skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That depends entirely on the cost of failure.

Nordstrom's became famous for having a "no return policy" return policy, which is the major implication of that 75 word card: a clerk at Nordstrom's could process a return with no receipt 7 months after the purchase if that seemed like the right thing to do to satisfy a customer (especially if it was going to get you to spend $500 more on that visit). But then, the cost of failure in handling a return is maybe $40.

In other environments, the cost of failure is much higher. My team works in one. We're paid to punch holes in other people's very important applications. The cost of breaking rules of engagement could be "halt trading". We have more rules.

Generally, it seems like you want to go the "75 word employee handbook" route when the cost of failure is relatively minimal, and then only if you can use it as a differentiator (you also have to pay for and train people who can demonstrate excellent customer service).

(And, obviously, in 2010, you can't be an employer with a 75 word handbook, unless you want to get sued every time you fire someone.)
in other news, apple reported record sales of its time capsule automated backup devices this week...
Also, consider the fact that Mongo is a document database, where each document has it's own schema. Postgres (and most other relational databases), has a single schema for the table.

There are tradeoffs with each approach. I've found that that migrating Mongo documents tends to require more software for easy migrations, but also tends to be more flexible.

For example, you can lazily cache data from services and since the schema is flexible, a single collection can seamlessly hold different types of records.

Replication is also more natural with Mongo.

Of course, reporting and getting aggregate data is easier with Postgres.
You are no longer using the service because the signal/noise ratio is crumpled. It's what happens when there are lot of new members and little moderation as well as abusing/power users.

HN is a niche social website and I don't think that it eats from Digg or any other social website.
I support this thread completely.
That's mean? That seems like very cutting criticism. I've gotten much worse from my old Creative Director. I would prefer people to speak their mind (especially on my own work) instead of sugar-coating.
Maybe if time capsule actually went back in time...
Works on my 3G!
Great comment. In the style of Eminem's Stan.
Analogous to mandatory access control security, though labeling objects (outside of a compiler) isn't particularly new, and keeping a multilevel-enabled server from getting its access tangled is not a trivial undertaking.
At my university, C is used when applicable, like graphics or OS courses. Some courses are Java, my compilers course uses C# (you make compiler for a subset of C#, c-flat, as part of course), others use a variety of languages. A lot of guys that are into iPhone development will know C from Objective-C.

C is nice, but you feel the datedness of the standard libraries, some basic operations such as string manipulation and what not is more work and verbosity than it should be.
CityReporter - http://plus1lab.com/about-cityreporter

It's a service for state and local governments to improve their customer service relationship with their citizens. It implements the Open311 GeoReport v2 API, meaning the data is open and Free.

We could really use a nice theme for the web administration interface! I have no idea if that fits within your 5 allotted hours though.
Same. Except now I regret one of them that I need, and has since been taken up by a parker. My fault that I didn't get around to it, but it's annoying.
What I have to do is to leave copying the first letter if I only want to copy the domain name. For example, example.com, I'll just highlight xample.com. It sucks, but it's a sliver quicker than having to delete http://

I'm glad that at least 24 people agree with you; I thought I was the only person who had an issue with the way Chrome treats URLs in the Omni bar. I wish there was an option that lets you choose.

I may write a Google Chrome extension for this (but how many people would really want an extension just for this problem?)
>> acknowledge a phenomenon called a "long job search"

Depending on the skill set and the market, job hunting can be a long process indeed. It is usually easy for a good developer to find something; it can be much harder to find something good.
This is one of several diseases in HackerNews.

There's a whole spectrum of ways to disagree, all of which have value in the right situation. Here, a good portion of that spectrum has been lobbed off in the name of niceness and nothing more. Is it worth it? Decide for yourself. I say nay.

Bonus disease: PG worship. Don't get me wrong, he's a brilliant guy; we're all here (directly or indirectly) because of him. But it goes too far.
What's your background, business? Either way, it's a fun event for sure, so check out the website and unless it says sold out, then you can stop by. People will ask you to pay at the door though.
It's been fixed in the 4.2 beta.
Just because someone is used to a condition, that doesn't make it the standard. I really can't imagine someone saying that to someone who would have asked for feedback.
I went to GIS school some years back. I am not sure you can realistically do this. Cell phones are "mapped" based on which cell phone tower they are using, which isn't terribly precise. AFAIK, it takes quite a lot of data from multiple satellites to give any real precision to mapping some specific, fixed spot -- ie this can take hours of standing on the same spot to get significant precision. Otherwise, you can be confident you are within something like 30 yards of the point.

I hope someone else a) knows more than what I vaguely recall from classes taken in ~2002 and b) can prove me wrong and tell you how it's done.

Good luck.
I just installed Unity in Maverick and it now comes preloaded with a workspace button that zooms out like Gnome-Shell to show you 4 desktops.

Also, gnome-terminal was one of the default apps on the bar
Can you share a link to the announcement?
This was posted yesterday on HN. Do you meet those criteria? If so, you will find a technical co-founder.

1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry.

2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject.

3. Bring a design - Actually mock up a set of flows for an MVP. Show it to 20 people, and iterate on their feedback. Find out what is important so when you do start building you build traction right away.

All of these are things that a good "Business Guy" should be able to do and will ultimately be responsible for when they do find a cofounder. Sure, pick up a little RoR or JS, but you aren't going to become a startup quality dev in 6-12 months (or likely more). However, in that same time you could do all of the above many times over.
"And, obviously, in 2010, you can't be an employer with a 75 word handbook, unless you want to get sued every time you fire someone."

IANAL, but I've worked for plenty of companies that have a 0 word handbook. I don't see why companies can't have a 75-word handbook.
Exactly what additional value is expressed by using three

???

vs

?

In other words, say what you will, but don't get carried away.
You just store the entire tree? Then how do you get a subtree? I don't think you're solving anything by just storing the whole tree as one thing. I mean you can do that in SQL too if you want.
Mobil Keluarga Ideal Terbaik Indonesia
The Most Ideal Indonesian Family Car. Berbagai kebutuhan segmen produk kendaraan telah dipenuhi dengan baik oleh PT. Toyota Astra Motor. Kenyamanan serta Harga yang terjangkau adalah prioritas utama sebagai Mobil Keluarga Ideal Terbaik Indonesia.
It's not that it's mean, it's that it's content-free. If I wrote "I think the Windows Phone 7 UI looks cool and the rotation effects are awesome" then I hope you would downvote it, because that is a trashy comment. (The real comment in question had 4 more lines, but they were all equally vapid.)

You have a specific comment about some identifiable aspect of the rotation effects? OK. You have evidence that the new wave of Zune-ish Windows UI style is not popular? Neat. You want to compare some design decisions between the WP7 UI and the iPhone or Android UIs? Sure, go for it. But if you have nothing to say, why say it?
And as expected, Mr. Gruber downplays this terrible, terrible bug.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/25/castro-iphone

If Microsoft (or Adobe) released an update to the software which wiped out data as precious as your personal photos, I am sure he would not talk about backups, but thrash the company.
Naw, just a hacker looking for an interesting project.
<blockquote>it's just that the system discourages you to have your own opinion on anything</blockquote>

Please continue to bring your own opinion's to us, for the benefit of all.

Opinion's are cool, but intelligent ideas and lessons-learned are better.
True, but nonetheless hilariously bad mistake.

Really, this is only a security threat to your tech savvy gf/bf/friend/thief since it requires physical access. And you know what they say anyway:

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore
Thanks, ergo98. I definitely think MongoDB can be used in money applications.

But there's almost always some ACID requirement when you're dealing with accounting, e.g, crediting payment or billing fees.

I would use something that could handle transactional ACID processing in combination with MongoDB depending on the application.
No official announcement. Multiple people on different forums running the beta have said that it doesn't work.
15 Impressive Green and Recycled Homes
Hi,

I thought you might like this: 15 Worst Attempts At A Fake ID Card - http://www.idcardgroup.com/blog/post/Fifteen-Worst-Attempts-At-A-Fake-ID-Card.aspx

Enjoy your weekend!

Amy
Not for nothing, but nearly all of the comments I looked at on your first 2 pages are pretty negative. Not that negativity is always necessarily a bad thing (ironically), but really man, why so angry?
It hasn't been offically acknowledged by Apple, but I can confirm this doesn't work in the 4.2 beta as well.

For obvious reasons, Apple prolly hoped this one would slip past everyone undetected until they pushed the next update out.
If the multiple outer joins or subqueries are too slow you can always denormalise a bit, you don't have to give up on your SQL database if you don't want to.
y'know a few downvotes are not the end of the world either. The most downvotes I've ever seen anyone get never exceeds 4. I've seen hundreds of upvotes for some submissions. So if you're worried about the karma, just post something interesting. Guaranteed you'll get your karma back AND still have the freedom to criticize something if you feel the need.
Toward killing cancer, tweaking cell function, and inserting Boolean logic
I see that I have already been downvoted from my one comment, here so I may as well continue the winning streak.

> Having said that, I meet these people all the time, so maybe I am kidding myself.

You're kidding yourself. To the average citizen, and this will include educated professionals such as dentists, attorneys, and educators, the internet is pure plumbing. A commodity. A public service utility.

And get this... the majority of users have no awareness of the difference between the address bar and the Google search form. They will blithely enter a URL into a Google search. And they will type keywords with no URL punctuation into the address bar. And if either does not work they will stumble around somewhat blindly until it does work.

Given this, how can even the most hardened geeks assume that "everyone" knows exactly how the slashes are arranged in a URL?

End users just don't care about our terminology. They really and truly don't. Because there is no penalty for not knowing and no premium for knowing.
No law says you need to have an employee handbook, but there are a variety of spurious claims terminated employees can make (from harassment to discrimination and so on), and if you're called to the mat, any reason you had for terminating that person should ideally be traceable back to an employee handbook (including the company disciplinary process, so you can give an employee a "warning" and have that mean something afterwards).
So where do you go if you're just looking for startup jobs? Are there any good sites out there? Or where do startups post openings?
Yes, you simpering vole.
Yes. It's our collective public relations problem.

Well said.
I write negative comments all the time and they seem to do fine.
I tried out f.lux a while ago. The problem is, a 'warm' screen really doesn't look very nice, and after a few late nite coding sessions I disabled it. I've found it much more effective to just turn the brightness down at night.

For the iPhone and iPad, it seems like when you turn the brightness down past a certain point it stops being an attention grabbing shiny object, and just turns into another, boring thing. Weird I know, but try it.
As Einstein said: Make it as simple as possible. But not simpler.

This is an art, and it applies to every form of user interface design.
I think that will work. I'll get in touch.
That's because the publicly displayed score for any comment bottoms out at -4 in order to prevent a "dogpile" effect. Every downvote still deducts karma, though it may not be publicized in the comment's score.
Border Bias: The Belief That State Borders Can Protect Against Disasters
I agree. But, the vaqueness is what elivates it to mean status. It contributed zero to the understanding of his claims, therefore leaving the negative energy stand out.

Also, that type of comment you refer to, gets usually downvoted on HN.
The article needs to be a little clearer. It's not just any light- it's blue light, specifically.
A bit of a tangent, but would something like source control (git, hg) be useful to lawyers? If they are cutting and pasting from older documents all the time, it seems like it would.
I think this is a great opportunity to do some A/B experimenting. You could start a new thread.
I'm writing a new todo application that runs and syncs on ALL platforms: Fin.

http://kennethreitz.com
I upgraded my 30gb photo album to iphoto '11 yesterday w/o any issues at all
How We Went From Idea to Launch… in 4 Days
I'm not sure it's exactly a disease. I'd rather call it a blindspot.

On the topic of "PG worship" I think, yes, perhaps the constant extolment goes a little to far. I think this is a blindspot of HN simply because most of us are pretty polite. One doesn't go into a host's house and take a dump on the floor, if I may. Sometimes I feel it may be rude to criticize Paul in this forum for a similar reason.
"He is extremely well-trained, reads 500 pages a week and does his own deep-dive research." Sounds like a Buffett guy.

Generating returns on a fund of Berkshire's scale is no joke, though. Good luck to him.
Makes me wonder what the effect would be of doing the same sort of thing for upvotes.
> I can still mount and read from the drive, but I can no longer write to it. It's nice to know that when a drive dies, it's more likely you just won't be able to write new data to it, rather than complete data loss.

That's incredibly interesting & very nice to know! Makes SSD's look just that much sweeter.
By the way you can dial anything, it doesn't have to be three pound signs.
I upgraded two libraries to iPhoto 11 without a single issue. One was 40,000 pictures and the other was 5,000.
I think it is more a principle than a pragmatic choice. People want privacy for no other reason than having it.
> Seriously, how the hell would anyone discover this feature on his own?

That's exactly how I expected it to work. Only goes to show I've been working in close mental proximity to the people who made this feature for a long time. Sometimes even physical proximity.
How is that a trashy comment? You're affirming that they did something right which is a plus. Not everyone has the means to fully explain why they like or dislike something. Sometimes its just a gut feeling. Or sometimes it doesn't need an explanation.
I just took a glance at my recent comments. Most of them are nominally negative (by about 2:1). Most of them have several upvotes, none of them appear to be downvoted.

People on HN enjoy criticism just fine, but they don't particularly enjoy standing next to a spigot of feces. The problem is that vitriol and excessive emotion skews debate. It makes the debate about the emotion itself, rather than about the issue at hand. When people get into a shouting match their brains shut down and people stop arguing rationally (the fight-or-flight response kicks in, blood starts being withdrawn from the extremities and some of the higher brain-function areas, the reptile brain starts taking over, and it becomes much more difficult to admit being wrong or that the other person might be right). This sort of thing is not helpful if the goal is productive rational debate.
Question is, would it have been that hard to defeat if you were someone who cared absolutely nothing for minimizing damage to the door and door frame? Usually, the answer is not at all.
To me it seems that HN has mostly been about content and thoughtful presentation. Not all of my comments are always happy unicorn rainbows, but if I'm presenting an alternative or unpopular opinion I (try) to at least explain my reasoning and logic.

Lame jabs, cheap shots, bad jokes, and vapid comments DO seem to get rightly pounded down.
Sure it's a neat backdoor, but does it play Global Thermonuclear War?
It doesn't surprise me people think Google is the internet. But it's still scary!
I am sure there are cases where upgrade didn't cause any issue. That doesn't mean all these other reports are invalid.

In fact, I was going to make another comment asking about how can bug like this happen. I am sure that Apple QA team tested the upgrade functionality and they didn't find it. I am really finding it hard to imagine what kind of corner case the code ran into, which caused deletion of precious data.

EDIT: Wow. This is interesting. So one person could upgrade w/o issues and that's why my comment which points out that there are other VALID, repeatable instances where upgrade did not go smooth gets downvotes. That's funny.
Look at my post above about a story where homeless people aren't exactly scum?
For your desktop/laptop, F.lux adjusts your screen color in the evening: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

(added bonus: gets rid of the eerie blue glow when you Skype at night)
Dude, it's karma points on HN. A number on a server somewhere that has no bearing whatsoever on your real life. Have some perspective.
Seriously, you can't take a Mac advocate's casual blog post, post it here yourself, and then argue that it isn't fair and balanced enough. It is not Jon Gruber's job to shout from the rooftops when things go wrong with Apple products.

And chances are, if it is a real problem, there will be a starred long-form blog post forthcoming from Gruber describing it in more detail.

This is among the more tiresome recurring complaints on HN. "Gruber is biased". Shocking! Next you'll tell me John Nack really isn't critical enough about Adobe! Can we give this a rest?
I have been witness to many JavaScript programmers who could have greatly benefited from good old fashioned pointer arithmetic.

Take the following code for example:

/** BEGIN **/
var f = new Array(3000000);
console.time(1);
for (var i = 0; i < f.length; i++) {
if (f[i] === 'foobar' ||
f[i] === 'foobaz' ||
f[i] === 'baz' ||
f[i] === 'barfoo') {
// Do something
}
}
console.timeEnd(1);
/** END **/

On my comp, in Firefox, this executes in 7478 ms.

Now, if there is one thing that pointer arithmetic has taught me to be especially aware of is that array index lookups are expensive, usually regardless of the language. With this knowledge, I am empowered to refactor my code to look like this:

/** BEGIN **/
var f = new Array(3000000);
console.time(1);
for (var i = 0, _i = f.length; i < _i; i++) {
x = f[i];
if (x === 'foobar' ||
x === 'foobaz' ||
x === 'baz' ||
x === 'barfoo') {
// Do something
}
}
console.timeEnd(1);
/** END **/

On my comp, in Firefox, this runs in 6235 ms. Now, I have achieved almost a 20% performance increase due to my expanded world view.

This is a very simple example, but the list goes on. One certainly should not limit themself to one language.
Yes; one of the things I noted in the worst company investment situation I was ever a witness to (angel investors who turned out to be devils who wanted 100% of nothing...) was that lawyers keep things below the level at which people pull out knives and have at each other.

A rather useful institution for a society.
I hope you aren't walking near peak hour traffic - exercising near traffic will make you inhale more polluted gas (from cars) than usual, which will actually damage your health
I'm struggling to design a decent toolbar location for an RPG Maker type website.

Here's a snapshot: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Vtq6sCdzyKs/TMUub_v3L9I/AAAAAAAAAG...
PyCon US 2011 - Call for Proposals Reminder
We actually had less alcohol-related incidents than any nearby college, despite their having significantly more restrictive policies

I'm not sure how that is a benefit and I think a lot of people are mistaking the absence of rules with the absence of authority. The easiest way to get compliant people is to threaten them with punishment but not tell them what the rules are. They had 5 other students explain the nuances, rather than someone with authority because that way, they could still punish you for what those students told you was OK.

It's essentially an open door for exertion of arbitrary power, but dressed up so the people welcome it as freedom. Imagine if traffic laws were "use your own judgment" - no speeding signs, but the cops could still pull you over on a whim and ticket you for speeding. And you couldn't go to court to contest it because there are no rules, and we'd all be driving a whole lot slower. But at least we're being treated like responsible adults, right?
Actually, I wasn't complaining. Just observing. I don't know why I should not be allowed to note all the instances where Gruber's bias show up.
How CloudSponge Increased Conversions 33% Using 99designs – Case Study
Interesting. I agreed with you until I realized something -- wifi is essentially broadcast radio waves. Unless the information is encrypted, there is not only no intent to hide it, but it is being actively transferred at you. I think a better analogy for sniffing unencrypted wireless traffic may be your neighbor yelling all his personal information across the street to someone in plain view. How is that supposed to be a private conversation?
Just to let you know, I visited your website hoping to find out more about the open positions that you have at your company and could not find a page listing them. I visited the page titled 'SEO jobs' expecting it to be your open positions, but it looks like this is more of a job board.

I don't know anything about your site so maybe I am missing something, but you might want to make it easier for developers to see which positions you have available.

I hope you find some good developers!
If it were in response to a person on HN (or a Microsoft employee!) who was looking for feedback, I might agree with you. There's a place for simple praise. But what's the use of affirming your love for the new huge product of a big corporation somewhere?

Anyone can say whether they like or dislike something, and if that's an acceptable contribution in itself, everyone will. Welcome to Gizmodo and Engadget. The end result is that more substantiative comments and comments from actual experts are covered in goop.