skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Several years ago, computers running Win9X in the company I worked for would stop booting, complaining about missing loader or somesuch. IT was puzzled and couldn't figure out what was going on - no data was missing and hardware seemed fine. A windows repair would fix it until it happened again a few weeks later with someone else.

This happened for a year or so until I was making changes to a code I had written in the past, in a method that would delete all files from a temp folder it had created. I noticed a rare case where it could fail to get the folder name and clean up non-recursively the drive root instead (wiping some windows boot files and mostly nothing else).

I then learned why you validade arguments and check return codes.
Thousands in city conned by cheaper energy scam
Improving the world with ad-hoc bathroom signage
Sure. I am not a fan of electronic voting either. Paper based voting is fine, because anyone can understand and audit it in principle. Auditing electronic voting is at least as hard as debugging.

If the general population can understand the inner workings of democracy, they are probably much more likely to embrace it.

(Though still, electronic voting and free form ballots are completely unconnected.)
I can finally dig out my old U.S. Robotics 2400 baud modem and start doing some low-bandwidth voice communication!

Seriously, though, the samples are very impressive. I was surprised at the quality.
Maybe the equity markets. The bond markets not so much.
Thank the good Lord for Safari Reader.
I think that your comment actually illustrates what jgc was getting at better than he did :)
I wanted to make a joke about how hard can it be to be number one on Google for "kowalczyk".

Turns out it's the fifth most common surname in Poland so pretty tricky.

Facts ruin way too many perfectly good jokes.
More specifically, a Scheme. Racket is nice.
"Fully operational battle station"?
Correct. In fact, one might think the OP used "SEO" for "SEO" of this blog post.
I would liken it to a JIT compiler in Java, though.
As entrepreneurs, we need both Conway and the Super Angels. It's time for everyone to get over these unfortunate meetings and forgive the participants. Enough is enough.

Did they do something wrong? Hell yes. But it's been exposed, examined, and discussed. Publicly stoning a group of angels represents the worst kind of mob behavior and reflects poorly on entrepreneurs as an investment class. Let's not forget that wealthy individuals have many different options for investing their money that historically have higher rates of return (i.e. make more money) than investments in startup companies. Many angels invest in startups because it's more fun than profitable. Let's not change that dynamic in spite of ourselves.

At the end of the day, we want angel investing to be the biggest game possible. It's a surplus of angel money that has put entrepreneurs in the driver's seat and made term sheets extremely favorable to founders. Fewer angels in the mix and the scenario can change quickly.

It's time to prove that we're better than a small group of angels who engaged in such unfortunate behavior. It's time to forgive and move on.
"Getting Real", their first book, is great also. Plus, you can read it free online, which makes it a no-brainer if you haven't read it already - http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
Yes. Booting up every VM would take too long. Cloning them just before you execute the payload is the way to go.

(At least as long as you have a general purpose operating system. A special paravirtualised would probably not need to make much of a difference between booting and resuming. But that's only a theoretical musing for your circumstances.)
it's not a memo, it's a mission statement.
Netflix shares soar after Blockbuster bankruptcy
Things like 'focus follows mouse' that I want will never work on Mac OS, because I cannot tinker with the OS.

Clearly, things are better if stuff 'just works', but if you have a critical need that isn't being met, open source at least gives you the possibility to fix it, even if it's "expensive".
There are definitely limits. I'm not suggesting you use a 20 year old technology like MFC. However, using .NET 3.5 instead of 4.0? Just fine.
You mention that anyone who deals with computers "ends up training themselves to spot minute details that are incorrect or out of place". I agree, but would also come at it from the other direction; people who are inclined to spot minute details are good at dealing with computers.
Hitler finds out about AngelGate
Patent Office Says Another 'Worst Patent' Should Be Rejected As Obvious
Yes. Though I wouldn't include New Zealand in the list of random 3rd world countries.
The irony in this comment is delicious, in that by posting it, you've found a way to feel superior to me. Congratulations!

You also completely misinterpreted what I was saying, but I suspect you're not interested in that anyway.
Reddit steals other sites' logos, day 21: Y Combinator
Many thanks for the tip.

This is my new plan of last resort if I can't prevent the current sandbox from failing.
I don't know if I would want my driving managed by Comcast.
Exactly. I think there's a lot of smart people in the Valley, but every time I hear a story like this, it sounds more and more like a clubhouse for middle schoolers.
Hm, nothing too severe. Once I didn't check that the config files used a dummy smtp server before running the unit tests for sending order confirmation emails, it was probably a bad idea to be using real data too :)

Just required an apologetic email to customers, no real fallout.
Spending a day figuring out why a new routine wasn't called only to realize there is another copy in /usr/local/bin of the same program that took precedence in the path.

Having the cleaning lady unplug the air conditioner to vacuum inside a glass enclosed server cage (fancy office) and to walk in there in the morning. It was like walking in to a wall of heat, amazingly most of the machines still worked, but we did end up replacing all of them.
I accidentally down voted you on this. 100% unintentional. I wish there was a way of reversing it.
Thanks for the advice. Yeah I would definitely be doing it part-time. Yeah I too want a better comfort level with accounting, finance, contracts esp and hopefully topics like big acquisitions ;)
Hoped this would be for the comments page -- would love one that didn't reorder the comments as they are rated.

I find it desperately hard to find what's new when revisiting a comment thread, unless I've posted in it and can go in via "threads".
I guess that's why the .com appears to be squatted.
Yeah, for a lesser investment than that, they could put some basic sensors on so I'm not waiting with 10 other cars while a green light stays on 30 seconds in the other direction for absolutely nobody. "Improving traffic lights" is pretty low-hanging fruit.
Agree that nothing can replace good counsel in a sticky situation. I just want a greater comfort level on the topics.
Normally, does getting a job at YouTube require the same hoops to jump through as getting a job at Google, or are their HR departments and processes separate still?
Bloody seabird flavor!

Implementation is the albatross.
How entrepreneurs can counter collusion amongst investors
Cool... though the site doesn't say what rubinius is for us clueless folk (at least I could find it under the overview).

Did some googling though. Nice work! :)
Hey, author of YouTube Instant here. I just want to say one thing: I'll never stop hacking. Expect to see lots more from me in the future!
I live near Chicago so I am thinking either the part-time program at Northwestern or UChicago. Definitely considering the Berkeley-Columbia program also.
I'll bite:

In my undergrad Operating Systems we used Minix and were expected to rewrite various parts of the system ourselves as our class projects. We were all given our own systems in a smallish lab used only for this class so we didn't need to save anything. About halfway through the semester one of my classmates mistyped a cd command, didn't realize it failed, and quickly did an rm -rf. This resulted in all their work for the semester being lost. Because we had all been given our own machines nothing had been saved. After this the rest of the class started backing up our work daily.
Awesome. I can't wait. Best of luck to you!
s/diffidence/deference
I've worked at Facebook all summer as an intern. Never have I been aware of any company policy that forbids side projects.
I'm afraid they lost the quarter of the audience that was active in submitting and digging content.
I figured that pg has kept HN feature and design limited so that the users can hack and chop it how they want it (eg. I have simple email thread alerts)
What is YouTube Instant?
I have great startup idea: It’s Hacker News ReDesign
Facts? A bunch of guys met for dinner and one of the regulars was not invited. That's about all the 'facts' that there are so far, the rest is just so much hot air.

If there is a 'smoking gun' then I'm not aware of it, for all we know they discussed golf and fishing.
For class, I built a RSA implementation that was susceptible to frequency analysis. That wasn't so bad, considering that I was a pupil, however the fact that I got an A+ for it was slightly strange.
You don't offer non-profits discounts because you necessarily agree with everything they do. Rather, you offer the discount because you agree with the entire concept of "non-profits".

Your opinion of a particular non-profit doesn't come in to play. And by being a way of donating without having to take sides it can actually be a benefit to you -- some businesses have been hurt by who they choose to support.

By offering a blanket discount to charities, you offer support to organisations trying to do good (even if you disagree with their definition) in a non-partisan way. Some of your customers will support some of them, others will support others.

Nearly all of your customers will support one cause or another. How could you choose? Non-profit discounts allow you to support good works without having to.
Also for pedestrian crossings, tear up the button controlled lights and put in a zebra crossing. Those are so much faster. No need for the pedestrian to wait (nor scramble across in a panicked hurry, if they are old or disabled), no timer keeping the cars waiting after the pedestrian already crossed, and no pressed buttons which operate the lights after the pedestrian has gone
Also, configuring the firewall to interrupt your ssh session.
Now I think about it in the light of day it doesn't solve the problem of too many articles getting submitted.
Cryptograms and the Allure of Secret Codes
The samples sound quite good, suspiciously good even.
I'll give it a try on speech samples from other languages and speakers (this often makes quite a difference).
For a story with so little actual substance this one is definitely creating a lot of waves.

When someone comes out with a transcript of what was said at the dinner I think we can move to the next phase, until then there is not much more that can either be said or done.

I'm sure that TC will try to keep this (successfully) on the front burner as much as they can but as far as I can see no new newsworthy facts have come out about what this dinner was actually about or who all of the remaining attendants were.

Dave McClure is now berated more for his writing style than for what he actually said, Ron Conway gets involved, it's a true photo opportunity for everybody and their dog to stick their oar in.

Reputations are to be made or broken, but over what, actually?
What are the IP implications?? Can FB claim the IP since he worked on it while working at FB?
meetup.com serves this purpose to a large degree. Unofficially, of course, but I think that is part of what makes it effective.
Dave McClure Dials Up Fund for Twilio Start-Ups
Precision makes me happy. :-)
The browser extension found on the about page highlights new comments.
4 Book Sequels to Popular Movies…Best Left Unmade?
Here are some interesting examples of literary sequels to very popular movies which, arguably, would have best been left unmade.
During the week before Christmas, I had to rush a quick change into production that would allow us to split orders into multiple shipments. The software was fine, but an admin accidently booted the wrong server (that had a bad test version of the software) to send feeds to the UPS label printing server.

Two days later, 272 packages arrived at one customer's house in Minnesota.

She had a good laugh, and we managed to fix the problem in a couple of days without too much additional expense.

Lessons learned:

1. If something is wrong, I'd rather have it crash than give wrong results.

2. Get a good version control system.

3. Have good policies and procedures.

4. Don't change anything after December 1.

5. Don't ask me to do a rush job if I'm busy on Hacker News.
For interns that would be pretty weird anyway, after all, it's not like they are under the kind of employment contract where you could reasonably make the case for that.

In fact, your best interns probably do have side projects.
F/W 2010 Popular Gucci Hobos
Be Inspired (By Everything) 12
The twelfth edition of Be Inspired was almost a video special as most of the things I’d bookmarked were brilliant animations. But a little bit of print and web design wrestled its way in as well. Hope you enjoy.
I never doubted that :)

Good for you man, make a go of it there.

Was HN your 'launch spot' ?
I've been fairly lucky over the years (touch wood!) and for most hiccups I've had the wherewithal to get it fixed, restored or whatever before anyone noticed...

...Except the time I worked for a web dev company that had just set up a sideline selling product [1]. At that time we received maybe 5 orders per day and while I was integrating the payment gateway automation, we had to manually enter card info into a web interface. We had a lot of attempted orders from Nigeria so very strict verification was enabled and if you mistyped a cardholder name or address even slightly then it would fail.

So one day we get an order for around £150. I enter this guys card info into the page and hit send. Bam! "Not accepted: please try again". I re-check his info and it's fine except my capitalisation is slightly different. I adjust and try again. Same message. I try a couple more variations with no luck. I phone the customer and find his card actually has 'Mr' on it. I try that and nothing. I try 'Mr.'. And so on and so on. Eventually I give up and tell him to send a cheque but we'll dispatch today.

Couple of hours later we get a call from an irate Mr Johnny Customer. His bank have just informed him that we've charged 16 x £150 to his card. Turns out that the address verification would only fail after a charge attempt was made - and then a request made immediately to void. However, for debit cards, the voided process can take 3 days and his card was useless in the meantime.

Not too bad in the scheme of things, but this error was over 3 times my monthly wage at the time and I'd only been there 2 weeks.

[1] specifics removed as they've since gone on to become quite a big deal (from the solid foundations I built I presume!) and Google can be a harsh mistress.
Overall, I dislike it. On the plus side there are more stories to scroll through and the hover effect is nice. But I don't think that makes up for the font. Plus, when you scroll down there's no way to tell which column is comments and which is points.
I don't know much about voice encoding, but I'm really curious as to why all the example files are the same size (46.9 KB). Could someone explain why this is an advancement if the file sizes remain the same?

I suspect it has something to do with all of them using wav as the container, but would love to hear from someone more knowledgeable.
This Indian startup makes Gmail search “instant” fast
I rather like the changes made to Digg. I got tired every day of going to the site and reading things that organizations obviously wanted to digg up for the sake of hitting a larger audience.

Essentially, it boiled down to kind of like trying to get to the top of Google Search rankings. And often times it kind of felt like if you go to Google and type "abortion", you end up finding the front page filled with religious, anti-abortion sites that paid their way to the top.

I prefer the new format since it lets me get news I'm interested in. Nobody can game the system to "reach me".

They re-added the "top news" section if you want something similar to the old Digg style, but the changes overall are for the better.

The only seemingly negative part of the change is the wealth of comments. Many articles now have very few comments. It's a fair trade off though since I was getting extremely tired of the dribble of interest groups trying to pay their way to shut me out of getting information I want to read.

It's a different Digg, and I think the execution and move could have gone better than dumping it on people without significantly announcing the change. They could have retained more users and gotten more support for it if they did just a tad bit of marketing first.

Either way, I like the change and will continue to use the site.
I once offered a (computer scientist) friend of mine some chocolate. He said "I'll have one or two squares, please". I gave him three.
This ruby code needs refactoring
rsync --delete is the new rm -rf (it's bitten me more than once)
Oh, there are a LOT of things you're not aware of, bud.
This seriously doesn't need to be called Angel Gate. It took place in it's own venue - the "Bin38 Scandal" is far more appropriate (and sort of brings into perspective how ridiculous the real Watergate scandal's name is)
Yes, choosing .NET was based on his skills, but also the fact that I'll be focusing on product design and development of the front-end. That work is mostly platform independent.
I have another startup project that I'm building in Grails, and I love it, but MVC with Fluent nHibernate doesn't feel that different, lemme tell ya.

We just started building the site. We have our ORM, authentication, and DI all setup. I've created some mockups using Balsamiq and we're going to try to use Rally's product to keep us focused and on track.
Don't worry about it, the karma does not mean much to me. I am here for valuable discussion so long as I have enough karma to participate in the community it is no big deal. My gripe above was more the principal of the matter than the actual loss of points.
Hehe, that's funny. That's what you get for not specifying if you mean a binary or a logical or.
As the source files are not in a WAV format, a WAV format must be used to hear it in the browser (or file system).
It depends what prompts the feeling of 'loneliness' and how people interpret it. From what the article seems to say is that it was a self reported metric of '# of days I felt "lonely" in the last week'. They found that those close to those feeling lonely were loney as well.

If we interpret loneliness as an expected social interaction that doesn't take place -- then of course if one person refused to reciprocate or contact their friend, neighbour, or family member that other person will feel lonely, perhaps rejected in some way. So that's the "expected a social interaction that didn't take place" if then that person refuses to engage in social interactions then it turns into a sort of a network effect.
Ask HN: I realigned HN a bit, what do you think?
I've always wanted to tweak the look of HN a bit without straying too far from the site we are all familiar with.

http://drawar.com/projects/hackernews/

http://drawar.com/projects/hackernews/single.php

As you can see I tried to keep it virtually the same, but with some enhancements to make it easier to scan and read. This was a quick 2 hour exercise (redoing the markup took the longest amount of time...no more tables) so there are a still a number of improvements that I think could be made, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the results.

What do you think?
this defense is not a whole lot better: http://twitter.com/jeff/status/25358068083
Thesis Title Tips
Selecting the perfect title for your thesis can be a challenging task. It should be enlightening, interesting, and clear and should grab the reader’s attention. If you know the elements involved in selecting a title you will be able to select the most suitable one.
Is it just me, or these are so not funny? Never were, never will...
And I did this earlier in the week before the "redesign HN" trend started to appear on the site. Now I feel like a total bandwagoner, heh.
These guys appear to be a bunch of ego-driven alpha males. They can no more stop talking about this, than piss up a tree.

In fact, being part of a macho secret conspiracy will probably inflame them to further stupidities.
I'm still trying to understand the processing involved, but it could be interesting if one could use it to effectively do voip calls over EDGE using this - may require having an external dsp dongle though.
Right. Pretty low bar to feel superior to children.
You're not alone. Except for Apple, Microsoft and some companies that give their product for free, almost everyone else is in the same situation.

One example: Intuit with QuickBooks. More than 90% of small business owners prefer to use pen and paper than a computer to do accounting. Probably they even prefer to chew Styrofoam than doing accounting. But, nevertheless Intuit is not doing bad.

What you need is competition, preferably a weak one. People will be able to better assess your value with something they can compare your product to; like that flopped Microsoft Office Accounting software.

Also, try to reach first the opinion makers, those that create a following (like accountants for QuickBooks).

To finish: everything in business is a matter of just good sales and marketing. Even good engineering is just part of it. If you don't have good sales you don't have a business; it's simple like that.
I'm not sure that is correct.

The fear of inflation is there but the latest figures I am aware of put the inflation rate at below 1.0% (If you never need to buy food or fuel). Some even worry about the prospect of deflation.
Ok, forgiveness is keen, but its not possible to forgive criminal acts. It's not up to this community.

Personally I look forward to the shakeup. The money will find its own level, whether its this group of idiots or some other.
My Master Plan to Destroy the Internet as we know it
Oh, you mean connected as in having with each other to do, not as in having the results connected to some central authority for quick counting. Sorry, I misunderstood you. :-)
I don't understand how is this a startup idea. HN obviously doesn't need ads, and if they want to redesign, they will.
I'm somewhat new to HN, but I don't like the new look. The existing one is much easier on the eyes.

A good UI should not introduce new colors or visual elements that are unnecessary. Zebra coloring of rows has its place, but not here. Don't need the lines between posts (lines are for grids, and this doesn't need one). Additional box around arrows unnecessary. Text too small. Contrast of white on black at top draws eyes too much to title and menu.

Basically, please leave things as they are or ditch this design. I know you've spent a lot of time on it, but you will not gain users at as high of a rate with the new design.
http://hckrnews.com/ was just posted and it seems to work for me.
Though it's been a while now, back in 2007 I was offered a job at YouTube without going through the interview process because I co-developed the now-defunct Chime.TV ( http://techcrunch.com/2007/06/12/chimetv-a-prettier-way-to-w... ) and won the Mashup Competition that year. I even confirmed to make sure I wouldn't have to go through the crazy Google hiring practices and was assured that "If you say yes, you don't have to interview - you have a job starting tomorrow on my team at YouTube." It seemed like a very cool proposition too - my code would be visible to hundreds of millions of people immediately. I would've accepted it had my life circumstances been different.