skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first time I tried Google I did a search for "foo bar" and it returned web pages that only contained the phrase "foo bar", and I promptly deleted my Alta Vista bookmark. What's funny is that I remember it so vividly, like how someone would remember where they were the day Kennedy was shot.

It would be really great if Alta Vista kept their old search engine and search index circa 1999 on-line, so we could periodically remind ourselves what the web used to be like.
Nike Dunk High 6.0 Women Plaid Trace Blue Orange Whip
Don't know about decorators. The real issues with Python that I find working at Red Hat (unfortunately Python and Ruby are popular choices here):

- generally poor choices for implementation: inefficient storage of values

- 64 bit version approximately doubles the size of all data

- interpreted, no code generator so it's very slow

- lack of type safety is a constant source of bugs that just wouldn't appear in other languages

- whitespace layout screws up patches silently

Edit: don't downvote, comment on what I have to say.
Ego (http://ego-app.com) does something like it on iPhone and iPad. Maybe it's worthwhile getting in touch with Garrett to figure out how easy/hard it would be to integrate bit.ly and mixpanel.
Don't just downvote this sort of material - flag it. If anything deserves flagging for inappropriateness, it's this.

Click on the link and flag it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1822990
Must have been a comma-law marriage.
That's very hacky of you.
history of cannibalism
This is spot on, IdeaHamster. I think the main question Apple asked itself is "why do we ship Flash with every Mac?". The answer is that back in the day when Flash was added, Adobe was a very good partner, and Flash was cool.

These days, Adobe is turning more an more into an enemy - even holding talks with arch-enemy Microsoft. So if you asked again - why do we ship Macs with Flash - the answer would be: We shouldn't. It should just be yet another plug-in that needs to be installed.

I think the bottom line is, there are good technical reasons, and there are good political reasons to dump Flash from the OS. It's about 50/50. Adobe has some power with Flash but it's standing on pretty shaky ground - videos work just as well in HTML5 which leaves Facebook games as the one application that really matters.
I wrote my own async servers and having done that (and used Tornado), I'm back on threads :) Async is kind of cool in some cases (long polling for one), but for most cases it's pain.

Right now mostly working on CherryPy's WSGI server.
http://jamafriend.com/LargeMap.aspx - a project I built during my free time and I'm still working on it.
Tell HN: Don't just downvote - flag it.
Sometimes there's a comment that shouldn't just be downvoted, it should be flagged as totally inappropriate or unacceptable. Click on the "link" link, then click "flag".
Here's an example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1822990

Literally made me feel sick, and I hope, really hope, it was someone's misplaced sense of humor.

It doesn't belong here. Flag it.

Here are some more - I'm detecting a theme:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823062

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1822976
That demo video has an iPad running 4.2 I'd be careful, that's still in beta.
When I was 12 I had my first sexual experience. At the time, I lived in a little suburb outside of Cleveland and anyway, the girl next door and I were really good friends. Our parents were both gone for the day and she was over playing Transformers with me. So anyway, we kinda got.. Bored I guess? And we started playing truth or dare, which turned into 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine". So anyway there I Was, 12 years old, heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears, and the chick (who was a year older than me actually) takes off her panties and hikes her little skirt up. So What did I do, you ask? I whistled for a cab, and when it came near, the license plate said "fresh" and there were dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought "naw forget it, yo home to bel-air!" I pulled up to the house about seven or eight and I yelled to the cabbie "yo homes smell ya later!" Looked at my kingdom, I was finally there. To settle my throne as the prince of bel-air.
When did the Texas "nexus" law come into effect? I thought it was just passed this year, so surely this makes their attempt at collection ex post facto?
That is pretty sad/funny. But to tell you the truth I actually thought that we did need another search engine towards the end of the 90s. It was around that time that search got totally broken.

I remember usually if I would search for X, I was sure to get a lot of "hot sluts taking X up their asses" links no matter what X was. Right before Google became popular search was totally and completely useless. I remember I actually went back to using the old Yahoo subject matter directory trees to find stuff. It was not very helpful, their links were mostly outdated. And for a while I was trying very hard to bookmark or remember any URL I found interesting because I thought I would never be able to find them again if i closed my browser.

And once I learned about Google it was like my eyes were opened once again. So yeah, if they offered me a job in 1998 and I had tried their website, I would be all over it. But alas they did not.

It was funny, they actually were looking hard for someone in my field (patent attorney). They needed a patent lawyer so much that they actually listed the position in the main Google page, and this was the only time ever that I know of that they have listed a job position on the main google.com page. Unfortunately, I was still in law school then :(.
Clicktoflash is the first thing I install on any new Mac - my own, or friend's. I find the internet unusable without Flash blocker.

Flash uses are as follows:
- Ads. Nobody needs those, and I actually dread the day Flash dies, because then these annoying ads will be HTML5 and maybe not as easy to block anymore.
- Games. I know lots of people who play nothing but Facebook games all day.
- Video. Not an issue anymore as most content is available in HTML5.

If Apple finds an alternative solution for Flash games, they can kill Flash off completely. I don't feel like they're going there though, probably knowing that the day they try to kill Adobe will be the day Microsoft buys Adobe out.
Why would you flag a sincere naughty story of my childhood? How is this inappropriate? Is it not naughty enough for you, oh RiderOfGiraffes?
Ask HN: The voting system is broken
There is a thread on here at the moment "tell us your naughty stories" or something.

There are two stories at the bottom both with -4 points.

One of them is some hideous and possibly illegal description of the torture and rape of a 12 year old girl.

The other is the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Now I don't know about the rest of you, but in terms of the "punishment fitting the crime" there is something going awry here.

I've been voted down a few times recently for things that suggest to me that the predominant population of HN are utterly humourless.

I can't vote people down (possibly I don't have enough karma) but I know that Paul Graham is basically on here 24/7 - Paul: do you really want to build a community where people are afraid to express themselves humourously?

Humour is the foundation of human character. Where is the love?
> Why would you trust anyone else to do your thinking for you?

Because there are only 24 hours in the day. Seriously, thew world is complex and it's impossible for one person to be an expect on everything. Therefore cognitive shortcuts are necessary.
Play Galactic Gravity Golf online at Y3 Games
A nice game. This is a mix of gravity game, golf and pinball.
Does JavaScript have limits?
I boot strapped my University book and lab fees at Purdue by holding a begin-of-semester Poker night, the finite mathematics came in handy :)
By glancing back, he is implying that the person behind him is something like a plain-clothes security officer (who should not be bribed)
I remember the days of having a hosts file that was updated and circulated around JANET users. It wasn't much fun.
Maria Sharapova Sasha Vujacic Engagement Officially
It's official - Russian Tennis star Maria Sharapova and LA Lakers basketball star Sasha Vujacic are engaged! Maria Sharapova Russian tennis Star Engaged With Sasha Vujacic on Tuesday 2010. Sasha Vujacic, the 26-year-old LA Lakers basketball star, has announced his engagement to the tennis player Maria Sharapova.
Is there a link to the download / torrent?
Very good point there! Speaking of exploits - both Java and Flash run in the browser and are therefore susceptible to web based drive by attacks. None of the other technologies are exposed to the outside world.
Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade from a B to an A.

----

My last year of college I was low on funds, so at the beginning of each term I would go to the school library and see if they stocked any of the textbooks. I could usually find 1 or 2. I'd check them out and keep them the whole term, paying only a $5 late fee - vs. the $100 textbook cost. (In case you think this is inethical, based on the past checkout records, nobody ever checked these books out)

----

Hack I wish I'd thought of: A college buddy spent the first day of summer vacation going into all the bars in downtown Portland and getting info about their happy hours. He had every day of the week mapped out and got dinner and a beer for $1/night.
Well - it certainly has limits right now in terms of processing power.

It's scripted, it's running through an interpreter. You could write a compiler for javascript that compiles to a PIC microcontroller assembly if you wanted to.

Anything that gets executed is machine code - the only arbiter of speed is how many steps of abstraction it has to go through to get there and how efficient each of the levels of compilation is because that's what determines how generic (ie. bloated) the machine code is.
I see a short film series!
I'm planning on writing up a blog post exploring the attack and possibilities, but from a high level:

When you pass data into a regex engine for matching, it works character-by-character. When it reaches a character that doesn't match, the matching is terminated. That means that if you have the regex /^foo$/, "f" will take slightly longer to parse than "b", since it'll move on to the next character for "f", but not "b".

Due to this, you can produce matching data for a regex in a fairly small number of samples. Interestingly, it takes fewer samples to reliably get characters further down the string -- however, this may be a result of my horrid statistics code. Not sure yet.

As far as I'm aware, no one has ever done this before.
I grew to dislike the AP style guide, which proscribes the final serial comma. Of course you may rearrange the sentence, "Kris Kristofferson, his two ex-wives and Robert Duvall" but then one wonders if they are Kristofferson's wives.
He implied that the person behind him was some kind of anti-corruption agent
The "hardball" approach isn't always the best. If you play hardball and lose, you permanently lower your power and influence.
Apple is all about rapid iteration. With the iOS, they're moving at lightning speed. Perhaps they want to achieve the same on Mac OS.
Steve Jobs has called Java a "ball and a chain" years ago, so this is not too surprising. Strategically, Apple doesn't care about cross-platform technologies because per definition they don't take advantage of platform innovations. See Job's Flash-on-iOS open letter.
Nobody say Apple is not consistent in their strategy and vision - in fact, I've never seen such a razor sharp focus in a company that size.
From Slashdot report: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/10/23/0134202/WikiLeak...

Torrent: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5904428/iraq-war-diary-redac...
Hmmm I added another "Ask HN" pertaining this worrying content - I don't actually see a "flag" link in my interface (or a downvote) so wasn't aware that it even existed. But definitely - this macabre content does NOT belong on HN.
In my limited time here on HN I've formed a model of how it works. In my experience of HN, humor with information is almost invariably upvoted. Humor without information is almost invariably ignored or downvoted. In short, people don't come here to be entertained, they come here to learn and to share. Pure entertainment does not fit the culture. Useful information in an entertaining package is always appreciated.

Your comments that HN is populated by the humorless is none of humorful, useful, or informative. It's just a moan. Hence it gets downvoted.

Vile comments such as the ones you reference are downvoted because people don't know how to flag comments. Submissions can be flagged with one click, but comments need two. First click on "link", then click on "flag".

There are now many, many people here on HN who don't know how things work, and these sorts of things simply aren't known to them. It's not that the voting system is broken (for this reason at least) it's because people don't use the mechanisms available.
Why would that be worse than talking on a bluetooth headset in public? They do that all the time now.

I think the idea of using the prefix "I wonder..." to trigger a voice operated search engine is awesome.
I'd like to know of some example of "freaking out on stupid stuff" from the FSF, frankly.
Here's one:

I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime.

So a year in, I only managed to find 35 hours of work one week, so I called up HR and got that overhead number to put down for those extra 5 hours. Next day, I found myself in a meeting with my boss and his boss, being put on some form of probationary "hourly" status, working part time until I could get my workload back up to speed. I could work as few as 24 hours per week, and I'd only get paid for the hours I worked.

So naturally things picked up and soon I found myself working 50 and 60 hour weeks again, and amazingly, my new "hourly" status meant I was getting paid for all of them. HR sent up the necessary paperwork to get me back onto "Salaried" mode and I told them I'd get it right back to them.

1 month later, they sent that paperwork again, and I apologized for letting it go on so long.

Next month, my boss delivered it by hand and I promised to "get right on it."

Finally, after 180 days of billing 60 hour weeks and getting paid for all of it, I found myself back in that same room with my boss, his boss, and now his boss, all of whom wanting to know why I hadn't filled in that paperwork.

I laid out the math for them. Silence... Then uncontrolled laughter from all hands. Congratulations, son. But how about we fill out that paperwork right now?
My whole life is pock-marked with failure and rejection. I can't imagine they would have been any different.
Hm, really? I've heard some fair praise for them. I prefer my keyboard (it has brown Cherry switches) but the thin Apple keyboards seem a step above standard membrane switch keyboards (this is the catch) once you get used to them.
Vile comments such as the ones you reference are downvoted because people don't know how to flag comments.

It's been a long time since the karma thresholds mattered to me at all, so I may be misremembering this; but isn't there a range where people can downvote but can't yet flag?
"The only thing stopping you from getting what you want, is the excuse you keep telling yourself about why you can't have it." - Tony Robbins
I don't think you have enough karma yet for your account to be flagging-enabled.
I never thought I'd get Bel-Aired on HN.
You're right - I've just checked. If your karma is insufficient then the "flag" option doesn't appear on comments (after clicking "link")

Good call.

I wonder if the thresholds are the same. If they are then by the time people can downvote such an item they should both downvote and flag it.
I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime.

So a year in, I only managed to find 35 hours of work one week, so I called up HR and got that overhead number to put down for those extra 5 hours. Next day, I found myself in a meeting with my boss and his boss, being put on some form of probationary "hourly" status, working part time until I could get my workload back up to speed. I could work as few as 24 hours per week, and I'd only get paid for the hours I worked.

So naturally things picked up and soon I found myself working 50 and 60 hour weeks again, and amazingly, my new "hourly" status meant I was getting paid for all of them. HR sent up the necessary paperwork to get me back onto "Salaried" mode and I told them I'd get it right back to them.

1 month later, they sent that paperwork again, and I apologized for letting it go on so long.

Next month, my boss delivered it by hand and I promised to "get right on it."

Finally, after 180 days of billing 60 hour weeks and getting paid for all of it, I found myself back in that same room with my boss, his boss, and now his boss, all of whom wanting to know why I hadn't filled in that paperwork.

I laid out the math for them. Silence... Then uncontrolled laughter from all hands. Congratulations, son. But how about we fill out that paperwork right now?
I am a 25% partner of website X, which earns in the low six-figures. The 75% partner has a majority rules attitude, and all accounts and passwords, and when he decided unilaterally to take a nice salary, and then reneg on a buyout agreement, I could see things turning wrong.

Having built the site (technical cofounder, translated as: free coder) I have a backend to all of the user's email addresses (10,000 or so, having been collected since the time I started working on it).

Soon to be ex-partner is kind of a volatile jerk, and I am by nature a little paranoid, so I sent the list to a couple of friends and family members, in case I needed someone to orchestrate a mailing. Kind of like being in a thriller with smaller stakes.

Anyone else leave a time bomb or easter egg?

TL;DR: Take care of your technical co-founders. Better yet, understand how to code for yourself.
I don't know what to say to that. It seems like uplifting but empty advice, the kind of stuff you'd expect from Tony Robins. Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut.
I like to live on the edge, what can I say.

Another time I started looking through a cardboard box that had been sitting outside my cube for months. It had office supplies and things in it. I started eyeing items like a stapler.

The guy in the next cube pops out and says "those are her personal effects!". Apparently the older woman in the opposite cube (I never met her) popped her clogs at some point, and this was her unclaimed stuff.

Oops!

(Okay, that's unintentionally-cringe-inducing-naughty, not hack-naughty. But I find it amusing these days.)
Can you elaborate? I could do with some free drinks…
I wonder if this is related -- it seems that people who wear shoes with less padding (or no shoes) are less likely to get certain types of injuries. With no padding, we strike the ground carefully. Wearing cushioned shoes, we strike the ground with full force.
Actually, this comment hasn't been downvoted. However I now see that the "fresh prince" theme song was actually a "wrapper" around another hideous pornographic story. Sorry for mentioning it.

In short, people don't come here to be entertained, they come here to learn and to share

I go everywhere to be entertained, learn and share. Humour is an inextricable part of humanity and if you're not humourous, you're in-human.

I find your response to my comment that HN is no populated by the humourless not humourful, not useful and not informative.

Yet I still can't downvote your comment.

Oh well, at least I can see the humour in it.
Golden State Law Group, San Diego Bankruptcy Lawyers
There are ways out for just about any financial situation, and the first step you should take is to contact the San Diego bankruptcy attorneys at the Golden State Law Group today to schedule a free initial consultation.
Top Parenting Fails
We all know you cannot choose your parents but this is a total disaster.
If you ever want any help developing this or need someone to bounce a feature idea off of let me know.
My youth was spent home schooled in a house with no electricity, phone, or plumbing. Much of our food was grown in gardens and in the winter we had to pull the laundry on sleds 1/4 of a mile to the car.
My girlfriend is English and I'm American. We met while traveling, so for the first several years we were together neither of us had a visa to reside in the other's country.

For a while we'd fly back and forth between the US and England every few months, and we did a bunch of traveling to allow the return restrictions to expire.

Finally we got fed up and simply moved to Spain, where neither one of us is allowed to live, but they just don't check very hard. Lived there for a little over a year, coming and going as we pleased with never an issue with immigrations.
Tell me what your stress level is like when you're elbows deep in someone else's shit.
Even as a minority stakeholder you have rights. It's possible a lawyer could help you achieve a settlement of some kind.

By doing something illegal (like stealing proprietary information) you're severely decreasing your chances things working out well.
I won't in a company I don't want to succeed. I don't want to have conflicted motives about wanting to see an organization succeed or fail.

But that's pragmatism more than ethics - I don't want to be in a position where, say, advocating publicly that smoking is bad makes me lose money on tobacco shares.
It's been killed so it's hard to know what was so bad that we should flag it. Not that I'm against flagging.
http://onlineqrlab.com
This is the first iteration. Actually re-coding it to fit into Fat-Free. Will add a decoder, other functionalities, a sharing tool... I really have nothing specific about it and will see how it goes and will decide later.

Grabbing the QrCodes that get coded and seeing what people are looking for ;) this would help me later on deciding my QrCode product.
This belongs more in a "Ask HN: Show us your 'dead on the vine' projects":

http://www.jooque.com/d_clay_smith/band_of_horses_everything...

You could play videos and keep searching while the video played, make and share playlists, etc. It stopped working when YouTube started muting copyright songs and then made some tweaks to their API and now there are dozens of similar sites so never had any real drive to fix it.

That was 3 years ago. It was one of my first php and ajaxy projects and is a bit dreadful code wise. It wouldn't have taken anytime to improve it and who knows, if I had kept it in running order it might have done something.

As it is, I think I made about ten bucks in Adwords and Amazon affiliate money...
This is discussed elsewhere in the thread. Search for Dweck
Getting married seems like a better hack. All you do is sign a little piece of paper and instantly attain a host of benefits (such as a guaranteed visa).