skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I too found the interviewers amazement a little odd...

> If you’re not a programmer to learn programming, that’s just, that’s beyond what most people are capable of.

Am I missing something? Were you guys all born knowing how to program?
I am a hybrid, business type/ technical, however I am not a hacker (I'm an IT professional). I believe that I understand the role of a hacker in a startup and I have a great idea for a startup. How should I approach a hacker about joining my startup as a possible co-founder or to work on my project?
I think w3schools would benefit greatly from an open dialog with the community or perhaps an advisory board.

But launching a frontal assault isn't the way to solve the problem.

I note with irony that the w3fools site displays as a blank page in IE-8 ;<(
In a similar vein- I thought the interview really showed how much they like each other and worked well together. They have been friends for years, been struggling together throughout, and even finish each others sentences. Helps show how they had the energy to get it done, and also the logic of funding teams with great relationships.
"The whole concept of closures doesn't exist at W3Schools. Also, they never go over the difference between a function declaration and a function expression. I know this is for beginners, but they could at least put it in the advanced section, or make it apparent that functions are first-class?"

Damn, that is awful.
* the site looks unloved. Just some bullet points, your logo without a transparent background, etc.

* these screen shots are overloaded, too much text and a lot of arrows
Perhaps the using the term "fools" could be seen as an attack. They do bring up some interesting grievances.
Fixing a Rusty Economy Using Technology
Announcing the Teens in Tech Incubator
So if I can't afford to buy my own high-end computer, I have to use one of the loaners from work. And those loaners won't be anywhere near as nice as the ones that people have bought.

So now my job performance depends on how much money I'm willing to spend on products that are for the company's benefit. If I'm not willing to cough up enough dough, I won't get good reviews or raises. I might even be fired for under-performing!

Yeah, this sounds like a great idea... If you want to invite lawsuits.

Having said that, I bring my own mouse and keyboard to work. I didn't ask, I just did it. The comfort was worth more to me than it was to them, apparently.
> The HTML rendering engine in your browser actually consolidates each block of white space into a single visible space character.

I don't believe that's true when the browser decides to break the line between the two spaces -- see: http://i.imgur.com/MksV7.png (which I took from http://www.jeanhsu.com/?p=229)

So I guess you could argue that putting two spaces in HTML is strictly a negative: it does nothing, except when it makes things look worse. Even that being as it is, I'll never stop putting two spaces between sentences.
Slate Invaders: Why You Should Use Two Spaces Between Sentences

http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57

HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104266
I work for a University and I laugh so hard every time I hear this.

For the people that say this should be an IT policy issue let me explain to you how academic people work.

Professors and researchers are KINGS and QUEENS. You CANNOT tell them what to do, nor can you force ANYTHING on them.

The only exception are the engineering professors for obvious reasons they have their shit together. Other faculty are just plain morons and think they can do everything on their own.

Professors and researchers get to buy and chose their own laptops, and they can do whatever they want. Unless they fall under the administration side, IT cannot tell them what to put on or do with the laptop.

Just to get off my chess I'll tell you one of many stories. A faculty member brought in his school paid laptop, and he obviously used it for personal reasons. This is his main work laptop with all his data (again we can't force them to follow our policy since they are not administration), so he has no backups or any antivirus scans.

His laptop had over 5000 viruses when I ran a virus scan. This is no joke, I have the screen shot somewhere. I refuse to clean and told him I will rebuild it. Which I did and put all this files back. I explain to him exactly what I did in an email, what he would lose (software etc) and he was okay with it, remember I have this in email. Only when he agreed did I go ahead with the rebuild.

He comes back and writes an email to the department chair that I had broke his laptop and had to rebuild it. Then I lost his software which he paid for and wants the school to pay for it back.

I almost kicked him in he face even if it got me fired. Luckily my boss stepped in and took care of it.
Cool! It looks like we also have similar ideas. I've been far too busy to get much time to look at any of the alternative shell projects this week, but I do intend to soon.

I was having similar thoughts about entering Ruby 'mode' (for want of a better term) with special characters. I'll be checking out your work soon.

All of these things make for some exciting stuff - I didn't realise others might be excited about them too!
of course none of it matters if the machine/vm crashes before the increments are committed to disk. :-)
I registered but was unable to actually try the service due to some error - "We couldn't interconnect the neurons.Please excuse and try again". Anyway, I saw the urls provided by you and here are some suggestions -

1. If appropriate, deep integration with facebook, twitter, linkedin etc, not only to ease registration process but also for sharing content(in both directions)and other social features.

2. Utilize FB API to provide a social network around your service and let users share/comment/discuss/rate/etc. about your public things.Provide top rated/discussed thinkeries somewhere on your home page.

3. Instead of making it just public and private, provide access levels - public, friends, private, customized, etc.

4. Mobile application for quick/anytime/anywhere thinkering.

5. A search interface for searching public thinkeries and adding them to your own collection.

6. Facility to add thinkeries through SMS, email, chat etc. example - SMS your new design/startup idea to your thinkery using short code or forward an intersting e-mail to your thinkery. That leads to another idea that e-mail and chats can also be a kind of thinkery items.
What you say makes perfect sense, but as an academic I have to say it is extremely unlikely that the policies and procedures you mention can be carried over from corporations to academia in a straightforward way.

Academics react extremely badly to being told to follow procedures as part of their daily workflow, especially ones they don't understand the importance of. In fact, a big part of the reason that they're in academia in the first place is that they're not able to handle the mundane requirements that are usually in place in the "real world."

For example, someone I work with complains incessantly about the fact that department IT forced him to upgrade from pine — pine, in 2010 — because it is no longer supported. If the IT folks tried to institute rigorous procedures, they would be instantly vilified (and ignored). Unlike in a company where there's a hierarchy, professors don't have anyone above giving them orders, and aren't used to the concept.

Of course, scientific protocols themselves often require lots of procedures, but this is very different because it comes from within and is well-motivated from the point of view of the scientist.

Let me clarify: I do think it is very important that what happened here doesn't happen again, but ensuring that is much harder than someone not familiar with the system might assume. It probably needs to be a mixture of carrots and sticks; I'd say a lot more carrots than sticks.
Determine price by value, not cost. No one cares how hard a business has to work, only what it can do for them.
Microsoft's Ambivalence About Kinect Hackers
I pinged the indexing team at Google, but this is almost certainly something weird going on with cakecentral.com's webhost:

wget http://cakecentral.com/
--2011-01-14 09:12:50-- http://cakecentral.com/
Resolving cakecentral.com... 174.129.211.41
Connecting to cakecentral.com|174.129.211.41|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2011-01-14 09:13:01 ERROR 404: Not Found.

Once the root page of a site starts returning 404s, we have to start taking guesses about the best way to handle it. Best advice for Cake Central: make sure your root page returns a valid HTML page with a 200 response code.

P.S. If the webhost is trying to do something sneaky, e.g. things work for browsers, but wget or Googlebot is treated differently somehow, the owner of Cake Central can use our free "Fetch as Googlebot" feature in our webmaster console to help diagnose the problem.

Summary: not the weirdest search result I've seen by far. Webhosts that serve up 404s, redirects, or duplicate error pages can cause arbitrary things to happen in search engines. Bing doesn't have the url cakecentral.com indexed at all, for example. Blekko has it, but their page is from Nov. 11, 2010, so they're probably missing the 404 issue by being a couple months older.
They're saying most people aren't capable of, which might be true, due to various factors such as intelligence and desire.
Mobl Blogging
This is actually the plot of Johnny Mnemonic. I can't believe anything about that movie's plot turned out to be realistic.
Hmm. I had assumed that it was the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops juggernaut. You're right - trying to sell Modern Warfare at this price is silly. This has the fishy smell of an experiment designed to fail...
It should be: "Stolen laptop may contain cancer cure data"
Cassandra reaches 2 billion columns per row
Maybe the bigger question is, is this a proportional response for his crime?
1) Take your income from programming and save as much as possible. Depending in your income & lifestyle you can probably save up several hundred thousand in a few years.

2) learn to trade the stock market. Continually invest, and re-invest in high risk/reward stocks

3) As soon as you are able to sustain yourself indefinitely you quit your day job and begin coding full-time for yourself
> What the articles fails to clearly mention

. . . is a whole lot of stuff:

http://blogstrapping.com/?page=2011.014.10.05.57
Actually, you should use a period inside parentheses if the enclosed material is meant to stand alone as a sentence.

By the way, there is no space before the exclaimation mark in American English.

As for double spacing after a sentence, I had broken myself of the habit once I learned all publications use single spaces, but the iPhone has conditioned me to use double spaces again since that's the shortcut to drop a period at the end of a sentence.
After reading some of the comments, I've decided to only use two spaces from now on.
Just be be sure we're clear on the "crime", it was that he guessed Palin's yahoo mail security question

No actually the "crime" was "anticipatory obstruction of justice" for destroying evidence in a federal investigation. Actually accessing the account was a misdemeanor.

Look I think this is a stupid kid who doesn't deserve a year a in jail. But you don't get to trivialize a crime because it was "easy". Just because my neighbors door was unlocked and I "just walked in" doesn't give me the right to do so.
Thanks for the suggestion. Andrew actually wrote an .hresume parser a long time ago (http://github.com/amccollum/microtron/), but that feature never got finished because we were going after universities so heavily this last year. Good to know that our users want it. We might have to reintroduce that soon, now that LinkedIn has their own "LinkedIn to Resume" app.
While we're at it, let's start storing customer data on these personal machines. What could possibly go wrong?
I'm of the opinion that somebody should steal each and every one of your future projects after you hire them as tech help.
Absolutely, copyright in the keys is irrelevant. The complaint is not that publishing the keys is an infringing act.

However, it is bloody stupid to put something which you wish to remain secret in the public record, which is what I believe the submitter meant. I do hope that Sony's lawyers have recognised that this horse has bolted.
Ashland is about a four-hour drive from Knoxville, and federal prisons don't exactly dot the landscape like mushrooms. Feel free to look it up, but I suspect it's the closest appropriate facility to his home.
Make it 320 characters long. You never know how long e-mail address people can make.
hmm I always use W3Schools but I have never used to learn anything just to refresh my memory on something
This probably means that jailbroken iPhones will be banned from GameCenter soon. Too bad.
Video Movie online streaming and megavideo
Video Movie online streaming and megavideo
However, Telugu version of Manmadhan Ambu is not being well received by the Andhra audience. The film’s pace and mood aren’t in sync with the Telugu audience.
Video,Movie online,streaming,megavideo
Doh! Now where did that cure for cancer I had lying around here go...
HTML's smooshing two spaces together was offensive to me in the 90s when I was learning it after being a touch typist since I was 7 years old. I still double space, but no one knows unless they view source.
This isn't a prank. This is an attempt to influence the election of the most important position in the land using felonious means. He's lucky he's only getting what he's getting, what he did is far more serious.

It is blindingly obvious that most expressions of sympathy here are because people approve of the target of the felonious actions. Had he hacked Biden's email the press would have called for his head and wrung their hands so hard about the evils of people who oppose Obama/Biden that they might have fallen off due to lack of blood flow.

But creating an environment where it's OK or acceptable to do this sort of this thing to "acceptable targets" is creating an environment where one day, you'll be an "acceptable target". Take a stand. Attempting to influence elections like this is wrong and can't be tolerated, in addition to the fact that hacking emails is wrong and can't be tolerated. Being sympathetic because you like the target is embracing the rule of men, not the rule of law.
Ridiculous on its face, but probably just an effort to feel out the top-end of the market (and ignore all the great market data Valve has been collecting over the years).
I feel like the world just told me Santa Claus doesn't exist.
This kind of thing makes me wonder... how long until backups are mandatory. I mean, in Windows 10 or OS 11 (aka: IOS 5), will it just come with 10 or 20gb of online storage that's automatically backed up, without the user's input (and is difficult to disable)?

We already have crazy easy backup solutions like mozy, carbonite, backblaze etc but the majority of people don't use them. What happens when the OS makers force you to back up?

And yes... it is totally the IT people's fault for not forcing backups on their users. Sorry but as an IT guy (I am one) it's your responsibility to make sure your users don't get into this kind of a situation!
The problem with those analogies is that they're due to physical properties which the designers of those cars, ovens, and apartments couldn't control.

Oil can't be regenerated. When gas burns, it emits CO. Catastrophes that might hit an apartment are usually out of the architect's control. There are protection schemes, but they're only protection, and they're often expensive.

In contrast, software authors are working in a world where they define the laws of the equivalent of physics. It's hard to define them so that nothing bad can happen, and they may be expensive in terms of memory or time, but there's still a big difference between problems in software and problems in the real world.
They've taken everything that made people lose months of their lives to WoW and condensed it

They've taken one aspect of WoW, the one everyone talks about and the single most addictive quality -- I agree. But people stay with WoW for more reasons than that. People who get addicted to leveling up get over that addiction sooner or later, and usually sooner.

Zynga is a one-trick pony, so far. That's why I have doubts about its long-term viability. Unless it comes up with something based on another paradigm or makes the games more interesting, they will lose the momentum they've got and crumble. You can't fool all the people all the time.
actually there was no restriction on the length of the e-mail address but rather a problem with Chrome's autofill.
Perhaps the "cancer cure data" claim is a huge exaggeration by Mrs Shin to help get her laptop back. You'd expect someone to value that at more than USD 1000.
Untangling code
Create Headings With Big and Small Overlapping Text
Overlapping titles use a small amount of big text and a big amount of small text to communicate more than a plain heading could do on its own. Sounds contradictory? Only if you ignore the fine points.
Their points are valid of course...but it seems laughably naive to treat this as some kind of cause that developers should rally around. And their response to "why don't you build a better version' made me laugh - it sort of encapsulates internet culture in general. I'd like to see more links to better sites for rank beginners than this "call to arms" stuff.
..and, by the way, there's an automatic 50% discount for anyone with a .edu (or similar) email address. :)
Agreed. If you're an IT guy and you haven't put a proper backup strategy in place for your users, you should be fired (and I am one).
First let me say, I am a web developer and use W3Schools as a reference. The web would be a worse place without it. They deserve their high Google ranking.

So to attack something that is on the whole good, which may be 99% accurate but not 100% accurate, seems mean-spirited. Someone put a lot of time into this, and it's a shame they didn't do something productive instead of destructive.
As far as I can tell, yes. In particular, the people being sued by them presumably cared quite a bit.
huh I always use w3schools just to quickly see what a language is. I never took it as serious learning, that's for books and other sources.

Attacking this site is like attacking a flyer for being too gimped on information.
I get access to the game immediately, that’s pretty sweet. I can absolutely see paying more for a digital download than some box with a load of crap in it. Who wants to still use CDs or DVDs?

From my perspective, I’m paying more for more.

This doesn’t really apply to this particular game which is shamelessly overpriced and old but it applies to other games.
The majority of applications being remotely virtualized in this manner are/will be general business applications--word processor, spreadsheet, etc--or line of business applications such as CRM or ticket management systems. These don't need much horsepower, and, in the case of Citrix-based application virtualization, can run on the providing server ("streamed") or have the bits delivered locally to the client for it to execute. I think Microsoft's App-V (SoftGrid) works the same way, but I'm unsure if it does streaming or just packaged delivery. Either way, a pool laptop need not be that powerful to "keep up with the Jonses'" who bought their own.
Projects: hijack (Hijacking the iPhone earphone jack)
From where did you get the idea that multiple-inheritance (in general) is a disaster? Multiple-inheritance is only a disaster when the rules aren't clear on ...

(a) what you're inheriting
(b) what you're overriding
(c) what happens when you try calling super::

Otherwise, inheritance is really useful, and Python scores pretty good on all the above points.

Also, GO doesn't have "duck typing". That's called "structural typing" and it is a lot more limited than dynamic typing. GO is not really object-oriented either.
> This whole thing is getting tiresome.

I agree. It's tiresome the way people like you blame the victims of a crime for complaining that they were robbed.

It's tiresome the way you pretend they did nothing.

It's tiresome the way you assume that Mark is wholly responsible for all his success.

Yes... everything about your ignorant, insulting, crime-loving post is tiresome.
I agree with you 100%, but the comment to which I was responding seemed to be suggesting that he solve his debt problems by choosing to work as a more profitable sort of attorney (as opposed to a public defender). Until he passes the bar, those specific options will be closed to him.

Furthermore, the student isn't demanding that anybody hire him as an attorney- just that they grant him the legal credentials needed to be eligible to be hired as an attorney. There's a big difference.
Freakonomics: Your ATM is a Bacterial Bomb
Influential Programming Languages, Part 4: Lisp
Ask HN: Review our startup (esp. if you file 1099-MISC)
Might be truer to say, review our startup's 3rd attempt at making something people want enough that we can make money on it. If you need to file 1099-MISC this year or you have in the past, we'd love to know if this is appealing to you, and if everything you have occasion to try works well for you. (You pay nothing until you actually schedule for e-filing.)

Track1099.com e-files your 1099-MISC forms with the IRS and e-delivers them to your recipients. We import from Bill.com, Intacct, RealPage (for property managers), Quick Books Online, and anything that you can get a spreadsheet out of.

http://track1099.com/?ref=hn

Note the various obvious referral tag! Our 'business person' believes that posting about this here is a waste of time (I had to explain that I wasn't signing us up to be 'hacked'), but as the putative UX guy on the team, I'd really appreciate your feedback, and if it turns out to be useful to anyone I'd like to be able to show the business person that we generated some revenue out of it, too.

---------------------

More details for the interested....

This is the work of a 4-person distributed team composed of 3 contractors and a founder (there's an uninvolved co-founder, too). I'm one of the contractors, but we contractors have a material stake in the success of this product as well.

If you do front-end work, view source on any page with a form (inc. the sign-up) for what is AFAIK a pretty novel take on building web forms.
Speaking of currencies, I'm wondering if anyone more intelligent than me knows what to make of this: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=BASE

To my untrained eyes, it makes the idea of diversifying into anything other than the US dollar seem like a good idea. But to be honest my understanding of the US monetary system gets fuzzier the more I learn about it.
And mine in 1998.
At least one of the places required you to use "standard" Mcfee.

So properly not.
Ah yes, "curated search". That's been tried, and it's literally impossible to keep up to date, web pages change all the time, what was an authoritative site yesterday is a phishing site or online pharmacy today. And you're wrong about the economics of spamming wikipedia or stackoverflow, spammers already target sites like that, there are even spammers who target HN, and your model would just make it even more worth it for them.