skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am really surprised at the group think here. It is no big distortion of reality to realize that Steve is an elitist and has a contempt for people that he sees below himself. He would probably readily admit it.

Further he has road the coat tails of some really brilliant people. He is brilliant in his own right, probably one of the best business men of our times but just because he is and is worth of praise in that respect, does not give him a free pass on the fact that he generally loathes people he perceives as inferior and treats them in a socially unacceptable manner.

I purchase Apple computers and phones and could be considered and avid Apple fan because they are a great products, Just because one likes Apples products does not mean that they have to accept Steve's actions or worse yet justify them for him. He wasted more time and money responding to her than just forwarding to the media department to take care of and he did so for a purpose, to show her that he loathed such a peasant request.
Yep, thats good to know there are people who have the wisdom to know when to bend or break their own rules.

Somehow the word 'rules' is more constraining, 'guidelines' seem more apt.
> Smart people are a minority and on average find themselves in a conversation with less smart people.

Only assuming that all people are equally likely to interact with one another. Which I doubt is strictly true, given that those cases in which I've actually interacted with everyone from an age group (e.g. military service) are strikingly different to the daily interactions I have. I would imagine people in places where opinions actually matter (such as the workplace) mostly interact with people of somewhat similar background and smarts, though obviously with different fields of specialization.

But even within groups of more-or-less equally smart people, the choice of topics to be assertive about and the style of argument are still factors that make people seem arrogant, so I do agree with you. But I would attribute it more to choice of topic and style of argument rather than "smartness". As you said, the definition of "smart" is problematic and potentially circular.
Are you suggesting that people should be judged on the probability that they might commit more crimes in the future, that is, for crimes they have not committed?
Lost libraries: The strange afterlife of authors’ book collections
amazing article,

slightly out of context, are there any 3rd party accessibility testing and consulting companies who specialize in web applications?
I used to stress over the bad comments and ratings. Now I have so many ratings on my apps, and so many comments, one guy doesn't have any impact. I've actually had my best sales day when a terrible comment was the first comment on the "lite" version of the app.

Also, the lite/free versions get really hateful and terrible comments often. The people who like the app seem to rate, but not comment much of the time.

Long story short, I just don't sweat it anymore. I don't even think people read (or at least believe) comments, especially the ones that are just mean.

I just try to build a great app, take the good with the bad, dwell on the positive comments, look for insights into problems in the bad comments, then ignore the rubbish.
Does this remind anyone else of the Peek? http://www.twitterpeek.com/

It seems like this might make Facebook more accessible for some group of Facebook users who aren't so computer savy. A dedicated device where you don't have to login, but you can see your families updates, interact, send messages, see pictures.

Also just did a quick check: http://whois.domaintools.com/facebookOS.com It's been registered since 2007, so it's certainly not something that's been off the radar from them.
I think they're sorted in ascending order of appreciation ;)
I think low ratings on apparently decent free apps are mostly down to users not reading the app's description, finding it doesn't do what they (semi-randomly) imagined it would, and marking it poorly in the pre-iOS 4 rate-on-delete pop-up.

My most recent app politely and unobtrusively asks to be reviewed after 10 uses, on the thinking that users who've stuck it this long probably don't hate it. I forget which other app I learned this trick from, but it seems to have helped a little.
Sadly, his consideration for where to go is probably "where am I least likely to be shot?"
It isn't a rumor. It really has stopped. A few months ago, with iOS 4.
What junk is this? I need an account to view the second page?
I am not renting the privilege of using my computer from Intel; I purchased a piece of hardware they happen to produce. I own it now, and I shouldn't have to maintain a relationship with Intel any more than I should have to continue paying fees to Honda for the car I own outright.

Corporations are renting the privilege of using Exchange from Microsoft because they want a corporation to stand behind their email system. If they didn't want to maintain a relationship with a major corporation, they could just as easily have done it with open-source software.

Cisco is entitled to sell me more sophisticated software, but not to prevent me outright from using the hardware I bought the way I want to with my own software. And they don't. My company wants features that would be too expensive with a unified Cisco solution, so we run Cisco phones flashed with custom open-source firmware connected to a Trixbox.
If you form your own opinions, there's no need to go foamy at the mouth when someone else's turn out to be wrong.

Maybe not.

But then again, this is a guy who has built an entire career (and industry, in fact) on exactly the opposite of what most of us practice here at hn.

While we build, he talks.

While we test, he guesses.

While we ask, he tells.

When we're right, we deliver value, When he's right, people just say, "Of course."

When we're wrong, shit stops working. When he's wrong, the PHBs still keep writing him checks.

When the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, someone should say so. Especially here.
> Most coffee shops aren't staffed for table service.

That's part of the point. If the coffee shop is so busy that the staff can't sweep the relatively small space, then they have no need to bother anyone to buy more. The bulk of my experience though, in both large cities and small towns, is that the staff spends plenty of time just hanging out.

> Customers interpret this signal in restaurants because there are social cues...

And those social cues are only social cues because restaurants train their wait staff to visit with the customers on a regular basis. The coffee shops are the only ones that don't seem to know this about the industry; if they started doing it, customers would learn the cues PDQ. (My pet theory for this is that coffee shops aren't run by restaurateurs; they're run by hobbyists, people like the article's author.)
They already are, by the ultimate opaque system, semi-random collections of human brains. Recall all the senses of the word "judge", after all; judges certainly take that into account as part of their human decisions.

This is more transparent and more subject to validation and verification. Are you sure you think this is actually a step backward?
Oh. Another "the next bubble is in academe" post. How interesting. It even has the same graph as all others. Fascinating.

Excuse my completely non-constructive comment, but am I the only one who thinks this topic has been dissected enough?
What I really like about PostgreSQL compared to e.g. MySQL is the support for partial indexes (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/indexes-partial.ht...).

Especially when keeping normalized data, it allows the easy creation of an index without having the need to index ALL records and blow up the b+tree
That's a funny coincidence that you'd mention that particular multiplication "fact". I never successfully memorized the whole 10x10 times table in elementary school. I memorized a subset initially, and did the others by factoring and re-grouping them into combinations of the ones I'd memorized. Gradually I memorized most of them simply from seeing the answer so many times, but 40 years later, 6x7 is about the only one I haven't yet memorized. I still work it out by factoring and re-grouping: 6x7 = 2 x 3x7 = 2 x 21 = 42. Though at this point I'm not sure if perhaps I've actually memorized it, and I recite that little sequence to myself out of habit rather than necessity.

(I don't recommend this approach; long division was quite painful until I got quicker at multiplication)
Continuing with the investigation of Lionhearted, this person might want to know the exact place of your "sensitive data", instead of searching your hundred gigs. I would suggest that you offer him that you'll return back to him the price that he paid and you won't inform the police. See how it goes with him.
I think the same rule holds with doctors as with programmers - there are tremendously arrogant people who use their position as a surrogate for competence, and there are people who really are competent and don't have much time to deal with fools.

The only way to tell the difference is to watch their results for a while.

Jacquesm mentions the "save my life" thread. Yeah. Read that. I'm one of the programmers would damn straight coach a physician on the proper way to design a course of treatment - until I know which of the above groups the physician in question falls into.
I find it kind of ridiculous that losses would need to exceed even $10,000 to be investigated. There's something wrong when a huge portion of our tax dollars goes into investigating, arresting and locking up non-violent offenders such as drug users and these cases involving theft are ignored.
"the future depends solely on you"

It always has. Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you always had to make your way on your own. And this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.

And as long as employers are promising stable employment, there will those who take them up on the offer.

I know a freelancer who never has trouble finding work, but I can't imagine that he doesn't worry about the economy preventing him from finding freelance work. In a company, I only have to worry if that particular company is doing well.
Not really. If your app is free and has something that vaguely resembles usefulness, you'll likely get a decent number of downloads. And if it reliably crashes, you'll get a decent number of people telling you as much. They usually seem willing to come back and retry the app on an update, though.
Am in a similar boat, most of my trusted friends who have given me good advice over time and could be good co-founders are not in the IT/CS area. ( What to do, I am from Mechanical/Industrial Engineering background)

The two friends who are extremely capable in this area of IT/CS, one of whom has a high interest coming on board with my start up, both have heavy constraints with family, requirement for financial stability and visa regulations.

In this case, I would disagree with PG' statement that not having friends as co-founders is a mark of no-confidence.
Your iPhone is limited by default but you are free to sever your relationship with Apple (jailbreak) and use it as you see fit.

Software is different.
Python, arguable most readable:

divisors = lambda n: (k for k in range(1, n / 2 + 1) if n % k == 0)
perfects = (n for n in itertools.count(1) if n == sum(divisors(n)))
I am not arrogant. I just have very little patience for incompetent stupidity!
Parts of a Thesis _ Getting Familiar  with this
Writing a thesis will be more challenging if one had no idea on what the parts of a thesis are. Any thesis, regardless of level consists of the same parts. Having an understanding of what these parts are will enable students to write their theses easily.
Your words and thoughts have physical power - Will Smith
Will is awesome.
WhoHasTlb? : Extracting TypeLib data from COM Objects
There's a limit to how much of a business's problems the customer should have to consider. I don't think very much about the co-working space's costs (are they spending more on marketing? What about faster internet? Building maintenance?), and I'm not thinking much about the coffee shop's costs.

I'm just starting with what a particular thing would cost me elsewhere, and offering to pay that to someone else.

Also, I'm trying to avoid going into specifics because they won't help us understand why coffee shops should work on their customer interaction, but I can assure you that our local co-working space has much higher monthly expenses than any of our coffee shops.
While I am not positive with whether I agree or disagree with your lunch hour statement. I would like the test re-done, but in Europe or Brazil, just not the USA. At multiple points, the article seems to be pointing out in so many words that Americans would do this because we are too busy or indifferent. But I am honestly interested if this was done in say London right outside a tube that lets off a majority of federal workers like L'Enfant to best replicate the scenario.

And honestly, I do not know if it would do any better in London or elsewhere. For anyone to say would probably be basing it on the stereotypes that the author alluded to. But what would really happen?
If this person bought it in person from the thief, then the cops can get him to identify the thief. If it's ebay, then this person can tell you the account username. Maybe they'll uncover something big, like an underground ring of thieves.
This is one of my big complaints about the app store too. I've had one user get a refund on my app, but Apple wouldn't tell me why or give me any way to understand what happened. All I got from Apple was the boilerplate, make sure you app doesn't crash etc...

One thing Apple could do to make the app store a much better experience for developers is to set up some type of communication exchange between the developers and users. They could still keep it anonymous, but when Apple issues an update that breaks my app and then takes over 10 days to approve my 1 line of code fix I'd like to let my users know that it's out of my hands.

I have also tried adding my direct email in the app and have never received an email from a user. Admittedly, I have a lot less users than you do though.
Mobile Colloquy makes it really easy to get into our chat room ("Join Support Room" button if you don't have any IRC connections enabled, and again on the view we have to let people join rooms).

There's maybe one person every two or three weeks that comes into the IRC room from the app asking for support. And one person every day or so, who just wants to chat (and doesn't stick around for > a minute or two).

But, we've gotten some very useful bug reports from it -- and users who stuck around after it was fixed to report that it was indeed fixed.
I'll respond out of order:

But a child rapist has no major impact on economic productivity, so... yeah, I'm starting to see the problem with this mercenary approach to sentencing.

This is almost trivial to account for, though, as long as you have a person looking at the numbers and making a decision - even if a judge sees that there's a large price tag if he sentences a child rapist, he's still going to do it, because the monetary value equivalent to "letting a child rapist back out into the world" is going to be ridiculously high, probably on the order of many millions of dollars. Same thing for other very serious crimes.

Where it gets more interesting is cases like "college kid caught carrying eight pounds of marijuana", where there's no clear and present threat to anyone if the kid was given some sort of reduced sentence.

If we can predict that, shouldn't we also be estimating the cost of the crimes they won't be committing?

Sure, why not? In theory we lock people up because it helps society, right? So why wouldn't we want to consider all the possible higher order effects of different sentences on society as a whole?

The problem is mainly that figuring out these effects can be very difficult, and I suspect that some of the second and third order effects end up being comparable in magnitude to the first order ones (direct cost of sentencing).

Plus, in many cases we're really locking people up to satisfy a thirst for vengeance, not necessarily to help society in any way whatsoever. It would be nice if we had a better measure of what it actually costs us, though.
It's not going to be used that crudely. The child rapist is going to get a hefty sentence regardless of the cost because people want to punish serious crimes more than they want to save a couple of bucks.

Where it does come in handy is for relatively minor crimes[1], serving as a spur to consider whether the cost of incarceration is really offset by the benefits to society.

[1] Things like drug offenses, etc.
Arrogance born out of genius is more than tolerable. But arrogance born out of mediocrity, ignorance or insecurity is a more common and toxic blend.
I heard a line in a comedy the other night: "I never compromise. Because if you compromise, you're admitting you aren't right."

On the other hand, being arrogant and stubborn about the truth is a virtue in my opinion.

I take it you're not married. And if you are, please write a book about this policy and its effects if you use it frequently ;-)

Also, an issue about being stubborn about the truth is that there can be as many versions of the "truth" as there are actors in the situation. Typically people don't deliberately argue positions they think are untrue. See crime witnesses or religious people for powerful examples.
OEmbed - embedded representation of a URL on third party sites
Ha. My wife is a physicist and appreciated that one. She's not like that - but we know lots of her colleagues who are.
Interesting, it worked with no issues for me and I am not a member (confirmed as it still shows the "log in" link at the top).
Screenshot: "A Fire Upon the Deep" sequel (2011)
Pgpool-II 3.0 officially released
Here's what I did with it: I imagined founders chained to startups they hate.
Very good post. It very much reminded me the leadership course I participated this summer (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1392406), in which they distinguished the difference between Transformative Learning and Informative Learning.

Informative learning adds to our current bucket of
knowledge.

Transformative	learning examines the buckets themselves – our worldview and our various frames of reference relevant to this aspect or that aspect of what we are studying.

While both learning are valuable. Maybe our current education system focus too much on the latter. It might be good to have more Transformative Learning to facilitate shifting of Worldview and Frames of Reference in school.
It's heartbreaking Doyle couldn't step outside of himself to see what a wonder he had created. I didn't read them until I was an adult and was astonished at the contrast with the Rathbone Holmes movies I'd seen as a kid. The Holmes stories deserve their immortality because not only are they well-written, they approach genius.
I think you're trying to cast the "He's a thief, QED!" opinion as the "black and white" opinion while you have the more sophisticated "it depends" opinion, but I think you've got it backwards. The reason why it is important to strongly denounce thievery is actually the second-order effects. A thief almost always "needs" what they have stolen more than the person they stole it from, but that's not the interesting point. The interesting point is that in a society without strong property laws, it is vastly harder to claw your way out of poverty and you have a huge general problem with crime taking a bite out of society's ability to progress. This isn't good for anybody, not even the proximate thief who will still be better off in a prosperous society than one dragged down by pervasive crime.

The hard-line "He's a thief" attitude is the sophisticated view, and wishy-washy "well, I suppose he needs it more than the first guy" is actually the morally-thin cop-out that refuses to consider the greater good.
Why is this written so poorly?

"Both have deep operating system experience."

"But he knows operating systems and he knows mobile."

"Papakipos is considered a rockstar developer, and there are any number of jobs he’d be able to do at Facebook."

"But that doesn’t answer the question of why he’d leave the Chrome OS project before it was finished. It would have taken something really interesting to lure him away. Something like a Facebook Phone, for example."

"Or who knows, the whole project might get killed before it sees light. All we know for sure is that Hewitt and Papakipos are working on something very stealthy together. And we have a source that tells us that stealthy thing is a Facebook phone."
I doubt this is true, but I hope it is. The more non-carrier companies with money in the wireless space the better. Maybe AT&T and the rest of them will have to give up some control when every major software company is competing for it.

In six months: the Oracle phone. You heard it here first.
Very good article. Well written. The idea is definitely one to consider when interacting with others. Without it, common ground is hard to find. His quote, "Every single action that you take determines your world. And that is why perspective is so important to consider. We co-exist with billions of other people that live in their own worlds..." is so true.
You mean putting a dollar number on a human life? This is done everyday by actuaries primarily for insurance purposes.
99% of gold supplies are controlled outside stock markets
This is good advice - from the timestamp and IP address in the header of the email, the ISP in question may even be able to tell law enforcement (i.e. with a subpoena, if necessary) the actual user. It's not as cut-and-dried as it used to be, given the existence of public WiFi, but there's a lot of information in log traces. Avail yourself of it. Quickly.
Why are so many teenagers arrogant? Perhaps it's the same with programmers and is just a phase, as suggested by this fascinating essay:

http://www.johnbyrd.org/html/bosslevel/ProgrammerModes.html
Ask HN: would you use a shared memcached hosted on popular VPS sites?
Hi HNers.

I wondered what are is your opinion on something that might be useful for VPS users. Take Linode as an example: the traffic between linode VPS is free inside the same datacenter.

Regarding memcache, when you need another memcached node, you would need to pay another VPS, only for the RAM. On Linode the ram cost is exactly 25.6 MB/$ no matter the plan you choose.

Imagine a service that would let you rent a shared memcached server for, say, 5 dollar to access a (max) 400MB memcached. Each memcached server would be limited to, say, 10 users. You would then have access to potentialy tens of MB from a fast memcached near your existing VPS at Linode.

This memcached would be shared: you would need to have unique keys, prefixed, for example, by a unique string. You could not store sensitive data on it, as anyone could read/destroy your cache, but depending on your application, that could not be a problem for you. I hear you, you are thinking : but that's not useable! What if everyong is deleting my cache the whole time ? Well, I answer you : there must be a way to avoid that ! SASL is one answer. That's not the question right now as I'm just thinking about the interest of people in such a thing.

Would you use such a service ? How much are you willing to pay to have access to such a memcached shared instance?

Thanks for taking the time to reply ! Contact me on #startups (nick henri) if you want to chat :)

ps: the goals would be to have many memcached servers in the different linode datacenters, as well as EC2, slicehost, etc..
Because you mentioned:

>your private key is not private anymore

and:

>the attacker who gets your key gets instant access to all other machines you access with that key.

Which is wrong. They don't get your key. They get the ability to authenticate as you while you are connected, and nothing else.
I was wondering the other day, does Facebook store the chat history? Is it legal for them to keep that data?