skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You hvae a fair critique, mostly amounting to "Nothing to see here, please move along"

And I'll grant you that we -- this community -- are the leaders in integrating technology into our lives. Most other folks are not as hooked up as we are (although that is quickly changing)

But my point was about social systems, not just political ones. Sure, I used the example of Jim Crow laws and politics because it was so easy to understand, but the same argument can be made for any social system, from 3 people to 3 million. I'm not trying to make a political point. I'm trying to make a point about sociology.

Take politics out. Change the subject to distributed systems versus hub-and-spoke systems. Same difference. Or the use of SQL-less databases. Or the best patterns for testing. Politics is just used as an example. It's really not the thrust of my comment.

Politics is a nice metaphor for describing how groups of people operate. Everybody can agree that Jim Crow laws were bad. We're still fighting some of these other issues, and I didn't think it was useful to bring them up.
This is very true. I would have left Reddit long ago if it weren't for the subReddits. I can still find the site/community that I love at Reddit.com.
I don't like it, but I understand why they can't have orientation lock be both a soft switch and a hard switch at the same time. It's a hell of a lot more convenient as a hard switch, that's for sure.
intrapreneurial is a term for being an entrepreneur within the confines of a larger organisation. It's a business school buzzword for people working in a larger company to feel like they're just like real entrepreneurs, but doing it with the might and resources of a large organization behind them.

Or, as otherwise known, 'doing your job'.

To be fair, though, creating new products/services within a larger organization can provide significant challenges. You could argue that Google promotes intrapreneurship with the 20% time projets.
Condé Nast Will Use Adobe Instead of Rolling Its Own Tablet Magazines
I'm ambivalent about the message. I generally respect A Smart Bear and I enjoy reading that blog, but I think this post conflates "reputation" with "target audience." I do think reputation can be powerful with some particular niche, but if the niche doesn't line up with what you are selling, that reputation is meaningless. Reputation is sensitive to context. If Tiger Woods says "Golf clubs from the XYZ corporation are the greatest clubs on the planet" then one assumes the XYZ corporation will see a surge in sales. But if Tiger Woods says "Pessac-Léognan White is the greatest white wine on the planet" then sales may not surge very much for Pessac-Léognan White, because Tiger Woods is not known to be a wine expert. That does not mean that reputation isn't powerful, only that its power is highly dependent on context.
I wish I could wrap my head around the size of the subset in relation to the larger set of users of the internet. I think that those are able to accomplish this have a huge leg up in product design, and this ability is something that is incredibly taken for granted.

One time my non-technical partner was attempting to access something I had been working on for a day or so and he told me that it wasn't working at all (even though I had confirmed it was before I had left) and I started to panic as we were close to a deadline for a client. Turns out that when i was telling him to access dev.somesite.com he was putting in www.dev.somesite.com and it was screwing up the javascript... because he naturally thought everything started with a 'www'.

It blew me away that he didn't understand the concept of subdomains, but also it was a reality check that he sort of knew his way around a computer and websites, and that it meant there was a much much larger set of users that couldn't grasp the concept of a subdomain. It can be difficult sometimes when you have the perception (especially on HN) that so many people out there know more than you about everything. I guess you just have to take a step back and realize you are still in the 99th percentile of the rest of the world when it comes to this stuff.
OSX comes with remote desktop, it's in System preferences, sharing .., remote desktop (I think). I don't have osx available to get the exact words.

It's just VNC.
It also has an SSH server in the same section so you can tunnel through securely.
There are three options that I know of:

1) SNI -- this has just too poor support at this time

2) Separate ports -- you can make make Apache listen on for example port 446 and use links like https://subdomain.foobar.com:446/.... -- however some corporate firewalls etc. may be blocking connections out on non-standard ports; we just that just for multiple testing environments. This still requires multiple certs or a wildcard cert.

3) Wildcard certs -- they are are usually quite bit more expensive but they'll let you register *.domain.com. So if a client wants a subdomain you can let them have client.yourdomain.com that way without multiple certs or IPs -- FogBugz uses that for example.
harvard's intro CS class is still taught in C. most of the CS majors there who do systems related stuff write in and enjoy C.
I go to Carnegie Mellon. I extremely enjoy C. The best programmers at CMU enjoy C. Granted, I'd rather program in Python, but I still really really like C as a language and use it whenever I can.
Plan9 - no modern web browser or media player.
What I can't understand is why you can't choose this in Settings if you want it as a Mute button or Orientation Lock button. Why not make this a CP setting? People who like it the way it is can go through the extra steps to activate it, while new users have it default as mute.
I don't think people here are suggesting that this is the only vector of attack against your system, rather that given the proliferation of unsecured WiFi networks it's just one of the more common.

When someone brings out the "ARP poisoning" add-on for Firefox maybe it will fuel debate on other types of attack :)
Forget the CEO, the Entrepreneur, the Lawyer and everyone else. Ask the mice.
The lower part is underfloor heating. I don't know what the higher part is, but I would guess that they retrofitted underfloor heating and used existing overhead pipes for the water. Normally those pipes would be well-hidden.
Redisql (an extension of Redis that supports a large subset of SQL)
Why Email Marketing Is Still In Vogue
Hm have you taken the inspiration for the woodworker metaphor from Andy Hunts "The Pragmatic Programmer"?

I immediately thought of his metaphor with the woodworker and his toolset, that needs skills build on it, as well as the working material.
I just started my own blog and was asking a coworker how I could get it noticed. He suggested reddit.

"That's a good idea. And Digg, too, huh?"

"Don't even bother with Digg," he said, "There's no chance your article will get on the front page".

"Well, it's worth a shot," I replied. He seemed to disagree.

So, being the stubborn guy I am, I decided to post on both. Every time I post on reddit, I get at least 100 views from it. I've yet to notice a single view from posting on Digg.

I don't really know what my point is. I guess this anecdote is another reason they're in trouble. If I have an interesting post (subjective), posting it on Digg will now be an afterthought to me.
My dad is a Master Electrician but he still asks me questions about his hotmail account and to resend a link to my Picasa albums. He deals with megawatts of electricity on a daily basis. I would hesitate to call him dumb...
I enjoy C because I like strongly typed languages, explicit code as apposed to ambiguous typeless languages. I haven't, however, found many companies hiring C programmers. I've been working for web startups in San Francisco for a while and have talked with a lot of developers at events and it seems to me that there is less and less focus on optimization in general, which is why there is less interest in C. The fact is that C becomes less relevant by the day. Rails and python developers are in high demand - C not so much.
No, and here's why.

It's not going to happen. Your not going to get investors coming to you. It just doesn't work that way. One of the first things an investor is going to ask you is who else are you working with, talking to or looking to take investments from? If your answer is no one, you came to us. That's a HUGE red flag, especially with the barrier to investors evaporating before our very eyes. RE:(incubators, anglelist, etc)

The only way investors will come to you is if you:

1. Have had a successful exit at another startup you've founded. In which case you probably have a decent group of investors you worked with before so not going to back to them would be counter productive.

2. Your traction/PR is HUGE. (In which case, you should be focusing on becoming profitable. Why take investment if you've already achieved EPIC traction?) I'd also argue it's unlikely you got to this point w/o some kind of outside investment. If you did then you don't need investors.
> Sorry, you are correct; I should have been more specific: the memory management overhead was tremendous. For every object added and removed, the vector and all of it's data was basically reallocated, moved, deleted, repeat.

If that was the case, you were doing something wrong.
Why? What does the author get out of it?
"SEC tends to investigate people who have made large amounts of money through potentially illegal means"

I suspect it is illegal to accept illegally-obtained money. Therefore, if Mark was found guilty, the staff cannot be paid. Which also gives incentive to not find him guilty, resulting in a conflict of interest. IANAL, though.
Perhaps. I haven't really checked it much in the last few years. And that's the other problem -- if somebody goes there once and looks around and doesn't find anything they like on the front page then they're probably not going to come back.
Two things to say here. First, "dumb" is not the right word. My wife is a theoretical physicist - thus pretty much guaranteed to be "not dumb" - but is not fully cognizant of the fact that URLs exist. She, too, has Google as her default home page and types what she wants into it. And she has Google search on the toolbar and types what she wants into that. Even if what she wants is the name of the site, she goes through Google first. Always.

The corollary to the observation that most people don't know what you take for granted in the computer realm, though, is that your customers know all kinds of stuff you have no idea about.

Think about that a little.
Spot-on. Thanks for making these points.
I installed iOS 4.2 beta on my ipad last week so I kind of get what you're saying.

The main thing I noticed is that when I needed to mute I typically need to mute quicker than I need to switch orientation. Whenever I need to orientation lock I can easily set it up before hand. I usually need to set my iPad to mute because I have to take care of something that comes up.

And holding down volume down seems to get rid of my volume setting whereas having a switch does not.
Save everything. Don't make the user click save. Even better if you can allow a rollback to any point in time. Better still if you can roll back to significant changes, with significant determined in terms of the domain context.

kb
Back when I worked at LimeWire (probably the largest Swing install base in the world) I played around with MacWidgets. It's really an admirable effort, but trying to emulate Cocoa in Java always feels a little off. It's sort of an Uncanny Valley effect...you can't easily point out what's wrong, but you know it's not quite right.

Either build a real Cocoa interface, or go LimeWire's route and don't make it look native at all.
I agree about the maximize button - after a decade of arguing for the current implementation of it (rather than the make this window fullscreen version that Windows uses) they're now finally switching it (and, of course, talking about how fantastic it is).

Rumor has it they're finally making windows resizable from any corner, too.

Of course, I shouldn't be shocked any more since Apple (and Jobs specifically) constantly play that game. I love OS X with a passion, but I can't help but chuckle at this point when they do it.
I've thought about this "you can't break computers" phrase for a while. I suspect, though, that when people say that they're afraid of "breaking" a computer, what they mean is that they'll get the system to a state they don't know how to get out of.

The issue here is not so much that people need to be taught they can't break computers, but what the map of states is. On the other hand, if they don't even want to learn that... well, then I'm not sure what the (software-side) answer is.
As a young company, "you're going after the top echelon of talent,"
he says, "with the least amount of resources."

Right, because your company is going to cure cancer and be the next Google, so all hires will eventually get rich and save the world; just not right now.
Go back to Linux, this is iOS.
I wrote a short essay (http://kid666.com/2009/12/15/your-users%E2%80%99-mental-mode...) about this for "Designing Social Interfaces" (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Social-Interfaces-Principles...) by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone.
I think this is a case of "flamboyant headline; reasonable article". He doesn't really argue in the article that people are stupid. It is implied by the headline, but that is clearly just an attempt to get pageviews. The actual content of the article is quite reasonable, and true.

While it would be even more reasonable for him to include a paragraph about how other people probably feel the same way about us with things like "social skills" or what have you, that would be off topic, and overly pedantic.
Because then, if you handed your iPad to another person, they wouldn't be able to instantly know everything about how to use it if they had used one previously. Apple goes to a lot of effort to be consistent.
Finding good business name takes simplicity, luck
A good friend of mine recently commented that I always brought up role models that he had no idea who were, and I quoted as known and famous. The people in question were names such as Niels Bohr, Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey, Richard Dawkins and Einstein.

My first thought was to dismiss him as not very knowledgeable, but then I thought to ask him who he thought were good famous role models. He rambled off a number of names that I'd never heard before, primarily from motoring and sports. A quick google search showed me that these people were just as known as my role models.

It's not so much about being dumb, it's more about simply having different interests and perspectives on life. This is a good thing.
Rock Star vs Rock Solid [programmers, and the difference]
Note the comment from Michael Arrington:

---

you'd be amazed at how people start adding up. We have something around 40 people at TechCrunch, 20 full time.

---

and the replies to that comment, such as:

"How may of them were hired to boost your ego?"

"Yes, in the absence of efficient cost control and good management, expenses always rise to meet income."
Usually you setup an organization and review routine, where lower level attorneys do the initial pass and escalate important documents. Let me tell you that 66,000 is nothing. Civil litigation can easily surpass 200k-300k documents. There are a lot of tools out there to help with this (concordance, IPro, Summation).
I've had good success with BlackVPN. Here's my review (with referral code to get us all free time!): http://www.iqdupont.com/blog/2010/4/19/blackvpn-review.html
---Thinking out loud---

There has been a significant evolution in the last 3-5 years respect to building and growing a company.

Google/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga [and others] are all direct competitors.

They all vie for the same thing [time/information/attention] of their audiences. There is no difference in what energy they need from their respective audiences in this matter; thus their business execution strategy requires vast capital to maintain their current hold on the slice of audience energy in the long term.

It also plays into how they are defensible. Twitter is taking an offensive position with its platform and how it treats apps built by the community. This money will likely be used to acquire and defend itself until it irons out is business model.

Zynga has been very silo'd in how it acts (their product originality issues aside) with respect to innovation.

Facebook has an incredible committed user base that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Thus in the next two years, we will really see a battle on useful extensions (profitable extensions) of these platforms that are all competing for the same resources of their audience (attention and time).

So these companies all are hedging against coming innovation from each other with respect to how they will garner that audience attention.

The evolution that I mentioned then, is in that the aggressive manner in which these companies raise enormous funding is all based on their understanding that they really are competition in the information state, and it doesn't matter that one seems to be in a different space or appear to currently be dependent on one another.

I think we really are on a precipice with respect to the landscape of how people will primarily consume/contribute through their preferred sites.
Cool, good stuff to record.

When I pause video for a short amount of time (<5 ish seconds), it's usually because I'm talking about the video. Longer pauses are probably due to be being distracted by something. Not sure if that's true of the general populace though.

Interesting service. You should expand to include slide analytics. Or slideshare should do.
I actually recently had a talk with my parents about just that; how, unlike years ago, computers have gotten better to the point where nothing they can do will 'break' them, so they should feel free to click around and try to figure out what they might be looking for. Software tools like CrossLoop have also made my life a hell of a lot easier in maintaining this promise, since anytime anything goes wrong I just tell them to click on the loop icon on the dock and I can usually solve whatever problem they have in ~5min or less.

Then I printed this out and put it next to the computer. http://xkcd.com/627/

I do think that the blue screen of death and similar things of the past have created this idea of the possibility of catastrophic failure on a computer and it is important to make the users feel more confident that their actions will not cause any irreparable damage.
I think the key word in the title is seem. People seem dumb if you don't know anything else about them besides this one fact they don't know that you do. The author is arguing that this is a bad thing.
Ask HN: Rural Entrepreneurs, Consultants, Bloggers
I'm working on a ebook, I'd like to release here relatively quickly. In it I talk about a rural renaissance built around technology and the elimination of geographical barriers.

I'm looking to profile rural entrepreneurs, consultants, or bloggers who have had success.

Does anyone know of anyone that might fit this bill that I should reach out to? Thanks.
Do you allow telecommuting? Or are you looking for local candidates only?

What is your strategy to reach potential candidates? Are you working with a headhunter?
That's hilarious. (and sad)

But seriously, every time Facebook changes something we get a reminder of how disruptive it is to change the average users' usage flow. Everyone gets around it eventually, but adjusting isn't pretty.
Sorry about that. It was new to me and I my eye slipped right past the little date there.
I'll echo the thanks. It was fun contest; I wish there were more programming challenges as they force me to think about something that isn't work-related. Usually I have to stick to Stack Overflow for that, though.
Anyone know of a good resource for developing rails 3 plugins? Like the blog post mentions, rails has yet to update their plugins guide so I've had to resort to trying to piece together how it works by reading various posts like this one.
Blogworld: old lady farts mixed with tobacco?
I did link to it as a joke, I wasn't genuinely hoping someone would think "let's fix that bug"...
I've found J.D. Roth's personal finance blog to be one of the more well-written and interesting blogs around: http://www.getrichslowly.org
Yes! And there are other HN threads with similar questions:

http://searchyc.com/github+resume
The problem is that the speed technology is growing with, made the barrier quite high for people to understand how technology works. The details are tremendous and the story of the web and its' evolution is too long that they should bother and keep up with it.

Same apply for other fields. How much do you know about neurology or physics to explain everyday facts?
I was diagnosed with "atypical cystic fibrosis", which is a relatively mild form of CF. I made a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes. CF involves a miscoded protein called the CFTR. The protein handles trafficking of certain molecules into and out of the cell, one of which is sodium chloride (salt). The misprocessing of salt is such a well known trait that a "sweat chloride" test is the most common test for the condition, yet doctors hardly address it at all. I found that consuming a good quality sea salt high in brine (a mixture or other minerals) and the right fats and carbs so it absorbs properly can reverse a lot of my symptoms. CF also generally encourages the body to be extremely acidic. I found that addressing PH balance and correcting it back to normal also does a lot to reverse symptoms. My reading has indicated that both of these factors -- PH balance and salt/mineral balance -- being extremely out of whack inside the cell will promote misfolding of proteins. This suggested to me that if you can address those issues, you can get the body to produce more functioning CFTRs and thereby get the body to function closer to normal. And, in fact, my son and I do function a lot closer to normal as long as we stay on top of the PH balance and get adequate amounts of good quality sea salt. We also engage in a lot of practices to reduce exposure to microbes, toxins, etc.

For me, it is more complicated than that because I was so very sick, so I had to address a lot of complicated infections and stuff. But my son had not been on antibiotics for over three years prior to being diagnosed, so it is clear to me that the right kind of support from an early age can drastically reduce the issues this disorder causes (at least in most cases -- in some cases, the CFTR is completely missing and I assume that would be different). Most medical intervention is focused on drugs and surgeries and vaccines. There is very little nutritional information available. Most research seems to be drug studies and the standard wisdom doled out by CF doctors is to eat great quantities of junk food because it is high calorie, high fat, and high salt. A "high calorie, high fat, and high salt" diet is the current state of the art advice for people with this disorder and I think it does a lot of harm. Instead, I went for aggressive nutrition to reverse a lifetime of nutritional deficiencies and began getting healthier and getting off all the drugs.

It's complicated and playing around with these ideas when you have no idea what you are doing can cause problems, so I understand why it goes over so badly with other people. A more information dense means to safely convey how this works looks to me like the only means to get more people to adopt this approach.
If you implemented this as follows, then yeah, you'll get log(N) reallocations, where N is your final vector size. But if you have a pretty good idea of what N is, you should set capacity at the time of vector declaration to avoid useless reallocations. You shouldn't expect any library to make this sort of predictions for you.

vector<T> vec;

while(getData(v)) { vec.push_back(v); }
I will take you up on that.
Facebook gets even more promotion - now in a banner ad near you
I'm getting parse errors on this headline