skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with consultants is that their expertise is usually in a higher layer of abstraction, compared to the ones that work on the place on a daily-basis.

The stereotypical consultant can only think about applying the same processes (mental- and business-) that s/he applied at all other gigs. Instead of adapting the process to the company culture, they want to change the company culture so that it can fit into the process.

Moreover, they usually have the wrong incentives. Someone who is used to charge by the hour has no reason to look for the most effective solution to the problem. If they got a six-month contract to build a better mouse-trap (or a faster horse), they will take that time to build, instead of trying to solve the problem from a different angle. And that's in the case they are actually good!
Was that vitriol really necessary?

I thought your comment was talking about YC as a whole and your opinions on them. I thought I was correcting a mistake on your part about YC today, and then giving a counterpoint. I believe discussions usually consist of two people talking and giving opinions.
I feel that mindset runs contrary to the mission of the site itself.

Criticism is not impolite. In fact, it's the direct opposite. Criticism is a show of respect. You criticize someone when you care about them, when you desire their betterment and you respect them enough to be confident that they will not react negatively to the idea that someone else may know better than they do.
I first noticed that the switch changed when I was trying out the beta and was pissed until I realized there was a software button for locking. The software button is fine, though less convenient. But now there is an easy access brightness toggle too! Net positive.
Surely those locking issues go away if you use READ COMMITTED mode though, right?
This is one of those rare kinds of mistakes where I really believe someone's head should roll. They gave away the privacy of potentially millions of people. It will have real world consequences for some of them.
> I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.

Visual and audio noise.

They're really bad for productivity of creators. They're good for managers / coordinators / investors.

The standard argument that "you can wear headphones" doesn't work for serious design work. Pounding music is great for grinding through list-ish stuff, but not for creativity.

It's like sleep deprivation. People who are sleep deprived will insist "I'm fine -- I just need a coffee", but their performance is much lower than those who are well rested.

EDIT> I'm not responding to the over-the-shoulder question here. I find it very distracting to see others' faces, though, e.g. with back-to-back monitors. Most of us are wired to pay attention to faces, so they cause a lot of visual noise.

At this point in my career, open-concept offices with > 4 or so people are a deal breaker. It makes me hate programming.
The New York Times Has More Twitter Followers Than Print Subscribers
How can he downplay it when we don’t even know the full extent of the problem? That forum thread is not exactly ginormous and as you can see, many updated without a problem (myself included).

It’s an absolutely horrible bug but Gruber doesn’t say otherwise.

Oh, and also, this is no Antennagate. Nobody cares about iPhoto, at least if compared to the amount of people who care about the iPhone.
Here's a hint: you didn't just spot another elusive occurance of the fabled Gruber bias. He wears it on his sleeve.
After maybe 30 seconds it automatically returns to the lock screen-in fact I was barely able to get to a contact before it locked again
Fabric Project Aims to Make All Code Secure
Mac. Expensive in Australia.
Yep, I would also post a link to this had I not had two problems with it:

- they don't share source code and provide a binary only

- their binary fails with an error on my linux box.
I'd like discuss your thoughts on hole punching. What sorts of rules do you apply, ethics, etc? What happens when you're successful and you halt trading? What sort of blowback is expected?
I grew up in a blunt, German family. Very straight forward, often crude. I am, as a result, one to speak my mind. Effective criticism is best delivered from a high position: hyperbole and mistakes like "my the way I" debase an otherwise salient point.

A good insult is like a fine, dry wine; it is bitter and refined. You come across in your comment history as a dullard, enamored of his own ability to shout at crowds.
Maybe people shouldn't feel comfortable. Maybe feeling comfortable is what leads people to not think critically about their actions. "I want to help you, but it's against the rules."
Leap Seconds
I'll admit that more elaboration upon 'amateurish' and 'unappealing' would be more helpful, but it isn't uncommon to hear those words in a design review at school, at an internal meeting at the company or at a meeting with a client.

And those type of harsh reviews tend to be quite standard... at least in New York. Watch the doc: September Issue. That type of tough critique results in amazing work.
Some things you could do to make your critical comments more valuable to the community:

1. Avoid unnecessary profanity.

2. Avoid ridicule and sarcasm, especially when directed at other HNers.

3. Avoid complaining about "trolls" downvoting you. In fact, avoid discussing karma in general.

4. Avoid using emotionally laden terms of disapproval. Instead use direct objective language ("There were rendering artifacts in the rotation effects") or clearly state the subjective aspects of what you are discussing ("Something about the rotation effects rubs me the wrong way.")

5. Be concise and relatively formal in your language.
That sounds exactly like the profile people want to meet.
This is also one of the reasons that storytelling in print can be such an extraordinary marketing vehicle.
re: the OLPC, what were you running on it? I have one in my closet and I've been meaning to put something that isn't the stock software on there for a long time.
Wi-Fi Direct Products Connect Without A Network
I like that Google is both fast and slow, according to that diagram.
Always has to be a "him" right? Myopic macho nonsense, just like this company that wants "hyper-motivated" applicants. Ridiculous, geek-macho, over-caffeinated boys who speak first and (maybe) think later.
I agree -- it just brought a viscerally bad reaction the first time I did it. After reflection, though, I saw nothing wrong. I think that a similar experience may occur with others. It may help if Paul himself said something about this, but I'm not sure it's important enough to merit the attention.
All I use gnome-panel for is the wifi applet and the the load monitor. I make it auto-hide and bind a key to show it in order to save screen space. But I don't see the appeal of Docky over gnome-panel--isn't it just for launching programs? xbindkeys is way better for that.
That's actually a pretty good strategy. Google will get you there more reliably than typing, thanks to typos and such.
Wow, I don't think anything else that's been posted in this thread gives such stark results as that. It seems almost like you broke it.
Dumb question: the author talks about not having to use caching because Mongo has built-in caching. Don't most RDBMSes also have built-in caching?
I don't agree with the drive by anonymous poster to your blog, but I do agree with the downvotes you got below http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1821175. (And no, I was not the downvoter.)

The open question was how big of a stick the government should wield, and your response was to implicitly ask whether the other person believed in capitalism, and if not then should we go with communism? This is a straw man comparison. There is a world of difference between saying that the government should punish bad behavior harshly, and saying that the government should have any active role in the day to day management of businesses.

In particular Stiglitz' proposal is that executives who can be shown to have engaged in fraud and theft, be punished for it. He further seems quite unhappy about corporate governance issues that in practice make it very hard for shareholders - the theoretical owners of a company - to have any direct ability to control compensation of CEOs, or to get an accurate picture of what their own company is doing.

The appropriate discussion to have about this is whether Stiglitz' characterization of the behavior is correct. And, if it is, then whether his proscription would be reasonable, and whether or not it would solve more problems than it causes. It is not to accuse someone of not believing that capitalism works.
HackerNews.
If you know someone who would do malicious things with your contact list, I think you've got bigger problems.

And playing devil's advocate, sure a thief could steal your phone and use this exploit (if he even knew about it), but what's he going to do with the contact list? If someone steals your iPhone, they did it to wipe it and resell it. There are much, much easier and less risky ways of getting large lists of people's contact info if that's what they're after.

Programmers make mistakes. Saying they should get fired over this is a bit silly, IMO.

EDIT: I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness. It's definitely serious. I've known some people who would use this against their "cheating" girlfriend in a heartbeat to see who they've been calling. But I seriously doubt anywhere close to millions will be affected.
Top Brands Favored Much Higher Among One Political Party or the Other
Doubtful that Objective C would be replaced. Still requires continual improvements and updates.

The engineers might now work on MacRuby, which is rumored to be the up-and-coming second language on OS X real soon now.
i think within most big law firms, there may be an enormous team which reviews documents, but when it comes to drafting documents, even at the biggest firms those teams are relatively small. i helped draft a section of a 2000 page document and the whole document just consisted of separate word documents with subjects like "chapter 1 rev2 final 9-3-2009.doc" which are passed around via email. but since the teams are relatively small, there aren't that many versions floating around so that can do a passable, if sometimes irritating, job.

there are some types of version control already out there which lawyers use, e.g., hummingbird dm. it's pretty lame and annoying to use which is why many lawyers i know just do what i describe above for version control.

so bottom line: yes, it'd be useful, but it would have to be very easy to use otherwise people would just use marginally more annoying but in some ways much easier to use (don't have to learn how to do something new) methods.
I play as 'adewale' on KGS and I'm currently a 9 kyu. Although, as you can see: http://www.gokgs.com/servlet/graph/adewale-en_US.png , my ranking tends to fluctuate.
Seattle DOT - Interactive Seattle Parking Map
My immediate thought as a non-lawyer is that source control works better with plain text than it does with binary data in proprietary formats. Unfortunately lawyers have to deal with a lot of real world data from random IT systems, much of which will come as images, Word documents, spreadsheets, etc.

So the idea of source control is probably useful. The current state of the art? Maybe less so.
Cuddling up with a warm cup of coffee and starting that article... then so suddenly it ends! I continued to look for content everywhere, believing that perhaps it was hidden in the source as <!-- comments --> and then I thought if I sent it random user agents I would get it. Then I tried to reload it a few hundred times. Still no content... where is it hidden?
I downvote people that I disagree with. It's never because it's too honest or too negative or too rude, I don't care about that. I downvote if I think it's wrong or misinformed.

This applies to nearly every one of your comments on Microsoft.
I think it's relative to the use to which you intend to put that knowledge.

There are zillion of different algorithms that could be applied to do long division. I could for instance, apply an algorithm that works for first order classical logic extended with the set of peano axiom and a successor function. Certainly someone who knows THAT algorithm understands something more about division than folk who just use paper and pen with arabic numerals. But do most people need to see the relationships between the two algorithms to do all the stuff in life that they need to? Clearly not.

So to be convinced of your position I'd need to see why the particular knowledge of the particular algorithm you think is so important is really necessary to the work that most people go on to do with long division.

I'm not saying the issue is completely cut and dried - but I personally can't see what your argument might be.

- edit - I might just add... that it's ALL technological reliance to some degree. I mean - what if they don't have pencil and paper? What if they don't have arabic numerals? These both were important technological advances that made long division as we know it possible. It simply couldn't be done with an abacus in any way that wasn't horribly time consuming. Technological reliance doesn't hold as an argument against employing new and faster algorithms except where it may still be difficult for many to get access to that tech. In the case of calculators in the western world - that's clearly not an issue.
legal software is such a lucrative market for someone to do something right. lawyers are so ass backwards in terms of technology, and the problem is it's not a profession where tech entrepreneurs normally grow out of.

One of my good friends works at an office where the secretaries put everyones tasks in to outlook just so they can have the calendar pop up telling them which case to work on from one hour to the next. Developer task management tools are light years ahead of the law world.
Article is from May 2010. It mentions the iPad because it was brand new at that point in time.
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Nice juxtaposition: http://skitch.com/dasil003/d7f2s/hacker-news-is-hn-only-abou...
I use this on all of my machines (Win/Mac) and it's fantastic. Great little app.

I wish the iPad supported something similar.
It'll make corporate iPhone users (well, more the IT departments really) think twice (again??) about their iPhones on their network. For all the crap that RIM gets, they do get the whole corporate environment and security lock down thing right.
Has anyone had experience comparing MongoDB and HiveDB from apache? I briefly considered both of them over a year ago before realizing that they weren't quite yet prime time for my application, and I've not had time to look at them since. I'm curious to see how they've evolved in practice.
Nice article, though I'm not sure I quite agree with this (or perhaps the way it's phrased):

> While it obviously can't stand up to the sort of abuse you could give a hard drive...

I'd have said one of the main advantages of flash storage is that it can stand up to vastly more abuse than an HDD. Toss your thumb drive across the room. Do it a few hundred times for good measure. Pick it up and it's like new. Try that with a disk drive and...I guess it boils down to your definition of "abuse".
Turn on persistent connections on your server, ensure you have session caching enabled on your server, and ensure your servers are sharing the session cache.
A lot of driving laws are "use your best judgement". For example, in Texas the speed limit is an advisory. You can go faster if you can make the case that it was safest for you to do so (like say you're in Dallas where everyone routinely drives at least 10 mph over the speed limit and driving slower would be a hazard).
BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator Beta hands-on
Why Mozilla needs to pick a new fight
If you need a secure phone get a Blackberry ;)
Am I the only one who thought "wait, the iPhone only has one button..."
We generally test dev, staging, and cert instances, but on virtually every project there's some set of things that must be spelled out in advance, like, "this message bus is shared by production market data systems so don't do anything intrusive with it".
Nice headline. Digg may be dying, but its spirit clearly lives on.
Apparently most CS is taught in Java and Python these days, with one or two courses in algorithms or operating systems. There seems to be only a few classes where C is involved.

These are bad schools. I'm really not willing to compromise on this statement.

Is this because teachers don't like teaching in C? Or because students prefer the speed of development of a language like Python or Java? Where are the students who do like C? Where can I find those guys (and girls)?

It's because C and systems are inherently hard and cannot be made... not. When your libraries are limitless your programming exercises can be made as trivial as possible.

I also always choose C if companies let me choose my language during interviews. I can fit the entire C language and its libraries into my brain all at once with no reference manuals.

C++? I don't think I could get everything even if I had the specification and Bjarne himself standing next to me.
Why would iPhoto keep the photos themselves in any other format than the original files and just point to them from the metadata store? The most I would to with the files would be to compress them using some lossless (obviously) algorithm, keeping the filenames and formats... This way, the worst that could happen would be metadata corruption for the new version's metadata with preservation of the original information.
At Northwestern this course is called "Introduction to Computer Systems." To this day it is the best class I've taken at Northwestern. I guess I'm glad the professor decided to take the course with him when he left CMU.
You, sir, have ruined my dinner with your "spigot of feces" imagery. Upvoting since I need drop a few pounds.
It feels like September 55th...
> Imagine if traffic laws were "use your own judgment" - no speeding signs

Haven't repeated experiments shown that this does, in fact, create safer roadways for cars, cyclists and pedestrians?
I covered this recently on my blog:

Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99 http://bit.ly/9PjsHW

LowBlueLights.com just made an ipad filter that fits over the ipad screen and blocks the blue light. http://bit.ly/b63zGi

Remember, you have to both block blue light at night and get bright light in the morning.

My new favorite product for getting bright light in the morning is the Phillips goLITE blu. http://bit.ly/9NXfeX

It's good to travel with and can be set to turn on before the audible alarm goes on, thus allowing you to wake up more naturally.
Introducing the New Authorize.NET SDK
I'm pretty sure iPhoto does store them in their original form—unless they were originally in RAW, in which case they get converted to .jpeg, I think.
Do I go a little bit too far with it? Maybe.

Trying to be genuinely helpful:

"Vertical list of applications??? Microsoft what have you been smoking?"

Sounds pretty emotional. Maybe was intended somewhat humorously but humor on the internet (especially in a forum) is tough to pull off. Three question marks expresses strong emotion. Strong emotion is the opposite of critical thinking and logic. Emotion is (in part) actually a form of memory. People with strong feelings are better at making snap judgments. People who lack that have to actively work at making a decision because they don't have some "gut feeling" to go by. When you emote strongly in a public discussion, you actively promote other people not thinking and, instead, just reacting. So there are valid reasons why that is something not very welcome here.

I'm someone who tends to strongly emote and I sometimes make remarks that get downvoted in part because of that. That kind of expression has its place. But it's so socially disruptive that there is good reason to discourage it in a public discussion and even more reason to discourage it in a public discussion where the goal is critical thinking and logical exchange of ideas.
I hardly think it's worse than antennagate. The iPhone's antenna issues caused so much of a stir because they impact the basic usage of the device. Is iPhoto such a core piece of MacOS functionality that this bug will make people stop buying Macs?

Then again, the timing along with the iPhone screen lock bug could have been better...
Take it as a life-lesson. People are more responsive to criticism and opposing opinions when it's expressed in a positive way, even if the core of the message is the same. While it's more satisfying to make clever remarks (believe me, I know), I've literally learned via HN how to craft negative statements in a positive way to get people to listen to me, and I'm sure you can learn the same.

(See what I did there?)
I seriously doubt anywhere close to millions will be affected.

In his defense, he was saying that the privacy was potentially compromised, not that they would be affected. All iPhone users have had their privacy potentially compromised.
There's an open-source alternative, Redshift, that does something similar: http://jonls.dk/redshift/

There's a fork of Redshfit, RedshiftGUI, which gives you a GUI if you want one: http://www.mao-yu.com/projects/redshiftgui/

I don't use either, but I've seen the former recommended, and the latter came up a few times while I was searching around to remember what its name was.
I had no problems with iPhoto 11 but historically iPhoto upgrades have been hit or miss for some so it doesn't really surprise me. Hopefully people will learn to backup someday. You just can't trust any software with your data. I'm not sure Apple is any better or worse at this than others but you might as well assume they do zero testing and your data is just a big joke to them. If everything works you're pleasantly surprised. If it catches on fire you have nothing to worry about.
The immense majority will experience no issue, as it would be expected that any bug that creates data loss would be a release blocker and, had it been verified during development, it would have been hunted down implacably.

Chances are it didn't manifest itself before.

For what I know of Steve's reputation, I wouldn't like to be in the iPhoto team right now.

But then, I would always keep the photos as separate files on a directory tree with the metadata in a single file. This way, the chances of a catastrophic data loss would be very slim.
El diagrama del comportamiento de un troll - Epic
There's an interesting TED Talk about sleep cycles, and the impact of sleep on waking alertness.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep.html
That's a very similar environment to one of my consulting gigs. No-one wanted any progress to be made because it was easier to sit in meetings all day long.

So, I just did shit, hid it, and then sprung it on them later.
How is taking pictures and saving them on a computer not a core piece of how a lot of mac users use their computers? Not to mention losing precious data like personal photos that cannot be replaced is far worse than a dropped call.
people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!"

Or sometimes people see an unfamiliar UI, think "ugh---yet another drain on my time to figure this out", consider the value of what they are trying to do, and may decide it's not worth it. This is why I largely stopped using MS Office when the "ribbon" debuted. It seemed to me to be an arbitrary change to something that had been long familiar, and I decided "I really don't need Office anyway" and stopped using it.
Discovering F.lux (via a previous HN thread) has had a dramatically beneficial effect on my life.

Before discovering it I would have difficulty falling asleep 3 or 4 nights a week. Now that hardly ever happens -- perhaps once every two weeks.
That was pretty funny. I hope their product is at least as good as that video.
You clearly need to read Stephen Fry's autobiograph (Moab Is My Washpot) :)