skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Turned out I was right though, and that really pissed her off, in spite of the very diplomatic delivery.

Sometimes, being right is the most offensive sin you can possibly commit.
>Until Intel distributes a EULA with the processor.
... written with a very tiny font in silicon.
programmers? ^_^
A bit similar to Medical experience, a deep familiarity with computer systems that many fine opaque may come across quite arrogant. Picture someone struggling with a setting and you fly by, "hot key to x menu, third tab, look for option Q, set it to baz", just seems obvious (although it took an hour of goolge-time to discover) but as you rush off the dazed user is still struggling.
If anyone is curious, as I was, apparently brown tree snakes are venomous (neurotoxin), but because of their rear-facing fangs in the back of their mouths, humans only get a trivial dose if bitten. So they're not considered dangerous to adults.
Show HN: This is a project I did to Manage Oracle tnsnames.ora files
Google has a phone and an upcoming SN-type-project in the works.

Apple has a phone and attempted a music SN.

FB has only a social network.

It seems like it could be a step in the right direction for FB, even if just to be able to compete with Google Me + Android integration
I have been called arrogant after I politely pointed out that people are driving 300mph towards a wall.

I have been called arrogant when after they crashed I politely pointed out that I warned them in time that they will crash and burn.

I have been called arrogant when I refused to clean up the mess for a 100th time - which could easily be prevented if people took a little bit of caution and tried to understand their own predicament.

I have also been called arrogant when I insisted that something has to be done YESTERDAY to systemically prevent results that have profound negative impacts.

Yup... I guess It has to be us.
I know it needs to be updated to Vista + Windows 7. I'm planning doing it in the near future. I did it for internal company use and we all use Oracle software on XP Virtual Machine by now (for legacy motivation).

The license is going to expire in the next days, I need to make a new build :D

By the way, thanks to all the people going to review it.
If that was my laptop (and it wasn't encrypted), I'd take his offer and then report it to the police. I don't see what you lose on taking his offer, and every theft imho should be reported, if only for making statistics.
Wow. If this was really from Jobs, that is unbelievably bad for him and Apple.

I think everyone knew Jobs had this type of personality, but his recent screw-ups with this and the handling of the "antenna issue" (saying that people are holding the phone wrong) just show that, regardless of his health, this man should no longer front Apple.

Granted he is one of the personalities that makes the business. It's not hard to forget his history of (1) riding Woz's coattails to claim success for the original Apple computer, (2) jumping ship from the Lisa project he led to failure to the Mac and then taking credit for the Mac team's work, and (3) riding Jonathan Ive's coattails and those of Apple's impressive marketing for pretty much all recent Apple product successes.

I believe that he truly thinks he deserves what he has. I also believe that he has always thought of himself as above this customer base and his company. But, this is just nuts.
Diamond star thrills astronomers [2004]
FB has the most complete contact list for a lot of people. It would be pretty cool if my phonebook ran off this and auto updates itself when people change their numbers.
Has Mark Zuckerberg grown up?
Missouri Tells Judges Cost of Sentences
To help with that he wrote it again at the bottom of the cartoon.
Accessible only to members of NYT. Any other way to view it ?
Bit premature imho. The offical release day is tomorrow, and these kind of announcements only cause confusion and do no good for anyone.

But awesome job PG team, it's my favorite SQL server.
Show HN: My "24/7 Advisory Board"
Such a bold headline.. ^_^

Everyone who at least once tried to participate in a mountain expedition should know that planing is useless. Everything is changing each half of hour, and what you do is adapting and correcting your assumptions on the go.

Of course you need some preparation, like getting warm clothes and stuff, but what would you actually wear you will know only right before the moment you're leaving the camp.

And of course, you never know when. ^_^
loljack Theft Alert System - True vaporware.
You're line of thinking is I think quite similar to Google's. Google seems to have this mindset of having no dependence on any outside party.

I can understand this from Google as it fits into their internet commoditization goal.

Apple's SN is all about selling more music, which is a core business for them. But to compare Apple and Google, Apple doesn't have a search engine.

WRT Ping, it's two biggest problems are:

1. Lack of FB integration; and

2. It's tied to an app (iTunes).

Apple wants (1). Betas had Facebook Connect. Rumour has it Facebook had "onerous" terms for the integration so it got killed. Lack of it is a huge problem. But that should tell you something: Apple needs FB because FB owns the much-vaunted social graph.
As a programmer and someone who has started a small SaaS software business by myself. I can related to this comment. Programmer are the doers. They often pride themselves as the ones who are actually getting things done in an technology company.

This mentality often comes off to "those who manages or lead" as arrogant, and rightfully so. Often the doers don't see the bigger picture. For example, the relationships that is required to have individuals in an organization work together as a whole.
as a rule are more often right than wrong, even if the subject is not programming

I would say this statement is the very height of arrogance. But this is easy to test: simply don't engage the services of any specialists for bit. Do your own plumbing, fix your own car or central heating, represent yourself in court (and tell the judge you know more than him about the law). Then see how you feel in a year.
"... scattering the town's 4,000 inhabitants before its terrific blast." is straightforward.

The 60 words in the sentence preceding that clause, are not:

"A leering tornado of flame from the southwest roared down through a half mile of underbrush upon the town of Haileybury basking sleepily in the September sunlight on the shore of Lake Temiskaming early Wednesday afternoon, ate its way across the railway tracks and then, fanned by a 60-mile-an-hour gale, ripped its way to the water's edge ..."

In general the phrase "the 60 words in the sentence" and the word "straightforward" are incompatible.
It would. I currently use my Gmail contacts for this. Android integration is excellent. iPhone integration is decent.

To borrow a term I heard from Mark Suster though, it's a FNAC (feature, not a company).

Think about the supply chain, inventory management, retail distribution, OS development and so on that would need to go into this. I simply don't believe the business case for an FB phone exists. What's more, I don't believe FB believes it is either.
So, how does the Diplomatic track then get to address the brokenness?

"But you said we were on the right track?"
I know a few people who really are world-class brilliant, pioneers in their fields. All of them are humble in their demeanor, they are friendly and approachable and always have time to help.

Arrogance is a sign of having led people to believe you're better than you are...
The point I was trying to make was not about my literacy, but rather that I instantly recognised the character as a programmer, even though he was meant to be a physicist.
Meh -- who would want their email address displayed? That's not a safe default. You'd just be punishing the users who don't manage to find the setting.
Blockbuster didn't fail because they didn't get into the online model fast enough. Blockbuster failed because of their pricing/fees model and lack of selection and business model. Netflix's business model is incredibly smart. Even before the online streaming, they were able to have an extremely wide selection because they didn't have to have stores carrying all of the movies in convenience locations, since they were mail-only. And allowing customers to keep the movie(s) as long as they want made customers happier than getting fees.
Sure some juicy rumours to awaken speculators interest as facebook IPO is drawing closer ...
"To boil this down to the essence of an executive summary, the best products fail when the user for one reason or the other, mostly through influence from piers, gets a better impression of another product – inferior as it may be to yours."

That means that it was better in the only way that counted: In the user's mind.
The blackberry facebook app attempts this, but it's not actually that useful. Variations in spellings of names confuse it, the 'type' of number (work, mobile etc.) can cause duplicates and a lot of my friends no longer store any useful contact details on facebook due to privacy concerns.

Some of these might be implementation issues, but I still don't think that even working perfectly it would be a killer feature for a phone.
Should we Hang Cheney by his short and curlies??
> Do your own plumbing, fix your own car or central heating, represent yourself in court (and tell the judge you know more than him about the law). Then see how you feel in a year.

I just rebuilt a house (which obviously includes a great deal of plumbing, including a central heating system) and have swapped out the gearbox in a front-wheel drive japanese car.

If you want I can post the pictures as proof.

I am not likely to be able to get in to situation where I will have to represent myself in court.

Anything else ?

But I do know the limits of my knowledge, am quite ready to admit I'm wrong about something and do my best to learn from people with more knowledge than me about anything at all. Including lawyers (my mom happens to be one).

edit: and as an aside, if I had to be represented in court I'd be more than happy to hire a lawyer because representing yourself in court as a rule is stupid, even if you are a lawyer, let alone if you are not.
How to visualize Bessel functions
Fun Spike Games Seeks 2D and 3D Artists for Charitable Game
What's funny is that when I saw the title I immediately assumed it was a TechCrunch "article" (meaning "linkbait"). And of course it is.
A phone could give FB plenty of new chances to capture data. What if, instead of sending a text message to someone, the FB phone sends a FB message or initiates a FB live chat session with them instead. If the FB phone became ubiquitious enough, they could challenge the space currently owned by texting (which would be really annoying for developers and the market, but great for FB). FB locks everyone in, AND they get to use all that social data too.
It's interesting that you mention apprentices to the great masters, which squares with my experience--- the most arrogant people, or at least the most abrasive and outgoing with their arrogance, are usually the 2nd and 3rd tiers, not the top tier. There are arrogant people at the top tier, but many fewer than I would've thought. I suspect it has something to do with no longer feeling a need to prove themselves, no longer feeling in competition with people, etc. There might also be a bit of branching out into other areas later in one's career that causes them to be a bit more humble, since famous people often try to become more generalist once they've gotten famous in a specific area, and it's harder to be arrogant in a very wide area than in a niche.

Among people I interact with, there seems to be sort of a peak of arrogance among people who are very good in a narrow area in their 20s and 30s, while famous people in their 40s or 50s are often quite humble and generous in their evaluation of other people. At CS conferences, for example, you don't find folks like Donald Knuth asking pedantic dick questions very often, but you do find the "ugh how could anybody not have read [x], did you even do any research?" type attitudes from junior profs and grad students.
Net users are hurried; they read summaries; they scan. Tweets nailed a 'headline/one-sentence' need; the hard limit was a part of the winningness.

Maybe, though, there's a series of gradual expansions of the attention you're willing to dedicate a thought, thread, person, or topic. There's the Tweet; there's a bit more context; there's a paragraph or two; there's a running conversation; there's an essay; there's a book.

The Tweet is still the gateway -- and you still need to be short and sweet there. But Twitter, Inc. wants -- and perhaps needs for a sustainable business model -- to play a role in your next few escalations-of-attention, in the direction that the Tweet sent you. NewTwitter (and t.co) are parts of their strategy to stay involved.

NewTwitter seems a little rough to me, so far -- so much new UI, so many sizes/intensities/colors of text, some new 'modes'. But, if they manage to give you just the context/followup info you want, in a manner less wasteful of screen and gestures then other options, it could be a win for them. And if you don't want all that second-pane stuff -- it's easy enough to ignore, or use a minimalist interface instead. The reader still needs to demonstrate interest with a click to see followup info, so Tweet-authors can't change their style too much. It's just that click-showing-interest may be easier for the user -- not requiring a full-page load or new web tab.
I would guess it uses some of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-specific_register
As a mathematical physicist who recently became a professional programmer, it doesn't seem that inaccurate to me.
Not extraordinarily unusual...

This person stumbled upon a 100+ year-old cinema lens and thought to adapt it to a modern DSLR, take some excellent pictures with a wonderful vintage feel, and post them online for all of us to share. I would most certainly call that unusual.

Let's give credit where credit is due. This is a wonderful and novel piece of work and I'm definitely grateful that s/he chose to share it with us.
Last week I released a game in the app store that has a button with the following text:

"Please click here to send me an email, so I can keep improving this game. Thanks!"

I could probably have formulated that a bit better. The idea was to get some feedback from players.

The result so far has been over 50 emails (many people sent more than one), all _completely blank_ except for the default subject and greeting text.

Oops.
Ok, point taken.

But it could have been an engineer just the same, or a person with advanced electronics experience (Hams are renowned for this sort of thing) and a myriad of other professions and activities where problem solving is the norm rather than the exception.

It's the method that matters, not the actual problem at hand.
How do you keep access to your cloud servers secure?
No, but I am shocked by the sense of entitlement displayed by some mediocre developers.

Consumer software is hard. If you release an update that your users don't like, it's entirely your fault.
What sense does a mobile platform make in that context? Absolutely none that I can see. How does it let them capture and control more data?

It opens the possibility for more location-based services, and therefore more location data. I can imagine a mobile "Like" button that when pressed reports your current location a la Foursquare. A location-aware mobile platform would also create some interesting tie-ins with Facebook games/apps. For example, go to Home Depot and hit the "Like" button on your phone and get more fertilizer in FarmVille,
Letts' Law: All programs evolve until they can send email.

Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

I propose a new law:
Every website calling itself a platform will attempt to incorporate the functionality of all other platforms that are popular at the time.

Having a phone for your platform is just another silly functionality that may or may not pan out in the end for any given platform.

It's an inevitable next step for any platform looking to invest in something/anything/i-have-ho-idea-what-do-do-now.
Decoding the mystery of TAJ MAHAL
Smart people are a minority and on average find themselves in a conversation with less smart people. Therefore, smart people tend to be right more often than less smart people, partly because they know more, but also because they are more aware of what they don't know and are less prone to saying wrong things. Instead, they will keep their mouth shut, hedge their words or learn about the subject first.

Jacquesm's statement in no way suggests a smart person should do his own plumbing. In fact, because a person is smart, he will be more likely to hire a professional. Or, if he does try it himself, he will succeed more often, because he gets the appropriate information and training beforehand. These arguments are actually somewhat circular, because this behavior partly defines what we perceive as 'smart people': people that succeed at what they attempt.

Smart people that know they are smart will inevitably come across as arrogant, because when they think they are right, they know chances are high they actually are right and they will not easily let an opinion drop. They know when they don't know stuff and they won't often end up having to admit they were wrong, because they weren't claiming to be right in the first place. The 'other side' doesn't see this: they only see someone that is pretty sure he is right most of the time and that hardly ever admits he was wrong.

What does this have to do with programmers? Programmers are generally perceived to be smart people and as a result programmers tend to consider themselves to be pretty smart. Unfortunately, this also holds for programmers that actually aren't all that smart and should be more modest with regards to their opinion about matters. The aggregate result of all this is that a relatively large group of programmers think too highly of themselves and that confirmation bias has led some to conclude that 'many programmers are arrogant'.

BTW, this is an explanation. I lack any solid data to back it up. It's an explanatory narrative and it may be wrong. However, if enough people think it sounds right, it's probably right. Another reason why people sometimes seem arrogant, is that they may strongly defend some position, while it never becomes clear during the discussion that they are well aware they may be wrong. If you defend a position very well, it just means that I am wrong, if I am claiming you are wrong. However, that doesn't mean that you are right. We can both be wrong, but, more importantly, we are probably both partially right.
Why Facebook is building a phone: To become a platform, not just a service
Only for laptops, though, I assume.

On Windows laptops, upgrading your graphics ATI drivers has always been a royal pain in the ass.
I think most people want a swiss army knife, a device that can do everything. They don't want to lug around a bunch of devices, each of which does one thing and does it well. That's probably why the iPhone is so popular; It's a phone, mp3 player, camera, browser, everything you can think, except it doesn't have a corkscrew.
I really want to like this, but your website is literally devoid of any information that would help someone make a decision about using your software, or telling their friends about it. Can you please either email me more info or update the site to include at least some screenshots?
I managed to somewhat alleviate this for a recent app by having a feedback form in-app, allowing them to vent without going through the hassle of shutting down, launching iTunes or whatever and submitting a review. Some of it is still quite shocking though - especially compared to feedback we get from the web version.

The app is basically a restaurant finder for a city. We have listings for ~600 restaurants, regularly updated, self-written reviews for around 50 of the most popular/well known and 600ish reader reviews. It also has offers that can be saved offline like vouchercloud & they have purposely signed up to be good offers (30% off meal, free dessert, 2 for 1 etc). All in all, aside from some speed issues which infuriate me (but users don't seem to have noticed) I'd say
it's pretty good (I use it myself).

Now with that in mind, some of the feedback we've received has taken me back somewhat. One user noticed a restaurant that had closed down a couple of months earlier (it happens - we try to keep the list up to date but the odd few slip through). He made it clear that he would never use anything by us EVER again and would encourage his friends and family to shun us too. Another complained their city wasn't covered (intentionally on our part - it's a very specific app and very clear in the description). They demanded we get in touch immediately with how we'd rectify the situation before he "took the matter further". Several more of the same variety. I forgot them all though the moment our first "Awesome!" comment came through.

Er, sorry for the essay. My point is basically: yes - I am shocked!

edit: The app is free btw, not sure if that makes a difference re comments on it!
How To Save Money On Groceries
I walk past an apartment building just about every day. In front of the apartment building are the mailboxes. They have them all right next to each other.
Completely true, but in the case of ephemeral software like iOS apps it's really tough to get feedback useful enough to help create new requirements -- unless you also have a compelling website that accompanies the app and people use it. I can see why developers of niche apps (or mass market apps in areas with lots of competition) could be frustrated.
Hi, yes you are right. The site, while the text say the contrary, has been made just for the people of the office :D

The screenshot on the left is the whole software. It is just a menu coming up from a taskbar icon.

But yeah, I will collect some more info and send you. In the mean time you could install and try. It's a quite simple piece of software :) .
I think the method by which acetaminophen kills the snake is by harming the liver. Thus resistance can not be acquired - it works as a poison.

If an adult human takes 4g (4000mg) or more liver damage can occur. Obviously much less is needed for a snake.
SMS is so ubiquitous because everyone with a (mobile) phone number can use it. IM always had this problem: some of your friends on MSN, some on AIM, etc.

I certainly agree there are opportunities for better FB integration into mobile devices but I don't think that translates to a viable business in making mobile phones (imho).

It's a bit like developing your own OS to compete with Windows because you want a better version of Outlook.
Ask HN: How do I increase the load speed of my blogger.com site?
Ideally I would like to increase the speed without removing any gadgets but would like some recommendations on what to remove if that is the best way. Search always seems to be the slowest to load and I really don't want to remove that

Also would consider moving to Tumblr or Posturous if that would help

Ideally I'm looking for some code I can add or some sort of caching gadget

Http://www.Rakkhi.blogspot.com
I'm starting to believe the maxim that the sweet spot for iPhone app sales is 13 to 17 year olds. Because some of them aren't spending their hard-earned 99 cents on an app - but the money from their parents.

Among my non-developer friends, it is shocking and depressing how few of those who have an iPhone have actually bought a single app. They know I do app development and yet some religously feel they should never have to pay for an app or they can find everything they want in the free apps. From personal observation, the real money in the App Store is from making apps for companies that want an app of their own, not from selling your own apps.
I thought I'd add some content to this treacly post: http://articles.cnn.com/2002-05-29/tech/time.money_1_pence-f...