skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. And yet, you walk away better understanding how those nightmares can become reality. By chance, I picked up Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" from a sidewalk seller, and was struck by her ability to address so many parts of a whole. After finding that she won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August", I had to read it.

I've heard that JFK was a big fan of "The Guns of August", and made it required reading in his cabinet.

As an aside, Tuchman is now recognized for the following reflection, which is often paraphrased as Tuchman's Law: "Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena."

Oh, BTW: On the topic of encryption, I can't believe the Russians were sending unencrypted orders in WWI over wireless!
Learning from failure is clearly an ingredient in success. However, it seems that there are varying qualities of learning. People often seem to learn the wrong lessons both from success and failure. What, beyond "attempt to pay attention" is effective as a filter for good and bad learning?
really? Damn, it should. It's Meta Pro served by Typekit. Are you on a Mac?
The https rollout you're referring to had nothing to do with the Zuckerberg hack, there were people testing it before the incident. It's a coincidence and has nothing to do with what happened with Zuckerberg's fan page, do you really think he went to coffee shop and logged into his fan page???
Well, look. I decided that I will get rid of the useless things in my life. Books and papers, trash, and so on.

I also decided to save and not consume much. Therefore, I resort to making homemade sandwiches and finding water bottle.

A few days ago, I made a pencil holder out of a discarded soda can. Why the hell not?

There are cool things that I want to buy. But, they're mostly for making cooler projects.

I am a prosumer. I find it fun to make stuff and sell stuff just so I can make much more interesting stuff to sell.

The Man's strategy? Did he even really exists? What's there to blame and be envious?

The intellectual life is worth more than the cars, the fancy houses, and 2 1/2 kids. Things are in itself an interesting intellectual exercise. Selling them is merely a way to keep points about which is the most interesting things to the most people.
This is a welcome set of changes. It looks like with some clever programming you can finally map reduce across collections which was a huge limitation before.
"Specialized" education is killing innovation
Mint.com was purchased during their Series A, well before any traction.

It's also the only domain of those four that had significant inherent value. They could have easily resold Mint.com for a profit. Buying it early gave them the benefits of the great domain and lowered the price they paid. I think what Mint did was brilliant.

The only reason I can think of not to buy a $1M asset for $1M is if it eats into your runway. If it doesn't then you're better off if you can.
A fair point for Rails-on-Netbeans. Not quite so much for Hudson, where Oracle wants not just to stay involved, but to stay in control --- and the amount of control they want is what's pissing off everyone else (including the primary author of the software, Kohsuke Kawaguchi).
Color-coded threat system to be replaced in April
"they lump together AT&T's old ADSL customers in with ADSL2/U-Verse, and, presumably Verizon's DSL with FiOS"

I was wondering why both AT&T and Verizon scored lower on the graph than I expected, though it's a pleasant surprise to see my local cable operator (Charter) parked at the top should I ever need to switch.

Perhaps Netflix can't easily separate the two? I know the hostname attached to the IP I get from Verizon reveals that I'm using FiOS, but the IP address itself seems to be assigned out of the same blocks that Verizon DSL customers use. I suspect Netflix isn't--at least for an external graph like this--putting in the computing resources needed to reverse look-up all the connecting IPs and parsing them for the individual provider offerings.
comcast's end product is not bad at all, compared to what is available in america.

their problem is customer service and their corporate policies. i avoid calling them at all costs and only do so once i know for sure that my problem is unfixable on my side.
Wow thats a beautiful font, thanks

Edit:
190.380 USD or 140 EUR, Really? How can a font be that expensive?... I could pay 10 to 20 euro but man, the price of this font is almost half of my rent...

Edit 2:
Just discovered Inconsolata, also beautiful, and free
http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
> To claim otherwise is disingenuous

Don't assume malice where a misplaced comma will suffice.
Nice piece. Something my female friends always do on FB, and that I half-expected the article to mention, is the 'perfect day' status update.. ie one along the lines of 'walk in the park, dinner at Mario's, curled up on the couch with <insert partner name here> and a glass of wine, perfect!' ... the scenarios described might be different, but the common factors are the veneer of amazingness, and the fact that they always end with a declaration: 'lovely', or 'great', or 'perfect'.

(This is one of David O'Doherty's 'beefs', towards the end here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgYIP-v-e0 )
> What's going on with the symbols (%, #, @, etc.) in those comparisons? It looks like they're getting pulled from Courier New.

Mathematica can be really finicky regarding fonts in graphics when it comes to what it thinks of as "math" symbols. This has to do with the way that it typesets equations- most fonts won't have glyphs for integral symbols, for example. Let's say that for some odd reason you wanted to typeset an equation in Zapfino. Mathematica will be happy to do this, but since Zapfino lacks integral signs and numerous other mathematical symbols, Mathematica will helpfully substitute glyphs from its own built-in fonts "as needed."

Unfortunately, it can be overzealous about this- its definition of "as needed" is awfully broad. I recently had a seriously annoying problem involving a graph I was trying to export- I'd set the graph up using Optima, but the graph's title included parentheses and a percentage sign. It all looked fine on the screen, but upon exporting it I found that the (, ), and % were all in the wrong font, since Mathematica decided that those were math symbols and as such needed to be substituted out for glyphs from another font. Turns out there's a (well-hidden and poorly-documented) way to manually override this font-embedding behavior- if any Mathematica users out there are interested, drop me an email.
Are you using Snow Leopard? That option was added in 10.6.

Go to Finder>Preferences>Advanced and you'll find it at the bottom of the window.
The recent buzz about NSA, or whichever three-letter agency it was, pushing for crypto backdoors. And by friends, I just mean other people in government/military/intelligence.

I don't really have a point here, just a thought that popped in my head.
I can only guess that you don't have many friends with babies. As more and more new moms in my social circle end up on Facebook, I can barely find any real content in my news feed amidst the endless stream of cutesy pictures, "guess what face the little guy made today?", safe-for-all-ages jokes about the husband-wife relationship, etc.

Re: the claim in the article, this type of stuff doesn't make me sad or anything, it just creates a lot of noise that I'm not interested in and makes Facebook seem kind of pointless.

I know, I could start trimming my friends list, filtering my feed, etc., but when it comes right down to it, what Facebook originally offered (and IMO, the most important thing that it offered) during the college years was a comfortably small and relaxed social space that contained mostly my peers. Now I'm getting friend requests from everyone in my extended family, and I have to make the choice between unfriending my grandmother and broadcasting all my interactions straight into her feed? Crikey.

I refuse to make that choice, so unless Facebook budges from their "We never intended you to be friends with acquaintances, coworkers, or family members!" party line and allows some sort of finer permissions control, my account's going to stay in zombie-mode.
Ten Bucks
I was referencing that essay in my comment.
Captains of Crush. Go get some of them and work with them relentlessly.

Farmer's walk. Do it. Do it with heavy weights.

Deadlift will certainly do wonders for your grip as well.
A bodybuilder-type once asked me what farmer's walks "works." Everything, I said.

Bodybuilders don't have much concept of conditioning, outside of being able to flex for long periods of time. Powerlifters care about raw strength, but for them, conditioning is being able to hit several very high lifts in the big three at a meet. It is a kind of conditioning, no question, but they're still going to gas pretty soon in any prolonged activity. Strongmen competitors, on the other hand, I think are phenomenal athletes who combine enormous strength with great conditioning.
True, but I draw a large distinction between 'the valley' and SF. SF was an hour and a half away in traffic from my employer, and I don't want to spend 3 hours a day of my life commuting.
Hipmunk: The Next Huge Travel Site?
Go Jackets.
I'm sorry but I don't see how this is a fantastic idea at all.

First, this is next to useless from a consumer perspective. Because anyone whose actually tested a single provider can tell you speeds vary by geography. Time Warner might be middle of the pack overall but the fastest in your particular area.

Second, they're really p#ss#ng off the ISPs here. If you want faster bandwidth out of the ISPs its better to privately talk to them than publicly embarrass them.

Finally this reinforces the reputation Netflix is already getting among content producers which is the company doesn't play well with others. There's a reason why the head of HBO and Time Warner are taking hard lines against Netflix.

Bottom line: Netflix is part of a content delivering ecosystem. If they offend every other part of that ecosystem it will be much harder for them to survive in the future
Fun fact: The RUSI official quoted in this article, Amyas Godfrey, was a child star on You Can't Do That on Television.
Portals: A Vignette
This definitely fits with my experience using Qwest DSL for my business in Seattle and Comcast cable at home. Comcast has consistently high throughput, low latency to my Seattle data center, fewer hops to the local DC, and for some reason Comcast routing seems to be smarter about routing via the higher quality of our 4 X 1 gigabit providers when I'm connecting to our local DC.
Yes, you are. Fortunately, Wiki backed my understanding of the situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Machine#Military_Enigma

In short, the Navy, specifically U boats, used a non-standard, stronger crypto (in this, more rotors) Enigma machine, called M4. They formed their own Enigma network called "Triton" which the allies called "Shark".

Due to their hardening, and less message sent for traffic analysis, these machines were "safer" against cryptanalysis.
http://www.cryptophone.de/

This German company has been selling commercial phones enhanced with their crypto software (for SMS and voice) for a while now.
You guys wear straight-leg pants, listen to obscure European bands, ride utilitarian bicycles and drive small cars. You're all US-style hipsters.
I'll temper the cynicism by saying that, despite everything, if you want to have any chance at being successful in the movie industry, you come to Hollywood.

Same thing with Silicon Valley, despite its flaws.
It's interesting that he downplayed the idea that Google is competing with Apple and Facebook. Does this show that most of the Google/Apple competition is fabricated by the respective fanboys?
I've used it for a while, but recently switched to RubyMine (with vi bindings). Much snappier, much more complete. Well worth $150.
I asked my mother for her thoughts on it - she currently teaches a few autistic children, in the past she's offered private tuition to children and adults learning English as a foriegn language, and she's also had ~10-15 for-children novels published in the UK.

[19:58:13] Hannah: I think a 12-year-old might find it a bit patronising. It's not bad, but I think there are better things of that sort.

[20:08:18] Hannah: I think any slightly intellectual child over five would find it interesting if it was their first exposure to that sort of thing. But I'd prefer to expose them to Lewis Carroll or Phantom Tolbooth.

(She also points out that it needs proofreading.)

But of course, her negativity doesn't mean you won't be successful :)
I've read your post on Windows, on Mac it looks OK.
What is the worst software bug in history?
I'm aware I may be too pedantic, but it bothers me when people seem to completely conflate vim with vi. For example, -vi- was released in 1976, and vim not until 1991, despite what the article claims. In the meantime, I'll keep happily using nvi, and keeping the kids off my lawn.

edit: links...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29
An interesting take on the recent Tunisian and Egyptian revolts
Yeah, but I'm guessing that the stress loads of the entire assembly are quite different than the shuttle by itself.

(again, no facts to back this up, just conjecture)
What they don't teach you in (W3)school: JavaScript variable scoping
Ask HN: Where can one find legal information on beginning a startup?
Hi HN! Love the site. Just curious where startup founders go to look for advice--beyond a sit down with a lawyer.
It would be more useful if Greenspun had, as he's the one who should carry the burden of proof in this case. He's made the implied claim that unemployment==party-time. You really shouldn't be asking me to refute his assertion. Feel free to disagree or use Google to sate your own curiosity if you don't believe me.

I think it's notable that people are more willing to give his careless characterization a pass, simply because it aligns with our moral sense that economic outcomes have some sort of parallel to our sense of justice. (economic losers must be social losers who deserved and/or inadvertently caused their unemployment/foreclosure/bankruptcy with bad planning/habits/use of time, etc.)

Speaking of Google: Moral Hazard has nothing to do with whether unemployment is party time. I agree that it exists and 99 weeks is far too long for a standard policy. I don't see how that has any bearing on my disagreement with the article.
This article totally reminded about whisper systems. I'm downloading their phone and text replacements now and can't wait to try them out.
Nice to see Erica's back. I got my first web host account from her company, Simpli back when she was a frequent slashposter. Why? Because I liked her approach to business -- work hard, take care of customers, provide a service worth paying for -- and I wanted to support that. Not that my $10/month account made any difference in Simpli's grand plan :-)

I agree with what she says here. I really don't get the misalignment I see here (HN's my only conduit to Valley thinking) between SV-type startups and what I think of as "good business."
You should read "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly.

He investigates these sorts of things, talking about how it is now impossible to be separate from civilization (even the Amish are dependent upon civilization at large to support their lifestyle). And he starts to talk about how we can cope with that, and engage with it on our own terms, in a constructive manner.
The Rise and Fall of XMB
Polishing vs. Sanding
Excessively anthropomorphizing the Man is a quick way to sketch civilization, but leads to a failure to understand it deeply. If I were going to put a word on it, it would be glib. Sort of Malcolm Gladwell-ish. It's not necessarily that it's wrong, it's just so incomplete a view that it might as well be wrong.
UX Poll - Users Want Speed over Social Features
I'm a very happy Charter customer in Massachusetts. I pay $30/mo for a 10Mbit connection
Suggestions are completely disabled while typing the blocked words. If I said partially, that would imply that suggestions are still given while typing the blocked words, excluding the blocked word itself.
Another commonly overlooked fact is that many law schools contact recent graduates who have yet to find employment and offer them brief opportunities to assist professors with research projects for $20/hour. Other schools offer to subsidize internships with public defenders' offices for similar pay. These outreach programs invariably coincide with the period when U.S. News and other organizations start doing their surveys for yearly law school rankings. Apparently, these programs are enough to count recent graduates as "employed" for the sake of rankings.

Truth be told, recessions hit the legal profession early and hard. Anyone considering going to law school and waiting out the recession should carefully weight their options. Obtaining a law degree is an expensive and time-consuming process that provides little guarantee that good jobs will be available upon graduation. I graduated from a great law school in 2009 and found good work, but I have several classmates that were not so lucky.
Four-core ARM A9 to run Sony game console
They should also filter for geographies that providers serve. e.g. If one provider is serving predominantly rural areas, most of their trunks will be using directional wireless, leaving them at a severe disadvantage which is no fault of theirs.

If we were then to rank ISP's on throughput, even though a rural ISP is serving a critical and under-served part of our community, they would be rewarded with negative perception.
From what I know of the audience here, I think a lot of people would be interested in reading a well-reasoned response to one of pg's essays. Even if it's long.
hacker dojo, check! When is the best time to show up as a stranger? Thank you Mark Christian, you are an honorable person of good taste:)
The mind isn't the brain,

Do you mean the difference of hardware and actual content or something else?

and the mind isn't strictly human intelligence, so what is it?. What is consciousness? How is it that I have an idea of self? What are my perceptions? How do I model the world around me? What's up with free will?

Isn't that what neuroscience probably will answer at some time? For example, we might get an answer to these questions from the Blue Brain project.

And maybe AI also in a somewhat different way. For example, we might get the result that all kind of intelligence has some form of consciousness and we could even define it somehow because of the knowledge we get out of AI. I even think it is very likely that we will get an advanced knowledge of what intelligence is by advances in AI.
I've often expressed this as philosophy is that discipline which brings other disciplines into being.

For instance the natural sciences were studied under the heading of natural philosophy for a reason at one point!
> There's a reason why the head of HBO and Time Warner are taking hard lines against Netflix

A gift from my employer -
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_kt8r19d1Kpw/TUCXRpFxEjI/AAAAAAAAA_Y/t_...

(context - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13bewkes.ht...)

And Bewkes is probably a bit more pissed about http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
I think it was even worse- I think if they signed a 2 year contract with a carrier, they got a refund on the subsidized price of the phone (which is usually a trivial amount).
+1 for divvy: http://www.mizage.com/divvy/

Watch the video, but basically, you can define predetermined window positions and sizes, bind those to keys, and use hot keys to snap windows to the predetermined sizes. Or a size selector available on the fly.

This is particularly nice if you travel with your laptop and don't like the resizing behavior for windows that are on an external monitor when you unplug it.
All crypto systems fail when faced with human operators!

Also doesn't help if you don't destroy your crypto books / equipment when boarded: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-505
"Database" isn't entirely correct, its a distributed K/V store. Maybe its just me, but the word database implies a lot of additional functionality that Voldemort doesn't have.
I agree with the general point. For your example: on windows I use "yy and "p. You can set "* as default in vimrc and just use yy and p though (don't remember it off the top of my head, I can check it if you want, I use windows though)
Scareware mongers cough up $8m to settle fraud charges
I thought it was inspiring.

EDIT: Why? Because I've never thought about it from that point of view before. It doesn't necessarily make his point true, but it's interesting nevertheless.
I was a philosophy major and my take was always that "philosophy is the study of things science hasn't yet solved". Yes, it butts up to science and when you tread over the line that helps you either prove or disprove that part of the theory.

It is like a financial model for a startup. In the beginning you guess at what your revenue and expenses are. Then you learn some facts (my rent is $xxxx/mo and I currently have xxx paying customers). You adjust the model based on the new facts, but the rest is still your best guesswork.
To get the undergraduate degree at Cambridge you have to pass the examinations for Part I and II (some subjects have IA, IB and II and others have I, IIA and IIB), along with some other crazy medieval rules.
You can trivially switch once you've completed Part I, and also within the first weeks of starting Part I; there are some other circumstances but these are the most common.
I respectfully disagree. This is a fantastic move by NetFlix.

NetFlix knows that the ISPs are already pissed at them and are moving to throttle them, so they fire back by showing consumers which of the ISPs are a better fit for their NetFlix viewing habits. NetFlix is flexing its muscle a bit here to show it can redirect customers to choose different ISPs and affect their bottom line.
In a sense, yes, but that's mainly on the books and it depends on which interest rate you're referring to. You're right, much of the bailout money was used to cushion the capital accounts of these institutions. However, banks are businesses too and at the moment happen to be making tremendous profits, much of it due to the spreads they're getting on the low lending rate from the Feds.
I've always thought the MongoDB database was really good, but has poor drivers for node.js. I've been using node-mongodb-native, and it has basically no documentation. If you want to use a relatively new feature, you have to figure out how to convert from the MongoDB command line syntax in the MongoDB docs, to some syntax that the driver understands (which may sometimes be impossible). If you have poor drivers, even an awesome database won't make up for it.
We'll have to wait for The Social Network 2.
I would say, don't get too hung up on the "the Man" aspect of the article. For me, the most profound part was the one about keeping people wanting useless gadgets more and more and thus keeping them in jobs they hate. People can easily live with much less and do work that will allow them to be much happier.

From what I've seen, higher earning potential doesn't correlate well with happiness.