skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to feel like an arrogant jerk when I said no to work, especially if there's a family connection or non-profit involved. At the same time I've admired others who have been able to say no to the same sort of things, wishing I could do the same.

One of my favourite books "Boundaries" helped me learn that it's actually good to be able to say no to some things. I used to feel that if I didn't say yes to everything, that made me a bad person. I would later beat up on myself because when I said yes to too many things, I became burned out and resentful. I highly recommend a copy of that book or something similar (Boundaries is from a Christian perspective, which may turn some people off).

I recently said no to some computer work for a friend of my parents. I think my dad assumed I would do it for him, and stated that I needed to go over and help him. I said "I'm sorry but I don't do consulting work anymore. I only help immediate family with computer related issues". No explanation or rationalization, just a polite but firm statement about what I am willing to do and what I'm not willing to do. I think my dad was a bit miffed (probably because he told his friend he would send his son over to help, saving him some money) but I'd rather have my dad respect me and the boundaries I've set than to try and make him like me all the time.

Do I feel like a jerk anymore? No, not really. I work long hours, have a wife and two children to support, and have projects outside of work that require a commitment. Saying yes to other things takes away from my wife and children, and it depletes me from being able to do my best.

Learning to say no is a skill that you can build. It's not about the phrasing or clever wording, it's learning to demarcate what you are willing and what you are not willing to do. It's also very liberating knowing that you don't have to be overcommitted and stressed out. You have a choice.
Totally understandable, one of the worst executed visions of all times.

I think there's a really huge opportunity in this space, and the first who'll be able to figure out the perfect (and, most importantly, simplest) way to offer a single-sign-on, integrating privacy and security features, will be hugely thanked.
Pyramid 1.0b2 released - no more API Changes, 1.0-Final expected Jan 31
Speak Human now available online in its entirety (for free)
A year ago, I started to give away my book online, one chapter at a time. Today, it's available online in its entirety. If you're the one tasked with marketing a company, I urge you to give it a read; there's a lot of hard won information in it.
GDB tricks every hacker should know
Also "This is not a Game" by Walter Jon Williams. The main character designs games like this. Then since it's fiction winds up involved in the real thing, of course. I liked it, and there's a sequel coming out soon too.
Steve's advice is sound in some situations but one factor not mentioned by him is the stability of the current platform. Are customers affected by bugs, poorly thought out process flow, etc.? Rewriting simply to add new features may be a losing proposition. But, rewriting because the current code base is so poorly thought out that it affects customers...now we MAY have good justification.

Also, the following struck me as odd, "Our CEO doesn’t have a technology background, but he’s frustrated he can’t get the new features and platforms he wants (Facebook, iPhone and Android, etc.)" Not knowing the situation better, I'm a little leery that the CEO is driving the new features when a product manager or someone closer to the customer base might be in a better position to determine what's needed. Perhaps in this company the CEO is close enough to the customer base, but I can't tell from the post.
Soldier develops Taliban-tracking iPhone app
There aren't many technical barriers to entry. That dramatically increases competition on the production side. It seems at least some sources are passing those savings on to you the consumer.

The price of a gallon of gas in dollars has roughly tripled in the last 30 years. The price of a CD has held constant or declined. New technology allows people to get hit singles at a much lower cost. a cassingle would be in the $6 range, now you can get just the one song for a buck.

I can't see how revenue could go up with the dramatic decline in costs. It's not diamonds or oil, there's not some scarce resource that can be controlled. Making music is so much fun people do it for free. The technical barriers to doing so are pretty much gone.
You said "Which sites you log into" but mean "Which sites you maintain a persistent log in on" which are two very different things.

The post you responded to is correct in that the title is somewhat incendiary compared to the reality, unless there is some possible hijacking or scraping vector from this, but that seems massively unrealistic.
I don't know if it's decent, I'm a Linux user but there's TortoiseGit:
http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/
Current version is 1.6.3.0, so looks like it's considered stable enough to be beyond the 0.x-stage... ;)
Silentale shutting down, deleting data. Will relaunch as SocialReply
No, not more efficient than Ctrl-W for closing, I use that frequently. However when discussing UI design and wasted space, putting an X on every tab is much less efficient than just one at the end.
This theory is, first of all just a theory and second of all from a time before there were products with 0 marginal costs. Sunk costs have to be covered somewhere because if you can never make any money off of the product then why would you invest in creating it?
The title was total bull, I guess that's a pretty good reason to kill it, if you go out of your way to produce a hiring ad then you might as well go out of your way to create a title in line with other HN hiring ads.

It's admirable you try to stand out but I think that was not the right way. Keep an eye out for the 'who's hiring threads' that pop up with some regularity and add yourself to those.
Too bad that it has no DisplayPort output.
The thing that popped into my head while reading the piece is that sparing one star developer might be pretty cheap; how about putting him on a Skunkworks rewrite for 6 months and see how it goes? If it's looking good, give him whatever resources are necessary to finish. Do you think that would work?
The only case where I can think of an example of this might be Photoshop or design software. I think many-a cash-strapped-highschooler pirates Photoshop, then picks up some good design skills, and in turn forces his/her professional workplace to pick up a copy of Photoshop.

Hardly a data "smoking gun," and obviously software is different than media, but potentially food for thought.
"Login with Facebook, Login with Twitter" <- these are your new single sign on providers. I wonder if in the future they'll try to standardize these login providers and the information they share, we can call the new standard Open...something...ID...no...OpenLogin, there we go.
A year ago, I started to give away my book online, one chapter at a time. Today, it's available online in its entirety. If you're the one tasked with marketing a company, I urge you to give it a read; there's a lot of hard won information in it.
Tags are flat-fee sponsored links embedded into search results (and maps results). They can be coupons, photos, or even youtube videos.

"Offers", as I understand it, will be location-based deal-per-day ads.
If enough people flag it, it gets killed without a mod taking any action.

Imo the whole post looks silly, not just the title. (Not sure I'd have flagged it myself, though.)
Tout (http://toutapp.com) uses SendGrid for emails. I'm happy to see some competition in the space, I can now have backup or multiple e-mail delivery providers, which is inherently better for my customers.
Go offline with HTML5 application cache
"The coin flip came up heads" is provable. I'm not certain 100% compatibility with an MS product is provable.

I don't expect an arbitrary precision like "98.3%" to convey wanting full compatibility because I understand statement's intent. To each their own though.
In what way is this a solar sail? It's a drag sail. From the article, it seems to me that the sun doesn't propel it any more than the sun propels my car.
I don't think it has to do with digital or non-digital. It has to do with the fact that people like forming bands, making music, writing poetry, etc. They like it so much that many of them---even people who are good at it---would be willing to do it even if they didn't make any money at it. Hence, it's hard to charge a high price for labor that people are willingly oversupplying.

Contrast with waiting tables, where people do not enjoy doing it enough to do it for free. If there were a lot of people who loved it so much that they were willing to wait tables for free in their spare time, wages would probably go down there too...
My lessons from painful rewrites:

Even if you have little time to invest in refactorings along the way, at least do this: try and plan from the start to componentize wherever practical as you go along -- as soon as you start to get a decent feel for how the parts fit together, but not any sooner.

That means that if things do become a mess, at least you have the option to rewrite or refactor different components without having to tear down the whole edifice.

You'll never achieve the dream of perfect decoupling and don't die trying, but at a minimum doing what you can to break a big problem up into smaller ones will make it all a bit less scary from a psychological point of view.

Not going to help you if you get your component architecture wrong, either, which is why you don't do it all upfront. But do try and decouple fairly aggressively as soon as you do get a respectably stable insight into the structure of the problem (or of a particular part of the problem), because the longer you leave it the harder it's going to be.

If the structure of the problem never stabilises, and it's a complex problem, then good luck to you.

It also helps a lot if you start out with a framework and development tools which make it easy to be modular and easy to develop in a modular fashion. As always there's trade-offs between this and speed of development, but I suspect the suggestion of an extreme mutually exclusive trade-off, eg along the lines of "rails vs j2ee" is a false dichotomy. Both can (and should, and do gradually seem to be) meeting in the middle.

As always YMMV.
Egyptian Authorities Blocks Twitter, Bambuser and Other Websites
That's a shame. He should finish it, eat the hit and then be smarter next time. Sounds like he could make a lot more this way if he doesn't destroy his credibility.
One thing I always found slightly sad about this movie is the idea that humans can only advance through outside intervention. I don't believe that at all!
Design for Hackers: Why You Hate Comic Sans
That particular holy grail is a poisoned chalice and it's claimed plenty of victims, anyone remember Sxip? It's not a technical problem, it's power, control and ownership. Anyone in a position to allow a platform to get serious traction isn't going to give that control up and anyone that isn't can't make a system with enough traction. Then there's issues of trust, delegation and longevity. I'd love someone to do it well, I'd love the ability to have anonymous, durable, cryptographically verifiable identities online that could be optionally tied to meatspace identifiers but I just don't see it happening.
Object-oriented programming, where is it now?
This is why I use "Request Policy" on Firefox. It prevents by default all kinds of cross-domain requests like these.

It's a bit painful to set up at first for all sites that you visit frequently (similar to setting up NoScript), but then you can enjoy a much more lightweight browsing experience - and a more secure one as well.
Developers Report Increased Interest in Android
"Man is a curious animal. He is uneasy in the face of great experiences, and if he is forced to experience something profound, he starts immediately to cheapen it, to bring it down to his own level. Thus after a great man is assassinated, lesser men immediately manufacture, buy and sell plastic statues and souvenir billfolds and lucky coins with the great man's image on them."

I had to read this paragraph several times. First I had to figure out that the word 'curious' here meant 'remarkable for his incuriosity'. Then I wondered who the great man was and remembered the publish date.
Last time I checked, gmail doesn't do word stemming either, or substring matches.
Chances are that both were (effectively) software RAID, though. Real hardware RAID is extremely rare on desktops.
All activities are optional, and at the discretion of the agent.
'Cause nobody ever sold nothing based on mystery and exclusivity...
Why do they cling to that brand? I've only heard about it here, and the opinions were unanimously negative.

I'm sure I'm not in their target demographics, though. Who do they appeal to?
I have a friend who works at a well known management consulting firm. One of his clients insisted that every deck was done in Comic Sans. The client already had a bad reputation, and this quirk just made it worse.
For the average user "Which sites you log into" and "Which sites you maintain a persistent log in on" are equivalent.
Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in eight weeks
One of the things Amazon is doing differently is offering complete control of the email headers. I've recently been evaluating some services and many don't offer this. I don't want to send marketing emails, unfortunately I have a service provider who uses e-mail as an integration strategy (instead of rest or anything similar). AWS does fill a niche for me, although I imagine that my particular niche is tiny. Although part 2, ill be hooked and using it for other email services soon.
Further, the 'security' of a long term fixed mortgage at present low rates (as in: who cares if home prices drop because interest rates go up), is only useful if the economy remains locally vibrant, i.e. rents don't plummet.

If you don't mind the stress and time, and are capable of selling quickly in a falling market, perhaps you should decide to buy when you're more than willing to bear the huge round-trip within 3 years transaction costs (scaled by your estimated probability of this happening).
> books were sold by subscription, with sections serialized and delivered periodically

Isn't that like what Manning does with its MEAP (early access program)?

http://www.manning.com/
Are you logged into RedTube? If you were, would that be 'private' information?
Happy 1st birthday HipChat – A year in review
In a way, I think that's sort of the point: that some people won't like it, for the reasons you mentioned.

It gives the sense that real people run the company. A megacorp would never send that email.
Exactly. Many musicians are doing better than before, due to getting a larger portion of income through live performance than recorded music. [1]

The recording industry might be shrinking, but the music industry is growing.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/17199460
It's a highly contextual decision. If it's coming from an experienced engineer who doesn't want to make more work for themselves than absolutely necessary; I would take their advice in stride. If you've just hired college kids with no experience, do the opposite of what they say.

I currently maintain a legacy web application built over 12 years ago in C++. When it was originally built, it was that developers first programming project. It has since survived several aborted attempts to extend it with and port it to Python before landing in my lap. It's horrible to say the least.

However, the approach to the problem was decided before I got here. It's a smart plan and well executed by the very smart developer who worked here before me. He's wrapped the legacy application with an FFI and has written a slew of heavily tested code to sync the legacy data from the old application to a relational database that they want the new platform to be written on. From there most of the application has actually been ported to a Python web framework. Those parts that haven't are still supported by the legacy application. My job is to finish this process and then look at "re-normalizing" the data and start re-developing and designing the features our clients have been asking for.

The problem with this approach is that it's not cheap. It's not glamorous work dealing with someone else's poor design choices, bugs, and lack of documentation. It's not easy grasping the amount of complexity that goes into running a system that maintains the legacy application and the new code in parallel. A green developer simply cannot do it. People with the kind of expertise it takes to manage this approach to dealing with legacy applications come with a premium.

One of the first questions I asked was, "why didn't you just rewrite this?" They certainly had enough time. The decision to take the approach we're on now was made four years ago and was not expected to take this long. A rewrite, even a mis-estimated one, would not have taken near as long and would have been far cheaper. They also wouldn't still be suffering some of the crippling bugs that are left in the legacy code that are affecting their customers to this day.

"Rewrite," isn't an ugly word that should be avoided like the plague. In many cases it's a very reasonable answer to a difficult problem. Like anything you just have to evaluate the pros and cons effectively. Only experience can help you there. So if your seasoned technical lead says, "rewrite," you might want to consider it.
Giving ISO 27001 Business Context
curious means "strange" here.
I think your 'oversupply' might be in the number of people willing to do X (acting in films, music, writing...), which doesn't necessarily correspond to the set of people who are actually good at X. The ideal solution would let people who are good at X do more of it, as this benefits both them and everyone else. In other words, we're "better off" with Humphrey Bogart acting full time, and J Random Dude moving on from waiting tables and dreaming about movies to something he's actually better at (making sets or something).

Were films something people could freely and legally copy, we might see a shift to handycam amateur efforts funded by table waiting, and fewer things like Avatar, which would require approximately 281328282 man-years of table waiting to produce. I think that we would lose something in that transition (although other things would be gained).
Does it even need to have the word 'office' in the name?

They could have just picked a short web 2.0 missplelled-on-purpose-with-missing-vowels name, that's easy to say and search for.
Mahalo Learns to Pivot, Pivots to Focus on Video-Based Learning
The biggest chunk of the $50 was a malfunctioning electric water heater. But we went on to save $160/mo. more. The biggest surprises were 3x 20 watt doorbell inverters, the DVD player that never shut off, the desktop computers, the old TV, and 5-6x 10 watt draws that were hard to track down.

Now our electric bill is 15% what it used to be with no real change in our behavior. ($40/mo.) Actually, we've increased the amount of light in several rooms.
I don't think it is just NIH, the new people just have a very superficial view of the amount of issues, choices and decisions that were faced in building the system. That means they have a tendency to underestimate the costs that go into building the system.
That's not how AWS works at all.

Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here:

http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-clo...

And the history is well presented here:

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/am...

The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf Amazon.com's.
> 5 years later? $350k minimum. There was a structural change in the economy that hasn't since reversed and doesn't look like ever reversing.

This was the fallacy that got the US into so much trouble. When real estate rises quickly and consistently, people think it's a guaranteed perpetuity. That's not the case. Any investment can go down in value and almost surely will at some point in time.
Ask HN:  Alternatives to FreeNX ( ssh vimming )
Hey guys, I realize there was an article on low latency connections through terminal a week ago but I was wondering if there are any other suggestions to make using VIM over ssh bearable.

Thanks,
Thomas
Misadventure Code Review, Part I
37signals doesn't want the "medal of honor for uniting the Internet".
CSS3 Rotating Feature Boxes
Part II:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2011/01/...
Brilliant: Gym makes you pay more when you DON’T go
A fun side-story: There was a question on Quora recently - "Why did Duck Duck Go Block Mahalo.com?" and Jason Calacanis, of course, felt it necessary to weigh in. I had to read this response twice, assuming there was some intended irony:

"if they did that is a big mistake... we are not close to spam and a we have the best articles on many things like how to play guitar, speak french, etc."

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-DuckDuckGo-block-Mahalo-com
They haven't scraped it at all, they've just evolved the product a bit. I think the new designation is more showmanship then "pivot"
I guess my concern might be the potential for actual crime being unknowingly committed by game partakers.

As a simple example, I could imagine a simple "courier mission" which uses a player to pickup and to deliver a package. If the mission is to covertly deliver the package without disturbing the contents, who knows what those contents might be (ie drugs, illegal content).

Another example might be a reconnaissance mission where you have to follow and observe (presumably) another player. Of course such a mission could be abused as well, perhaps by making the subject someone that isn't actually a player. Suddenly you've gone from playing a game to stalking an unwitting individual.

I'm actually quite intrigued by the game idea--personally I'd like to submit my $5 and play but I'm having trouble ignoring my (perhaps overactive) imagination.
I know I wasn't logged in because I don't even have a twitter account :). But, your assumption that this may be a proxy issue is almost certainly right, since I accessed the page from my work computer. I tried it now from my home computer and everything checks out - it doesn't show that I'm logged in anywhere except where I actually am.
Promoting a game like this would be an interesting way for China, Russia, NastyCorp, etc. (insert bad guy) to cultivate a network of HUMINT sources within the U.S. for low priority work. Create and run it as a game until you've got someone who lives near that scientist you want to keep tabs on:

"Welcome operative. Your neighbor at 2201 Main is also playing, and is your next target. To earn points, select from the missions below:

(500 points) For each day of the week of 2/24, call your handler at 212-555-1212 [twilio number] and report the time that the target returns home from work.

(1000 points) Your target has left an important clue in his trash. Rifle through his trash midday to find the clue. You will have to determine what it is. When you've found it, mail it to 2222 Anystreet."