skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YouTorrent Relaunches with 67,170 Legal Torrents
Sorry, I'm going to have to disagree. It probably depends on the painter, but I know a few who's senses of humor and curiosity perfectly match that of stereotypical hackers.
I don't find it visually pleasant at all when I get confused about what's quoted and what's not, and when everyone is forced to come up with their own quoting scheme since it's not supported. Some use double quotes, some use italics, some use double-quoted italics...

It's a mess. I'd much prefer a consistent representation for blockquotes for ease of reading and semantics. It's the Right Thing.
Its a horrible depressing feeling. You feel worthless, sometimes angry, always frustrated. But there is always a tipping point, and the rush is incredible. You feel 8 feet tall, the sun shines brighter, food tastes better.

Either that or I have mild bipolar ;)
How different my experience has been. I'm an avid drawer and programmer.

I don't know how similar the mental processes of drawing and programming are. But what I do know is that the state I'm in when I'm drawing feels the same as the state I'm in when I'm programming. When I'm deep into either, I often remark to myself how relaxing it feels.

If painting didn't feel like programming to you, maybe it was because you weren't good at it. When comparing hackers to painters, it only makes sense to compare people who are good at hacking to people who are good at painting. Doing something you're not good at involves so many hurdles and complications that are unique to the novice that all you're getting is noise. If you'd been drawing for as long as you've been able to hold a pencil, PG's thesis might not seem so bollocks.
The author might have done well to read pg's essay on disagreement since his attacks were mostly vague (I too agree that the characterization of London and Paris could have been better supported), and the attacks were executed merely by bringing up an example point and then not attacking it. On the point of cities, I think that there is good economic evidence (not cited by pg) that Cambridge and Boston are very much an intellectual center because some of the greatest universities of the world and they are leaders in terms of patents and scientific citations (from "Who's Your City" by Richard Florida).
Loopt Trips Over Privacy
Gödel Escher Bach
What Getting Buzzed Says About Yahoo
Apple's walled garden
One point of interest: there are already a couple of Linux distros that will run natively on the Cell processor by itself; could these same libraries be integrated into a IA32 / AMD64 environment? I'm thinking something similar to the ATI optimization of Folding@Home but widely applicable using OSS libraries.
App Store? More like Crap Store
Did the bank clerk pay taxes on the money that the various governments paid him? Just asking ... supposedly he was paid upward of 5 million euros.
I think it's fine to specify the technologies, it's kind of like online dating. You specify your "interests" to find other people with common interests.

In this case, one cofounder already likes Cold Fusion and developed in it, so it makes sense that he's looking for another cofounder with the same taste in programming.
The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. Classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the printed page.
The Mother of All Database Normalization Debates on Coding Horror
Um, iPhone?

By most measures, it's the least open smart phone platform.
You do realize that craig is dedicated to this 'game' just as we are. There are measures he could put in place to rid spam completely, but luckily for him spam actually inflates the page view statistics for CL. Which in turn drives up the sales of post for the RE and jobs sections. This is due in part to the 'spam'.

EDIT: It is a quote from the submitted link.
ok seriously, this post along with this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247824

are hardly HN worthy.
GTA/Toronto meetup 
After a massive DemoCamp yesterday I wondered if others here would be interested in a smaller meetup in Toronto. I'm sure we could find _something_ to talk about for an hour or two over beers.

If interested, email me or comment in the thread.
I think Warren Buffett did the right thing by giving his wealth to Melinda and Gates Foundation. This foundation has a vision and it goes well with Buffett's vision.
exactly. i imagine lots of people, even practitioners, see technical fields as rigid robotic type things. but to me, when i'm working on a program or electrical circuit or whathaveyou... to borrow a line from Eminem, it's like smearing bloodstains with a paintbrush
Google's Android platform: not so open after all
Actually that is worrying. It would be bad if blockquotes led to a nastier style of arguing.
Online dating kinda sucks. Are you sure that's a metaphor you'd like to build your cofounder relationship on?
IPhone Frenzy, "All You Can Eat" Data, Mobile Internet Now At "Critical Mass"
And anyone who wants their USB drive accidentally thrown away...
Actually both in equal portions :-)
Apple passes Acer to become third largest U.S. PC vendor
Don't judge painters by art students. They're quite different groups. The link between art students and painters is nothing like the one between, say, medical students and doctors. Most art students (painting majors especially) don't end up as artists, and quite a lot of artists spent little or no time in art school. IIRC, Picasso went for one semester and Van Gogh didn't go to art school at all. Calder studied engineering.
Where painters are those who do painting, and hackers are those who hack, I have to say I've noticed much similarity. But if you compare self-appointed 'artistes' to self appointed 'hackers', you'll be disappointed by the similarities, because a cultural touchstones are comparatively random.
Pandora betters last.fm in the iPhone music war
I'm sick of this re-writing of history. There are other countries that helped to remove the Taliban, among them are Canada and the U.K. Please give credit where credit is due. A U.S. pilot even killed some Canadian soldiers! So to say "the U.S. drove them out" and "the U.S. army invaded Afghanistan" is insulting.
I'm Gen X - the High School I attended, and ultimately received my GED from was inner city. While we had more Ivy League acceptances from our student body than any other local public school, we also had on-campus murders, armed police officers roaming the halls, and a bathroom that no one but drug dealers and users went into.

I left school my senior year, and went into a career in computers. I had been a part of the "computer underground" since 12 or 13, and knew UNIX better than most admins. I couldn't speak or write properly however. Turns out employers, weren't too keen on odd combination of l33+ sp34/<, and street slag. I relied on two co-workers over my first several years of work to teach me English. I think I've been free of "tooken" for nearly a decade. Thank God.

It wasn't the school's fault, I made a choice. I could of easily gone to a decent college, but laziness and lack of priorities could have derailed my life. I was lucky enough to have these guys take an interest in me.
Five Web 2.0 dev lessons for enterprise IT
I hate when Google acts democratic about web and its technologies when it clearly shows they are getting ready to be autocratic.

All Warfare is based on Deception - Sun Tzu, Art of War
Really good interview! What I really liked was the clarity with which Sunil Mittal is able to express his thoughts without using buzzwords or jargon anywhere.
Bloggers Want Out Of Playboy Poll, But That Bed Was Made
I really hope I'm misunderstanding.

You're saying spammers benefit CL by dramatically reducing the average quality of postings down to almost nothing and that the illegitimate page "views" of bots make up for loss of legitimate page views by actual users that are lost by aforementionned loss of quality and that Craig actually loves it?

You're out of your mind.

By the way I'm interested in knowing that secret to "rid spam completely" that Craig sits on.

edit: Really interesting to see the kind of lame excuses people can come up with. I guess when you're dishonest with everyone then you're also dishonest with yourself. Or is it the other way around?
I personally don't use ColdFusion but I guess there are some CF haters around these parts. I guess that why you were downmodded. But please as hackers we love certain bits of technology and swear by them or perhaps swear at them lol(PHP comes to mind). I understand you as my brother also loves the ActionScript family of languages. And does not have any interest learning anything else.
That is incredible from one pIC Chip. Thanks for the link.
I'm not suffering mean/median confusion (note I said "roughly"), I'm just not convinced the distribution is quite as asymmetric as you think(despite, as you say, being capped at zero). But we don't have any numbers either way, so shrug.
RFR: Does blockquoting lead to nastier discussions?
(RFR = Request for Research)

I mentioned I was thinking of adding support for blockquotes, but boredguy8 pointed out that, while more convenient, this might actually make comment threads worse:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248035

This brought back some alarming memories. I can remember some really nasty arguments on reddit that included a lot of blockquoting.

So this would be an interesting question to know the answer to, if anyone wants to try a quick test. Is blockquoting correlated with a nastier style of arguing? E.g. is there any correlation between the amount of blockquoting and the use of insults, comments beginning with "Um," etc? Scraping randomly chosen reddit comment threads might help answer this. Are there any statistical differences (esp in word frequencies) between threads/comments with lots of blockquoting, and those with little?
Just be careful, those numbers are most likely skewed by that initial rush from that initial promotion you did(i.e. HN thread etc). What I mean is, I wouldn't quit my day job thinking the revenue stays the same, wait till you have at least 2-3 months of 5K/month
>What is the fire burning in the pants of your market? (And who is your target market -- you've got teachers and students and school admins, please pick one.)

WebCT and blackboard (the competition) are utterly unusable from a teacher and student perspective. I'd love to use something different if I ever have the need for more than just HTML. The main thing I'd like is a grade management system when I deal with large courses.

However, I'm almost certainly not permitted to use a grade management system besides the one my university provides, certainly not a third party one. That would violate student privacy.

Another problem is that commercial software can't (legally) add all the features of blackboard:

http://www.blackboard.com/patent/FAQ_013107.htm
Yup, the current revenue levels blow all my conservative predictions out of the water...I keep waiting for the slowdown to start...hopefully I'll have to keep waiting a while longer... :)
what they need to do is come up with a better captcha method, ie. right now all of them are just trying to make the image itself as hard to read as possible, and for a lot of them you can try 5 times w/o getting wtf the captcha says.
I'm almost certainly not permitted to use a grade management system besides the one my university provides, certainly not a third party one. That would violate student privacy.

Are you allowed to use a notebook?
I don't know if Google is trying to test the new SDK on few developers before releasing it, but their development platform is not as open as they stated to be. Example: once I started developing and getting into details, I noticed applications are prevented from getting the current outgoing and incoming call data (http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thr...) This data is already available on other platforms.
at that stage you need to start looking for employees, not co-founders. Just call it a CTO position and give the person stock options.
Core Versus Context
Please, the next time Quebix is mention I will sue. I've had enough. There is only one other company in the US who is allowed to use this name governed by International Law.

If your company starts in the EU I will take this extremely further.
http://startuphubs.com
It just goes to show, search is not a solved problem even now.

I think it's fantastic that they can share this kind of information.. it's really interesting technology.

I would have liked some more in depth technical details though.
http://startuphubs.com - This site gives you a graphical representation of Startup Hubs around the globe! It lets you easily locate all the major hubs where most of the startups are happening.
i'm confused what your rant about theo is supposed to mean. you found a problem but didn't know how to fix it, so you presented it to theo and he said he didn't know how to fix it either? he didn't write the code in question and no one on the team (at the time) knew it well enough to change it. what's your point?

no one's security record is unblemished and i don't think anyone from the openbsd project would say it is.
Could've sworn the roughly 75% figure did come from data (thought it was a Berkshire Hathaway annual report, and it may've been 70% or 80% or something in between), but I can't seem to dig it up, so I guess we'll have to leave it as idle speculation.
i can't wait to see matasano's cross-platform ssh implementation that will be bug free now and forever. let us know when you guys write it.
Hmm .. I have hard time believing that you are not twisting or misinterpreting what he said. Can you source the quote please ?

Especially considering what he said regarding the vendor-sec -

I refuse to have anything to even _do_ with organizations
like vendor-sec that I think is a corrupt cluster-fuck of
people who just want to cover their own ass.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/701694/focus=7069...
You can request more in depth technical details at

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/

;-)
You could disallow blockquoting from previous posts in the thread.
Google = Microsoft 2.0

(same tactics)

I wonder in how many of those 50 finalists is google investing on, therefore giving them a huge leg up while the rest is left with outdated SDKs.
Google Continues To Test A Search Interface That Looks More Like Digg Every Day
Yeah, you need to either explain the actual functionality you expect to have behind the button or figure that out first. You need to figure out if zooming in and back out again is actually possible with the same element before figuring out how to iconify it.

And if you go for just a toggle, then I agree your best bet is to simply toggle the button along with the state change.
Huge numbers of people have their machines drafted into botnet by drive-by clientside document vulnerabilities like this. Nobody has to choose you as a specific target to make that happen.
I don't know where you're reading the "I could do it better" part from. The Internet does have a history of "hard" protocols being deployed almost entirely from a single gene pool: BIND, CMU SNMP, and SSH are three great examples, and two of those three are epic security failures.
I believe this is called "Fisking".
I thought I remember the outcome of the "should we ban links to TechCrunch" poll was that only the good ones will end up on the front page. It seems like just about every single TC article is still getting submitted. I think it's safe to say this is not one of the better TC posts.
The easiest by far would be to make or find a simulator. Dealing with a real robot is a pain in the ass. Gazebo is a good robot simulator -- part of this tookkit:
http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/gazebo/gazebo.html

It's free and good. I'm sure someone has made some hooks into it. Building those hooks would be a subset of building your own simulator.
this is very cool but does it crash for everyone else a lot?

edit - i lowered the resolution and it works a lot better
Take this with a grain of salt, as I'm currently in the same situation as you? These are just a couple of strategies that I'm trying (YMMV).

Option 1: If you're in college, look through the professors' web pages and look for ones who do research in areas that you are interested in. If you find one that you think would potentially make a good mentor, think of a SMART question to ask. It doesn't have to be anything incredibly difficult or profound; this is to show that 1)you are at least reasonably intelligent and 2)you are interested enough in his field of expertise to involve yourself in it outside of coursework. This is just the beginning of a process; all you're really trying to do at first is get them to think that you're not worthless. Having a little pet project that is relevant could help as it gives you a reason to visit and ask questions every now and then; if you are making significant progress, they will notice and you will hopefully progressively become less of a waste of their time until they warm up to the idea.

Option 2: Join a professional organization (IEEE, ACM, etc). Some metro areas have organizations specific to the local tech industry. I cannot vouch for this personally; I just recently became an ACM member but won't be able to evaluate its influence until the coming school year.

Option 3: If you live in at least a semi-urban area, check for tech meetups or events in your area or even try traveling to a couple. This might not yield a close mentor quickly, but the more people you know, the more there are that can potentially help you.
Dmitry Orlov's lessons for individuals from the Soviet collapse, http://www.badcyclopedia.com/what-if-us-collapses-soviet-col...

More at Dmitry Orlov's blog - http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
Wow.

In a world where philosophy was reserved for 'philosophers', art for 'artists', hacking for 'programmers' and business for 'businessmen' the hapless inhabitants would be sleeping the open and picking berries.

Thankfully this ain't 'that' world.
Beggars can't be choosers...but why not a pdf?
In addition, if you are an investor and you do poorly, you may just drop out of the market. On the other hand, if you are a winner, you'll stay in the market.

In this way, you can have a lot of investors losing their money with a fewer # of people gaining.
There's little evidence their patents are meaningful at all. Almost always, the best course is to ignore patents entirely and forge ahead. Most software patents are unenforceable.
Why would you even want to develop on someone's corporate platform to begin with? Apple or Adobe or Microsoft or Google or whoever... In the end, you always get fucked, either by your "patron" or by market forces, when your "platform" loses out.

This ain't 90s anymore.
and?

Not really hacker news, but there are two lessons:

1. Techrunch comments are schizophrenic at best. A week ago they were (figuratively) throwing him tomatoes at his face, (and yahoo too), now they are applauding at this? What changed in a week? Basically, techrunch is just like those celebrity magazines you find on the grocery store, not to be trusted.

2. Maybe, there really is no such thing as bad publicity?

Ok, maybe there is, unless somebody wants to hire the guy that locked out all users from the SF City Hall's computer system.
It also brings to mind a certain lawsuit involving Psystar and a certain product clone...

I bear no grudge against Apple, Microsoft, or Google for not 'contributing enough' to Open Source.

I love it when companies make their products open source, but after all, they are companies and their primary objective as publicly traded corporations is to create value for shareholders.

My opinion on the matter is simply, give Microsoft and Google a break.
I personally don't like the kind of arguments where each person responds by splitting up the post and arguing paragraph by paragraph. I've found that it often devolves into nitpicking of spelling and grammar, which I could care less about.

I think arguments can sometimes be useful discussion, but I'd prefer that people respond to a post as a whole rather than respond to each paragraph of a post separately.
http://arclanguage.com/item?id=7567
Video: Stevenote bloopers - even the best make mistakes
Top 10 Computer Annoyances and How to Fix Them
Knowledge Connects Everything
I have a job offer at a startup, am I getting a good deal? Part 1.
"Certainly they are much better than the average unfunded or microfunded startup."

If you aren't saying what I've asserted you're saying, please explain the above. Also, did you edit your original comment? Perhaps I misread it.

In any event, it remains awfully convenient to chalk up the evident YC fetish at TechCrunch to mere editor laziness: I've seen plenty of seed-funded or non-funded startups in the past months-- heck, TC pays folks to sort through the mountains of press releases that arrive every day; I'm sure that there is no dearth of interesting, upstarting startups to profile.

I've always gotten the impression that TechCrunch serves up a fairly decent mixed bag-- except when they seem to exclusively cover YC-funded startups. Hence, my prior remarks.
I often open my posts with a quote pulled from the comment that I'm responding to, just so that the post will make more sense when pulled out of context; e.g. on searchyc.com or when someone is scanning down the page.

But I think that not having formal blockquote formatting subtly encourages me to avoid sprinkling blockquotes throughout my posts -- or, worse, sprinking my words throughout an endless series of blockquotes. Instead I generally restrict myself to one big blockquote, in italics, at the start of my own writing, and I think very carefully before I try to insert a blockquote in the middle of a post. Such mid-post quoting requires careful wording and formatting to make the change in author clear, which is appropriate because it encourages me to just write in my own words and leave other people's words alone. :) I think that's a useful constraint.

The lack of blockquote formatting also encourages us to keep the blockquotes as short as possible. And it helps the flow of comments and responses to flow nicely down the page -- it's easy to see if a block of text is part of a post or part of a response to that post, because (with the exception of code blocks) only responses change the indentation.

In short, I think the missing blockquote formatting is a feature, not a bug.
Other than openmoko, that platform is???
Flagged - this is NOT hacker news.

No offense to ajbatac who's submitted some good stuff.
Buffet has said unless your going to make a full time passion/profession/obsession out of it, get index funds.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.3/ might be worth taking a look through.
Linus Torvalds' 1986 Sinclair QL code listing
Contrasting Programmers
Ruby Internals
Dance Like No One's Watching
Google obviously values the market more than the ethics. As any self respecting company should. Playing in the mobile arena is better for Google than not playing at all. We chose to allow service providers to arbitrate the network and it's not as if our loyalty has anything to do with Google's success?

Consumers are swines. The pile of crap that this world is today is testament enough.
Whatever happened to openmoko? They appear to have released actual hardware while I wasn't looking! Does anybody have one, and how do they like it?
I highly recommend checking out the Ruby source code.. it's some of the best C code I've seen. It's not all that big, and it's pretty easy to follow.

I've even seen people use it as a kind of framework for writing C code in a ruby style. :)
Is This The Future Of Search?
Running for Office: It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
But are "100s of verified accounts" scalable? I don't know that "100s of verified accounts" will make a big, long-term dent. How long before CL cancels those accounts? I'm sure CL is watching this like a hawk and will shut an account down quickly and for little reason in an attempt to prevent early gaming-the-system.
Here. here. We use MaxMind.com for their GeoIP product too