skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know I get serious "presentation anxiety" when confronted with the challenge of with filling out my profile on a dating site. If women are more susceptible to this kind of malaise I wonder if that explains something about why there are 4x less women than men on those sites. Find out a way to make "selling yourself" less threatening and you answer the million dollar question that Match, eHarmony, and all the rest have been racking their brains about for years: Why won't women join?
It's arguable, but I'd say that the real Internet is like that, at least in well-connected places like the US. I cannot imagine the act of God necessary to stop Americans from accessing Google.
A Dataquest Analyst Meets Michael Dell as a College Student
I'll echo the gvim menu hints recommendation for Windows users.

As to copy/paste, does that depend on the platform? I use vim in a terminal on Linux and Ctl+Shft+C/Ctl+Shft+V on selected text works fine for clipboard transfers. I don't use vim on Windows often enough to remember how things work there, however, and the article that prompted this discussion was focused on Mac usage.
To travel, yeah. Baby steps, it'll be my first time offshore (at 28 years of age)
Perhaps the fact that I was surprised that the article's author didn't immediately think of Fiddler is evidence of how exclusively I've worked with web services via .NET. Personally, I've had a great experience with SOAP from within Visual Studio. Once the service reference is established, all coding is against the strongly-typed code-generated classes. If I must, I use Fiddler to debug. My experience has been positive.
Agreed. It becomes especially complex in a distributed system with multiple users having access to the same data.

For instance, even a simple message exchange, which has no data interdependency issues, an undo feature requires some kind of design trade-off. Either the application lies to the user and delays the sending of the message to allow for an undo period, or it allows the message to be delivered to the other user, but then allows the delivery to be un-done. However, in the later scenario, if the receiver reads the message before it is "unsent," then you aren't really providing a reliable undo facility.
Poll: Should the US President have an Internet kill-switch?
This poll was inspired by Zak's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150376), which connected the recent claims that the Internet has been shut off in almost all of Egypt with the emerging possibility that the US President may be given those same rights. While I don't know much about the issue, it does seem as if it is a prominent and difficult debate with both sides have solid arguments. I set up this poll to see what the HN community thought about it.
I also think it's unfair to characterize Newtonian mechanics as "wrong." Under the right circumstances - ones that apply to a lot of day-to-day scenarios - it accurately predicts what will happen. Not so much with the four elements. They, in fact, do not have any predictive power.
I think it's more that TV and Facebook and such are enablers of less than healthy behavior, not causes. The whole problem is that they DO provide a diminished dose of what healthy socializing provides and continually suppress the motivation to seek out something more substantial. It's sort of akin to snacking on junk food all day long and never eating a real meal. Sure, you can keep yourself from getting hungry, but you're not getting any actual sustenance, and in the long run you will experience feelings way more unpleasant than hunger if you keep it up. It would probably be better if those foods provided no hunger satisfaction at all. Then people could enjoy them occasionally for the taste, but wouldn't be tempted to use them as substitutes for real food.

Personally, I quit Facebook a few weeks ago, and I've been much happier and more productive for it. I might go back at some point, but honestly I don't even feel the urge anymore. I'd rather just be alone when I'm alone. Get work done, sort out my thoughts, etc., and then when I feel like being with people, I'll make the effort to call around or round some people up. Overall I find myself getting more out of both kinds of experience. I've also noticed, strangely enough, that people have tended to seek me out more since I quit Facebook, I suppose since they no longer have an easier alternative for keeping up with me, and when we meet up, it feels like there's actually some catching up to do, as opposed to the feeling that you already know everything that's going on with a person because you constantly post on each others' walls and read their status updates.
As someone who funded them, I disagree with you. What investors are looking for is scale combined with profitability. Often the best way to achieve that is to optimize for scale first, as Google did.

It's easy to "build a profitable company." Just start an unambitious service business with low costs. But it is much harder to start from that and add scale than to start from scale and add profitability.
Deru kugi wa utareru

Cross-reference with "An Innovator Leaving Japan"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325704

http://synaptify.com/?p=613728

OT: Ikiru "To Life" (a 1952 film about one man and Japan's human crushing bureaucracy) is one of Kurosawa's best

http://www.acepilots.com/discussions/ikiru.html
I think you now need a registered business in mainland China to buy .cn domain.(check this)

Many Chinese websites don't use .cn domains.

E.g 51.la tudou.com, mtime.com, douban.com

Later these sites registered .cn .com.cn

I don't know of any big sites that use Chinese characters as their primary address(if you know of any please link in comments.

It's actually easier and quicker to type the pinyin(romanized letters) into the url bar.

Finally many for many Chinese websites the name is pretty unimportant as long as its easy to remember.
Passing a law like that means they'll put in the infrastructure to actually do it. If things deteriorate significantly in the US, it is likely that attempting to gain the ability to shut down the internet would directly trigger some sort of civil unrest while now it only triggers angry blog posts.
JERRY: So you're saying, I go in to YC, and tell them I got this idea for a startup about nothing.

GEORGE: We go into YC.

JERRY: "We"? Since when are you a hacker?

GEORGE: (Scoffs) Hacker. We're talking about a startup.

JERRY: You want to go with me to YC?

GEORGE: Yeah. I think we really go something here.

JERRY: What do we got?

GEORGE: An idea.

JERRY: What idea?

GEORGE: An idea for the startup.

JERRY: I still don't know what the idea is.

GEORGE: It's about nothing.

JERRY: Right.

GEORGE: Everybody's doing something, we'll do nothing.

JERRY: So, we go into YC, we tell them we've got an idea for a startup about nothing.

GEORGE: Exactly.

JERRY: They say, "What's your startup about?" I say, "Nothing."

GEORGE: There you go.

(A moment passes)

JERRY: (Nodding) I think you may have something there.
Cofounder paid for a subscription. Loves it.
Interesting -- was he living with parents? My impression was, and the comments here seem to confirm, that most (all?) U.S. unemployment payouts aren't really enough to live on carefree while casually paying slope fees.
Code walking with macroexpand-dammit
I see this got modded down already, so let's examine the question closer:

If you're reading this, chances are you're here because you've read Paul Graham's writing and want to be an entrepreneur. Paul Graham says that jobs are bad things (http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html) and you should be an entrepreneur instead.

The problem is that something like 90% of startups will fail. I bet there are more than a few people on HN who have worked on a startup while receiving unemployment benefits. So if you're on unemployment benefits and decide to do a startup under the table, there's at least some chance something good will happen.

The chance that nothing productive will come out of people working in the unemployment GULAG digging the Great Mexican Ditch (btw, wouldn't it be cheaper to hire Mexican laborers to dig it?) is 100%.

Of course, none of this applies to you, because you're a special entrepreneurial snowflake. No one you know or care about has ever, or will ever, be unemployed. But everyone else is supposed to be your wage slave, willing to move across the country to work on your social media startup, cleaning toilets for stock options (because, you know, janitorial services is a dead industry). Either that, or they're a welfare queen spending their days snowboarding and playing x-box while sipping champagne and smoking cigars rolled from your tax dollars.

And fuck their safety net and their medical care.

This is why I have no problem calling out "libnerdtarians" and other social conservatives. There's a surprising lack of self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to perceive things from other people's perspectives. Some people call it being a sociopath: http://addictinginfo.org/new/?page_id=342
Zodiac Hacking: An Accidental SEO Experiment
I can't seem to get it to work in Google Reader. I get no mouseover text at all, neither the Comic Text version nor the default Chrome version. Am I doing something wrong?
What you're seeing is the slow merge of PC's with consumer electronics and the surprising thing is that people actually like it ...

What I think is going to happen eventually is that only 'geeks' will have real laptops/desktops. Everyone else will have one of these personal devices (in varying forms of complexity).

We live in interesting times.
I think you're going to have to lot further than that to be too pedantic for a discussion of programming editors.

As a relative latecomer to vim, I think your distinction is worthy remembering. If you didn't start with vi, it's easy to assume that all the power and cool stuff is the result of improvements and not realize how much just plain old vi could/can do.
I can undo the shit out of Adobe Illustrator, and I still wind up losing work from time to time. How is that clearly superior to accidentally clicking "OK"?
Kinect is fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history
FWIW I'm the author of the Zeus programmer's editor and it can import VS solutions files and once imported you can build and compile all from inside the editor.

Zeus also does a limited amount of intellisensing, but naturally the intellisensing is nowhere near good as that found in VS. But the code navigation is not too back.

Zeus also has full MSDN integration and it can actually do context sensitive queries of the MSDN much faster than VS:

http://www.zeusedit.com/zforum/viewtopic.php?t=2833

So if you are prepared to forgo a bit on intellisensing, it is in fact possible to develop outside of the VS IDE at least some of the time.
Not to mention that they can inherit 'assets' other than wealth: connections, experience, confidence, cushion, as well as less consequential financial support that just makes their lives a bit more fulfilling.
The fundamental problem with this article is that the author brings up a problem, but does not offer a practical real-world solution. The article only pretends to offer a solution.

A List Apart is well known for helpful and practical solutions, down to detailed implementations. This does not introduce anything helpful or practical.

All I got from this article was that undo is better than a confirmation modal. Thanks for stating the obvious.
Ask HN: What does Apple's entry into mobile payments mean for Visa/MC?
Hey guys - just curious on what people think Apple's entry into the mobile payments space means for incumbents like Visa/MC (the networks), online payment portals like Paypal etc.

Does Apple have enough clout to change the landscape? Will Apple and Google dominate this space through a consortium?
I’m not claiming that undo will protect you from everything. (It doesn’t.) I’m merely claiming that undo is preferable (“clearly superior”) to no undo.

Are you saying that Illustrator would be just as good without undo?
Also curious what that means for terminal companies like Verifone and CMT.
> I mean, what happens if you delete 3 things, and realize that you want to undo the 1st one?

Just drag the first one out of the trash and leave the other two there.

> What happens if the action you take, changes the state of the user's data in a way that is unrecoverable?

Store the previous state.
The question is, where is that point? We're already past where I would have put it if I had to guess when we started, and the startups are doing better than ever.
I'm sure the sentiment among these companies is similar to how traditional mobile companies felt when Apple announced the iPhone. Something along the lines of "this could be really bad for us if this thing catches on."
Samsung ships 2m Galaxy Tabs in its first three months
And the 32-bit address space generally has some space reserved for the kernel, so more like 3GB per process, depending on the OS.
> socially isolated people who no longer have a TV would probably figure out how to tie a hangman's knot and eliminate themselves from any future asinine statistics.

This is probably intended as a joke, but it’s really not funny, especially in the context of a discussion of DFW.
Hah. Did this combo as a undergrad.

Loved CS. Loved Philosophy. Hated their intersection, which I thought I was going to base my career around, when I was 17. Oops.

Still a fun degree though.
What about the rule that matches "*" at the end? That's there for all the rest - the others are just fine-tuned for mutual benefit.

There is no rule in there that denys other search engines, just some rules that set some slightly different rules for different ones.

EDIT: I see now -therule at the end is rather specific, and wouldn't allow crawling the entire site. Still - without actual complaints from someone who contacted them and got no response, I see no evil.
Best. Post. Evar.
I think if that happens (which seems more likely every day) it'll create a bigger disconnect between creators and consumers than we have now and it sort of worries me. I got involved in making things from my desktop PC just stumbling on "how to make x" guides, if I'd only owned an iPad I don't think that would have ever happened because I'd have to have had made a concious choice to purchase a desktop computer for the "advanced" tasks like creating.

I guess it's good for Apple short term, but long term... although I guess the exposure to the app store and similar systems may cause that concious decision to purchase a desktop to create.
Most rejections happen in the application phase, and in most cases when we don't invite people to interviews it's because there's nothing that stands out about their application. I.e. it's not so much that there's something wrong as that there's not enough that's right.
TextMate falls down on all sorts of things - it's remarkably slow. The go-to editor for very large files is BBEdit.
Maybe because it protects data with replication and sharding?

But hopefully doesn't provide copies of your data to your enemies by accident.
The Future of the Internet: Year 2020
Follow the uprising in Egypt via this live Twitter collage.
What's interesting to me is that we're in a constant war between the technologies used by governments to control their people and the technologies used by people to uproot their governments. There's a post below about mesh networking, I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to broadcast network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks without a central kill switch.

One thing I fear is that eventually we'll reach a point where a dictatorship will establish itself and be so cruel and effective that it'll represent a permanent power which will dictate until it's own will to govern expires. North Korea seems like a close enough approximation but with the weapons and technology of the modern world it doesn't take that much creativity for a psychopath to imagine a world where that can occur.

Perhaps it's time I re-read Cryptonomicon.
I understand how Haskell can use the cores automatically, but can you point a lower being like myself at some documentation or even terms to figure out how this becomes async for free?
Search engines can be a real PITA for a site. They can take a site down. When it's my site - I don't have to let you, or anyone else, index it. We can do it nicely through robots.txt, or cold-war style through firewalls and script and tarpits and who knows what else.
So - assuming Quora took the time to put what they did in their robots.txt, in a world where many sites still don't bother at all - one can assume they are paying close attention to the business value they are extracting from search engine driven traffic.
"It's not strange that people's perception of Japan is so out of whack with reality, it's mainly
because this country is still very closed."

I think it has more to do with the inaccuracy in reporting that the author mentions more than anything. There's a large selection bias in reporting on foreign countries; Japan is an exotic land of technology, so reports tend to focus on exotic technologies (LED eyelashes? Come on.)

With other places, like, say, Iraq or Pakistan, you tend to get war-centric reports rather than things about up-and-coming companies or various charitable events.

This particular paper seems to be very linked with this article posted earlier: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/asia/28generation.ht...
*pull requests containing a new, failing test. Love it.
Domain Pageranks Cheker
Chek Pagerank, and site Value
Been using it as a replacement for MacPorts for many months. Works well, easy to maintain. I like it.
Smoke Signals
Other books that influence how I build software:

"The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts" by Harry Binswanger,
"The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand,
"The Autobiography of an Idea" by Louis H. Sullivan,
"Reason and Analysis" by Brand Blanshard
Poorly defined question. What's an "Internet kill switch?" An executive order to shut down all routable ASes in the US? Legislative?

I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.
Did you actually read the article?

EDIT: my bad. I got confused between Facebook and Quora
I am not tech enough to know, but could an ad-hoc network be created from people's wifi connections that could get around an internet backbone shutdown? At least it should work to connect people within urban areas, I would think.
Hmm... I see the same issue. Let me see if I can figure out what the problem is.
"Undo" is one alternative to warning dialogs that users learn to click through mechanically.

There's at least one other: if you're going to implement some irreversible action, find a way to delay it --- like in email programs or file managers where the button labeled "delete" moves things to a trash folder, and the real deletion operation is separately labeled "expunge". Implementing this sort of thing is usually easier than keeping the "real" delete operation, and then implementing a separate "undelete" which works in full generality.
You know, it seems that way, but Americans might be the most docile population on earth. There's no way I'd believe they could get away with all the shit they have in the last decade with nothing but token complaints from the masses if it hadn't already happened. If the end of the internet in America was decreed tomorrow, sure it would be a monumental logistical challenge for the NSA, but there's always the Fed to provide them with whatever budget they need, and given what Americans are already perfectly willing to put up with, it isn't likely they'd do anything but roll over after a few sham demonstrations in designated sham demonstration areas.

It's depressing, but I think it's important for us to be realistic about how bad the situation really is if we're ever going to do something serious about fixing it. The reason we still have most of the privileges we do isn't because we're too powerful to have them taken away from us, it's because there hasn't yet been a need to take them away, or because we haven't (yet) elected someone with that sort of style (we certainly HAVE been too close for comfort).

I mean, America is effectively bankrolling the Egyptian censorship. There clearly aren't any qualms with the tactics.
Justice Department Seeks Mandatory Data Retention
I love pianobar- I use it daily and love the fact that it uses very little emory especially compared to the Flash-based official clients.

I'm not sure what the official Pandora position regarding pianobar is, but I did hear from an employee that they have worked to disable it in the past.
> A friend of mine has a little poster by his wall that says, "Stacktrace or GTFO"

This one? http://imgur.com/jacoj

That'd make an awesome poster.
Don't trust me - but I would wager a bet that the US government already has such infrastructure. We trust them with the power to detonate 1,000's of thermonuclear warheads or study Ebola virus for weapnization at USAMRID - the internet kill switch is horrible, but it is nowhere near the top of my list.
Because you think only people on the left are so insulated that they don't know any right-leaning folk, or because you believe I'm on the left and only read blogs and articles that express such views from the left?
Is it a possibility that Peter Klein is pulling this out of his ass? I've yet to see a Kinect at a house / dorm, but when Furbys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furby) came out, boy were they everywhere.
It's not necessarily a mistake to spend a million on a domain. What's alarming is when it's the first thing you do.
I think the ideal solution would be to adopt the deep springs model, where students do two years of monastic liberal arts education as described, and then finish off at a research university. I would have greatly preferred this over the actual college experience.
Goddamn this looks good. I've just finished a project that required us to do an audit of 20 social media dashboard tools and in 30 seconds these guys have made me want to go back to the client and show this to them.

Looking forward to starting the trial.
That's like asking, "should the United States have free speech?" But it also has other implications as well. If our enemies have networks, and ours our disabled, how in the world are we going to "win"? How do you even "win" a "cyber war"?

You can prevent "cyber warfare" by disconnecting sensitive stuff. You don't need to kill Wikipedia or my blog because there's not much warfare you can really wage with pages that aren't sensitive in nature. How is an enemy going to abuse Remember The Milk or Reddit to the extent that it cripples our national security? So a kill switch is not only stupidly impractical because it makes us more disorganized and disconnected than an enemy, but also because it's strictly unconstitutional.

A better question: is there a sane justification for it?
You're absolutely right, but is that such a bad thing?

I mean right now you could look at it like we're forcing Users to deal on a level of knowledge/abstraction that they don't want to be on ... that is too complex for them, as evidenced by things like users not knowing what a browser is or the inane questions users ask tech support when their computers run into trouble.

To take an extreme example ... Automobiles ...
I drive one everyday, but I barely know anything about how its built, how it works or how to fix it when its has problems ... now imagine if to start my car in the morning I had to have some knowledge of exactly how a car worked? (You can even substitute a manual transmission for this) ?
Wouldn't that be a bad thing?

What is going to happen is the segmentation of enthusiasts and experts from everyone else, and I actually think that is a good thing.
There Be Dragons.

A high bounce rate does not mean low-quality by itself. You'd definitely need to wrap some other indicators in there too. I think that would naturally become clearer by itself as you developed is.

I have no need for such a service. Then again, I said that about Twitter too...