skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you saying you switched to the MSFT competitor to Sites (if such a thing exists)? If so, what does it do better than Sites?

Disclaimer: I have a friend on the Sites team...if you could make your comment constructive I'd be willing to pass it along.
There is a Facebook page, but it doesn't look more legit than the savingcaptaincruch website. They might both be fake. http://www.facebook.com/jdcrunchman?v=wall

EDIT: On inspection, the stuff from early October and back seems pretty OK. I'm more inclined to believe this now.
Why don't you just send a copy of the app by email to the other two WP7 owners?
Google's "New Service" in Account Page
Dropped by my Google account page @ https://www.google.com/accounts/b/0/ManageAccount and see "New Service" listed after "News". The "New Service" link just points to google.com. It's there for my GMail account, but not for any of my Google Apps accounts. Anyone got any scoops on this? Social thingy?
inotify is a great service, but is is "lossy", in that you aren't guaranteed to get a notification on every file. I have run into this while doing a large number of small file/directory updates. So, if you are designing apps like backup utilities and need to be aware of all file updates, factor that into your planning/design of your apps.
You know, there was a reason that post was tagged "rant". It wasn't meant as a position on anything, just a little rambling on my private blog. I didn't expect it to be read by anyone except my few regular readers and am frankly quite surprised it showed up here. I do appreciate the input however.
I have come across this in my city--lots of people complaining and fewer people changing things (almost all of whom are quieter than the complainers). The easiest thing to do is complain and it's very rarely helpful. The reason why things aren't optimal (for you) isn't because no one has had the opportunity to complain.
That sounds cool. I usually just dig http://www.cookingforengineers.com !
For what it's worth, I would love to get patches to my open source Hacker News app. (https://github.com/jpf/hacker-news-wp7)
Risk aversion has been the focus of a few HN discussions recently: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+rej...

This book also immediately came to mind (there are lots of great free summaries online): http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...

It's probably nothing you haven't heard before, but as they say, common sense is often not common practice. I think, in the end, you will only improve and gain confidence with practice. Some specific tactics that might help:

- Ask leading questions rather than directly stating your point.

- Before a meeting, create a mental image of yourself having successful exchanges with the other attendees.

- Work hard to be better informed/prepared than others in the meeting.
+1
As far as understanding the value of technology to people, this list clearly demonstrates that Google is trying to tackle hard problems and products to do just that. Compare this list of side endeavors (besides their obvious core competencies) to those of Facebook. Recent products are talked up as world changing innovations, (Groups, Messages, Places) however they haven't changed the game or significantly added value to their product. Yes these products are young, but in the last few years Facebook has done little to provide this "value of technology" besides the initial innovations of News Feed and the Like Button, both of which drew heavily from FriendFeed acquisition as well. Everything in tech is built off something, saying acquisitions don't count is ridiculous.
Don't underestimate the power of appeals for donations. We have a small userbase (26k), and make about $1000 a month in donations. Granted it's in a easily monetizable sector, with dedicated users, but I would think the sheer number of users you have could get you a decent amount of donations.
Well, they are generally in the making pottery or weaving sheets business, so I doubt it would come up.
Could they have added any more self promotional links at the bottom?
Who says that it's wrong to have a two-tiered hiring system: the standard "interview then hire" system (though done more rigorously---thus all the "how many golf balls in a schoolbus" questions); and the "let the market see how they do, then hire them at market value" startup acquisition approach. You can't have everyone at an organization as big as google go through the second process, so the first one fills out the engineering ranks.

See also: http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html
From the site, as I write this (an hour or so after this link was posted and hit the front page of HN):

> Amazon should be made aware of the scale of public opposition to what they’ve done.

> If we reach at least 1,000 people, then We will each mail Amazon letting them know why we won't be buying from them anymore.

> 1%, 989 people to go

If that's not irony, I don't know what is.

In any case, I don't see the objection here. A lot of Internet warriors seem to be almost zealous in their support of Wikileaks and their belief that the various large-scale releases they have made recently are somehow changing the nature of society and making governments fundamentally more transparent.

Wikileaks are quick to say that governments have not identified specific people hurt or killed because of the leaks. However, looking at things from a slightly more neutral point of view, it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect. They have created a lot of hype, disruption and embarrassment, but where's the huge smoking gun? I'm in the UK, and so far there has been commentary on our politicians as with many other places, but there's no evidence that our government ordered a hit on Dr David Kelly, or that Tony Blair had more information than we already knew from the public inquiries about whether Iraq really had WMDs, or that our then-government's support for the US action against a lot of popular opinion was a result of some corrupt deal for personal gain by the politicians calling the shots. Frankly, the leaks have so far been rather anti-climactic.

Also, just as an aside, the whole "we offered to let the government help us vet the material" argument is just transparent politics. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of documents. To even try to vet that data in any useful depth, the time needed from security-cleared and fully informed officials, and the amount of taxpayers' money it would cost would be staggering. Please don't tell me Wikileaks weren't well aware of that. And that's without even getting into the "we don't negotiate with enemies" ethics.

Given this sort of mess, I don't blame Amazon for not wanting any part of it. The fact that Wikileaks and various embarrassed government officials are having a very public pissing match is not a reason for independent businesses to start taking sides. More pragmatically, given the aforementioned lack of any real substance in the leaks, it is highly likely that the governments are going to win this one, and no business on the scale of Amazon wants to be out of favour with major national governments. There just isn't anything in it for them.
This doesn't have anything to do with free speech -- they're not arresting people for posting discussion on Twitter, etc. -- but rather with reminding people to think about the consequences of their actions.

If you publicly associate your identity with anything socially or politically sensitive, you are potentially modifying your job prospects, including (in this case) potential jobs with the federal government. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want with no consequences -- there are always social consequences to taking a position on something. (That's part of human nature, and you'd sooner be able to legislate love than to change that.) What this email is basically doing is reminding students that if they post about these kind of things in a way that is google-able, then they'd probably look at you the same way as someone going into a job interview with a shirt that reads "I want to steal your secrets!". (Or, imagine going into a job interview with Shell or BP wearing a Greenpeace t-shirt, for example...) Of course, you are legally free to say that, but good luck getting them to hire you afterward!
Howto install Call of Duty Black Ops in Linux using PlayOnLinux
I suppose the trade-off is having a style tag for each selector, which seems wasteful, and I'm not sure of the effect on performance. Any benchmarks for a large-sized stylesheet (1000 rules or so)?
I see spaces instead of hyphens on Dolphin Browser for Android.
Wikileaks Reactions from the US and around the World | ConspiracyWatch.net
Bad advice: trade a non-secured debt (credit card) by a secured one, so that indeed, you may lose your house, whereas before you weren't actually losing anything (bad credit is annoying, but doesn't force you to become homeless).
Whois says the domain was registered by this person:
http://www.blogher.com/member/christinemarie
She doesn't look like a scammer.
Don't take on debt secured by you personally. Your business should take on the debt. I know it's easier said than done, because no one will loan anything to a business with no revenue.

By agreeing to personal debt, you pledged personal money that you didn't have. I guess different people have varying levels of risk, but I don't invest money I don't have.
Mass-mirroring WikiLeaks
Choose Shampoo for Dry Hair
Shampoo is an important part of maintaining healthy hair as it allows you to remove the buildup of natural oils within the hair that can lead to oily hair and allow you to remove the toxins that you
You're absolutely right, and another point is that once you start the "work to make money" wave it is often difficult to get out of it in order to do the "startup" wave. "Nights and Weekends" / "on the side" is another way to bootstrap, I'll likely blog about that sometime :)
Ask HN: Why aren't scientific journals free on the web?
Asking $ for them seems contrary to their purpose doesn't it?

And post links if you know any freebies as in:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/

http://www.springer.com/computer/reading+room+welcome

http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
most of my family is trying to be more minimal, so we stopped giving each other gifts years ago unless it was something important (baby, etc), or something they needed but was easier for someone else to find.

What I'd value personally: high quality outdoor clothing. I'd be happy if it was just a merino wool pair of socks. I'm tired of buying cheap jackets and want to finally invest in a good layering system for wintertime outdoor fun.

I like books/music, and things that get me out of the house.

What I hate: Best Buy gift certificates. I usually end up donating these to someone else.
Stratford 727, Yale 9: Keeping Score on DHS "Best & Brightest" Program
This is not how it works. When you open your business credit card, make sure it's not a personal credit card in disguise. The credit card needs to really be linked to the business. Then, iy cannot be switched to personal, ever.

The trick is that many credit card companies will be happy to extend credit to you personally (your SSN), and agree to print a fancy "company name" on the card, so it makes you feel important. Wrong approach.

It's simple to tell: if you provide your SSN, you lose. If you only provide your company's EIN, fine (and read the small print).
My cousin sister did opt for Lasik and she went in for a second round of corrective surgery. After that, her vision is pretty good. AFAIK, in India, quite a lot of super specialty hospitals provide Lasik (with a good track record of success rate) and charge around 30-40K INR (approx US$1000).

Best of luck! :)

My numbers being R-11L-13 and my left cornea (which according to my ophthalmologist) being very weak, I was advised not to go for Lasik. Am still waiting for a better option than glasses; no contact lenses available for those numbers. (BTW, am a programmer aged 27)
"If Amazon gets sued and bankrupt, then I'm absolutely fucked."

is this really the core issue here?
I would suggest iHack, but it might make it harder for you to get it on the app store ;)
Unubstantiated hearsay? Actually, it's insane to call any of what you're saying "conventional wisdom". It's sort of like saying that Abraham Lincoln chopped down trees with his hands and puffed his enemies away with his breath. All that we have for evidence is some compositions in her sister's notebook that could have been made by anyone, and her sister's account which is likely to be terribly biased.
I use something similar to that. I run Guake so that I always have quick access to a terminal. I have an alias set up called "idea" so that it opens a file called ideas.txt in Vim.

As a side effect of opening the file up, rather than entering it in a dialog, it refreshes my memory each time I add a new idea.
If you are pledging for money the least you should do is introduce yourself.
Unless I am listening to my wife. Usually, she doesn't want solutions from me, just an ear :)

That, and no more lists...
I have seen closer to $6K, no more than $8K.
China's skyscraper boom buoys global industry
Their purpose is to make money: they are not there for the sake of helping spread research (although it is an "useful byproduct").
"MS has ensured as best they can that any properly written Win app from 16bit on up still runs today."

Unless you're running Windows 7/Vista in 64-bit mode. Then no 16-bit apps will run, and it's emulation time.

Being able to keep old code isn't a long term advantage. Old binary apps that require an old software stack will eventually have to be replaced or rewritten.

Source code that can be recompiled or ported is much better than old binaries, as at least it can be worked on.

Worst of all is if the data is in a hard to decipher format. I did some work with some space science data from the 70's that was basically binary files in a pre-ASCII character set - it was a total PITA.... Old non-dumpable databases are easily as bad.
Facebook profiles are getting a new look – going live tomorrow [Screenshot]
There is another important lesson: you can't get business loans or credit cards (the big culprit here) without personally signing for it. BUT: there is probably some point in time that changes, and you should be on top of things and cancel the original. Too late now.
I don't see hyphens in Chrome, but odd, disruptive gaps in the middle of words.

I did an 'inspect element', then meandered up to the head to look at what CSS there was. My jaw dropped. There's about 10K lines of CSS getting pulled in, all for the ads.
Wow, does this unassuming post really constitute an appropriate venue for the old axe-grinding platform snark? Find something better to do with your Sunday afternoon, gents.

Marius, we're a small shop with 4 apps on the marketplace, and we'd be happy to help - will drop you a line.
Exactly. And the idea that "most people are complacent. Sheep, even" is one of those ill-considered ideas foisted on the uncritical.
FWIW the 10K number is about right. The average cost of removing spinal hernia in Mayo clinic is 11K as of a year ago, and I expect his case to be similar. That's covering the whole stay, and excluding any follow-up physio.

However the site does look fishy... or if CC in fact can't afford a 10k expense, then things are just plain sad :|
Eventually, thus the StartingOver handle. :)
This strikes me as odd (from section 5.4):

> "Acquisti and Varian [2001] examine a simple model with two types of consumers: high-value and low-value, in which a monopolist can commit to a price plan. They find that although a monopolistic seller is able to make offers conditional on previous purchase history, it is never profitable for it to do so, which is consistent with the earlier analysis of intertemporal price discrimination by Stokey [1979] and Salant [1989]."

Isn't this what OS companies do? They charge less for upgrades? According to this paper, this would "never be profitable".

Am I misunderstanding this?

EDIT: added section number for reference and context
That's an interesting point you bring up. Differentiating doctors is even harder than differentiating developers because at the least, developers can show you their work/portfolio. But for doctors, what are the external indicators of goodness? Perhaps, having intelligent conversations with each one might tell you something but even that is merely a fraction of the whole picture. I'd be interested in reading studies about how people pick their doctors (historically and now). Opinions of friends would probably be an important factor. And perhaps, race too.
That's a fair point. I think you are right and I am wrong.
The Not-for-Profit Capitalist
5 geniuses who renounced their work
It seems to be a political thing, running during the last hundred years or so. The left likes the tabula rasa approach: if everybody can be a genius, then we need to have a public education system that equalizes the chances. The right prefers the genetic explanation, because it justifies that rich people keep their fortunes in the family: intelligent people's sons are more likely to be intelligent, so it makes sense to offer them a better education to develop their intelligence and means to create companies that they will direct better than anyone else.

In my opinion, both models are bullshit. To develop talent you need both genes and environment. I believe that's becoming one of those things that you can't say:

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

The most progressive the environment, the most politically incorrect is to mention that you need some inherited muscle.
Microsoft doesn't have a sites competitor. I've had my own domain name for a while went to Sites. It's too hard to get things to work the way I want them too. Very unintuitive interface. My complaints:

1. I get 8 gigs of storage at my docs site. The problem, I can't let anyone with a link to a file view it unless I have a paid account. SkyDrive (Windows Live product) let's a user link to documents without others having to have a Windows Live account. It's a true online file storage system. SkyDrive has much more space. SkyDrive doesn't charge for the linking capability.

2. Sites doesn't give me the option of creating a file system and letting that be the root of my site. I'm not a programmer so I apologize if the technical terms are wrong. There is no index.html that I can edit as I want and then link to files in subfolders using relative links.

3. Google Voice. I like making calls from my laptop. They recently added this feature but it can only be done from Gmail. I can't do this with the Google Voice Chrome extension. I know that Live doesn't have a Voice option.

4. I don't like the interface of Google Docs. It's too unintuitive and too ugly. It's not a clean interface. Looks matter to users like me. If it isn't simple, clean, and visually pleasing then I'm not using it. I use Google as my search engine because it's not cluttered and easy to use. Bing looks like garbage to me.

5. Can't have multiple email address with my sites account. I address per user. To pay for sites costs $50 per user per year.

So I'm going to migrate to a paid hosting account and use Windows Live for my free email address. I don't have Office on my personal laptop and Windows Live Office is much better than Google Docs. There isn't a reason for me to use Sites anymore. Since I decided to quit Sites looked at other solutions.

This is one thing that a lot of companies don't understand. Once I'm used to a service I don't want to change. It's a pain. But if I get into a situation where I need to change things then I start looking at alternatives. Don't give users a reason to look for an alternative.
Messy Ponytail Hairstyles
The messy ponytail is a hairstyle that is very popular right now All that you need to do is pull your hair into a ponytail the same way that you normally would.
Inside a social network startup
Not involved in any of those cited ...but just a question. Who says X alternative is NOT recommended ?

Is that not recommended because it is new ? or because it does not comply with X regulatory compliance or just because you dont like them.

Also, all these alternative do not target the same marketplaces that paypal has grown up with. Some address remittance for example. Others P2P payments. some national. other international.

I think this is just anti-innovation, labels that do not mean anything and so easy easy to throw into a new innovation.

When Paypal started, everyone was saying the same.So lets give a chance to the new players and respect their own targets.
Thanks! It took longer to accept the situation I'm in, than it will be to start doing new things, I hope.
'not a reason for independent businesses to start taking sides'
That's the whole point, they did.

'it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect'
I disagree on this and they aren't done yet. So you don't know what is next. Besides, why would you shut something down that isn't a real threat(yet)?
Ask HN: Where is the wikileaks.ch blackhole?
I can't get to wikileaks.ch in the swiss top level domain.

Here's my traceroute. Where do your packets enter /dev/null?

1-3 <private>

4 if-13-0-9-143.mcore3.PDI-PaloAlto.as6453.net (216.6.29.13) 19.388 ms 21.083 ms 21.849 ms

5 if-3-0-0.mcore4.PDI-PaloAlto.as6453.net (216.6.29.38) 48.868 ms 49.555 ms 50.520 ms

6 if-11-1-0-1824.mcore5.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (207.45.196.78) 100.338 ms 82.635 ms 83.118 ms

7 if-11-0-0-1815.core1.PYE-Paris.as6453.net (64.86.71.54) 163.653 ms 165.143 ms 166.095 ms

8 if-0-0-0-0.tcore1.PYE-Paris.as6453.net (80.231.154.37) 165.548 ms 167.056 ms 167.508 ms

9 if-11-4.har1.PV0-Paris.as6453.net (80.231.154.30) 169.959 ms 171.211 ms 172.383 ms

10 * *
Anything related to the production and consumption of coffee and tea. Mugs and the like fit nicely in the gift price range, allow the giver to express themselves a bit, and are easy to collect and enjoy. Really, who doesn't love an awesome mug?

Then there's my other Christmas list, the one with the SSD featured prominently on it… ;)
The answer to that can make a big difference.
It properly has to do with the assumption that you can't finish you allotted work in the time everybody else has, like the kid who struggled to finish the test with just a few minutes left.
I don't have much faith in WP7 becoming a major mobile platform either, but I can't say that this type of comment really contributes anything on HN
Why do we need database joins?
Afaik: Technically it isn't "public" as public is a classification in itself (as in public domain). But that's just nibbling on the details.
If somebody came, exclusively, to the Times with 251,287 stolen / leaked cables, would they have published them all?
There are legal issues in every country to work out and verify - just because other companies are legally sloppy doesn't mean it's okay (disclosure: MS engineer).
Isn't this in Gladwell's book Outliers?

Also, perhaps this is the SCIAM you are referring:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-ori...
Done! Thanks for the tip.
Good on you. I can't really justify paying that much for something I don't deserve, since I don't think I'm that good yet.

How about this one, though? :(
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Ibanez-Artist-Guitar-1978-2622-S...
Errr... really? This? http://www.amazon.com/Pacific-Play-Tents-Hide-Tunnel/dp/B000...
Sell might be an option. One of those things where there was an offer a while back, perhaps they will take it for a song. But otherwise, how to go about it?
> The point is not to take a productive citizen and hang upon a yoke of debt for much of their life.

That may have been true once upon a time, but is certainly no longer true since the 2005 bipartisan bankruptcy reform law, which had the specific intent of hanging yokes of debt on productive citizens.
Have you thought about getting investors now?

If you don't think the business is attractive enough for investors, then the bad decision wasn't that you didn't get investors, it was that you picked the wrong business.