skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please don't be abused....

Please don't be abused....

Please oh please oh please don't be abused.

Please, ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend with a facebook password, avoid the temptation to post a fake suicide note and then report using someone else's account.

Or middle schoolers who think this would be a funny practical joke.

Ever had a sinking feeling?
Will Beluga have push messaging? I think that's one reason SMS is so successful - the near instantaneousness of it.
Just 2 hours back I though of writing my project report in LaTex, but then after 1 hour of tinkering I switched back to MS Office because I needed to get work done today.

May be if I'll have some spare time, I will learn it and write my next report in LaTex.
I posted a brief explanation and demo installer at http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/archives/1350. I'm using http://www.cocotron.org/ and http://www.gnustep.org/ to provide the missing platform libraries.
You have to realise if you're not focused on one project your mind is going to be scattered everywhere and you'll end up with half assed products or incomplete projects. I made this mistake when i was trying to start something like 3 companies at the same time when i was 15/16, i wanted to do it all. You just can't.

For example if you had a series of essays to do in a certain amount of time, they'd all probably be mediocre or incomplete. Yet, if you had to do one essay in the same amount of time that one essay would be pretty impressive, you'd have time to proof read, spell check, change areas etc...

Pretty poor example but you get the idea.

Find one and stay focused on it.

When the idea becomes no longer fun get some feedback, nothings more motivational than feedback. There's going to periods were you just can't be bothered or were it tires you out and the next task/step is soo complex you procrastinate for weeks, you have to identify this and the fact that it happens and push forward.

On thing i do, it's pretty weird, start with really small tasks and build up til' you're in a productive state. (do the dishes, reply to emails, make breakfast lol) When it comes to the hard part (opening up the code editor and getting started) what i do is kinda' go consciously unconscious, you phase out everything, the task, every thought in your head (you might even go light headed), complete yet forced zen and just start coding, when you "regain consciousness" you'll have already started the task and it will be less of a mountain.

And prioritise.

I'm currently at university, in my first year, working on my new start up. It's more important than university to me, i haven't been a class all term and only about 2/3 lectures this term because i'd rather be designing/programming. My priorities are with my idea not with this degree, i have a load of other ideas and what i'll learn from this start up with help me with the others later on.

Just shelve the ok ideas and push forward with that one idea you love the most.

D
Bookmark navigation on OS 10.6.6 with Chrome 10.0.648.127 beta works just fine. Clicking the address bar doesn't work, though.
Ok, well your parents are much more clued in than mine!
My Dad can figure out Word and Excel, but if he was expected to write codes I think he'd struggle. Maybe I'm being too harsh on him though.
Are you sure you aren't thinking of public companies? I've been in a fair number of sales and M&A meetings where I heard people lying up a storm about corporate health or financials. Any laws to cite?
You might mention prominently on the landing page that Socialcam is free of charge. That's a lesson that Instagram seems to have taken, anyway: http://instagr.am
Actually I've created custom styles by modifying existing ones, and it isn't nearly as hard as it seems. Indeed, most academic styles are not more than a few hundred lines of code.
HTML5 vs. Silverlight -- good discussion.
I think it's okay to use revenue as a measure of valuation as long as there is strong growth. A company may have 0 profit now but as it grows, it can control costs and hence turn a profit (economies of scale).
Apple does contribute beyond what is required. They are not required to post their updates to LLVM+clang, but they do. launchd was considered for Ubuntu before they licensed it under Apache (it was under APSL at the time). They didn't have to hire the CUPS dev to work on it. If you go through Apple's OSS listing [1], if it has the APSL license, that's something they released themselves.

[1] http://opensource.apple.com/
It's not where you are. It's where you're going.

I liked this article, but my experiences have been different. From what I've seen, it seems like broad career choice is also incredibly significant; and that's something rich kids often get wrong (from the perspective of an entrepreneur). They want to have happy lives in prestigious jobs, and there lies the problem. They want stability instead of the ability to change something.

Now I'm studying abroad, and have met up with a bunch of rich kids. They all want to party. Sure, if I get a job with them it's possible they'll do better than me. So I won't get a job with them.

Let's look at the top entrepreneurs right now. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. All of them were well-to-do but weren't rich. But that didn't matter for them at the time. Because their ambition was far more powerful than their income.
3d Sokoban?
I don't know about amazingly. It seems entirely predictable: phone makers desperate for something to rival iOS, and Google provide it for free. Why would they turn it down? Android's popularity, in a funny sort of way, is actually indicative of the iPhone's lack of serious competition. What would be amazing is if one of the Android handsets outsold the iPhone.
The entire article can be summed up with this line "And if that worker feels spied on and censored, surveilled and suspected, he will resent it, and his boss, and the company, and life at work will be that much harder for all."

The title doesn't really have much to do with the article itself. Misleading linkbait probably designed for just the type of people the article describes.
Should also second the mention that SimAnt is awesome.

I wasted many many of my childhood days playing that game, and feeling the rush everytime my hoard of ants took down a huge freaking spider.
That graph says Download at Dropbox. Secret info? :P
Firefox phones some of your URL's to Google to 'check for malware'
Sounds great, but I bet a few months after they finally purchase them everyone will wonder what pilots are doing with outdated iPads.
It's hilarious and ironic that Simonyi helped develop Bravo, the predecessor to Latex, and then went on to oversee the development of Word, the main competitor.
Just Book Off - Open for beta users
New web service for managing staff leave, currently open for beta testers
It will be abused anyways, this is the Internet. Facebook could simply log IP (as if they don't already) and report the trolls.
So far it hasn't been at all, that was the point of the test:

"The system had been operating in a trial mode, without publicity for three months, during which it received several genuine reports and no hoaxes, according to Samaritans."

Doesn't sound too bad.
His nickname throughout the process of writing was Jack... as in "the Ripper". Maybe that'll help dispel the chimney sweep from your mind. ;-)
Most coaches would rather play it safe, especially where the risk of turning over the ball with favorable field position outweighs the benefit of another 4 downs...but what if the 4th down decision to punt or to 'go for it' could be crowdsourced? Meaning fans could weigh in with their decision from the stadium or from home - maybe this would help tip the scales in those questionable scenarios...
Framework for fostering better conversations in comments sections
YouTube Buys NextNewNetworks, Launches YouTube Next
I don't know if they agreed, but IIRC they both said that new controllers (Kinect and Move) are the "next generation", so we shouldn't expect the next next generation for several years.
I don't think it was that predictable a year ago for most people. There were still many people thinking Android would have no chance against iPhone, and the last argument I heard about this was that iPhone would kill Android once it goes to Verizon, too. And this was only a couple of months ago when Android was already surging. A year ago when Android had 4% market share, ideas like that were a lot more popular.
Hey Facebook, Your Code Is Showing
Paper flight charts are there for a reason - they're made of paper!
Yep. When you're out of cash, the game is up, no matter what the P&L says.

A different way to look at it is this: cashflow tells you the health of the company right now, P&L in the long run. You need to watch both.

For example, you've booked $100 million of sales for the period. According to the P&L you're profitable by $20 million. A bill arrives from a supplier for $10 million.

But supposing you only had $5 million cash on hand. Unless those customers begin paying you money for the booked sales, you are in trouble. Time to take corrective action.

Likewise. Consider that you're in a business where customers pay on purchase (most retail industries). Your cashflow might be excellent in that you have plenty moving across your books. However costs are rising and you are making a loss on the P&L. Eventually this will deplete your cash and you will be out of business. Time to take corrective action.

Used properly, P&Ls and cashflows are a monitoring tool, a kind of standard Nagios/munin/zenoss for your business.
Why is gender protected? You seem to be perfectly ok with discriminating on age (experience) and where you live.
This makes Facebook seem more creepy. To me and anyone already concerned they have to much user information.

One alternative would be to have Facebook sponsor a new independent local charity to do exactly this. People can relate to a local charity, they can't relate to Facebook.
"The very best filter is an empowered, engaged adult. Whether online or offline, people act out the most when they don’t see anyone in charge. Next time you see dreck being slung in the bowels of a news story comment thread, see if you can detect whether anyone from the news organization is jumping in and setting the tone."

This suggests that Hacker News can promote good quality comments by having its founders (pg and others) actively participate in comment threads. And they do. Maybe that is part of the secret sauce here. (For the record, I am horrified by the comment threads on all the online news articles hosted by the two major metropolitan daily newspapers in my town. I don't see any editors slogging into those morasses.)

After edit: For people who care about the condition of comment threads on news sites (aren't some YC start-ups trying to restructure local journalism?), the post "Why news orgs can police comments and not get sued"

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/01/david-ardia-why-news-orgs-c...

is quite an interesting read.
Implementing Workflows on Google App Engine with Fantasm
Are "teens" born or made? An interesting twist.
UIDickBar
There's stuff I don't talk about, but it's operational stuff, not basic concepts.
UK 'over-reliant' on GPS signals, engineers warn
I know folks who have used e-readers for this purpose too. Charts are a really natural fit since they are updated regularly and they are bulky. Next up check lists.
Tread lightly. There seem to be dozens, hundreds of new philanthropic web services, and almost all of them have an incredibly difficult time of distinguishing themselves.

My suggesting is to stay very narrow to one field. Better yet, join one of the others (Clojurerocks seems nice). You don't need your own charity business to be useful, especially when so many good ones already exist and are trying to innovate themselves.
When writing my dissertation I burned a couple of days trying to get up to speed with LaTeX as it came so highly recommended by smart people I respect. However the tooling let me down. Now I understand one of the joys of LaTeX is the ability to write with any text editor but there were a many things I wish made my life easier. Like an editor that actually ships with Spelling, tag completion, helpers and importantly... good documentation for how the UI works.

I was constantly frustrated. What about inserting a picture? I was pointed to packages to try to locate for my OS & install, perl scripts to convert my PNGs to whatever format my tex distribution uses. I wished whatever editor I used had a simple Insert->Picture menu that could do all of the work behind the scenes.

So I ditched that and bought Office 2010 Student edition for €69 and wrote my dissertation in Word. I got the formatting just how I wanted it within a few hours. The Navigation View was fantastic for visualising the structure of my document. I was able to drag and drop paragraphs, sections, chapters around with ease and even though I spent a few hours fiddling with the styles, I was able to turn out a PDF that looked absolutely terrific that had none of the formatting mess in that article.

I will take the time to learn LaTeX better in the future, but if minds are to be won, better intuitive tools need to be built that HELP the writer, not writing long articles saying why it's the best.
Sounds like a problem with your machine. That is obviously not typical.
We Have the Answers you Seek Now
What makes Facebook's comment system important? Identity and Traffic.
Yes, they currently depend on kernel patches to provide bulk map/unmap APIs as well as some other vm_area trickery to allow parts of physical memory to be mapped to multiple places in virtual memory with different protection flags.

(assuming I understood their talk correctly)
Facebook, Single Identities, and the Right to Be Anonymous
I don't read newsletters.

While some do, their use is dying and being replaced with new forms of social media. Even if your business becomes huge, it's going to be facing a market that's declining. That doesn't seem like fun.
I'm using Airtel. I have no idea what my actual scheme is but I do know that I hardly pay anything on local text messages. And almost everyone I know in India (regardless of carrier) has a similar deal where the cost of sms is, as they say, a rounding error.

The exception is when they charge extra on holidays. I guess that part is a bit of a racket, though a more benign explanation would be that they're just trying to keep the network traffic to a maintainable level on those days.
What happens when you run out of batteries mid flight? Paper doesn't have that problem.
He meant Ghash/sec. That's quite a few ATI cards. ;-)
We're talking about color as a storytelling element, not as a mechanism to get a visual pop.
Great minds: http://mvccss.codeplex.com/
I use whatsapp which, I'll readily admit, is not without its flaws, but it's available across multiple platforms and has a fairly large user base. It also runs on blackberry in addition to iOS and android and, fwiw, symbian. I also like the fact that it registers you and your favorites by phone number - people have many email addresses but typically only one mobile number. I've found so many people I likely would never have connected with otherwise, show up in my favorites.

I've never tried Kik, but I know several people who signed up when it first came out, but then stopped using it after a while because they realized there weren't that many other people using it.
OMG. We gave away 100,000 free recordings to military parents in 134 days
I guess you mean for CPU mining? Mining with a GPU is definitely profitable.

That's why the difficulty keeps increasing; mining is so lucrative that an ever increasing number of people are getting on board, which drives up the difficulty.
Taming the Wild: Tame Foxes
India's social media revolution brings in older users
I don't think it would be possible to disagree more. Connections are not at all necessarily required for startup success.

I am speaking here merely from an anecdotal and firsthand perspective, but all it takes is one data point to refute the claim that condition A is necessary for outcome B.
Best seller, the Best seller from fashion7days.com
Three Facebook stories on the front page of HN at the moment. The rot is in for sure. For a second, I thought I was reading TechCrunch.
Yeah have seen that only issue is it's only for Opera browser. However Google[1] and Mozilla[2] are both working on remote debugging solutions that will allow you to have true remote debugging abilities, like attaching break points and do a whole bunch of really cool stuff that isn't possible with just JavaScript. There is also the weinre project[3] which has some huge potential.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/chromedevtools/wiki/ChromeDevToolsP...
[2] http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Crossfire
[3] http://pmuellr.github.com/weinre/
Ask HN: How to compete with a local giant...on a budget. 
Hello everyone,

I am thinking about starting an online job board for my city.
( <100,000 Primarily Agricultural )

There's already an online job board for my area in place, but I think I can execute better.

They advertise everyday on local television which for me at this point is impossible to do.

They service surrounding areas which I am planning to do as well.

Taking into consideration the size of my town and how long my biggest competition has been around (about 4 years)... should I bail on this idea and move on to the next one?

People in small towns don't like change too much.

I'm planning on running commercials that people will remember as opposed to running the same boring commercials everyday, and planning on charging less than my competitor.

Anyone else running a job board that can offer some advice?

Thanks in advance.
Do a lot of people pay per SMS message? I've been on an "unlimited" text message plan for at least 4 - 5 years. Granted it's still a lot of money in terms of the raw bandwidth consumed, but as is pointed out here very often, the price of a product is more about its value to its users than the cost of its raw materials.
They intend to have two of them, one per pilot.
The problem is that under the hood there is a query language. When you have no query language, you can't inject commands into it, either by carelessly passing user input down the stack or assembling your own queries.

It would be devilishly hard to inject malicious operations into ZEO/ZODB (the one "NoSQL" I am very familiar with). I can only assume it would be equally hard to do it with systems that do not try to replicate the human-friendly nature of SQL.
I hadn't learned of sendgrid prior to going with critsend. That said, critsend has been fine with supporting my few issues, and until they let me down I'll keep trusting them :)
How much does it cost to call a cell phone in the US?
Please make a recording available more widely afterwards, for those of us who can't attend. I'd pay the same amount you're suggesting as an in-person donation for this, if it comes to that.
>you may be misunderstanding bitcask

Yes I was, I apologize. It must have been MongoDB that required total data be no larger than amount of RAM.

The test was run using protocol buffers and Python client on the same computer testing reads vs. a naive map reduce. The naive map reduce was storing 4,000 files in a folder, treating the filename as the key and parsing the text file contents from JSON into a python dictionary to see if an attribute matches. Basically I figure doing a loop of thousands of blocking disk accesses from a laptop harddrive on a standard filesystem buffering nothing in memory should always be much slower than any database.

This was last year so maybe Riak's performance has increased since then. I'd be interested if TokyoCabinet was added as a backend.
> FYI, objectivists are also allowed to buy birthday presents for their toddlers.

I thought they weren't allowed to have toddlers in the first place.
"When I'm done with college, wal-mart customers are going to get a piece of my mind since I won't be worrying about getting fired."

Right, because having a college diploma is equivalent to guaranteed employment.
Lego should fire all its designers (Or release an API)
Yet another python video tutorial
You shouldn't be able to update the system's MacRuby (or anything else, for that matter). Doing this is pretty suicidal.

And your old Perl problem is a Python problem for me. Too many Red Hat servers have 2.4 installed where Python is supposed to be. I have to build my own and call it from the /usr/local tree
The web2py database abstraction layer (video tutorial)
Joining the choir, this is fantastic. I've been writing Android apps for a year, and still got several useful pointers out of it.
Mailchimp & Campaign Monitor are the class of the bunch, you can't go wrong with either one. Easy templating, nice stats, A/B testing, autoresponders, API, good customer service.

iContact and Vertical Response are my next two favs, especially the latter if you send direct mail.

I've never used the enterprise solutions, but when I was researching for a client I was gravitating towards ExactTarget. You can do some pretty sophisticated rules for who gets sent what and when based on their behavior.
The main problem, at least for me, is that it is on Sprint's CDMA network so it doesn't work if you travel out of the country. Another issue for some people is it doesn't have flash.
Advice on User Testing Methods?
Hi All,
I'm currently writing up a user testing plan for an application that I'm working on. I'm an Industrial Designer with an non-traditional background and tons of free users-- now all I need is the most efficient system of testing my prototype. Which start-up companies should I look to, to best understand the process of effective user testing?
You plug it in and charge it. At least that's what I did on my last vacation when I was in the air for 15 hours.
AppHarbor (YC W11) adds support for Mercurial
Then if you have any honor as a maker of things and a doer of stuff, you'll appreciate that your new thinkstuff was given a chance to become greater then you could ever make it.

I think you're exactly right that a number of people think this. It certainly crosses my mind before I bully myself into not being so pathetic... Lots of people are better at stuff then me, and the reverse is also true.
Seconded. The claim that height is some sort of social, sexual, or financial advantage is absurd.
> #1 in volume doesn't always mean #1 in profit.

Unless you're an Apple shareholder why does that matter? As a developer #1 in market share is a very significant milestone.
Psychopaths aren't a problem until they start killing people. Yes they have a certain psychological profile but if you take away the serial killer part, nobody cares.
I would liken it more to your ISP charging you an additional $30 a month on top of your internet subscription to be able to use instant messaging.
Facebook Redesign (Concept)
"- Magnifier:

zoom in and zoom out."

Aw, I was hoping the magnifier did something else.
Word is easier to use, but some of the document processors built on top of TeX/LaTeX (like Lyx) alleviate a lot of the LaTeX pain. And you still can go down to LaTeX if you need to fine-tune the output.
Why You Don't Need A New MacBook Pro
Only to those in the U.S. In most of the world, "libertarian" means left-wing, and anti-capitalist.
Ask HN: Why is the Android emulator so slow?
Coming from an iOS mobile development background, the Android emulator is ridiculously slow. Anyone know why it's like that?
The biggest issue I've noticed is when listings use a local reference for the location instead of a street address or intersection: for example, a Cambridge, MA listing might refer to "Kendall", a Portland, OR listing might refer to "alphabet district".

I do think Padmapper is great, though. It's still a huge improvement over the Craigslist interface.
Asterisks without whitespace (or a leading indent) mean italics: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
True, but in a salaried job in the UK, it's typical to include those hours in your total (though not if you're paid by the hour). At least in my experience. So if you're "at work" 9-5 M-F, that's still a 40 hour work week.