skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good advice. We had something, not quite the same but relating to some negative posts on forums, where our lawyers suggested we go after them. I spoke to a friend of a friend who is a litigator, who told me (in a friendly capacity) that "principals can be expensive things" and that I should just continue doing a good job. We did that and it went away thanks to our own user-base coming to our aid. Turned out that it was one competitor (in our case) who decided to talk negatively about us. As an aside though, we now monitor forums and social media that relate to us. The added benefit of this is that we can provide better customer service in an event where someone has a gripe and they express it publicly, rather than via our own support channels.

Anyway, I'd agree with the above advice. Tell your friend good luck. Maybe she should find a way to help her customers to be more vocal about her business
Thank you for your feedback! UI definitely needs some improvements, I'm not a designer myself so I've just tried to do it more or less neat. I will look into other things like location choosing to make it more clear.
Thanks, Philip. Much appreciated.
Record the call (if it is legal to do so), when they start asking for money, send the tape to the FBI.
Heroku is Hiring
Heroku (YC W08) is transforming the way people build and deploy applications. We’ve got a fun and wicked smart crew of 25, a hacker-driven company culture, and a sweet office in San Francisco. Come help us change the world!

Our current open positions:

Infrastructure Developer - If you're an Erlang, Clojure, Go, or Node.js person this one is for you. Big concurrency, messaging and queueing, and unix-fu FTW. http://jobs.heroku.com/infrastructure_developer

Ruby Web Developer - For Ruby/Rails/HTML/Javascript ninjas. http://jobs.heroku.com/ruby_web_developer

Support Engineer - Are you a solid coder who loves helping people? http://jobs.heroku.com/ruby_cloud_platform_support_engineer

Technical Sales - For coders who enjoy sharing technology as much as programming. http://jobs.heroku.com/inside_sales

Specifics on how to apply are included in each job description, although most of them boil down to emailing everything you think we should know about you to jobs@heroku.com.

http://jobs.heroku.com/
Tell HN: Come to Hootsuite's "top-secret" API Hackathon - Nov 12, 11 -5 (YVR)
I've got so much from the HN community, it's about time i contributed! ;)

To the Vancouver hackers: Our company, Hootsuite, will be opening up their API for developers to embed their own content into columns on the dashboard. For ex. One of developer got his Tumblr feed in there in less than 4 hours.

There will be free pizza, beer & other healthy hacking food, as well as first hand knowledge with other hootsuite devs. I've got the ok to invite the HN community! ;)

"Top Secret" Invite page: http://ow.ly/390Fo

Signup Here: http://ow.ly/390R6

For those who don't know what Hootsuite is, it's a "social media dashboard" (i hate using that name) for professionals. It's basically a web version of Tweet Deck that allows scheduling & tracking of multiple twitter, facebook & wordpress accounts. We're pretty stoked to have clients like the White House, Martha Stewart, SXSW, Zappos!
> Moving the cursor to the exact middle of the button you want to push every time in <100ms is a dead give away.

This seems intuitive, but it is actually false. The majority of "grinders" (mid-stakes players who multi-table 9-24 tables at a time for a living) use programs like autohotkey that actually do exactly this, allowing players to play with the keyboard and even console (e.g. PS3) controllers. The most popular poker sites explicitly allow those helper programs.
Product Design: Who’s Your Initial Audience?
Good idea, thanks. Will fix that
I found this interesting and appreciate people who think about things instead of regurgitating what "experts" say with a pompous little whine in their voice.

In this case, however, I wonder what is the tail and what is the dog. For me, when I'm in the zen of creating something, I can't be bothered to take time to eat. So, I am hungry when I'm creative, but I've always assumed it was an effect, not a cause.
Google Bowls a Googly - Possible invalidation of Oracle's patents
It's pretty simple. If a book succeeds, the author's name acquires "brand equity." Frey wants to retain total ownership of all the equity. The real author knows it's a fraud; but with a confidentiality clause, they can't tell the world. It's an extremely nasty clause, designed to keep the author beholden to Frey. Sadly, this type of control freakism and greed are common in the murkier echelons of both the music and film business. To be fair, Frey is not alone. Any big shot who suddenly "writes" a memoir most likely had help; and a standard part of such ghostwriting arrangements is that the real author remain exactly that: a ghost.
Hey, that's still a great read. I love the little vignette about Woody Allen. I voted you up because reading this completely answers the question of "why won't NY cabbies take me to Brooklyn?"
mdaniel: I've seen no profiling tools that can reliably perform this kind of automated profiling and force people to think about certain issues. You're spot on—the tooling is more about raising awareness than making your build faster, or slower. There are many legitimate reasons to have a very-slow build. It should be the choice of a fully-informed human to figure out the trade off and make a conscious decision.
Breakfast may be overrated, pending double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled studies corroborated by multiple, independent research teams.
Thanks, tried actually that but no page loaded, therefore the comment. Page loaded fine now though.
Yes! Imagine the productivity gains if compiler and upload times were reduced to zero. Sure it only took 30 seconds to upload all those files, but it took me 3 minutes to read this thread! :)
Just signed up.

Holy balls, is this fast! Mind sharing some details of your tech stack?

Secondly, can guests actually ask things? They have a text box, but no "Post" button, and if you hit enter, the text goes away, but the question doesn't seem to be asked. This is important to me, because I don't want my users signing up for Yet Another Service just to ask a question...
Stanford Star Is a Threat on Both Sides of the Ball
Go channels?
Wave isn't being fully integrated into Google Docs. There's a large feature overlap, but the two products use different implementations of operational transformations (the heart of Wave's "liveness") among other things. Ideas from Wave may be included, but the core technology is not going to replace the core of Docs.

Wave in a Box is an open source project, not a google service. That's what the Wave team is putting most of their effort on. Next year, it seems like most will be moving onto other Google projects unrelated to Wave. I'm in a coding session at the Wave Protocol Summit right now, and everyone's focused on federating Wave in a Box servers together. I'm working on a RaphaelJS Doodad. Doodads are new-- they're extensions to the Wave editor. So you basically get to use the Wave Protocol to collaborate on structured data with a custom interface (in my case, SVG graphics).

One major concern is what happens to our precious google waves, so the export feature from GWaves -> Wave-in-a-Box is a big deal.
Get a workout buddy if you can. Take pictures daily after workout (sounds lame, but it works).
A history of libertarian countries at sea
Hi Samuel,

I think entrepreneurs are not so enthused over gambling as you would believe (gambling as in casinos & slots, or an online questionnaire).

I think that what matters more is the intrinsic value of building something, but I'm not sure about how to measure it..
FYI, this is one of the better decks I've seen on puppet/chef/devops. Very well done.
Tests taken remotely do not work to screen out the incompetent who routinely take them to the internet for solutions or pay someone else to solve. Nor do they screen in the competent who realize their day off work is much better spent making some phone calls or networking if they are really looking to switch jobs rather than spend it doing things like learning a new web framework to solve some canned problem.

And yes, he actually mentions in the article this is an actual thing he does: have applicants learn new frameworks in order to apply. Sheesh. Who has time for that except the very desperate.
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who calculated EVs.
Special Forces + Android = Killer Combo
Reninds me that I wanted to watch the movie "Yes Man".
Which only demonstrates that "openness-abuse" has been with us for many years...
All the technology is build by two of us. One other is doing design and the rest are just helping with sales, albeit quite a bit.
Google – A Study In Scalability And A Little Systems Horse Sense
I agree with that. The problem with third party certs which you allude to is they are almost exclusively taken by mediocre developers looking for an easy feather in their cap. Meanwhile true talent has no reason to bother with such nonsense.

The credential I look for when hiring is someone who has already done something remarkable.
I am hiring <senior> software engineers. LAMP. Remote is a possibility though not certain.

http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/7731

jobs@recoverydatabase.net
The majority of recreational players are really bad. All you have to do is make a bot that is a little bit better and not trivially exploitable. It doesn't matter how good you are, you still lose some. All you have to do to win money in the long run is be "better enough" than the majority of the competition that you can beat the rake.

How would you tell the difference between a bot who plays consistently well and a human who does? It's pretty trivial to legitimately put in 10K hands per day. You think that with 250K hands in a month, a human player doesn't start to play consistently well? At that point, there will be long stretches where the players is basically on auto-pilot, a human-powered robot if you will.
Indeed. In fact, this was the whole deal with the Atkin's diet (remember that??) a while ago. Zero carbs, but craploads of protein and fat will force the body into long term ketone usage.

Basically, your body runs on glucose. Everything else is a stop gap for you to get more glucose.
go channels are like that (im a little rusty but it works pretty much like this).

c := make(chan int, 2);

c <- 1;//c contains 1

c <- 2;// c contains 1 followed by 2

y <- c;//y=1
What do you mean "not for professional use"?

For most professional use, meaning "work", I use work's e-mail system (usually based on Exchange, but I guess that depends on where you work). If I apply to companies, do you think they really care what your address is?

I do some of the interviewing duties at work, and I can tell you my eyes pretty much skip over the e-mail part of the resume. HR needs it to e-mail them "your interview is on the 10/10 at 10:10am", but I doubt the HR person really cares about the address beyond copy'n'pasting it.

(Mind you, if I got work e-mail from a personal address, I would regard this as unprofessional behavior, but it doesn't matter if it's @gmail.com or @faceboook.com)
I don't accept excuses. Don't even let yourself start, it gets too easy. Apply that to other things in life and you'll be pretty productive.

Good luck!
What is your experience with banner designs that look like they are using plain html (sorta like google adsense)? IMHO these designs convert better than graphical banners because users just filter our the latter.
I wrote Buildapp for SBCL to make this a little easier and command-liney. I use it all the time.

http://xach.com/lisp/buildapp/
Unfortunately they're all design or sales oriented, rather than engineering.
You're absolutely right; I jumped to conclusions a little too hastily.

That said, I just did a check on online reviews for a doctor I know well and whom I know has been one the most loved and respected doctors in the community for decades. I also know his reviews were excellent 6 months ago. However, today, there are now some 1 star reviews.

Hmmm...
Clicking the button in the exact same spot is not a good way to detect a robot though. Many multi-tabling players use hotkeys to trigger their actions, which is much nicer than a mouse and is almost essential once you get up to 12+ tables.
That just means that your utility curve isn't flat. In other words, you value very large sums more than smaller ones.

And people who honestly can't afford the certain $50 penalty might be forced to take a chance of a $1000 loss even when it doesn't make sense (assuming a flat utility curve), etc.
There are a surprising number of remote places in New York.
For instance, I doubt any cab would pick up a fare to Broad Channel, Queens. The truly far places like Staten Island aren't an issue, because the fare is so expensive nobody is trying to cab it out there anyway.

The fares the cabbies hate are to emerging yuppie gentrification neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Uptown and the part of Queens near Manhattan. Places like Greenpoint, Astoria, Windsor Terrace, LIC, Prospect Heights, Morningside Heights, etc. In these neighborhoods a cabbie is almost certainly not going to get a fare back to the city, especially late at night.
At the Back to the Mac event, Tim Cook pointed out that Apple's Mac business, if spun off into its own company, would be #110 on the Fortune 500. The Mac isn't going anywhere.
Red hat /jboss secret patent deal
After making it only part way through Tim Ferriss' new book The 4 Hour Body I am already thinking that I'm going to have to soon start going the "I, API" route. Basically: measure everything.

I bought a Garmin GPS watch a while back just to see what it looked like to walk around for a day. What if I could combine that data with, say, Fitbit (http://www.fitbit.com/) and Zeo (http://www.myzeo.com/)?

I think we're on the cusp of a revolution of new technology that will let us cheaply measure and collect data on all kinds of things in our lives. Just think about what kind of effect visualization of data like this could have on your life!

The fitness imperative is almost implicit in this kind of self-analysis.
Nothing Interesting Happens In The Office
Direct link to the annotated source for the connector:

http://janmonschke.github.com/backbone-couchdb/backbone-couc...
In three parts: how I exercise, what I eat, my mindset.

1. http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/Competition/Hoffman/hoffmanindex... (the last one is most comprehensive, but also hilariously bloated with statements about the importance of fitness to improve the nation and fight Communism. )

2. Lots of protein, and a bit of supplementation(multivitamin, additional vitamin D, Omega-3). The rest is mostly a matter of "what harms me the least." A difficult subject which my opinion has changed on multiple times, but the one truism that seems to hold is that if you can slow and smooth out digestion and energy levels(mainly via more fat and fiber), you save yourself tons of post-meal discomfort, evening cravings, binges, etc.

3. There is no particular motivation. It's just what I do, hence it's my lifestyle. Occasionally I experiment and shift the boundaries. I'm not particularly disciplined and things like weather will shift my cravings around. I've searched specifically for methods that are incredibly lazy and tried to ignore prestige. Most of the diet/fitness material out there is prestige-based, does not use science properly, and will simply crush your ego without helping you.
The Spirit of Lisp
Yeah, the percentages questions are kind of nuts. Would you expect to determine an exact threshold of the percentage odds an entrepreneur is willing to take?
Incredible announcement, 3 days before (rumors say) Facebook opening their "gmail killer".
I am reading this like a fat slap on zuckenberg's face(book hehe)
Big thumbs up for PG for messing in facebook vs google brains war.

(edit: seems I wasnt able to explain I was trying to congratulate YC for being able to play in the big league where such companies are punching each other. I think this speaks a lot about how YC name is growing.)
Why isn't Mexico Rich?
Hi, I'm the author, and I disagree with you about the definition of a bubble.

A bubble is when you're paying for something based purely on speculation about the future value of that thing, rather than on a rational analysis of the expected future return.

I would wager that Google does not have an internal projection of the value of any engineer showing them to be worth $3.5m over four years; rather, I'd bet that comp decision was made based on an irrational fear of yet another defection from Google to Facebook.
What Is A Meme?
Voted the OP back up, cause I think it's really just a poor choice of diction. The brain DOES consume a lot of your body's total energy budget. Like roughly 20% when resting, and it goes up when thinking harder [1]. Granted, compared to supercomputers, we might have godly energy efficiency, but when our source of power isn't a 240V outlet, but food, then we have to evaluate the actual energy consumption a bit different.

[1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JacquelineLing.shtml
ReBirth on iPad, and Probing Mobile Workflows with CEO of Propellerhead
Magazine Lifts Blogger's Article, Then Says She Should Be Grateful
I think it would be similar to the phenomenon of Chinese people forgetting how to write characters that they can read and type. Perhaps not disgusting, but something is lost in the process.
A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications
In October I paused a lot of my banner traffic because it wasn't converting directly to sales. But then search conversions dropped off like never before. It was a huge mistake. Now I'm ramping up banner ads like crazy and seeing more and more sales from direct traffic.

To add to the original post, once you have banners up I'd suggest you pay attention to view-through conversions. It's the most measurable way to show that your banners are paying off--aside from conversions from clicks.

IMO, banners should reflect the philosophy, attitude, aesthetic and goals of the brand. If you're the real deal, your visitors will find out sooner or later and become real customers.
How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses
i compare it to the other brains in the Nature. How much flops does cat's/lion's/wolf's brain perform before the jump or orchestrating pack attack.

You compare it to even more recent and even more inefficient devices - computers, which themselves are just very primitive products of human brain.
http://bnetauth.freeportal.us/specification.html

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2010/Sep/160
Thank you for posting this, could be useful to someone.

But let me remind you that this post does not fall within the general guidelines for HN posting. For your reference:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
logicalmoron@news.ycombinator.com
Nice app, the homepage made me almost click back. You have to redesign it.

I think a good audience would be the people who are learning to program. I gave up learning Java programming because it took hours to get things up and running. So a web ide would have fixed that.

You have to encourage users to go full screen. I clicked f11 by accident, and it was much nicer.

I would also like it if I could read Github files here.

Great app overall.
This likely has more to do with avoiding the credit card merchant fees than avoiding the tax.
NYC might not own the yellow cabs, but they certainly dictate some of the rules governing them. The are extended that ability in exchange for the working agreement between the government of NYC and the yellow cabs.

It is the exact same as "your boss... was hired by the person that owns the company to tell you what to do."
Actually, having used it, I enjoy the way they handle full screen mode. It handles it extremely well. By default it doesn't load up into that mode, but it's one button click to get to that mode.

I'm not suggesting that Word is for everyone. Rather, to dismiss Word is silly. It does a lot, it does a lot really, really well, and while it costs more than the other options in the list, it's only because you are buying other applications alongside it.
The point was to demonstrate that the one-liner fits easily as an argument to 'python -c' from the command-line. You could also point out "import _if;" probably won't let me call "_if()", but again that wasn't really the point.

Also, you'll need to know the version of python:

$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#1, Dec 11 2006, 11:39:03)
[GCC 4.1.1 20061130 (Red Hat 4.1.1-43)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> fact = lambda n: 1 if n <= 1 else n*fact(n-1)
File "<stdin>", line 1
fact = lambda n: 1 if n <= 1 else n*fact(n-1)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>>
Cheap, durable lightsabers
> Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.

I think this is an example of the Jobs reality distortion field. Geeks, at least, did distrust Apple back in ~2000. Consider high geek Neal Stephenson's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Com... essay written back in the dark ages of 1999 :

> "It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?

> It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them."
While i don't buy his explanation of the causal mechanism at work, he's almost perfectly described my work cycle: I'm most productive in the morning, get the usual post-lunch valley, and have a nice productivity rise after my (usually light) dinner. I'm also stick thin. It's so stark that i usually will put off lunch as long as possible, and try to schedule meetings/etc for the 3p-6pm area. I always assumed this was a side effect of being really involved, like pdx writes, but maybe i had causality backwards.

I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but i'm volunteering to be a datapoint :)

Also, w.r.t. the eagerness to write off how half-baked Scott Adams is:
There's empirical observations of a black box, and there's the attempt to explain what's inside. You might get causality backwards, or explain the correct behavior in the wrong way, but who cares if the real goal is to maximize the behaviors of the box, right? I mean, who cares if the explanation for putting off lunch is ridiculous, as long as the behaviors it explains really exist.

[edit to clarify -- i don't really care if his explanation is accurate. He so accurately described my mental cycles and my diet that it was interesting to read his hypothesis]
http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#channels
Gorillaz Record New Album on an iPad
Congrats Paul. Great news for startups in general.
If your boss is required by law to provide FOO upon payment of the standard fee, then our examples are the same.

Cab drivers aren't blind sided by the potential pitfalls of their job. They know the hazards when they start. To suggest anything else is not only ridiculous, but it undermines the judgment of cab drivers.