skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easily the most controversial thing I've ever written, but I'll stand up and be accounted for in my errors. I write once daily, every day, and I write honestly. Here, the mistake I made was not filtering my thought by another person who could feel ill because of it.

I will explain my line of thinking, which does not excuse the large gaffe I made, but perhaps so people can understand my thinking. I've met a book editor, a literary agent, a prominent researcher, and other notable people through my writing on my site.

I am four months into blogging, and getting the feel for what is right and good for decorum when discussing publicly with discussing others is tricky. I shared no information that wasn't public knowledge, I broke no confidence, and I shared what I was thinking, in a way I believed would be constructive.

The community has mixed feelings over that. For the record, I did not expect the piece to be so popular, nor for it to have such a negative reaction. I misjudged.

A prominent, very good member here and I shared a few emails when this was happening. He condemned me strongly, and I listen to that - random people saying hateful things I don't notice, but good arguments from good people I do. In the end, he recommended "One thing you could do is to email Paul Graham to ask him to kill your post, to explain why and then
remove the article from your blog. I think the damage to your reputation would be minimized that way."

I will not look to preserve my reputation here - I have presented what I thought, it was my honest and well-intentioned thought, but I did it carelessly. A few hours ago, I emailed patio and told him I would edit, delete, amend, or otherwise follow his instructions if he preferred. I still will; I will respect his wishes.

John - I'm going to respect Patio's wishes, whatever he wishes, and try not to make this into a larger spectacle. We have had some (always civil) disagreements in the past, but I would ask you do the same.

Going forwards, I will learn from this error, and be more cautious and tactful in the discussion of other people. For my part, I hold no ill will for people, even ones who said horrible things, and my door is still always open to people who need a hand. I'll lay low for a while, and be more tactful going forwards. If anyone feels harmed or like this is a less safe space for them, you have my apologies, and I will be more cautious and tactful going forwards.
I found the article creepy - http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=251
Same here, I already have most of Facebook's domains in my hosts file. I haven't seen a Like button in ages.
Hey! Ad-hominem the 37 signals if you must, but leave Chicago out of it!
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1554

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/kfiles/b34039.html
The problems movement incurs aren't "game mechanics" so much as "3d chatroom mechanics".

Buff tracking as a performance hit is surprising to me, though. I'd presume you were tracking monster lifespan - with this and an offset for 'AI interruptions' (like for chasing players as the buff wore off) you could recover the buff times and remaining durations without touching the monsters when they were out of player LOS. I can see LOS as a more taxing system, but monster LOS has no z-axis and the dungeons don't seem to require too many nodes for a pathing graph...

At any rate, most MMOs have rather... shallow... gameplay mechanics, and I don't think it's really computation that's holding them back.
It seems to have a lot of traction in the Silicon Forest
Does it? DHH seemed to be saying that if Facebook had profits and cash flow they wouldn't need outside sources to provide liquidity. So the important part as far as DHH's point is that Facebook needed cash - whether the "liquidity" came with or without dilution, the point is Facebook needed it.
Fair point. I suppose I was thinking about it from the perspective of a non-dev worker. I can see the benefit of an internal blog.
It sounds like you're saying that cuts to education by the Bush admin caused total education spending to increase.

Regardless, education spending has been increasing at a more or less constant rate since the mid-1960s. Discounting one hiccup in the seventies, (energy crisis/boomers leaving school) the uptrend goes back almost 50 years.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html
I'm probably missing something (fairly tired right now), and will likely end up looking like a muppet, but...

Where does the '500' come from?
Relax. A month from now this will be forgotten. What am I saying, a month? A few days from now it will be forgotten.

What scrolls off the front page scrolls out of the present into ancient history.
Los Angeles, CA, USA
I almost did up until this submission. Flagged, in any case.
2 year ago we did an IRC client, tons of twisted and JS, I don't think we were penalized too heavily for it. It did use Django in a few creative ways though.
In case you missed reading Todd Henderson's response to the thrasing he's taken:

http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/20/im-sorry/
As the recruiter for a medium-size mobile agency, I definitely would not pass on a great candidate that wasn't local — in fact, we frequently post on local job boards in other cities. However, you have to immediately make it obvious to me that you're a kick-ass candidate. I more likely to bring in a local candidate for an interview (which gives them a bit of a leg up), even if they aren't immediately an obvious great candidate.

That said, it's much easier to network and get in touch with the right people if you're in town.

If you really want to make yourself available, being very upfront that you're willing to cover relocation expenses goes a long way.
Indeed, I only found out about it because of this submission. Barbara Streisand effect?
Yes it is hard, but Twitter was down a lot. Was Blaine fired? I met netik at a conference just before he was hired by Twitter - great guy, knows his shit.

I am not saying that they shouldn't be challenged on the accuracy of their claims, I am saying that they are learning as they go. That post was a bit personal, the next one won't be.

Judging by the hit rate outlined in the post above Arrington seems to have learnt a lot about how to handle sources, stories etc. But ignoring him completely based on a few examples from years ago seems wrong.

By your reckoning I seriously would have nothing left to read atm (especially the NYTimes) - I still read it all though because I take everything at face value.

I am not going to exclude myself from an entire slice of online media just because 2,3,4 or 5 or 10 blog posts out of thousands that provide me so much information and value.
This fund is a subset of 500 Startups: http://500startups.com
I've also built his self-esteem
I honestly believe you and you are right
1Passwd for Windows is in beta now
Ahhh. Thanks :)
> Growl. It's not a Mac OS X builtin, but it's a must-install. I describe it to PC users this way: "Those little popups that Outlook does when you get new mail? Growl is a system-wide service that gives those to any application that wants them.

I wish Apple would just buy Growl or something and just build it in, the lack of a notification system in a modern OS was bizarre to me when I first realized it was missing. It's something that's missing in both OSX and iOS.
1Password with Dropbox integration is the most elegant solution, assuming all of your machines are Mac's.
If you want a country that does not espouse conspicuous consumption and has an industrial base, you should move to Germany.

(Of course, in Germany politicians talk about how to boost "domestic consumption", and a few years ago there was the "Standardortdebatte", basically whining about how Germany is still an industrial economy and hadn't ascended to service economy, yet.)
If you choose to invest in stocks, invest in the S&P 500.
And this is something that outlines the state budget costs of the Iraq war:

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/budgetpriorities2009
Keyloggers (often malware, so not intentionally put there by some hacker) download the passwords for your FTP sites, and alter some of the pages on the websites you have FTP data from. They will use your websites to send spam.
Congrats Jazzy & Stammy!
>But, more importantly, patio11 is not who we think he is, and I am not who you think I am.

I received a phone call from someone claiming to be both patio11 & jgrahamc. I must say I found it very puzzling.
This may look like a silly choice to some, but if your goal is to stretch your mind a bit, assembler will definitely do the trick. 6502 assembler is less annoying than its i386 equivalent, and can be used in e.g. C64 or Apple emulators.
Eating out is definitely conspicuous consumption if done on a regular basis.

Consider a perfectly ordinary example: a couple eats at a restaurant twice a week (call it at least $15 per person), they both have their starbucks coffee morning ritual (call it $4 per person per day), and one of them regularly eats out for lunch at work (call it $8 a day). These are all very low estimates, and they are not at all unusual examples. However, all of this money adds up.

How much does it add up to you ask? Over 7,000 dollars a year.

That's a decent used car, every year, or a new car every 2 years. An iPad every month. A laptop every 2 months. A trip for 2 to Hawaii (or the Bahamas) every season. Or buying one or two albums on iTunes or Amazon MP3 every single day, even weekends. If you had a coworker who spent $600 a month on consumer electronics you would definitely consider that conspicuous consumption.
I've tried both. I've found better success with #1.

This isn't substantiated, but my thinking is:
- hr/recruiters notice if you've made a move
- people see it as a sign of commitment if you've made a move
- you're more likely to find a job the easy way: networking with likeminded people
- you're more likely to avoid bad pursuits (ie, the "good on paper company")

The economy isn't bad for talented people. Believe in yourself, show employers why they need you, and get on with your first job already.

You've got a world to get out there and conquer.

Best of luck,
-m
To make it an interesting challenge, you should formulate a more specific goal.
You are right. But you're also condoning behavior which you're implicitly against(or at least I interpret as you implicitly against) because that's the way things are, and at least some people are effected by others tossing in and claiming things are good, or allowable, or not cool...and in that condition, accepting the world as cruel will let someone else feel ok being cruel.

The internet is mean because the internet is mean. If it were more nice, it would be less mean, and there are interpersonal feedback loops which support that.
This looks great. Great motivation to keep me going. I plan on launching my Twilio powered startup/app on Sunday.
No, not kindergarten. This is supposed to be a nice forum.
A creepy, misinformed, and ultimately empty article does not belong here.
Patio11 has chosen to reveal some personal information in order to help fellow hackers. This is certainly not the way to pay him, nor the way to encourage future helpful behavior from HN users - which is, to my understanding, the ultimate goal of this forum.
How about APL? (Well, I think APL is expensive, I think there's open source variants?)

Watch someone program Conway's Game of Life in one line of APL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

It's black magic to me, but pretty cool looking, too.
I don't think I'm ready for Haskell, but we are thinking along the same lines. Coffeescript is indeed the least interesting of the list. It seems I've accidentally ordered the list in ascending order of interest. Ragel has caught my eye from the first time I saw it, a couple years ago, and it seems like it would be useful for an immense number of projects.
My Android browser complains that the dn on the cert doesn't match the domain.
I disagree. While it might have been just as good an article if it adopted a polite veneer of fiction, I thought it brought up a lot of very good points that I'd love to see further discussed. If repercussions are required, I'll leave it to 'patio11' to request them.

It's a self-referential article by someone encouraging a style of self-promotion that I find repulsive. I don't like most of the recommendations, and I'm sure Patrick won't either. But I definitely self-identify with some of the criticisms, and feel like I benefited from reading a perspective I disagree with. With luck, Patrick will too.
Here in Denmark a lot of traffic lights respond to road sensors.

Another cool thing is the countdown in seconds for the pedestrian lights.
The js scripts for the actual twilio fund page are 404. I tried to subscribe to the newsletter.
You can't ban somebody for their opinion
do we really need to give this more attention? really? REALLY?
Thoughts on IE9 and Teleportation
Every time someone declares something dead, I die a little inside.
I'd invest in a way that didn't consume thousands of hours worth of my time.

I'd do what Mark Cuban recommended people like those found on HN (young entrepreneurs who want to launch a start-up) do: 6 month term back CD's:

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/08/20/the-stock-market-is-still...

When I was in my early 20's the president of a start-up I was working for (whom was a former professional stock trader) essentially gave me the same great advice Mark Cuban gave everyone. He told me to not focus on investing in the stock market because the amount of time I'd need to invest to do well would never yield as good of a return as I could get from investing that time instead on my computing and start-up related skills. He advised me to stick to what I was good at (computers) rather than trying to take on essentially a second job and build a second career in trading.

Looking back, I'm 100% sure he was absolutely right. In the last ten years, I've spent thousands and thousands of hours reading books on the investing, reading financial news, watching Bloomberg and CNBC programs, doing research on companies, developing and testing trading strategies, doing simulated trading, and trading. From all that time investment, my return was probably -5%. It was almost flat. That isn't bad considering that the markets have been so bad over the last 10 years. In fact, it's pretty good. But, had I spent all those thousands of hours on start-ups I probably would have had at least one big success by now.

I also would have been a lot less stressed and lived a lot happier life. I vividly remember the sick feelings I got during the crashes and upon watching the fallout from unforeseeable things like the bail-outs and the oil super spike.

Even if I didn't do bank CD's, I could have just bought index funds and done better with out all the work and wasted time. I think CD's are the way to go. If you really want stocks, it's index funds.

I almost got involved in the real estate market and other types of investments. I'm glad I didn't. Again, it would have taken a huge amount of time investment to compete with other involved professional investors. And, looking back now, I can almost say for sure I would have come out essentially flat if I made very good decisions and with heavy losses if didn't.
Thanks for the link. I couldn't really access the loudthinking link.

On this one, I am with David. Joel pretty much negates his point about using something battle tested and mainstream in the end when he mentions using some proprietary language for his product, which translates to a couple of mainstream languages. I don't really see the point of cross-compiling to multiple languages. The work and time invested in maintaining the proprietary language can be better invested on other critical activities. If language interoperability is an issue, thrift or message queues is there to the rescue.

Why he would use some fancy stuff when he himself is advocating using mainstream stuff is beyond me. I sure would be betting on ruby being more robust than whatever he is using in-house (preposterous claim; I have no ideas what they have in-house)

IMO the only valid complain about Ruby was lack of good unicode support at the time post was written.
How very strange. The article about Patrick is very positive and merely suggests that he has the potential to make a lot more than he does now, and gives him some tips to that regard. Since Patrick lives his business life in the open of the internet, then it's not unreasonable to publicly post such an article, using only public sources as reference.

There's a couple comments maybe he is afraid of success, maybe he suffers from Catholic guilt (presumably since he has a very Irish name and nearly all Irish are Catholic.) But it's nothing horrible and it's all highly qualified.

I really don't see anything wrong with it, and it's obvious that Patrick could make more money if he wanted to (say working as a quant on Wall Street), but that's his own business whether he wants to or not.

I could make more money doing other things myself as well and people tell me that, but there's a lot of stuff I don't want to do. Money isn't everything, and the article in reference is no big deal.
I work for a printing company during the day. I must say, this is quite impressive.
It depends how well the site would run now, if he stopped working on it today. If it would run for another 5 years with comparable profits, that would be a lot more than a plumber could make without doing any work.
No, I am saying that cuts in government education subsidies cause higher tuition, something that makes perfect sense.

It also makes perfect sense that total education spending would increase, because (a) the population is increasing, and (b) our economy is changing in such a manner as to require higher and higher portion of college-education-necessary jobs.
Those metal detectors 6 feet from the light post? This system seems to ensure that entire columns of cars can flow nicely through several intersections.
Chrome definitely complains as well. It puts up the red skull and crossbones and crosses out the https in the address bar. It doesn't pop up anything though.
The really puzzling part was that... the calls came from inside the house.
See in Colour - Unknown Unknowns
it very much reminds me of aleksey vayner.

i'd love to read a psychoanalysis of this character type.
jbarmash - I'm happy to shoot, edit and provide to you, if you are okay with me reposting the content on my site - http://itleaderstoday.com
I've recently started using a Mac laptop, and one thing that I've found frustrating is how much harder it is to access menu items from the keyboard.

In Windows, you can just press the alt key -- either one, and you don't even need to release it -- and then each menu/item is (usually) a single keystroke. For instance, alt-e-a-s is firmly in my muscle memory... a quick four-key sequence on the right hand to activate Photoshop's Edit | Transform | Scale menu item. There's probably about a dozen menu items in Photoshop that I access regularly this way.

These keystroke combos are sometimes even easier than the menu item's hot keys; for example, I find alt-f-x (File | Exit) a less-contorting sequence to hit with one hand than alt-F4, the standard application-closing shortcut.

On the Mac laptop, by default you need to hit Ctrl-Fn-F2 to access the menus by keyboard -- an awkward three-key combination that takes two hands, and moves at least one hand off the home row. And from there the navigation is lexographic, which means multiple keystrokes per navigation step.

Does anyone know if there is a better way to navigate via keyboard that I'm missing?
Did you build the house from ground up? How long did that take you?...Lately I have been reading up about building a small house using shipping containers.
"A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized." - Fred A. Allen
Thanks for the heads up. I'll get someone on it.
I've looked at the languages related to APL and it doesn't seem there is a solid open-source implementation.

J (closed source, free),

A+ (GPL, inactive),

K (closed source, commercial)
PPC? CPM?
I fell out of my chair laughing when I read this:

"So of course, the blackhat compiled a C program with #include “/dev/random” in it, and gcc was hosed."
And you are so concerned with him and criticizing him dearly because ... ? Can we not let a man do what he wants ?

>I'm not saying I'm better, in many, many ways I'm a lot worse

So being worse than someone gives you the power to critique someone so badly ? I wonder what you would've said if you thought you were better shudder
I looked into this. Seems like to keep them on my site, I would need to get a SSL certificate installed on my server which doesn't seem fun or cheap for that matter. Thanks all the same :)
I think you misunderstand Sprout's meaning, and that Sprout precisely understands Wolfrom's. Sprout is actually saying just what you say: honest belief can be independent of truth or legality, but Sprout also emphasizes that from a legal point of view the statements of Arr. and McClure are mutual contradictory. An action can be ethically grey, but not legally gray (i.e., there's no such thing as bending the rules without breaking them).
I demand a refund.
Degrees in law and medicine are relatively easy to get. It's basically memorization and pattern recognition, with a little bit of reasoning. An overclocked monkey could do it. Unforced introspection, self-criticism, and change in the face of perceived peer pressure to the contrary? Now that's hard.
Self-inlining anonymous closures in C++
I didn't get it. I'm assuming the majority of the people voted electronically. So, are these votes the traditional ones? If so, why do they allow a text area on it? Is the person supposed tho write the name of the candidate instead of selecting it from the options available?
I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog has a dramatically different perspective. Pervasive design-by-contract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language) was also interesting, though it isn't much of a departure otherwise.
Given employees of small service companies sometimes deal with clients more often than they deal with their own families, it's not unreasonable to posit these clients act as a "bubble" that insulates the company from the world at large.

What's laughable is Joel's implicit assumption that the majority of 37s clients are, apparently, Chicagoans. How charmingly pre-internet of him.
How about Go? http://golang.org/
Click&Clean v.6.0 Chrome Edition Released
Added: BitDefender Malware Scanner, Tab to Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE, Flock...
I always thought the suggestion of "grabbing coffee" was just a polite way of brushing me off - ergo no response is really needed. Perhaps I'm just dense, tho'.
Someone should tell people that if you make $250k and spend $300k, you're going to be poor.
Last time I undertook a major trip (37 flights through 20ish countries), there were two main alliances - Star and OneWorld, from memory. If you stuck to airlines from one of those, your points would be combined.

I don't fly all that regularly (maybe just above average) so things might've changed since then.
Any words on why there is no API for HN?
How is what lionhearted wrote different from the commentary we place on "superstars" like DHH, Spolsky, and Zed Shaw? It was personal, yeah, but nothing was taken from something that Patrick didn't publish publicly.

I'm not really sure what to think about the article. Running it by Patrick first may have been a better move.
It'll be just nine slots if patio11 throws Appointment Reminder into the mix.