skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, this is a huge problem. I was on a business trip once and eating dinner at the bar of TGIFridays. I normally wouldn't eat at a chain restaurant like that, but I was in Virginia and there was nothing nearby.

In any case, these college kids were sitting at the bar next to me, and we started talking. They seemed to be friends with the bartender and one of the told me "give the bartender a $20 and you'll drink all night for free." This was a Friday and I was stuck in VA for the weekend, with my hotel across the street so I was like, OK. Anyway, I slipped the bartender a $20, and he proceeded to make all kinds of drinks for us. He was using the top shelf liquor, not the well drink stuff, and he was making all kinds of custom martinis, shots, etc. We literally finished well over $200 worth of drinks in the space of a few hours. When the check arrived, it only had my meal on there, and all the drinks were missing.

Essentially, the bartenders gave us about $200 worth of drinks and we only paid for our meals, plus $20 each in tips (there were 4 of us).

If I owned that TGIFridays somewhere in VA, I'd be seriously worried about how much money my bartenders were stealing from me. It is literally stealing when a bartender can make an extra $100-200 a night just by slipping free drinks to his friends. I guess the markup is so much on alcohol that most people wouldn't notice.
Funding & Next Steps
The amount of opportunity here is mind blowing. Someone needs to do something even more wild with XBMC than Boxee. If I had Fk you money or funding, you have no idea what I would build.
Exploring a healthy cloud computing job market
Payment Processor Pays Discover $5M in Settlement Over Data Breach
Well... it's a spectrum from this to Jim Crow. Obviously it's nothing like it, but in the States we tend to say all forms of discrimination are socially unacceptable in order to avoid any slippery slope issues.
They @Anywhere authentication system is not published and it's use is generally hidden by their JavaScript library. The post pulls out how everything works if you want to use it directly in your own JavaScript.
It is useful to denote when ordered outcomes occur as a result of action but not of intention. Russ Roberts covers it well:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....
Many companies would find similar behavior among their employees to be unethical and cause for termination.

For instance, large retailers have strict gift rules in place so that suppliers cannot "bribe" the retail buyers to get their stuff on shelves.
Funny how I read this in the morning on reddit and it travelled to Gizmodo, then to the Consumerist to finally get to HN.

I found the top comment on reddit[1] very interesting, although it's actually a wikipedia citation [2]:

The copepods can be added to water-storage containers where the mosquitoes breed. Copepods, primarily of the genera Mesocyclops and Macrocyclops (such as Macrocyclops albidus), can survive for periods of months in the containers, if the containers are not completely drained by their users. They will attack, kill, and eat the younger 1st and 2nd instar larvae of the mosquitoes. This biological control method is complemented by community trash removal and recycling to eliminate other possible mosquito-breeding sites.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d7pso/look_what_i_f...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copepods#Water_supplies
San Francisco Values
Reminds me of this, from last month:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66Q4BJ20100727

"... many in the psychiatric community are worried that the further the guidelines are expanded, the more likely it will become that nobody will be classed as normal any more."
I'm not sure Amazon's userbase really is comparable (I'm not even sure how to measure, since Facebook users vists Facebook every day, whereas Amazon users don't).

I think the difference is in potential. Facebook has more potential than any other company to make huge amounts of cash. What it's making now is (probably) just the beginning.
It doesn't seem to contain recent information: I checked the ISBNs from the latest books of a few publishing houses and none of them seems to be recognized :(.
If I sold bottled water in NYC I know what my advertising campaign would be about:

Feel like drinking an arthropod today?
No? Then buy our Bottled Water(TM)"
If there's a 'display as single page' rather than a print option, I'll recieve an add impression for most sites posted here, and might like the nav tools, but if it's 'print version' or page through a half dozen pages, I'll take print every time.
People will find a market unethical if it's consistently biased in a way that seems unnecessary and "unfair." In this context, since bribery isn't a common part of American culture, it seems unfair to give an advantage to people who are skilled at it.

The situation you described is very opaque, compared to the television market. How well is "well," and how much better might the service be? The answers vary wildly depending on your manner and the establishment in question, and you're almost never going to know them before you pay.
Ask HN: Is your site fast? (Stella beta launch)
Hi HN,

I just relaunched a new version of a product I've been working on. I posted before and got some good feedback, so I thought I'd submit an update.

It's a monitoring service called Stella that's like Pingdom for makers. There will be paid plans but right now the service is free:

http://www.blamestella.com/

And here's the previous post for posterity:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1381521
I had a similar experience. I went to an open bar birthday party, where with a particular wristband you could get unlimited drinks. I ordered something simple, and tipped a dollar, came back once, and did the same thing. The next time I came over, the same bartender made a beeline for me and started pouring two drinks before I got all the way up to the bar. Another dollar. Now I had two drinks and only two hands, so I gave the second to a friend, and found myself with an order for four drinks from some friends who noticed my speed of service. Somehow she heard this, and had two of them mixed by the time I got back to her.
Really I should have known.
I feel like ive seen job postings for valve like this several times in the last few years. so either, its actually happening or they just like that they get huge numbers of smart interested people looking at thier job postings. my money's on the latter.
Yes, it's economically rational for the barista/bartender, but it's not necessarily bad business for the bar/coffeeshop either. If the bartender is smart about when and how often she hands out these freebies, she can convert one-time or occasional customers into loyal, regular customers, which is much better for the bar in the long run.

It reminds me of the Apple store - 9 times out of 10, if you go in there with something broken that's out of warranty, you have to pay the full price to repair it. However, Apple geniuses are given a little bit of leeway, and often offer "unnecessary" free out-of-warrany replacements that, while costly to Apple in the short-term, generally pay handsome returns in the long run by encouraging loyalty.
Sometimes forms have to be long, because you need lots of information.

A better approach would be to display some section tabs at the top of the form, saying how much you have filled already, or red/green (or icon) if any information is still needed.

For example, when filling a car insurance form, a square saying "Profile (12/18)" and to the right of it another one saying "Car (07/20)", or whatever the breakdown needs to be.
In the biological and biomedical sciences, it is literally impossible.
'Pingdom for makers'?
A good UI solution would be to colour rows alternately so that the association is clear.
I would think so, yes. But restaurants, bars, massage parlors, etc. are service-oriented places where tipping is already the norm. The precedent for more-money-means-better-service has already been set.
The neglect I've seen from tenured faculty is usually due to having too many students and too many projects. For tenure track faculty, neglect seems to usually be due to too much time spent worrying about writing grants, teaching, and politicking (sitting on committees, etc).

My main point is that I don't think you can really say one is safer than the other. I certainly think early tenure track faculty have greatly divided attention and are under incredible amounts of pressure, which is not a good prescription for being a good advisor, but I think that a lot of what tenured faculty people do also can make them poor advisors.

As a student you will always be working with incomplete information, in particular, how you will handle a given advisor, even if everyone else says they are great (or horrible). Of course you have to simply play the hand that is dealt and make changes to your situation when appropriate.

On a side note, I was able to get one very senior person on my committee, who is very enthusiastic about my project. Even though he is not my direct advisor, he has been able to strongly advocate for me when necessary.
If there's a "single page" option, I prefer that to "printable". I don't mind ads, but I hate to click through three pages just to read an article.
Why should universities be held liable for the ignorance (or perhaps naivety?) of guidance counselors and parents. College degree != guaranteed job, nor should it.
Yes, Winamp 2.95 still is outstanding. Simple, functional, tiny footprint, etc.

Get it here: http://www.oldversion.com/Winamp.html
and apply AlpineAmp skin: http://customize.org/winamp2/skins/4571

The lesson- Sometimes newer and more "features" != better.
Employees take home tips, too.
Fair point. Paging through is a pain and annoying to the reader.
The post isn't a tribute to the freedom to fail. It's about having an idea, not complicating it, and executing the basics that matter in 24 hours. There's so much you can get done in 24 hours if you don't make it take longer than that.
This article comes off as hand-wavy. The crux of the argument, that "[t]op aligned labels have proven to be faster and easier to fill out than left or right aligned labels", is unsupported. The author supplies no links to research or other corroborating sources.

The graphic is a little misleading, too. Under "Top aligned labels", it says: "less vertical space". I initially understood that to mean that the form occupies less vertical space. It really means that the form leaves less vertical space below it.

I'm confused why they didn't consider other types of labels, especially for text boxes. For instance, the iPhone puts the labels inline with the form element. And placeholder text frequently replaces labels, anyway. How does that affect usage?

Interestingly, they don't follow their own advice. The comment form after the article uses right-aligned labels.
Presenting the MiFi of Your Dreams
@paulg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1640530
The flowchart seems to describe the current Windows 7 shutdown sequence. As much as I hate to say it: if this is so obvious, why hasn't any other operating system implemented it?
"Makers" is a reference to this essay by pg:
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
It doesn't look horrible. It looks about 40 to 50 times bigger than the new Apple TV though...
The funniest part is that the "finished importing" chime hasn't changed since SoundJam 1.0.
I first encountered this story when Steven Pinker retold it at an Authors@Google talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU

About 40 minutes in, Pinker talks about the psychology, linguistics, and game theory of bribery and talks for a few minutes about the article.
I activated Safari Reader as soon as I saw those walls of 12px text, so I had no idea what you were talking about until I went back and let the page finish loading.

"Foul" is not a strong enough word for that. Maybe "vile" is better?
Save Yourself $1000 And Have My Contract
One of the mysteries with today's Apple TV announcement is why they didn't incorporate Apps Store (which is very obvious given that ATV2 nows runs on the A4 processor and IOS4). My guess is that Apple is saving its dry powder (to compete with Google TV). I am convinced that when Apps Store become available, Boxee would be a fantastic app (and as such, would benefit from Apple as opposed to competing with Apple). On the other hand, Boxee Box is a piece of hardware and would be a direct competitor and a strategic mistake (which explains why D-Link is dragging its feet).
Of course it'd be a hard fight. But that it'd be a fight at all makes them 1000x more dangerous than anything else in the last few years.
Poll: Do you have Gmail Priority Inbox already?
You might want to peruse the submissions over at ideaaday.org. I submitted several ideas to this site years ago and am pleased to see a Japanese company recently picked one of them and manufactured it. All the ideas at that site are provided with no strings attached what-so-ever. But there's a warning: some ideas are just plain whacky.
Ah, I see, thanks, I thought I was missing something! It's a nice bit of reverse engineering/hackery.

I read it as "exploiting @anywhere", but you're using 'hacking' in the proper sense.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about it since, for my usage, setting up keys is pretty much always a one-off event (and pretty rare on top of that). What are the consequences of dropping your key into authorized_keys files multiple times? Tried it out on a Debian box, and didn't see any issues other than the obvious clutter.
Make Free Phone Calls from Gmail - Video Tutorial
I didn't call the NYT anything. I called the article out for what it is.
Ask HN:  Do super smart people avoid entrepreneurship?
Perhaps it's not a rational thing for them to do given the risks. They would probably have much better opportunities as employees.
Um, I am a girl who enjoys being an idiot. Try it sometime. :)
Yeah, I agree. What I was trying to articulate is that this is a good example of a principal/agent problem, as the Principal (owner) has interests that differ from those of his Agent. Solutions to this generally either decrease information asymmetry or involve a better incentive system for the Agent. However, as you point out, it's possible that the Agent will act in his interest and still benefit the Principal.

Wow, I just looked and this exact example is actually featured on the Wikipedia page for Principle-agent problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem#Employm...
One of the mysteries with today's Apple TV announcement is why they didn't incorporate Apps Store

There wouldn't be any apps.

When they do this, they will do it like they did with part of the iPad... secret seeding to top devs they want to have in the store at launch. Right now iOS devs are all still recovering from having to crank out their iPad apps in a short amount of time. Personally I am thankful they have given us a break!
Who votes for Scala developers free scala from java vm and .net with compiler for own vm or runtime?
There's a joke there about tongues in cheeks but I'm too refined to make it.
That is a no brainier. The dot com bust bitterer a whole generation and out of the pool that remains probably 10% are truly talented enough to build something more robust than a desktop app.

So there is a huge fight for that 10% and their always will be until the system of rewards changes.

$85k on average is not worth it to anyone who is talented. If I had to do it again now I would not do it (i would go into bio-eng or something).

Fortunately I passed the cusp of working a "job" and survived the .com bust and sold a start-up, now I freelance but the idea of a dev "job" with all it's lack of freedom is a reprehensible though indeed.
And without any visible degradation in the quality of the stories or the comments, nor any scaling issues with downtime. Good job for the reddit folks :-)
I think a very common tip increasing strategy used by people serving food is to give discounts. If I'm selling you something for $10 and you'd normally tip $1 and I give it to you for $8, you are much more inclined to tip me $2-3, because you'd still pay the same or less and received "special" service.

This of course may be unethical for the employee, depending on store policy. My best friend falls for it every time, tipping back up to "full" price. I see it as a type of scam against the employer, though.
From what i see in your site, right now it's only gmail, right?
Seems that you have a good product. Best of luck.
The parent comment wrote explicitly: "and any VM (even clean-room like Dalvik) running any language is going to run afoul of them since they're absurdly broad."
I guess this isn't quite like the experiences I've had, where you have a reputation of tipping well, and all of the sudden items are missing from your bill. That's just an illegal transfer of wealth from the owner to the employee.
No - it would be a gamble. Immoral, and possibly a fireable offence, would be if your employee actually gave them a better deal in exchange for the kickback - in which case you, as their employer, can deal with them as you see fit.
A big one is affiliate links, which are particularly well-suited to niche sites like this. You can regularly review products and put affiliate links so that readers can buy them online. Look into Commission Junction, Linkshare, Google Affiliate Network, Amazon Associates, etc. You can make a decent amount per sale (usually around 1-15%). If 10 people buy a $400 Kayak and you get 5%, that's $200 in your pocket.

You can also put together an instructional ebook or video about kayaking and sell it on the site.
Airbnb hiring back-end engineers
Teradata is meant for data warehousing and analysis with lots of reads and few writes, not for OLTP that has a lot of writes.

Any DML that modifies a row in Teradata either locks the whole table if it doesn't know immediately where the row is, or locks the row hash if it does (if you give it the primary index value). Locking the whole table involves sending a command to all of the nodes and waiting for a response. That's why most writes are typically done as large batch loads at infrequent times.
And these new Google hires will probably be on a 4 year vesting plan with a 1 year vesting cliff.
Oh, I agree, anyone with any intelligence shouldn't listen to them.

I'm not sure how old you are, but it's borderline brainwashing. My mother literally used to tell me "Work hard in school, so you can go to college, and get a good job." It's not hard to see why people think that way.
And a self hosting clojure.
Airbnb hiring front-end engineers
Robot May Furnish Lesson in Human Trust
Airbnb hiring UI designer
You don't know whether it is or isn't his decision to make - that would be between him and his employers.

He may very well have the discretion to bend the rules a bit for the right kind of people to keep the place popular - wealthy people who like to buy their way to the front of the line are also people who are likely to spend more extravagantly on the wine.
This is 100% anecdotal, but based on everything I've really ever seen: absolutely not.
its taskforceapp.com by the way. Let me know what you think.
I took a deviance class in College. The most important thing that I took away from the class is that deviance is normal. Everybody is deviant somehow. Granted, deviance is a sociology concept rather than a psychiatric one, but I doubt that psychiatry is much different.

After all, everyone gets physically ill. Why is it such a stretch to say that everyone gets mentally ill from time to time?
So what's he hiding? He wants users to share more about them but when it comes to him, that's another story...
Right...
Ask HN: Why is there still no facebook app for iPad?
Months have gone by and nothing. I can only think that there's bad blood between fb and apple.
Let the engineers build the vm modular and plug everything that deserves it.

But i dont't know if this could be really fast accomplished, because the java vm has such a maturity.

Goodies could be modern concepts deeply incorporated and specific configurations for current and future hardware usage.
That's a good point. I think in part that is because of the strength and amount of lobbying going on in the US and the many cross ties between business and government.

I'm not aware of any other country where lobbyists have that much influence.

Shocking, really the amount of money that goes in to that:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/health-care-reform/2009/07/...
A common definition of intelligence, or at least part of the definition of intelligence, is "the general mental ability to learn and apply knowledge to manipulate your environment." I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this type of tipping "hack" applies.
I don't have it offhand, but Luke Wroblewski gave a great presentation about this at An Event Apart San Francisco last year. He had done a lot of studies on the matter and came to the same conclusion.
googleblasting.com is free

in case anybody is interested...
Thanks, based on feedback from our current users they'd be willing to pay in Apps and outlook.
I went .emacs bankrupt this summer.

gist.el, powershell-mode, yaml-mode, org-mode are a few I've taken out for brevity.

Otherwise, a few of these are emacs23 specific:

;; syntax highlighting
(global-font-lock-mode 1)

;; add .emacs.d to load path
(setq load-path (cons "~/.emacs.d" load-path))

;; nethack
(add-hook 'nethack-mode-hook (lambda () (linum-mode 'nil)))
(setq load-path (cons "~/.emacs.d/nethack" load-path))
(autoload 'nethack "nethack" "Play Nethack." t)
(setq nethack-program "/opt/local/bin/nethack")

;; 4 spaces in objective-c
(add-hook 'objc-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq tab-width nil)
(setq c-basic-offset 4)))

;; straight to *scratch* buffer please
(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)

;; use old navigation for line movement
(setq line-move-visual nil)

;; linum mode
(require 'linum)
(global-linum-mode 1)
(add-hook 'linum-before-numbering-hook
(lambda () (setq linum-format "%d ")))
I think it's some kind of protest against Apple.
Zootool is a Visual, Social Bookmarking Tool
Clickable: http://taskforceapp.com/
that one ?

http://www.slideshare.net/lukew/web-form-design-best-practic...
Over what though? And what's the point if no-one knows you're protesting.
I'm not so sure that they are inherent. Some individuals can clearly overcome and rise above them. Just because all haven't doesn't mean it isn't possible.

But my point was that, as much as I like the idea of colonizing Mars, I don't have as much of an idealistic view of it as some might. Because I think as long as we haven't solved or eliminated those other issues first, we're just going to bring them to Mars with us. It won't all be unicorns and rainbows and shiny spaceships and robots and techno-meritocracy ruled by wise ethical anarcho-socio-libertarians. As it's going now, we're going to start polluting Mars, erecting churches there, fight wars, etc. Ideally I'd like to see us overcome these things and leave them behind before spreading it off-planet any further. Or at least say, "This is acceptable here on Earth. But not on Mars."

Idealism, probably not practical, granted, but that was my point.
But its actually not that bad.

This applies to Apache Harmony, too. Spot the difference here?
Apache Harmony is open source, not big business. Android actually incorporates at least parts of Apache Harmony.

If Oracle sues the Apache Foundation, you know what's going on.
http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/raw/master/dot-emacs.txt

plus

http://lisp.pastebin.com/raw.php?i=MRbccMG4
Need resources to maintain privacy on web
There is Tor and there is anonymouse.org - what else can I use to not be tracked online? Any suggestions for software, services or strategies? Or site specific solutions?
There is something similar with hotels, esp. in a place like Vegas: show $20/$50/$100 at check-in, and get an upgraded room. Google "twenty dollar trick".

Not that I've had the nerve to try it.
for anyone who uses erc on emacs 23 and gets the weird "selecting deleted buffer" error, adding

(setq Buffer-menu-use-frame-buffer-list nil)

makes it work.