skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An employer has the right to check private email of an employee. It seems that the shafted guy is pissed off because he did not think that his employee status would give his opponent the right to snoop.

You should qualify that: the employer has a right to view a work-provided email account, and the work-provided computer. But not all employee email.

In this case, the employer's rights could hinge on whether the email accessed was sent to an @employer.com address, and whether McConnell's claimed prior agreement about a "personal partition" on the company-reimbursed laptop is substantiated.
The proper use of "begs the question" is as the name of a logical fallacy where the conclusion of an argument appears as one of its premises. Kinda like a circular argument. It's rarely used this way outside of philosophy and logic contexts.

Most people nowadays use it to mean something like, "raises the question," which traditionally is incorrect.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
The CSS should go in the head, and the Javascript can be placed at the very end of the page right before the closing body tag.

Failing that, you can put the JS right below the CSS in the head tag.
I definitely think having a single designated "meetings day" would help just about any company. Monday morning meetings have to be the most life-sucking idea ever. While I can see value in meeting briefly with your direct team--the one or two people who are working on the same part of the codebase--at the first of the work week, a bunch of people working on a random panoply of things in a room at 8:30 Monday morning is comparable to beating productivity with a Louisville Slugger and leaving its bloody barely breathing body in a ditch down by the highway. Starting the week off that way is just asking for trouble.

Though the Wufoos are more fun than most people I've met, so they can probably make Fridays into a vacation without having to actually be free from work. I suspect not many employers have a comedy goldmine like Kevin, Ryan, and Chris around to tap into. (And, if they do, they probably think of them as a problem to be managed into submission rather than given a raise and put in charge of something.)
Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I definitely notice/perceive the need for glucose after extended concentration. Whether from a longer respite and a good meal, or from a modest intake of something like soda. With the latter, though, it is difficult to keep from overindulging and inducing a sugar buzz/crash cycle.
The main problem with an eBay type startup would be the vast number of scammers who would immediately be able to deploy their scams to the new site.

eBay and PayPal have a vast ongoing fight with scammers, phishers, fraudsters, which surely sours the pot for any competitors.

That said, I'd love to see a competitor to eBay.
It's because there isn't a compacting garbage collector running. The core is C/C++, so it relies on the OS allocator to keep memory from becoming fragmented. The OS allocators are good, but they aren't that good. In a browser you're constantly allocating and freeing large amounts of memory, so you're going to end up with some holes. Its usage pattern is way different than most applications because it's used like Google finally designed it: as a window into a bunch of different processes.
It was an interesting reed, but why the hell was it on the front page of a computer nerd site? The sun has no spots on it? Ok, thats cool, and nerdy, thats real science, brain burning extra calories? Well interesting, of course, we are smart people and we care what happens in our brains, there are viruses in our genes, cool!!! But save the males? Who cares? Western civilization has a lot of more interesting issues than this. It wasn't even THAT interesting, just readable. I was alway annoyed by 'not HN' posts, and i know my post is annoying too, good, it was meant to be annoying, it's important, you can't ignore my bitter rant!
The middling rich are probably the unhappiest people in the country right now, but this isn't because of economic inequality. They don't, for the most part, care about other peoples' private jets and designer mansions. (I've worked on Wall Street, but I've never even seen a private jet.) It's because of social and power inequality. They're miserable because they expected to have a fair amount of autonomy upon "getting there", but they're still owned by someone.

Although social inequality is a bad thing, I'd blame this unhappiness on the dominance that large corporations hold over most peoples' lives, especially in the small world of upper-tier management. The powerlessness and anomie are what make the mid-level investment bankers and "white shoe" attorneys miserable, not the fact of being merely rich instead of super-rich.
At a small startup with a huge and complicated JS base, we've done just that. There's no way we can justify the man hours required to support IE6.
And they flicker oddly, in such a way that you can click next, see a few things happen, and then wonder if you have gone forward one page or three.
are you using $(document).ready() ?
DJIO = DJ | Multimedia Developer | Web Designer
I'm glad someone out there is making a point about the emasculation of men at the expense of wimmin's lib, even if it's not in the most articulately expressed manner.
Cool... I think a potential sweet spot for Erlang is doing just this: avoiding HTML and doing Javascript (client side) <-> Erlang (server side). Erlang - or at least anything I've ever seen over the last few years - is just not a good language to do templates with. And while overall that's not a deal killer, I'm a bit spoiled by Ruby; it's flexible enough to do whatever you want with it, including using a simple subset to do HTML templates.
I don't think there's any issues. There was never an announced time for the release.
Comparing the Lisp and ML language families
I don't see it. DSL is simply outdated technology that's being sold for cheap because some people don't care if their connection is only 1Mbps rather than 6Mbps. So, they hope to get those customers by being cheaper.

Part of the reason we haven't seen changes in price is because of how technology works and partially because of how American businesses work. For example, upping speed is often easier than lowering price because as technology gets better, you can provide more efficient technology based off those ideas, but the materials and work involved remain decently constant by comparison. So, they can't give me the 1.5Mbps connection I got when I signed up for cable for $20 as easily as they can up that to 10Mbps for the same $40 I had always paid. In terms of business, American businesses like offering the idea that consumers don't have to think. So, even if prices spike for a while, consumers shouldn't see them rise and as prices go down, consumers should keep paying the same. This leads to companies pricing products to sell them at a loss for a while to regain it on the other end. This happens in a lot of places, but Americans seem particularly fond of sticky prices.

DSL just sticks out because it's an end-of-the-road technology that the telcos can't make better. So, they package it as the "value" alternative and sell it. Cable internet has seen constant pricing because it's just become faster. There isn't really a price war so much as different options for different people now.
so, how was this legit with the iPhone NDA?
Three reasons the GDP was up this quarter:

1) Gov't loaned us our own money in the form of stimulus checks.

2) Prices increased (inflation, but not as how the gov't reported it)

3) More importantly (and related to 2) is the way they collect their data. They add in something called "hedonic regression." That means if a TV costs the same than it does 3 years ago, it's still more valuable because it has 1080p, and that gets added into GDP, and somehow mystically subtracted from CPI.

There's plenty of other reasons why his claim is bullshit, but just a couple more notes:

Recessions are not defined as two quarters of negative GDP. Rather, it's a period of economic contraction. We are in a recession. Anyone who denies that is not looking at the same data as I am. Look at employment, housing starts, credit spreads, equity markets, bond markets, credit default swap markets, CPI (both core and otherwise), and number of bank failures.

Some better resources:

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/
Yawn. Lisp had this feature fifty years ago.
GMail has been improved in ways other than UI changes.

They have rewritten the HTML, CSS and JS to make it more hackable for Greasemonkey - and in the process, optimized that HTML, CSS, and JS to reduce number of connections and subsequently load time.

The backend has seen massive scaling. They added POP and IMAP.

I don't know what I would change for GMail. It's a strong email client that gets the job done. I wouldn't consider it "worrying".
You're absolutely correct. However what is different is that the upside of the boom (above what it should be) is so high that the correction is at least almost as big a downside. There are two ways that the market correction can occur, a sharp correction would cause many problems, a slow recession would ease the pain somewhat but would take too long.

The actions you're seeing in the US, UK, EU and Japan are all designed to lessen the steepness of the drop.
I didn't get the impression from the article that Friday was "break time". I got the feeling that it was "meeting time" and "argument time", which is a different thing altogether...it's formalizing the constant interruptions that most work environments have throughout the day into one half day at the end of each week. So, you save up your discussions for Friday. It just happens that having meetings and discussions with people you like OK is a pretty low stress way to spend an afternoon, so it makes the last day of the week an easy-going sort of thing.

But, I agree that a lot of corporate environments could not pull this off. There is a point in every companies life where the culture becomes too divided. Not everyone likes fantasy football, Mario Kart, Rock Band, Medieval themed restaurants, or volleyball, and any formal attempt to get everyone involved in any one of those things is destined to failure and poor morale.

A pretty large percentage of people, below a certain age, can agree on free beer, so the "picking up the tab" policy is a somewhat safer choice, but probably a less productive one. Do you really want people discussing business strategery after four or five cocktails over the sounds of the football game on one side and the jukebox kicking out Justin Timberlake on the other?
I always thought once you have enough money for food and shelter for some time out in advance, it's just a matter of finding a way to do what you have passion for and keep the ball rolling. That's easier for a programmer than a guitar player. I think part of this is a reflection of the sick culture we live in - get rid of the useless trappings of wealth and stop caring about the mercedes or the LV bag and save every penny you can out of that $200K and if you are unhappy, pretty soon you will have a bankroll to change your life. You only get one, it's not worth wasting it as a slave so you can have a fancier cage.
Grin: A smarter way to grep code
Next milestone: 32,768?
Unlike most commenters, I would like to offer some words of support to Brian. Much like rape victims used to be judged on everything from their dress style to being out late after dark, you are being judged on everything from your writing style to your choice of deal structure. If the blame lies with the victim then surely nothing bad could happen to us, right?

All in all, I think you offered rather good reasons for structuring the deal that way even though hindsight says otherwise. It's staggeringly naive to think that any amount of lawyering could "sort a deal out a 100%". People who make those sorts of comments have very limited business experiences and don't know the true meaning of the phrase "history is written by winners".

I wish you the best in whatever you choose to do next. I do hope you get a lawyer - even if you don't like to think of yourself as a litigious type, it will help you achieve some closure. Please keep us posted on your situation.
My parents grew up in the '60s, and my mom is quite feminist, but I'm pretty sure they'd be disgusted by Sex and the City.

Casual sex is actually radically anti-feminist, but few people are willing to point this out.

I'm surprised the author didn't discuss divorce and alimony. The fact that a woman can divorce her husband for another man, then use his alimony payments to live it up with her live-in boyfriend, is much more of a concern to me than the existence of a "lovable doofus" father figure in Everybody Loves Raymond.
Critique of ERVs: http://www.trueorigin.org/theobald1e.asp#pred21
I don't understand why a new program was created when a shell alias would suffice. I have a set of grep commands aliased in my .bashrc such that I get the features the author described.

For example:

alias g="grep -R --exclude 'SVN' --include '*.c' ..."

etc
What's interesting about these articles is how out of touch with reality the journalists are.
Mozilla CEO's Thoughts on Chrome
Wow, that's a lot of activity. It takes about 10-15s to load nickb's submissions page:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb
Adam Smith and "The Zone"
I don't want one of my only sources of news to break :(
On Productivity and Time Management
Big conclusion: your brain needs some time on it's own.
I see this as much a color sorting ability as it is a demonstration of your monitors color accuracy.
I should add I tried the test on my laptop yesterday and scored a 90?, tried it on my cinema display today and scored a 7.
Its better than nothing. But its no panacea.
This article, from tech investor Bill Burnham about what he learned consulting at Fannie Mae in the 90s, is instructive on the very real political pressures to loosen lending standards:

http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/07/fannie-mae...

(This got 71 upvotes when posted to News.YC about a month ago.)
Some dude in India took the project and now is trying to get someone to get the job done.
To save everyone time reading complete garbage, allow me to provide one representative quote from the article:

The shame attached to unwed motherhood did serve a useful purpose once upon a time.

/sigh/
Set up domain name on App engine
RIAA meets hacker. Hacker loses.

Rinse, repeat.
A Talk with Tony Segaran (Author of Programming Collective Intelligence)
IE8 needing (more) cores and (more) memory certainly looks like respectable fodder for a future system upgrade marketeering.

For purposes of comparison, the no-execute flag (also variously known as execute disable) was another recent triumph of marketeering for software and hardware upgrades. That was a notable marketeering success, too, as no-ex didn't effectively address its goals.

What's as interesting as the resources required with IE8 is the compatibility with HTML standards. This as has been discussed elsewhere:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/29/hakon_lie_ie8_intero...
We're actually writing about this in a future article about some of our productivity experiments.
http://www.i4u.com/article20077.html

These guys are saying 1pm central. No word about that DoS attack though.
Some people can write a python program faster than they can figure out all the things they need to do to make grep work the way they want. It's like learning a whole new platform!
It was vandalism and has been reverted. There was no such DoS attack, if it wasn't already obvious from the text.
The article or the dev camp? My (non-legal) opinion is that the article gets into NDA-land when they talk about available connection API's and the return values of the accelerometer. It is also my opinion that the dev camp probably had more significant breaches, but if you don't hear developers talking at dev camp, did they really talk? Finally, it's also my opinion that it is silly that we even have to question whether someone breached the SDK NDA. Come on Apple lawyers. Fix this already.
Binstock re: java 7
Entire subsystems like Google Gears can probably be put in place, with a lot of code used without modification.

Also, if someone implemented my original proposal in this thread, this would be entirely orthogonal to any code currently in Firefox.
Ask HN: Do you have a business plan?
I know, i know, we're all supposed to be agile, iterative startuppers, building something quick, and then being flexible enough to recognize and capitalize on every opportunity that presents itself...

PG says

"don't worry about making money. Making something people like is much harder".

DHH says

"Ask yourself: how can i build something that i can charge money for?".

Neither suggests a formal business plan, as far as i can tell. I know everyone here has at least a vague idea of how they might be able to make money. But does anyone here, who hasn't launched yet, have a written business plan?
I agree that social science is different from the physical sciences, but that's not an excuse for the cargo cult science that dominates the field. Read Historians' Fallacies for a view of how the social sciences should approach their work. (http://www.amazon.com/Historians-Fallacies-Toward-Historical...).
You've summed it up pretty well, Joe, and I agree this would need an overhaul to be scaled. The only correction I have is that enjoying Medieval themed restaurants is a prerequisite to working with us.

As far as "break time" goes, we really don't care exactly how or when you accomplish 4 days of work, but we do want 4 days of solid work to be accomplished. Some of us are night owl's and others rise at first light. Nobody's going to freak out at you unless you're really slacking.
Babies, Parents and Home Offices - Advice?
Congrats indeed. Tons of great submissions = well-deserved.
Watch The Google Chrome presentation live.
I like this idea, mostly because it's one I had earlier and never had the time to implement. :-) From a cursory glance, the site looks good.

I do see the point that others have about who the site might target. Serious writers might steer away from the site in favor of workshop style sites, leaving you with prolific, but possibly weak writers. I have a feeling that might be a rather young demographic and I wonder how well the site would monetize. Still, I wish you the best with the venture and will check back.
A day late, but...
Is there a way to do syntax-driven wildcard matching of Python code?
I vote that it's implied name calling... "did you even think about what you just wrote" is basically calling someone stupid. Not literally, of course, but semantically it is. But I thought it was funny, no rude.
A man's reluctance to marry may be down to a genetic 'flaw'
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield OH Health Insurance Company
Motorola A1200 Black Unlocked
This is a wonderful Linux PDA-phone specifically invented by the leader in mobile communication devices, Motorola. It comes with superb technology, awesome features and amazing performances. The phone has a QVGA touchscreen and a 2 megapixel camera.
Why do you consider casual sex anti-feminist?
I Want Your .com For New Startup
This is a smart move, and it's a step in the correct direction. The browser is an application platform but browsers have not truely caught up with this in the way the information is presented. The google browser screenshots seems to be the one that goes the furthest.
The end of the credit era?
Justin.TV is hiring engineers
Here's what you need to know about JTV:

- We are the largest live video site in a rapidly growing market. If you want to check them out, some of our competitors in this space are ustream.tv, livevideo.com, stickam.com, mogulus.com, live.yahoo.com and kyte.tv - more spring up almost every day to keep us on our toes.

- We are growing very quickly. Here's a graph of our daily pageviews since last October, when we opened up JTV to anyone who wanted to broadcast:
http://abstractnonsense.com/justintv-daily-pageviews-october...
Our Alexa graph shows a similar story over roughly the same period of time:
http://abstractnonsense.com/justintv-alexa-2-september-2008....
We have over 1.5 million registered users, and our doubling period is roughly 2.5 months.

- Not all the hard problems are solved, and not all the equity is gone. In fact we are dealing with some of the most challenging problems any of us have come across. The scale and speed of our growth force us to experiment with techniques and technologies only the very biggest websites ever need to use. Sometimes we find something other people have pioneered, and adapt it to fit JTV. Other times we're the pioneers, inventing new scaling solutions that we haven't seen anyone else using yet.

- We treat ourselves well. Everyone sits down to a free catered lunch together on week-days. We have a great company health plan that includes dental-care. We subsidize gym memberships and commuting costs. Our office is comfortable, naturally well-lit, and one block from SF Caltrain. You can see it here: http://www.justin.tv/officecam

- Despite treating ourselves well, we're frugal where it counts. We're working our way towards profitability quite quickly.

- The people here are smart, friendly and driven. We have MIT dropouts, robot-builders, and PhDs. We come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You'll find us very welcoming, and you'll definitely learn a lot from the people around you.

Here's what we need to know about you:

- You know a bunch of different languages, and you're comfortable learning new ones quickly. You have strong opinions on what makes a language good, but at the end of the day you're a pragmatist and you'll use whatever it takes to get the job done.

- You know Linux. You wouldn't be uncomfortable if someone suggested you spend a few hours digging around /proc to see if you can squeeze a bit more performance out of the tcp stack.

- You know how the web works, at least from HTTP to HTML. You probably need to look up the details, but you know if you needed to, you could figure out everything from cache-control headers to why something isn't rendering properly (in Firefox at least. Only masochists know why things aren't rendering properly in IE6).

- You are available to work in San Francisco.

If you think you're a good fit, and you're excited about JTV, please contact us (jobs@justin.tv) with your answer to one of these problems: http://www.justin.tv/problems
This is not hacker news!
The Google Chrome download link is live.
It is online now. http://www.google.com/chrome
I don't know what point you're trying to make.

The article clearly explains that the political pressures came from Fannie Mae itself. It wanted to lower its lending standards, but was barred by Congress from doing so, presumably because the US Govt was implicitly guaranteeing Fannie's debt. According to the article, Fannie Mae's lobbyists came up with the "affordable housing" campaign to pressure Congress into letting Fannie lower its lending standards.

Congress didn't "force" Fannie Mae to make bad loans. Fannie Mae "forced" Congress to change the law so that Fannie Mae could make bad loans.
Removing the Firefox 3 EULA
Thanks pg for the site!
Frink: a JVM language for doing unusual but precise conversions