skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, and you're also wrong.

I did have the impression that under the right circumstances, in the right climate, the book was a very useful reference. I never said that the book was safe. You may have have the impression, or experience to argue for, the dangers of this book because of certain events that may have occurred, or possibly could have occurred, after you read it at about the same age I read it.

If I may, let me abstract both of our arguments:

I say that the book is a good tool, under certain preconditions, that may help one in time of emergency. I'm talking about the book as a reference, as a tool, and a guide. And by its nature, anyone with some common sense knows that it is not a complete, concise work. There are thousands of pages omitted regarding safety. But it can point one in the right direction when it is the only thing available.

You say that the book is dangerous because 13 year old kids from Tulsa can buy materials off the shelf of retail stores and build bombs, with the possibility of killing or severely injuring themselves. You are arguing that the product of the actions derived from use of the book in an irresponsible manner are unsafe, and thus no one should have access to the material described within the book. If this is not what you are arguing about, please clarify.

The book isn't inherently dangerous. It also is not inherently safe, having it on my shelf does not make my home or family more prepared for survival than yours, if you didn't have this book on your shelf. Nor does it make my house more dangerous to be in. This book is a tool, just like a machette or toaster oven. Just because a 13 year old puts shredded newspaper in a toaster and burns his family's house down doesn't make toasters dangerous. Corollary, a 13 year old reading this book doesn't become a violent madman, until that person acts on the ideas and methods of building bombs to take to school. It is the action, like building a bomb, that is the danger, even for people trained and experienced in the field.

With every liberty man has been given a burden also comes with. We shouldn't prevent this book from being published because the fear of it being used irresponsibly is too great. We should be teaching respect and safety to the ideas presented within. No one answer will win this argument.
What's interesting is how little thought seems to go into differentiating web sites through colour palette.

It's a common consideration in other industries to establish a clear colour choice as a method of differentiation. Take Coke red, for example, versus Pepsi blue. Or green John Deere tractors or yellow Dewalt power tools. Any new entrant would be wise to pick a specific colour and stick to it.

Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area. Likewise, for a blogging host, something in the greens or red/purples would be good.

It looks like the location and social news sites are doing a better job of differentiating themselves.

Also take a look at Google and Microsoft, clearly "rainbow" companies. Apple used to be a rainbow company but has done an excellent job of shifting their palette over to the monochromatics. Not only is it as far away from rainbow as you can get, but the monochromatics are associated with "expensive","premium" and "well designed".

I think rainbow palettes actually kind of backfire when it comes to big companies. It's like they try too hard to say "hey look at us, we're so fun!" while also looking unfocused. However, overemphasis on one colour can backfire too.. just look at Yahoo and all their purple crap. They just seem completely dorky.
I couldn't find a way to move the table of contents to the left side. Is that possible?
When i do add my location birmingham, al...... the 2nd restaurant is Krystals (a crappy fast food place). When I call google voice and ask for restaurants in birmingham, the first one is bottega, one of the best restaurants in town...
If online support doesn't fit your app/game, add better offline support. This ends up meaning difficult to copy stuff, like included cloth maps or quality manuals. You could get crafty and convince the user to pay you extra money for, e.g., t-shirts, with a discount if they bought your game.
Why are there so few male nurses?

Why are there so few male daycare providers?

Why are there so few male teachers?

Why are the so few female pest control techs?

Why do so few women work on a fishing boat?

Why do so few women work on an oil rig?

Why do so few men work at a bank branch?

Why are there so few male domestic violence shelters?

Boys and Girls are different. They have different goals, risks and pressures. If a certain career path lines up with gender based goals/pressures then people self select into that path.

Bias does exist, but overall the pendulum has swung in favor of women. I'd argue that a woman has a much easier time becoming a programmer, than a man becoming a daycare provider.
> The theory behind free market capitalism is that enough companies doing the same will average out to the best results.

You left out the part about how this only works if (a) the market is actually “free” and “competitive” (what this means is a complicated topic beyond the scope of this text box), and (b) the interests of the company and the interests of the broader society are aligned. (Which is why we have all sorts of specialized regulation of companies, various kinds of guaranteed rights attached to consumers and contract-signers and so on, a court system, and ultimately elections). In the specific case of Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, they clearly were not. The idea that Microsoft’s corporate strategy embodied some kind of Adam Smith small-firms-in-a-competitive-market ideal is hogwash. Notice that Microsoft’s actions were found to be illegal in several court battles.

It is definitely not a company’s fiduciary duty to break the law.
Actually, even in the banking industry, most CEOs have a salary between $0.6-1 million/year.
The real money is in the bonus.
Just to let you know, I experienced the same thing with editing as GP described using Firefox 4.0b5 on OS X 10.6.
They should have linked to the original source :-)
I completely agree.

Paris Hilton was also given a lot of freebies early in life...looked how that one turned out.

Early advantages don't always produce exceptional results, often times it can lead to the exact opposite.
Very very slick.
I'd love to see a boss try that in reverse.

"Hi, employee. Just wanted to let you know we've started interviewing for your position because we think we can find someone just as good to do it for less. Unless, of course, you'd like to take a pay cut..."

edit: A boss, but not my boss.
It's not that different from the laws of gases, really. Increase pressure, temperature increases (can't tell what individual molecules do). Increase demand, price increases. (Of course, this only works predictably for very, very atomized markets.)
I guess HN is not the best place for targeting inexperienced programmers.
This also happened during a period of doggedly overblown optimism about the opposition in Iran and its chances against the government. We were all rooting for them, of course, and the optimistic coverage may have helped them a little bit, and perhaps it was difficult to get real information, but it clearly wasn't careful or apolitical journalism. That was probably as much of a factor as the "boy wizard" aspect.
There is perceived responsibility that comes with those gifts.
He could have just blown the money and everyone would have moved on.

Plus your next statement is just baloney. The greater good? You mean the good that would have affected you? The man can do with his money as he sees fit, who are you to tell him what to do or judge him when he does it.
Ask HN: Do you use programming tricks in real life too?
I suddenly realized that I'm practicing 'programming tricks' in real life all the time.

Specifically, the divide and conquer strategy for problem solving and building larger things out of smaller sub assemblies, but the more I think about the more I see that plenty of the stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis has it's roots in programming (or at least that's where I picked it up).

For instance, assume nothing, trust but verify, be strict in what you send but forgiving in what you receive and so on.

Those all have real-life equivalents for me.

Professional deformation or useful trait? Do you have it too ? In what way ?
Maybe, but without electricity, how are you going to transport, prepare and store food?
Bill Gates is the ultimate example of what's explained in the book 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell. Success is usually a combination of hard work & luck.
Actually I think that's pretty well addressed in the article - WebKit supports a bit too much. Contrary to Apple Microsoft targets the corporate market and weird internal applications. If they start implementing unstable features or using an engine that supports them they will just paint themselves into a corner once again.
It only has that max if you happen to have a sata 3 compatible host, otherwise you'll be downgraded back to sata 2 and your speed will be comparable to everyone else.
I am a young(ish) hacker, and I'm proud not to engage in religious nonsense like this at all. Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares? Get on with the coding already.
HP Unveils New Ultrathin Monitor
Maybe not catastrophic, but personally I can't stay where I live (in the city) with more than about 48hours without power, as I can't safely store food and I can't really get new food (unless the loss of power is only at my place).

Anything less than that, you use batteries.
Perhaps a good measure of whether or not the general populous can perform mental math based on the value of the coins is to check and see whether or not a single dollar is divisible by the value of the coins (as you hinted with the 15 cent coin). It allows for many mental paths to arrive at the correct answer for what amount of coins are needed to make a certain sum. Take the nickel for example, to make 50 cents you might think to yourself, "I just need to divide 50 by 5, which is obviously 10." Alternately one might think, "I know there are 20 nickels in a dollar, if I halve this I'll have half a dollar, which is 50 cents. That means I need 10 nickels."

I'd say that the pool of coin values we can choose from then are 50, 25, 20, 10, 5, 2, 1. The two cent piece is already in use in Europe, and many economists have suggested adding it to the coinage in the united states (usually in replacement for the penny altogether). It'd be interesting to see if the 20 cent coin would be a viable addition though.
Yes, but its not turnkey. It takes a certain level of skill to put up a landing page and track clicks on your "Buy now" button. I think he wants all of these things to be super simple.
It looks better than previous versions, but it's just a shitty knock-off of Chrome. It's hard to argue that Chrome defined the minimalist look for browsers.
Flash Player "Square":  GPU, and 64 bit for everyone
Jessa Gamble: Our natural sleep cycle (video)
"Code doesn't exist if it is not checked in Version Control System."

What if it's "checked in" to just another part of the same harddrive (e.g., git)?
I'm currently binary searching to find the changelist that broke my project.
Do you know that Microsoft supplies VHD images for free that you can use to test any version of IE? YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software. They're intended to work only with Windows and Virtual PC (of course!) but apparently it's possible to get them to work with other VM software on other OSs.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=...
Doesn't explain the popularity on that list of orange. I have no fondness for orange (my HN topcolor is a soothing 7BB6F0) and have always been a bit of a loss to figure out why it figures so much. It also tends to be the same shade of orange - whereas at least with blue you get a bigger range.
Being new to the field, you've proved to be astute. Anyone who can do those things earnestly will do just fine.

Historical note: there was a time when you could retain everything in the field, and it was around the time I was taking home more than ten trade rags a week that I decided that a new tactic was required: where to find information. That was well before the Internet, of course. And now we have it, it is a fantastic resource for us. Geez! Complete lumps of working code. It's too easy :)
I think in this market the only way to survive is to go the Ning route and make something just that much better, which yours might be and make it all premium, with a free 30 day trial.
The capital gains/dividend tax breaks basically benefit the rich. Cap gains/dividend taxes should be on a marginal basis just like ordinary income.
It also requires filesystem support. ext4 was the first support it.

I believe btrfs, nilfs2, and xfs support it now as well.
I agree with his larger point that being purely scientific is impractical in situations when there are too many unknowns and data is hard to collect. So, sometimes one needs to go with their gut feeling or intuition.

I might be nitpicking here but intuitions are not always based on reasons. Some of our intuitions are based on reasons (eg: past experiences) and some are not (eg: preferences, prejudices.)

>> The measurements you choose (which will necessarily be
>> somewhat arbitrary) will shape what you make, and you
>> will most likely end up making the wrong thing.

Failure here is no more likely than failure after making a decision by intuition because we are still juggling with the unknowns.
I don't understand the reasoning about not wanting to put a relatively expensive SSD in a relatively cheap laptop.
What's bad about supporting software long after it is obsolete is that it encourages people who know very little to think it is perfectly legitimate to continue using it long after it is obsolete.

It's their lousy software, it IS their responsibility to transition people off of it.
I'm inexperienced in any language that I did not write at least a mid-sized program in, on every system that I haven't used yet and on every program whose code is not intimately known to me.

There is 'general' experience that applies equally across the board and that experience you either have or you don't have it, but for the rest we are all only as experienced as we are familiar with the tools we use to do our work.

Try switching from your 'favorite language' to one that is your least favorite and making some headway, versus the 'experienced' (but relative newbie) on that platform. You won't stand a chance.

Programming computers and computer science has become too large to still be able to be an 'all-rounder', you can't do all of 'embedded systems', 'web apps', 'operating system kernels', 'algorithm research' and so on. And if you can then you're either not human or exaggerating ;)
May I ask why you are stating "online" in the question title? I mean, wouldn't you be interesting in developing the next firmware for a tablet for example? Aren't there any computer company in your area who is looking for a student 10h/week for automating test scenarios or remodeling one of their database? That would not only make you meet professionals but also would enrich your CV probably better than a SEO gig would.
I don't think this is true. Search will always be important in my view. I don't see the rate of new information being created going down and this makes good search even more important.

Let's not forget that searching the web requires literacy and an idea of what you want to look for. Formulating queries is something that might require a certain maturity to do. Kids learn to search at an older age naturally in my view.

A lot of us are in a generation that started using the web pre-google during the Yahoo years (;p) . Using Yahoo was more like clicking around on a portal website that the kids under 12 (at least in this article) are using today. Once google came around most of us started using it almost as if it was natural. (well I migrated to altavista before that and I was 12 when google showed up. but that's my experience).
I've seen people use exceptions for flow control: rather than constantly checking if it's OK to keep doing something, just keeping doing it until there's a problem, handle it, then gracefully stop.

That's something I do all the time in real life.
Stealth VC funded YC startup seeking Backend/Operations Engineer (S09)
Operations Engineer

We seeking a forward-thinking experienced engineer to lead our operations.
You’ll start out supporting the existing tools that we already have and quickly move on to owning automation and integration projects. You’ll also be responsible for managing and providing active support for mission-critical MySQL production/QA/dev environments. You should have a “can-do” attitude and work well in a cross-functional environment. This position is full-time and will report to the CTO. The position is based in our main office in downtown Burlingame, CA.

Responsibilities

* Create and maintain tools that facilitate administration of servers

* Create and maintain scripts to deploy web applications to multiple environments

* Assist in tracking server issues

* Understand and debug network, hardware, and Linux OS related issues

* Predict growth and scaling issues before they occur and implement solutions

* Provides all aspects of MySQL administration: installation, configuration, backup strategy, disaster recovery, upgrades, schema deployment

* Implements and manages database replication

* Responsible for availability and usability of the database servers

* Provide requirements and solutions to expand existing monitoring tools

* Quickly diagnose server problems and employ preventive measures to maintain high availability servers

* Creating processes to ensure data integrity and identify potential data errors

* Performs all other duties as assigned

Requirements

* Bachelor's Degree in CS, MIS, or other related field preferred or equivalent experience

* Deep experience with Linux and hardware systems support for web applications

* Working knowledge of ruby or python

* Excellent verbal and written communication skills

* Excellent time and project management skills

Bonus

* Security experience

* Rails knowledge

* Postfix/Sendmail knowledge/experience

This position is full time with salary + full health benefits and stock options.

Submit your resume to "railsycjob@gmail.com" and tell us something interesting about yourself.
Seems to have turned out pretty well. She's famous for no other reason.
New Aluminum-Foam Sandwich Material Could Yield Lighter, More Efficient Cars
The Short-Sighted Campaign against Craigslist
I've seen this equation used to estimate costs for private tech companies, but never for revenues.
How much can be made in a year? Who knows. iFart on iPhone makes a lot of money without much technical difficulty. Angry Bird makes a lot of money as well but with more sophistication. You will find out that it's not just coding that makes an app successful. Market trends, ideas, design, art work, coding, and luck all come into play.

Phone apps seem to have price-anchored from $0.99 to $5.00. Users expect prices in those ranges.

Android developers are in great demand, for working for the man. I've seen heavy recruitment from companies.

Developing on the emulator can be done, but depending on the functionality of the app, more difficult if you have unusual input control or unusual UI. The trick is to mimic the screen size correctly on the emulator. It allows you to scale the screen. Make it about the same size of a real phone. Screen dimension can be tricky. There are devices out there with unusual dimensions, like 320x570. Make sure you test with different emulator screen dimensions.
I'd like to see this tested on known datapoints--that is, public companies that disclose number of employees and profit revenue.
MS likes to pretend to want to end IE6, but it is all talk (ie the "funeral" they held for IE). What is so bad about getting them to also walk the walk?
I like it.

One suggestion: on the "name your site" page tell people the rules for site names. I first tried a number and got told it had to start with a letter. Then after my second attempt I was told it had to be at least 6 letters. Third time lucky.
See, the real problem here is that the OP thinks that math and science are distinct.

I certainly am of the opinion that they are not, which makes the whole argument very weak, since reason -> logic -> mathematics -> science.

[Edit: Perhaps the downvoters have tried to teach quantum mechanics as a subject distinct from mathematics and physics and succeeded, in which case I am most interested in your arguments. Personally I have only managed it as two sides of the same coin]
It's useful though if the network you're on blocks ssh.
Ask HN: How to (best) monetize a beta?
Hi all,

Suppose that your product is going into beta, with potential for 1,000s of beta testers. But being a small company, you would like to try to get a little money now to ease development costs for the next few months (you wouldn't want to take more investment and dilute your equity just to solve a temporary cash flow problem). You don't expect your beta to last long (2-3 months), and you don't think you'll have trouble finding users for it.

What is the best way to monetize your beta?

One of the scenarios I thought of was selling discounted licenses of the release version (presales) before it comes out. This way, you get some money, the customer gets a discount and possibly a "trial" period. Also, it lets you know that your beta testers have a vested interest in your beta.

A complication or interesting point is you could make the beta private/paid only. But what if you wanted the beta to be public and still have paid users for presales? Would the discount be enough to not anger customers over the fact that some have (essentially) paid to use it and others haven't?

What do you think about this scenario? What are some other possibilities?
Agreed. Microsoft has talked about the need to end using IE 6.

It is now time to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk.
For the record, I disagree with some parts of the analysis. In this case, Craigslist was more than a common carrier: it created a special section just for adult advertisements and charged money only for those advertisements. You could post a couch for sale for free, but you had to pay Craigslist if you wanted to post in the "Adult Services" section. The decision to charge for ads for that category intertwined Craigslist into profiting directly and intentionally from those ads.
The most important characteristic of a micro instance is not the raw performance per se but how the workload is distributed. It's not suitable for a task where a a steady performance is required, micro instance designed for short but intensive burst. AWS monitors micro instances and degred performance when needed to allow other instances to run. Right now there are not that many micro instances are in use, probably they are not as strict but this will change at the future for sure. For more info check they documentation: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/DeveloperGui...
If you happen to be on Windows Vista or Windows 7, ReadyBoost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readyboost) comes close. It helps cache files, as well as providing a faster place for virtual memory to be stored.

Vista's implementation of RB had some...oddities, but it seems they fixed it in Win 7.
Yes it does. Orange is the complement to blue so orange will also look good on a blue screen.
Too much cash infused into a new or developing start-up can actually destroy the incentives needed for the start-up to be successful. Not needing to budget well and prioritize features (because we have cash to do them all) fights against the do the first things first, and do them well mentality needed to move a budding idea into an actual revenue stream.