skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed -- I'm the same way.

I can't speak for all the deaf people out there, but personally, I find it uncomfortable to leave my hearing aid in all day, which means I'll often remove it if I'm just working at my desk, and won't hear someone come up behind me.

My last job had an environment where everyone had their backs to the entrance of their cube and I would constantly be startled by people walking up behind me without me hearing or seeing that they were there. It's very unpleasant and actually started making me a little neurotic. It didn't help that the floor in that office was kind of shaky, so you'd also feel it whenever someone walked by.

My current job still has cubes, but the desks aren't attached to the cube walls (we mostly use IKEA Galants) and pretty much everyone has their cube set up so they face out. It's a much more pleasant environment to work in, and since we work in a converted factory it means I look up to a fantastic view of downtown Akron through a bank of windows. I'm much less neurotic now (at least about this... ;)) and all the natural light has actually done a lot to help my sleeping patterns, too.
Firefox Browser Never Coming to iPhone
VMS also ran on Dec-Alpha.

The main problem was that a single Alpha could replace an awful lot of VAX HW and so to claw the profit back, the license fees meant a VMS Alpha was about 3x the price of the same machine running NT.

We used to buy NT Alphas and install Linux - to compete with Sun Sparcs.
Well, I agree with you as far as the attitude, I'd think most men would, and was surprised that on a "build yourself up" board like HN, everybody fainted and was shocked by my sexism. Heh.

Anyways -- on that point -- the different social levers available to men and women VASTLY dwarf any differences in aggregate earning or typical education level. Men have all of those things you mentioned and that enables us to do certain things and act a certain way, women have a very different set of tools.

And those that complain about the situation? Not going to get very far in life.
Swedish atheist here. I got 13 out of 15 on their quiz, which put me in the 97th percentile. What did other HN:ers get? I suspect similar numbers..
unfuddle has an awesome private free plan, used them for years for both subversion and git hosting.

http://unfuddle.com/about/tour/plans
20 Success Quotes for the Entrepreneur at their Best | Under30CEO
This already hit the front page twice yesterday and wound up dead both times.

But while it's not dead, I'll make the point I was planning on making yesterday: people with the minority non-default position on an issue will often know more about an issue than the people with the default position... but this isn't always a good thing.

If you did a survey of 9/11 truthers, I'm sure you'd find they were way better at answering questions about the trivial minutiae of the event ("Which tower was hit first? When did WTC 7 collapse?") than the general public. Holocaust deniers probably know more about the precise location of Auschwitz and the chemistry of Zyklon B than the general public, too.

I'm not saying atheists are wrong (in fact I'm almost certain they're right), I'm just saying they shouldn't get too self-congratulatory about this survey.
Look at the history of some of Paramount's divisions (book vs film/tv). I remember there was some threats of lawsuits there.
Hello HN,

Please check out the latest collaboration between myself and bmahler - Instant Search for iPad.

I'd love to hear what this community thinks, is this something you would use? What would you like added to make it more useful?
I've never really had any interest in how an ALU works. I use one every day, and I take it for granted. But after seeing what an ALU looks like, in video game terms, the scale and complexity becomes apparent. Now I'm absolutely fascinated.
I am somewhat confused....

Unless that have managed to remove the moisture from the dessication media as it enters the filters, these packets will saturate within minutes in a climate like summer Houston. Therefore not only will the desiccant have NO effect on the moisture level, but it will increase the load on the fan motor to keep air flow at an acceptable level.

Can someone please clarify how they are moving the moisture outside the control volume?
Seriously no-one needs Dick management.

Some may need more support, more monitoring and so on but no-one needs to be spied on.

Give them the freedom but have five minute chats with each one each morning so you can see if they're making progress. These aren't heavy things, they're quick informal updates, what are the problems, what's done that wasn't, can I see a quick demo and so on. Outside of that you leave them alone.

If you can't do this yourself because you don't have time then get each of your seniors to do a couple of the more junior guys.

If they're not making progress then they have a case to answer and ultimately moving towards a position where if they don't improve you are looking at getting rid of them (legally, even in the UK this is possible if you show they aren't performing given reasonable chances).

Monitoring progress is fine, that's management. Insisting on watching what someone is doing all the time is something else.
He's also planning to give python classes: http://codelesson.com/python (discussed in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724354)
TechStars New York Is Moving In With Pivotal Labs
In criminal cases I can see it often being necessary to within a day or two

Oh, if only. Digital evidence is seeing a lot more acceptance in recent years - but just recently there has been a sudden resistance to it, partly, I think, because of all the noise being made in the media about the ease of faking such things and the prevalence of viruses.

Oftentimes an audio recording tagged to within a couple of days will be fine.

But don't rely on that - it could easily be rejected out of hand by a judge who is not convinced.

Any sort of ambiguity in digital evidence and timestamps is being frowned on at the moment - at least here in the UK.
The Symbian open source experiment has failed
From looking at the code it seems that node.js is very tied to V8.

It would be a lot of work to abstract the js core.
Very true! Most things can be solved that way. But sometimes your issues are not googleable. I remember back when I was just learning javascript, it would never in my wildest dreams occur to me that there were host objects and that you couldn't write over them, since I'd only used compiled languages before... it took 5 seconds for my friend to start laughing when he looked at my code because I had named a variable "top."
Technically, MN and ND have a reciprocity agreement where residents of one state that work in the other can pay tax in the state they are residents of and not the state they are earning money from. It is generally there because of the Grand Forks / East Grand Forks and Fargo / Moorhead areas crossing states.
Ask HN:Why do in-ear plugs have left and right marked on them?
Is there anything different in how the two plugs are built?

Is there any difference in how our left and right ear works?

I find that due to my obsessive compulsiveness, I waste a few seconds every time I use them in making sure that I am putting them on correctly!

EDIT: In addition, does it have an effect on your hearing experience if you put the left ear plug in your right ear and vice versa? If not, then why bother marking them?
My searchyc foo is weak, but I think this was done a few weeks ago.

And also, this is directly part of Microsoft advertising on Reddit. Since HN doesn't have ads...

Not saying they wouldn't ever do it, just that's how it got on Reddit in the first place.
Strikes me more as garden-variety fearmongering than anything useful.
FWIW, the random number wasn't always large enough to be unguessable:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490788
I play with QNX when you could boot the entire OS from a floppy.
It seems like node performs better at the bottom of the curve where most of us are likely to be.

Can the performance issues be solved by adding hardware? (or spin up more node processes so that each one stays at the bottom of the curve?
Nice find. This is why it's 'not optimal' as Thomas puts it. Does anyone want to test what happens at different privacy settings? Sorry, I don't really use facebook.
What do you do when it loses power and you have to land?

(and WTF is with the greenwashing statement that guy made?)
Perhaps we should invite them to an HN ama?
The Chuckie movies?
I understand that git is the new hip version control, but if everyone uses it with a 'master' branch... why bother? Why not just use subversion? It defeats the whole purpose of using a distributed version control system.
> The problem is that there is a latency hit required for a thread running on node 0 to access memory on node 1. Furthermore, this uses Hypertransport on AMD or QPI on Intel, which has limited bandwidth so if you get too many off-node memory accesses, performance begins to suffer.

Does it suffer more than hitting the disk?
My understanding is that the Xmonkeys are not nearly so amenable to embedding as node. There are some server implementations of older monkeys, though:

* whitebeam http://whitebeam.org/, which to my surprise appears to be not actually dead yet.

* jaxer http://jaxer.org/

* couchdb

But none of these seem to be low level enough to make a reasonable comparison.

Flusspferd http://flusspferd.org/ seems most like node, but using spidermonkey (circa Firefox 3.5, it seems, but actively maintained, so there's hope for future enhancements). Unfortunately, it doesn't yet seem to have all the handy web serving stuff that node has, so probably still not useful for a competitive benchmark.
The most surprising part of that was the ad revenue.

I wouldn't think the HN crowd are big ad clickers (if they see the ads in the first place).
I also have a day job (like many aspiring startup founders here I guess), so I expected to find some insight here :) (some way to cheat some sleep patterns, cramming code in some way or whatever).

So, in your case, you only do some coding on your day off and Saturday-Sunday afternoons/nights? Guess I'll be on the same boat.

The post then wanders into digressions on Focus, self improvement and other observations that read very disconnected to me, and took away from the main point of the post (they may be valuable, but I'll have to process and digest them myself, as they aren't explained much, just thrown together).

I don't want to sound harsh, just some constructive criticism which I hope better blog writers than myself can expand (or refute :) ).
I can understand the usefulness of awk if say only C, C++, Java/C# existed, but given that it's just easy and fast as Awk to code something useful and powerful using something modern like either Ruby and Python; I just fail to see the point.

O yeah and let's not forget Perl.
And notice how they changed "requirement" to "objectives" in:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=11...

Does that mean it isn't manditory? This is basically what I was saying here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1718230

imo politicians are all about talk and bills, but when it comes down to making things easier on the handicapped, lobbyists win out.
I talked with Brendan Eich in New York after JSConf.eu and he was suggesting they might be looking at porting the V8 API to Jägermonkey after they release it so that it can run Node.
Art is also pointless in most cases, but--and I'm sure some will disagree with this--there's a value in the process and in what is produced. Whether it be real or virtual. I think this holds true for the logic circuit guy too.

Also, there's no way to know if someone who posts something online "need's help" so that seems liks a pointless debate to me.
The Seven Greatest Embarrassing Early Movie Roles
These movies are obscure and will vanish…until you become famous, and then they return to haunt you. Such as!
I think the editorializing of the headline is unnecessarily negative (read biased). There is obviously an issue Ryan is working on addressing but Node is clearly already providing performance which is suitable for many server workloads.
Don't blame Perl. Blame the programmers and your methodology that allowed them to do that.
I imagine Facebook photos get so much traffic they wouldn't even notice.
Songs are recorded in left and right channels, for the stereo effect.
Should Facebook Buy Skype?
Why Aussie beer-vending start-ups are tough work
jerf was being sarcastic and transitioned to his point with "Ahem". Let us all celebrate the ambiguity of text.
Back in the 80s I wrote a 500-line program analysis tool in Awk. One day the woman I was going out with handed me a printout I had left at her place, saying something along the lines of "here's your awk code". She wasn't a programmer so I was stunned that she knew it was Awk, and very impressed too.

Years later I ran into Brian Kernighan at a conference and told him the story, ending it with "and that's when I knew she was the woman for me." He looked at me like I was nuts.
I cannot tell you how many time I have have posted a question to USENET, hit send, and then had an AHA! moment.
I've never taken a marketing course, but it kinda felt like that was part of some general template. The first part is <attempt to relate to audience with inside jokes> followed by the rest of the stuff.

Of course, this backfired spectacularly for them.
A friend of my dad's was really good at finding gaps in the rule books of dirt track speedway. Like, for instance, it might specify you could only have a radiator of a certain capacity in the car to cool the engine, but it didn't specify where it had to be mounted. If you can find somewhere with less mud being thrown at it or better air flow, then you've got a competitive advantage.

Eventually some Nascar teams became aware of him. He told them his time was worth a lot of money. "Money's not a problem!" "If you're serious you'll send me a blank check."

Two teams sent him checks. He filled in some unnamed amount, waited to see if it cashed and then ripped up the other one.

He spent a few months in the States, came back, and bought himself one of the biggest houses in town.

Sometimes chutzpah pays off. :)
no, everyone can see my monitor as they walk by. Pretty much everyone except for our CEO (confidential info, etc.) has their monitor visible as you walk by.
This guy learned how to make a 16-bit ALU (Which in my opinion is a great amount of experience) and got a job offer from playing a game on his spare time.

Hackers that play video games want to learn and try out different things with the game, not only play it. I myself am really interested in how the game is saved (How chunks is designed, etc.) and is now currently studying linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise on my spare time because that's how Minecraft design the dynamic world.

Hackers that have decrypted or learned how the game is saved will make tools to ease work, and/or to visually view their world, or to see it from a different perspective.

Minecraft has made hackers design map-editors, cartograms and other things, including a 16-bit ALU in-game.

Making programs and learning how stuff works is a net gain for the community.
I don't think that's true.

Have you ever heard a priest or reverend telling people "Naah, I don't really recommend reading the Bible at all"?

Ever heard a rabbi saying "Nope, reading that Talmud thing is a complete waste of time"?

An imam going "Fuck, the Koran is way too long for you folk to read, why don't you just have a squiz at the Cliff's Notes?"

Religious leaders genuinely and honestly believe that their religions are true, so they certainly don't think that you'll believe it less if you find out more about it. Any religious leader out there would be only too happy to help his followers to learn more about their religion if they were interested.

edit: On the other hand, it could be that many lay-religious folks -- the people who officially belong to their parents' religion but aren't really interested in it -- might deliberately avoid thinking too much about their own religion, because they secretly suspect that if they did then they'd be obliged to abandon it. They have the sort of faith that can only be maintained by not thinking too much about it.
My dad owns two Lexus's. I've driven them extensively. I agree the attention to detail and quality are high. In my opinion, Lexus does fall into the "great experience" category. I guess your "german cars suck" comment got me riled up.

Windows 7 is modeled after OS X. Android was modeled after the iPhone. If you are designing a new product, you have to go out and see what's out there and learn from it.

Someone who has never used one of these high end products simply doesn't know.

It I started a blogging platform today, and all I had ever used was Xanga, I would probably build something 10% better than Xanga. And it would suck.
I would integrate somewhere the kindle for web as a preview of the content if it's already possible to embed it.
I think it bothers me because they're probably the two least productive employees we have. I want to address this issue - the first step to me seems to be "well, what do they do all day?"
Aha I didn't even think of that. Chuckie was just insane though. I'm thinking of a Matrix Revolutions for Toy Story.
How do you prove the e-mail wasn't changed? At least gmail allows you to upload pretty much anything (which is useful when migrating mail), and may not be able/willing to turn over (old) logs.
I'd love to see what architectures are being used server side to make these instants work.

According to google, it's not map reduce.
Yeah. The argument is based on reduce not being clear and easy to understand, which is frustrating to those of us who actually find map/reduce/filter to be more clear, not less.
It is recommended to use multiple node processes on multi-core servers since node is single-threaded.
If you fork it, will they come?
Dude, make the cover clickable to buy.
"point" can be a verb too. :-)

Just today I renamed a method someone named "showButton" because I thought

result = showButton()

was a call that showed the button and returned a boolean result. In reality it just returned a boolean based on if it was configured to show a button. The new name: "shouldShowButton"

But then I got to thinking… well… maybe I'm suggesting that the button should be shown…

There's something to be said for context.
Do not store the output of a build in your VCS alongside your code
Great idea. If there's an API to hook into - then YES!
those are examples, not absolutes. You can't spend your whole life using commodity products and then think you can build a better one by adding a feature.

Audi and VW are essentially the same company. Have you driven an Audi? The polish and finish on that car is incredible.
Clicky: http://bit.ly/icount
Honestly, I don't think there could have. Take for example, the question on spell checking. The right response, IMO, would have been. "Given everything else we needed to do and still needs to do, this is pretty far down on the priority list."

I'm sure that would have been disliked just as much as their response, which I actually sort of liked as it went into more detail about how items get prioritized.

But a general tip to the IE team... you can tell customers your decisions, not how you arrived at them. In general the most vocal people will be those that disagree with your decisions, and can then attack how you made the decisions.
You know what they say, those who can't, teach.
Well, the CPM was pretty abysmal: about $.40.
I am always amazed how few developers document their code.

I always hear:

"I write code that is easy to read" - Great but well written code can't... tell you why it was done this way, what it is actually supposed to do, how people should use it, how people shouldn't use it.

"I don't have time" - When is a developers time constrained by typing? Unless you type one word a minute you have time type create documentation.

Documentation is even helpful when creating the code. As ideas or thoughts change medium... from brain to paper or to sentence form. I see the problem differently, which gives them better understanding before wasting time creating something that isn't going to work.

Documentation is also helpful for two other people: Those who are not you and your slightly older self.
NEW IT Rules for Media - Do you know them?  You should.
I'm fairly confident it is true, though. While you won't hear such things said, they definitely won't advise you on a "History of Christianity" reading list.

In fact what your talking about is reading the religious book, which is only useful for a small portion of information about a religion. For most religions it's not even a very good briefing a) because it's usually obscure and open to interpretation (which the cleric will do for you) and b) because it often doesn't deal with the practices of the religion.

At their core religious leaders aim to propagate their religion; so they will steer people away from things that might put followers off (note: probably not intentionally).

If you were an adherent and showed an interest then, sure, I doubt they would actively discourage you. But they might direct you at "nicer" material, and they certainly won't encourage interest in the disinterested :)
outselling your competition is one way to define success (admittedly, a huge way).

But another important factor is to follow your heart, have a vision, build what you want to build.

The most successful companies (Apple, Zappos, Amazon, Google) have strong founders/leaders with strong visions for what they want to build.

Those companies could easily pivot and make more money if they wanted to
As far as I know, this piece of code (containing a lambda, map and filter) is standard idiomatic python:

[ (student.name, 'A') for student in students if student.grade > 90]

I'd assert that first class functions are idiomatic python as well and are also critical for python programming. They play an integral part of django, for example.
The Dropbox Syncing Text Editor iPad App Smackdown
[pdf] Abstract Machines of Systems Biology
Developers More Optimistic About Android's Long-Term Future than iPhone's
One of my professors in college would bring a small teddy-bear to the lab. Whenever one student wanted to ask a question, he would just put the teddy bear on top of the monitor, and you'd have to talk to the teddy bear first.

It seemed ridiculous, but it worked wonders. Most of the time said professor didn't have to open his mouth. It was just a matter of organizing your thoughts in a coherent way.
Ha, and here's me thinking it was I that was feeding the trolls, perhaps we're into trollish recursion here. He trolled me, I trolled him back, you're trolling me now. Touché?

In fact what he was trying to do was pass off as truth several controversial and highly volatile statements without proper [on-topic] opportunity for retort wrapped up as an argument against Microsoft's effort to troll Reddit.

>Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them.

The Catholic church certainly has much to blame with how they've handled the revelation of child abuse amongst it's followers. However, the current situation can not faithfully be described as ignorant. If the head of the IE9 dev team were meeting people in person who'd had been "victim" to the beta, then perhaps there's some comparison. Maybe if it were a metaphor for their past behaviour - but this is the rub, there are huge [unsupported] assumptions required to leap to the point at which this metaphor is even valid. That then isn't addressing whether it's useful.

My post was intended to be inflammatory in interpreting his statements in a way that would clearly (to me) conflict with his views without giving him a genuine avenue for reply. Trollish, perhaps, but there ya go I'd assume that the thread would be downvoted and ignored generally on the basis of the OC content but instead it was being heavily voted up. Perhaps reddit is down?