skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bullying isn't solved on the playground. At least online the perpetrators document their aggression. Not that I believe that will solve anything, thought it might be fun to name-and-shame them.

Also, on the playground a bully will enjoy power by oppressing others in full view of their classmates. Authority and fear go hand in hand. Anonymity and the internet might make it easier to bully others but it also removes the pay-off. Somebody that bullies others online is wasting their time. If you do it, it's not a stretch for somebody else to point out that you're a bit of a 'loser'.

It's sad if children kill themselves because of this though. I've heard awful stories of people pretending to be a girlfriend/boyfriend, gaining trust and then humiliating the other person. You would have to be a little naive to fall for that but I don't think that's a lesson anybody should ever have to learn. However, I think that's an exception, kids will learn to not trust so easily in the virtual environment and to carefully control their virtual image.
In high school, I asked my mother one night to wake me when a meteor shower was happening. In the morning, I was angry at her, because she didn't wake me. She informed me that not only did she wake me and we saw the meteor shower, we had a full conversation about the meteor shower before I went back to bed.

In college, I once climbed out of my loft, walked over to my desk, turned off my alarm, climbed back into bed, went back to sleep, and didn't remember doing so when I woke up.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here, and point out that you can actually construct the proper automaton where the transition conditions are decided by regular expressions.

It might work like this: some programmer working on the project realizes something can't be parsed in a finite state machine, and 'cleverly' separates out one batch of regular expressions into a loop/recursive call. Repeat until the programmers are satisfied with the number of conditions they can handle. I've seen software that was actually written like this. Fortunately, the language it was designed to parse was pretty simple.
Real nice posting a hot link to a hacked site. Sighs, the Internet is doomed.
The really interesting thing here is the alternate DNS root that hosts the gimmick TLD. But it's not the first (remember AlterNIC?).

Getting involved with this will teach you about DNS, and that's probably the best reason to do it --- but there are risks. (Frex, you're implicitly trusting whoever's running it to direct you back to the mainstream root servers for ".com", and not to an alternate ".com" on which selected sites are directed through password-harvesting proxies.)
Several students in my campus ACM chapter realized this and worked to make our meetings fill in some of the gaps. We had weekly meetings and covered things that attendees could get started using immediately. Code-alongs were encouraged. Popular topics had followup meetings. I don't even know how much time we spent playing with POV-Ray.

The lightning talks meeting was also really popular; one guy showed how to use Blender in five minutes, someone else talked about a darknet he had written, and another student used it to distribute Google Wave invites she had from her summer internship.
Happiest Man in Detroit. The Remarkable story of Ford's CEO
It required a small language change, which I believe you can see in it's entirety here: https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/changeset/23993
TV ads were also very effective when they first came out. So were google's text ads. Just like any form of advertising, the effectiveness of iAds will decrease off over time.

In most cases, the advertisers will try to compensate by making the ads more annoying.
> ... what is most likely, that a guy that has build the largest free dating site the world is a moron? or that his ambition overrules any concern for his user's privacy?

I don't beleive these are mutually exclusive choices. One who is ambitious at the expense of his users' privacy is indeed a moron.
Would be great if someone made diagram out of this.
Same founders? Same project? Its important - this implies YC missed a golden opportunity - did they?

Further, was it typical of YC's space - web app, demo'able in weeks, two to 5 founders? If not, then its apples-oranges. Yes, you have to find your investor; YC may not be that investor.
Banking seems a lot like a gambling except that it's heads you win and tails they lose.

Lend big into a property bubble and you'll be rewarded with colossal bonuses.

The bubble bursts, loans go bad and the share price collapses.

However the main banks banks are considered too big to fail and the taxpayer has to bail them out.

Bonuses (smaller ones) for exceptional performance continue to be the norm, rolling heads the exception.

Why don't the shareholders get rid of their employees, the bankers who have overseen the collapse of their asset?

The shareholders are Pension funds who, while they ostensibly have the little peoples'interests to preserve, are actually run by people from the same gene pool as the bankers themselves.

These people sit on one anothers remuneration committees.

Dog does not eat dog.
In Jul. 08 got links from Freakonomics and Kottke which led to a little burst. Ongoing organic traffic (I essentially haven't update the site except to keep the data fresh each year) seems to be about 1M page views/year. Squarely in the no profit/hobby territory, but enough that I do keep updating the data.
I think it's absolutely, blatantly self-promoting, but I don't see how it's tasteless.
It's certainly self promotion, and fairly blatant I suppose, but what about it strikes you as tasteless?

I think his central point - writing more helps you write better; StackOverflow is an easy and welcoming place to write more - is largely true, and I don't think he should be unable to say it just because it happens to promote his own interests.
Vancouver startup helps WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pay legal expenses
Where was it advertised? I heard about it on twitter DURING the event, but I would have been interesting in going.
At the pub afterwards, about every other person I met was working at a startup - especially later on when it wasn't so packed. The pile of business cards I'm going through now reflects this. Perhaps there was some self-selection amongst the people who stayed on at the pub for a while?

(I regret that I missed the talks - unfortunately I was held up by a meeting that ran late).
The HN meetup clashed with the Springboard mentoring & networking event hosted at TechHub. There must have been about 50 startups there (+ VCs/angels/jurnos/mentors). Quite a lot of HNers were there so I wouldn't be surprised if that had a negative impact on the number of startups at the HN event.

(For future reference if Springboard runs one of these events again, it's definitely worth going. I got a lot of practical advice that's going to have a major impact on my business, plus I had an early stage VC ask me for a pitch deck. I'm not sure how the event could have been any better.)
Push will allocate concepts into the logical recall section of your mind, meaning that you make the effort to recall these things. For instance, if I'm designing a UI, I'll sit back and think about principals and rules before I do anything.

Pull allocates into the creative regions, meaning you are a bit more intuitive towards what makes up good design.

One isn't always best for all stages of skill development towards mastering something, and a healthy development is likely to include both sides of effort. A push-and-pull if you will.

To draw an analogy, this is similar to language development in persons. Your native language is stored in the creativity hemisphere of your mind, and languages you are trying to pick up later in life are in the "information" side until they reach fluency. Cultural immersion would be a pull, where as learning from books is a push.
I've never heard of Plenty of Fish, so I don't know what they do or what kind of user data they store. But I'll take a contrary point of view and say that for some services, light security is good enough.

Mailman, the mailing list management software that's widely used, emails you a password reminder once a month. They warn you when you sign up that your password is not really providing "real" security and not to use a valuable one.

This is the strategy he was employing... sending users a reminder of their password and keeping them engaged in the site.

Now, I do think they should tell people, when they are signing up, that they will get reminder emails of their password and not to use e.g. their online banking password here. If I know this going in, and depending on the nature of the site and what personal data they have, I might be OK with this.
Verizon already sold out of iPhone 4 pre-orders
Choose another career ASAP. Find something you love.

This is why there are so many bad programmers around. Depressing.
Tech industry is world's most trustworthy, says new survey. Why?
A Beautiful Race Condition
I went there with the rough expectation that I might find some people to co-found something with, but since I'm a wuss I didn't talk to anyone I didn't already know.

If they're not already working at a startup, are people who attend these events likely to be open the idea of work for equity or co-founding?
Great advice - early as early as you can stomach or after the train has left the station. Most folks gravitate towards the middle ground where the risk/reward isn't really there.
Couple follow-up questions:

1.) Have you admitted to your cofounder you screwed up? You're owning up to it here (+1) but to him?

2.) Did you just screw up your CEO part of the job or both CEO & CTO?

3.) Could you live with just being a code monkey (role player) for a while?

4.) How many people are in the company?
It's in the faq.
Hi Piers, this is the meetup page http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/ . We'll announce the next event shortly, expect it will be at some point in March depending on venue availability.

I did not advertise the last event on HN because it got booked up very quickly and were at pretty much full capacity last night.
Improving my writing skill by writing persuasively on blogs, HN, etc. is why I spend time here.

I've always hated writing, from my first english courses. I felt the way it was done, with an overemphasis on creative writing (which is of limited use in many real-world situations, beyond developing technique), and the focus on word count (write me a 3 pager, if it's less your grade goes down) was a detriment to clear, concise, well written and direct communication.

Writing in school should quickly progress past the creative stage after middle school, and focus on technical, nonfiction, and other explanatory methods through high school. It should be split off from literature courses, which would better be combined with philosophy and history.

Similarly, I hated typing classes. I learned to type by telnetting into MUDs and learning it on my own. This was much more fun and less of a grind than typing "cat cat cat dog cat cat" over and over. The downside? I can never use an ergonomic keyboard, as I hit the "b" key with my left index finger.
tl;dr They trust the cost-based query optimizer more than the DBA; for the rare cases where the optimizer gets it wrong, they're more likely to add cost adjustments than the explicit "do it like this" directives that, say, Oracle DBAs are used to. There's already one cost adjustment in Postgresql 9.0.

(They also claim that query optimizers all over are good enough that they don't need the hints anymore, and the only reason that anyone asks for them is because they've gotten so used to messing with bad query planners that they don't know how to work with a good one. Which, regrettably, has not been my company's experience with Oracle 11g --- we haven't resorted to explicit hints, but we've restructured queries in other ways for order-of-magnitude improvements in performance.)
Quick, what does the i stand for in "for (i=0; i<n; i++) {"?

It was a quick prototype written by one APLer, for another APLer, using mutually understood conventions. For example, its dyadic verbs ("V2" functions) use the variable names 'a' and 'w'. For a while, I wondered why (maybe they stood for "Arthur" and "Whitney"?), but after reading Iverson's _A Programming Language_, I realized APL usually uses lowercase alpha (α) and omega (ω), which look like 'a' and 'w' in ASCII. Details like that would need no explanation.

Likewise, in

typedef struct a{I t,r,d[3],p[2];}*A;

t is type (is it boxed? 0 or 1), r is rank (number of dimensions), d is the dimensions (hardcoded to a max of 3; a 2x3x4 matrix has d={2,3,4}), and p is a variable-length array sized by malloc-ing extra space; that's where the values go, either longs or void pointers). That'll save you some time if you ever try to pick the rest apart. :)

APL code is often terse to the point of seeming cryptic, just math papers are. You get used to it, and it's that way for a reason.
Sending clear text passwords in email might itself be in an issue. However, if all he wanted was to regularly send clear text passwords in email to the users, he still could have encrypted the passwords before saving it in the database. And when sending password to user, decrypt it while taking out of db and send it.
Back in The Day (tm) I wrote a full Gnutella client in about 1600 lines of code.
Perhaps the tech industry is just the most difficult to judge?
scp at the command line is easier still, especially if you define an alias in your .ssh/config file. Do any of the "cloud" file storage services support scp/sftp access?
Agreed, and as above, 42 is in the valid range for the 'D' part of an A.B.C.D ipv4 address. If the number were larger than 255, there would be no issue.

How about 420? ... Okay, okay. 421 is prime.
I'd argue that raising money from YC (specifically) might be harder than raising money generally from angels/VCs.

There are still only a finite number of YC applications selected into every cohort (and my guess is, as the brand grows, the number of teams competing grows). But, the number of potential angels and VCs for a deal is not as constrained.

Summary: Getting into YC is not the same as raising money from angels/VCs. I wouldn't equate the two.

Besides, it's not just about the money.
Nokia recruits Silicon Valley developers, says good things are coming
Akihabara Street View
HN is useful for this too. My particular niche is that I'm an academic researcher, but I think there's a bunch of stuff that's poorly presented in academic papers, or at least only presented in a way that's intended to be read by other people in the same field (or sub-field, or sub-sub-field). So one of my medium-term plans is to re-present some of the stuff I like in a less jargony and formal way, in tutorials / blog posts / whatever. But often that gets pushed off behind other obligations, and it feels like Work, even if it's work that I enjoy. But posting an explanation of something I know about that comes up in a discussion on HN just feels like conversation, much more natural. It's not always as polished as a result, but sometimes I've actually used my HN comments as a first-draft of a longer tutorial.

For example (for a bit of self-promotion), this recent comment possibly could've been a better-written and better-edited blog post, with some images and examples, and a title like "implicit and explicit models in interactive fiction", or I dunno, something like that but catchier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177226. But writing something like that would probably sit on the TODO list for a long time; meanwhile I just banged out that comment in 20 minutes or so because it came up in discussion. The fact that it was "replying to a comment" rather than "writing a thing" somehow tricked it into not feeling like writing. Now if I ever want to write a blog post, I have a draft of the idea written out.
Facebook map is interesting because the people are geolocated, and friendship is usually personal - interesting to see how the digital revolution has affected that.

Scientific papers are about ideas not people. Unless you're looking for a job, or a coffee shop likely to be high in PhDs, not sure this is the right projection.

How about an idea-centric map of some kind? Or place researchers in an imaginary spherical idea-space, let us see who are the stars, who are peripheral.

Anyway I think forcing the map to geography is disguising more interesting patterns.
Starting the feedback loop (part 2 of "The agile one-pager")
Switching from Google to Duck Duck Go
Why the hell does he use the "Like" button if he's quit Facebook? (I know it's for others to share, but still. Double messages much?)
How computers should be
probably adding a favicon might do the trick :)
Why the Web Is Useless in Developing Countries - And How to Fix It
From the Pastie above, it looks like they are using this:

http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/app...
i'd love if you were to film it next time, I get git, and i can handle git, but i'd like to really deeply understand it- and visual reference may help :)
Maybe the best thing to do is to try and sequence your "pushing" and "pulling." I actually graduated with a Political Science degree in 2009. I came to my first job not knowing a lick of programming, and the job didn't require it anyway. I got into programming because we were trying to do a website redesign and I wanted to help out. After we finished up that project, I kept going at because I liked it.

The first 9-12 months were tough. I read some beginner's books, wrote lots of really ugly code, and got things to work eventually, if only barely.

Then the code started to get prettier and more robust, and I picked up some more theoretical books like Leiserson's Intro to Algorithms to learn the theory. Having "pulled" around code for 9-12 months on my own, learning more formal computer science really allowed me to begin gluing those pieces together.

Everyone learns differently. Maybe a better approach for some CS programs would be to throw students into the water for their first year, let them struggle reinventing the wheel and solving practical problems as best they can, and then teach the theory and formalisms later?
I think one of the points that was glossed over in the conclusion of the article is that writing with feedback is much more valuable than without it.

The author of the letter to Jeff made this very clear that the up and down votes and whether or not the answer was accepted was feedback on his/her writing and it made them better.

Authors of books have editors to make the author (and the book) better, blogs have commenters which make the blogger better, SO answers have commenters and votes to make the participants better.

So DO just go out there and write yes; but also try to get feedback for your writing because it will multiply the amount you learn by writing.
Reporter's first person account in Egypt: "You will be lynched"
Oh, quit using the site, not quit working there. I would've been more interested in the latter.
As I see it, either his report is solid and contains no factual errors or incorrect assumptions (and thus is "engineering quality work") - in which case since it's correct then there should not be any issues in following its conclusion.

Or alternatively, his report contains fallacies and invalid conclusions - but by extension is no longer of engineering quality.
http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/
Here's the previous article in what seems to be a series: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-b...
He's mostly right, but I also get the sense that he misses it a bit and is trying to justify not using it - to himself.

I agree with him in that FB communication is generally shallow - the less meaningful your status updates are, the more people seem to like them.

I also tire of inspirational quotes and Internet Marketing pitches - MLM too.

I continue to use it though because I'm not really bothered enough to ditch my account.

On a side note - did anyone notice that the picture of SP in his sidebar looks like Julian Assange?
The "do you like to program" and "programming vs. being a programmer" are really good points.

We recently hired and then let go of a guy who is doing a CS degree, good grades, competes in ACM tournaments, so he was really sexy as a junior programmer. It turned out he doesn't really like to program, he's not a programmer. The way this materialized was when given an assignment, he wasn't willing to proactively figure out how to solve it. We either told him in great detail how to solve it or he'd throw up his arms.

This happened in 9 out of 10 cases, whether it was a really small (1 hour) or a larger (multi-month) assignment. After two months of this we let him go.
Ok. I'll be the one to ask.

What is this feature? I still can't find it after looking.
The focus on word count in education is absurd, and I cannot help but feel it contributes to the use of 'business speak' and vague waffling e-mails that workers and customers are subject to every day.

It seems to me that people get it drummed into them that length is proportional to importance. This is not true; the best writing conveys its point simply and elegantly.

"[Writing] is finished not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away." (paraphrased)
Piping git archive into ssh - great stuff!
It's not Android. It's an iPhone. And yes, if you are thinking that it's an Android you are having less sex than if you think it's an iPhone.
Personally I have witnessed a pretty drastic level of hoop jumping to get pgsql to force a particular index, and forgo destroying the site for another few days. And this hasn't been by schmuck DBA's either. Rather, by actual postgres committers that we have employed as contractors.

Granted, I don't know if reversing the orders of things in WHERE clauses, doing a rain dance, and hoping for the best would have been necessary if the original author of our schema hadn't made some critical mistakes. Like using text fields for enums--that boner seems to have confused the bejeezus out of the planner on numerous occasions.

Then again most big sites start out as some dude learning databases for the first time and making major mistakes. So anyway, I question the 0.1% figure Berkus throws out there.
As someone currently living in Ireland, I found the subtitle of this article particularly appropriate: "Where's the rage?". The Irish government bankrupted the country many times over by putting the debts of the banks on the backs of the people. But, unlike France, for example, where people have taken to the streets and brought the country to a halt to be heard, in Ireland there is nothing like the level of activism that one would expect given the depth of the economic quagmire.

I find it quite sad to see how a country that was once such a hotbed of political unrest has become so passified by the recent wealth that it experienced. My guess is it has to do with people having the feeling that they are stakeholders in the system now, with mortgages and fungible assets, and so they are less willing to want to subvert the system itself rather than muddle along even with unsatisfactory political solutions.
That's a very interesting answer. I'm a self-learner, so can you kindly recommend good resources on
"- Concurrency & why ACID transactions are hard"

That will be really helpful. Thanks.