skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've ever dealt with code that Gets Things Done but is not Smart, you'll know why it's in the title. There are a million ways to skin a cat with programming, and you can pick a stupid(er) way or a smart(er) way. I'd much rather work with the person(s) who pick the smart(er) way.

The "perfect code" part of your comment above implies smartness. Dumb people don't write "perfect code".
PG, do you see this? Turn the numbers back on, please.
Doesn't look like your odds are good (consensus atm is there's no theoretical basis): http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/h28sd/is_there_a...
No, they wouldn't. They might be more accessible, even more effective, but they wouldn't be more credible.

In any case, I'd appreciate knowing specifically which parts you thought were condescending, since I wasn't trying to be, and it's not obvious to me on a reread where I was. Would you still have found them condescending if I hadn't said "Stanford"?
Agree

Cannon rushing is lame, and I main P.
In the example provided, the business does not pay tax on the $100,000 given to the owner (as salary or other form of compensation) as that is an expense of the business. The business only pays tax on the profits to the business (as an entity separate from the owner).

There is nothing illogical with the phrase "unfair to corporations". A corporation is a person in the U.S. Is is it illogical to say, "unfair to people"? It can be said of a policy that it is unfair to corporations. Suppose the only entities that were taxed were corporate entities. In such a case one would reasonably say that the tax structure was unfair to corporations.

Owners of a corporation are stock holders. They make a profit on their holding via dividends and selling the stock at a higher price than what they bought it for. I disagree that it is unfair to a stock holder to pay taxes on the dividends received or on the capital gains. I believe it is a sound principle - for the maintenance of consistency, which is what fairness really is about in this issue - that entities that make a profit pay tax on it.
Haha, and a top contender for the record of having the most independent backdoors at a given time.

If you want privacy, the last place to host your email is on a shared shell box (especially a free one).
This product fails my first test: it exposes my personal information irresponsibly:

http://twitter.com/edw/status/63300073005662208
Summary: It's the same as any other vendor's law enforcement guide. Nothing really revelatory here.
But the entity must exist within Facebook's system for it to be tagged, no?

Can you tag photos of people who are not members of Facebook?
Chirpstory - Live Tweets Obama Bin Laden (sic) Raid (And Didn't Know It)
San Jose, CA

Axolotl (an Ingenix company) is hiring software developers, development managers, testers, and product managers to work on health information exchange and clinical messaging software.

http://www.axolotl.com/careers.html

http://careers.unitedhealthgroup.com/job%20search/search%20j...
As a side note, Harper is a former libertarian (which obviously deviated from his principles). http://www.quebecoislibre.org/06/060129-2.htm
That's what I consider "the best", but unfortunately that kind of professionalism even rarer than the "superstar" programmer. Which is very unfortunate should you manage to hire one of those "superstars", since they need at least three of those guys to clean up after them...
For ads, fine. That was the deal from the very beginning.
Good read. I hope you make it someday!
is remote an option (within uk)?
Oh well, this looks to me as if they had to have an excuse to shoot him.

What I find weird is how it doesn't look like this question gets asked a lot. Everyone seems to think that killing him without a trial is how we do it now, but Saddam Hussein had a trial and the nazi SS had a trial. Killing bad people on sight is normally NOT how we do it.
One thing I don't understand (and I have no experience in this arena so forgive my ignorance): why is there no mention of a court order, warrant, etc? Is it really just enough for an officer to sign their name to this form and get this information? Or is that something that's not in the scope of this document, it's just assumed that officers will know they need some sort of warrant to access this information?
Personalize JIRA with Javascript and CSS in 15 minutes
He is stating his belief. Are people not allowed to believe in false dichotomies?
Screamer Radio – Listen to and download over 4000 stations
Oh I get that (did read the whole thing) however conversely, couldn't it then just be titled, "Smart" with an explanation further down that smart people know that they have to get things done or else it's just talk? I mean, you can redefine and contextualize anything, but I think if you promote a slogan as strongly worded as Joel's quote below, you have the responsibility to make it complete without a further explanation.

The #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek:

Smart, and Gets Things Done.

That's it. That's all we're looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night.

He wants us to memorize a short slogan, and that slogan, in programming speak, is buggy and wasteful (wasteful in the sense that I described above, and buggy in that a smart gets-things-done a-hole will single handedly kill your project). Gets Things Done and Gets Along on the other hand is complete in and of itself.
Twitter Does Not Supplant Other Media, It Amplifies It
Just to be clear, that's the number of users with at least one submission in a given month. (Not the number of users with at least one submission or comment, as I sleepily wrote originally, and definitely not the number of distinct visitors.)
Well written. There are so many little things that serial entrepreneurs have learned that each successive company moves faster. The point about first-time entrepreneurs having trouble with the company side is true, and groups like YC are geared to assist in that aspect so the founder can focus on the product.

But take someone who is building a great product, and who has the experience for building the company around the product, and you've got a better combination than just a first-timer with a product.
A "superstar programmer" that doesn't "write clean, readable code, with comments, error checks, clear log messages, and tests" is simply not a "superstar programmer."
You can tag people without linking to an actual profile. You can still manually type a name or any other text.
This is the obvious choice, but we are in the cloud now ;) I feel like it's better if all the instances are the same regardless of the configuration. That's the whole point for not taking this path.
> The RSA patent doesn't provide source code per se, but it definitely describes a particular algorithm which could be transcribed to lambda calculas.

Yes, but "transcribed to lambda calculus" does not imply that RSA isn't unpatentable any more than "can be translated to Japanese".

Note that you can't patent chemistry, molecules, or forces of nature either. However, no one confuses that with patenting the use of said things for specific applications.

Why do you think that math is different?
I'm not sure what you mean by "wait for questions"...

Yes, I would love to add that ability in the future. If I get a lot of re-usable submissions, that may happen sooner rather than later.
Well, let's see what the data says. I confess I want the universe to surprise and confound. I want the theories to be wrong, I want reality to be stranger than fiction. That would be awesome!

Or I am wrong, in which case I'll happily pay out[1]. I'm a layman, as if that wasn't obvious, and it will be a much-needed physics lesson. Win-win.

[1] If in Australia, payout will take the form of alcohol credits at an establishment of winner's choosing. Hey, I want to learn from my superiors :) If not, a crisp USD$100 note will be posted to any mailing address in the world, to be supplied.
The Hacker News site runs on arc, which is a language implemented in mzscheme, which in turn is a subset of Racket.
SFL Hack and Tell #4 - Automatic Bathtub and VR Edition
Uber To Expand Private Car Service To Chicago, Seattle, Boston And D.C.
Great read! It's great to hear some of the brutal truth about attempting to do what we all love to dream about but mostly FAIL at.
Smart people solve difficult problems that less smart people either (a) couldn't solve or (b) would take a relatively long time to solve. This is what smart people "get done". If you're lucky they'll even write the code for the majority of the system by way of proving to you that their idea works. (By definition it is easier to implement a skeleton solution than it is to explain the idea to someone who wasn't smart enough to originate the idea.)

People who merely "get things done" are conscientious in their attitude to work but do not have the spark of intellect that would help them identify quicker ways of getting a task done. This lack of spark also means that they will frequently say that problems are impossible to solve (or prohibitively time consuming to solve), whereas in fact a smart person would identify it as a problem that they could solve.

Example from my own experience within a government accountancy department:

- The person who merely "gets things done" happily spends two weeks each year calculating the cross-charging amounts between all the departments and eventually produces the correct figures.

- The smart person does the same task in 30 seconds using pivot tables and lookups in Excel.
As Jeremy says, it's an active ticket, and Brendan Eich himself has assured me that he's committed to it.
Review: Al Gore's "Our Choice"
Sounds like a lot of work. Why doesn't Facebook just build an admin portal so that law enforcement types can register themselves and then just be able to "star" a user/group page on which they'd like information, fill out a short form for details (checkboxes, javascript date range, radio buttons, maybe a drop-down select) and submit it to the queue? This way, Fb engineers could issue them a help ticket and track the case along with the man, online through the portal without the need for pesky phone calls or emails.
Reading this, I realize it would be fairly trivial for a foreign government to have an operative working at Facebook as a developer with widespread data access.

Facebook doesn't yet require security clearance for employment.
I think that the "making something people want" at the right time is the hardest part, and maybe distribution as well.

Execution is important.

But I think many people have the skills to create what ends up being successful.

Take Groupon for example. It made something a lot of people wanted. Could most people on Hacker News have made it? Sure.

But Groupon created it before anyone else (I might be wrong about this?).

Another example is HN. Pg has said that what he thinks users want most are quality articles and discussion.

While it's "just a forum", I think Pg is right for not adding a lot of features, or spending the limited time he has working on the UI, and instead focusing on how people can discover quality articles and make/read quality comments.

"Make something people want." It's simple, but it sure isn't easy.
We cannot afford to drop everthing and move to SF. And considering where we are (Richmond in Virginia) and our roots here, we feel like we owe this town. There are a lot of things we are surely missing out by not moving to the Valley, which is the startup ecosystem, the investors, the talent etc. But startups also have to deal with the noise, the saturation, and the "meh" when you launch. Where as in Richmond, we can possibly have a far bigger impact, with a lot more people who will love us, and we are right next to DC.

I am sure we will not know if we made the right choice, for a long time. But I dont buy in to the belief that unless you are in the Valley, no one will give a damn (as touted by Vivek Wadhwa a few weeks ago).

Any thoughts?

EDIT: Needed to add a couple more thoughts that came out of the responses my post received.

a) Its really hard to find talent in SF - Right now, we are one non-tech founder and two hackers. And finding android or iOS talent in Richmond is like looking for needles. But I believe that if you find a darn good hacker, then a new tool or language is just a speedbump. We are still trying to find a very good UX designer though.

b) I agree with the Valley vibe. But it sounds more of a Goldrush than anything else. And I also agree with the vibrant support system that the Valley can provide. Right now, I get that through HN, blogs and my peers over email and phone.
The Secret Team that Killed Bin Laden
Identifying such a bug could very well be an intentional part of their filter. Was it your intent to post part of the solution for GetGush applicants to crib?
Read the portion under "Types of Requests"
Smart people don't write perfect code either (this is obviously relative to program size and complexity), no one does :-(
It's anecdotes like these that reinforce my belief that for a bootstrapping pre-success founder it's easier to focus on revenue rather than investment. The growth curve might be slower, but the friction you face as a first time entrepreneur trying to raise money is deadly.
Unless you host your own email, I assume that even without this specific backdoor built in google would have little trouble getting at the email they host.

This is not necessarily bothering to me, or unexpected for hosted services.
No amount of hot is going to convince me to date someone with an STD. That would be...well, crazy. I want my SSD to be at least as reliable as my system memory (if not more). The article makes it sound like they are inherently diseased. If that's the case, no thanks.
Unless he starts using his legs for extra propulsion!
I didn't see how to (with an update rather than a new install) but I eventually figured out how to use the Login Screen Settings to make Ubuntu Classic the default.

BUT switching back to Ubuntu Classic did not get rid of the Unity Overly Scrollbars - so it's still a game of hunt the scroll thumb.
But unlike the rest of us, he heard bin Laden being killed.
This site is banned on HN (I'm not sure whether for posting fluff articles or for spamming), but I unkilled this post lest it seem like we were trying to suppress it.

They certainly don't seem to understand how YC works though. They say that YC has a "hands-off approach," when in fact the biggest distinction between us and the others is that at YC the startups are advised by people whose full time job is to advise them, while at most or all of the others they're advised by a pool of people who've agreed to advise a few startups on the side.
Using the OpenBench Logic Sniffer to circumvent IDE password protection
I have an interest in making parsers, but all mine so far are either hacks or made with ANTLR. Does this fall under "doing it wrong"? (I presume the answer is yes) How would you recommend I go about learning how to do it right?
Sorry I didn't catch this post at the time... the same submission got some traction when it was reposted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2498438
It seems like it depends on the manufacturer. In this thread, somebody posted a comparison: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2505883

Also note that mechanical hard drives fail a lot, too.
Can you imagine the productivity gains if this demographic was turned on to human computation games such as the Google Image Labeler: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Indeed. I had to read a few articles to find out that he was shot in the head after resisting. I have no reason to dispute the fact that he resisted (he wasnt the only one who died), but there is an air of revenge here, and that's not how the western world does it. I guess years and years of FUD have changed some attitudes.
I like the idea, I don't like the implication of the branding.
My favorite cheap method of terrorism is the DC sniper times ten. It requires no real coordination and very little money, yet causes a huge sustained impact.

Fortunately, it seems that the number of motivated crazy people in the world is fairly low.

> personally I was never really that strongly impacted

I'm guessing you don't live in the New York area. Events can seem a bit unreal if you have no personal stake in them. It may seem trivial next to the loss of life, but looking at that hole in the Manhattan skyline where the towers used to be is still a bit tragic.
Hacking the customer acquisition game through contests
I guess it depends on your definition of "done". If something is sorta slapped together in a way that is hard to read/debug or non-performant, to me that's not "done". So perhaps it's a matter of semantics.
All the news that’s fit to tweet: Osama bin Laden is dead
Completely agree. I am in the same boat as a Canadian not wanting to move to the states. While it may be true that many investors will rule you out based on location; my firm belief is that first time entrepreneurs should spend their time acquiring customers, not investors.

Customers generally don't mind if you're not in the valley (although it is true that if your product is built for tech oriented people the bay area may be a high customer saturation zone.)
Imagine a business with one owner. The owner employs 5 workers. Shouldn't the business pay tax on the profits? Suppose the business owner makes a profit of $100,000. Should this be tax free because he/she owns a business? If the business owner made $100,000 while working at 3M then the salary (profit) would be taxed.

You are missing the exact point.

If this business were owned as a sole proprietorship, then the owner would indeed claim the $100,000 as income and be taxed on it.

If the business were owned as a C-corporation with only one shareholder, then the business would pay corporate taxes on any profits. Then, if the owner wants to have immediate access to those profits, she needs to distribute them to herself as a dividend. She would then pay taxes AGAIN, on the same income, since dividends are taxable.

So, the second entrepreneur, just by virtue of owning a corporation, could be subject to a higher tax rate for the same income.

That said, if one were to entirely eliminate the corporate income tax, then it would be all too easy to stockpile gains inside a corporation and let them compound tax-free until withdrawal, which would be a pretty nice tax shelter.
> How are they going to "crack down on bitcoin"?

Govt can crack down at any point where bitcoin is convertible into something that they can affect.

For example, they can stop many biz from accepting bitcoin.

Sure, you'll probably be able to buy foreign porn with bitcoin, but ....

> Note how well the crack down on filesharing is going...

That's a very different problem.
Can someone explain why I'm "hellbanned?"
This is honestly absurd. I would like to be able to post under my original username again.

I think someone strongly disagreed with a comment of mine so they clicked "flag" and from then on all of my comments/submissions have become immediately dead. Sounds like a flawed system to me. If this isn't resolved, I may have to take advantage of it and start "hellbanning" everyone I disagree with in the future.

For the record, I've e-mailed pg. And a short reply from naner indicates he prefers the guilty until proven innocent method; i.e., reading my comments/submissions should prove that 99% of my posts are not hateful/spammy.

Put yourself in my shoes. How would you like it if for the past 20 days you thought your comments counted but in fact they're all hidden along with any possible future submissions?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TimothyBurgess
Also, folks are super responsive on the mailing list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/listinfo
Interesting, I had read (although I can't find the link offhand) that the Collateral Murder video was, in fact, edited by Wikileaks.
i host my own server, but the best i found - about a year ago when i looked into this - was a norwegian company called runbox http://www.runbox.com/

their support was also friendly, helpful, and technically clued up when i discussed some issues (i didn't go with them in the end because i've hosted my own email before, know how to do it, and decided it wasn't worth paying anyone else).

[edit: to be clear, not only do i have more faith in the impartiality and openness of a scandinavian govt than the usa, there's an advantage in simply not using a host in your own country, imho.

also, running your own server isn't hard. with opensuse, for example, it's pretty much just a case of (1) clicking the right options in yast and (2) configuring getmail to pull your email from your isp. although to get something anywhere close to gmail in functionality you also need to understand (and use) procmail and mairix. then you need a client - i use mutt over ssh, but you can also install a webmail soln like squirrelmail if you want.]
Its really tough to market to restauranteurs because there are tons of scammy companies out there...

My company helps SMB's find the best credit card processor, so in theory Restaurants would be great customers because they are often getting screwed. In reality, we don't convert restaurants well at all.

I've been to trade shows like the NRA (Nat'l restaurant association), Pizza Expo, etc, and a new trend is well-funded companies offering a "free" POS system. It's free because they include the merchant account, and they KILL you on the fees. Almost all of the POS vendors are partnered with http://www.mercurypay.com/ which is a very expensive solution with hidden fees/upcharges etc.

Restauranteurs become lured in with the free POS and are locked into a shitty payment processor. I think being on iOS is a strength though - maybe there are ways you can focus and optimize your ranking on the app store? Participate in blogs/forums whenever you can.

We've had some luck getting in publications (QSR, Food News Today, etc), which has been very useful in getting the word out. You should try to get in QSR.

Drop me a line if you want to talk further.
The scuttlebutt method of stock research
The backdoor would not be for Google, but for US intelligence.
You could modify your user stylesheet:

#posterous_footerbar { display: none; }
The book's page has just been updated with a few excerpts: http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript

Criticisms welcome. We're aware of some technical issues (most notably, there's no syntax highlighting for the CoffeeScript snippets), which will be fixed shortly.
Not that I think this would truly help (they probably replicate all inbound/outbound mail to some vast pool for statistical analysis), but is there an automated way to delete all mail from one's Gmail account? I use fetchmail to remove mail from my inbox and manage it on my workstation, but must periodically log on via the web interface and go to my "All Mail" folder and do a manual select and delete.
Did you verify the authenticity of the drives? It sounds odd that that they were limited to a NewEgg warranty without a manufacturer's warranty.
I've had good luck with SSD drives (Intel and Kingston) for the last two years. No failures. I use them in servers and laptops. I do rysnc them to spindle based drives hourly, so if they do fail, I've got backup. Just my experience.
Sorry didn't realize, thought you were refuting the idea, not the concept.

I think you're misunderstanding me, I don't want it to be true (or false, frankly, don't give a crap either way), I am just sharing what is a widely held belief there, in contrast to what is believed here.
"In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don't understand that their own government is on the list."

Gave me a good laugh this morning...