skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an attempt to poison your spam filter. By forcing the filter to discriminate between good emails with English text and innocuous words, vs spam emails with English text and slightly different innocuous words, the filter can't discriminate as accurately and may misidentify good emails as spam. In order to combat this we (sometimes implicitly) change the threshold required to flag an email as spam, and allow more spam email through.

(My guess is this doesn't belong on HN, though.)
Both emacs and web servers are major programs, and analyzing them 'from the source' for debugging purposes is a different thing than analyzing how a single minor module works in it's normal environment. Debugging can have you rooting around in the basement fairly quickly, which is more than likely to overwhelm a novice.

If you say, "it's too hard", it will be. (You don't have to be productive on day one. But some day, you should at least take a look.)

Plenty of people have trouble getting slime working, let alone hacking around on the guts of emacs without an experienced hand around to guide you.

If they read the source code, the magic would become understandable. The problem that people have with things like SLIME or monads or pointers or classes is that they build a mental model that's a lot more complex than the real thing. Take a look at the real thing, and your mental model becomes simpler and more in line with reality.
I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important?

As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.
Keep in mind that many of the opinions around Soviet technology were overly optimistic. Until the Mig-29 and Su-27 entered service in the 80's, they had nothing that could match the F-14/F-15/F16 and F-18.

The kill ratios of the F-15 and F-16 speak for themselves.
Go through the deck card by card and rip each card in half, stacking one half in one pile and the other half in the second pile. Done :)
Getting malware warnings on the link !
Well I've been doing similar for years in Firefox through a combination of the Firebug and Stylish extensions, but this is a marked improvement in usability and obviousness.

At any rate, tweaking styles mid browser session is a great convenience.
"I know I'm not going to evaluate whether the guy who paints for himself or the guy who paints for a spot on the museum wall has a higher degree of "pure" love for an action."

Right. There are no Scotsmen here, true or otherwise. My point is that some people do assorted things for the sake of doing them, for some intrinsic reason, not to solve some specific problem or address some external need.

Few people seem surprised when this is what motivates people to paint or play music, but when people say they feel that way about writing software, eyebrows go up.
And in 25 typefaces with a few slab serifs, you'd do Clarendon before Archer, PMN Caecilia (best ital ever), Joanna, or Chaparral? More to the point --- bringing it back to the post --- if the other slab you were stuck with was Rockwell, you'd use Clarendon as your backup? Two faces that would both look at home on a WPA-era wrought iron factory gate?

What parts of my criticism are wrong? I'm sure there's lots wrong, and I'm happy to be called out, as long as I'm going to learn something from it.
Had me right until the end: "Solution: Kill features. Often."

In most enterprise environments, that's not realistic. Unless you've really screwed your design process, features are in there because clients need them. Even refactoring a feature into something that makes it a better product for 99% of your users will greatly annoy the one user who needs the feature and is used to having it implemented in a certain way.

It's much better to negotiate with the users on the front-end for a better product or avoid overly-demanding users that will hurt your product. Because once the feature is in there, it's there to stay.
Flying robot swarms, and the open source sw to run them
Ideally share the repository of styles at http://userstyles.org/
Specifically, it fails the very simplest thing in web UX, making the mouse cursor change to the "hand" pointer to indicate that it's clickable.

It's a cute little story, though. I'll give him that much.
Maybe PM is karma-walled? Maybe I'm failing to find it. Either way.. famousactress (at) gmail.. I'd love to talk more about ways to make cycling safer, and I have a few resources that would be helpful.
I used to live over a garage and during the winter it would get freezing cold in my room even with the heat on. I left my tower on all the time running World Community Grid to keep the place warm.

Conversely, during the Summer it would become unbearable to even operate my tower so it was a great incentive to turn it off, save electricity, and go outside.
I'd only notice if I didn't fire up any games or any major CPU-intensive workload, which are few and far between most of the time. I run powerd on my 3.4GHz 4-core workstation, and the CPU spends 50% of its time between 800 and 1100 MHz, and it often goes all the way down to 100MHz if I shut down Firefox for the night.
Something interesting to do is see the source for google.com, msn.com

Compressed really well and built for speed. Then view the source at yahoo.com

Links to look at for performance.
yslow
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

page speed
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.htm...
JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace.

Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.
"When someone is looking for commiseration but you offer problem solving, you might actually add to their frustration by your lack of compassion for their situation."

Especially if you're married to them.
+1 on this thread.

I've never had a problem driving my bike like a car. Sure, sometimes someone honks at me or yells, but that's what your middle finger is for. As soon as someone is mad enough to yell at you, you know they see you, and you know you're safe. It's the people that don't notice you that will kill you.

(Of course, there is the 1-in-a-million homicidal maniac that just wants to murder something for the fun of it... but that's something that you can't prevent -- bicycle or not.)
The depressing vogue for having fun at work
People don't think about, "Let's make this number one" when up-voting. They think, "Do I like it?" (Or did it help me.)

This has everything it needs to be liked. Does it deserve it? Probably not. Does it have to? I guess every programmer needs a few laughs in a day.
Facebook Kills Platform Virality
Either the CPU-consuming process was running at an idle priority -- meaning the OS would always push it aside for other activities that needed CPU, such that when the author was browsing the web or navigating emails, those more important processes got the run of the processor -- or the author is just incredibly tolerant. If there was something actually competing on an equal basis for the same cycles (instead of only taking the available cycles), the impact is obvious to anyone.

While for some reason "browsing the web" always comes up as a low need activity, it happens to be the area that really differentiates machines. It is not a low demand activity, and hasn't been for years.
Thank you! Your rare sense of humor more than counterbalances the dime-a-dozen downvotes that have yet again stripped me of run at a 100 karma points on this, my ... 8th(?) YC account!
Beware of being too open about your company on Hacker News
HN does not have private messaging.
A major selling point of this seems to be that you can package your application into a nice little bundle and just push it into your deployment environment.

In fact, I would appreciate if there was a way to make static files (like js and css) location-agnostic.

I could say:
<% Html.Stylesheet ("styles/foo.css") %> and it'll map to /Content/styles/foo.css or my nginx server or my Amazon cloudfront storage, etc.
I wonder how cheap the stock would have to get for Apple to acquire Adobe? I can imagine them cleaning house in management and get them back to a focus on creating the best graphics/video/authoring tools around. Would be a natural fit given Apple's "Creative" user base, software expertise, and history. Adobe WAS a great company, just seems to have been MBA'd into the ground over the last 5-8 years.
I would notice if my DVD Rips were taking longer to process, or I was no longer able to sustain my live streaming video feeds at church on Sunday morning.
Do any aeronautical engineers know if it's getting any benefit from ground effect at that altitude?
Working for Oracle as a programmer _most often means_ working for innumerable number of ERP and middleware solutions they offer, not the database itself.
Sure, give the selector "td.title:first-of-type" the property "visibility:hidden;"
actually, twitter is already cracking down on this practice. too many automated spammers trying to shill lame products.
Better yet:

apt-get install cpuburn
Chromium Blog: Google Chrome Frame: Stable and Speedy
Fascinating, informative interview, that validates most of what TC said in their first article over the weekend. Arrington is on a roll lately.
Using wordpress+website optimizer (a/b test), google spreadsheets api (form data collection) and chargify (billing, up to 50 customers), you might be able to achieve a similar effect for a bit less money and a bit more programming.

Working on a wordpress plugin to address some of the additional programming requirements... any thoughts? How would you implement this and what are the major challenges you see? What would the plugin be worth to you ($0, $50 or more)?
If I could upvote you 100 times, I would. Completely agree about Sports Night, I still re-watch both seasons of that at least twice a year.

Also a huge fan of Studio 60 - not sure I could call that one "underrated", as it did have some problems, but... still absolutely loved the writing/characters in it.

Sorkin's the reason I can't wait to see this :)

(And luckily for me, I happen to be in NYC early October, so don't have to wait the extra couple of weeks for it to arrive in the UK!)
I sympathize with both your sidewalk-borne POV and those who are vehemently opposed to it.

Unfortunately, bicycle safety is not primarily a behavioral issue, but a structural one. Road and sidewalk etiquette are important, but these territorial disputes between car, bicycle, and pedestrian are inherently unsolvable. Cyclists, being neither heavy fast steel nor slow moving soft tissue, really belong on neither road nor sidewalk.

A different layer of infrastructure is needed to really solve the problem, but unfortunately such a layer doesn't easily retrofit to existing US cities. Even dedicated bike lanes along existing roadways can be an overly compromised and unsafe solution, for instance when they are bordered by a line of parked cars, doors just waiting to be opened in front of the cyclist.

As much as I love all things bicycle-related, it's for these reasons that I believe cycling as transportation will always remain a niche activity in the US.

For me, riding near traffic requires zen-master focus, alternating between the attitudes of assertiveness and invisibility. I view the sidewalk as a tool to be used when appropriate, e.g. when there are few pedestrians and vehicular traffic is murderous.
Required Reading: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Alternatively, you could use Prime95. Run it in stress test mode and it should heat your room just fine.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/#newusers
I agree with the last point. The offered prices are way too low. Their price for ISBN (978-0471676003) was 11$ when the least on Amazon is 29$. So definitely focus on the ease of use
Yes. If it is a situation to side the customer or the developer, SAP would side the developer, Oracle most definitely the customer.
While your command of vocabulary is impressive, you should be careful with 'niggardly'. The word, while not technically racist, is obviously very close to some very bad parts of US history.

I'd suggest: stingy, greedy, or others - http://www.answers.com/topic/niggardly
Hey - I think we disagree on the basic premise. I don't think most features are there because the clients "need them". The point of the post is that many are there because they think they need them, and thus, through a sales process they were "required". Of course, one size does NOT fit all... many specialized apps do require more features... but in general, you can kill features, especially if based on data that shows nobody really uses them.
This reminds me of some observations by Douglas Hofstadter and self-referential expressions. I forget where he wrote this (Metamagical Themas, perhaps), but he wondered, when you come across a dirty car with "wash me!" drawn into the dirt, to what does "me" refer? Why do we assume it's meant to be the car; perhaps those words are some desperate plea from a passerby in need of a bath.

The funny thing with seeing a folder named "My Documents" is that since I did not create that folder, and did not pick that name, my gut reaction is to attach "my" to whatever entity did create it.
Fuzzy image Dilation and Erosion
Hey Sweetheart - AwesomenessReminders.com for love
I wouldn't work at any company that required me to use windows or osx.
CPU contention is one of the least noticeable overload situations on a computer because schedulers have hidden it well since forever. Even if your video playback and your benchmark are at the same nice-value, the scheduler notices that the benchmark is using lots more CPU, so it gets effectively "niced" compared to the video playback, which then gets the CPU whenever it's runnable.

If someone swapped out your RAM for something less than the working set of the programs you have running -- you would notice. Also, if it were an I/O benchmark instead of a CPU benchmark -- you would notice. (Yes, there are I/O schedulers now, that help somewhat.) I/O and memory are not as trivial for a kernel to "make room" in by kicking out other programs.
I'm not clear on what benefit it would offer over a glider or microlite. Not that I have anything against quirky projects for their own sake, but since he is a PhD candidate I imagine he must have some applications in mind beyond the aesthetic ones emphasized in the article.

Project information and research links are interesting but not very informative: http://hpo.ornithopter.net/
Oracle working on cloud-based office suite using JavaFX
I guess Chrome Frame is better than plain ie6/7/8, but part of me thinks it's just adding another layer of complexity (having to add a tag to pages to work with it), and not helping the standards movement. Could be wrong, though.
The piece is called 'cookieless domains'. Not 'using static domains for increased connections'.

If the actual speed increase is from something totally unrelated to the piece's conclusion then this is really misleading.

The static domain trick has been around donkeys.
I found a hidden way to Remove OS X's Trash Bin
Angelgate BIN38′s Super Angel Menu And More
New clip from "The Social Network"; Mark Zuckerberg talking to lawyers
I have long had a good source for that: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

PS: I am not going to gain a thing by promoting it. I genuinely appreciate the quality, focus, tone and the information the author provides.
Of course, look at any modern Cray ads and Cray is using the same 1024 chickens everyone else in the livestock industry is using.

Sparc isn't failing because it's inferior to x86. Sparc is failing because Solaris is failing, and no other OS is built from the ground up for Sparc. You can run Linux and other Unix-likes on it, but given the choice between x86 and Sparc, you choose x86 because that's what's least likely to cause incompatibility issues.
I manage people now. I don't care if the general counsel of my company restricts me, if I have to lay off half my team (or even one person) that worked with/for me for years, I would find a way of explaining the situation, taking blame (where due), and making sure they know I would do everything I can to help them find another job.

In my case, the only contact all of us had with the manager was an email the previous night, asking us to come see him in his office. When we reached his office, he was no where to be found, instead an HR person directed us to a conference room and finished the formalities. The only time I saw the manager is when he scuttled past the conference room to his office and stayed locked in there till we left.
I think these clones are taking the concept way too far...having a total stranger call you every day saying "I miss you and I love you" is creepy and deranged.

EDIT: It gets worse. Who would want to receive a random phone call of "I want to nibble on your nuts"?
Clones are great, since you look at what they copied and then know what your competitive advantage wasn't. Ever heard of my clones? There are about half a dozen by now. Life is still going great for me.
Biking in DC is insanely dangerous, and the cyclists here are some of the worst I have ever seen. There is some kind of massive and fundamental lack of recognition that they should at least try to follow some of the traffic laws, sometimes, if they want to be taken even a little bit seriously. More than once I've nearly been taken out by a cyclist who wasn't expecting me to do something crazy and unpredictable, like stop at a red light or yield to pedestrians.

If you expect drivers to yield to you, give you your lane, and (most importantly) not actively work to bring about your death, you can't be weaving in and out of traffic, running red lights, or not letting cars through to turn at intersections. Even if you don't give half a damn about your own life, it's just simple courtesy.

In general, people on bicycles in DC combine the worst parts of the "urban road warrior" cyclist stereotype with the intense sense of entitlement and privilege shared by most in the DC area: "why the fuck should I stop at a red light? I have places to be. I saw David Axelrod at Ruth's Chris yesterday. Do you know who the fuck I am?"

The drivers are insane as well, but I want to grab most of the cyclists I see around here by the shoulders and shake them hard: "Do you want to die??!? DO YOU??!!!?" They are just the worst and sicken me deeply every day.

Disclaimer: I am a frequent cyclist in DC.
Ask HN: I'm trying to find an RSS reader posted here that 'learns'.
I ran across an RSS reader on HN recently (maybe a month or two ago) that 'learns', and prioritizes stories likely to be most important to you, based on some sort of like/dislike system. It easily integrated with Google Reader. Any ideas?
This reads like personal drama in the form of a blog post. I didn't learn anything from it about how I should comport my company on HN, but the title pretty much demanded I click through. Irritating.
who doesn't want to be like ee cummings
"Milk"?
Don't learn C++ as a starter language. C++ and Java are languages that have been mostly evolved from C. C was designed as a convenience tool to replace stack based assembler programming, which is what existed before any of these languages were available. So if you learn C++ first, you will have hard time understanding why there classes, why there is protection, why there are member fields, why inheritence ... the whys will be an endless list and you will never figure it out. If you wanna get that far, buy the C progamming language book and learn C first. In C you will get to understand the roots.

To fast forward and save you some time in programming, learn python. It has all the bells and whistles, and its simple to program.

Read this guy's essay: http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

If I were you I would either write a simple program that you think aviation people might need, or taking the employment path I would go for an aviation related software company like one doing flight simulators.
> Also, I live in Dallas - we don't really have sidewalk traffic. Every time I ride my bike, I can count on one hand the number of people I see pedesting.

Also, someone else lives in Dallas. Every time he drives his car, he can count on one hand the number of people he sees cycling. He uses that fact to justify driving in a manner menacing to cyclists.
I think the best thing for bicyclists to do is avoid main roads with a speed limit over 35 mph. You give yourself a better chance of being noticed by automobiles if your rate of speed is closer to theirs.

The last thing you want to do is be a nuisance, all it takes is one unhinged, rageaholic to end your life for a very stupid reason.
"Execution is everything"
I'm not sure how posting on HN actually does anything more for these clones. The idea is obvious. The text is there.

What stops any Joe from doing the same?

Obviously it's just dumb, stupid, and unprofessional to copy from a fellow HNer, but I don't see how it gives them any boost.

Thoughts?
I had to see this myself: http://gist.github.com/592622

Ruby proved it right, but I still don't get it. :-(
And if there is no competitive advantage, maybe you should work on something where you do have an "unfair advantage".
not sure if this is it but:

http://feedafever.com/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1680575
If someone creates a site that makes money and can be cloned in a few hours of work, of course people are going to copy it.

Isn't that why investors want to know what the competitive advantage is with any company they're going to invest in? To prevent this sort of copy-catting?
I think you're talking about Canabalt by AdamAtomic.

This is a link to the original Flash version, but he ported it to iPhone too.
http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/
You didn't learn anything from it because you're not enrolled in Hackernews Highschool.
Alas, typography is cursed by two common afflications in the design community:

1. Good typography does not draw attention to itself. Most people will only notice your typographical work when you get it wrong. When you get it right, the reader takes in the information and registers the mood without ever noticing the medium.

2. There are snobs, who will artificially exaggerate the differences between fonts to try to appear more knowledgeable. There are differences between fonts and they really can create very different results. However, sometimes there are two well-designed fonts that happen to be very similar, and you really could use either with good, professional-looking results. Arguing about which of these fonts is "better" invariably generates more heat than light.

In other words, if you're not a trained designer, you're supposed to be font-blind. And if you are a trained designer, your reader should be font-blind. If they are noticing the details of which font you use, you're probably not doing a very good job.
Chart of the Day: RIM's BlackBerry Price Collapse