skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boredom? When I'm debugging someone else's spaghetti code it's not interesting or rewarding. It's mostly tedious bookkeeping that shouldn't even be necessary. It's the difference between compiling a custom linux kernel for yourself and removing malware for a friend. The former is intellectually engaging, rewarding, and fosters a sense of accomplishment in making something work. The latter is a tedious abomination that should have never happened.

The only times I enjoy spaghetti code is when I have to learn a tool or more about a language or library to debug or understand it. At least then I'm engaged and learning what to avoid and how to fix it.
> No marketing would help if your product is crap.

So many counterexamples to that, I don't even know where to start.
Now the just need to stop making awful office software ;)
Seem many people here have high expectations on JavaScript, cool! :)

Also, be sure to check out the JavaScript's kid brother - coffee-script

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
I have noticed this too. Previously, I could pretty much tell (and mostly agree with) which comments would get downvoted. Nowadays it's more or less become a crap shoot, which is a damned shame. Is there some way to take downvote privileges away from indiscriminate downvoters? I wouldn't even mind relinquishing my downvote rights as a (hopefully) false positive of that filtering process.
I was saying existing system.
I was going to submit the following, but wasn't sure if it was following the rules of HN posts, so here it is:

Tell/Ask HN: I attended startup school as a non-founder and it was awesome, how was your experience?

I attended applied and attended Startup School 2010 as a non-founder and it was quite possibly the best day of my life in recent memory.

I want to say thanks to Paul, Airbnb, Bases and all the volunteers, and anyone else that put in any effort to make this event what it was.

Second, thanks to all the speakers! You all did an awesome job. Well done! Words cannot describe how well everyone did. By far the best event/conference I have ever attended mostly because of all the interesting and insightful talks.

Some of my highlights:

I sat next to the 3 awesome intelligent founders of Dr. Chronos (plug: http://drchronos.com) and spoke with them about all sorts of interesting topics through out the entire event and after.

I met Alexis and Christopher from Reddit and we joked and talked about many interesting topics during lunch. I even got some pictures taken with them.

Speaking of lunch, that might have been some of the best pizza I have ever had.

I feel like I met almost the entire Airbnb team, they were all awesome. Sorry, if I can't remember all your names, so I want to say thanks for the awesome after party! Special thanks goes to Nick, Joe, and Erin for putting up with me.

I briefly met Paul and got my picture taken with him, truly an honor. Thanks again Paul!

I met tons of intelligent, fun, awesome developers and founders. The networking was worth every single penny alone (just a little over $600 total including hotel from Oklahoma). I learned a ton! It was truly and inspiring time for me throughout the trip.

To all those I did not mention above, thank you for making this quite possibly one of the most fun, exciting, and enjoyable days I can remember in recent history.

I hope I can attend next year. I'm looking forward to it.
Which is the most searched term in Google Insights for Search
I tried to get the most searched term in Google worldwide. Started with the usual money, news, sport, games and ended with these three terms as the most searched terms online:
google 13
yahoo 15
facebook 22

Can you think of a term that beats these three?
I added an issue for globally controlling the auto back button behavior:
http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/210
I agree that it is interesting, but not necessarily relevant to Mondrian's intent. While brushwork and other painterly touches do add interest, and a subtle complexity, I don't think it was Mondrian's intention. His work presaged Albers, Stella, Noland and others, who specifically sought to remove painterly marks from their work.

Mondrian's work is generally considered to be hard to copy due to the subtle balances of color and form, not technique. Simplicity arrived at as an end point does not correlate to a simple approach in the beginning.
I was refering to the dangers of a system where the lawyers didn't take on the risk.
New Way to See Faint Planets Previously Hidden in Their Star's Glare
My "Fantasy Math" project
Water Droplet Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array [video]
Here's the one they did on Mark Zuckerberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/63583008/
they are unwilling to discuss startup ideas unless an implementation has been made

This is a good thing. Why waste everyone's time with something you haven't even worked on?
World Trade, Once Rising, Is Starting to Sag Again
If they're unique it means you can determine x, y from the result of x^2 + y^2.
Nice site - I added a few domains. I do question, like others, why the additional password requirements. If I take that nice long string and put it in my hn profile, is that not enough to consider me a valid user?
No, they were not. At least some of those submissions were made in jest, but that's one of the things that attracted me to HN. The humor is at a pretty high level.
Zerigo is solid, has an API, and as low as 1 minute TTLs
http://www.zerigo.com/

- 3 domains are free

- $19.95 up to 25
as it would be. I don't know many geeky women.
Chicago's MCA transformed into a 60 foot, living comic book
Some of us lived locally before YC, too.
I ran a similar poll on this issue 200 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232020
You're suggesting something like a fire insurance that you can buy when your house has already burnt down?>

No, it would be like buying fire insurance during a small fire that would only payout if your house burned down completely. The insurance guy would arrive, examine the fire, and determine that it had a 90% of being stopped with most of the house intact, and a 10% chance of destroying everything. Then, he would calculated how much you would need to replace your house in the case of complete destruction, and model the premiums accordingly.

>The last 10 years there have been double-digit increases in the amount of people who have such insurances, so it's really something of the last decade.

But the poor are going to be the last people to get such insurance.
My experience with Lua hasn't seen this problem materialize.
Easy tips to control your privacy [tips]
Japan: Micro-Homes in the Big City
Basing the downvote karma cap on fraction of alltime high seems slightly wrong. There is too much history in that number. Five years from now, that number will have five more years of increasing, making it that much harder for smart new members to break the barrier.

Better might be to base it on some function of votes. Maybe a fraction of the number of votes cast over the last n-months.

I assume people here generally wouldn't hack the algorithm to get a downvote arrow. If they do, it might be best to make it a function of not just the recent voting volume, but the average of the voter as well as the recency of the parent. At that point, the right cap might be +inf.
Saw the production in late August. The show was an amazing homage to 50's and 60's "They Came From Outer Space"-style scifi. There are a few scenes from the show available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_AMczwJA2g&feature=relat...

Amazing that they were able to do this with overhead projectors.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والترجى
Seconded!! I loved Omnisio; I can't believe Google just effectively killed it.
Sometimes you can abandon a stinker before you start just by asking other people about it - they'll see holes you didn't or couldn't. That's pretty valuable.
3 Ways to Sharpen Your Saw Daily
I'm very happy with Netflix, but you'd have a rather hard time getting it running on Linux: the best workarounds are running a Windows VM or playing the Wii Netflix disc through the Dolphin emulator.

Only downside is the content can be a bit lacking, but it has most (if not all) of the shows I usually watch, so I'm content.
I know lots of geeky women (and am a geeky woman). I like it here. I'm a little sick of some of the stuff I run into on the female dominated sites I have hung out on for years and years. (Maybe in a few years I will get sick of stuff that goes on here, but, for now at least, it is refreshing.)
Yeah but #!/usr/bin/node does work. I've used some node.js command line scripts, and it works decently well. Some people praise Node.js for general purpose command line scripts. Personally, I find Ruby easier to use for command line utilities and scripts.
Interesting idea, but that would reduce even legitimate downvoting. Not everyone can get a karma point out of adding even more explanation to why some idiotic -4 comment is idiotic.
With respect to point #2. This is an interesting one for me. My career started where I was a software engineer for a TV company. Most of my product managers and business managers were non-technical and generally I got to skate a lot on "feel". "I don't like it - it seems hinky" was actually a viable disagreement for a technical issue.

My job after that was an a heavy engineering company - basically 100 engineers and maybe 10 non-technical staff. There I had to defend everything rigorously. I didn't like that much but frankly it made me a much better and thoughtful engineer I no longer could float on feel and had to be able to defend my positions.

HN is much more like that second job, with the karma attached you can't just throw out a random "I think..." and expect it not to be challenged. I'm not saying it necessarily better, there's frequently times when I'd just like to make a joke and not have to worry about my karma score getting battered. But thats the way it tends to be in highly technical and intelligent communities.
This behavior always bums me out. Seems like HN of all places should accept and encourage disagreements as long as the resulting conversation is interesting and doesn't devolve. Using the down arrow to try and stifle opposing views is disappointing to see.
Maybe it's time for another site for meta-discussions, just like stackoverflow.com has meta.stackoverflow.com.
The next big platform is multiple cores/multiple CPUs. The next big language is functional and helps deal with consistency across time and across CPUs. Therefore, the next big language is Clojure. Rich Hickey said it best:

"If somebody hands you something mutable—let's say it has methods to get this, get that, and get the other attribute—can you walk through those and know you've seen a consistent object? The answer is you can't, and that's a problem of time. Because if there were no other actors in the world, and if time wasn't passing between when you looked at the first, second, and third attribute, you would have no problems. But because nothing is captured of the aggregate value at a point in time, you have to spend time to look at the pieces. And while that time is elapsing, someone else could be changing it. So you won't necessarily see something consistent.

For example, take a mutable Date class that has year, month, and day. To me, changing a date is like trying to change 42 into 43. That's not something we should be doing, but we think we can, because the architecture of classes is such that we could make a Date object that has mutable year, month, and day. Say it was March 31, 2009, and somebody wanted to make it February 12, 2009. If they changed the month first there would be, at some point in time, February 31, 2009, which is not a valid date. That's not actually a problem of shared state as much as it is a problem of time. The problem is we've taken a date, which should be just as immutable as 42 is, and we've turned it into something with multiple independent pieces. And then we don't have a model for the differences in time of the person who wants to read that state and the person who wants to change it."

http://www.artima.com/articles/hickey_on_time.html
umm...ignore that - early morning, need coffee. Duh - the string is publicly visible. Sorry about that...and again, nice site.
I wish I could forfeit my ability to downvote permanently. It's kind of a downer to have the feeling in the back of your mind that you can or should police HN to rid it of "undesirable" comments.
The worst thing that could happen to a board is to become a bias confirmation chamber, alas it's inevitable.
Facebook has some very interesting open source projects: http://github.com/facebook

Particularly interesting to me is their static analysis tool for PHP written in OCaml.
Somewhat related to the coroutine vs. FSM issue: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/08/29/co-routines-as-an-al...

[apologize for the plug, but IMHO it's very relevant]
The Magical Properties of Everyday Numbers
That's true. In the Sculley interview that was posted the other day a recurring theme was that Apple is a design company first. I think that's good. I like products designed for humans even though my inner geek likes to solve puzzles (figuring out a bad interface is like solving a puzzle, it tickles the same part of our brains).

Some lament the fact that you can't change hibernate/sleep settings without running a few defaults commands in the terminal. I like that the machine does something sane out of the box and I don't have to think about it. I just focus on what I want to get done. Again, people care about different things. I care less about tweaking & tinkering as I get older and lazier.
A Net Neutrality Case Study
I use http://www.geoscaling.com/ - which allows DNS redirection based on geographic location.
just like most of the other stuff being discussed, some people see it as a bug, some as a feature, and some don't care either way
dubreuil.ww.com -> http://christophedubreuil.posterous.com/

thank you to be so generous :)
Even as they become more connected, young people are caring less about others
Foursquare's MongoDB Outage
My Startup School experience.
It boils down to philosophy. Not all developers like the $() function. And it's not even specific to JQuery anymore, most libraries are doing this now. And for old school JavaScript developers, the "ninja-javascript" just doesn't sit right.
Ask HN: When to start a startup?
I am a current college student and I want to get my friend to start an idea with me. I am asking the HN community on when should be the time to start it? I also have experience working at two previous startups and I know I want to make my own now.

I have a few questions, how would I go on finding an advisor and should I plan to move to california during the summer?

Any help/advice would be appreciated or contact me through my email.
Trolls gaming the system are usually trolls gaming the system, not psychopaths.
For years and years, grumpiness and flame wars have tended to break out and be more common during certain parts of the year (like fall/holidays) on a number of forums I have spent time in. I have no way of knowing what is going on generally in the world that might be impacting this microcosm, but I am slower than I used to be to jump to conclusions that it's something going on "in this particular forum" (whichever forum is being discussed) rather than something going on out in the world that is, coincidentally, impacting lots of members of a particular forum and thereby impacting the forum, but not rooted in forum dynamics specifically.
I liked some of these very much but the fifth story didn't go over so well with me. It is more a sad case of not effectively communicating and unnecessarily scaring a child than a lesson about 'giving when it count'. Otherwise, some very good stories and points, of a sort I am fond of.
I've noticed this too - I think it might be a combination of this site's large commment width (up to 85% of screen width) and higher resolution monitors leading people to subconsciously keep their text to a reasonable width by adding new lines.

Long comments that don't incorporate this style appear on my screen at ~1600px and are 16.5 inches wide! (Not complaining, since I can just resize the window or modify the table's CSS, I'm just guessing what might cause this phenomenon.)
I was just thinking about this. From the linked discussion it seems to be something a non-lawer can do. Does anyone have a pointer to how to best start this process and the approximate cost in EU or in the US?
This is very true. Apple products are luxury products which, IMO, are worth the money. UX, design and the "it just works" factor are worth the premium. But for most people, cost/availability is the gating factor so Android phones are totally fine for them.
right, my reaction is to wonder whether most of the guys hanging out here don't seem to know many geeky women or seek them out, and are so used to environments where there are almost no women that they don't even notice it.

it's true that most programmers are male but the ratio in general isn't as extreme as it is on HN. the FB group seems like it's 95%+ male.
I think the issue there is that 'good luck' doesn't add anything to the discussion, so someone decided it wasn't 'worthy' of the upvote.
Anything, including jealousy is in human nature and HN has a large enough footprint that you can reasonably expect that if it is in human nature that it will have found it's way here.

I don't think you can stop that unless you put a hard cap on membership.
He gives consideration to Clojure, which makes only limited use of curly braces and explicitly rejects object-orientation as most of the world understands it.
I'd love to see one on Jack/Evan/Biz and the journey through creating and scaling Twitter
Angry Birds: 1 Million Downloads in 1 Day (on Android)
Perhaps you want to look at Raphael JS libarary: http://raphaeljs.com/
It uses SVG on all browsers that support it, and VML on IE. There are some minor differences in rendering sometimes, but overall support is quite good.
Buy TVS Bike & Get Free Micromax Mobile Worth Rs. 2000
Free Micromax Mobile worth Rs. 2000 with every purchase of TVS Star City, TVS Sport & TVS Jive*.
Kriegsmarine short signal systems and how Bletchley Park exploited them
The sample solution on the original article is incorrect.
they demand that discussion be evidence-based

I think this is the crux. So often, the stuff that's snidely said, as if it's so true it's a joke, is just false. "That's so true" should be added to "what you can't say" and "what you have to say" as places to look for common misconceptions.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

(In particular, I'm thinking of Smalltalk/Lisp = slow. In terms of HLL, there were often implementations what were impressively fast for the time. This had absolutely no effect on the frequency of these jokes.)

This may also explain some of the seriousness you sense.

they are unwilling to discuss startup ideas unless an implementation has been made

Sounds evidence based to me.
I'd consider that a minor adjustment as it would still essentially be a planar graph (with periodic boundary conditions). Locally both of the cases look identical.

Just checked wiki while writing this and toroidal embeddings are a subclass of planar graphs.
Given that the fork happened for a reason (namely, Oracle wants the development process of OpenOffice to be more proprietary), it's pretty much inevitable that there will be two OpenOffice flavors rather than one. For the product itself, it makes much sense to have people on both boards because there is the common interest of maintaining basic compatibility between those two versions.

If you look at it in terms of commercialization - which of course is the more important reason why StarDivision/Sun/Oracle pays developers to work on OpenOffice - then of course you see a conflict of interest there because one half wants to make money off the thing and the other half wants an open-source ecosystem.

Since Sun accepted only contributions with copyright assignment, Oracle could also go all the way and turn OpenOffice back to the proprietary development model that StarOffice had before the Sun acquisition. Questioning the business sense of Sun turning StarOffice into OpenOffice, however, should also be accompanied by the question why OpenOffice is more popular than StarOffice - which was, back then a bit better-known than the handful of other non-Microsoft office suites (Applix, SoftMaker), but by no means the only player.

I think it's fair game to ask Oracle to be honest and either continue the standard of community participation that they had or just drop the whole pretense of openness altogether and be honest about the new OracleOffice, just as it is fair game for the now-Oracle StarOffice people to want to keep the brand they built.

Probably the whole brouhaha will die down within the next year and someone will suggest having and all-sorts-of-Office working group where OracleOffice and LibreOffice people will discuss things without any suggested or experienced conflict of interest.
Yes. They did big-bang reforms, or more gradual shedding of socialism?
Watch out RoR, they're coming
* they demand that discussion be evidence-based

I don't think that's strange, and I think it's actually slightly less evident on HN that on many other sites.

I think that in internet discussions, a lot of assertions tend to be challenged due to the relative anonymity and high occurrence of counter-factual statements. This makes it hard to have opinion based or exploratory discussions, as any random thought you put forwards, however useful, can easily generate a "please show references" thread.

However, in a place where people can demonstrate domain knowledge, expertise, and also trustworthiness, people can take your word and only ask for follow-up out of interests sake. For example, if grellas commented on a law topic or tptacek commented on security then most would not challenge them.

In relation to the seriousness, I think that people here are quite respectful (relative to the rest of the internet) of other's time. So, they don't joke around so much, I guess. I think maybe that is unusual, another word for that is strange.
Strange things about HN members (that actually make a lot of sense once you think about them):

* we obsessively follow a guy who makes bingo cards

* we downvote comments like "I agree" or "good job"

* we don't necessarily demand that discussion be "evidence-based", but we do demand that it be interesting and thought provoking, and tend to avoid "tired" topics (like politics)

* in a world of multimedia webpages, we hang out on an extremely minimalist site. The YC logo and voting arrows are often the only images on the screen. There are no avatars, banner ads, facebook/twitter sharing icons, videos, or funny cat pictures to be found here.

* on other sites, when someone wants a feature, they pester the admin about it. Here, they just use the API to build their own site (searchyc, ihackernews, hackerfollow, etc.)
Adobe Illustrator → HTML5 Canvas. Free.
Maybe, but I have my reservations. I think the attitude that the future is the tech that extracts the best performance with the least work out of future hardware is mistaken.

Clojure may be a great language for a multi-core world, but I'm not sure multiple cores will be needed for the vast majority of apps in the future. I'm sure some sectors will find clojure to be amazing for their purposes, but by and large, I doubt it will be as big a language as Python, Java or Ruby.

For instance, I doubt it will become a big player in the web app world.

Clojure's great support for concurrency only applies to a single machine. If your problem is squeezing maximum performance out of a single box w/ multiple cores this is great, but for something like a web application where processing a single request across multiple cores is generally unnecessary clojure's benefits don't really apply. Each thread/process in a web app is totally isolated from the others, and IPC must happen over a network, not in memory.

IMHO the most interesting tech for concurrent web app programming is using Redis as a data structures server.
I challenge you to create a more interesting problem.