skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: How to make ISP realize?
I have been using internet connection from BSNL in Bangalore. These people don't care an iota about uncountable number of times I have made complaints about their broadband service which keeps getting mysteriously disconnected time to time. I have checked all the cabling and am sure that problem is on their side.
To add more to my frustration, today I couldn't book urgent tickets and within 20 minutes all the travel tickets are gone. This ISP has left us emotionally baffled... these tickets were too important to us.
How should I take revenge from these ignorant morons? The morons who provide internet to IT hub of India and claim to connect India, in my case they have disconnected me from my relatives and furthered my daily frustrations.
What to do? (apart from complaining which never works with these people)
In the time when globalization has touched even inner parts of India, this ISP employs people in customer care who don't even know India's national language, forget them to understand well, when you speak in English.
Ideas on how to take revenge from them are welcome.
I can be imagined to be looking like 'Angry Monkey' of the Family Guy series right now.
I started using Emacs a few months back and I found that having a keybinding reference next to your computer is super handy. So long as you know what you're trying to do, you can just look it up and do it. After a while the commands will become second nature. Muscle memory baby!

I found this really nice visual cheat-sheet by Stephen Chan and it helped me a ton. There are a few text references out there but I think this is by far the best.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/264676/NotesheetEmacs

PS: Look around for information on modes, they're worth mastering.
Gopher - gopher.co.nz online directory - Simpy Group
I've been reading "Beating the Street," by Peter Lynch. At many points in the book he notes how various experts were predicting the next depression throughout the 70s and 80s.
Well, that is kinda sorta the point he was making - it is a big company now.
I don't know what your options are in Bangalore, but couldn't you cancel your service and use a different company?

Taking your business elsewhere is always the best possible revenge.
Gifty.co.nz -- gift lists made simple (my new little web project)
Don't make excuses. The 1950s was a very conformist era, maybe they would have been arrested for being communists.

And they didn't even have Home Depot, Kinko's, GPS or Arduinos. There are people who practically make a career out of such pranks, sometimes much less benign -- Billboard Liberation Front, for example.

http://www.billboardliberation.com/2008/02/28/video-of-the-a...
Yes, that's an awful argument for legalization, but I do think that we need to either ban alcohol or legalize pot for the sake of consistency. Alcohol is an addictive substance that kills lots of people[1] directly through toxicity and indirectly through impaired judgment. Pot is not physiologically addictive and is nontoxic for all practical purposes[2], and the worst that can happen while stoned is that you waste a lot of time or anger your roommate by eating his cheetos.

FWIW, I say legalize both, use it in a safe environment or not at all, don't drive or operate heavy machinery, don't let it derail your life, etc.

1. http://www.csdp.org/research/1238.pdf (Looks like we should ban tobacco too.)

2. The LD50 of the main active compound (THC) is on the order of 500mg/kg oral in animal models. (That's a ridiculous amount. A marijuana user typically smokes well under a gram of plant material at one sitting.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LD50_of_THC
Very common in France and Canada I expect. English has always happily absorbed words from other languages. That's why it's the de facto lingua franca...
Nucor (18,000+ employees) comes to mind as a counterexample. But then, the exception proves the rule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor
Windows XP begins its long goodbye
I've studied Islam in depth, and can answer this question.

Islam calls for the presence of an Islamic state, which may live in coexistence with other non-Islamic states in peace. Within the Islamic state, all Muslims are held to the Islamic laws, but non-Muslims are free to practice and preach their own religions. Muslims are required to serve in the army of said Islamic state, whereas non-Muslims aren't allowed to - they pay an extra tax (Islamic tax is 2.5%) instead. So long as the tax is paid, they are considered to be full citizens and have most rights (with some rights related to the Islamic-religion obviously excepted).

Islam (in the Quran) does say to kill the "disbelievers," but this is almost always immediately followed by conditionals. Generally, the conditionals will refer to "those that have invoked violence upon you" and "those that have taken your lands or people from you." And then it's directly followed on most occasions by another statement: "And God doesn't forbid you from making peace with those that aren't fighting you and haven't taken your property."

So Islam demands the presence of a non-Secular entity (not dis-similar to the Vatican) which gives preference to Muslims, but does not require that there be a "Islamic World Order" and domination of the planet. Within the Islamic empire, non-Muslims are free to practice their own religions and their rights to do so are protected by Islam and outside its boundaries other countries are obviously free to do whatever they like so long as there are no transgressions - just like modern politics dictates.

It's important to note that in the history of the Islamic empire, there were great periods of tolerance and coexistence with the non-Muslim world. Take, for instance, Jerusalem when it was handed off from Christian hands to the Caliph Omar some 15 years after the spread of Islam. They would trust it to one other than the Caliph himself, and it was understood & accepted by both sides that it would remain - like the rest of the Islamic empire at the time (with the city of Makkah, where only Muslims are allowed to reside, being the exception) - open for Christians and Muslims alike without fear of religious prosecution or interference - and so it did.
Your pinyin is correct: zhen de! (Really! 真的!)

Chinese does indeed give you a new view of the superfluous nature of many English words. Chinese is like caveman English: "I want beer. Bring more." type stuff. Fun.

Still, English is a more precise language in many ways. And don't get me started on how having an alphabet is totally superior. Gah, stupid characters.
The point is that the developers of git don't use any bug tracker. It doesn't matter how much bug tracking software is available if they refuse to use it. Honestly I'm not surprised; I don't think Linus uses any of the Linux bug trackers either.
They're also being quite generous when they say that 300M Chinese read and write English. In my experience (Canadian living in China) it's got to be way less than that who are actually capable in some rudimentary way.

I wouldn't expect any significant impact on English from China any time soon.
Hrm.

"I think then the best way to come up with a $20,000 B2B product idea is to focus not on "what kind of software do businesses really need?"

and:

"So, how do you sell it? Firstly, the fact you have a "lite" version is covered by your reduced price. You're going to sell your lite version for $5K or $10K a seat or something well below the competition, to account for its being a basic product."

I think his mention of consultingware is in reference to positioning it as "product-plus-consulting". Not uncommon in enterprise software to layer on services.

And, uh- $5 to $10k a seat isn't big ticket?!
Testing for isotopes can have limitations. What if the forger gets hold of pre-war paint, or purifies paint personally, or forged the painting before atomic testing? I don't know how viable or common these methods are, but they could make this testing process less useful in the future. Of course, identifying fakes between 1945 and 2008 is still an awesome contribution.
In the ORM Battle, Everyone Loses
I was with the author up until I saw the "..for a 25% lower salary" part.

At my startup, I'm paying people a regular (8-hour) salary for working a 6-hour day. The company gets value out of mental focus, not in having an ass in a chair-- so, if people are more focused and motivated with an extra two hours available for other activities (family, friends, what have you) then it is a net gain for the company.
JobScore.com
I always saw Searle's Chinese Room as more of an attack on the Turing Test. Here is a room that will pass the test, yet is in no way intelligent.
NYT on why Microsoft should rewrite Windows from scratch
Agreed. Malice, stupidity, don't confuse 'em :)
Whoosh.

That no "understanding" of Chinese takes place by Google would be Searle's point writ large.

Of course, the point Searle misses is that the phenomenon of "understanding" is just symbol manipulation.
Higher Education Isn’t Worthless
As the most of such systems, JobScore wants to own your profile. From the opposite, Atomkeep wants other networks to own your profile and it'll do the "dirty" job for you on syncing it. JobScore will never be as much effective, as just keeping your resume in Monster, Dice and Jobster simultaneously. JobScore looks like a good partner for Atomkeep, though.
FREE Coloring Pages - Kung Fu Panda
Do you have any data to back this up? I know 37signals yells about their workday all the time, but I haven't seen any real analysis of productivity between 8 and 6 hour days.

The problem I've seen is that most of the 2 hours of wasted time happen randomly throughout the day; it's not concentrated at the end. So when you simply cut the day off 2 hours earlier, how much real work are you cutting out?

Also, if it's a startup, don't you expect people to work until things are finished? Why create a specific time range per day?
I use PayPal to send invoices to international customers, but only in low monthly $$ amounts. The costs aren't hurting me and it's a lot easier than worrying about the details myself.

I suppose it depends on just how much you're using it-- it sounds like you'd be using it for some high value amounts and I can't comment there. Best of luck, though.
I've always thought it would be an exciting development if enough OSS developers could be paid to do their work, à la Canonical or some of the other places that do that.

The trouble with OSS is that most developers are working on it part-time... if more projects had dedicated teams of individuals, I think we'd see faster iterations of better quality. For instance, desktop linux is moving there pretty quick nowadays, but it still takes a lot of time and energy and coordination to form a product as cohesive as some proprietary software (e.g. Apple).
Unfortunately, neither of those drugs are as effective as smoked marijuana.

Two points:
1) Smoking marijuana, it is much easier to titrate your dosage: i.e. get the right dosage, as the effect is much faster.

2) One of the main uses of marijuana, medically speaking, is control of nausea. Taking pills to control nausea just doesn't work.
Java 6 for Mac OSX Leopard
Outback bbqs
Welcome to the official Outback UK website. When you buy an Outback gas, charcoal or stainless steel barbecue you are buying the result of over 28 years experience in the barbecue industry, the latest manufacturing technology, the brightest designers, and
Aston on why the NYT should read the mythical man month ...

Also, microkernels aren't the end-all-be-all of OS design. And Singularity is more about a managed-code kernel than a microkernel.
If there is a policy against automation, then every "Autofill" tool available in the browser as plug-in or embedded functionality will violate this policy as well.

It's very imporant to note, that when using Atomkeep - it just gives the same functionality as browser-based "Autofill", but on the Web. There is no any fetching of friends data, photos, e-mails, messages, whatever else. Just the data you have with Atomkeep, and the data you want to change/update.
I completely agree with you, like I said I dont smoke it(doesnt give me anything) but I dont mind if you do.

Legalizing also makes it safer I guess, on the other hand I guess also more widespread but if it's legalized it can be taxed which is better than the money ending up in criminal hands.

However I doubt it will be legalized and banning alcohol would be incredibly hard, at least wine and beer and I certainly wouldnt want it to be even if I dont drink much of it myself.

Maybe a ban on heavy alcohol(vodka, scotch etc) would work but I doubt that too.

Anyway what do you think of marijuana as a stepping stone to heavier drugs?
I guess alcohol is one too but do you think the legalization of marijuana would bring more people to heavier drugs?
Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers
It seems I've miss spoke. I was actually thinking of Monotone not Mono ( http://monotone.ca/ ) I was just confused because I assumed the author was comparing version control systems. But they were actually just comparing open source projects in general. I have no opinion on Mono but Monotone sucks.
As I understand, your friends and your networks is most valuable for them. Definitely, though, nobody knows the right answer. ;-)

At the end, it is important that profile filled out with Atomkeep just gets "pushed" to any system you need (well, which is supported by Atomkeep). Even without importing.

And it's really important that it's _user_ who owns his data. It's not that he is trying to "fetch" his friends. He just works with his data, like "Autofill" function in your browser inserts your fields. And "autofill" is something what has been here for ages and has been implemented in numerous third-party tool bars for IE/Mozilla and nobody had problems with them.
So... your browser doesn't track history for you?
Cannot see how can I even register my profile with them, then find job on JOBCentral or Monster and apply to this job with my "JobScore" profile... Really - I am not sure this is what can do the job...
NHIbernate 2.0 Goes Beta 1
I thought this was a very prescient article, and also drove home the fact that corporations have dominated our government long before the present era.
Confirmed: Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook’s Board Of Directors
Here is an interesting thing:

Search google.com/trends for Emacs and Vim:
It suggests that in the last few years, both editors have lost users, but Emacs lost them faster than Vim. While Emacs started out with twice the popularity of Vim, Vim is now stronger.

Personally, I tried them both for some weeks each, but in the end settled with TextMate and WriteRoom, as both Emacs and Vim somehow felt too clunky for me.
Wired (Conde Nast) is in the eyeball business: they sell eyeballs to advertisers. The real surprise is why anyone expects them to publish something other than SciFi hand waving which appeals to the "arithmetic mode" of consumers.
Hmmm, the article starts off with "Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it." Then moves to "A MONOLITHIC operating system like Windows perpetuates an obsolete design."

I'm no OS expert, but I thought Linux was also "monolithic" in terms of kernel design.

I think Mr. Stross should keep to writing about subjects in his expertise.
Nokia To Target Rural India Market For Growth With Microfinance Options, Services
In SEO that's a pretty common problem.
I don't know if you meant it like this, but the original sense of "prove" was more like "test". That is, an apparent exception is a test of the rule's generality.

According to that wikipedia page, Nucor believes in decentralization and objective metrics, so they are indeed a good test of the rule. If that page is accurate, Nucor employees can't get very far on politics alone.
When Ambassadors Had Rhythm
"However I doubt it will be legalized and banning alcohol would be incredibly hard"

I don't know, I think it's hard to predict. There's a lot of unknown and difficult-to-predict things that can happen to change public opinion in a short time. A good example is the sharp turn public opinion took against racism during the 1960s in the US, or the sharp turns worldwide for and against prohibition in the early 20th century. So it seems like status quo bias to predict that these things will just stay the same indefinitely.

"what do you think of marijuana as a stepping stone to heavier drugs?"

That's just a myth manufactured by the anti-drug movements. They take the true statistical fact that most "hard drug" users also use marijuana and come to the bogus conclusion that pot somehow contributes to, enables, or causes the hard drug use. Correlation is not causation! http://www.drugpolicy.org/marijuana/factsmyths/#gateway http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/library/mjgate.htm
Yes it is a constant theme in Sweden about how the swedish language is detoriating(it is not in my opinion, just changing).
So you think Google ships code fast? How do you know?

There are a lot of services Google tries to build that never see the light of day. And there are yet others that took a year or more to be released even as beta. There are some projects that seem to have gone from concept to launch in a few months, but I'd say those are usually the exception.

Also: there is a lot of necessary process that comes with launching a Google service. Version 0.1 for a startup can be buggy, embarassing, ugly, contain security bugs, or be non-scalable. In fact, you might go all the way to acquisition and still have all these problems. Pretty much anything on *.google.com has to be ready for Digg on day one.

I will say that there are many teams at Google that deliver quality, polished software faster than almost any other company. But that's more like winning marathons rather than sprints.
I think the people you're referring to are well aware that it may sound iffy. They use this type of reasoning because they know well that acceptance of marijuana as a legal drug will lead to far laxer rules about marijuana for recreational uses.
Thanks for the detailed summary !

It sounds slightly troubling.
Exaggerating with maps
actually - from skimming the article it appears that it doesn't.
Agreed, but deep down, I will not be surprised if ideology trumps common sense in the world of OpenSource. It's happened often enough in online discussions (e.g. Windows vs Linux flamewars) for it to be discounted. Though I have to admit this would be the first time I will see it in action and not just in words.
Ask PG: Angel Investor Ettiquete
Founders are always advised to multithread VC deals to create a market for their shares. Is this any different with angels?

Aren't the benefits of an angel financing -- speed and quick turnaround -- enough to warrant most founders focusing on closing the right deal versus shopping it around?

Thanks for taking the time to share thoughts and experiences.
Well, pidgin english is widespread accross west africa, and I've met several native french speakers from cameroun who can not speak english, but can speak pidgin english. Also, with the advent of cheap flights and phones, pidgin english is normalising accross the entire western coast of africa - from sierra leone down to west cameroun. Previously, the pidgin english used to use many words that could not be understood, but those words are dropping away.

So already, there are large areas where english has been changed into a form that is difficult to understand for native english speakers, and the new form of english is spreading faster than standard english.
In a bit of stereotypical geekery, anyone remember the star trek episode where they pick up the fighter pilot when they go to the past, and realize they can't keep him because he's sort of a nobody, but his kid will be someone very important?
I'd personally cut back on all of the "tabs" in your layout. Really confusing and there's probably a better stylistic solution to what you're trying to accomplish.
Visualization of the Django Project, by code_swarm
Incidentally, there's a gallery of code_swarm videos here.

http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/wiki/Gallery
Published or not, "happiness research" is notoriously difficult. It isn't exactly hard science.

Here's another personal opinion: our daughter is pretty much the most important thing I've ever done, and even if something like Hecl were to become hugely popular, she still would be to me, although perhaps not to the world at large. I would bet that someone like Linus might feel similarly.

Many other things you do in life might have significant impacts on lots of other people (perhaps adding up to 'more overall impact'), but a child's life and future is entirely in your hands, which is a huge responsibility.
I don't agree. The acceptance of morphine (a very pure form of heroine) as a painkiller hasn't really created laxer rules about heroine for recreational uses either.
Watch Dragonball Z / GT Episodes online
Complete Dragonball Z/GT videos online, download dragonball episodes, Goku, Son Gohan,Gotenks, Vegeta, Buu, All the dragonball z, dbz episodes.
Man auctions off his life, sale price disappoints - Yahoo! News
Did you just quote the bible in an argument? Am I having nightmares?
In the Ruby community, quite a few of us donated to someone who wanted to work on an open source project for several months. He didn't raise quite as much money as anticipated but enough to spend a few months on a much needed library: http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal
See this is the good thing about hacker news IMHO. You don't follow users. You follow intelligent discussion and argument.

I think it'd be a sad day if everyone started following particular users. Just my 2c.
I can now import my News.YC comments into Friendfeed, thank you.
Here's the link to the full interview:

http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/06/former_house...
Bug Alert Google Adsense Flips out Mysql 
While recently building a new App. I ran into a nasty bug that trips Mysql up in very strange and unpleasing way. So here's how to repeat this. You set up a simple table 'yourtable' with 2 columns, 'id' (int) which is set to auto_increment and 'name' (for example). Then run this simple script on a unique (this part is important) named page, for example call you file unique-1.php each time you call this file change the name!

what will happen is that instead of the expected 1 row inserted into to DB you will get 3 rows all repeats of the one expected. Change the name of the file to unique-2.php load again and you will get another 3 insertions. I have tested this on 2 completely separate servers with different distros, same results every time. It also happens with any Adsense advert whatsoever. Considering the nature of this bug I'm suprisesd no answer has come back from Google on this (over a week since reported). I imagine databases filled up with 3 times as much data as necessary all over the web!

Heres the code:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Test bug</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<div id='vu_ytplayer_vjVQa1PpcFPb8BUW_RRt-RtcJhs9CmRKZDf2_gtwvfw='><a href='http://www.youtube.com/browse'>Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com</a></div><script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFPb8BUW_RRt-RtcJhs9CmRKZDf2_gtwvfw='></script>
</body>
</html>

<?php

$server = "localhost"; // Server Host

$DBpassword = ""; // Database Password

$DBusername = ""; // Database Username

$database = ""; // Database Name

mysql_connect($server, $DBusername, $DBpassword) or die ("Database CONNECT Error ()");

mysql_select_db($database);
$GetEmail = mysql_query("INSERT INTO yourtable (
id,
name
)
VALUES (
'',
'test'
)") or die ("Database Email Error");
?>
"That's a little like saying the purpose of religion isn't to achieve salvation" -- more quality journalism from Time
This is probably the first time a cannabis thread is this high on the front page. No one reading this site can reasonably defend the idea that the government should ban weed for medical use and research.