skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Focus, Not Fury: What Entrepreneurs can learn from lifting weights
a simpler distinction would be whether the marijuana is outdoor or hydroponically grown
Dunno. I call people that use my software idiots for choosing to use my software. It's more of a self-deprecating thing than me actually thinking they are idiots.

Phrases can have many meanings, and it's tough to draw a conclusion from a handful of sentences. I often have IM conversations where I pretend to be someone else and sarcastically say things that they would say, without any indication of that in the text. People I am friendly with online know that that's not me, and they read it as sarcasm. Post it on a blog, and people are guaranteed to have the wrong idea.

Everybody loves to hate the big guys, but this IM conversation doesn't really rile me up.
The New Twitter.com
First thought was that Twitter client apps might be negatively impacted. On the other hand, this presents a good way to get people who have been stuck on the old-school web interface to learn how much richer the experience can be, predisposing them to use rich clients.
Google fired engineer for breaking internal privacy policies
On the other hand, giving meth to someone with OCD results in feedback like this.
Team Leading – First Thoughts and Observations
Meanwhile Boingboing is making public a recording of a private conversation held over IM.

Yeah, but it's okay because the Boingboing offices are not bugged and you didn't get to hear the editors say that they were going to fuck Zuckerberg in the ear.
These numbers seem off to me. Does anyone here actually run a site where Google is only 65% of your incoming search traffic?

Looking at traffic for a few of my own sites (mostly tech related, admittedly), Google is consistently in the 92-96% range.
1/4th gram will get you very high. Most people buy in 1/4th or 1/8th oz amounts. In comparison to alcohol, smoking marijuana is a very inexpensive way to have fun.
> It's not like he could have known that in a few years it would have become one of the world's biggest web sites.

That's the exact reason a lot of people see this as such an insight into his true nature. The true mark of character is not to behave morally when you know you are being watched. Any intelligent liar or psychopath can pull that off. The true mark is what you do when you don't think the information will spread.

Of course if he did still harbor the same underlying attitude now, one wouldn't expect some youthful prank if and when he decided to 'fuck them'. You have to imagine there will be many times when Facebook will have to decide between the honoring the trust of their users versus some other gain. When these decision are made that underlying attitude may still be calling the shots.
Thanks for all you've done, working with Rails has been (if possible) even easier and more fun because of you. Can't wait to see what new possibilities open up to someone with nothing more than an idea and a laptop.
Don't use a search engine to look for it either, or visit websites related to it from a browser or location that could be tracked back to you.

And don't leave voicemails about it to someone with google voice, or talk about it to someone using google to call you. Don't talk about it internationally on skype, and don't visit untoward locations with your smartphone in your pocket. Don't drive there using gps, either.
Whenever people start accusing other people of crimes, including citing the section of the US Code that they broke, I flip the bozo bit.

You are too personally invested in this situation to act rationally.
New rule: If you didn't work at Facebook or with Zuck when there was a "the" in the URL, you don't really know much about the origins of the company, and you know even less about the guy.
The rise and fall of perfect security
Hm, not sure if you were replying to me or not, but no, it does not matter for the end users. But I bet that Zuck wished he had been a bit more careful with those messages.
New Twitter - Straight from the horse's mouth (Press Site)
Tell HN: First Chicago Journo/Dev drink-up tomorrow night
Hey, Chicago HNers,

There's a pretty sweet event happening tomorrow night in Uptown. The Tribune's head hacker @brianboyer will be there talking about building sweet news apps.

http://meetupchicago.hackshackers.com/calendar/14512445/?a=socialmedia&eventId=14512445&action=detail

I went to one of these in NYC to pitch my new startup a few months back. There were folks from AOL, the Huffington Post, the NYTimes, and lots of other places. This event should have all the local heavy hitters represented.

I'll be there. If you spot me, we can exchange an HN salute (suggestions?)

----------------

Official spiel:

"Hacks/Hackers is booting up its Chicago Chapter on Wednesday, Sept 15 from 6-8 p.m. at the Holiday Club (4000 N Sheridan Road). Meet up, geek out, and enjoy complimentary food and beverages with programmers, journalists and others in Chicago’s media and tech communities who want to explore and strengthen the connections between technology and journalism.

Hacks/Hackers is a community of people who seek to inspire each other, share information (and code) and collaborate to invent the future of media and journalism.

In addition to refreshments and conversation, Chicago Tribune News Applications Editor Brian Boyer will talk about the Apps team’s first year, and The Media Consortium’s Tracy Van Slyke will give a special sneak preview of it’s upcoming Independent Media Mobile Hack-A-Thon.

Hacks/Hackers has organized groups and events in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. The Chicago Hacks/Hackers kick off event is organized by Rich Gordon, Director of Digital Innovation at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and co-founder of Hacks/Hackers; Tracy Van Slyke and Erin Polgreen of The Media Consortium, a network of the country’s leading progressive, national media outlets; and Tracy Samantha Schmidt of ChicagoNow, a network of local blogs sponsored by the Chicago Tribune.

Special thanks to the McCormick Foundation for supporting this event.
Is it that big of a deal considering Bing powers Yahoo search anyway...? The two companies have a partnership.
Your figures are quite off.

The mood of this thread suggests I will be modded down but:
1) How much is the real tax on the top 5%?
2) How much of the national income do the top 5% of earners make?
3) How much of the income do they make because of the unique situation they find themselves in the USA?

A wiki-search revealed the following:
In 2007, the top 5% of income earners paid over half of the federal income tax revenue.[36] However, as of 2004, the top 5% hold 59.2% of wealth. The top 1% of income earners paid 25% of the total income tax revenue.[37] Again however, the top 1% hold 23.5% of wealth. Forty seven percent of Americans pay no federal income tax.

(The 47% thing includes children / housewives / househusbands / etc.., hence it holds no interest to me as a figure. That said, you're welcome to try to change my mind).

The rich are paying a fair share, especially considering how difficult it is to accomplish the same task outside the US.
http://spinning-yarns.org/michael/
On a table listed in 1/10th of a percent I find that unlikely.
The perception could be because the traditionally poorer American minority groups are not as common in San Francisco: there are not too many Latinos (14%) or especially African-Americans (7%) compared to other major American cities. Not sure if that's for cultural reasons, or just because SF is expensive, so there aren't as many poor people of any color as in many cities (e.g. compare SF's under-$30k-income population to Chicago's). Might be related to the SF versus East-Bay de-facto segregation as well; it seems most of the Bay Area's Latino and Black population lives in the East Bay (e.g. Oakland is 30% Black and 25% Latino; Richmond is 36% Black and 27% Latino).
"There are also countless stories of rich people who are very nice..."

Enterprise is great--I'm a capitalist, too--but who are you kidding? If all it took to get rich and create value was niceness, I'm pretty sure Hacker News would be largely unnecessary.
For sure. For a while there, I tried it as my default. I came back to Google for the long tails on my obscure coding error searches, but until the recent Google revamp, I would go back to Bing specifically for image searches.

Also, I still use Bing for certain, ahem, less savory searches. They have Google beat for that. I think they optimize for it, whereas Google has stated that they don't key on it either way.

Either way, shaking up the search landscape is a good thing for all of us even if you never touch Bing. Google has definitely been forced back to innovate their search UX since Bing has come out (Image search, Instant, reformatting the results screen, etc.). We all win in that scenario.
Depends on your tolerance and method of usage, but I use it 2-3 times a week, using a vaporiser, and go through ~0.1 grams a session. Due to taxes where I live (Victoria, Australia) it's cheaper than alcohol.
Of course you can verify if it's valid, but that's remarkably short of what's being claimed here. Lots of folks here are talking as if this is the end of HDTV DRM. I'm simply advocating that someone with the means actually test it before we start singing "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead."
I love Robert Scoble's view on this. Anything happening online is effectively public.

As he puts it, if your "private" data is just a copy-paste away from being posted in public, it's not really private at all.
I'd argue that there are more people out there who could be benefitting from using Mongo but won't because SQL databases are "standard".
Pretty sure that Blackberries were pretty popular before the iPhone.
83% for google, 5% for bing, 5% for yahoo, 7% small fry. 100 K uniques on that site per day

84% for google, 6% yahoo, 3% bing, 7% small fry, 1.8 M uniques / day on that site.

That's according to analytics ;)
Free as in Freedom: Chapter 6 (Stallman's early days)
You're saying that people who actually work with Mark Zuckerberg know less about him than the people who have never met him that are writing articles about him? And that have an incentive to write sensational things about him?
Is anybody left at EngineYard?
One UX question that I haven't figured out from watching the video: how does scrolling of the timeline work?
hm; I wonder if there's a loophole in craigslist's terms-of-service that let you make money /with other parts of a site/, as long as it's not the craigslist part.
Definitely. The emphasis now is to get your potential users to spend 99c as many times as possible (with "do one thing" and shiny graphics; see "fart apps"). Previously, everything was either free, or something you found for $20 at some commercial vendor's website.
Danielle,

Any plans for Twilio start accepting non-US costumers?

Thanks!
Are they coming to your house to smoke pot?
I think JS performance on Firefox has now reached the point where its good enough. All I ask for now is parts of the UI to become multithreaded so as to prevent the random issues one gets when having in the neighborhood of 150 tabs.
The article takes as given that people who hack rather than watch Netflix do so because of their superior self-control — does anybody else doubt that?

I've had times in my life when I've been really prolific and times when it would take a Herculean effort to get anything worthwhile done. When I'm prolific, it's not because I'm exercising self-control to stop myself from watching Netflix — I'd just rather work on Thing X than watch a movie. When I find myself watching Netflix instead of putting in time on something I've been wanting to do, it's because at that moment the movie is more appealing than the work. It's the same force pushing in different directions.

I'm not saying you can get by with no self-control (there are always some less pleasant things you need to do), but I think taking this article at face value might lead people down the wrong path.
The Percentage of U.S. GDP that is Venture Backed?
Ask HN: The new Twitter
What are your thoughts on the new twitter UX? Any key features that stand out? Is it enabled for you yet? If not, read about it here http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/the-new-twitter/.
My personal favourite:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GhostOfUsenetPostingsPast
Google Images API + Google Translate API = World Images
Search for something, and it is translated into a variety of languages, then these translated phrases are searched for in Google Images, restricting searches to the TLDs for each target country.
There are laws regarding the recording of conversations, and GPS usage does not leave a trail.
Exclusive Enter any wireless network without a password
Looks like mouse scroll-wheel / trackpad in the video. I'm guessing that the scrollbar at the right is just cut off to make the video look nice.
BTW, my friend was considering a N1, so I did the math to see if you actually save money by buying the phone for $600 upfront versus paying for it over two years. You do.

(But if you are just going to put it on your credit card and pay it off over those two years, then you lose. T-Mobile lends you the phone at a very low interest rate. Or gouges you on service for the unsubsidized phone.)
(Since I can't reply to the comment below mine)

I'm saying that new hires and people whose companies remain in the Facebook honeymoon period don't know much.
A couple of nugs might be typical. 1 oz is a lot of cannabis; it might take a year for a casual user to expend it. So no, your garden variety cannabis is not expensive and is comparably cheaper than alcohol, and much cheaper than pharmaceutical drugs.

"The Union" is a decent documentary about cannabis in general, including its distribution and pricing history:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9077214414651731007...
Seems worth it considering the hundreds of millions of times that code has been executed and hacked on.

Sure, write your YAGNI version in five minutes, but don't expect anyone to help you. When you put effort into your public code, others will too.
Agreed, the New Yorker mentioned 2006 as the date when the IMs were discovered and the boingboing article screwed it up.

http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
Twitter's YouTube account credits Jeremy Briggs(@briggletweets) and Maggie Utgoff(@mutgoff) for making the Twitter recruitment video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU6epAkC9wg), so I would assume they are probably responsible for this video as well.
Rethinking School Communication with a Classroom Blog
I think the goal is, in part, to negatively impact the Twitter clients. They did their part in carrying water for Twitter for the last two years. Now it's time for Twitter to swallow up their best functions.

"A true friend stabs in you the chest." - Oscar Wilde
How do I become a Code Ninja or Rockstar? 
Hello friends,

I am a CS major but somehow I feel my programming skills are not great as to match to that of a code Ninja or Rockstar.

I have read most of the algorithms books, Data structures book but somehow I feel I am still falling short of being a good programmer.

I have the following books in mind to complete:
a) Programming Pearls
b) Programming Challenges.

I am not sure which one should I pick.
I have been in industry for past 3 years and know coding languages like Java, C and Python but I haven't had the courage to take part in Google code jam. This is I did and due to my silly mistake I uploaded the wrong output to the code. I was able to solve two easy and 1 hard problems.

In short I wan't to code with ease so that I can crack any coding problems in MS, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.

Don't consider this post as a way to crack the interviews of these companies. I just want to be a Code Ninja.

Thanks!

Looking for your suggestions and pointers.
Including our comments on this forum.

One good that can come out of it is people will start behaving themselves online too, just like they (mostly) do in person.
I was staying with a lady who worked at Goldman Sacks in San Francisco.

She said the 12-14 hour days, writing market reports were normal for her. I'm guessing there was limited schedule flexibility for her. I'm not surprised people would rather found a start-up.
What's the problem with this comment specifically? Instead of saying "HN sux, everyone behave differently", why not just disagree with the comment?

I will argue both sides. For:

"It's a good point; at some point biology has to take over and break your concentration. Did they have bathroom breaks and not mention it? Were they so focused that they couldn't hear their body telling them to let it out? Did they just go in a bottle right there?"

Intersting point, jrockway!

Against:

"I think the point of this story was not to literally describe the exact events that took place over the 10 hours they were working together. They took breaks. They got some lunch and made some coffee. But that part isn't very interesting to talk about, and neither of them remember it because it was so meaningless in the context of what they were doing.

But yes, they used the bathroom. Glad that that's all you could think about."

See how I could argue either side and I didn't have to mention HN at all? If I disagreed, other people would see that and upmod me and realize that the OP's comment didn't have much relevance. If I agreed, other people might think, "hey, this OP guy is insightful".

You can control how comments are moderated and how the conversation flows. But you have to put more effort into it than just saying "HN is dying, OH NOES".
So refactoring is difficult due to the way in which you interact with Sproutcore's API, or because of a lack of refactoring tooling? The two are completely different. Refactoring != Tooling.
This is a problem for Turkish man living in Germany with dual citizenship.
Does anyone else think it's weird that we make up artificial goals for some company, so we feel like we can tell it what to do or make a comment?

Like here we're talking about the assumption that Bing wants to knock google out of search or something, rather than have a successful, competitive product. Who says that's their plan?

I find myself doing this same thing.
SublimeVideo Beta starts Today
Doesn't emacs even save automatically (in a temporary file or so)? I know that vi does.
Did not even know that Google have a form of "university" where they provide tutorials and "courses". Google definitely seems to be expanding it's horizons in what it can provide to its users. This is pretty amazing as well because other Search engines just can't seem to compete with Google (maybe yahoo) and its notoriety. Anyone else think that Google may end up taking a good portion (if not already) of the internet? That is, Google's influence over sites (such as using Google's engine on their site) and it's extending its already common usage.

( This is my first post, so hopefully this comments is in accordance to HN standards. Let me know if it isn't! :( )
I'm pretty excited about this and hoping I get it enabled soon.

Centralising my experience inside just one page. No need to click on links to view, go back and reply.

It's adding just enough value to not drag it down in the complexity stakes. Twitter is known for it's simplicity. I think this features add more without looking like they've added much at all.
Fast user switching, perhaps?

You could probably create the new account, note the user/group of the new account, then copy the contents of your main account home directory into the new user's home directory. Then chown -R as appropriate so that the copied files belong to the new account.

That ought to give you a second user account, that has an identical environment to the one you've been using. You might want to use different desktop images so you quickly know which account is active.
Blackberries were corporate purchases with more restrictions than any iPhone. The parent was talking about consumer purchased smartphones like Windows Mobile or Symbian.
This is the first time I've heard of this. I interviewed back in 2007 for SRE, and again in 2010 for SRE. I was told "we'll keep your resume in our database and let you know if anything comes up."

It kind of goes against Google's entire corporate culture to ever delete information like this. Sometimes I wondered if their interview process isn't designed more as a data mining process to find out what interesting things technology leaders are working on.

What Google should do if they want to hire really good candidates is to go with a contract to hire approach. Find good candidates, do one phone interview and a second in-person interview in the space of a few days (not 4 or 5, stretched out over months). If they pass your initial 2 interviews, hire them as a 6 month contractor.

See how much they accomplish in 6 months. If they are contributing and integrating effectively, hire them full time. If not, just wish them the best and don't renew their contract.

This is the way it works in most effective large companies. The cream that rises to the top gets offered a full time job within a 6 month to 2 year timeframe. My current job is like that. I've worked there for 4 years and started as a contractor. It became so expensive to pay my hourly rate that they were begging me to become full time after a while. I was doing a valuable job for them and was very effective at it, so I got the full time offer.
I'd get a radio spot on the local radio. You can have the DJ announce the name of your product, what it does, then play your favorite song. It worked really well for me.
Why You’re Going to Hire the Wrong Designer
http://www.schneier.com/
Once upon a time, my very favorite manager wanted to review the high level schedule for his software product. So he called a meeting among all the managers who worked for him. At ten, maybe fifteen minutes past the hour, everyone had finally made it into the room, random issues with projectors and computers and missing files had been resolved, and everyone was ready to present.

The manager scowled. "People, if you can't run a meeting on time, I don't know how you're ever going to run a program on time."

Attendance was prompt thereafter.
I guess getting the code down to 100 lines was just a side effect. They first had to find out what they wanted to achieve in the first place --- including all the nitty-gritty details.

After a while they probably understood their domain. The number of lines just shows this understanding.
I'm a lilypond user and I can tell you we're totally spoiled by the quality of that project - it is just immaculate. The Vexflow samples look very primitive by comparison but it's a great idea and with open work like lilypond already having tread this ground, hopefully they will have a lot of resources going forward.
Bing has a tough battle especially because most people (including me) equate the notion of a comprehensive search result for a query to what Google produces for that query. That is expected considering we have used it for so long.

Bing is my default search engine because I'm paranoid about Google's tracking practices. In my experience, I still see cases where I do not find (all results, enough results, related results, etc) what I want on Bing and then I try Google and find it.

They've done a decent job nevertheless.
Not entirely true. If I could buy pot at the dispensary and my friend couldn't, I'd just buy it for him and split it down the middle.
I like the Economist. They have all their current articles online. (Though I read it on paper.)