skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking stupid should be a side effect of getting rejected and not a path towards it. It's interesting that you mention improv because rarely ever in improv do you reject an idea. From what I've seen successful improv is working with every outrageous thing that your partners can make up while to turn it into a genuinely enjoyable act. Like you said I believe the point of Rejection Therapy is not to embrace looking stupid, rather it is to overcome your fear of doing so.
Haha - funny you should bring that up. I am great about getting feedback, even harsh feedback, which is something that you get a lot from your coach, or from judges.

I also work in sales and have done phone fundraising for my school so I've gotten plenty of "nos" and hang ups. It's not as big a deal though. For me, this was really about overcoming personal rejection and just challenging myself to try something a little outside my comfort zone.
Hi hackernewsers! HNResources.com is my approach to create directory of content and applications for HN. Site is hosted by GitHub and uses Jekyll generator, Compass stylesheet framework and Discuss commenting system. If you think I miss something fork repository and send me pull request, open ticket or just leave a comment. Your ideas how this site could be improved, structure changed, etc are welcome. Most of topics is not filled enough so consider this submission something like MVP.
That's why pg made http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless
Oh man - that's a slightly scary but exciting idea. I may have to take you up on it!
I'm curious to know what else you would want to see there. I felt like it was a reasonable balance between writing something brief enough to be worth reading while still sharing the places where they themselves screwed up. It's pretty common practice, for example, to admit no wrongdoing whatsoever.
there's only one option: explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what happened, why it happened, and how it's going to be fixed in the future.
Why? Because their clients can smell bullshit better than a purebred bloodhound. Too much bullshit means it's time to move on.

Okay. I feel a bit sorry for bashing heroku here, but I'll bite.

If I was a heroku-customer then I'd feel, ahem, a bit washed by their idea of "excruciating detail".
So here's what happened according to them (verbatim-quote):

A slowdown in our internal messaging systems caused a previously unknown bug in our distributed routing mesh to be triggered. This bug caused the routing mesh to fail. After isolating the bug, we attempted to roll back to a previous version of the routing mesh code. While the rollback solved the initial problem, there as an unexpected incompatibility between the routing mesh and our caching service. This incompatibility forced us to move back to the newer routing mesh code, which required us to perform a “hot patch” of the production system to fix the initial bug. This patch was successful and all applications were returned to service.

So their "internal messaging system" triggered a bug in their "distributed routing mesh". And they applied a "hot patch".

Great. As far as I am concerned they could as well have written their flux-compensator overheated because the pixie-dust exhaust got clogged with rogue bogomips.

I applaud their willingness to talk to their customers at all. But please... either explain what was going on in a meaningful way - or just leave it at "we screwed up and promise to do our best to prevent it from happening again".
On the other hand, you should definitely continue "playing around to see what I could make". That's how you become a hacker (not to be mistaken with a cracker).
Currently in the middle of a job search so feedback on this would be very helpful!

http://miazmatic.com/wiki/images/0/04/Tech-resume.pdf
pg had already done it :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/offers
http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless
"Your privacy is our top concern."

...later...

"A cheating spouse's cell phone armed with Honey Location gadget can tell a thousand proven facts and can help you on the road to finding the truth."

Ahh, delicious irony.
Well, I do not quite agree with your argument that Python is "always memory-hungry". As a matter of fact, writing "good" Python code is a very seldom observed art and most performance issues can be gotten rid of if you know enough about the language and follow the style and design advices of true "Pythonistas", as the "gurus" there call themselves (and many more who do not deserve that title ;)). However, I have been programming several years in Java on an earlier assignment, where stuff got so clumsy I wrote a 6 page manual for my team outlining "don't do's" in Java because it would either cost tons of performance or memory, mostly related to very basic stuff such as instantiation strategies and everything that might be "good" for OOD, but bad for performance. We ended up writing most of the core of the system in Lisp and then generated the "light-weight" Java stuff from a DSL one of our Lisp "masters" had conjured, to avoid all the bloat you have to go through to write simple things such as walkers, etc. in Java. If I ever had real memory problems ever, I must say it was with JVM, and it took me months to, for example, come up with a solution to index a few TBs with Lucene and the JVM "crashing" (well, hanging) because of gc (although that was back more than five years now, so things will have gotten better, I admit). Nay, I must say the Python/C combo is much to my liking. I want something that fits into that picture, not so much an alternative. And there I currently see Erlang as quite promising combo to my two favorite languages, after going through all the advice and pointers everybody here gave me.
see also:

http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/
Ask HN: Is Facebook's email validation broken?
Attempting to change my email address to mail at kapilkaisare.info does not work; I get an error message asking me to use a valid email address. Attempting to register a new account, expectedly, doesn't work either.

Is there a non-stupid reason this may be so?
Further, regardless of the writers' ability to relate to hackers they still need to write stuff that appeals to people. Most people don't enjoy just building things like hackers do.
But I'm sure that didn't stop Jack and Jill from liking each other's statuses once they got home from the cinema to tell the world that they had just seen the movie. I don't think it really affected anyone, at least not Facebook's main demographic.
Blackwater at least felt that their name was tarnished to the point of changing it.
Will this offer still be valid next summer? With any luck, I'll be doing research for the summer at a university in Tokyo, and I'd love to visit Shikoku for a few days.
Yes there would. You could do "ajax" style communication using <layer> tags in Netscape 4 even before IE4 came out.
Please tell us about the time you, ABrandt, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

note: non-computer
Ask HN: How can somebody  register a file format such as ".xyz"
Is it possible to register a name for file format such as ".mp7" or names like that?
Agree totally. I realized early on that some of us are just born to build. Everything else, including making money is just secondary.

For some of us the biggest part of our happiness is dependent on the meaning that we seek through our work, and more importantly, anything less than building something isnt meaning enough.
A Hollywood blockbuster is written by a screenwriting team who use formulae and focus group feedback to make a saleable product. They're unionized and it is just an assembly line job.

Not that there aren't creative writers, mind. But those guys are making arthouse flicks, not working for Jerry Bruckheimer.
For what it's worth, I've upvoted this too. I certainly didn't mean to kill the trend completely (which is what seems to have happened :-/). There is some obvious value to it.

I wouldn't want to see the Offer HN thing become a lasting trend at the current levels... that said, the odd "Offer HN" doesn't bother me, and I certainly wouldn't want to think that all offers stopped completely just because my post got upvoted.

That said, to elaborate on the point jacquesm singled out, many/most services-businesses (from tax consultancies to seo consultants and web developers) use free consultations as a way to generate leads. My suggestion to people who want to offer something to HN is, don't do it just to generate leads, and try to make it clear to the readers that it's not something you're doing to generate business for yourself. It'd be a shame to see some percentage of this site become basically a lead-generation site for the brazen few willing to take advantage of it like that.

PS: I'm not suggesting that any specific "offer HN" post was like that, despite mentioning examples above.
For anyone that is not exactly sure what is going on, here it is laid out in laymans terms:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180238/SAP_accepts_l...

And this is what is being sued over:

> TomorrowNow provided maintenance services for customers of Oracle's PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards software, and Oracle accused the company of downloading software patches and other materials illegally from its customer support website.
That's rather my point: you can't use upvotes alone to gauge if the majority of this community approves of a submission. I admit I was doing it sideways, but I was trying to point out that if you used his metric for both this and the other posts, you'd arrive at a contradiction.
I don't know much about Google "process" but usually a company has a set of minimum rules about quality and code standards. The individual team usually have more rules on top of that.

Why? Cause everything depends on the type of problems that people have to face.

So to say that "Google gets it wrong" as the whole company doesn't seem to fit well. The "GMail" team didn't catch this one.

And I understand that testing is hard and certain things might not testable/doable. But to know how Google try to minimize the impact by doing "something" is far more important.
Because of a discussion in #startups.

I should have made that clear, thanks.
It's really missing the point by requiring the desktop installation. It's apparently only a "native shell for additional features" but what are those features? You can save to/load from the desktop with data-urls and the file api. I think it's because of some dysfunctional DRM that they're using.

Nonetheless, it's an extremely impressive piece of software. Not sure that CSS3/Transitions is the best tool for this, SVG/SMIL are much more suited for animation. I made a similar tool ~4 years ago (using HTML5, and Ext as well).

http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/
The experiment started when I came across a story about the best time to submit a story to HN. The article concluded that a certain time when I'm usually sleeping is best so I thought, "hmm, that sucks. How can I get around this?". I know submission time ultimately doesn't matter, but I decided to hack something together anyways.

Probably an ethical gray area, but like I said; it ultimately was just a lot of harmless fun. I'm not going to do anything with it. You'll know I'm lying if you see me submit something before 10 PST :)
Coder details how Firesheep works (facebook, hotmail hack)
So true...I didn't even think a lot about the title, I'll be more attentive next time, thanks :)
Hey, thanks for the offer, I was just about to take you up on it, but I don't see your email in your profile.
Looks really nice! Any possibility of adding other grid systems, or perhaps a customizable grid? I'd love to be able to specify column and gutter width.
For me, my offer of help in the RoR Offer thread was motivated out of two things. First, just because I like helping where I can. Second, I might get the opportunity to work on something cool, or meet someone new, that I might not otherwise have.
> Microsoft exacerbates this problem by not hiring the best web people to build their products.

There is a problem here: the best web people will not work with MS tools and that's exactly what MS management will demand.

> Why isn't Microsoft hiring the best Javascripters, CSS, html5

They can't even ship a browser with proper HTML5 support. How do you expect them to be able to hire the best Javascripters, CSSers and HTMLers on the market? They lack the tools to distinguish between them and the low-end of the spectrum.
This is a very general question.

I looked through the feature lists of many e-commerce analytics packages. It struck me that while they offer impressive-looking graphs and gather huge amounts of data, the "analytics" part seems to be very simple. They mostly present you the data that has been measured.

I am in a situation where I will want to provide e-commerce analytics as part of a more complete solution. But I would like to approach this from a different angle: provide digested data, with insight into patterns that could lead to increased profits for online stores.

What do you think could be extracted from e-commerce data that would be of value to online stores? I'm looking for information that is difficult to extract (e.g. requires a tech advantage), but can be extracted automatically or with minimum human curation.

An example of an interesting direction: e-commerce analytics companies offer "customer segmentation" views. But they are all just simple data views: you can segment based on location, time of visit, etc. I think doing a factor analysis on customer buying patterns would be much more interesting and would provide real value to the store by automatically extracting "customer types" from data. One could then market directly to these customer groups.

So, to rephrase, I'm looking for ideas/pointers on what kinds of analyses would be difficult to create, but very useful for e-commerce.
Http://Like.fm - you don't have to design it, just advice on how it can make it look better. Thanks!
I enjoy having access to "thousands of HN users, each with their own expertise" and the gall and cojones to offer their wisdom (and fragile reputations) up to the community.

In this age of "what's in it for me", the minimal networking benefit offered is the very LEAST the community can give to support the model. We should only be so lucky.

I'm curious as to your background, since it sounds like by your post, your entrepreneurial pursuits have resulted in great wealth which allows for access to unlimited operations, creative and technical knowledge in all areas of business by responsible, domain-expert, timely and proactive professionals.

You, my friend have struck CEO paydirt, can you offer us your secret?
In case you don't want the offers on your homepage, please use the link that pg created specifically for that reason in the other thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless
Screen capture from the video. http://img.skitch.com/20101027-ka7qhprsu7nsnmfd4jae66mp9f.jp...
You are confusing the Streaming API with the REST API a bit. The Streaming API rate limiting notices [1] for statuses are delivered in the stream and once the limitation period expires the matches will start automatically being delivered again. This generally means your keywords are too generic or common.

If you are getting a response other then 200 check for the coresponding reason on Twitter's list [2].

[1] http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api_concepts#filter-l...
[2] http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api_response_codes
Yeah, I found Wacom tablets to be no good for me, for the reason you describe. The iPad is definitely a better drawing device, as long as you don't care about pressure sensitivity.

(Hope they release a large-screen iPad soon :)
Pen Testing for Low Hanging Fruit - Part 5 of 7
BFI Challenge & Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes
> The best programmers I know make mistakes constantly, but have developed ways of working that ensure they get found early.

That's what I do. You don't make the same mistake twice in the same section of code: sometimes the code is wrong, sometimes tests are wrong, never both.
Meanwhile, after seeing the movie, someone else concluded not only that Zuckerberg's main motivation was building something with his mind but that he enjoyed literally nothing but coding (to put it mildly) :

http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-678

I haven't seen the movie myself.
I'm a total Ruby/RoR newb, but is there a "right way" of doing things in terms of setting up an environment?

Much like Python and Django has virtualenv/pip?
I think the interesting bit is that Apple apparently isn't capable of producing a white iPhone. They've missed their deadline by 4 months already and they've just announced another 4-5 month delay.
I would like to take you up on your offer, but I'm incredibly nervous about applying to colleges because (despite taking honors classes) I screwed around 9-11th grades, and my GPA isn't 3.0 or higher.
Any particular idea what his reason might have been? My personal drive to build things feels about as fundamental as anything.
22 months and counting here...
No, but you can register a MIME type with IANA and your magic with Christos Zoulas. http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/ http://www.darwinsys.com/file/
You don't need to register file format extensions, usually it's standardized by usage. The common ones are recognized by your operating system but applications you install ask the system the application with certain file formats.

For example on windows here is how the file type associations are done with an installer : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k3bb4tfd(VS.80).aspx
(look for the heading creating a file association)
I download the "developer preview", unzip the dmg, open the dmg, put it in Applications, open the app, and now I need a username and password? It should require a login before downloading to avoid annoying people.
there's only one option: explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what happened, why it happened, and how it's going to be fixed in the future.
Why? Because their clients can smell bullshit better than a purebred bloodhound. Too much bullshit means it's time to move on.

Okay. I feel a bit sorry for bashing heroku here, but I'll bite.

If I was a heroku-customer then I'd feel, ahem, a bit washed by their idea of "excruciating detail".

So their "internal messaging system" triggered a bug in their "distributed routing mesh". And they applied a "hot patch".

Great. As far as I am concerned they could as well have written their flux-compensator overheated because the pixie-dust exhaust got clogged with rogue bogomips.

I applaud their willingness to talk to their customers at all. But please... either explain what was going on in a meaningful way - or just leave it at "we screwed up and promise to do our best to prevent it from happening again".
"People who don't want to use a smartphone but want to own a smartphone"

I think that sums up a lot of the Blackberry owners I know. Company mandates a smartphone, but employees want to use it as little as possible.
You need to provide more specifics. Visa for which country? Interview for what? Advice on what?

The only reason I have not flagged this submission is because your account is 66 days old.
I think there's a pretty big gap between folks like Sorkin and Bruckheimer.
HML = Hanna Montana Linux Distro
My question about improving NER results, or finding a better library for tagging:
http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/3092/improving-ner-resu...

Thanks!
I just started reading Security Analysis by Dodd & Graham. I heard it was a classic book on investing.

Given what you've said, should I bother reading it if picking at random is going to work out better in the end? Have you read it and can make a recommendation as to its usefulness? In the first few chapters they identified the issue of massive amounts of information, but the book still charges on.

If you do think it's still worthwhile to continue reading it, do you have any suggestions for some introductory books that can help me understand some of the financial slang they use? :)
New Snub-Nosed Monkey Discovered, Eaten
1) Plant an encrypted file on somebody's computer.

2) Call the police.

3) ???
Set up your own local hn and play around with that instead.

http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/how-to-run-news
1) It's $10/year vs $10K once.
2) If you prefer to sell your domain for the price buyer is looking for -- that's win-win situation.
On the other hand if you want to keep that domain to yourself without using it -- then the tax ($10/year in that case) would help you to reconsider that.
3) If 0.1%/year tax is not enough -- it can be increased a little. E.g.: 0.2%/year.
Thank you so much for this kind offer. Emailing you now.
If you're insinuating this is some kind of YC application stunt, I can assure you its not (didn't apply and no plans to).

I do enjoy "hacking" non-computer systems though (a valuable skill they teach in business). I think social hacking can be quite amusing. Once I was pulled over for speeding 20 mph over the limit, with an expired license, and no proof of insurance. I was young. The officer had every reason to arrest me on the spot. When he asked me what the hell I was doing, I answered completely seriously, "Sorry Officer, but I've got extreme diarrhea and need to get out of this car." He took a step back and promptly told me to go home. Pretty simple but my friends couldn't believe I had the cahones to say that.
I don't think it really works that way. Or at least it shouldn't if the company doing the hiring is smart. If a good candidate comes across a startup's desk, are they really going to risk losing them by paying them $10k less to make up for the cost of the recruiter? If the company doesn't want to pay these kinds of expenses, they shouldn't use a recruiter. They shouldn't shortchange their people because of it.

Besides, if the candidate truly is good, they will more than make up for the extra 10k.
I should probably reserve a bottle champagne, or some other celebratory indulgence, for the day that I no longer need to run Flash.
It's an odd thing. While I was there at school, I was often pretty ambivalent about being there. Classes were tough. I felt like I had a hard time standing out. The East Coast was a strange and foreign place. But in the years since, as I've met more people and connected with alumni older and younger than me, I'm prouder and prouder and more and more grateful for the opportunity I had to spend 4 years there.
I access twitter through a browser on my netbook that runs Linux, on my wife's notebook that runs MacOS or on a PC running Windows (unlikely - I'd never type my password on one).

The OS is a "computer driver". The browser is the API.
World’s First Carbon Capture and Storage Project in Basalt Begins in USA
I created the HN Offer: Tax Help for Startup Entrepreneur thread and I wanted to reflect on how I went about it.

Maybe it would've been better if I didn't show my website. I wanted to show that I've been doing this for a while as a career and hoped that it would help lend credibility. I hope that it didn't come off as a gimmick.

I'm keeping my offer open and standing. I was thinking about posting an offer hn tax help for startup entreprenuiers thread once a month just to show that I would consistently help people and that I wasn't looking to be a scammer.

But maybe that was a bad idea. Let me know and I'll act accordingly. I was just hoping to interact with the hn crowd and maybe meet some cool people and discuss interesting tax subjects hopefully. I can say that I definitely got a lot out of it myself. I learned about a new tax strategy i didn't know about from RDL in ROBS 401ks. I'll be looking into that myself and sharing what I find with everyone else since it could be an awesome way for people invest in their own companies.

Let me know your thoughts and ill definitely take them into advisement.
Thank. God. This was getting unbearable. Understood the generous nature behind all these offers but c'mon. Not the venue.