skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife took her dropped/broken iPhone into the apple store. She's too honest and didn't realise when the genius was asking her if it was broken/having issues before she dropped it that he was wanting to put it through under warranty.
Viper mode gives you the best of both worlds, although I'm probably considered a heretic in both religions.

(setq viper-mode t)
(require 'viper)

(custom-set-variables
'(column-number-mode t)
'(inhibit-startup-screen t)
'(show-paren-mode t)
'(tool-bar-mode nil)
'(menu-bar-mode nil))

I used to have slime config stuff in there, but now Ubuntu does it all for me. Thanks Ubuntu!
What you really want is to have a very common name.
Any service that offered to carry out 'digital suicide' would have to be damn sure they had authorization from the person in question. Otherwise it would become digital homocide.
Replace "Bebo, Myspace, Friendster" with "Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek" and we've an argument that Google has no future as a search engine.

Facebook has been less fragile because it has provided more value for its users. That they have a 500m users locking in each other is a bonus. Whether Facebook continues to thrive depends on whether they can fend off competitors.
Kudos to Jessica. I just hope ppl don't hype her beyond reason ('wunderkind', 'female zuckerberg' etc). That kind of pressure at such a young age can be crippling. Let her grow and succeed at her own pace.
Patio...do you think I can include in there some form of requirement that they send me notification via email - just to ensure that I get it in a timely manner, and likewise I do the same to them.

Because I am not in the US, I will be emailing them with my response - rather than a hard letter (or should I arrange to get a hard letter sent?).

I was thinking of saying something like, all written communication via email should be constituted as s substitute for postal mail due me being out of the country.

How does that sound?

Thanks.
An ex employee of mine had a student loan that they were sure was 'interest free'.

Right.

After looking over the documentation I found the clause they were referring to, it was 'no obligation to pay interest for the first 5 years'. The debt had increased to about 30% more than it was initially (4 years had already passed). So much for it being 'interest free'.
Do you have any reasons to believe this other than your own rationalizations? I'd like to see some evidence, please.
The article was designed to provoke and it certainly did. This person fabricates a false blanket rule over the entire Facebook userbase by taking her own subjective experience and extrapolating.

"Yeah, because it's a $15 billion company (so they say) with costs that exceed revenue - and no signs of that ever changing."

What?
The really nasty thing I think (not sure if that's the same in the US) is that debt is charged with interest monthly but credit balance only annually.

So the cumulative effect of interest on interest for debt is much higher than it is for credit.

The 29% is pure usury.
The L.A. Times Flunks L.A. Schoolteachers
If you really have lots of questions to ask the users, don't do it all in one go.

Especially for customer acquisition, the first form should be as simple as name, password, email address. The other information about the user can be asked later on and provide some kind of (virtual) incentive for people to do so. I know that LinkedIn uses this kind of system.
Well, super smart people probably don't ask such silly questions and then worry about the answers. They're out there doing something smart.

Unless they're super smart AND have an anxiety problem, and thus want to be told whether they're normal (or not).

What was your goal?
I think I misunderstood your message. What Japanese kids eat seems to be excellent and I support healthy food choices. What I sensed, however, was an unfair antagonism towards branding and packaging design as a way to achieve that. If my inference was wrong, apologies!
Why the Apple crowd's completely wrong about Flash
Mint took on Quicken out of the gate, with a pretty broad functionality offering.
Probably a silly question, but how do you intend to monetize this? Getting people out of debt is a great goal, but that means it's going to be pretty hard to charge them for the use of your tools (it would defeat the purpose).
I hear ya.

However, I've got some fantastic friends with whom I talk medical ethics, the state of the world, our technical future, etc., almost exclusively. On Facebook, with those same friends (I constantly prune my FB friend list for real, current friends), no such conversation ever happens, even if we've (say) been on vacation away from each other for a solid week.

I've heard many many people say on FB: "This is not the place to have this debate, let's have coffee?" I'm convinced that there's no way to have a rational (but heartfelt) dialogue in the tiny, self-collapsing ("don't talk too much!") blue boxes that make up that all too superficial site.

(I mean it's called Facebook.)
You assume that super smart people have money as their primary goal in life.

I have found this to be far from true. The truly brilliant people I know follow their passions, and usually make just enough money to do so, spending the rest of their energy on their actual passions.

Even if your ratio is right, that they get only a tenth of the opportunities as entrepreneurs... they tend to land the right ones, make the correct one, and be very satisfied with their lives.
I learn something new every day - thanks! If I were going to be evil and do a ninja edit, I could pick any of 100s of weird, in-your-face Japanese products, but it appears I have been hoisted by my own petard on this one.
Here's how we solve this.

We host our DNS with DNS Made Easy, but you could also run your own DNS servers. (We actually have a pair of EC2 instances that we configured as DNS servers and then shut them down, so we're paying a minimal amount for them, but can spin them up very quickly the next time DME is hit with a DDOS.)

We query the ELB CNAME periodically and check its IP. If the IP changes, we update our corresponding A records with the new IP. It's a small amount of code and a cronjob that runs every 5 minutes.

Elegant? No. Get the job done? Absolutely.
For a location aware site, is it worth visiting actual locations?
I've recently started coding a location-aware site with a couple of friends (we actually just applied for the upcoming YC round), but we've all been feeling we could work a bit harder on our site's location features.

For brick-and-mortar retail, it's a no brainer. You'd be laughed at if you decided to simply open up shop without doing concrete research--as in, looking at things from ground level as oppose to siting in the cloud peering down. I thought it'd be different for an online business, but now I'm not so sure. So, myself and one other founder have decided to travel across the US while working on the site, hitting most of the major cities. The blog we'll create will hopefully be really useful as our project moves along.

What are your thoughts: is the internet location-agnostic, or do you need to do the same on-the-ground research you would if your business was in a building beside a sidewalk?
How long are invites going to take? I'd love to take a look at this; my recent wedding has simply wiped me out. I'm not sure what to do, and having a better idea or what needs to be done would be a real boon.
Mistakes That Start-Up Entrepreneurs Make
Grad students would be my guess...
Anybots hiring programmers
We’re hiring 3 well-rounded hackers to work in our small dev team building ridiculously awesome robots.

The ideal candidate would be chill, effective and able to perform miracles without breaking a sweat. We mostly code in C++ and JavaScript with some Python, Objective C, and C thrown in to keep us on our toes.
We're looking at people to head up, take the lead, and generally make things happen in the following areas:

Plugins for browsers: We have a plugin for Firefox on Mac that needs to be improved, polished, debuggified, and then ported to all conceivable OS/Browser permutations. (Well, at least all the cool ones. IE6 can suck it)

Streaming Media: Streaming low-latency video through the intertubes is hard. We want someone to figure the tradeoffs and then give people the best experience possible at all levels and types of network bummage.

Networking: We have a Unix machine that wanders around with two wireless cards and possibly a 4g card. We want it to have the best through-put possible no matter where the robot wanders off to, without any hiccups while roaming. Plus we have to be able to connect in all kinds of wacky networks and through firewalls.

Website: Ajax to html to UI. Security and encryption experience a plus as is design sense.

Anybots is a fun, casual and exciting place to work. Also we build frikking robots. We are small (<10 people) and shipping product in a few months so it is a really exciting time to join.

Send a portfolio of cool stuff you've made, and a resume (for the sake of tradition) to jobs@anybots.com.
To answer this question, one would need to...

a) accurately define intelligence (good luck), and

b) know the motives of those who belong to that highest tier of intellegence (again, good luck).
Female Zuckerberg is a mixed blessing.

Nice to see someone to counterbalance the 'lack of females in tech' again, to land an investment like this at the age of 20 is quite amazing.
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Why would you go in to debt in order to marry? I know it's done and that is not going to undo the damage, but if you knew this was going to be the result would you do it like that again?
Given the reputedly storied history of Zuckerberg and Facebook, I don't know if that comparison is apt to draw the most positive connotations from a lot of people?

On a side note...I don't know why the media generally feels the need to add these hyperbolic and largely tenuous comparisons - her accomplishments can stand on their own.
Check out: http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

I've modified it slightly, but overall it set emacs up better than I new was possible (and introduced me to some add ons I didn't know existed).
My oldest brother said one of the best classes he ever took was a high school course called Home Economics, or something like that. It taught students how to write and balance a check book, and prepare their tax forms among other things (he used to make side money doing taxes for people). By the time I got there the course was gone, but I think such courses should not only be commonplace, but be required, and certainly include debt and interest education.
a lot of things, 1376 lines @ http://github.com/cycojesus/emacs

It uses org-babel to keep it organized and readable so really there's a short wrapper init.el that then calls babel-init.org

External packages are installed system-wide using my own .SlackBuild generated packages (@ http://github.com/cycojesus/slackbuilds/tree/master/e/ )

Of course I run Slackware.
> I really wish I could find something for Emacs which automatically detects the style of the code I'm editing and switches the coding style to that.

If it makes you feel any better, back when I was managing a team in Visual Studio, we called this the "When in Rome" feature. And yes, the versions of this we tried to put together worked as you'd expect... mostly. Determining peoples' whitespace decisions are not trivial. How many lines does the THEN clause of an IF need to have before you surround it with curlies? Do you only put a space before the parens around a function's arguments if there is more than one argument? And my personal favorite, how do you "funge" your indentation style if the nesting level gets high enough that you're at frequent risk of line wrap (soft or hard doesn't matter here)?

People have wacky rules, and as soon as you say you're going to auto-detect them, you're in for a world of pain. Of course, you might have a user base that isn't as persnickety, in which case it's really not that bad.
I assume you are talking about the credit creation cycle (if not, then please explain your logic?)

I think this depends on your definition of "goes further"

While credit creation may create more value (measured in dollars) than tipping/gifts/charity, the opposite may be true if you measure in terms of numbers of people helped. Many people who are helped by tipping are service workers who don't have easy access to credit.
The only "crime" that is broken is split between ethical and social.

Socially, if there is a line to get into a place or to receive something and you skip ahead of a hundred other people, then you're a jerk. Another point I can see is if by this article being published, more people start trying to bribe their way into restaurants, the people that already try to follow the standard rules get pushed further back in line. Bribing your way into some place shouldn't be the protocol for getting a seat. Only when "This is a really important night for me" is true should it be used. And if it successful, tip on the way out if the service was great. If you start acting like an ass, you're going to ruin it for the rest of us.

Ethically, its fairly weak. There might be rules and a code of conduct that the wait staff need to adhere to, and when offered cash to break them it may get them in trouble. Though, that is their problem for accepting it, but you should also respect those rules and not try to break them either.
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In Ottawa the challenge is to find a company that isn't totally tied into the government. I mean this even for the private sector. When navigating the job market here, having a security clearance (ever-important when working with/for the gov't) almost seems as important as competence. Ok, maybe not really, but the ubiquity of government contracts is probably far different than many other places in Canada.
In a nutshell, stack is a collection of components, with the goal of setting up one "server environment".

You could, for instance, have a Django or Pylons stack that would be composed of a script that installs Python, MySQL, Apache, mod_wsgi and finally Django/Pylons itself.
Any of the downvoters care to explain themselves?

"Immigrant babies taking over?" has a negative ring to it for me. My counter-question would be: So what?

Why doesn't the headline read "Outlook on future population heritage"?
iTunes 10 - Direct Link
Ask HN: Alternative to BatchPCB
Hey HN, first time post. I was reading through the comments on another HN article when I happened upon and HN-user's website that provided a service similar to BatchPCB. I can't remember the article but I remember that a few HN users were bickering over the way the HN-user ran his service (money issues or the like). Does anybody know the site I'm talking about? Also, what other alternatives to BatchPCB do y'all recommend?
That is fair enough, but we're not there yet. But we will in a few weeks and we're gonna release screenshots and screencasts. Stay tuned.
Why do baby carrots taste different from regular carrots? I thought they were regular carrots, just pre-peeled/cut.
Metacurrency? The work is already done and it's called bitcoins.

Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency system with a very vibrant community and several enterprises. It's also a system in which nodes trust no one and verify all transaction in the network. http://bitcoin.org

Austrian school and other economic models are not obsolete at all. Their tools just need to be shifted to analyze the information realm. In fact, Austro-libertarians in general already reject intellectual property.

Indeed, the system paradigram is beginning to replace the old system of nation states and coercion and replace them with anarchistic law system meditated by computers. Computer code will be law.

The world is starting to look more like the Diamond Age, everyday.
Not really. Social server provisioning means sharing deployment strategies and being able to search through a collection of user-driven installation recipes. On top of that, StackFu will allow you to deploy that stack, straight into your server, with one command.
Same here. And I love Safari Reader aka Readability!

A good rule of thumb I have is that if you "have to put a bag over the head" of something in order to make that thing pleasant to digest or access (whether it's a UI or a bureaucracy or paperwork or a person or physical widget or whatever), then really the source thing itself should be designed that way in the first place. In this case, my own ideal style of web design is very close to what Readability/Reader produces. Thus making it redundant to the extent I've achieved my ideal.
I don't completely agree with your 5th point. By the same argument, auto manufacturers make a profit, so don't buy a ready made car - you can make it cheaper yourself! (Maybe the part about auto manufacturers making a profit is a bit shaky these days)

Sure, going to Starbucks is not a good use of your cash if you can't afford it, but where I am some of the cheaper restaurants can give me a decent meal for around the same as if I cooked it myself. They get their ingredients cheaper than I could and they make their money from the wine that I buy to go with it.
Yeah, the game is totally biased in their favor. I got my parents to get their finances in better order. My dad paid off one large balance and somehow ended up with the company owing him a few cents. It did him good to call them up threatening late fees if they didn't send his refund within 30 days.
We're ridiculous sometimes. I was at the farmers market and wanted some strawberries. I noticed none at the stand but the vendor had some stacked on a table behind her. Why weren't those being sold? She said she'd forgot to wash them off and customers don't like fruit with dirt on it.
Sleep Deprivation May Spur Serious Mental Problems, Study Finds
I think you are blaming Amazon for a problem that is inherent in DNS, or possibly your approach to handling your DNS based features.

Unless I've drunk too much AWS Koolaid, I'm fairly certain you can run wildcard DNS for just the MX records for your domain. That entry would look something like:

*.example.com. 3600 IN MX 10 mail server.example.com.

Your mail servers can take the DNS synthesized domain from there I think.

BTW, I agree serving naked domains is a bit of a PITA, (appengine problem too!) but you can solve that by assigning a few elastic IPs to a few web heads and use RR DNS for them, with some code to take them out if one fails. Zerigo, for one, supports doing something like this IIRC.

302 anyone using the naked domain to the www. I doubt it matters much load wise as it sounds as if your running subdomains for your app like we do at Loggly.
What compensation do these people get? A salary? Equity?
Your comment is a little unclear, but it appears you think room rates are fixed.

They're not at all - they vary pretty much the same way airline tickets do. Hotels are a bit less obvious about it because the often have display rates.

(Varying rates is especially common in places like Vegas where there is usually a huge oversupply of rooms, but hotels make money from other things, ie, gambling)
A bit offtopic, but I'd like to chime in anyway.

Any startup should be afraid of the big guys, especially Google. But that's not a solid reason to quit when you have good traction.

BTW, good to see other people trying new approaches to task management. (I'm one of the guys making http://task.ly)
Can you jump ship from Apple and work for another Mac/iOS developer? If not, your ObjectiveC skills aren't that valuable.
A general rule: learn anything by doing it while following people who are doing it well.
The new download page hasn't completely rolled out. In the mean time, this direct link works :)
Why does it need write access?
I check Facebook dozens of times per day. I barely ever open iTunes except when it decided to play a song I don't like.
Sorry if I read too much of my own bias into your blog post. I agree that selling is what's important. The web has definitely helped Canadians in that respect, as our startups can now compete on an equal level with American players. In fact, as you alluded to, the startup scenes up here are big in the major cities precisely for the reason the scene is big in places like San Francisco (e.g., close proximity to good educational institutions, the right culture, etc.).
Making a car requires a very large investment in capital that you only recoup if you make lots of cars, so buying a car from an established manufacturer is cheaper than making only one.

Making food requires less in outlay than it does to buy ready made food.

> where I am some of the cheaper restaurants can give me a decent meal for around the same as if I cooked it myself.

Ok, that's different from where I live. Here eating out would easily cost 3 to 4 times as much per person as it does to home-cook.

Also, you have to factor in the cost of transportation if you do not have a cheap restaurant nearby.

> They get their ingredients cheaper than I could and they make their money from the wine that I buy to go with it.

The restaurant slogan is 'they eat you poor, they drink you rich'.
It's surprising the divide that exists within the HN community. You have a lot of entrepreneurs who try to make successful companies based on free content and another side that can't stand those people. Or at least it seems that way based on the way this article is submitted, downvoted comments and general comments posted on the site.

Someone creates good content and we're almost punishing them for it. Yes, paging is annoying but is it such an offense that we remove the ability for the site owner to monetize the content?
So I should learn all of these before I apply right?
It depends on how you define smart.
Maybe a stupid question but.. Where does the money go when a little startup or this kind of startup raise fundings ? in advertisement ?
> The truly brilliant people I know follow their passions, and usually make just enough money to do so, spending the rest of their energy on their actual passions.

This sounds suspiciously like No True Scotsman
Doesn't that give you trouble with the reverse lookups though?
So you're the other viper-mode user! We should have coffee sometime :)
I just realized you are probably running CNAME wildcards for the subdomains as well, which wold conflict with the MX one. How about running separate records for each subdomain?
Interesting idea, although I think the slogan (Eat 'Em Like Junk Food) might be so corn that it turns kids off of the product. If you want to reach kids you have to speak their language and whens the last time you heard a 12y.o. say anything like that?
That's why you have to insist on http://tapdny.com . (I know, it's filtered.)
How much dirt isn't excess?
My favorite bit about carrots is the idea that they'll help your night vision is propaganda from WWII:

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp
More than anything, i would say: read. Reading good stuff will subliminally creep into what you write (also known as the secret to originality is bad memory). There is simply no time available to read the books that are so good that you shouldn't consider yourself a complete human being before reading them, which basically means: Do not read anything that is not very good. Like stellar good. Also, sharpen your thoughts: Words can set you free if you know that it is not the words themselves, but how you use them.

But, really, blogging helped me a lot too ;-)
Don't you carry one with you?
Probably not front-page worthy but upvote your comment as thanks for the link.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319872
Presumably hiring, mostly. Salaries can burn through $1M pretty quickly.