skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not following. Being able to work for more companies is pretty clearly a greater "freedom" than not being able to work for some of them. Your idea that the ability to contract away that right is somehow itself a "freedom" sounds awfully orwellian, no? The freedom to choose not to be free? Please.

And I don't follow your game theory point at all. This decision was about one particular kind of contract in the multiverse of possibilities. It certainly didn't throw out our "right to be sued" (again, Pravda much?) for breach of contract generically.
#startups @ irc.freenode.net although I discovered it yesterday. Haven't seen a conversation there yet but I'll give it time

#jIRCii on EFnet (my IRC client, http://jircii.dashnine.org -- check it out)

#unix on irc.gimp.org - tight community of Mac and Linux enthusiasts.

Some of the smartest people I knew on IRC moved to SILC.
Is it just me or does every Wikipedia article feel like it's written by the same person?
I browse with the Firefox Web Developer toolbar and the Disable->Disable Page Colors menu entry is a great way to kill obnoxious colors without losing all the CSS styling on the page.
It has a USB host port, which at least means that the universe of USB devices is available. You can get USB RS-232 devices, parallel I/O ("printer ports"), cheap ADCs ("joystick ports") etc...

But I agree. A tiny microcontroller board is really only useful for what you can control with it, and out of the box this doesn't do much. Would it have killed them to toss a dozen bidirectional TTL ports on the thing?
I don't think it is good advice. Maybe sales skills are useful, but the thing is, there are zillions of things one could learn before starting a business that could be useful (like getting a degree, saving enough money, ...). It is just one more thing that delays you actually doing what you want, and that is bad. Why not just learn on the job (starting a business)?

However, if you absolutely think you have to put yourself through that ordeal of selling crap door-to-door, perhaps collecting money for charities would be a better choice than selling products of questionable quality.
You sirs have excellent taste.
I rather like the "disemvoweling" used over on BoingBoing. It's a good balance between just deleting trolls and giving them too much attention.

The color fading used on HN is a good technique too.
When I am struggling with something, I sometimes think 'Damn, this is hard. I wonder if I am stupid,' and then I remember that I have a counterfeit degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech; I might be stupid, but I can still fool others.
From the same page (unrelated comment): "Not long ago, we came up with an interesting set of facts: A billion hours ago, human life appeared on Earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning." Goizueta knew his marketing stuff (wasn't he one of the biggest Coca-Cola's presidents?).
While there are probably plenty of geniuses out there, most of the interesting people I’ve talked to are of average intelligence, but above-average aspiration. Stop believing in the myth of triple-A people as a different kind.

Whenever I start feeling frustrated on some endeavor of mine, I try to pause and remember this principle.
I'll second that - definitely quality over quantity.
Pop culture phones home
Aren't pretty much all companies incorporated in Delaware anyway?
For purposes of noncompete, the jurisdictions that seem to matter are the place you work from, and the place your employer operates out of.

I'm not a lawyer, I've only ever observed noncompete drama.
Windows Vista security 'rendered useless' by researcher
"Get cooler with age"

That definitely puts me in the pro-Jazz Programmer camp.
The Rise and Fall of Twitter
#django on irc.freenode.net
#genmay on '0id.net'
#perl on efnet

i'd second that, silc...
Another Kohana user! Nice.
I'm sorry if this is beating a dead horse, or if I'm completely missing a good reason, but it seems like it would be easier to just add a search link than keep commenting "use this: searchyc.com" every time people ask.
Another sign that something is definitely wrong!
any place where iphone hackers hang out?
Yes, but you should be able to use SSL to verify the certificate.
Hmm, isn't Twitter just the Web 2.0 version of IRC?
The Mathematician and the Journalist styles
History made: Go program MoGo beats professional player in 9-stone game
Hey DenisM: You might want to chime in here - http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=536580
Apple is covering their ass... I think it's a fair measure.
Look at the weave, this is how you can tell it is not machine made.

I hope he didn't believe that. Turkey is full of fake. People don't have a continuous relationship with the seller, so the seller focuses on selling something that looks great. For fruit and vegetables, this isn't much of an issue (What You Taste Is What You Get), but I struggled to find a bike. All bells and whistle, no quality.

That's the positive side of megabrands and chain-stores, they have reputations and standards.

I was surprised by how social haggling was in Turkey. As far as I can tell, a lot of sellers do not lower the price because you're going to leave the transaction (i.e.: the rational way); they lower it because they want to feel good about themselves. Typically, college students get better prices that way. Foreigners can get either royally screwed, or offered a free meal at a restaurant. Turks want to think of themselves as being great hosts (and they are).

I tried a few times to tell a merchant: I can get a better price elsewhere. Even if it was true, they didn't care.

We went to a high-end restaurant last week. 6 foreigners, some obviously older and well-off, and one Turkish girl. We sit, start eating, then want to order wine. She haggled. And won. I still don't get it. Presumably, the reputation of the restaurant was at stake. It'd be rationally selfish, but still. Foreigners are not coming back!

The requirement to haggle in so many situations has some unfortunate day-to-day consequences. Some Turks become used to lying under all circumstances. (though to be fair, I got some of my best relationships ever here)

Last anecdote: some cafe manager told me he has trouble finding personel. They pay an employee 1.50$ / hour (1$ if you're unexperienced, no joke) in my city. The price of a beer might be around 2.50$. The ratio is much worse than in the Western world, so I ask him, why don't you increase the pay? Nuh-uh, he said. Things don't work that way around here.
Given my specialty, it might not be surprising I have the following open on Freenode:

#x264dev
#x264
#avisynth
#ffmpeg
#videolan
#mplayer
#ffmpeg-devel
#mplayerdev
#xvid

I have gotten at least 2 or 3 consulting jobs just by hanging out in #ffmpeg and #x264.
As far as I'm aware this is the first time a Go program has been shown to play at or above Dan level at 19x19 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings].
Apples to oranges. That's comparable to listing every source file in git.

How many of those do you ever execute directly? (How many are even in your shell execution path?) All of the interaction with it is namespaced behind the hg executable, including extensions.
As such, the git project has consciously made no effort to make the migration to git easy: the revert command in Subversion resets your current working copy to the last commit, but in git undoes a supplied patch and commits the changes needed to remove that patch. (The equivalent command for svn revert in git is git reset --hard HEAD^.)

Yes. You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to understand what you mean. Last time I checked, git came with extensive documentation. Try reading it :P

Anyway, I think hg takes the right approach to design -- a library that some shell scripts call into. Git takes a non-ideal approach -- monolithic scripts all written in different languages that sometimes share nothing. (Or more often, call each other to "abstract away" some details.)

But despite this, git is much nicer to use. It's more flexible, more consistent, and has a lot of really nice sugar. But I guess if you think svn is the only way revision control can work, you won't like it. Your loss. <link to "Beating the Averages">.
Rackspace goes public at $10, ticker RAX
A trade secret is "a plan, process, tool, mechanism or compound which a company desires to keep confidential as a competitive advantage."

By definition, trade secrets are not patented (that would be public exposure). Also by definition, they are not general knowledge (they must be known only to those inside the company). A trade secret from Google might be the exact set of elements and weightings that go into the search algorithm.
So, when hired, you'll make a specific claim like "You'll see a 462% increase in traffic from organic search engine results in 2 weeks."?

Your case study is pretty, but it's not predictive, you just say "We did [proprietary stuff redacted] and afterwards traffic jumped." I'd be impressed if you'd published this PDF beforehand and said "We'll increase traffic to the site at least 3x by 2 weeks from today." and your case study was about how you did or didn't meet that specific goal. (And don't even get me started on the fact that the site with the big percentage increase went from 5 daily visitors to 25, or that you seem to claim that your changes were instantly reflected in search engine rankings.)

I'm not saying what you do is snake oil, just that I've never seen an SEO confident enough to make a testable, quanitified promise. It doesn't sound like you're making them, either.
Does anyone know if this presentation is on video or podcast somewhere? Couldn't find it on Youtube.
I loved this article. That being said:

This brings us to another of git’s faults: its documentation is terrible. Man pages are no longer a sufficient replacement for a good, well-updated wiki or reference work;

Huh? This is the kind of thing that IT pedants say when they don't have any better arguments. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a good man page (or, to be sure, any documentation format at all). /usr/bin/man, in 2008, is still my first choice for looking up the interface to system calls, C APIs and command line utilities like git.

Now, could some of git's man pages use some work? Sure. But make that the criticism. Smacking about the format is just dumb.
Wow. They are very upfront, and might have a niche they cater to that needs to see prices immediately. I can't hate at all. I may do the same with my services. It will stop the low budget projects and answer a lot of questions upfront.
Coca-Cola is also one of the finest examples of the "Be Evil, Don't Care" philosophy. And it could work for you, too, if you're willing to sell your conscience.
+1 to you sir.
The author did not think that he was conned or purchased an inferior product or paid too much or even purchased something unnecessary. This is a success story of how to sell a luxury item that both parties agree was an unnecessary item, with the customer being actually satisfied at the end.

The magic of the Turkish Carpet isn't about closing the sale, it's about the sale process accumulating in the fact that you feel good that you've made the purchase. The entire process was really all about the customer receiving attention, trivia, entertainment and respect -- these are all added values to the end product.

A lot of web apps are completely unnecessary : what can we learn from these guys to sell well made but unnecessary stuff?
I've actually added searchyc.com to my firefox search box, but even so, HN would be so much more usable if there was a search box in the orange navbar
I think pg is well-aware of the request by now as it has surfaces several times. Hopefully it's on the dev schedule.
thanks nice list!
I could not climb the stairs in the light tower (in the northeast). '<' and '>' did not work.
any more... basically where discussion like one seen in hackernews also goes on?
Almost half of all internet users now use search engines on a typical day
And that's one of their cheaper services.

http://www.nngroup.com/services/platformguidelines.html
Knowing what it is when you see it does not make you immune to social engineering. The author knew right away what they were doing, but it still worked.
Agreed. I'm a big fan of Ruby, but when millions of people are using your product, you need to put some thought into the engineering process behind it, and that includes putting some forethought into how you're going to handle security problems.

Here's to hoping they get it right this time...
The quote comes from Aaron Hillegass's book, "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X", which is a great read for anyone wanting to learn Cocoa.
I wouldn't say so. It's too difficult to have a real-time conversation. I'd go crazy trying to work on a project with somebody via Twitter, especially if I had to DM everything that I wanted private.
In what sense was this a scam?

Obscured, hard to find or misleading price? Nope.
False or misleading promises of what the program does? Nope.

So what's the scam? That you think it's overpriced? That he bought it and now doesn't want it? That the author created it with the sole intention of making money?

Caveat Emptor, and all that. Yes, I think there should be an "undo" option, a cooldown period, right to cancellation and money back no questions asked - but there's no wrongdoing here - he has no right to feel outraged or hard done by about the situation.
I absolutely worship at the feet of Don Norman. But Jakob Nielsen's stuff leaves me completely cold.

I'm not sure if it is the numbered lists or what. But the writing never holds my interest for very long.

As Joel says better than I could:

"Every time I read Jakob Nielsen," I wrote in 2000, "I get this feeling that he really doesn't appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone's number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you'd never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other."
#django, #startups, #twitter @ freenode
In alphabetical order:
#af83 (my workplace), #turbulences (our framework), #django, #rails, #python.

After seeing #startups in a comment, I might do that.
I like how they refer to customers giving them money in exchange for services "unlawful activity". Fine with me, I fly your competitors anyway.

Hilariously, the "related articles" sidebar contains "Ryanair warns of potential losses". Maybe if you didn't cancel people's reservations you would make more money.
Instead of arguing for one over the other, how about volunteering your time and skills toward improving your favorite's weak areas? They're both quite good, but there's always room for improvement. Give something back!

For example, if I have time this weekend, I'm going to work on adding support for hg's record extension to its (already quite good, IMHO) Emacs interface.
Yeah. I learned this by experimentation, though for less expensive services. I'm relatively expensive as independent GMAT tutors go, and for a while I thought I'd get more interest if I encouraged visitors to email me for rates.

Unsurprisingly, I ended up answering a lot of questions and having a lot of people disappear after they found out my rates. Now: the rates are public, I have at least as many clients as before, and I think the public nature of my rates make people less likely to haggle/complain/seek discounts/etc.
Factors influencing Cache Design
You should definitely try to mount the screens higher. Your line of vision should be horizontal. Otherwise, you may have back/neck problems.
Considering iPhone hackers are contractually obligated to not talk about their work, probably not.
Because this articls is about a guy who knows he sells unnecessary goods selling something successfully to a guy who knows he's buying unnecessary goods.

Kind of like web apps or startups.
David Byrne on the Uncanny Valley
what's the difference?

hg status -someflag | xargs do-something

git-status -someflag | xargs do-something

as far as usage is concerned -- is hg really less tool like? you're right, it is partly semantics. however the article over-simplifies things to the point of being misleading.
the negotiation in the example isn't good, but looking back on his purchase in retrospect he admits that and identifies the reasons he ended up purchasing the rug.

on a side note, "Getting to Yes" is also another good book on negotiation.
That's edging really close to a 'freedom is slavery' argument right there.
Conscience? I don't think I ever had that. Damn, I could have sold it if I had though.

(Spoken with a go-getter CEO voice)
Brad Greenspan: MySpace Lawsuit Is The 'Financial Equivalent Of The OJ Simpson Case'
I was trying to get on the ryanair site a few days ago but the site was too busy. Perhaps this was the reason.

That being said this is an over-reaction.
Many people have asked for search before, but it would probably take less than five minutes to just add one paragraph and a link to the FAQ and/or a one-word link to an existing site at the bottom of the screen. The payoff to effort ratio would be really high.

I fully understand that building a full search interface internally is no small task, but this is just adding a link, and one that is already the semi-official search suggestion.
How YouTube got its video [player] for 20 euros
MySpace Apps Catching Up To Facebook's?
This is an incredibly misleading headline.

What Dowd and Sotirov did was figure out how to defeat Vista's post-exploit runtime security measures in IE only. They can exploit .NET DLL controls to build reliable exploits, even though the Vista runtime goes to a great deal of trouble to make reliable exploits hard to write.

For this research to come into play, you have to already have a memory corruption vulnerability in IE.

Great talk? Absolutely. One of the best of the show.

Important finding? Absolutely. IE is a top 5 attacker target.

A blow to Vista's standing relative to other OS's? Doubtful. Nobody has a good answer to this problem. If attackers can control memory in your process, they're going to win.
Kurzweil was right. Looks like we just might live long enough to live forever after all.
My workspace http://www.flickr.com/photos/8541974@N08/2743799927/

Vim + Ubuntu.
Um, spending a couple of years just to get self-confidence is a pretty stupid deal.
Kites could provide electricity for 100,000 homes
Twitter clients like Twhirl don't make it any easier unfortunately. It just becomes a chore to sort and delete the static.

Twitter needs a "temp-IM" feature. Or maybe something like email grouping (Gmail conversations etc.)
Isn't 9x9 Go substantially easier, computationally, from 19x19?
Remember that Nielsen is the guy that says all websites should be up-front about their prices, and has done research to confirm that that's what customers really want. It makes sense that he would use his own research to better his own company.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
Yay for RSI :-) Any other RSI alums read HN? RSI '00 here.
Same with counterfeit currency. If no one can differentiate the two, who are you to say one is fake?
A 9-stone game means a 9-stone handicap, not a 9x9 board.
irc.freenode.net #startups,#javascript,#slicehost

irc.mibbit.com #mibbit

Also have to go in various networks help channels which can be an experience :/

#startups is a fun place to hang out definitely.
boy, you HN people have absolutely NO sense of humor!!!
Summary: neither is ready yet. Wait for one to get good enough to make the other unnecessary.

My guess is Hg, as it's simpler. 90% of my SVN work is done with update, checkout, and commit. Really, why so many more commands for essentially the same work cycle?

Ok, that question wasn't rhetorical, I'm curious.
AJAX File Upload Progress Bars (with jQuery)
Yes, but this was a 19x19 game, you can see it on the screen in the background. The "9 stones" is referring to the computer's handicap
DMCA Does Not Apply to U.S. Government
people who have degrees aren't stupid or smart, they are people who have degrees. a degree is a piece of paper. it means you did stuff and someone thought you did it well enough for them so they handed you the piece of paper. in the grand scheme of things, it's just a piece of paper. get over it, you're not smart or stupid because of the piece of paper, it's just a piece of paper! and so on.
when millions of people are using your product, you need to put some thought into the engineering process behind it

When millions of people are using your work for free, they should realize that they aren't entitled to anything.
Okay, how about a simpler example: if California announced that, from now on, all restaurants must allow all patrons to smoke, would we be a) more free, because if we smoke we can smoke in any restaurant, or b) less free, because we can no longer elect to eat in a smoke-free restaurant, decide whether or not to allow smoking in our own restaurant, compare the benefits of a smoke-free or smokable restaurant, etc.?

When you no longer have the right to make an agreement, you are not more free just because that agreement restricts your freedom. A state could ban loans (you're more free -- you never have to pay interest again!) or marriages (screw this "'til death do us part" shit) or promises of any kind. You would be free of the obligation entailed by the promise, but you would no longer be free to trade restrictions for benefits.

It's profoundly misguided to say that being free means never being free to limit your future actions. This is a lot more clear when you study game theory -- people who can restrict their future actions have far more bargaining power. People who can't restrict their actions are, to that extent, unable to make promises.

Anyway, this should be a moot point: if you think noncompetes are a bad idea for you, you can turn them down. For someone who thinks noncompetes might be okay (e.g. a company can only afford to hire a new researcher if they know they can restrict this researcher from handing off ideas to a competitor), this ruling only restricts their freedom. Irrelevant to you, bad for other people -- how could you possibly desire this?
What problem does Twitter solve that IRC has? :/
Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer
BINC TV Episode 2
> What part of being a child prodigy or going through "hell week" summer schools makes you entrepeneurial?

The working your ass off part. I can speak from my own RSI hell week experience, as well as that of the two RSIs at which I was on staff. Hell week is intense. That sort of intensity isn't sustainable, but is necessary in bursts both for research and startups.

While the research is necessarily academic, the passion and focus can translate to any other field. And I know for me, a Midwestern boy at the tender age of 16, coming to MIT and meeting 70+ students from around the world who all were smart and intense was both eye opening and inspiring. Tyle's comment makes perfect sense to me, and he doesn't mean it in a demeaning or superior way. It's just that for many students, including myself, RSI was the first time we met people our own age who clicked with his on an intellectual level. And for nerds like me, that's a closer sort of connection.

You're correct that there isn't a direct causation here, but the spirit can translate easily into entrepreneurship. For example, RSI alums Ben Rahn and Matt DeBergalis started ActBlue back in 2004, and they've seen incredible success with it since.
I've always been a big fan of Linux User Groups, as such I hang out online with the two that I've been the most active with #cplug and #nblug on irc.freenode.net. I also check out #ubuntu on occasion.
Arrington is kinda like a really sad Nero, standing atop techcrunch hill with his fiddle, desperately waiting for twitter to burn.