skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I understand your point, but I think you're being a bit harsh.

At the most basic level, good writing does involve ensuring that the reader can comprehend the ideas that are being introduced. However, in my opinion, it also involves knowing something about the intended audience's ability to comprehend the subject being discussed. If someone's studying law, I'd assume that they'd have no difficulty understanding the quoted paragraph. I'd certainly hope that someone studying law wouldn't need to be spoon-fed ;)

"Writing is like design"

Writing is also an art-form. 'Quality' is difficult to define - so sometimes, a full tool-kit of literary devices might need to be used to illustrate a point. Sometimes the reader will be required to infer meaning.

This section of text uses metaphor, it provides itself as an example of the didactic rhythm that the author's discussing, and it does all of this without being patronising or condescending.
Good thinking; you are often wrong when generating hypotheses about yourself and they are hard to test.

But I've seen it in myself at other times over the last decades, too.

(I didn't know introspection was harder for introverted? Reference?)
Oh the joy of an open office landscape!
People are allowed to disagree with you about PayPal. This would be a very boring site if everyone automatically agreed with everyone else.

I'm curious now. What was your first entrepeneurial effort, and how did UPS, PayPal, and eBay kill it?

I have zero opinions about PayPal.
Agree to you both. This is what they must improve in their future updates. My timeline has photos that have been posted by others on facebook and have tagged me. I dont want them to show up in my time line.

But I'm sure the memolane team will come up with a solution soon :)
Path - new social service for photo exchange
How about backing up your text messages, call history, etc so you transfer it to another phone?

This is a one-time task. If it's 24 hours, I can easily finish the backup and get refund.

If it's only 15 minutes, I won't have enough time.
Improving and Fixing C Code
Cannot agree more. Learning the tools is the only real challenge. Once you have sufficient background knowledge in CS, you understand more of the possibilities that your creative juices can draw from.

I'm currently a joint CS/Fine Art major at Concordia University in Montreal (http://computationarts.concordia.ca/). Even though I could have went to a more "prestigious" university, they didn't have a program in creative computation. Don't get stuck in a boring typical CS curriculum. Every professor I meet in the program has been incredibly enthusiastic about what they do, and best of all, since it is a niche program compared to the size of the university, getting time to talk and know your professors is considerably easy.

As far as user-centric design goes: Most of the HCI design stuff can be picked up by just reading books on it. The more you know about human psychology/sociology and its applications to computer interaction the better.
Precisely. I am also amazed by the very fact that people chose multi-disciplines to pursue their interests. And with what results? The results are beautiful when you marry non-allied fields.
I don't know whether I am reading too much between the lines, but Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be a lover of classical literature. Isn't there a tiny connecting dot answering how did he happen to get hit by the idea connecting people and what they would like, inspite of being a near-solitary person.
We sold everything bought a sailboat and have been up and down the east cost of the US and the Bahamas for 4 years now.
My children are 11 years old.
Interesting. I'm considering running a local imap server (to speed up search), but so far bbdb looks fine for contact search. I'll look up some way to get contact autocompletion, I'll take a look at eudc (I found a small page about it in the emacswiki). Thanks for making me aware of it!
This is a great essay about language, which provides a lot of practical advice: http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html
Paul Allen Loses Round One in Lawsuit Against Google, Apple & Facebook
Well hold on now, "negotiation" is one thing, but I think it's disingenuous (or perhaps hyperbole) to call what you're asking for "an educational discount." I mean, I think I understand what you're doing, and of course negotiation is natural, but if you're going to exaggerate your terms by saying your personal software needs amount to institutional status, you risk being perceived as a bad-faith negotiator.

We all see the world differently, it's just that communication and, dare i say, negotiation depends on the participants operating with similar terms. In your example you're trying to tip the balance of perfect information by causing the provider to have to account for a question of how legitimate your discount request it. Which it really isn't, because you aren't really that kind of institution.

I hope I'm explaining myself well enough, it's just that it's not a good negotiation if people are exaggerating their terms. Sure, "ask for twice what you want so the compromise is closer to your target number," but this isn't a foolproof strategy.
> Don't hire "mobile engineers"

A large media company rejected a friend of mine who only had less than one year iOS experience (but had already collaborated on a couple successful apps). Their rejection reason was they were looking for engineers with 2+ yrs of iOS experience. Some of my friends meet their baseline requirements and they are not hirable (busy with client projects). What this company's HR department fails to understand is it easier to hire someone who has a solid non-mobile background and has been doing it for fun, on-the-side than to hire a mythical 2-yr iOS experience developer. I've gotten all of my contracts because of two big things: my personal connections and my portfolio of iOS apps. What pointy-haired bosses seem to fail to understand is the portfolio is the benchmark for performance and experience. Btw - I have exactly one year of iOS experience and have worked on four apps.
Google Hotpot PM talks freely about Yelp Competition & more
Great interview with Loir Ron the PM of Google Local/Hotpot, who speaks freely about a bunch of topics including competition with startups like Yelp.
I think this works both ways.

With only a 15-minute window, less people will buy your app but there will be less cancellations.

With a 24-hour window, more people will buy your app but there will be more cancellations.

I don't have any data to back things up but it's possible that the number of downloads will be the same. And according to Google's stats, most refunds happen within 15 minutes.

However, having a shorter refund window is more beneficial to developers in terms of handling their business and will reduce abuse.
Cyber attacks by WikiLeaks' defenders hit online traders badly
Does this guy bother anyone else as much as he bothers me?
By the way, if you start your project, please, let me know! Spotlight is perfect for searching... If I can interact get it with emacs and my gmail accounts it is a win-win situation
For the life of me I don't understand why cubicles are the norm for developer offices. There have been numerous studies showing the productivity effects of open offices vs individual offices. And many more studies on the importance of concentration and the destructive power of interruptions.

Do people value programmer productivity so little that they're willing to throw so much of it away to save a few dollars in real estate costs?
If a manager of another department came to talk to you about moving (and you're at that large a company), there's a very good chance that the prospective manager has already given your current manager a heads-up that you had that conversation, and may have even cleared it with him beforehand.

Most companies of your size have a large HR department that has some serious procedures for all aspects of hiring, including interdepartmental hires. Plus, it's doubtful that your prospective manager would want to piss off your current one by going around him, seeing as it's in the prospective one's interest that he feels happy with the process (so that he doesn't block it in the future). If your current manager is a really good boss, he may have set this up to begin with because he sees you're the kind of guy the company want to employ, and that moving you somewhere else is preferable to losing you.

Bottom line is don't worry about it - your boss is almost certainly waiting for you to have this conversation with him.

Ask your prospective manager when you should talk to the current one about it (the answer is probably after the new one has filed the HR forms), and don't worry about finding a replacement - that's what you have an HR department for. You may be asked to set a reasonable transfer date to deal with knowledge transfer, but that's an issue for discussion between HR, your new manager, and your old manager.

Given the size of your company, you're not the first person who has ever wanted to do an interdepartmental transfer; there's a procedure for it, so it's just a matter of kicking that into motion and following along. Your situation is unlike most of those discussed here (a multinational vs. a small business/start-up); don't get romantic notions about doing your personal bit to help out your manager or current team. There is a (likely large) HR department that exists to manage these things and set procedures, and it's unlikely your current manager even has much choice in terms of when and how you move departments.
I'm a newb with the formatting here, but after installing the eudc-mab library, I do the following:

(eval-after-load
"message"
'(define-key message-mode-map [(tab)] 'eudc-expand-inline))
(eval-after-load
"sendmail"
'(define-key mail-mode-map [(tab)] 'eudc-expand-inline))

(require 'eudcb-mab nil t)
(setq eudc-server "localhost"
eudc-protocol 'mab)
(eudc-protocol-set 'eudc-inline-query-format
'((name)
(email))
'mab)
(eudc-protocol-set 'eudc-inline-expansion-format
'("%s <%s>" name email)
'mab)

EDIT: Oh yeah, you need the 'contacts' utility somewhere.

http://gnufoo.org/contacts/
Beside Salsa dancing (where I met my girlfriend 3 years ago), I can also recommend meetin.org - at least for people who are 25 or older it's a great way to meet people and hang out.
I can't tell you the number of times that Hacker News has helped lift my day. Also, going to a coffee shop with a book works short-term wonders. There are times where I question my short-term goals (finish client work) when they prevent me from hanging out with friends (deadline).

Get a cat or a dog. Sitting alone in my house with my crazy cat is better than being alone.
I won't go that far, but I did notice that they completely glossed over her mention of partners in the interview with the laptop stand woman.

Ferriss is certainly invested in the idea of one-person financial power, but in the laptop-stand case study there would seem to be more to the story.
If the article's purpose was to teach you how to be a better writer, then I agree. It lacked clear instruction. However, I felt the article was really about why it's important to want to write well, especially if you're a lawyer. This is the affect it had on me. Great article.
...probably not too different from early adopters who wanted to have the first iPhone with all the cool apps.

Suckers. Didn't they know to wait a few centuries for the 2nd gen?
Even if it were (it's not), it is impermissible to "weed-out" people with OCD or a host of other problems in the US; it is an ADA violation.
I'm a programmer/business owner that once needed several specialist contracts drafted, but couldn't afford to hire a specialist lawyer to draft them. A lawyer friend of mine gave me a load of sample contracts and drafting notes, and I spent the next 6 weeks copying, pasting, and modifying.

I'm not convinced it was the best use of my time, and it's quite possible the resulting documents were a legal disaster (although I thought they were pretty good). But it was certainly an interesting experience.

After a couple of weeks I came to the conclusion that drafting contracts is actually a lot like programming. The aim of both is to specify precisely what should happen in response to various conditions.

if partyA terminates agreement then partyB should get X, Y, and Z. And so on.

One key difference is that, whilst programming languages are built for precise, unambiguous writing, English is not. It's very hard to write English in a completely unambiguous way. It's even harder to write English in a way that can't be intentionally misinterpreted by someone who stands to gain by doing so.

Breaking up a sentence to improve the readability can often add new ways in which the meaning can "reasonably" be interpreted. Often it's easier to be precise in meaning with a 500-word sentence than with five 100-word sentences. And many English words can be interpreted in multiple ways, so you often have to use unusual words that have a precise accepted meaning set by legal precedent. Hence the complexity you often see in legal documents.

I talked to my lawyer friend about this, and he agreed. He also pointed out that, as professional legal drafters improve, they typically write more readable documents with less jargon, but no less precision of meaning. Irrespective of how precise they are in meaning, contracts that are hard to make sense of are often the sign of a rookie. A bit like programming again.
Sounds like you didn't apply for a trademark, did the other guy? You can do a trademark search here: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=400...

Either way, if the other guy is running a legitimate business AND received a trademark, he'll probably be able to force you to hand those over. That may be true a little longer down the line even if he doesn't hold the trademark.

If you don't have any investment (other than the $7 or so), selling to them for a reasonable (whatever that means) price is probably the most useful course for both sides.
It may seem cliche fancy but I can go for hours with smooth jazz sax in the background. no lyrics help me focus on the task at hand while my mind can be in a relaxing/stimulating environment.

By this I mean most jazz music is slow-tempered and chill-out while also offering impressive musical talent for lead instruments (sax solos, piano, strings...). This is just what works for me - a buddy of mine swears on the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack.
The Viral Me: Inside Y Combinator
I'll weigh in because I know Jason, one of the people profiled. His modesty obscures the fact that starting, running, and growing Clockspot wasn't an easy ride by any means.

But Jason did pull this off almost entirely on his own.
You seem to be right; all of the pastebins in the link below are from within the day.
Years ago there was a tool by Tom Liston called LaBrea Tarpit that could be used in defending against a DDOS. The theory behind Tarpit was to acknowledge the packet, then silently forget about it, releasing the resources on the defending side, but, the attacking side sat there with the resources being used. We used it rather successfully against a DDOS and while handing data over to several three letter agencies. Through cooperation with another country, 18 months later the hacker was arrested.

Now, LaBrea was unique, DMCA was a new law on the block and Tom Liston received a legal brief or opinion (I don't recall from whom) that stated that several states that were classified as Super DMCA States might actually consider LaBrea to be a reverse DDOS. It was sort of a stretch of the existing law, but, you could see how it could be applied.

The original intent of the SuperDMCA law was to prevent the anti-telemarketing devices from holding the line open when telemarketers called. Because of the way the old phone system worked, a flashhook would not disconnect two parties in case the person was on an older 1A switch and was trying to access certain services. This behavior moved over to 5ESS switches and even to this day, when someone calls, if they refuse to hang up and you don't have digital service, when you hang up you will not immediately get a dial tone. Briefly, the contention was that this behavior could prevent someone from calling 911 and could put the person in jeopardy. The rough comparison between the law and LaBrea Tarpit claimed Tarpit's behavior could constitute itself as a reverse DDOS - and Tom Liston stopped distribution of it. Of course, it was open source, but, by taking the stand that he wasn't distributing it, he was trying to protect himself from any legal liability.

I've dealt with the FBI on other DDOS attacks and I am in Florida, and I have told them that I have used Tarpit to defend against the DDOS. During one attack, they did offer to write an OIA as they wanted the data (political site).

So, even defending yourself against a DDOS could be illegal. :)
What kind of boat do you own? I couldn't find it in your comment history. Given the choice would you still buy that particular boat today or would it be something else?
Keeping Secrets WikiSafe
The "reading mail in emacs" option he didn't mention is notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/). It's a mail indexer with full-text search and a few front-ends, the most-widely used being for emacs. It's search is really fast, and it was fast enough to make me forget folders once and for all.
Those were all created today. It seems more likely that they're mocking him.
Mad props for posting this.

Fairlight - when dreams come true

These guys actually wrote their own linkers, assemblers, monitors, etc. when they were barely teenagers.

http://www.c64.com/scene_display_interview.php?interview=181
And what performance do you get from running Redis without any virtualization directly on the host system?
The bill might have changed since this was written.

Current I see "(1) IN GENERAL- The owners and operators of covered critical infrastructure shall have flexibility in their cybersecurity plans to implement any cybersecurity measure, or combination thereof, to satisfy the cybersecurity performance requirements described in subsection (c) and the first-party regulatory agency or sector-specific agency may not disapprove under this section any proposed cybersecurity measures, or combination thereof, based on the presence or absence of any particular cybersecurity measure if the proposed cybersecurity measures, or combination thereof, satisfy the cybersecurity performance requirements established by the Director under subsection (c)." ( http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c111l3R...: )

Which seems to specifically state you can choose any approach you want as long as you secure the site.

Maybe there's something I missed.
Java Serialization options
When you want to use external caching mechanism (outside the JVM), serializing/deserializaing of objects introduce a penalty. A good serialization library makes the external cache more viable.
When people complain to me about so and so technology related I tell them to relax, breath and consider the millions of things that need to go right in order for you to watch the latest Lady Gaga video on youtube.

I am constantly reminded of this by Louis CK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Brown noise (from simplynoise.com) works wonders for me. I can work in a room with the TV on!
I skimmed the bill but couldn't find any reference to "specific proprietary software". What are we talking here, Cisco routers or something?
I had intended to applaud the author and assert that this was one of the few examples of essays on good writing that I've recently read that is also itself an example of good writing. So your critical comment comes as a surprise and a challenge, especially since I think you are right in a crucial respect: it would take a bit of work to isolate and evaluate specific actionable tips on writing well from the essay. But I read the essay in the first place as an exhortation to others to aspire to write well, to recognize the importance of writing well, to appreciate and confront the difficulty of it, and, indeed, to provide an example of it. In these respects, I think the essay has succeeded admirably, and in these respects, too, it is doing something that most essays on writing, including the ones that would well satisfy the criterion that you invoke, fall short.

I think one of the important, if implicit, ideas of the essay is that it's not possible to learn to write very well without being able to fix in your own mind an ideal representation of what good writing is against which to measure your own real efforts. Reading and recognizing the right examples can go a long way towards reaching that goal, and while the essay emphasizes the hard work of writing over the work of attentive reading, it nonetheless is the kind of essay that contributes, by virtue of its logical development and style, to my idea of what good writing is.
Neither of us has registered the trademark but they're using it on Twitter etc and they're close enough in what they're doing to cause confusion. Thanks for the response.
I'm going to graduate next year, so maybe I'll take a year off and try to find something to do in NYC. Do you recommend college before working so I have an easier time finding relevant jobs? I imagine it would be difficult to get a job at a digital advertising agency without any credentials. Realistically I can't work during High School, so I guess I should just study up in the meantime.
Apple disabled jailbreak detection API in iOS 4.2
SF author and civil-rights activist Joel Rosenberg has been arrested
Dişli Savaş 2.5
I just tried eudc-bbdb, and it somehow works (oddly enough, it expands one contact but not another... I'll have to look at the configuration options). The eudc-mab solution looks better for my Mac, although I think bbdb can work better in the long run: I use a Macbook at home and a Linux netbook at work: I have my bbdb file in the Dropbox folder, thus I can have a nice cross-system contact file.
It would seem that there's almost always more to the story, and his overall message ("you, too, can have financial freedom all by yourself...now go have fun") might be stronger if he acknowledged that, yes, it's hard to build a company to that point.

What I think is valuable is the constant reminder that the business/income-building is a means to an end, and there's a wide world of choices out there for what the "end" is.
That's true, but the headline is am understatement. This line of legislation will kill Silicon valley. Who can afford $100k/day when you are just two guys in a garage? Or even writing cyber defence plans and submit them to DHS?
Another fun way to learn is to run games and demo's in WinVICE, accompanied by the ICU64 visualiser ( http://icu64.blogspot.com/ ). It allows you to narrow down where in memory code is running and what it is doing, in a fun, visual way. I taught myself C64 programming by examining other people's code and figuring it out (and sometimes copying it, too). It's a lot easier to do this with ICU64.
Ok, I am still learning Haskell, but I thought I would try to fix the above so that there is only one filter pass:

qsort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
qsort [] = []
qsort [x] = [x]
qsort (p:xs) = qsort lesser ++ [p] ++ qsort greater
where
(lesser, greater) = foldl split ([],[]) xs
where
split (left, right) x = if x<p then (left:x, right), else (left, right:x)

Does this work?
>maybe it is an issue of a poor title for the piece

The simple title of the HN submission works better for me than the original title.
This. 100% this. Although, there are times, particularly when deep-diving into someone else's trainwreck, where you know that futility and defeat are the order of the day, when I'll put on Godspeed! You Black Emperor's "Dead Flag Blues":

The car's on fire, there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.

Sorta sets the mood.