skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not in shape to start a company because I don't have any sort of overarching passion that will keep me motivated no matter what, nor do I have any monetizable hobbies or interests. I also have serious doubts about my programming skill, let alone ability to run a business. Everything I've been interested in making already exists in a form better than I can ever do myself. (That ought to be a wonderful thing in itself, but my selfish ego demands that I personally make a difference somewhere.)

I believe I know the answer you seek, but I'm not sure if my body will
hold out long enough to type it. The details of my health are my own, but
it should suffice to say that moving and even typing come at a price.

When I was near your age a dear friend of mine, Regina Riley, was kind
enough to share an important bit of wisdom; When you say, "I'm Bored," you
are actually saying, "I'm Boring."

For many people, it can be a very harsh revelation.

The additional difficult revelation is; fascinating people are
fascinated, and fascination is a choice.

An alternate, but equally accurate, way to phrase it is; interesting
people are interested, and interest is a choice.

You must choose to be interested. You must choose to be fascinated. It
might be a thing, or a field, or a topic, or even another person. Your
choice is an investment, and every investment has a price. It may or may
not be the very best investment you could make, but it is guaranteed to
pay off in some way.

In taking the time to type this, I chose to have an interest in you as a
fellow human being, and I made an investment at a higher price than most
must pay to post an opinion on a forum. I could flatter myself with the
effort I've put forth to type this. I could flatter myself with
believing I spotted the root of your problem. I could flatter myself
with making a difference in your life by sharing something that was
shared with me.

I don't need self-important flattery, and I honestly have no clue if
this will be helpful to you in any way. It may have been a poor choice
of investments.

None the less, I'm happily content with just knowing I tried my best to
be interested and invested in helping another human being. I decided to
be interesting. Can you say the same?
Yeah, that's certainly a part of it. I did prove to myself recently that it's not necessarily application of focus that's the problem -- I successfully completed 50k words for nanowrimo last month.

I think maybe I'm just addicted to deadlines.
Definitely agree here. A girlfriend is only one of many people with whom you can share a close relationship. Close non-intimate relationships with anyone can be just as rewarding.

I've done a lot of boneheaded things in my youth, and postponing romantic relationships to a later time probably would have resulted in me making better decisions when faced with the same situation. I'd like to think so, at least.
yeah, I didn't know HN still cared about Tornado. I thought I was the only one using it for production ...
Yeah we're on TextMarks Plus. I was going to use Twilio but they don't have short code yet.

No revenue plan atm, we originally built it to scratch our own itch. Then we thought we should share it with others. :)
"Sorry, we couldn't find you any matches in <your_country> using those artists."

My inner socialite is upset, but the hipster part of me is pleased. :)

As has already been mentioned, amazing name and a-mazing design.

I look forward to checking into the site when the user base is bigger, so I'll find me some like-minded hipsters.
The Mother Bear [wallet] (pictured) has a hinge that makes it harder to open if you are approaching monthly budgets.

Seriously, that is funny.
Why don't they translate the foriegn words? And is this supposed to be worldwide? Am I to understand the most popular search terms across the world are in three languages and amost all englsih? If it's not worldwide report why include the foreign terms?

Someone really dropped the ball on this one.
49 points? People have been having problems with Outlook for well over a decade. This isn't news, and anyone still using Outlook has Stockholm syndrome (or needs to find a new job).
While the welcome page does a great job of explaining the kind of atmosphere it has created and how people should behave, it doesn't explain how it encourages it. In short, blunt words, how do we keep the jerks out?

Someone who wants to be a troll isn't going to be discouraged by a few words in the welcome page. That type of user isn't likely to even read the page in the first place.

On the other hand, that's not the point of a welcome page either. It's to welcome those people that do want to be a friendly new user. However, then I read HN's hypothesis about popular community sites declining in quality, the first thing that went through my mind was 'Oh no, how does HN solve that?'

HN has obviously been successful at it so far. Maybe it's the utilitarian nature of the site. Perhaps HN's biggest benefit here is its name. The subject matter might not be limited to 'hacking', but the thought lingers in people's head when they hear it, and probably keeps a good number of people at bay who would otherwise post the latest Justin Bieber gossip.
You might have seen this posted here before, but Reg offered an interesting one that certainly opens the door to other questions that may help or give you ideas:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/06/my-favourite-interview-q...
Nope, haven't made it to a Music Hack Day yet unfortunately. Was there a similar idea there?
NDAs are contracts between private entities. Freedom of speech is a protection against the government.
Pretty awesome.

There's an unfortunate focus in the admiral's comments on ship-to-ship warfare, which really isn't something we get a lot of nowadays.

What's deliberately not mentioned is how useful this might be for shooting down a missile at launch. It is, as they say, hard to hit a bullet with a bullet. But hitting a bullet with a much faster bullet...
"Because key chords weren't painful enough"
Borges and Marquez are the two I latin americans I'm acquainted with and they are overall the most famous too. Borges is always very brainy and philosophical in a very good way; sometimes he even ventures into flat-out mindfuck territories. He mostly wrote short stories that are consistently good. Marquez has a lovely vivid and very visual prose and writes either in a realist or slightly magical realist style. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" are the pivotal points of his bibliography.
Operation: Payback changes course, may be fizzling out
Sent you a few bucks, best of luck with the surgery.
Noam Chomsky, with his two-ish fields, springs to mind. Asimov and Bertrand Russel might qualify.

It seems, though, that those sparse matrices are largely populated by creative efforts; we see many professors of hard science who are also philosophers, historians or writers, but we seem to have lost the biologist, engineer and composer of da Vinci's ilk.
I wasn't aware that listing a set of things I've done counts as impressing people. It's not like I go around just announcing accomplishments to crowds hoping they'll cheer me or toast me or blow me.

We're discussing an article that opens up by mentioning one man's prowess in multiple areas. The article uses this man as a springboard to ask if there are similarly talented people today. My response was that I think there are, and that while the current generation of Internet People is still young, there's a hell of a lot of promise there, pretty much wherever you look.

I'm sorry if you're insecure about yourself; I didn't mean to shove a list in your face in an attempt to make you feel unhappy. I know firsthand the shallow satisfaction that comes from doing things just to fill out a resume; happiness comes from friendship and personal curiosities. When I was 17 I thought writing a novel would make me happy; it didn't.

I don't know much about Ellison and Ventor. Would you really call Abagnale a polymath? He's a fascinating man, but I don't know him well enough to say that his activities are diverse enough to be called polymath. He was a con man; now he works in security. What else has he done?
I'm somewhat surprised this is getting so many up votes. Maybe am I missing some context?
For the record (believe it or not), I'm not interested in doing any of this myself. I'm just curious as to what kind of trouble those that have been doing this recently might be in.
Thank you - that's just the kind of reference I was looking for.
Questions about our jobs post?  Ask here.
This is a companion thread to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1993153

Firstly, sorry about the obnoxious title of job post last week. In combination with anonymous post and no ability to comment it was a real problem.

On anonymity -- we need to stay anonymous for now for job posts. We don't really like it either, but that's life. YC funding has news value, and if we disclose it now we won't get news coverage when we are ready.

On comments/questions -- HN job posts don't allow comments. That's a reasonable policy in general. But we are happy to answer them here.
Sweet. We use Apache ZooKeeper for service discovery and have a #zk channel. We just did a deployment, here's the irc log: (deploying the 'PM' service, updating instance pm12 first)

[1:05pm] dm: PM leader changed from pm12 to (none)

[1:05pm] dm: PM leader changed from (none) to pm11

[1:05pm] dm: UNANNOUNCED: ServiceDescriptor[id=pm12,kind=class com.kaching.platform.guice.KachingServices$PM,uri=http://10.99.110.140:8080,shards=[],status=UP]

[1:05pm] dm: ANNOUNCED: ServiceDescriptor[id=pm12,kind=class com.kaching.platform.guice.KachingServices$PM,uri=http://10.99.110.140:8080,shards=[],status=INIT]

[1:05pm] dm: UPDATED: ServiceDescriptor[id=pm12,kind=class com.kaching.platform.guice.KachingServices$PM,uri=http://10.99.110.140:8080,shards=[],status=UP]
I think the people I have the most respect for are the people who master cross-browser CSS going back to IE7.

Is there another equivalent when it comes to a somewhat popular technology where quirky fixes are actually the main part of the work process?
I had a similar experience after recieving a concussion this summer. My memory was shot, I had to write everything down constantly. Basically it forced me to become more organized and really simplify my lifestyle. I was really close to getting burned out. It's been a rough trip, but I'm starting to get a good foundation built again. Learning to cut down my projects and not working like a dog has helped out immensely. I would not like to experience that handicap again, as I'm still often struggling with the effects.
Wordpress without caching on a VPS that is probably not configured well. w3tc or wp-super-cache would probably fix his issues. Installing it while the site is hammered.... will be fun. Perhaps as challenging as solving the easter egg.
I'm not sure which aspect of my comment you were referring to, but I don't think there's data to back up the suggestion that the majority of the visitors here fetishize karma count and care greatly about it.

They care about learning something new, being intellectually stimulated and sometimes just being entertained, but given the limited way that karma is exposed, I'd be surprised if the average user goes to any great length to find out the karma count of a comment poster.
Have you actually looked at the other pages?
Here is a comprehensive list of Python implementations:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonImplementations
I'm not convinced that effect is significantly different from watching TV or reading Hacker News. A little bit might not be bad and probably even has some desirable effects, but too much pleasurable consumption and you fall into a less productive state of mind. It's true for all luxuries.
Every security professional I've heard speak emphasizes the importance of grasping what they tend to call "the security mindset". Which I understand to mean putting yourself in the place of an attacker and asking how your code could be taken advantage of.

Running an automated tool against your web app isn't a bad idea, but it's no replacement for thinking about what you're doing.
Yes - it is indeed hard to make something do what it was never intended for.
The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs in America – 2010
"But seriously--anything you might consider "subversive hacking" is illegal."

What are you counting as "hacking"? Hacking together some encryption software to retain privacy from an intrusive government is subversive and, in many countries, legal.
Let it be known that your investment has paid off in, at minimum, a grateful reader and an upvote.

The really scary thing is that I've noticed I'm having an easier time acknowledging that I'm boring than taking action to change that. I'm still trying to fight the idea that I might be fundamentally lazy.

But thank you for your support! It will be a difficult journey for me as well.
Now we're sidestepping this entirely, but I never really understood that sentiment. Do people really have some sort of ideal spouse image inside their head and then seek out someone to fit? That doesn't fit with my version of reality.
>I wasn't aware that listing a set of things I've done counts as impressing people

this is what he said.

your statement is essentially 'i think i am a polymath and so are my friends'

>My response was that I think there are, and that while the current generation of Internet People is still young, there's a hell of a lot of promise there

man, when did i get so old that i'm cynical of generational pride? every generation feels this way, at the edge of the new and exciting.
Yes, Web Programming can be hard, but it's probably harder than it needs to be. The whole ecosystem of HTML + CSS + JS + IE6 is a mess.

Something along the lines of Cappuccino will help a lot. Then you're "only" left with the problems of UI/UX, scaling, security, A/B testing, big data and marketing.
I've considered it, but that wasn't the use case for nodebot. In order to do some of that, you'd need to be able to run commands on the machine the bot is running on, or have the bot keep some log of state as messages are fed into it, both of which are somewhat non-trivial in terms of storage/query-ability or security. We have a few modified bots (supybot is the most common, I think) that developers have written and run themselves, but I don't think any of them are much more than playthings.

I could definitely see having the ability to allow a bot change the topic of a channel though, so, for example, the deployment status channel's topic shows the most recent version deployed, or the status of the current deployment, for those case where you're not sitting in the channel. Also, the ability to control nagios from IRC would be interesting, but we just use shell scripts for that right now (which is non-ideal in other ways).
Yes, there are Russian. This is not a pure meme in his understanding. foundation here - that the word "жрать". There are three common words used in respect of the word is - жрать (Russian profanity) есть (general use) and кушать (cultural variant). As anything anywhere using the profanity (from cleaners to politicians) the meme is not here, this expression for sushi can be heard quite often. I don't know if there are any country in the world, in which the mprofanity is so often used in everyday life.
Hi, I made this video. I don't show it in the video but this is a Touchsmart TM2. The screen flips up and swivels 180 degrees to reveal a conventional laptop form factor with keyboard, so I mainly use emacs that way. However, gestures are still available above the keyboard when the screen is in that mode, and also emacs code reviews that i talk about could be interesting... I have a lot of other stuff planned, see http://lispgamesdev.blogspot.com/ for more.
Would you do better if asked to write it in $YOUR_FAVORITE_EDITOR rather than a whiteboard?

If so, just ask the interviewer to write in emacs, tell him you are uncomfortable with a whiteboard. If not, find a new career.
Thanks. I'll take your suggestion to experience something different, although I find it curious that you chose to frame this as relationship advice.
I wrote about this a while back:
http://teabuzzed.com/2009/09/its-time-the-case-for-a-browser...

It still baffles me that Google hasn't tackled this already.
Socionics, which is a Jungian typology that's similar to but different from MBTI developed primarily in Russia, provides some of the evidence for this. The types in Socionics don't map one-to-one onto MBTI types, but the general idea of what the grandparent is saying is supported by the concept of "dual" types within Socionics. The basic idea behind a duals is that you get along best with people who share your attitudes/proclivities, but have complementary strengths/weaknesses within those dispositions. And yes, meeting duals is often pretty hard, especially for certain pairs, because they move in different social circles and environments.

It's very interesting stuff and it seems to me like it's onto something, but it's still pretty fringe, and has not been convincingly statistically validated yet. I'm very interested in formalizing these notions and subjecting them to statistically well-founded empirical tests. Right now there's a lot of enthusiasm for Socionics in Russia, but not much work in the Western world. Email or IM me if interested in chatting about this.

Also, since it's so new, beware of crackpottery... there's some people who claim absurd things like being able to determine someone's dominant Socionic type just by seeing a photograph.
As someone else stated, AWS doesn't provide you systems administrators. Storage administrators sure, but that's not difficult to absorb.

So taking that out of the equation, you're left with hardware and bandwidth. I imagine Netflix didn't get the same off-the-shelf price you or I would, so speculating on what their TCO is and how it would compare to a local build-out is probably fruitless.

For a small business, you can keep your hard costs (hardware/cabinets/power/bandwidth) under $10K/month and get a terabyte of memory in a pair of Dell R910s, a triply redundant 44TB SAN, a couple beefy Dell R610s with 96GB of RAM for database servers, Flash for the table-spaces and SAN read/write caches.

You can't come close to that kinda of power at AWS pricing.

Sure there may be cases where AWS makes sense at scale, but there are many more where it simply doesn't. Look at Basecamp. There's a reason they're switching (switched?) to a local SAN vs S3. It's insanely expensive to store anything more than tens of gigabytes in the cloud if you need DAS-like performance.

When it comes to bullet-proofing a system, automate the hell out of it, and skip the service contracts. Buy redundancies.

Oh, and stay far away from Oracle/Sun. ;-)
I'll spend some more time with Chrome then, I have it installed but normally only use it for compatibility tests.

thanks!
Hey guys, we actually built this concept the week of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

We built The Evolyte Store in 14 days, spent 1 day marketing, and received nearly 18,000 pageviews and $30,000 in reserved sales.

We were selling a 32GB Wi-Fi iPad at up to $100 off and the business model was like Groupon + Woot had a superhero baby (a little corny, we know :)

You can read our case studies detailing every aspect of the design, development, and marketing process (what my firm specializes in) here:

http://evolyte.posterous.com/pages/the-evolyte-store-case-st...

We're currently trying to figure out what we're going to do with this Store going forward as we only built it to market our professional services, and not to be an eCommerce competitor.
Well, first of all, if you're writing crypto software to avoid an intrusive government, then said government would probably make that software illegal.

My goal was actually to show (as you're rightly pointing out) that there are lots of cool security related hacks that one can do legally.

The poster, though, was asking about DDoS, form stuffing and otherwise "black hat" activities in relation to the law. You can't DDoS or exploit software on systems that you don't have permission to test, nor can you stuff forms to defraud advertisement providers like Adsense. Spamming email is illegal as well.

I'm not trying to argue the semantics of "hacker" and "cracker" and "script kiddie." Hacker News refers to hacker in its original sense, where as I perceive the poster to be asking about security related practices.
Data storage is ludicrously cheap unless you cater to more people than most countries have. Years of email times 10s or 100s of millions of people probably isn't that cheap.

Drop Box reserves the right to delete free accounts after just 90 days. Is that unreasonable? Hell no. I bet they don't hold your stuff forever in case you do pay that overdue bill one day too.
Medieval England was better off than some of the world’s poorest nations today
Wow, I never thought of it that way. I really really want to believe this is true... but time will tell.
I immediately thought of this as well upon seeing the site.

However didn't he come to the realization later in the book that perhaps those things aren't so important?

(I hope to come to that realization some day as well, soldiering on until then.)
I want a Manhattan made with rye, port instead of vermouth (man is this good), and Cynar instead of angostura bitters. And a pound cake. And for my planned sous vide goo-du-cken with Activa RM not to be an abomination before God and mankind; I talk a good game, but I'm 40/60 on execution.

I have everything else I could possibly want right now; the only deficit in my life is of good cocktails. And gooduckens. I've got the Vince Gauraldi Charlie Brown music playing, I'm expecting light snow, Christmas is already a win.

It's been a fantastic year for us. I hope it has been for you as well. Happy holidays!
How is mouse-closing tabs in Chrome different and what is "smart positioning"? Didn't notice myself.
you forgot to factor in the negative implied equity of being "that guy who fought over a 0.2% pay increase." 10% is fifty of those. You'd never be hired again!
How can I decide which words should be slashtags in a query?
I'd rather code with a pen and paper than on an iPad!
Don't feel defensive. I think it's great that you are putting yourself in public and getting feedback. The truth is most people think that they are the shit but yet they are so insecure to express so in public. So they feel like Unibomber on the inside but are too chicken-shit to do actually like the Unibomber.

But it's important to take criticism well. Like playing music, it's jarring to hear your own voice or playing on records but it's the only way to get feedback and improve. What you are doing is to turn my criticism of you against me and it doesn't reflect poorly on me but shows off your bruised ego. You are free to think for yourself and then dismiss my criticism but don't turn it into the "idealistic you" vs. the materialistic world; that's descending into the Unibomber rabbit-hole.

And by the way, this is coming from someone who went through a phase of attempting to write the Great American Novel, exploring the liberal arts/music/philosophy/bohemian living, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it was a very educational experience.
Can I ask who did your design?