skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that metaphor fits at all, because this isn't about people swearing off an entire class of services ("women are evil : web-based payment companies are evil").

To better fit your metaphor, I'd say it's like having all your guy friends warn you that they each had a relationship with Jenny and she cheated on every single one of them, and you shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, she hasn't cheated on me yet, and besides, I think that was totally understandable behavior."
I have none. The colour of my flag does not make me guilty of fraud.
Couldn't say it better myself: http://xkcd.com/137/
How do fake charities impact them, exactly? Are they losing out on tax per transaction, or what?

(What is a "fake" charity, anyway? I've worked with some charitable companies that were outright scams, but due to clever phrasing, continue to do business.)
I retaliate with this:

> By accepting this e-mail you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

And this is even better:

http://www.andrews-and-arnold.ltd.uk/inboundemailterms.html
Thanks. I appreciate the feedback.
Petals Around the Rose was really interesting. I couldn't figure it out until I read the line from Bill Gate's program, at which point I got it almost instantly. I don't really understand why since I already knew the name of the game, and that the name was relevant.

I do have a long history of over-analysing simple mathematical games, though.
Yeah, the lambda issue in Python is definitely not very Lispy.

But I think even though Ruby offers a bit more for Lispers, I just don't like the design of the language as much in general as Python. If I don't code Python for a year and have to delve into it again it takes only a few seconds to get back to speed again. In Ruby, on the other hand, I always forget how the blocks & variables behave and am thrown by the strange predicate syntax, making this far more unpleasant.
FedEx also gives you the option of paying for expedited service. It doesn't make them, or the US Passport Office, corrupt. The point is that the choice whether or not to pay for faster service is left entirely up to the customer, not the grasping official.

Call out corruption for what it is, and don't try to excuse it as a cost of doing business in 3rd world countries.
Thankfully, as touch screen devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and upcoming palm or windows touch devices come out, hover states will be forced to fade away as it becomes cumbersome to design interfaces for both touch and non-touch computers.
I agree. But if you find yourself with an employer who requires that everything be written one of a few languages, and Lisp isn't on the menu, I'd take Python over C++ in a heartbeat.
It's possible to write macros in python. Every python function (with the exception of C-compiled stuff) has a bytecode property that can be parsed, manipulated, and rewritten.

It's a terrible idea to do this, but it is possible.
Causes Raises Another $9 Million To Help Spread Philanthropy Online
Ask HN: How to teach a business person to program
I hear a lot of advice that if you want to start a company, but you don't know how to code, either don't bother at all or learn to code first. I used to fight this notion, mostly because I really wanted to start a company but was too worried that I wouldn't be able to learn to program even if I tried.

Yet now that I have a start-up (web-based), I feel the need to know how program more intensely than ever. I have a technical person on the team, but just delegating everything is starting to feel very limiting. I wish I could do what he does, and help out more.

So my question is, is it realistic for me to think I can learn, and how do I start? My undergrad background is in math so I have some familiarity with algorithms and thinking in that way. But I've never written a line of code.

Any books / courses you might recommend? What language to start with if my objective is ultimately to program for the web? Any advice would be awesome.

I know I open myself up to criticism by posting this, and maybe I sound like I don't have a clue, but really I just want to learn.

Thank you so much!
I think for a general designer, using a grid is probably the best method because... it takes a lot of skill to actually break the grid in a method that is still readable yet a well-styled execution.

I definitely upvote the notion that using a very fixed grid limits options, especially if one is also working with a vertically fixed grid. If I think about the most memorable websites, they usually break the grid.

In many ways, you've actually convinced me not to use this grid.
Feature request: Please detect user's country and use appropriate amazon locale. eg I need to see .co.uk links not .com
At least P. Norvig things python is an acceptable language, if not LISP. I think the point about being optimized for small teams is a significant one. Also, because LISP appeals mostly to programmers, but it often "repeals" people with expert knowledge (e.g. scientists without a strong programming background). P. Norvig mentioned that when he converted his AI book from Lisp to python code examples, it seemed much more natural to most people,
The Lisp vs. Python story really hasn't changed terribly much in the past five years or so. Both are still great languages once you learn to speak the idioms of the language. Both languages have persistent problems with people refusing to do so and then bitching that it's not $SOME_OTHER_LANGUAGE. Both languages have places where I'd suggest one of them over the other. Neither language is even close to a replacement for the other, and programming Lisp in Python is as big a mistake as programming Python in Lisp.

(Of the two though, Python seems to have more problems with people refusing to speak the native idioms and insisting on writing $LANGUAGE in Python instead. Python Is Not A Functional Language. It is a multiparadigm language where the functional is definitely the foreign and borrowed paradigm on top of an imperative/OO core. Ignoring that will bring you grief, but it won't be Python's fault.)

Later edit: In fact, refusing to speak Python's native idioms has been getting noticeably worse in the last six months. If you want a solid OO language with some decent functional borrowing, learn Python. If you want a pure functional language for whatever reason, do us all a favor and don't learn Python. Or at least don't add to the chorus of people complaining Python isn't Haskell, just go learn Haskell. Or Clojure, or whatever.
Wow, that BIOS book is a great find. Thanks!
> With Pods you don't need explicit locking from what I understand, right?

That is my understanding yes.
I have diminishing amounts of sympathy for anyone with a recent PayPal sob story. There are ample enough warnings about doing business with them -- both here and elsewhere -- and there have been plenty of topics about alternatives.

If you choose to do business with them, you're choosing to take on a great amount of personal and business risk. Maybe that'll work out for you, maybe it won't. That's gambling.

Can we stop the PayPal complaint train now?
Depends on when you wake. It is possible to nap and awaken feeling better than before, but you generally need a timer of some sort.
Oh, it's so ugly, and it hasn't been checked for mistakes, etc. I'd be embarrassed to have my name associated with it.
Education: Is the concept of parents paying tuition so unfair?
Harrumpf. I've been using the same layout for my .sig since 1990; I'm not changing now.
You gain knowledge of how things work, even if it's not anything that can be learned implicitly by looking at the insides of something you can get a general idea of how pieces fit together and can hopefully take something away from it that you might not have known before.

Also you gain skill of knowing that you can take something apart and be able to put everything back together again, which is often harder than it sounds.
I have a use case for this in a wargame with hidden units. You know the size of an opponent's stacks, and the total forces he commands, but not always which units are in which stacks. But you can observe some, and deduce some, and guess some.
Then perhaps congress should force Paypal to clearly advertise that they make serious errors and steal from you, so that these small businesses are clear on the choice they are making.
Thanks, I'll take a look. I'd love to be able to do without npwrapper.
Microsoft Word Productivity Tips
Improving your productivity on Microsoft Word is one of the most important and the most neglected aspects of corporate life. The problem here is not that people aren’t aware of the importance of productivity; rather, it is that people aren’t aware of the fact that they are not productive.
Given I cleared cookies a couple of days ago amazing how many on the list it's telling me I have active cookies for.
$30MM is a disaster for a VC for structural reasons, but it doesn't inherently mean "talent acquisition". Is it really the case that (say) Google is buying companies for $30MM strictly for the talent?

I had a significantly smaller number in my head associated with "talent acquisition". I assume at $30MM there's a technology or line of business being purchased as well.
Red flag? Hmmm, don't think so...

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_donate-intro-ou...

"To accept donations, put a Donate button on your website. Creating the button is easy. We provide the HTML code, which you simply copy and paste to your site. Donors can then click the button to make donations. See button features you can customize."

How could you use the Donate button?
"Let’s say that you are an animal rescue organization needing to raise funds to provide care for animals. You can easily add a donate button to your website and make it safe and convenient for supporters to give to your cause"
Legal Advice: dealing with unpaid consulting fees with a NYC startup 
Hi guys,

My apologies for using a throwaway account, but for potential legal reasons, I thought it best not to use my real name or contact details.

I started consulting with a startup in NYC earlier this year. A few months later, due to some of the ownership's other businesses having problems, they gave the entire company their contractually obligated notice. That's life, it happens. We were asked to stay on for a bit longer, finalizing a few projects and were told there would be no issues with getting our final checks as we knew the company had more than enough money in the bank account to pay everybody many times over and we had never had any issues with getting paid.

Weeks after leaving, not only haven't I received payment, I still have not received any response to my emails from their management requesting payment or a date when payment would be submitted. A few of my co-workers managed to get in touch with the ownership, but they also haven't received any payment. After talking with some of my former co-workers, I have learned that the executive team is still working for the company and getting paid and the owner is claiming that some sort of legal issues are preventing him from paying the rest of us. I haven't been able to find out yet what sort of legal issues these are, but I have never heard of any legal issues that allows some people to be paid while others aren't.

If they simply ran out of money or something and treated me like a human in response, I'd probably have dropped this by now. But refusing to even respond to any of my attempts to contact them really angered me and I wish to pursue all legal means of getting paid AND receiving damages. This isn't a situation where the company has no money, this is a situation where some millionaires are trying to con average working people out of their money.

I would sincerely appreciate any free legal advice anybody might have about how to deal with not getting paid consulting fees in NYC. I have a group of co-workers that are also in this boat and willing to pursue legal action, if this helps. I have never been in this situation and would love some guidance.

PS: If anybody in New York City is hiring, a few of my co-workers are currently on the market; including a very talented backend engineer that builds highly-scalable systems, a front-end engineer that is an expert in Javascript, and an all-around great graphic designer that is a whiz with Photoshop. If anybody is hiring and is looking for some great guys in those areas, I'd be happy to forward you their information. You can reach me at gh2548867@gmail.com.

Thank you.
To mask the affiliate links perhaps.
By way of a control, is there passenger ship traffic to Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, other islands in that region, or Cancun?
You know watching that rescue reminded me of the US we used to be. No bullshit, get it done. I was impressed and kind of sad at the same time. It was awesome to see what people working together to achieve a common goal with no politics can do. Chileans should be very proud they out America'ed the US. It is good to see that somewhere in the world hero's and champions still exist. Chile showed the world how to have hope and strength again.
Ask HN: How would you steal market share from Facebook?
Just curious. There is no better place to ask online than here (unless I'm missing something). I am sure there are at least a few seasoned entrepreneurs here who have succeeded by winning over users from another behemoth in another space.

Challenging Facebook seems like an impossible task because Facebook is hitting critical mass globally and showing no sign of slowing down. Not to mention, the push of the movie and the PR campaign. I am guessing only 1% to 10% would even consider leaving. Then again, Mac only has 10% market share anyways. I just want to try anyways, what do I have to lose?
9/11 was a game changer. Up to that point, planes were kidnapped for hostages. In that scenario, the best to do is not to confront the highjackers.
Italian Cuisine in Rome: Made in China
Requiem For A Roommate
Paul, this would be a great opportunity for you to plug Arc, an increasingly active Anarki (http://github.com/nex3/arc), and the growing Arc community (http://arclanguage.org/forum).
>In fact, if I were to drop my pants in the middle of the security line, I'd be arrested, but the TSA can drop my pants for me without recourse.

There is actually a hilarious idea buried here. An interesting way to protest full-body scans would be to walk through security naked to make the point about what is really happening in the machine. Done en masse, it could probably get some media attention. And to make it legal, you could probably just wear some minimal fleshtoned bits taped over the right parts, which is supposedly all the machine does to make it "legit" for TSA employees to watch.
Cognitions (Twitter) Comments Considered Harmful
Banana vs Oranges?
From the top right of page 6:

To assess the statistical significance of the SOFNN achieving
the above mentioned accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the up and down
movement of the DJIA we calculate the odds of this result occurring
by chance. The binomial distribution in- dicates that the probability
of achieving exactly 87.6% correct guesses over 15 trials (20 days
minus weekends) with a 50% chance of success on each single trial
equals 0.32%. Taken over the entire length of our data set (February
28 to December 20, excluding weekends) we find approximately 10.9
of such 20 day periods. The odds that the mentioned probability
would hold by chance for a random period of 20 days within that
period is then estimated to be 1−(1−0.0032)10.9 = 0.0343 or
3.4%. The SOFNN direction accuracy is thus most likely not the result
of chance nor our selecting a specifically favorable test period.

I'm not sure about the result not being chance. In particular, aren't they privileging the hypothesis by using the probability of 87.6% guesses being correct? They say the result only had a 3.4% chance of happening, yet we could assign a similar probability to a wide variety of other seemingly unlikely outcomes. I'd much rather have seen the predictor tuned on a subset of the data and then tested on the rest of the data - perhaps the authors will release their predictor and we can try it on 2009.

Given that twitter and the stock market are both correlated to what is happening in the world (in fact, caused by what is happening in the world,) it is not surprising that they are correlated with each other. Somehow I don't think correlation in the other direction would get the upvotes though - stock market crash predicts sadness on twitter? You don't say.

In short, I don't follow all of their statistics, but I am highly dubious of their model having any predictive power.
How to Hire a Good Web Designer and Developer
In the US at least going by train is about like walking. Going from Dallas to Austin is about 3-4 hours by car a short enough trip you wouldn't think about flying but long enough that you would like to avoid driving. By train that is 7 hours. Looking at Dallas to Denver a 12-14 hour car trip, something where the few hour flight would be an option. By train that is 48hrs one way. so to visit a friend my options are: 24hours in a car, 4 hours by plane, and 4 days on a train. The train ride would cost about the same amount as the plane ride, and the car ride would be dollars spent cheaper but not by much.
Looks interesting, nice work. A couple of companies that all work out of our office are actively hiring engineers, so I'll talk to them and see if they'd be interested in using it.
Looks like they don't delete any cookies. They set a bunch of new cookies in your browser to indicate you want to opt-out.

From the FAQ: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/faqs.asp

9.	How does the NAI Opt-out Tool work?
The NAI Opt-out Tool replaces a network advertiser's unique online preference marketing cookie on your browser with a general opt-out cookie. It does not delete individual cookies nor does it necessarily replace other cookies delivered by network advertisers, such as those that are used for aggregate ad reporting or mere ad serving purposes. Such cookies allow network advertisers to change the sequence of ad banners, as well as track the aggregate number of ads delivered (impressions).

...

13.	Can my browser settings interfere with the use of the NAI "Opt-out" Tool?
Yes. Your browser must be set to accept 3rd party cookies in order for the NAI "Opt-out" tool to work.
I just wanted to say thanks. It seems like you tested the app out on the iPad. If you didn't, it sure seemed like it. I first visited the app on mine, and was happy to see it fit like a native app. Highly encouraging. Good work.
When he says they built 6 hi-fi mockups of their product to go sell --- is he implying that they build mockups for 6 different products, and had the prospects select which one they wanted?

I'm a little stuck on the Discovery vs. Validation distinctions in Blank's book; in my head, "Discovery" is about "do your customers have this problem", and "Validation" is about "ok, can we get 20 companies to buy this almost sight-unseen"?

(This is very, very, very relevant to me at the moment).
The problem with napping at work is that a lot of people don't know how to nap properly (how long to sleep? when to nap? etc) so it might actually cause people to feel worse, more tired, or groggy.

How long is enough? About 30 minutes is considered sufficient, according to a recent NASA study that assumes most Americans miss a little more of an hour of sleep every night.
EPIC, along with Bruce Schneier and Chip Pitts, is suing to stop the use of the body scanners

http://epic.org/privacy/body_scanners/epic_v_dhs_suspension_...

you can help out by donating -- they're a 501c3, so it's tax-deductible
Does anyone know when this archive was released? The copyright at the bottom of the index page says 2010 so can we assume this is a recent, awesome event?

BTW: I Googled for some PR for this but didn't find any (at least, on the first page of results).
I dunno, for me "understanding" something implies an ability to reason about your reasoning. a rule-based AI can't do that, and even if interesting patterns emerge, it's still deterministic.
Ask HN: Rate my Startup
WeatherLoop° - Receive Weather Texts Everyday (Please provide feedback)

http://weatherloop.com
Better still would be the ability to select user country / language rather than have that decision taken for me. I am in Portugal and would like to be able to select my Amazon locale to be either the UK or USA and not my local Amazon site which is in France.

EDIT: Just change .com to .co.uk and you'll get the same page on Amazon UK. Sadly the exchange rate seems to be $1 = £1 - at least for the few books I checked.
What is the practical difference for you between the sites? Do the books ship faster and cheaper for .co.uk? I wonder why wouldn't Amazon's backend just figure it automatically and just ship locally anyway.
Personalized private social networks might possibly have a future. See Diaspora.

It would seem that in order to disrupt a market leader, you concentrate on what they're not excelling at or what feature users want but they don't have, and you go for that.

What's Facebook bad at? What do Facebook users want that Facebook doesn't offer?

I doubt one can totally steal Facebook's social market share in a short amount of time, but certain add-ons to Facebook are less than sufficient. Facebook Q&A is an example; see Quora. In my humble opinion, Facebook Classifieds is another.
So they're looking for bomb making things (etc) on him, yet when he's on the plane he's going to be the pilot. I don't think he needs to bring things with him to bring the plane down...
Link: http://www.weatherloop.com
I see. Python seems to lack the composability requirements of coroutines (3, 4). Thanks.

It looks as if the only way to compose coroutines in Python (say, using g inside f) would be to call `yield g.next()` every time you want to access g.next() inside f. It works, but definitely not as pretty as the real thing.
I appreciate the sentiment, but this doesn't seem as big of a deal now. You can have a semantically structured page, then using jQuery or more advanced CSS selectors cherry pick elements and assign classes without touching the html.
There is more interesting materials about testing on http://exp-platform.com.
That was my thought. And if it's correct, it's not worth it given the aff link is visible at the Amazon page, and if there was ever a crowd that would know to check for it, this is it.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the aff links. Profit is fun.
Absolutely.

The answer that's related that I was trying to elicit is "because it interests me to know how things work." By the same token, trolls derive the same sort of intellectual pleasure from trolling: to anger someone is to own them. They do it "because I can."

Real trolls aren't the ones that are going "lulz obama is a socialist," "ruby is better than python," or anything so obvious. The real trolls are the ones that sound reasonable, but slowly end up destroying your community by creating discord much more subtly.
Programming is for Stupid People
very useful, although the report after says it only worked on about half of them.
Western Union is aimed at transfering money, not buying/selling goods. I had to transfer money to someone with WU and had to ring them up to verify it. They explicitly asked on the phone if I was sending money in exchange for goods, and that they don't support that, and you shouldn't use WU for that.

This is would scare off most customers and is not a good business idea.
Nice site Daniel, any chance of some RSS feeds or an API?, I'd love to integrate this with http://hackernewsers.com/books.html