skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finding FBI tracking device on your car and posting pictures of it on Reddit to embarrass them : win.

Fedexing it to Fiji first : epic win.

Sending it into orbit : Richard Branson.
I don't know that doing something like this wouldn't cause the justice dept to get interested. It would be a really anti competitive move.
Most of the need for monospace in coding is for the sake of indentation and alignment. If you have any ASCII diagrams (see the Internet RFC's) you need monospace.

But we forget how much of this is a circumstance of history. Teletypes were monospace, like typewriters, for mechanical simplicity. Line printers and DecWriters were monospace for the same reason. Then the first video terminals and eventually the original IBM PC were all monospace, all for the same reason, and because of familiarity. We simply got used to monospace and came to depend on it. There is no inherent virtue of monospace.

Come to think of it, the first (mainstream) computer I remember with proportional fonts was the original Mac in 1984.
Yes, and it sounds a lot more complicated than ramen. While a box of ramen is a meal by itself (for a sufficiently loose definition of "meal"), you'd have to open a lot of these cans to cook anything, which would require a lot of plastic pots and storage place and shorten the shelf life.

But it's a cool idea for that nuclear bunker/zombie shelter in the backyard...
Digg and Reddit pander to this. Don't kill HN.
I'm familiar with the story but had never read that. It's fascinating as a time capsule into the 2001 web. A crude commenting system, best wishes from people who think that a company-destroyed lawsuit could be endured and a successful business could emerge in the midst of a recession.
ICH GCP,Clinical Research Investigator Certificate Course for Doctors Worldwide
>No. Not because I wouldn't want to work for equity (I have done that before) but because there doesn't be a clear path to liquidity of those options. You've described this as a lifestyle business which typical means no imminent source of liquidity for shareholders.

Assuming the liquidity issue was solved to your satisfaction, would you work for equity in a company where the valuation of the percentage of the company you were earning plus the salary you were earning was 1/3rd of your fair market value?
This ignores Ruby Dependency Hell, which is why I'd want to use VMs in the first place.
Facebook Groups Is Sort Of Like Google Wave For Human Beings
Evernote (https://www.evernote.com/) Notes service. Clients available for Mac, Windows, iPad etc.
Ahh the 'gate' suffix, the most overused cliche.
My money is on "no."
Those who has the ability to program has a moral obligation to drop everything to help the homeless? Classic slave morality, cliched moral self righteousness.

"Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me.

If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.
AwesomenessReminders is up to $45/month
Invest In Food
I'm actually interested in this not for ramen profitability but for survival rations. I'm not some post-apocalyptic tinfoil hat wearing doomsday person, but I recognise that I live in an area that can (and has) had natural disasters from time to time. In those cases, food quickly becomes in short supply and sometimes transport isn't possible. I've been thinking about building a up a 'canned food reserve' but this is a much better solution because of the longer shelflife.

Note for the same reasons I'm investigating solar power, rainwater tanks and bottle propane for cooking/water heating.
I used to be super skinny in school/college. Due to my engineering degree, my starting salary was more than what my dad's retiring salary was (and he was obese). Then as I overworked and gorged on pizza while working in the office late in the day, my weight started to increase. Now, I am 10 pounds overweight and earning much more than what I began with.

Moral: Correlation does not imply causality.
Let's say you don't care about the "lasts N years" part, but you want to construct a least-cost diet which is not significantly less nutritious than a more expensive food selection. What foods would be included? To keep it simple, presume shopping to be limited to Costco/Sam's/etc.

I did some math at Costco after examining a 50 lb bag of rice. Someone earning minimum wage must work five minutes to purchase 2000 calories of rice. While I know one can not live on rice alone, has there ever been a time or place in the world's history when so little effort was required for sustenance?
Yes, we will. Hopefully before Christmas. BTW: We're looking for Cocoa developers... http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/work-ia/
Reading other people's bullshit can be really inspiring.

Serious question: Are there no well-known female "lifestyle designers"?
One Year Food Supply Love Nest
Pill Identification Tools
thank you jolie. this has been on my mind for nearly 2 yrs. i'm glad some one wrote about it.
Oprah, Martha Stewart
It's been a while since I've done this; but:

* Install your different Firefox versions in different locations (so one doesn't overwrite the other)

* Use "firefox -ProfileManager" to create at least one different 'profile', which is Firefox's user data set

* Use "firefox -P <profilename> -no-remote" to launch Firefox. -no-remote allows multiple Firefox instances to run on the same machine. -P profilename is necessary because you need a separate profile for each running instance.

More info at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments
Medium Hairstyles
The galleries include short hairstyle pictures, medium hairstyle images, layered hairstyle pictures, and a lot of other hairstyle galleries
So stop living in a world of bread and circuses. I don't use foursquare because I get no value. Nor do most people I know. I use Twitter for work, nothing else. I produce, I do not consume. I am not special. There are lots more like me.

There is an entire world of startups focused on societal betterment -- some with the stated goal of just being self-sustaining rather than profit centers.

in finance: kiva, prosper, even greendot which is now worth $2b, banksimple, etc. etc.

in energy: bloom, kitegen, blacklight energy, etc. etc.

And the list goes on... for a really really long time.
The one time I had a huge failure and needed to restore I found Tarsnap amazingly slow. Between that and the overly complicated pricing I'm going to consider something else going forward.
> That he did not solve the biggest scaling problems and instead let
> his employees do that(ever wonder how they attracted those
> employees in first place)?

I think that Seldo was contradicting the popular image that since Zuckerberg built some 'tech thing' and that it's really successful that he's some sort of 'genius hacker.' This is completely different from the sentiment that Zuckerberg is some sort of 'chump that just got lucky.'

Personally, I think the idea that he is some sort of 'hacker genius' stems from the fact that the vast majority of the people that use Facebook, are probably the same type of people that thought I was a 'hacker genius' for showing them how to change their wallpaper or use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.

It comes down to some equation like:

do something related to X + gain success/fame/money = genius at X

Whereas that's not necessarily the case. You wouldn't put the person that developed Netflix's recommendation algorithm up with Einstein or Euler, but that's not to say that he/she isn't smart or 'just got lucky.'

Other people posts here seem to just be related to fighting the assertion that Zuckerberg gave Facebook success due to some genius piece of code. This assertion detracts from all of the rest of the stuff that made Facebook a success (business decisions, etc), any one of which had the potential to sink Facebook.

tl;dr Zuckerberg did a lot of things and made Facebook through a lot of hard work, but the moniker 'genius hacker' is not fitting. That is not a criticism of Zuckerberg so much as it is a criticism of the MSM (or just people in general) trying to boil the success of Facebook down to a single thing (the code) and claim that Zuckerberg's success must make him a genius at the one thing.
Ask HN: Techniques for relaxing before an interview
Hi All,

I've got a terrible penchant for getting all worked up and nervous before important meetings.

For instance, i have an interview in half an hour and my hands are getting sweaty, im feeling hot and uncomfortable and then that makes me more nervous as to whether it will come across in the interview.
It probably has a lot to do with my nature as an introvert.

Do any of you have techniques that you use to calm yourself before a big meeting/interview?
"either copying ideas is right or wrong"

I am perfectly aware of the point you're trying to make. However, that was not what the grandparent, Tyng, was talking about. He suggested that, because Apple improved on Gelernter's idea, Gelernter should've just be grateful that Apple threw its R&D prowerss at it, making it what it is now. You then replied comparing the situation to Microsoft and Google copying Apple's work, which isn't exactly the same thing.
This sounds like a better value than the food insurance companies Glenn Beck promotes. I would be interested in how many calories are in this package. I eat >3000 a day when training hard.
HN seems to think this is a good idea... it looks like TVP, Textured Vegetable Protein is the primary source of protein in this mix.

Have you eaten TVP? It was a staple of my childhood. It is not something I would want to consume more than once a week or so. You can turn it into something that almost passes for sloppy joes? but really, I'd place it a few rungs below tofu on the ladder of foods I'd like to eat.

I mean, to be clear, I'm sure it's fine food for when TSHTF or what have you. I'm just saying; if I had to eat that stuff every day? yeah, I'd go nuts.

From the product description:
"The taste and texture of TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein) is consistent with real meat, making it a great addition to vegetarian diets"

Uh, this makes me wonder if the person writing that has either never tasted meat or never tasted TVP or both? Now, the TVP sloppy joes my mom used to make weren't bad (you know, maybe once a week) but nobody is going to confuse TVP with meat. even that mechanically separated meat that was featured in another article. TVP is another thing entirely.
If you liked Scala, you defnitely wanna go ahead and give Lift a shot. http://liftweb.net/

EDIT: http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-repl...
Interesting, it didn't occur to me to look into that realm.

I'll narrow the question: All the people mentioned in the article are popular bloggers who capitalize on "I'm awesome, you can be too." Are there any female bloggers doing the same thing?
I find it rather ironic that many of the problems she claims the rest of the world should address aren't even real problems at all.

Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck....

The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions.

Jolie's premature narrowing of the problem makes it impossible to think of some solutions. If you think the problem is affordability of health care, you'll never think of a healthier lifestyle. If you think the problem is that public schools suck, you'll never think of scrapping them and replacing them with some alternative.
Disclaimer: I am the creator of what I'm about to plug here.

If anyone is looking for an easy, low-risk, documented method of beginning development in VMs, check out Vagrant[1], which is what I wrote this for. Creating dev VMs from scratch is pretty tedious and there are a lot of steps involved. Vagrant abstracts this away and provides a tool to automate all of this in a reproducible manner.

[1]: http://vagrantup.com
The app market finding problem differs depending on how you intend to monetize it. Running an app means more to an app that makes it money via advertising then one which is sold. Making money from analytics is different from targeted advertising and from having a paid app.

But if you want an interesting take on it, how about figuring out which people who are downloading the popular apps first, and tracking their behavior as a cohort. Use the trendsetters to predict the trends.
Microsoft Office. Windows only. Oh yeah, Mac too.
It really depends on whether you look at the startup as the means or the end. For example, while the creation of Microsoft did not directly fix the problem of healthcare or hunger, it allowed for Bill Gates to create his foundation, and thus indirectly created a ton of good for the world.

Same goes for Facebook, yes of course keeping up with your friends has no direct impact on real issues, but the fact that 110m went to public schools in an area that really needs it - that is a pretty big impact.

The same goes for any other person who creates wealth from web startups or any business in general - I don't think that web startups themselves are going to do much directly but when you take the knowledge and potential wealth that you acquire in the process and put it toward a good cause, that is one way that you can fix a social or human problem with your app as the author challenges.

Just my take on it.
I remind myself that I'm more competent than I give myself credit for, and that "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer. As an introvert, I've found that most interviewers don't mind if you take the time to think over a question before answering it, instead of snapping out the first answer that comes to mind.

Beyond that, it's just deep breaths. Don't worry, you'll do fine.
I disagree. Angry Birds is the best game for any platform, ever.
> and which is likely to be much better than what a professional designer would do for the same price

Why would you think a novice on the web with Photoshop will automatically do better than a professional with experience and who is looking beyond making a cool design?

Logos aren't just pieces of art — they also brand a company. Crowdsourcing will never match a professional brand designer.
this is really the right answer, as it is the exact solution given what tools are available for solving the problem of managing development. but what is the difference between the startup time in this video, and the start up time of an ide?

i can see a developer workflow where you start up the vm, create your example function or class of what you are solving, close the vm, and let some script find the new file, check everything in, etc...

i don't feel it would be much different than having a standard install of an ide for a group of devs, but in this instance you could have all the customization of an entire OS, plus creating a single app that people can throw away and start from square one, or even check in the whole OS install as a version?

i agree this is a lot of overhead, but i think it is okay someone is exploring this, i feel it is very interesting, and a pattern of abstraction we should consider more. this is how i see the small EC2 images i've been playing with.
Whole post is silly and pretentious. If the design really is so great that Gap thinks it's worth using, then legally they'll have to pay him to transfer the copyright before they can do anything with it.

So cut out the stupid ego-drenched drama and just show the logo. He'll get a lot farther that way than demanding compensation up front anyway. Even if Gap rejects the logo, it will stand as a nice portfolio/concept piece if it is really good as guy claims.
From the Costco comments:

"The contents of opened cans can be easily stored in glass mason jars, the ones used for canning, with a canning lid which is vacuum-sealed onto the jar with a food saver jar attachment. For jars which are in constant use, use a white plastic screw-on lid available with canning supplies."
What about rice and kimchi? You could even pound the rice into glutinous rice cakes for dessert!
Red mud: Toxic waste of aluminum refining
So, does that make Jackson Pollock a 'genius artist' or a 'genius entrepreneur'? ;-)
App engine had big downtime too, due to problem with database re-balancing (though downtime was not as long, as foursquare's).
This reminds me of facebook development, where you need to have a live fqdn for all of your environments. We used to use a staging server and had a similar problem with huge amounts of small unnatural commits for things you would normally test locally. I ended up moving to using ssh tunnels to a server, where each dev has a subdomain redirecting to their dev box through the tunnel. This has the added benefit that you can work locally from anywhere you have wifi. Whether you use tunnels or VMs, both are a solid way to do development.
Remember that you're interviewing them as well. You have to decide if this company meets your standards. When you look at it that way, they should be the ones who are nervous! Don't be afraid to ask them questions as well (e.g.
"What systems do you have in place for code review and production pushes?" or "What is your preferred framework for PHP development, and why did you choose it?"). I'm impressed when people I interview have such thoughtful questions, and usually at that point the interview turns into a conversation instead of a cross-examination.
GitHub isn't just for OSS (you'll have to pay though)
Don't worry, you're boring.

Seems like a waste of my tax dollars to put a tracking device on his car then...
India's Tata invests in MIT spin-off Sun Catalytix
While I'm not arguing that you can get some nutrition from this there's no way it's healthy.
I was going to Paris for the first time and I had been learning french, but my pronunciation was still terrible. I use a spaced repetition flashcard system [1] to learn new things and improve my recall, and I wanted to use it to learn some french pronunciation. About.com has a 2500-word french audio dictionary [2], so I spent a few hours building a scraper to pull down all the pages, parse out the words (their markup is crazy), download the mp3 files, and build an xml file so I could import it all into my SRS system.

Not a terribly challenging problem, but it's always nice to be able to quickly hack up some code to solve something.

1. http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/

2. http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/audiodictionary.htm
By complicate, you mean simplify.

"We need to search your laptop."

"Sure, take it."

Laptops are disposable when they're encrypted.
All things being equal between this theoretical opportunity and another with a more attractive compensation structure, no.

If I believed that there was a longer term value to the equity that could make up for the shortfall in cash compensation, maybe.

But, the specific case you've laid out leads me to believe that there isn't significant growth potential in this business. Am I interpreting that wrong?
If I recall correctly, authorizing TwitPic makes you automatically follow @TwitPic and @noaheverett.
A classic mistake; The parish pump generalizing.
Xmarks CEO: Knight-in-shining-armor rescue likely
It's definitely not tied to VS. There is an extensible core that the VS clients are built on top of. I think the mono guys will have their own client.
I’m Demanding EnoughGate
thank you - "Remember to breathe" is a good one.

i often find myself holding my breathe for no reason other than im anxious
The definition of the atomic object modelled by the service doesn't include an 'error' condition.

A curious inconsistency.

But still... ok, the bullshit is elsewhere.

For a distributed (i.e., multi-node) system to not require partition-tolerance it would have to run on a network which is guaranteed to never drop messages (or even deliver them late) and whose nodes are guaranteed to never die. You and I do not work with these types of systems because they don’t exist.

This is bullshit; it assumes that the only options are complete reliance on absence of failures, and tolerance of arbitrary partitions. Specifically, it claims that P(system fails) = 1 - (1 - P(any particular node fails)) ^ (number of nodes), and that therefore "the question you should be asking yourself is: In the event of failures, which will this system sacrifice? Consistency or availability?". There are plenty of real-life counter-examples to this; given a real-world (ie, at least partially synchronous) network, it is possible to maintain consistency and availability in the face of partition/failure of up to half-minus-one of your nodes. This blows the probability calculations completely out of the water.

You cannot, however, choose both consistency and availability in a distributed system. ... As a thought experiment, imagine a distributed system which keeps track of a single piece of data using three nodes—A, B, and C—and which claims to be both consistent and available in the face of network partitions.

Hey, see how that "in the face of network partitions" snuck in there? It's bullshit, you want "in the face of these specific kinds of network partitions", things like crashed nodes. Just enough to invalidate that abuse of statistics used to claim that Availability is impossible.
How any one who writes a blog can consider themselves anything other than self-serving is beyond me. You can't get any more narcissistic than having your own blog and prompting people to subscribe to it whilst telling everyone what movie you're out seeing with the hip crew du jour.

People like entertainment. People like socializing. Whoop dee doo. How is that any more self-serving than telling the world you're seeing "Waiting for Superman with the Facebook crew".
My Side Project: Mr Goal. Goal reminders via email and SMS.
I wish I had a cabin in the middle of nowhere in Northern California to stash something like this for when the world falls apart...
A very odd post. It's weird for someone to actively post real pictures of other people in order to denigrate them. It comes off as a strange hybrid of jealousy, anger and confused thought. The post would be better served by attacking stereotypes rather than real people, and observing the phenomen of people buying books/reading blogs about lifestyle - because it's the public appetite for this type of escapism that fuels it.

I'm no Tim Ferriss fanboy, but he appears to live the life he wants on his own terms. We might not choose that life for ourself, or admire his methods, but to deliberately look through videos of him until you find one with a strange thumbnail comes across as vindictive and enemy-centred. It's as though, by pulling down Ferris, the author can feel better about themselves. And that's not a good way to go about things, long term.
This is what a police state looks like.
Beans are nearly as cheap as rice when bought in bulk. Beans and rice are a complete protein. Potatoes are cheap too, and are a complete protein by themselves. You could throw in some fish oil and a multivitamin and still be paying around a buck a day for food.

I would much prefer that diet to living off of canned goods.