5, that isn't new. Everyone is also right that Apple clearly dominates distribution, but it's not an absolute lock. The only way you can ever wrestle control away from Apple is if someone creates an alternative, which is what OpenAppMkt has started. Just because it's not huge now, or it's not dominate now, doesn't mean that it can't become a player in the future.