skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because something is done surreptitiously doesn't mean it's against cultural norms--it may just mean the cultural norm is to be surreptitious about it. Cultural norms are weird that way.

For instance, maybe the taboo isn't against bribery per se, but against conspicuous displays of wealth--"flashing your cash". For instance, it's taboo to openly discuss one's salary or other financial details. You might think conspicuous consumption is a counterexample, but really it works for this point too--since there's no surefire markers of social class and it's taboo to just go around saying "ha ha, I earn 100 times more money than you", people who want to brag about how rich they are buy really expensive things and make sure everyone notices them. (Similarly, since there's a taboo about exposing certain parts of your body, women who want to brag about how fantastic certain parts of their body are wear tight clothing and cleavagey tops.)

If this trick works universally among high-class restaurants in a certain culture (be it the US, New York City, or whatever), it's indeed a cultural norm to do it--even if the norm requires surreptitiousness.
I think what's really going on is now that there is such an enormous amount of slack in the system we have to find new ways to self-actualize. For instance, because of all the cheap labor in China, manufacturing is now turning into an esoteric geek hobby in the U.S with Maker Faire, etc. I see Unemployed people on food stamps spending thousands of hours of their life in WOW and Farmville pretending they have a job because the real economy doesn't need them.

Maybe I'm too cynical.. Any idealists want to cheer me up?
Three reasons:
1) To hire and pay for costs
2) To have great people involved with building your company.
3) To have leverage for if you ever had to raise more money.
Y'see, that's just crossing the line from nudge-nudge, wink-wink into outright let's-steal-from-your-employer.
Tell HN: iCombinator now has a "read" link
Hi HNers

Just a heads up that I just added and deployed a "read" link for each news item that will bring you to instapaper's mobilizer so that you can read the articles on your device.

Hope you enjoy!

- Benny
It's about having a special moment with your partner, a moment that's devoted to nothing but each other.
maybe you can help them save/invest money once they're out of debt.

oh wait, sounds like future advisor ;)
Of course you should, but posting this implies you don't, as trying to appear as if you don't care how you appear is the pinnacle of ironic falsity.

Good luck.
Yes! It looks slapped together from stock icons.
Library access seems a good bit faster on OSX but that could just be the benefits of a cold start. We'll see how it goes in a few weeks without an iTunes restart.
He's not the only one. viper + vimpulse here.
It really is odd. Also gone are the colored icons, replaced by grey/slate with blue highlights. It's not the blue that's currently used as the default OSX highlighted row color, either. Makes me think that the Aqua theme will seem some changes rather soon.
At 500 million active users, they're sweeping up some pretty non-trivial percentage of all of humanity. Unless they figure out something that'll grow their revenue by 100x...I hope that any investor isn't banking on the continued exponential growth curve of the human species as a market for targeted adverts in the near term.

Basically they're going to need to start selling "stuff" for that valuation to make any sense at all.
Does it need a reboot after installation?
You know what gives dollars, otherwise known as federal reserve notes, their value? It's that they are the only medium of exchange that can be used to settle tax liabilities.
No, at least not on OS X.
Performance does seem to be improved.
Did Facebook fix whatever caused that app to be flagged, or is this a case of them just unflagging it and leaving it at that?

If this app is erroneously flagged then there's a good chance that many other apps are in the same situation, but aren't lucky enough to be able to get the magic email address.
Another Viper mode heretic here. 10 years of everyday vi (I started with elvis!) and then switching to emacs will do that. I use gtags and doxymacs pretty extensively too.
This sounds like a great product for lots of small companies that don't want to spend their VC on bookkeepers etc. Can you detail a bit about your product, services and target customer?
No, I did mean HSV-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_herpes_simplex

It's the most successful virus.
Read. Read. Read. Then read some more. If you want to write for a modern audience then read as many great works of fiction from the last 50 or 100 years as you can. Read the non-fiction too. Read great essays. Read The New Yorker. Then try this...

You know how when you go to an art museum you always see art students sitting around sketching some great masterpiece? Do that. When you read a great passage--or hell just open up something by a great author and pick a page--copy it down, word for word, and pay attention while you do it. Now go back through with a different color pen and break it down. How long are the sentences? Does their length vary? How? What letter starts each sentence? Is there alliteration? How is it stressed? And so on.

Reading will give you the tools, but like Alex said, you've got to write to get good at writing. Here's what I suggest. Either blog or write a journal every day. Then make it a habit to go back to things you've written (blog or work stuff, whatever) and review it, then revise it. Do that about one or two weeks after you've written it so you have fresh eyes. You'll start to pick up on your common mistakes and learn to correct and avoid them.

Above all else, a great writer must develop empathy for the reader. Become sensitive to every miscue or ambiguity in your writing. Empathize with the reader. Learn to express yourself simply and clearly.
Given that bacteria spores are known to survive for millions of years in dormancy, it wouldn't be a wasted effort to litter Mars with different and hardy species of bacteria. Even if the planet can't support them right now, it could lead to a potentially explosive growth in their population when temperatures hit just right.

Considering that the hottest temperature recorded on Mars was 32C, talking like it's a wasted effort is wholly naive considering the survivability of regular bacterium, not to mention the extremeophiles. Cryophiles can reproduce down to -15C and up to above 10C. Radioresistant bacteria can survive 1500 times the dosage of radiation humans can, making Mars a breeze. Similarly there's radiotrophic fungus that actually grow off of ionizing radiation.

The biggest concern with viability on Mars is that the regolith has such a high concentration of free radicals that any complex organisms simply could not survive in unprocessed soils. Essentially if we suck our thumbs and wait for the engineering of a super bacteria to survive all the environmental conditions, we're going to have to be engineering it to survive harsher soil conditions than we even know. Whilst bombarding the planet with bacteria and fungus that will only survive in the environment will help us in the long run.

It would be advantageous to simply transfer several tons of select bacteria and extremophiles to Mars and colonize areas where temperatures routinely manage to hit above freezing. The lesson people fail to learn is that life doesn't adapt to its environment, it adapts its environment to life.

Radiotrophic fungus is a black fungus, if conditions are adequate in this +0C regions for it to thrive, it would slowly decrease the regions albedo (increasing the regions temperature) and allow it a longer reproduction cycle. Similarly landing this in a natural heat-trap like a crater or valley would only dramatically increase the effect.

Colonizing Mars is a different story, but we should begin terraforming ASAP. Complex plant life would transform Mars completely within a single persons lifespan, however all complex plant life survives in a mixture of O2 producing and CO2 producing respirations. Until the atmosphere has O2 present in an actual percentage, terraforming will require exceedingly complex greenhouses not necessarily to trap in heat, but to trap in oxygen.

You can irrigate countless acres very simply to provide the necessary water, you can't build the necessary domes or greenhouses, etc, that would be needed to trap oxygen.

It's simplistic to say, but throwing everything at Mars and seeing what sticks certainly wouldn't hurt, and if you aim it at some good spots, it could even thrive with amazing simplicity on such a complex problem.

I mean if we're pissing around imagining bacteria (I've heard of no actual effort to genetically engineer a viable terraforming bacteria, so this is based on assumption) we might as well imagine one that performs self-sustaining electrolysis of rust to release the vast tonnages of sequestered oxygen in the Martian soil.
I'm in the process of watching all of them .. very few I skip. great topics great speakers!
Of course if you did distill your water, you'd just be killing the shrimp and then not eating them. A correctly-designed filter is what you'd want.

It's an interesting question, actually: how many animals do you kill every day if you're trying not to? Let's limit it to multicellular animals, but with the shrimp in your drinking water plus the insects you breathe in, and everything you step on, and whatever might be lurking in your (non-meat) food, I'd say the typical vegan has killed a lot of animals today.
If they're 1-2mm long, surely they should be visible with the naked eye if you look closely?
Yeah, good point. Only Kerouac wrote in one draft. And he was a liar.

Don't be afraid of the 10th revision. Don't get attached to that witty phrase. If it's wrong it's wrong.
I believe there are services that allow one to make annotations on web pages. Perhaps they allow one to control the degree of sharing; that might go some of the way toward what Mr. Pennarun wants. An annotation might link into or out of a private wiki.

I'd like something even more modest: a better place than Wikipedia to discuss software. Wikipedia policies just don't allow what I want for current software. E.g., look at the near uselessness of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText (if it's still there?) and then look at the discussion page and history to see all the useful content that's been deleted. Or just read the text next to the broom to feel the essential "Go away!" point of view. Is there a better wiki for software topics? Or are Google searches the best one could hope for?
Please include MacOSX in the title, not everyone uses a mac..
My take is they're trying to stay a step ahead of Ubuntu.
It's nice that YC helped these guys, but getting this kind of consideration on a platform is something everyone should be entitled to--you shouldn't need a special "in" with YCombinator to get it. It's like if YC partnered with Apple just to help YC startups get their apps approved.

This makes YC look good, but FB look bad.
I had a similarly frustrating experience with Feedburner in early 2008. I was running something slightly controversial and they basically reverted to an older version of my RSS and wouldn't let me do anything to change it, including redirecting the traffic away from Feedburner. I emailed the Google rep I had dealt with in addition to trying all their listed means of contact with absolutely no luck. The EFF told me that their terms of service probably (and did) have a clause that they could discontinue service to me for any and no reason (which is how it seemed). Since this was for a podcast I decided on a whim to try emailing Steve Jobs too. I had full control of my account not an hour later, and I've been happily on Amazon's S3 ever since.
While I think it's awesome to have friends in high places, and I wish these guys the best, it reminds me just how miserable it was to work on the FB platform.

Their milquetoast, ever-changing policy that's occasionally enforced and frequent API updates and breakage was maddening at best. IMHO FB makes apple's app store policies seem "not so bad".

I understand that zynga and the lot have made a lot of money, and the level of traffic FB can provide is intoxicating... but I'll be damned if i'd do that again. This tale is a good reminder of why.
well the CD in the old icon seems kinda outdated ;) but its strange and needs some getting used to i agree.
I hope that seed money goes into building the product - I haven't seen the growth in the offering of inDinero over time that its story is capable of considering its working off the problems set already solved by Mint.

Consider it harsh criticism or motivation, this product is perfectly positioned and I hope to see it grow more/faster.
How can you judge the architectural design of a Django project just by looking at a site's interface? Do you mean clean URLs? Or are you asking for open source projects, like @madhouse referred to, which were built well?

Both of my projects: http://www.littleheroes.com and http://www.repustate.com are Django projects and in my biased opinion, they're laid out well under the hood.
Are there any truly brilliant people for whom money (in some abstract, score-keeping sense) is their passion? You could argue this for Warren Buffet, who isn't crazy about spending a lot of money but is very serious about investing well.

You could also be super smart and also passionate about something that immediately leads to making lots of money--Steve Jobs, for instance, is undeniably passionate about the kinds of products Apple makes, and how well they make them.
what's wrong with this link? http://www.apple.com/itunes/
Wait a minute. From looking over the bitcoin site, the process for currency creation is based upon CPU processing power? The argument given for limiting wealth creation is that, once bitcoin was used enough to have real value, the expense for electricity to perform the calculation approaches a higher amount than would be profitable by doing something else... First, not all computers will utilize electricity uniformly to perform the "calculations". Some computers are just horribly inefficient. Also, it's certainly possible to construct more power efficient computing devices, and do so without even talking about upcoming nano-technology and processing at the atomic scale which would make electricity costs at a macro scale negligible for even the most hard core computing. So right off the bat the bitcoin market does skew its participants with non-uniformity, and a thesis that almost certainly won't hold up within 50 years.
I think the point is that he's decided his wife is more important than anyone else he deals with, no matter what. I for one respect that.
Psychology Researcher Investigates Mindfulness
High Resolution Fundraising
I've been lurking on the c2 wiki (and occasionally posting, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ScottVokes) for almost ten years, and the culture there feels completely different from Wikipedia. The c2 wiki isn't a blip on most programmers' radars, though, let alone the world at large.

Back when I was preparing to become a librarian (academic research or possibly a medical archivist; before I got sucked into the software engineering vortex), I spent a fair bit of time talking with my coworkers and professors about the relationship between rapidly-mutating secondary (tertiary?) sources, such as Wikipedia and blogs, and actual primary sources based on actual hardcore effing research. The c2 wiki did not once ever come into the discussion, because nobody cared about HowComeLispAndSmalltalkAintPoisonYet or DoesRelationalRequireTypes. It was too alien a culture.

I think the author is on to something, that the Wikipedia culture of anal-retentive editing and (worse yet) knee-jerk "[citation needed]" has been bleeding the spontaneity out of the popular concept of wikis, so people are much less inclined to just post stub documents and collectively flesh them out as time allows. Often, the expectation that writing ends up polished prevents it from appearing in the first place. (Documentation or otherwise.)

I've successfully pushed for a wiki literally everywhere I've worked through the last decade (including the library system, which has a great and actively maintained collection guide, based on mediawiki). Sometimes it took offering/threatening to run my own server specifically to host one, and it's always taken some content-seeding and nudging to get things in motion, but the net results have always been positive.
They're also transparent, the image uses stained samples.

An aside about staining, the dyes created for the textiles industry during the industrial revolution had the neat side effect of advancing biology greatly. As each dye binds to different things in a cell it allows scientists to glimpse the inner workings of the cell.
I pulled up the iLife photos in Finder and compared them at 512x512px with the new iTunes logo and... there is no comparison. The amazing detail we find in the former is strangely lacking in the latter and the result is shoddy craftsmanship.

I'm surprised this made it past Jobs...
What’s Your Time Worth?
Even if entrepreneurship is irrational, there's no requirement that smart people are necessarily rational.
Temperatures on Mars in areas hit 30C, many of the unmodified lichen reproduce well below these temperatures. I don't see a point in 'planning' when we already have the necessary bacteria and fungus to be doing. Bacteria spores have survived millions of years, temperatures colder than anything on Mars, freeze drying and beyond, whilst still being viable when reanimated by the correct conditions.

Find key locations and seed them. Craters and valleys will trap any heat produced by these lichen (via lower albedos and the bacteria themselves) making them ideal locations if their temperatures break freezing. Mars' strong winds will do all the work of spreading the spores into surrounding areas that are habitable, or that may become habitable if the lichens have adequate effect.

I fail to see what the harm in trying is aside from a loss of money. However any space launch comes with the expectation that it could fail, any deployment comes with the expectation that it could fail. Failing is part of going to space. However the crucial here is that this produces valued data. Until we get data we are guessing and all the mythical genetically modified lichens in the world will do nothing if we guessed wrong and they'll be guessing blind for attempt 2.

We should be doing a trial run with materials off the shelf, so to speak. If our off the shelf materials don't work, then we design our own. It should never be the other way around. I know, we're hackers, we like to tinker, but YC is about start ups, it's about doing. Not everyone here had 20 years to fiddle making their own programming languages to perfectly execute their start up, they just got on and did it with off-the-shelf stuff until they had to invent, if they had to.
iTunes has always been doing (for lack of better words) weird shit. That was sometimes a sign of things to come (the beginning of the end of brushed metal), sometimes not. I wouldn’t read much into it.

iTunes is not really the jewel of all of Apple’s applications. At least not anymore. Other applications always seem to have much more polished UIs. Safari is an obvious candidate, all their iWork applications also have pretty nice UIs, as has the iLife suite. Those always seem to be the better OS X citizens.

Combine that with the frequent UI blunders in iTunes (usually at least partially straightened out in subsequent updates) and I’m beginning to suspect that their top UI people are not really working on iTunes all that much.

I’m not even sure whether Apple likes iTunes. For all we know they think of it as this huge, overly complex burden, a trap in which they themselves ran. iOS doesn’t have one monolithic iTunes app that does everything and that clearly seems to be what Apple should have done on OS X. If they could have a fresh start they might. It’s just that they probably don’t want to make that kind of investment. (Consider also that Apple probably doesn’t want to install half a dozen different applications on some poor, unsuspecting Windows user’s PC just so that it can sync to the newly bought iPod shuffle. One application is quite enough and that already makes a lot of people angry.)
Journalists want stories that spread. Making hyperbolic comparisons help make stories spread.

It can be weird having stories with those type of comparisons made but I think it will help Jessica and the indinero team more then hurt.

I once had a way overinflated headline written about myself and since it has helped to open doors for potential jobs and such.
Having known Jessica for several years - she is the real deal, and she can handle the pressure. Some people are just made to do this kind of thing.
No, no, no. Use paper. Demand paper. If they can't figure out how to mail paper internationally -- and this is highly likely -- then you've accomplished your goal of not being hassled.
Truth. I wonder what the percentage of people on HN are Mac users. I'd say something around 80%.
"Something seems to be wrong here, and tells us APP_ERROR. prezi.com/support might help."

Or not. Adobe flash player 10 under Fedora 12. Should I try from a Windows box at work in the morning?
link to Green Mountain photo: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/4235237

(thanks to hitting street view on the google maps link)
Even compared to the QuickTime symbol, which has a similar style, the new symbol seems to lack detail and looks shoddy.
Indeed ! Wow... that's so lame
It's like if YC partnered with Apple just to help YC startups get their apps approved.

Wow, what a great idea! :)
Can someone post a watered-down version of this essay? I like Paul Graham's writing and I enjoy reading his ideas, but not knowing anything about the finances of investing makes this essay pretty much unintelligible for me. (I hope I'm not the only one.)
You can see all of the talks from 2009 on our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/startupbootcamp
If I read the article correctly, one requirement of their system is that transactions have to be defined in such a way that all transactions succeed for some definition of success.
That's a little bit too Gladwellian for me to hazard, but still a possibility.
The time taken to fill the form is dominated by the time it takes a user to understand the field label and fill the input box. I think UX people use the term 'cognitive load' to describe the effort taken to understand. This paper presents research that shows that vertically aligned labels cause less cognitive load on users, resulting in faster form entry:
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement...
I just hang up on my gf who is, literally, in the other side of the world (i'm in seoul, she is in costa rica) and were discussing the same stuff.

we work together, at the distance, she spent the first 7 months of this year here with me and now we have a few months aside... and quality time, distraction-free, thru skype makes wonders and is needed no matter what.

when were together here we'd go to momments of solitud where we'd focus on each other, this not only made us relax and forget about all the project's stuff it nurtured our relationship.

I don't know if Brad's policy of answering the phone is wrong or good, but seriously guys work is just a mean to be happy... been with ur SO is been happy.

I think us as entrepreneurs will tend to let ourselves go with all the crazy stuff that goes on launching a project or staying ahead of the google's, apple's and facebook's stilling our thunder... but we cannot let all that take our life just as well.

nice post and thanks for sharing!
I think you're jumping the gun by using a loaded term like stealing. It may be restaurant policy to allow servers that discretion.

Especially if that "discount" is appearing on the bill.
Besides, aren't the main components of the wedding's cost supposed to be paid for by the bride's parents? Last I heard, the groom paid for the rings, the limos, and the honeymoon.