skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, he knows they're update-able. I think its very low-cost to him to let/make me keep working without validating the basic app with users... its like building a house where one guy does all the work, and the other guy gets to decide when its done. The "decider" doesn't have much incentive to let the worker stop.
> There are plenty of other cheap VPS providers anyway...

Certainly, but what am I supposed to do, hop from provider to provider according to who (blanket-)blocks what...?

> you are rather a special case

I setup this VPN, following instructions from a blog post from 2009; I'm guessing there are many people who did the same?

But if I'm going to die as collateral damage, I don't intend to succumb quietly! ;-)
You originally said that the people with brown eyes would commit suicide after 900 days. Can you explain to me how any of them can know for sure that they don't have green eyes?
Nanomaps on Android
Digitalismo.com / el origen de las ideas (1st part)
Why women love Viagra - Know why Why women love Viagra at scviagra.com
Specially annoying is when the "check this if you don't want to receive spam from us" checkbox is unchecked every time the form is shown again after a server-side validation error.
You'd think they could rate limit requests coming from EC2 ip addresses rather than blanket banning, but I guess value wise its cheaper to block all of them given the low likelihood of it being a real person.
I guess you could use the most followed users to create a default-filtered firehose, but whatever happens there's going to need to be some form of default setting, where people have to start filtering to refine results (even if it's just by tag a-la Reddit).

Any other ideas about how to solve that?
I think the "surplus effect" here would also be nice. If he was willing to accept $55k and you say, "tell you what, let's make that $75k because we really like you," you're going to get a very happy employee, because he perceives that you just gave him $20k he wasn't expecting. Whereas if he just threw out $75k and you said "fine," it doesn't feel like a gift.

You could get a similar, cheaper surplus effect with all your employees by throwing in perks. "Now that we've agreed on salary, we also want to give you an extra personal day each month," or a laptop, or a trip to a conference, or a weekly lunch, or something else that's nice but not incredibly expensive.
Let your community grow alongside you: Ship unfinished apps
I think it gives the site a feel more like MetaFilter. Exactly as you say, your impetus to post is stripped of the karma motivation, and becomes more purely affected by actually wanting to make a contribution.
Ace The Phone Interview
They surely can't call them "freedom reduction" or "anti civil liberties" laws.
If you just need proxy support to get around restrictions, EC2 is an expensive way of doing it (assuming you're using it 8 hours a day).

You can get a VPS (http://www.lowendbox.com/ tracks various offers) for as little as 3 USD/month, and have it 24/7/365. Even if you're using an EC2 micro instance, you'd have to use it less than 150 hours a month (out of 730) to get ahead.
There's actually an extension Persistent Text that does this
https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/persisten...
Are you kidding me? US media is as censored as Chinese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-p5822Yew
> While in Java we have only common/shared memory.

That isn't entirely true. There are ThreadLocal variables in Java. However, these have some performance ramifications and have to be carefully managed so they don't leak, basically because the system wasn't designed with this kind of storage in mind.
1. Should have been clearer on point 1 - it's not limiting the size of the community, but the size that any individual user can see. I'll edit this

2. To allow users to self-segment themselves to keep the content they see tailored to their interests

3. Of course there needs to be a human level, but ideally this would be at an administration, not a workings level
EC2 is always marked as spam if you try to send email from an instance too. It would be nice if Amazon could create some tier of white listed, verified non-spam instances or something.
Are you against nuclear power?
I contacted Dan and suggested he try to find interested neurosci guys to scan his brain as he progresses, he's going to do so (local uni) tomorrow, very cool.
Very interesting. I'm surprised that there's no way to limit the size of Erlang queues and therefore memory usage. Surely simple limits like that are a necessity for any production environment? Can anyone with deeper knowledge about Erlang comment on that?
I'm assuming this is levelled at HN? It's probably the only forum I use regularly where I get timeout's on submission. And the timeout page isn't even friendly either.
How is life at Initech?
Whilst it's not ideal, currently experiencing spammer abuse had lead me down similar paths on one of my web apps. Sadly solutions like this free up time for more core functionality - which I'd much rather spend my time developing, considering that abuse prevention is not a feature you can charge for exactly.
Some people, when confronted with a calendaring problem, think "I know, I'll use Lotus Notes". Now their subordinates have two problems.
Navy officer => Startup => Freelancing/Bootstrapping

PC => Mac

Paris => Small village

No kid => kid
oh, i hardly buy any crap i dont need, although i can always buy even less.
the "stuff" that i want is just more space/rooms.

skilling up and being promoted has already happened, although there is always room for improvement.

i thought it was obvious, so i didn't mentioned it, but i am a professional programmer. so doing something online is, for me, the obvious thing.

i was thinking in the line of a dating site or some social news site in niches that weren't explored yet, but thought that maybe the HN community might come with something more original.

doing the freelance (10 hrs a week X $50 per hour) is for example something i didn't thought of because i am oriented toward building a product or service. i am not sure i can add the extra work for so long (4 years) and i am also skeptical about reaching customers. but it is surely something i should consider.
Comfy + working a typical 9-to-5 => More Stresses + Running own company + more personal time
At least compare equal products. On the list Awesome Note VS Ultra Notes I, are the only comparable ones (even though iPhone app vs Android App).

"Calcbot VS Calculator", is like comparing HP-48 vs Mac inlcuded Calculator. "Bjango VS Musical Pro", the former is a disk scratching app, while the latter features a metronome and tempo.

Edit: UI and UX reflect the functionality, features, plans, mission, identity (the one people identify and wear shirts about), etc. If the application and its functionality itself is not comparable, why should the UI be?
$50 ? Here in Australia it's a $200 fine for trains.. regardless of distance. 200 for a 2 min trip ? seems fair ...
Incidentally, this is why dictatorships don't allow gatherings of people (or free broadcast media). Everyone knows the regime is bad but not everyone knows that everyone knows etc. When the whole hierarchy collapses, revolutions break out.
Right, that's my point. I mentioned Windows, but I didn't mean to restrict my comments specifically to that (though everything MS does is ultimately a play to further entrench Windows and/or Office, including Exchange, IE, and .NET). MS has other properties whose presence is so ubiquitous that no person attempting to make money off of the market where they dominate can seriously consider leaving them out.

Everyone works with Exchange because Exchange is the de-facto standard calendaring and email server. Of course, Exchange mainly got to this point through association with Windows and the MS brand.

If you want to do something with email or scheduling for users who work at a company with > 100 people, you're almost definitely going to need Exchange compatibility, and there's a pretty good chance you'll run into Exchange in smaller groups too.

The ubiquity of Exchange, Office, and Windows make not supporting any of these infeasible unless your primary motive is not maximum profitability and/or wide impact. For most companies, maximum profitability and wide impact are the primary reasons to continue business. Ergo, support for Microsoft's mainstay suites is a forgone conclusion.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem, as they say. Until we can get business people off of Windows and Office, we are stuck. If Linux vendors were smart they'd target the business workstation with at least as much enthusiasm as they target servers or consumer workstations.
I think parent was referring to the definition on the Wikipedia page:

"When n is a positive integer, exponentiation corresponds to repeated multiplication."

And then an equation that suggests an iterative approach.
Windows XP on Dell -> Mac OSX on Macbook Pro
Nokia -> iPhone
Noise (Techcrunch, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb) -> Signals (37svn, AVC, Seth Godin)
I have done; I was using the "blue eyes on their own" as an example to demonstrate it.

I'll try again (this can take a long while to get your head round :D).

Once the Blue eyed people are dead each islander now knows that there are definitely at least 899 brown eyed people, with the unknown factor their own eye colour.

Their hypothesis must be as follows (imagine this is the logical reasoning of ONE islander laying out the scenario):

- If I do not have Brown eyes that means each of the brown eyed people can see 898 browns. If that is the case, then on day 899 all of those people will kill themselves.

- If I did have Brown eyes then each of the brown eyed people can also see 899 brown eyes. If that is the case then no one will kill themselves on day 899, therefore as I can only see 899 browns, I must have brown

Here is where most people struggle to understand: The number of brown eyes each individual can see is fixed at 899. The only unknown factor is their own eye colour. The solution is that everyone knows each other unknown factor. You know that either n or n+1 brown eyes exist (where n is the number of brown eyes they can observe). And so does everyone else (and, crucially, you know they know).

If everyone's n matches yours, then on day n+1 you can infer what the unknown factor is.

Another way of thinking about it is this; an individual can logically reason that only two types of people exist on the island. Those who see 899 browns (him, at the least), those who see 898 browns (potentially everyone else; on the hypothesis that his eye colour differs). If on day 899 no one commits suicide then each individual knows that only the former exists. And therefore they have brown eyes.

(this is horribly hard to put across :S which is why it is such a delicious problem! The main thing to remember is that to the knowledge of one individual there is a known number of brown eyes, and a figure for the minimum and maximum number of brown eyes any other individual can see. If the number of days exceeds the number of browns you can see, you must be brown)
Are you, basically, referring to CSS grid frameworks ?

Even if you are not - dont they accomplish the same thing ?
What in the interface tells you that navigating away from the page will not submit the data?

Perhaps instead of reset a "do not submit" button is required. But then if I changed my mind about what I'm writing but still want to send a message things get a little lame.

How can you tell for example that going back doesn't instead save the comment as a draft (like the SMS interface on my [pretty old] Sony Ericcson phone).

I disagree with the article, I think there is a place for a reset/clear function.
The high profile startup Asana is attacking problems like this. One of their advisors is Mitch Kapor,
the founder of Lotus and designer of Lotus 1-2-3.
Yours, it may have been serious, but it comes off as trolling.

(This one, it's mean and full of snark)
I'm a web developer, i write php, html, css, js mainly. So IDE's are totally unnecessary. I have a development server i connect to via sftp and edit on that, i use dropbox as my source control since 99% of the time i'm a single developer and it stops me having to remember to check anything in. It also makes deployment to live pretty easy too.

I dont use any external plugins or anything, everything i use comes out the box with gEdit, the file browser side pane, highlighting, indenting and thats about it. I imagine its a lot easier from a web dev's perspective than from actual programmers.
Isnt there a danger that someone else working on your code might not respect that rule (or dare I say it, but maybe you're in a rush one day) and you don't update the comment when you update the class.

Now you've got comments saying in correct things, and you risk all sorts of confusion.

The same rule applies to commenting methods in code really, you don't comment what the code does exactly - just what the intention of the code is.
Spectacular Homebrew Z80 8-bit Computer
I highly recommend watching a movie called "Revolution #9". Though it is fiction, I've never seen a better depiction of schizophrenia.

Be warned, though, that it's pretty disturbing and depressing. Not something you want to see on a first date.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253586/
too little too late gavin/red-hat. which i guess is how the entire java world operates, so i shouldn't be surprised.
Linux completes 20 years, watch this video.
When I visited Vancouver, the locals mentioned some ridiculously high rents/condo prices for places in downtown near Stanley park (and I'm from the Bay area). I thought the city was gorgeous but couldn't figure out any high paying employers (100K+). What gives? How can a developer afford this?
Actually, Apple makes an iCal server:

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/ical-server.html

And Novell GroupWise is the server-side product from that company which does calendaring:

http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/features/#calendar

There are definitely alternatives, depending on what functionality you need.
Heap sort with a deck of cards (cool video)
Vimeo censors remove evidence of how australia's richest man makes his billions
This is too surreal, I'm not sure if I believe it or not. Is the US really that screwed up?
Smoking Candy Cigarettes
How did those Chinese fake the capacity of a hard disk?
I agree. Not to mention that for many places the whole check-in bit a moderate hassle.

EG: Panera Bread.

Go in to get a coffe and a bagel in the morning.
Take out phone, launch app.
Oops, can't connect. Panera has free wifi, but I have to open the browser on my phone and check a little box and hit submit. Go back to the app, let it figure out where I am. No, I'm not at Baby Gap (next store over) at 7AM, I'm at Panera. Finally check in. And then... nothing... kind of anti-climatic really.

Meanwhile, I'm juggling credit cards and rewards cards and a drink and a bagel with the cashier.

If I'm lucky, I might get to be Mayor and get $1 off or something, which equates to earning about 2 cents for every checkin.

I played with 4sq and some of the other location services for a while, but just never got any value out of it proportionate to what I put into it time-wise.
Ok, I picked a fake random number with my terrible human random number generator. I added my salary and got 65419563.

It's easier to guess someones salary than it is to guess the random number they generated (in order to figure out their salary).
Unlock bootloader
Thanks for pointing these out mikhailfranco and	arethuza. I'm the author of the linked post. I'll be giving them a read.

Just scanning them now, I think they will be very helpful.
2011 Jeep Compass New Sophisticated Design -
Isn't the EC2 cost 1.68 USD/month for your assumed usage pattern? (0.007 USD/hour * 8 hour/day * 30 day/month)
It loads fast for me…
AFAIK, Rolling Stone has a reputation of being fairly accurate, if not unbiased. So yes, probably.
I would suggest multiplying the number of up votes on a article by 1 + log ( account age) vs some sort of fixed filter.
they have spam as a service for that http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
Why are you spamming us with this app?
The case with 3 people always bugs me in solutions for this puzzle:
If Alice, Bob, and Carol have blue eyes how can they not know that everyone knows that there are blue eyed people?
AOL Mail: Simple, Free, Fun
The Art of Scientific and Technological Innovations
Honest advice: learn to meet people organically. It's really not that hard (granted, you've probably heard all this before and think that for YOU it is that hard).
It might be a stupid question, but:
Is there an example of a hyped "whatever killer" that actually killed "whatever"? I have the feeling that all those Google, Facebook, Microsoft, iPad/iPad/iPhone killer that sensationalist journalists tend to write about are forgotten after half a year or so.
Ask HN: Not having comment scores?
For me the site is sub-optimal without comment scores.

Part of the usefulness of the site is in presenting what other people think about a particular topic and a quick way to ascertain that is to look at comment scores. Having scores available is like having a digest of opinions, without the scores one has to read a lot more; skimming threads is a lot harder for me now.

I was also one who liked to "upvote a comment if it looks too lowl" and vice-versa which I think gives a better view of things.

Does any one like HN without comment scores?

I don't think it would matter if I had all day to read and digest every comment thread but as I don't it does, it grates with me terribly. For me reading HN now is too much work.
Drinking whenever => No drinking => Drinking two days per month

Drinking too much sucked. Drinking not at all sucked. Drinking two days a month lets me enjoy my wine/beer/sake and whacks me with the occasional hangover to remind why I opted for this damn policy in the first place. It is drinking in perfect balance.
Absolutely correct. I ended up leaving Toronto after I realized this. I'm not sure if it was a good decision or bad. I ended up getting fantastic work experience and a higher number salary. However, my quality of life wasn't the same (because I left behind family and friends, and miss Canada in general). Also, I realized that the salary number doesn't mean much when you live in ridiculously expensive places.
I took 0.02 USD/hour for on-demand micro instance; 0.007 USD/hour also requires a $52/yr or $82/3yr fixed cost on top.

I have no idea how to predict the spot price, and I haven't tried to collect statistics on it, so I (personally) wouldn't choose it for this kind of application, where you expect it to be there all the time, not just when it happens to be cheap.

I mean, 3 USD/month, or 30 USD/year, is cheap enough to pay once and forget about, rather than worrying about turning it on or off.
That is the sad, sad truth of it. At least with CSS compilers and libraries like jQuery, it's getting easier to compensate for CSS' deficiencies. I do, though, still hold onto some hope that someday we'll be able to leave it behind.
Graduating from an average university, should I do a MSc or work in a startup?
My first question to the Hacker News community, I hope I am not doing anything wrong. :)<p>So, the situation is like this: I am 22 years old, I study Computer Science at Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London and I am graduating this July. When I first got admitted to university I was planning to become an academic. Now, all I want is to finish with my exams and...go out there.<p>Now, there are three main problems with that:<p>1. I am most probably going to graduate with a high 2:1 (an average mark between 65% and 70%) from an "average" institution so I suppose that this may be a weak point in my applications for jobs.<p>2. I don't have any major work/project to show to places where I apply. As with my skillset, they are limited to what I was asked to do/study at university. I can obviously work on this issue after I graduate but since then my applications aren't going to be as "rich" as I'd like them to be.<p>3. I don't know if that's the "right" thing to do. I am disappointed with higher education in the UK and this is making me feel that doing a Masters will not really help me (apart from giving me another qualification in papers, that is -yes, I am one of those that believe higher education is overrated-). Also, because of that, I feel tired even when I am just thinking about MSc studies.<p>Which brings me to my question: Do you reckon that it's better I do a Masters (even at a "yet another average university") or should I really give it a go, build something and apply for every position I find interesting? Is "actual work experience" going to be be more helpful than a MSc from a university like, say, UCL or Imperial? What do most people ask for when they look to hire someone? What's better for us as individuals?
hey michael, I really appreciate your response, its good to have feedback. #3 and #4 are too expensive for me right now.

I found this law article on copyright ownership of "computer programs" to be relevant:
https://calico.org/html/article_478.pdf

"an independent contractor owns the copyright in any work he creates unless there is an express signed agreement that the work [is] for hire"

My reading of the article suggests that as long as I'm not classified as an employee, and haven't signed away copyright, I'm likely the sole author, and at worst a joint-author "entitled to modify, reproduce, or distribute
copies of the work". The article also lists court precedents that suggest that specifying features and even supervising dev still leave the programmer with sole ownership.

I know I'm not going to get sound legal advice from HN but a chorus of IANAL g Still, I'm curious if anyone has experienced similar situations and what they learned!
I think that the biggest news here is that Microsoft has already released the next platform preview!

Download here: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Info/Downloads/Default.htm...

And there's a nice message I got in my dev-chrome: "Cool, you're using a Chrome 12 nightly build!" (http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/)
Why a Free Logo Creator Is the Wrong Choice for You and Your Precious Business
Before we talk about how a free logo creator can ruin your business image, let's take a look on the background of a business design.
Your replies have prompted me to rethink the logic. I'm going to add some rules to the "Clear" button:

1, Hide the button whilst no records have been clicked.
2, If a record has been clicked, clicking the button clears the form then hides itself.

Feedback appreciated.
Like others on the thread, I also initially did not "get" what your site was all about immediately. I suggest having that information above your sign up form - because I am not going to sign up for the service unless I know what it does.
.NET APIs Pushed Into GNU/Linux by Microsoft MVPs and FUD Spreaders
Coil: A simple, addictive HTML5 canvas game
Данон Груп
Френската компания Данон води преговори с японски компании за напитки за продажбата на бизнеса си с минерална вода, включително на емблематичната марка Evian,предаде БГНЕС.
I don't see why not. Rory McIlroy went from pro to amateur overnight.
Oh yes, I agree. Or when you mistype the essentially human-unreadable captcha, and have to fill in half of the fields anew.
also Erlang "threads" are called processes but are not OS threads nor processes - there is generally one scheduler per core and the processes are swapped in and out by the scheduler.
They know that everyone knows that there are blue eyed people.

What they don't know is that everyone knows this. In other words, they don't know that everyone knows that everyone knows that there are blue eyed people.

Alice thinks like this:

1. there are blue eyed people (e.g. Bob and Carol)

2. everyone knows there are blue eyed people (Bob can see Carol, Carol can see Bob, everyone else can see them)

3. I know that 2 is true, but Bob and Carol might not know. Bob might think that Carol thinks that there are no blue-eyed people. (Of course, in reality, Bob does not think this because he can see Alice as well)