skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have sympathy for the guy, but there's really not much he or Facebook can do here. The only real thing Facebook can do is put some kind of auto-flag on accounts with that name (both "variants" of it, I guess) and check each case to make sure it isn't someone else who coincidentally has the same name. But are they willing to expend so much effort on someone who doesn't want their services? Facebook has demonstrated an interest in weaving itself thoroughly into people's lives wherever possible, and you'd think it would go against their business interest to put in that kind of effort.

The only real solution I would be able to offer him is to make an account himself--a real one--and never use it (much like I do with my account these days). That assumes, however, that Facebook has some means of verifying that someone is not an impersonator and is in fact the real one. I'm no expert on that--do they?
Don't listen to these lily livers. It's an unusual, funny name and suitable, given that the player uses a variety of weaponry.
I agree about changing the layout to make it fit on one page. But I wouldn't remove high school. He's done IB, which is way more challenging than regular high school. It's a straight admissions ticket to many top universities, some even let you skip the freshman year entirely based on what you took with IB.

It's unfortunately not as widely recognized in the US than elsewhere in the world.
Presumably because they want to improve as well.
From the readme file on GitHub.

If you're someone that runs an enterprise-level website (>100 hits per day), you've probably had to deal with the pains of scaling and maintaining your code.

Enterprises have dealt with these problems for years -- this is an attempt at gathering all of that knowledge and to share it with the world.

The sarcasm is so think I can almost taste it.
The first thing that popped into my mind as a user is what about my privacy? Can you assure me that my data will not be seen or used in any other way than helping me out?
His distinction is maybe analogous to binary (readable) and source+makefile (writable).

Minor point: "text" here covers all sorts of artistic creations (TV, music, fine art), not just the written word.
Hello Designer, Do you complain about IE? Well 30% of our users use it
Why are designers always complaining about IE and up to the point that they don't want to do CSS for it?

I understand that it is quite bad but in the end, it still has a strong user base.

A great web app should always look great beyond our personal preferences!
To pickup on the don't waste time point, sometimes I think ambling along can produce a better results than just heads down pushing towards a goal.

Writing my thesis recently, I spend plenty of time going off on tangents, sometimes related, sometimes not. Or going for a walk or a ride just to let ideas sit in my unconscious mind.
The site guidelines are a good resource if you are new:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>This is beneficial for the phone companies only, not for the customers.

I have a number of top notch companies fighting for my attention and purchases, all of them generally on a common "app level": None have the comfort of sitting back, cocky that you'll have to choose them anyways.

Do I want a Galaxy S? Maybe a slider? That new dual core? Maybe an inexpensive LG?

It's extremely good for consumers.
The difficulty lies in that most small businesses in local communities operate in a small, volatile economy that is not impervious to the overall weakening trend. Add to that most communities are anchored by one or several large employers--sources of income are not diversified and any change will hit hard and fast. The more the conditions of socioeconomies worsen, the more people will rely on reverting only to basic necessities (and vice) to meet their needs. One strategy is to hedge the microeconomy by assisting businesses expand their reach without investment (read: revenue share).

Some ideas:

1. Partner with a small business that produces a product, offer to design, market and help them fulfill that product on the web for an X% of the receipts. Example: Guy sees ipad coming, designs and sells ipad case by partnering with SF's last remaining booksellers.

2. Partner with a service provider (eg. a CPA) to create a lightweight online equivalent similar model to #1. Bonuss points if specialized to an industry and segment open to working online.

3. Start a completely new business by buying equipment from closed businesses, integrated online and employing local workers.

4. Focus on a niche in demand and excel at producing and selling this. Run product scenarios on initial investment entail low-cost, lightweight (or even free) resources resulting in a high-value product comparatively. Scale, iterate and optimize.
Hi Jawns,

I am not sure how you have your Awesome Bar set up or if you already created an Amazon keyword in Firefox. If you did, then you are correct it would be the same in that instance.

The goal is to create lots of keywords on eEntogo so you don't have to in Firefox. You can also create the keywords on the Entogo site and access them anywhere.

Please try some of the other keywords as well. It will give you an idea of how it works beyond Amazon.

Thank you very much for trying it.
I would love this feature, because I regularly have to deal with OOP code that is constructed solely of functions that are about three lines long. This often swaps method-level complexity for systemic complexity, and it drives me nuts. Having to look back through ten different files to find out how a method does what it does as well as what it does (i.e beyond what you find in your average comment) is infuriating. Being able to inline method definitions would be really helpful, if it could be done in a way that didn't cause breakages around 'this', and so on.
Your being overly generous. Consoles operate on a lifecycle that goes R&D > Manufacturing > subsidized early adopters > mass market > end of life. Over that cycle mass market and end of life are only profitable if they cover R&D costs and the subsidy to early adopters. Based on their sunk and the fact the 360 is not going to last 20 years they have yet to manufacture a profitable console.
Ask HN: did you build a custom billing system? 
or did you use off the shelf software, and why?
Every billing system requires some integration into your product. Do you think there are significant savings to be had by using off the shelf billing software and integrating it vs. writing your own billing software that fits just right with the rest of your system?
> edit: Also, anyone notice how often Apple reports their "best quarter ever?"

It would be slighty more meaningful if you took inflation into account. (Though they are growing way faster than inflation.)
Ask HN: Looking for hosting resources. Best practices.. etc
I'm in the process of researching for a move from some older expensive dedicated servers and I only seem to be finding entry level questions on StackOverflow and spam or half answers on Google.

A lot of what I found is directed at people just starting a site or just learning. Anyone have suggestions for resources on hosting mid/small site?

We are low traffic but burst to 50,000 visits a day multiple times a month. Our main users table is well over a million rows.

Heroku is awesome but I still have to host the db somewhere and pay extra for ssl and email.
Linode or Slicehost VPS looks great as well. Is a VPS enough to handle a database and a site? What happens when you need to scale and load balance?

Any advice would be great. I feel like I'm more comfortable with code rather then admin stuff as I get to practice the coding a ton. How do I build my admin knowledge base?
I think you are right edw519. I tried to push myself beyond the pain threshold once and instead I got a fracture. I think the caveat is that you have to be in good shape before you start pushing your pain threshold.

For programmers/entrepreneurs, this may translate to pushing past your concentration/sleep/tenacity threshold.
This article seems to reflect the "entitlement" approach to education. It's up to the person entering school to determine whether the time and debt are worth it to them when they sign up not when they fail to get a job. It is not career services' job to get you a job. They should provide the resources and training to give you a better chance. However, in the end either you made a good choice or a bad one going to school. Either you're someone who has the initiative to get a job or you aren't. Schools are in business to make money, not to get people jobs. They're going to use the same marketing tricks as everyone else.
The buzz around Writer comes from Focus Mode, not necessarily the WPM you churn out. Your WPM is lower because of iPad ergonomics, but it seems writers backtrack less with this app, so their realized WPM improves a ton. At least that's what iA says.
So you can do this in all modern browsers without installing a toolbar or jeopardising privacy. What's the benefit?
Deja Vu All Over Again
You have a typo on the homepage (desitination).
I've worked on java projects in both vi and eclipse. While ramp up on larger projects generally takes longer in vi, I feel like the payoff is worth it. What eclipse does for you in suggesting classes become memory muscle pretty quickly in vi. At which point, eclipses slowness is just crippling. If someone could make an IDE that was fast, and could figure out the project completely from my build tool without nudging, I might enjoy it. I just don't see how a more feature rich IDE is going to be faster and less buggy.
Most contractors I know end up spinning plates (like in that circus trick) when they have periods of too much work - they usually don't like turning down certain jobs because it is revenue. And have periods of downtime (not necessarily voluntary). Of course, if you are an elite bespoke developer, you can turn down work and always have work.

I met a guy who installed sprinkler systems in rich people's lawns. He worked all Spring/Summer/less during the Fall and took off to Barbados or Jamaica for the remaining 3-4 months of the year.
It is real brute force, but I do not investigate some stupid nodes. If I choose to not use an available jar during a timestep, I disqualify that jar, until another jar has been used, since there is no point in waiting to use a jar unless you want to save your balls for another jar.

The code is ugly and undocumented. I think the same could be accomplished in less than 10 lines of Haskell :).
http://pastebin.com/MfXK9fwS

An implementation detail is that my branches are actually "jar1" "jar2" and "stepforward". To use a jar many times, you do jar1, jar1, stepforward.
Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet
speaking as someone who sells VPSs... the thing to worry about when moving from dedicated hosts to a VPS is the disk I/O. If, for example the host in question is a memcache server, this matters not at all. for a MySQL server, on the other hand, this matters quite a lot.
Yes and no.

I use ActiveMerchant for the hard part ( http://www.activemerchant.org/ ), but built my own UI and models for storing transaction history.
Chrome does this as well.

I just type in "az harry potter" and it searches amazon.

It was really easy to set up in the chrome preference panel.
Once you learn someone else's framework (not much of an option yet) or build your own (as I and others have) it takes no longer to make games in JS than Flash.
They're Going To Do It Anyway
Link please? Thanks!
Ozzie Microsoft Exit Fuels Concern Over Ballmer Bench
There is direct competitions. Between android and apple. The discussion resembles around what is best for the end consumer. And it's my view it the integrated approach is better than a fragmented one when we are talking about the same product
Introduction to Server-Sent Events
These people are serious. They think they're entitled to a job after graduation from school. One of my younger acquaintances was asking around about how to sue his art school for not providing an education that got him a job.
I hate to be That Guy, but HTML Tidy tells me his page has 26 errors, mostly related to proper nesting of elements. It's just too easy to make sure your HTML is valid to let his "Attention to Detail" commitment slide.
#wp7/#wp7dev + Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Windows Azure
I got to mess around with the Windows Phone 7 SDK finally over the last few weeks (Twitter hashtags #wp7 and #wp7dev). The first few things I noticed was that there are a lot of missing parts to it. Namely the calen...
If you're business depends on your customers not figuring out what you actually do then you shouldn't be in business.
"We are social beings, and I think once in a while a lunch like above is healthy to keep us sane. But, doing this everyday for years at a stretch, is insanity !"

This is just bizarre to me. I'm not the worlds most extroverted person, but creating and maintaining social relationships at work has been the single most powerful thing I have ever done to: Learn new things, advance my career, form mentoring relationships (both as a mentor or mentee), try new foods (one of the great joys in my life)etc....

If you aren't getting anything valuable from lunch with other people, you are doing it wrong.
No, Apple is concerned about making money. They make money by making things and convincing end-users to buy them. One way to convince end-users is to make something useful and pretty and then market it in the most effective way possible.

They are very good at this, and I do not fault them for it, but I also do not confuse altruism with what is clearly a profit motive.
matlab skills are highly desired for some jobs, If you know it well enough to put it on your resume, you should just lump it in with the other languages. same with latex(if you're possibly looking for anything academic/research lab)
I like the idea and creative approach, but I'd like to know a bit about what your skills are. It not in the theme of the site to put up a resume, but you need to give me an idea whether or not you're somebody I'd want to hire as a developer, or to work in marketing.
To be able to show closest and cheapest the service will need to include more stores obviously, correct? Cause if you use (a) then the potentially you're missing vast majority of stores closest to you
This app really bothers me. Writer is sold to people "who can't concentrate while writing," and it seems iA believes the success of the app means the app really helps people focus.

But as anyone on OSX knows, people have a voracious appetite for these kinds of apps (WriteRoom, Ommwriter, ZenWriter). This doesn't mean these apps help anyone write. Rather, it says people who want to write spend a lot of time thinking about their tools. Instead of, you know, actually writing anything.

So there's a market of aspiring writers who obsess over text editors. iA releases Writer, and expands the "zen text editor" market to iPads. Now these aspiring writers can "focus only on their words" on the go! Only, they spend time complaining how, in landscape, you can only see 6 lines of text. Or how it's hard to move around your doc and regain context.

If you really enjoy writing, any other app would get the job done. Hell, pen and paper or a typewriter would get the job done. Instead, iA's tapped into this market of people who want to write but "can't focus." And I feel for them, because their writing tools aren't the problem.
hm. thanks. yeah, no matter what I'm doing I'm going to take advantage of libraries to interface with payment processors.
The Marathon Monks of Tendai
Ask HN: Examples of when you hacked some (non-computer) system
One of the questions on the ycombinator application is when have you "hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage". Anyone want to share some of their past hacks they've used in previous applications?
What's Your GitHub url?
Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster here.

Can we get a list of public repos? I'm really interested to see what some of the regular HNers are creating.

edit:

Post a link to code you are working on!
In my experience hiring people, there are a lot more good job openings available than even competent developers to fill those roles.
Do people use multiple VPSs to host a single site? It would seem slower and a bigger security risk to have your db on one slice and web server on another?
How David Spinks Took His Idea For BlogDash And Jumped For It
Pain is an interesting thing. When you first feel pain, it's scary and, usually rightly so, is the body telling the mind to stop something. The problem is that in order to get better in most athletic endeavors, athletes must push their bodies into an area that often causes some sort of pain[1].

A couple things eventually happen. First is the athlete starts to associate pain with progress. This is actually a bad thing since pain should always remain as valid feedback and signal a person to think about the actions they are taking. Second and more import is that the athlete accepts the pain and deals with it. Like most things in life, it sucks a lot more until you know what to expect. For example, getting punched in the face causes pain, but more than that it causes surprise. Remove that surprise and even if the pain is the same, the athlete will now react in a more sensible way from the punch.

For reference, I don't do any long distance (5k is what I maintain) running but have always played various sports, trained in MA, and primarily powerlift now (at least until the ski slopes open!).

[1] After experiencing all sorts of pain over the years there are definitely good pains and bad pains. IMHO, it takes time and experience to recognize what pains are what :)
I did say "medium". The form with which we interact with.

Text is the best medium right now. No one's discovered a better method of representation.

Are you saying we should represent code in a more graphical tree-like way? Even in that case, you still need text to fill in the tree.

Or are you saying we should program in visio-style diagrams?
Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative
You're correct:

http://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support

http://github.com/blog/644-subversion-write-support
This is stupid. 3rd year student, going to graduate soon with a law degree, can still return back to teaching if he wants afterward, doesn't have to forfeit house and home to pay back loans. He will be just fine. He made the decision to go in the first place so he must have understood what taking loans would be like.
How to identify people in your company who might have good ideas ?
That I certainly agree with - the industry point. He probably has an industry in mind, but he has not communicated that at all.
I'm http://www.brittanymlaughlin.com - I collect information on entrepreneurship, tech, travel and events in NYC.
i think it's most helpful for those that are just getting off the ground, but from an experienced entrepreneur's perspective, consider how much they stand to learn from a sitdown with a young gun.

especially if they operate a company that appeals to the b2c market, it's essential for them to understand how the younger demographic perceives and digests in an ever-changing marketplace.
Nice link, but the title used to post here is empty of any information.
I don't really agree on the point about lunch. It really depends on who you have lunch with. I had lunch many times with really interesting people from who you can learn a lot and even share ideas and think about new startup projects. Sometimes, closing to yourself is not a good idea. Speaking to different people broadens your mind and that is absolutely necessary.

On the other side, i really like the experiment behind the shower ;)
A lot of people will argue that this kid didn’t purchase a J.D., he purchased an education and a way of thinking, and he cannot just “return” these things in exchange for his money back. You know who will say those things? Law professors, deans, and other theorists who have idealized the process of “thinking like a lawyer.”

But this kid (and thousands out there like him) did not go to law school to gain some intangible brain stimulation. They went to law school in order to get a job. That’s the whole point of a professional school. Deans who don’t understand that point do a disservice to their students.

Now this is just sad. Is this not why the education system sucks? A part of the problem is the difference between agendas of students (even among themselves) and institutions.
Ask HN: Web Analytics iPhone App Feedback
Hi All

I know some of you use Clicky for your web analytics. I've developed a native application and am interested (before I push out for beta testing) what data/features are important to you. Even if you don't use Clicky, you may have a view on what an iPhone app should consider for a web analytics stats app...

What Clicky data is important for you to see on a per site basis?

How flexible with the timeframes do you need it to be? Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days?

What must you absolutely have in the app?

What you don’t like about the Clicky iPhone webstats site

What iOS native API functionality could the app take advantage of?

What price point you would be willing to pay for such an app?

Remembering that this is a mobile app, and features/data required should be seen as required 'on-the-move'.

If you're interested in beta testing, feel free to email me: steve[dot]reynolds[at]gmail[dott]com
I think it's possible to do, but you need to differentiate yourself from browser keyword search and DuckDuckGo-like !bang searching more in order to get me to use it.

In Firefox (and I'm assuming other modern browsers) I can right-click on a search field to make it a keyword, and then do essentially (as far as I can tell, at least) the same thing as you're doing.

DuckDuckGo makes this easier for me because I can just use its !bang search syntax (http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) to do the same thing. I now much prefer using DDG's method over manual keyword searches since I don't have to set them up and they work on all of the computers I use.

I understand that you having the keywords all set up already is a convenience, but (at least for someone who already uses things that do this) I think that the added value is not immediately obvious.
http://github.com/mdeiters
5 years. No Regrets. After 3 years at a multinational and 4 patents later, I quit and learnt a lot. Tried many startups. Burned out. Joined same company again and quit again after a year... and still exploring the landscape. I guess I am addicted. :). I wouldn't trade doing this for another 5 years even if someone offered me a job at a Goog or an FB. 5 years later my responsibilities may take precedence :).
I think Sony still sells the PS2 in several markets. That must offset some of the subsidies on the PS3
you emailed me? I didn't receive anything. I am not sure where you got my email but here it is: jezowicz at gmail
The Minecraft developer should implement lego NXT-esque stuff in his game :)
Agreed. I'll throw in my vote for Emacs; you can get very far with autocompletion (M-/) and tags. Autocompletion will complete the word you are typing with other words from all your open buffers, and it works 95% of the time. Tags allow you to jump to definitions easily.

The way Emacs implements these are so dumb but in reality they work great, and it's all really fast. The problem with large IDEs is they can be really slow if they are having to constantly analyze large codebases.
Fitness and Wellness Tips For Teens
Vim and Emacs are 20+ years old and still popular. They're still around precisely because they're really good tools for transforming source code.
Are you price sensitive? Budget? Is this RoR? Does the site have performance problems right now?
I wouldn't hire the guy. He does not communicate well what he does and what kind of position he is looking for, he spends a couple of paragraphs telling the world how useless he is, and he did not show any initiative to start something himself while he was unemployed. Nice try, but it's not sufficient to convince me.
Can someone describe how this is possible
The best question to ask your interviewer