skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Know when you're good and accept a compliment don't feign being stupid.

This is standard advice that I would readily accept in a Western cultural context. (For these purposes, HN is a Western cultural context, even though it has participants from all over the world.) But please note that in some cultures, declining compliments is not false modesty, but simply the standard form of politeness. For example, when speaking Chinese, if someone has just told me that I speak Chinese well (which would be a compliment, perhaps not deserved), the standard polite way for me to reply would be to say, "I speak Chinese poorly." The most striking example of this pattern of politeness, which extends not only to the speaker personally but to persons closely associated with the speaker, was when I met the Korean husband of a Korean woman who had been my classmate already for several months by the time I met her husband. The conversation, conducted in Chinese, consisted of some other person saying to him, "Your wife is quite beautiful," to which he replied, IN HER HEARING, "No, she is very ugly," contrary to fact, for politeness. If the cultural context is clear, everybody knows how to interpret such statements (with both the effusive praise and the denials by the praised persons being counted as conventional politeness) and no one is offended on either side.
That sounds a lot like a paraphrase of the old quote about the Internet. In this case, "The law interprets sanity as damage and routes around it."
Or we can use modern statistics and/or randomized/sublinear/approximation algorithms...
Is there a header set to identify this crawler so I can limit it?

For what it's worth, when people crawl sites I am responsible for, and it impacts our products performance, I block the offending IP.

It doesn't get unblocked until the system reboots (rarely) or someone lodges a support ticket to say they cannot access the site.

It's heavy handed but crawlers can cause a significant amount of trouble given it's a non-usual usage pattern. Spiders often have a time between hits, I hope you have programmed one in rather than going full speed!
When the government wages its war on drugs, it cuts supply of drugs, which raises the price, which raises the incentives to smuggle drugs. Meanwhile, there is a certain contingent of people who will basically do anything for drugs. If the government could push the price of drugs for them above "all economic value a person can possible generate in any manner including through illegal means", they would win, but they just can't do that effectively.

When the government goes after a BitCoin exchange, they make BitCoins less valuable by raising the transaction costs associated with them, and severing the BitCoin economy from the general global economy. This will cause BitCoins to reduce in value against the currencies traded in the general global economy. This will cause people to be less inclined to use them because they will be less valuable. In this case, where the economic characteristics of drug trade fights against the government's goals, the economic characteristics of alternate currencies give the government a multiplicative advantage in its efforts to shut it down.

It is not a defense of BitCoin that the government can't shut down drug trade. It's a different problem. Indeed, the question BitCoin faces is even if the government never takes exception to it, will the multiplicative advantage that any attempt to shut down or game BitCoins will obtain be insufficient to kill it or gravely wound it? I don't think the government will have a need to demonize BitCoin users, they will be perfectly capable of shutting it down without that effort.
You should think of the legal system as a paraconsistent logic. Laws are globally inconsistent, and so arguments are favored that align most closely with established precedent. Arguing that murder for hire is covered by freedom of speech won't fly either. This is a similar waste of time.

The focus on correcting patents, generally, and software patents, in particular, should be on making sure the economic incentives protect only development that would not otherwise occur.
Kristján.
I'd have liked to see the Haskell rendered "unexecutable" by reducing it to pure, typed lambda calculus. Just a matter of a few rewrite rules from the Haskell specification ...
Well, it doesn't negate your statement. apt-get is still a great way to install nginx.
> You suck at estimating!

Took me a while to learn that one, but it's so true.
When some one brings up something sad or bad that has happened is "I'm sorry to hear that" or "Don't worry, it will get better" really enough of a response?

You ask a very important question, because we all have occasion to hear other people's announcements of bad news. Expressing some sympathy is better than doing nothing, and is (if my experience is any guide) comforting to the person who announced the bad news. Among my several hundred Facebook friends (many of whom I know mostly via common subscription to email lists discussing parenting issues), there are friends who I don't know WELL, and whom I am unable to give any practical help, who nonetheless seem to appreciate me saying things like "Get well soon" or "I hope you get over that in a while" or even just "That's rough." Just acknowledging a fellow human being's common trouble from being part of the human condition seems to help somewhat. Perhaps I haven't given you a great deal of practical help by this reply, but I did want to reply to acknowledge that you are grappling with a tough problem.
Have you asked in the Stackless mailing list?
US Firms Shifting Hiring Abroad, But Is a Change Near?
that's a gerat idea dude/ mix mixergy! who wou;d expect mix3eregey itslef tobe mixed?S!!!
That was actually pretty useful. I really like the game crafter site as it removes risk and saves time (no shipping from, no time doing fulfillment work, etc).

I would love to do the mobile app. Unfortunately I'm not a coder so it would take me quite a while to learn it myself. I outsourced the initial development of my website to India and they're still working on it.

Thanks for the tips.
The guy running mtgox says it's an actual ddos.
Spanish does.

Not agreeing with grandparent, though. Lots of people admit to playing with their Wiis for hours a day.
giberson said: """-When walking leaving my office and entering the hallway, how close should a person be entering the hallway from the opposite direction be before I wave or say hello. If I wait to long, they think I ignore them. If I do it to early, then theres a great length of time that we are both still walking down the hall and having used my throw-away "Hey" I have nothing left to offer them. It's awkward."""

1) I would recommend playing music. Playing music of any kind can allow you to become a better listener and help with timing your response or initial request/comment/gesture.

2) Be sincere; be empathetic.

3) Have fun.
1 - Try taking a small step back away from the group, this will signify that you would rather listen. Once in this position, you can escape ('go mingle') more easily.

2 - Words of comfort really don't help, they're more of a tribal signal. They're still necessary.

3 - Try saying "I'm not sure how you got to this step/result, could you explain it in more detail for me?"

4 - About 1-2 seconds of travel away.

5 - Talk about what they like, try to find common interests. Most people won't refuse a snack or dessert either.

6 - It's just "Thank you", then shut up and wait. Anything else doesn't work.
This should link directly to the page on braincubix.com, http://www.braincubix.com/post/5044460599/neurons-grow-into-...

Second, this is the link to the original journal article http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn103618d?journalCode=an...
That's a price point I'm comfortable giving it a long term spin on. Thanks. I do think a $99/year might be a decent prepay option for people who want a longer term commitment.
rpcnet.exe seems to be essentially same thing as rpcnetp.exe, only without the BIOS persistence hack.
> It means less of mundane and low productive, time wasting jobs.

Unfortunately not everyone can do less mundane jobs, especially when the skills needed change within a generation - there isn't even time to go to school to learn them.

> More value produced by less people. That increased amount of value allows for more investment (and spending as well) which creates more jobs.

Maybe. But only if the investment creates more demand. It doesn't always.

> Following your logic, the 20000 years ago was the golden era of employment

Certainly. But who said employment was the only goal? It's _a_ goal, but not the only one.

> is worse off than the other half.

Yup, which is why people don't like it. But your plan (of higher productivity) won't fix that.
PiCloud (http://www.picloud.com/) is an offering for Python.
The Quick Python Book - Daryl D Harms Ph.D.
As it only does one URL at a time and uploads to S3 between requests, it shouldn't unduly load any reasonable system. I'll add an additional "BrowserCrawler" string to the user-agent, that seems very reasonable.

Update: JQuery can't set the User-Agent header on ajax requests it appears. I have instead set a new X-User-Agent header to BrowserCrawler.
An upvote would be nice :)
Good advice from the submitted article: "'Overall, the beneficial effects of eating fish to prevent heart disease outweigh any harm related to prostate cancer risk,' Brasky said. 'What this study shows is the complexity of nutrition and its impact on disease risk, and that we should study such associations rigorously rather than make assumptions,' Brasky said."

There is a lot of scholarly literature on the general issue,

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=docosahexaenoic+acid+pro...

and it will be interesting to see how the trade-offs are resolved.
It's an interesting take on it, but there's a lot of assumption here - not least of which is that Oracle somehow did this because it was the "right thing" or a "good" thing to do. Indeed that's founded on the assumption that Open Office is/was, to quote "a very viable and free alternative to Microsoft's bloated, way-too-expensive Microsoft Office". I'm not sure I buy that, for various reasons it hasn't been shown to be viable in the market. Even before Oracle pulled the plug-in stunt (which was shoddy, certainly) I don't think Open Office was gaining huge traction outside of occasional companies and people driven by ideology.

To me it seems more likely that Oracle couldn't figure out a way to make money out of it and got shot of it in such a way that caused least backlash and left the least possible blame attached or Oracle in future - now the community is solely to blame for any future failings.

Just my take of course, but I don't personally feel like "Open Source" has won any fight here - I don't think Oracle would even acknowledge there was a fight.
I have worked a lot with exchanging e-currencies for certain niche reasons. Exchanging can be quite a pain. Generally you have to tap into the various exchange communities to figure out your options and lookup reputable exchangers. In these communities you will find that a widely accepted rule is that you don't exchange with currencies which allow charge backs (unless perhaps you personally know that person.) That includes Paypal and credit cards.

Yes, there are people who will exchange for Paypal and credit cards. Yes, there are some services which can start out with low charge back rates. The problem is the scammers will find you as the service grows. This is a business with low margins, eventually you will lose out.

Again, Paypal isn't perfect, but the service has plenty of experience with this issue. Too many people are getting screwed over. Unfortunately this is a lesson that people have to learn over and over again. Do NOT use Paypal for exchange.

I don't understand why I'm getting down voted for this.
I think the reason Wikileaks has not filtered the cables (aside from some minor redacting to avoid putting lives at risk) is to retain credibility as an unbiased reporting organization.

We have learned that (in the case of the Iraq/Afghanistan releases), much of what was deemed "secret" was done so simply to prevent embarrassing info from entering the public domain. In other words, for propaganda reasons. There was not any national security or safety reason to keep the information secret.

Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage in.
There is another solution called Bitnami cloud (http://bitnami.org/cloud) that is not in the list.
So long CoinPal, and thanks for all the bitcoins!

http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/5086167006/paypal-freezes-o...
Great list, added some suggestions to your comments.

For Twitter users, I made a list of PaaS offerings here: http://twitter.com/peakscale/paas/members
If the company/startup isn't that big, why don't you just sit down and talk with them explaining the position you are at?
Investing in energy? huh?
Amen to both points.
This is exactly correct. I got seriously down voted for making the same point in less words. Bitcoin and exchanging e-currencies is nothing new. People have been getting screwed over exchanging Paypal and credit cards for other currencies for a long time. That's why Paypal doesn't allow it. But yet, these services keep popping up. Poor business idea, it's been tried many times and it doesn't work.
Actually, the article specifically refers to the gift buy-back tax shelter which was prevalent before the 1986 tax code.

In the most common form of the gift buy-back, a donor would gift restricted stock or ownership interests to a charity. Eventually, the donor would buy back those shares/interest from the charity for the same amount as the shares were worth when donated, or less, depending on how the restrictions affected the market value of those shares.

The tax benefit to the donor was usually getting a charitable write-off on the donation without actually giving up their interest in the company.

The 1986 tax code basically killed this tax shelter, though its descendants live on in a form roughly similar to the Bose gift.
How to accept a compliment. Thanks or agreement feels egotistical. Trying to act as humble by playing it down doesn't seem to be received well either.

"The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Well, it never was listed that Oracle was the reason, just that it was one of, and indicative of why it failed. If the MySQL solution was working, which the answerer on Quora implied, and there was no immediate sign of its failure, I think transitioning to Oracle at the cost of millions of dollars is a pretty big mistake.
Programming is like electrical wiring; that is, its a means to an end. A "good programming language" is basically one that you're fluent enough to use in order to complete a project.

Additionally, very skilled programmers increasingly become less relevant as processing power increases. In the original days of the personal computer, insanely clever techniques were useful when the computer only had 4K of memory like the original Apple II. These days, knowing such techniques isn't so useful.

The real paradox is finding programmers that can fluently program something that users actually enjoy. Programmers that program only for the sake of solving interesting technical problems are what Paul Graham refers to as "techno-weenies" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html ). Ideally, a very tiny percent of people will actually see the source code compared to those that actually use the product. You can write something that people enjoy and then hire programmers later to optimize the source code. The inverse is not true: You cannot program something that is elegantly written and then hire someone to make people like it.
You either believe what people say or you don't. There are plenty of comments on HN along the lines of "when I was at google..." or "our site does 500 req/sec". Not sure why weekend project claims would, somehow, be less trustworthy.

The reason I say it's a weekend project is to let people know that a relatively small amount of time was spent on it..so it might not have the polish of a more exhaustive system.
The customer's money was not at risk as delivery of the purchased bitcoins is nearly instantaneous (e.g., 5 minutes or less on average).
Thanks for the link! A new version of the tool (written in javascript, with key new features, including undo) is now available in the same location:

http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization

It should run in any browser (even the Kindle, believe it or not. Lousy framerate on the Kindle, though)
He's being punished primarily because his coins look too similar to U.S. coins.
Congrats Ravi Kannan
"not being a dick" is one of the most important (and perhaps least used) "social skills".

If you've got no other framework to decide what to say or how to behave, measuring up your options by asking yourself "Will this make me look like a dick?" will set you on the right path almost 100% of the time.
> releasing all of the cables regardless of whether or not they contain incriminating evidence.

Except that's not remotely true.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/07...

"Currently released so far... 11214/251,287"

That would be less than 5%. Not "all".

http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html
SAP's analytic appliance HANA (formerly called Business Warehouse Accelerator) has been doing this for at least 5 years now. And people think SAP is old-fashioned...
Agile SCRUM Google Spreadsheet template for freelancers
At Menoovr we are at a junction where we are on our way to meet our first milestone as a startup on May 2, 2011 since our start (at #swsj (@SWsj) on Aug 15 2011) and the key component of it is laying the technology foundation.

One of the most common questions that keeps coming back are related to which technologies/tools to use and the main theme around all of these questions can be put into two buckets:

Familiarity vs Trend

Time to market vs Solid Foundation

And when I am asked for my opinion or sometimes asked to make a decision to go one way or the other, as a Non-Developer Tech Guy schooled in Technology Risk Management I look at things from the following angle:

1. What are the risks of using one framework/tool vs another.

2. Can we mitigate the risks?

3. Do we have to accept/consume any risks?

4. If we must, do we have the appetite for it?

When I go down this route…the first set of things I look at it is:

1. Who’s behind a tool/framework?

2. Who’s using it?

3. How active is the community?

4. What is its roadmap?

Oh..and if at anytime we have to pivot to a different tool/framework…can we?

Asking these questions to Developers can be challenging as more often than not Developers/Engineers have a technology bias based on experience. Which I respect!

However, when you are working with a solid team (one of the very few companies I have seen that showcase Open Employee Testimonials on their client facing website) like my friends at Karthavya (http://www.karthavya.com/index.html) it becomes a fairly friction free conversation.
On having looked at the above and making a Non-Developer assessment of the facts and extensive technology commentary such as this:

http://oddments.org/?p=494

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3461549/what-are-the-use-...

http://dachary.org/?p=173

http://www.quora.com/Node-js/What-companies-are-using-Node-j...

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/07/multicore...

I leaned towards Node.JS and had a good chat with my team-mates regarding the same.

The team is going to decided by COB today taking into account the above items from the lens of these two themes “Familiarity vs Trend” & “Time to market vs Solid Foundation”.

However, I’d like to share this with the community here on our blog & on twitter to get more feedback/advice/pointers. We are not just building a community tool but a community experience, thus getting feedback from the commnity and incorporating it into not just our product but our decisions is an integral part of what we do here at menoovr.

Please share your thoughts, advice, feedback and do invite your network of tech ninjas to opine as well.

Cheers,

Akshay

Founder, Menoovr

akshay@menoovr.com

blog.menoovr.com, aktionitems.com

5622GOMNVR

@mnoovr, @chillaxsingh
Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives
My thinking room is my car. If I need some time to think, I'll drive somewhere an hour or so away. On the open road watching the horizon and sky the whole way is good as sitting outside, while driving avoids the temptation to hop on a computer or watch TV or do anything else distracting.
Hostiles are already quite rare for public companies, never mind a private one like Bose. Disgruntled equity shareholders can more easily coordinate to change management, and it's much harder for hostile purchasers to get enough information to price a bid.
I would like to see the wording of "Companies that distribute software cannot bring a legal claim against the software users" changed to a non-negative, "Companies that distribute software CAN bring a legal claim against the software users." It may seem pedantic, but the "Yes/No" arrows are ambiguous because if you answer the "question" with arrows, it would be "Yes, companies that distribute... cannot bring a legal action..." just sounds confusing.

Otherwise, awesome infographic.
Professional Manager does not necessarily mean Competent Manager.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. . . . The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

That's the basic issue. Legislators craft laws in a rather messy process[1] that involves trade-offs among interest groups,

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

with many laws having built in from the get-go a certain amount of illogic. Judges who rule on cases are supposed to interpret the law as written by the legislature and as it applies to the cases before them, and sometimes particulars of how a case was argued by its parties introduces further illogic into judicial decisions. The law will never be perfectly logical--at least, not until human beings in general are perfectly logical and willing to set aside their personal interests for the sake of greater logical consistency in the law.

[1] "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe
It played over the piezoelectric motherboard speaker, the one that usually emits only a beep, and is intended to play a given frequency for a given duration. It's possible to use pulse width modulation to make mediocre digitized sound come out, but it is quite complex and would use a lot of BIOS space. A simple sequence of notes, however, is compact and easy.
Ask HN: What are the most important/valuable software patents?
Patents are seemingly valuable to the companies filing them. If all software patents were found to be void, which patents would be the most important to the open-source community, in general. Or rather, what patents do people want to use the most, but cannot because of licensing issues?
I think you've got some variant of Stockholm Syndrome.
Minor copy hint. It will be better to tell people that they have been "grandfathered" than "downgraded" to the new price.
"Arguments are favored that align most closely with established precedent" -- This is the theory. Practice in the area of software patents is precisely contrary to this theory.

Established precedent: Benson and Flook, specifically, is ignored. Diehr is deliberately misread to be inconsistent with Benson and Flook.

Seriously, if precedent were followed, every software patent we've ever discussed on HN would be rejected. The focus on fixing software patents should be on letting the law be the law. Every time a software patent is legally successful, the law is not the law. They're all invalid.