skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like Paul Graham's essay where he points out that society can adapt to not have these things.

He uses the example where people used to have live in servants. Now people aren't willing to be butlers so the wealthy just go without.

A similar job would be hangman or executioner. If everyone decided not to do that job, then it wouldn't get done. Is that really so bad?

Janitors are quickly being replaced by passionate iRobot employees. Cashiers at the stores I shop at are replaced by self-checkout robots made by passionate robotics people.

Assembly lines and making clothing...... do I even need to say it?

Construction jobs should go unfilled, it's shitty work, why not leave it unfilled? Who cares? Soon enough those quad-copter construction workers will build stuff anyway.

The medical profession is full of passionate doctors and society will adapt if we truly run out of proctologists. Many dental visits would be unnecessary if people used proper preventative dental hygiene. Society could cut back on the suicidal dentists and be fine.

If a job would truly go unfilled due to lack of passion I doubt this would be a problem.

Also, every single job you listed, I guarantee there are people who thoroughly love those jobs.

Some people are passionate about making money and those people would be passionate about being a highly paid prison guard or executioner or butler. This is, in fact, pretty much what happens. People who love money a lot do become dentists and they do enjoy their job because it affords them their yacht on the weekends.

Passion for money is genuine passion.
If it's not a proprietary secret, can you elaborate on the compensating technology you guys developed?

I prefer encapsulating database logic in SPs as well, and am always interested in learning how others have solved some of the problems incurred with them.
If we discount 30 votes from 16–20, at the current distribution (roughly 14 older teens to each younger one) that gives maybe two extra 11–15s.
What does it really mean to be a hacker?
Thanks for the article. It's always good to read the open opinions of others and freely debate them .. sort of like the scientific community :D

I agree on your point about query plans; they do cost a hell of a lot. This is one of the reasons why we use caching solutions such as Redis and Memcached on top of a well planned out relational databases that we can poke and prod with SQL.

What's the hook for MySQL you are talking about?
One followon idea. If you know the approximate birthdate of the delivery, you can contact customers a year later suggesting first birthday present ideas.

And second birthday ideas.

And third birthday ideas.

You get the idea.
YouTube Partners With Curation Startup to Chronicle Protests in Egypt
How about pictures of Detroit from above? Especially the areas where nature is starting to reclaim parts of the city. That would be a different view than the 'pre-packaged suburbs' image.
Question (and I apologize if I missed it): How do you track purchases across multiple stores to show registrant purchasers' purchases? (say that 3x fast).

I can see how it would be done with exact matches, but a lot of stores don't carry the exact same items, in order to remove price competition. The items may look and function the same, and be under the same brand, but they will be distinct models.

If I list a 4 slot, extra-wide, chrome toaster on a registry under one model number from Target, how could I know if I should buy a toaster matching that description at WalMart without scanning the list of purchased items? The model of one store offers the convenience of being absolutely sure there aren't any duplicate purchases since once an item is purchase, it is removed.

I just realized a toaster is a bad example for a baby registry, but you get my point.
i think you failed the whole interviewing process when you agreed to complete and did complete the _unpaid_ "homework".
Your 'atomic operation' sounds a lot like a transaction. Or am I misunderstanding?
There has been an over 100% increase in DDoS attacks
Indeed; you can add as many "breaking" (normal) spaces as you like in HTML, and it will only show a single space. To add explicit spaces, use non-breaking spaces.
Mixing DOM and PHP objects for fun & profit
Really, how often do you see these things on mainstream sites? Most developers who care about those things are fighting other developers or founders who continue to use the "We need to make money, not be standards compliant" argument.

When I give talks on accessibility, that's the #1 thing people say. THey can't be bothered to care because they believe that time could be better spent solving their business problems. They often truly believe that it's too costly, or that their target audience doesn't care.

And sometimes, they're spot on. Fact is, people come to web sites (not apps, but sites) for content. If it's wrapped in a crappy container, people tend to just deal with it, as long as the content is worth their time.

[edited for typos and clarification]
Knowing how to do it naturally includes "knowing how to land the job".

Not as easy as it sounds.
If it is just transcoding then a) they are not storing it permanently, it is just in a "buffer" b) they are not changing the content any more than converting 16bit PCM audio to 8Khz voice quality (for instance for a music on hold application) is.

That is, it is not "alteration" in that the song or image is still recognizably the same - they are not changing the rhythm of the song or the height of the buildings in the image.
What Apple's Internal Culture is like
Behold, the magic of Apache (or pretty much any web server) ...

Alias favicon.ico /path/to/your/physical/location/favicon.ico

Now please give £300 for selling you this tip.
A useful feature might be to clean well known site URLs (like amazon/dp/<prod id>). I'm paranoid about sites leaking information.
Handling Keyboard Shortcuts in JavaScript
This is great, and it's awesome that you guys are back in the game after going through a big 'dip':
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325785

Kudos!
I'm getting an error when I try to edit an item on my list: "We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."

But it's inconsistent; I can edit other items.
I know a guy who likes to tell the following story about how he learned RPN:

Back in college, his calculator battery died right before a big test. He borrowed his roommate's calculator. It was an HP calculator.

After failing that test, he made a point to both learn RPN and always keep extra batteries.
Not everyone at 37signals is a programmer.
Hmm, is that a small bit of condescension I detect in your response? Our goal is also to create a large independent company, not build a $500k/year online TODO list company or whatever it is you have in mind (our revenues surpassed that in year 1).

I'm not really sure what you mean by 'independent', though, because all companies depend on their customers.... (QED?)

Here are some large, independent companies in our space:

RAX,
TMRK (well, not anymore I guess),
peer1.com,
he.net,
IBM

From what I can tell your competitors are the large mutual funds, ETFs, and retail wealth management, so I'm sure you will achieve success, as it's a large and proven market.

And as far as not recruiting this year - web content doesn't disappear after a year.
I'm hoping passive aggressiveness and lack of communication is not typical of high-tech or R&D.

I have no trouble believing it is common and maybe even typical of BIG companies, even if you're not in the R&D department.

I have worked for large high tech corporations and while there were death-marches at least there wasn't a crippling lack of communication and passive aggression. Sadly I am currently experiencing both of the latter at another Big Co's R&D department.

But I have found startups and small businesses to be refreshingly full of passion and free of BS.

This is why my thoughts revolve around working either for myself or at least partly for myself as a share holder in a startup.
You might just end up with less than 20 customers. It realy all depends on whether this is the ceiling of 5% or the floor of it. What is 1.3 customers, anyway?
Ditto, that very question came up earlier today. We just posted our splash page (http://AllMyBiz.com) - any advice or feedback would be appreciated.
Seriously, RPN was freshman year stuff for me. Did all the schools somehow ditch the classic "write a calculator" assignment?
Interesting website, very well designed.

I was baffled at first, because I didn't understand what a 'baby registry' is (despite the fact that I have two kids). Had to google it :) and now I understand. We have similar tradition for weddings, but not for babies. I wish you all the best.
Well good luck with everything. Assuming the surgery goes fine, there aren't any long-term effects besides having to get vitamin B12 injections every few weeks (since your terminal ileum is where your body absorbs most of it), but itll be at least 10 not-that-great days in the hospital =/
I think that the post you're replying to may have confused the target of the throttling. The comment would make sense in the context of Verizon FIOS rather than Verizon Wireless.
I don't understand why business project failures are treated like normal occurrences but government project failures are treated like fundamental and systemic problems with social democracy.
Funny pattern in responses. People on the younger side (<25) tend to be eager to prove themselves by listing their accomplishments, and people on the older side (>30) seem to be humble and self-deprecating, but still with that unmistakable hacker spirit.

I'm 28 myself, seems like 25-30 are the 'inbetweeners'.
Yeah, it doesn't support that.

I think the next step would be that when you add a product to the registry there's a checkbox like "let people buy this from other stores" which is default checked on amazon/babys-r-us and default unchecked on etsy.com. Then in the registry display you would see multiple offers for one product. Then there would still be the challenge you describe but it wouldn't be a UI problem, it would be a data challenge.
So, would you say the NSF is a money pit?
Try thinking of a baby shower concept/activity that participants have an emotional connection to. Usually the concept is a slightly slang term meaning there's a higher chance of the domain being available.

If it were a wedding registry, I would suggest maybe HitchedList? It would be better than WeddingList since it's less general. Obviously this doesn't help directly, but maybe will inspire some ideas!

I think the best startup names are those that relate to a market's pathos.
Totally agree on the efficient market thesis, but not when it comes to big research and public works projects.

In my post I reference an earlier short essay on mega projects

http://www.victusspiritus.com/2010/01/13/think-bigger-short-...

Some projects entrepreneurs can't build unless thousands of them get together. Many of these mega projects have resulted in very long term benefits. Hoover Dam, Panama Canal, Lunar Mission, DARPAnet are just a few ideas which entrepreneurs can't possibly tackle on their own, even massive corporate IR&D budgets can't be risked on such endeavors.
The final paragraph resonates with me. Of all the reasons I have ever considered for finding a more enjoyable but potentially less gainful way to make a dollar, the idea that my four-year-old is watching me both frightens me and builds my resolve the most.
Agreed, SSL should be the default.
[RTP (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) NC]

I am. I'm working on an open-source Enterprise 2.0 project; elements include social-networking (eg, a Facebook'ish piece, but intended for organizational use), knowledge management / discovery (using tagging, collaborative filtering, automatic text classification, semantic-web tech, etc.) and social-search.

The technology stack is primarily Groovy (Grails for the front-end bits); but there is some Java code. As some functionality spins off into standalone services, I'm considering either Scala or Clojure, but no firm decision has been made yet.

More details on the current state of things can be found at http://code.google.com/p/screwpile, and there's a demo of a very early prototype of one of the components, at

http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/

I'm looking for one or possibly two co-founders.

For one, I'd like to work with someone who is a top-notch UI/UX person with strong skills in terms of design, HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. and who can handle making the UI a strength.

For the other, I'm looking for somebody with a background in the sales / marketing / business development world... preferably somebody with actual experience doing B2B software sales, and actually closing sales. Any technical background would be a huge plus as well.

I'm in North Carolina and would prefer a co-founder to be local, but I won't categorically rule out working with someone remote, depending on the details.

I'm at a point where I feel like it's time to get into Customer Development seriously, and do the "get out of the building" thing and start getting feedback from potential customers; so that's a goal for the short-term, just to give you an idea of where this is at. Also, this is completely self-funded at the moment, but seeking outside investment is absolutely in the cards when this starts to look like it has some legs.

Finally... the (existing) code is out there, and Apache licensed... if anybody is interested on hacking on this stuff, but not interested in being a co-founder, feel free to jump in.

Interested? fogbeam [at] gmail [dot] com
Definitely a data matching challenge, and especially one stores wouldn't want you to solve :)
Nice tool.

I recently found and registered a 6 letter .com domain on godaddy: http://Shaloc.com, the site is mainly for Location Sharing, SHAare-LOCation = SHALOC, this is one way to find .com domains, the word may not mean anything, but based on what the site does it can be made easy to remember.

.COM is definitely better and easy to tell others about it.
Is hipster giving something in exchange for sign up? Am not seeing any offer on their landing page.
For myself as a CPAN author at least when I'm in the midst of writing the first release of a distribution there is usually no indicators that what you're doing will ever be used by someone else regardless if it's a new concept or tacking onto an existing. So sometimes the best thing you can do in the first few releases is just scratch your own itch enough yet keep it less specific for you and more for the problem and hope maybe someone else will pop up somewhere, either with a bug report, a patch, even just a moan on IRC to show interest, even if it is negative. Once I catch wind that someone else other than me, their feedback is very much taken into consideration and iteration and improvements can happen with a focus on the people who need it most.
For copyright to take effect the work must be "fixed" in a tangible form.

See here: http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/obtaining.html#fixation

That leads to a question of whether storing it in RAM counts as "fixed". I can't find a reference right now, but I remember reading that congress recently clarified the issue that storing in RAM does not count as fixed (and prior to that it was either an open question, or it did count).
I carry extra water on any long road trip, but especially in the desert. It's important in areas where you might get snow-stranded too.
This is a really good point. Also - as a startup, we typically got better candidates who came through our investors. Certain type of candidate was the one that knew where to look.

If you're in Los Angeles / SoCal - talk to Mark Suster at GRP Ventures. He's communicated that just about everyone in his portfolio is hiring.
There is a difference between playing the lottery, and playing regularly.

If a reputable organisation held a one-off lottery, in which you stand a very slim chance of winning £5M, for a £1 stake, then (morals and poverty notwithstanding) then the default position is to enter. £1 doesn't really buy you anything much.

If, on the other hand, the stake were £52, then you'd think twice. £52 is a fairly significant sum it could buy a decent meal out for two, or the latest game with enough change for a couple of beers on the way home.

Playing every week for a year is the same as that second scenario.
The url really doesn't matter. The name does, and it's great.

My advice would be to use the proper spelling ('Babylist') in general - especially in your html titles - and in no time you'll be #1 for the term, regardless of spelling:

http://bit.ly/h5fizW
Its insane to me how much leverage a first-approximation model of economic activity, developed more than a century ago, has amongst even highly intelligent people.

As soon as you leave the limit of omniscient investors with infinite capital you will quickly see why government investment is necessary for large projects with long-term impacts.
JQuery hotkeys
Small Romanian Town Has Become Cyber Crime Central
I think a second dimension on this discussion would be fascinating. "How old are you AND how old do you feel?" Although I'm not sure how to word that just right.

For instance, capturing situations like: Are you a 65 year old grandfather that feels younger through the interaction with the core crowd here? Are you a 12 year old aspiring hacker that seeks the maturity of the seemingly 20-something base contrary to the peers of their own age?
I love the concept for this, finding friendly hackers to help you on your hack project is massively useful
It spawned this plugin for jQuery: https://github.com/tzuryby/jquery.hotkeys

It even had contributions from the jQuery author himself.
The West Should Celebrate, not Fear, the Upheaval in Egypt
For those who have too little time to bother with broken links, the article is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
From my personal previous experiences with VC's, my general issue with them is how they wish to make you successful. They are concerned with the short term success, pump and dump to a certain extent. If that is your concern as well, then excellent. If not, beware that your definition of success, and theirs are going to conflict at some point, and could end up hurting both of you.
You don't really know the back story. Neither do I, but I've been here before, as I'm sure you must have.

What about the 3-5 comps the graphic artist did that were rejected by committee? Let's say there's 5 hours there. Then a meeting where some others sketch up their own ideas which could be done in MS Paint.

Then the artist gets to go back and implement that idea, which indeed probably took 5 minutes. But you still bill for an hour of your time, right? :)
> We can't apply skepticism to one source and not the other. Either Google and Bing are not blogging with self-interest and spin - and thus Bing are more trustworthy because they're blogging about themselves, or they both are blogging with self-interest and spin - and still Bing are more trustworthy because they're blogging about themselves.

Libel laws prohibit indiscriminate accusation, while there's no law against puffery.

The premise a company's own public relations messaging is more trustworthy than an outsider because the company's PR is about themselves seems without merit -- otherwise we would deem companies more trustworthy whenever an outsider points fingers, and send all the journalists, whistleblowers, and wiki-leakers home. "Nope, sorry, I believe the company, because they're talking about themselves."

Google presented incontrovertible data. Bing's PR tactic is "Google does this or that worse thing and profits off it" -- distracting hand waving -- "plus we're not copying anyway" -- deliberately disingenuous.

Responsive would be:

Of course our toolbar is recognizing search terms across the top N search sites, and correlating human selected results as an indicator of search intent and result quality for those search terms. This is the same thing you do when you look at your own web stats and check inbound search terms for your own pages: 'How relevant are my pages, and am I showing my users what they are looking for?'

This is the very definition of 'improving your search experience' as outlined when you install our toolbar. We're thrilled so many of you chose our Internet Explorer browser and Bing Toolbar that this provides us meaningful data on user search intent. We want to thank Google for demonstrating we are truly 'improving your search experience' using well accepted Internet crowd-sourcing techniques.

We agree, however, that generating correlations solely from competitor listings -- when we have no existing correlation in our own data corpus -- could be misperceived, so going forward, we will not create correlations solely from competitor results where none existed in our data. However, like every webmaster, we will continue to use crowd-sourced search term and results data from across the web to refine our suggestion order towards best predicting the information you want to find.
It's worth noting that there's a karma minimum one must have to be able to create polls, so emrahyalaz won't be able to create one.
Poll: Do you like my poll?
Do you enjoy polls that have a really useless question poorly disguised as genuine interest that give me karma?
College Diploma
3-4 Times per Day
We are experimenting with Clipperz Community Edition (the private version of the online Clipper) (http://www.clipperz.com/). We prefer the community edition because tt - somehow - feels better to have our (encrypted) data on one of our servers.
That's a good question, thank you to the reply below. I discovered it when my friend sent me the invite.
River of IPv4 addresses officially runs dry
I've seen much worse. One being a client billed 7 hours x roughly $150 for... wait for it... modifying a dns entry...

This is not a joke, and it was a pretty sizable dev shop here in iceland
It's hard to imagine a government which embraces risk and failure as par for the course for learning and improving, but it's worth doing.
Need Help/Feedback with Social Shopping / Style Q&A Site
Just launched the first version of my site, an online Q&A platform for style related advice, built with RoR, called GoodToGoOut (www.goodtogoout.com), and I'm looking to contract/hire an engineer who's interested in the idea, preferably in NYC, to help with the concepting and development of some part of the product's next iteration.

As well, if you're simply interested in checking out the site and offering some feedback it'd be much appreciated. I'll get back to you ASAP with an invite code if you email me at emeka@goodtogoout.com.

Thanks!
The Larry Page Era at Google is Going to Be Aggressive
This may be true of arts, but it's not true of science.

That would be why I was talking about the arts.

"this" is contentless. It is chaff. Noise. Mental overhead. It adds nothing

It's easy to see that this isn't always true. The "This" in elliotcarlson's original comment - for which he was reamed out and even felt obliged to ream himself out - wasn't contentless at all. Suppose instead he had written: "Here is the portion of the article that I found particularly significant." Nobody would have complained. Yet that would have been 10x as wordy and less idiomatic to boot. I knew what he meant when I read that comment and so, I bet, did nearly everyone else.

(I hope this subthread isn't too contentless. It's certainly offtopic. But language is intrinsically interesting, so I don't feel too bad adding to it.)
I know nothing about this industry, but I can say categorically that hipmunk has the best UX of any airline search site on the web. It just makes me happy.
I've picked door number two consistently throughout my career. It's more effective and much more meaningful to establish a relationship with decision makers from the get go.
Awesome free tool for iOS app design and prototyping