skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, it's very hard to measure good planning and foresight. I also definitely agree that emergencies happen, even to people that plan well. My main point was that there are some people who are constantly responding to emergencies, more than would happen by chance, and they're easy to recognize.

tjmaxal made a good point in another comment about specifically focusing on big picture for one month per year. I think it'd be useful to do that on different levels (one month per year, one week per month, etc). Managers could definitely measure time spent on big picture projects or automation versus handling crises. There are people I've worked with that spent 80% of their time handling crises. That should be a huge warning sign that aren't planning properly, or they're cleaning up somebody else's mess. Either way, that's a situation that'd be worth poking into.
Im sorry but this doesnt hold water when tumblr has 40 million in vc funding. If they were bootstrapped then yes maybe. But if his team is stressed out maybe they could start hiring people. Instead they are causing situations like this to happen.

Also im sorry but i dont care how stressed out you are. As a ceo you have a responsibility to treat your customers with respect. Especially since what the customer was asking was so simply and basic and straightforward. Its not like the emailer sent a nasty mean email calling everybody names and asking them why the service isnt working in harsh ways and being disrespectful.

He sent a very polite email to the people working there. Theres absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. Its part of doing business and doing customer service.

The response frankly was absolutely ridiculous. At the very least the response could have been more polite and simply said we apologize and are working on it.
Yes SO is above efreedom in this instance, but the SO results are actually worse then the efreedom result based on the query.
I do not have any direct experience with your type of situation.

Making cultural changes are hard and can take years. Think of your efforts as an experiment if you only end up making a small change at least you have learned how to do it better next time.

Start working on projects that effect other computer science students, the general student population, and the community in general. Preferably projects that make lasting changes, projects that will be used or remembered for years. Include these finished projects or proposed projects in your advertising.

Be warned this experiment may take years to produces results. Be happy with a small but lasting change, if it ends up being a big lasting change so much the better.
Any good alternatives to basecamp for a startup/side project?
We've been using basecamp for the project we're working on, and of course we're bumping up against the limits of the free plan.

I was thinking about upgrading to the basic plan, but just found out it is now $24 a month (I remember it being $10), which is something we can clearly not afford at this stage.

This isn't a rant against 37Signals or anything like that (though I think they should have more options to cover folks like us). I just want to know what hn'ers out there are using to project manage their startups.
In fact this is the first year that SS has to get payments from the general fund ~50 Billion IIRC. As more and more of our taxes go to entitlements either 1. taxes will need to raise or 2. benefits will be reduced or 3. government services will be reduced
Factual incorrectness aside, and even speaking as a person that doesn't have much to do with anything other than SQL RDBMSes: this style of presentation piqued my interest in Redis. Seeing how fast and easy it was to get up and running, seeing how simple the protocol was, and getting a smattering of its features in this very terse format was effective on me.
The two SO urls that rank above the efreedom url are for different questions. The identical SO link (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3977343/nstoolbar-on-bott...) doesn't seem to show up in the results at all.

Two SO links on the first page above any efreedom urls is a positive thing, but even so, if content is apparently considered good enough to make it to the first page, it should come from the original source rather than a scraper.
I notice that you run a competing site to collegegrad.com - namely onedayonejob.com. Obviously you are likely to have paid attention to some of the things your competitor has been doing. But are you sure you're not just using this as an opportunity to stick it to them? If so, that would strike me as a distasteful use of this forum, especially since Matt has been very gracious to give this opportunity to the HN community.
Huh? Microsoft was on the committee and big parts of SOAP design came from MS's DCOM - the most widely used RPC toolkit at the time.
Interestingly, net sales increased by 40% in 2010. Amazon is still close to being a not-for-profit organization, but they appear to be growing faster than Google.
Syndicating content across your own domains is a common practice and will not be effected by this.
Another thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151895
Show HN: The current status of our massive multiplayer iPhone Game
Seeking CIO, sysadmin heroes
The _relevant_ SO result http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1097115/bottom-bar-in-nsw... shows up in the collapsed results below the 2nd SO result!!
Agreed, but I don't think those are necessarily the kind of people in his audience -- reading Hacker News and articles on A List Apart, I feel like one can assume "make things usable" is a principle on which we can all agree.
http://tema.ru/travel/north-korea-1/
http://tema.ru/travel/north-korea-2/
...
5 parts
Another excellent example on why it is utterly important that we develop open-source GSM tools, both software & hardware.
Your blog isn't going to be deleted, dude. This isn't martyrdom, this is a customer service complaint.
"Operate as if in a vacuum" is taking a big risk: if you revolutionise the industry you win big, if not you die quietly. Most hugely successful people/companies will have taken huge risks early on. Does that mean that taking risk is a good idea?

I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad advice, but I think there is some selection bias here.
Couldnt agree more. I find it embarrassing for tumblr that all of the people involved with the company seem more interested in covering their own asses then dealing with the problems. Not a company personally i would ever want to be associated with.
There's nothing manual about this. Everybody who authors their own content should be helped. :)
NetBeans drops Rails support
How Reddit Gets You To Notice Their Ads
> Good, let it destabilize.

That's like wishing for an avalanche to start. The problem with avalanches is that you do not know when they'll stop, potentially you're talking about thousands or even tens of thousands of people to die. If the end result is worth it or not can not be known at this point in time. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
I will be adding this in a forthcoming version, thank you for your feedback!
Who got a Nexus S for Christmas?
How Hulu Lost Its Place In a Netflix World
A waterfall of nostalgia just washed over me. Thanks, just subscribed (I know this was for back issues, I decided on some new content).

2600 is great. Anyone else remember the knockoff Blacklisted 411? Or the definitely not knockoff, Phrack? Man, I'm 15 again. :)
Who knows, what with old broken software installed on old broken routers, but there are transpacific cables, and Asia is directly connected to Europe... so I think there would be no loss of Internet functionality in this case. NYC-LON ping times would be a lot higher, of course, but that's exactly why those cables exist -- to make things faster.
While I applaud such an improvement, I still despair over Google's inability to handle context. For instance the search phrase 'tex decorative rules' is totally miss managed. First it overrides the search and changes tex to text. Humorously enough, when you counter override back to tex, the search is even worse. We won't even speak of what happens when you change tex to latex--- porno doth ever rise to the top I guess. While we may be in a new millennium, some things remain far behind. And yes I know that things are being worked on from the those who were academic and are now working at Google, but still...
Im sorry but ive read a couple of youre comments and you say the same thing over and over again. Not dealing with the problems he mentions but simply attacking him personally. Which just makes his case look stronger and tumblr look more like a bunch of immature idiots.
will there be any penalization for sites that use wikipedia content. Specifically a site that would NOT show up in the same search results as a wikipedia page but a commerce site that uses some unaltered wiki content in the descriptors of the products?

I've seen many sites use this method of adding text to an image heavy site and have watched one particular site that uses this method of adding text, drop dramatically out of the search results since October 28th and again around Dec 28th.

Would you advise to discontinue the use of wikipedia content even though the targeted keywords differ from those of the actual wikipedia page?
There's some really annoying torrent sites like this. I mean, sites that pretend they have search results for whatever torrent you're searching for. Those show up on a google a lot and they're useless.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2...
Net approaches address exhaustion
A few great biographies: "The Man Behind The Microchip" by Leslie Berlin, "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It" by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, and "Just One More Thing" by Peter Falk.
I agree, the claim sounds like PR hype. It's a great device but the initial market is primarily XBox owners which is by definition a limited pool. The article suggests XBox sales last year were largely driven by the cheaper XBox slim, not by the $150 Kinect. It'll be interesting to see how it drives 360 sales this year, particularly after the inevitable price drop to $99.
SS is not a time bomb because we have a rather convoluted accounting scheme for the government. Let me explain by analogy.

Essentially, imagine you have a kid. You start socking away money for your children's college, call this the "college trust fund", which has future obligations of $200k. You also have your "general fund", which pays for food, daily expenses, etc.

Now your kid says "daddy, I want an X-Box." You point out that you can't afford it, but to make her happy, you take money out of her college fund. But she makes you put IOU's into the college fund, and you declare the college fund has no problem. You keep doing this, until the college fund is full of mostly IOUs.

You also have a younger kid, but he's too young to talk or pay attention to the management of your finances.

Eventually, the younger kid gets old enough to talk, and he starts to wonder. "How can we pay for college for me and my sister?" He looks at the price of having a roof over his head + the cost of college, compares it to income, and gets scared. Something has to give, and he describes his big sister's college fund as a "time bomb" that will ruin the family finances.

But his sister says: "Hey, there is no problem with my college fund. It's covered - look, the account is full of IOUs from daddy. Stop being such a jerk, trying to prevent me from going to college."
I too fear we are outliers.

But surely there must be a market for people like us who are also more likely to be high earners and tech opinion setters. And surely there must a way for a company to build trust and explain how/when/where advertising will be displayed that is acceptable to people like us, and everyone wins. Market opportunity?
What has happened so far: A curfew was put in place, it has done absolutely nothing, the streets are full of people everywhere in the country. There are reports of dozens of deaths. The headquarter of president Mubaraks party is on fire for hours, no firefighter are there. The headquarter is next the most important Egyptian museums. The police has no control over the streets, the army was ordered in to enforce the curfew. The people are actually cheering as the military is moving in. It is still unclear what the military will do. Hillary Clinton has issued a statement to the Egyptian government to restrain security forces and avoid violence.
Sometimes no response is better then this kind of repsponse which was completely unprofessional as well as disrespectful.
I seem to be posting this a fair bit recently:
* http://www.villagetelco.org/
* http://www.open-mesh.org/

But yes, I've been considering getting one on and off for 12 years. Sadly data over amateur radio doesn't appear to have progressed much in that time. Still, as voice comms it's pretty solid! Some countries UHF radio is still very popular (e.g. Australia).
Trader Racks Up a Second Epic Gain - $5 Billion in profit in one year
Surely. After having read this response I pivoted (had to) my reaction. The original post clearly intends to have the reader believe "go away" is a poor off-the-cuff defense to "your site is down". Which especially given the down time is a bad defense. That said, at this point I'm much more likely to believe "go away" is a valid defense to harassment.
30 Tips for Building a Successful Landing Page | Joanna Ciolek
This is obviously not a surprise, but what I don't know is what I - as a standard internet user, without active domains, an online business etc - should be doing about IPv6.

If the changeover is not happening fast enough, is that because I haven't requested something from my ISP, or should I be lobbying them to do something themselves sooner?
So OpenBTS is doing a reasonable job on the base-station side, at least for small call volumes: http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

Does anyone know of an open-source stack for handsets?
> In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a newb to Redis. My
> knowledge is basically the contents of this post (at the
> time of writing). I don’t use it in production (yet).
> Likewise I’m no expert in AK-47s (I’ve never even fired
> one) or guns in general. I’m aware via notoriety alone.

Fantastic quote. So you're hardly familiar with either component of your simile, but you'll post it anyway? I really don't expect New Yorker-esque editing from bloggers, but that's simply not very substantial writing.

No wonder people make fun of the so-called "NoSQL movement."
I think most movies use the Chinese Type 56 assault rifle, which is a Kalashnikov knock-off and is far more common in the US than the real thing. Most people can't tell the difference between the two.

BTW, I highly recommend "The Gun" by C.J. Chivers. It's a fascinating historical treatise about this weapon.
Apparently, it's subjective. Someone on Reddit said the Arabic version is akin to Fox News, while others felt it's doing a good job. So I guess it depends on what you're expecting to hear.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/eryzu/al_jazeera_...
Foolish move by the government. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are broadcasting images non-stop, and satellite TV cannot be turned off with a switch. Shutting off communication is ruinous to a modern economy like Egypt. Plus it broadcasts fear and emboldens the protestors. A suicidal move by the government (or so I hope!).
SeL4: World's 'first hack-free' software developed
On the other hand, it may temporarily solve the ipv4 address exhaustion issue
I found it remarkable that both Quora and the article in question have something in common. Both scream 'useless garbage'.
So I assume you are following the Tunisian scene or living here?

* message could not be sent, are you sure your email is correct.
Granted existence: Are you willing to take the chance?
Books that sharpened my thinking: "An Introduction to Logic" by H.W.B. Joseph, everything written by Ayn Rand, "On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle" by Franz Brentano, and the works of Aristotle.
The entertainment division operates WP7 and consumer software (as stated in the article), so what makes you think this division only cares about selling XBox?

Microsoft (from my understanding) doesn't have exclusive rights to the Kinect tech, just for it's use in certain applications, but with the relationship that Microsoft has PrimeSense (the company which created much of the kinect technology), I'm sure groups outside of just the Entertainment division are looking at ways to leverage the tech and relationship.

The brilliant hacking that is going on with kinect show just how valuable this tech can be in different uses. I'm sure microsoft will be leveraging much of this for ideas. Hopefully they'll be getting into the acquisition game and picking up some of these hackers to continue to create great experiences with kinect on platforms other than xbox.
I'm very ambivalent on this uprising. Murbarak is a brutal, evil person but the Muslim Brotherhood will be no better for the people of Egypt than he is.

The Shah was a horrible person, but do you think the Ayatollah have brought peace, prosperity, and democracy to Iran?

One thing a radical Egypt will do is further destabilize the region. Particularly the situation with Israel will grow very tense. I am no flag-waver for Israel, but I can't see how a new enemy will do anything but further harden the worst impulses of all participants.
Egypt's current regime may not be hostile towards Israel, but more importantly, it is very hostile to Egyptians.
I believe they meant the Kolmogorov complexity of the environment constituting the problem posed to the agent -- not the complexity of the agent itself. I don't have access to the paper, though. (Edit: the paper confirms this -- thanks, rubidium.)
This is another class of problems we're working on. Expect some changes here in the next few months.
I've thought so. Haven't gotten my act together, yet, though, with respect to tackling it.

EDIT: I guess that can sound kind of narcissistic. But, this is a forum with a start up focus. So I feel I have some license to at least think in that direction. :-)
Attention entrepreneurs, newspapers need a paywall provider like described in the article. What a wonderful business opportunity for a few years before they all go through bankruptcy.
Completely agree. This type of stuff happens ALL OF THE TIME in business. Sure sometimes you want to react like this but you realize its not in the best interest of your customer or the company. Even if the customer is wrong or right all of it gets lost in noise. He should have taken a time out chilled out and then responded. Instead it was reactionary and ridiculous. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong in this situation.
That’s why the West’s support for suppressive regimes is so dangerous. It’s a temporary fix, you can’t count on it forever and it might just erupt and end badly for everyone involved. It seems like a pragmatic fix but has serious downsides.

If at all possible the West should avoid to let the enemy of its enemy become its friend.
The US government would not have to shut down the rest of the world, it would just have to shut down it's portion of it. All the resources that matter for that purpose are directly under it's control.

> I don't know a single one who would actually shoot a person for refusing to shut down a router, especially in the context of an attempted government shutdown of the Internet.

That's called desertion.

Would they also refuse to take foreigners hostage and place them in confinement outside of US soil to stop them from having access to the courts?

Typically when people with guns show up the options are 'do this or else', where or else can be anything from we'll take you prisoner to we'll put holes in you where they do not belong. And you will end up doing what you're told.

Really this is an insane discussion, no ISP would hold out for more than 15 minutes to the moment of shutdown, you can choose it to be an orderly one with a chance of getting stuff back up once the order is lifted to one where stuff will be shut down by major force. Shutdown the power (and the generators) and it's curtains anyway.

I understand that you'd like it to be otherwise. Let's hope we'll never find out who was right ;)
I thought the original email was a lot less deserving of a flippant response than the hatchet job blog post.
1.) The destabilization is due to youth overthrowing dictatorship in order to establish democracy. You're saying that's a bad thing?

2.) The avalanche has already started, despite our massive meddling.

3.) US should not have a say in middle east, period. What gives us the right?
What's Alan Kay done to make him an enemy of the British government?
What about a country where the head of the church is also the head of the armed forces?
Where nuclear missile submarines are launched with "god bless her and all who sail in her"?

Where belief in God, the head of state and the superiority over foreigners are pretty much the same creed
Not exactly a scraper site, but if you do a search for "learn to hack" the top result is just a list of SEO keywords:

http://www.learn-to-hack.com/

Several of the other results are rather dubious as well. The reason I bring it up is because the Squidoo lens that comes up is something I made, and while certainly not perfect it's still a much better than many of the SEO spam sites and fake eBooks that rank above it. (And plus the ad revenue is going to charity rather than some shady organized crime ring.)

Anyway sorry if it's a faux pas to complain about my own stuff, but I feel like it's a legitimate problem with the way Google works.
You also should understand that Egypt controls the Suez canal, which is not just a major international shipping channel carrying goods of all sorts, but is also vital to the US Navy in it's efforts not just to carry out it's missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also for how it polices waters off of Somalia and the Horn of Africa in it's efforts to fight real world piracy.
It seems kind of ironic to have to get a license to get around services the government might shut down.
I can't seem to replicate this:

http://i.imgur.com/kDwPd.png

Are you sure there isn't something else going on?
>> Can you cite a reference there?

> No, this is not an academic paper.

If you can't support your assertions, they are worthless, regardless of what the context is. Asking for citations is a really common practice on HN, and one which almost always improves the conversation; despite the fact that you're one of the most prolific members, you still need to conform to community standards.
Of course they won't sleep well tonight- the last thing we want is a violent Islamic theocracy in Egypt. Egypt isn't Tunisia.

If this revolution goes through it's 50/50, liberal democracy (ElBaradei) vs Islamic theocracy (Muslim Brotherhood). It's that 50% chance that keeps us supporting Mubarak.

American foreign policy is deigned to secure American national security- we have our hands full in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia. The last thing we need right now is to have to worry about Egypt as well.
Is it a surprise that tens of thousands may die? They appear to be willing to take that risk and I applaud them. The American Revolution cost 50,000 lives on each side.
It's all of a piece. After all, Mubarak's response to citizens violating curfew today was to expand the curfew nationwide. "The Frog and the Scorpion" comes to mind.
Maybe it's being downgraded because it's being seen as dupe content?